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If America’s First, Europe Asks, ‘Who Should Be Second?’
May 18, 2017 by Natalie Samarasinghe
The author argues that Trump’s foreign policy should strengthen diplomacy through the United Nations and that Europe should back such steps. Jens Stoltenberg, NATO secretary-general, visits the White House, above, on April 12, 2017. NATO
LONDON — Since Donald Trump took office as president of the United States, numerous satirical videos have emerged, apparently from European states vying to be “second” to America’s “first.”
The German spoof cites the country’s experience of walls. Luxembourg’s boasts that it has a lot of money and “you know what, Mr President? You don’t even have to pay taxes. None. Zero. Nada.” And Switzerland’s proclaims: “We also love to treat our women badly. Love it. We didn’t let them vote until 1971.”
The idea of diplomacy by YouTube may appeal to a president who governs by Twitter. Such diplomacy would certainly allow for even deeper cuts to the US State Department.
But if Trump is serious about his “America First” foreign policy, he should be strengthening diplomacy, particularly through the United Nations, the only organization capable of tackling the major challenges facing the world. And American partners in Europe should be making this case vigorously. This is especially true for Britain, which considers itself the closest US ally on the continent.
The White House’s proposed cuts to UN funding were hardly surprising, and they foreshadow what could appear in next year’s budget, which is due to be sent to Congress by the end of September. Trump took aim at the UN before his inauguration, tweeting that it was “just a club for people to get together, talk” (one of its most valuable functions) and that “things will be different after Jan 20th.” A draft executive order on UN funding was prepared — and shelved — during his first week as president.
From across the pond here in London, it appears that many US Republicans, even those who opposed Trump, are now exploiting his presidency to promote red-meat causes, such as attacking a woman’s right to choose and the UN. While the American Sovereignty Restoration Act, a perennial fringe attempt to withdraw from the UN, is as unlikely as ever to succeed, proposals supported by high-profile Republicans are more troubling.
For example, Senators Ted Cruz (Texas) and Lindsey Graham (South Carolina) have proposed defunding the UN in response to a Security Council resolution condemning Israel’s violations of international law. That the resolution passed, in late December 2016, only because the Obama administration chose not to veto it is conveniently forgotten. So, too, is the fact that millions of people who rely on the UN’s humanitarian agencies for their basic needs would suffer if financing were withheld. In the words of a former presidential candidate, Rick Santorum of Pennsylvania, this is an “opportunity for those of us who are very anti-UN” to “deconstruct it.”
Despite longstanding hostility to the UN, the White House budget, both the interim and for 2018, is most likely to encounter opposition in Congress. Even if it doesn’t succeed, it is deeply disconcerting, implying a failure to understand how valuable the UN is to the US and how useful it could be to the Trump administration. Trump’s UN envoy, Nikki Haley, has already demonstrated the organization’s utility as a soapbox. It could also serve as the forum for unconventional meetings if Mar-a-Lago falls out of favor.
The UN is central to the rules-based international order the US has built since World War II. The order cements American power and inoculates the country against global power shifts. As former US Ambassador Susan Rice memorably put it: “The Security Council can’t even issue a press release without America’s blessing.”
Like their allies in Europe, US administrations have always acknowledged, albeit more reluctantly at times, the UN’s role in furthering their interests. After 9/11, President George W. Bush may have sought to justify “coalitions of the willing,” but he also reaffirmed America’s commitment to the UN, noting that “no nation can build a safer, better world alone.” The invasion of Iraq by the US without the UN’s blessing arguably ended up harming the US more than the UN.
If Trump still wants to put “America first” and adopt a narrower definition of US interests, the UN will be crucial in picking up the slack in promoting stability across the globe. Europe continues to ride out a period of turmoil brought on by political and economic challenges from within and without, notably a more adventurous Russia. Meanwhile, the major emerging economies, except for China, seem disinclined to play a global police, humanitarian or peace-broker role.
The UN is a vital tool for advancing Trump’s foreign policy priorities by strengthening international efforts to counter terrorism and by creating conditions for trade to flourish. It also provides a mechanism for US allies, in his words, “to take a direct and meaningful role in both strategic and military operations, and pay their fair share of the cost.”
And the UN is cheap. Its interventions are far more cost-effective than those of the US. The organization’s annual peacekeeping budget, which currently covers 16 operations on four continents, is roughly equivalent to what the US spent in a month in Afghanistan at the height of the war there.
Other countries provide more than 80 percent of the UN’s shoestring regular budget, which, by the way, is a sixth of what Americans spent on carry-out pizza in 2015. US funding to the UN represents just 0.1 percent of the federal budget and is generally supported by the American public.
Today, the UN is needed more than ever. The convergence of multiple crises has stretched the post-1945 international system to breaking point, threatening to reverse the gains of the past 70 years of the UN’s existence. Yet instead of increased engagement with the UN, national outlooks are narrowing.
While Obama’s record at the UN was far from perfect (the US continued to shield its allies from criticism and opposed proposals it disliked), the eight years of his administration showed what constructive US engagement can achieve, from helping to secure the Paris Agreement to negotiating the Iran nuclear deal. And in Secretary-General António Guterres, the US has a strong partner in such areas as counterterrorism, UN management reform and tackling sexual abuse by UN peacekeepers.
To put America first, Trump must put the UN second. Channeling the farsighted leadership of the UN’s founding father, Franklin D. Roosevelt, is the best way to make America great again.
A version of this essay first appeared in Huffington Post.
Don’t Miss a Story: Subscribe to PassBlue
Message to Trump: The US Needs the UN and Vice Versa by Donald T. Bliss December 17, 2016
Nikki Haley Tells US Congress: The UN Does Matter by Barbara Crossette January 21, 2017
It’s Time to Rally Grass Roots to Fund the UN Population Fund Again by Jane Roberts January 29, 2017
Four Easy Steps to Reform the UN Human Rights Council by Bertrand G. Ramcharan October 15, 2017
Categories US Foreign Relations, US-UN Relations, WORLDVIEWS Tags US-UN funding, US-UN relations Post navigation
At the UN Oceans Forum in June, Will the US Play a Bit Part?
Nikki Haley, Seeking the Right Style to Make Big Statements
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by Natalie Samarasinghe, PassBlue
<h1>If America’s First, Europe Asks, ‘Who Should Be Second?’</h1> <p class="byline">by Natalie Samarasinghe, PassBlue <br />May 18, 2017</p> <p>LONDON -- Since Donald Trump took office as president of the United States, numerous satirical <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2017/02/06/world/europe/europe-trump-parody-videos.html">videos </a>have emerged, apparently from European states vying to be "second" to America's "first."</p> <p>The German spoof cites the country's experience of walls. Luxembourg's boasts that it has a lot of money and "you know what, Mr President? You don't even have to pay taxes. None. Zero. Nada." And Switzerland's proclaims: "We also love to treat our women badly. Love it. We didn't let them vote until 1971."</p> <p>The idea of diplomacy by YouTube may appeal to a president who governs by Twitter. Such diplomacy would certainly allow for even <a href="https://www.ft.com/content/6156a6fc-0a3e-11e7-97d1-5e720a26771b">deeper cuts</a> to the US State Department.</p> <p>But if Trump is serious about his "America First" foreign policy, he should be strengthening diplomacy, particularly through the United Nations, the only organization capable of tackling the major challenges facing the world. And American partners in Europe should be making this case vigorously. This is especially true for Britain, which considers itself the closest US ally on the continent.</p> <p>The White House's proposed cuts to <a href="https://www.whitehouse.gov/sites/whitehouse.gov/files/omb/budget/fy2018/2018_blueprint.pdf">UN funding</a> were hardly surprising, and they foreshadow what could appear in next year's budget, which is due to be sent to Congress by the end of September. Trump took aim at the UN before his inauguration, tweeting that it was <a href="http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2017/01/19/donald-trump-united-nations-fight-waiting-happen/">"just a club for people to get together, talk"</a> (one of its most valuable functions) and that <a href="https://twitter.com/realdonaldtrump/status/812390964740427776?lang=en">"things will be different after Jan 20th."</a> A draft <a href="http://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-trump-un-idUSKBN15B2DP">executive order</a> on UN funding was prepared -- and shelved -- during his first week as president.</p> <p>From across the pond here in London, it appears that many US Republicans, even those who opposed Trump, are now exploiting his presidency to promote red-meat causes, such as attacking a woman's <a href="https://news.vice.com/story/at-least-46-anti-abortion-bills-are-already-in-front-of-state-legislatures-in-2017">right to choose</a> and the UN. While the <a href="https://www.congress.gov/bill/115th-congress/house-bill/193">American Sovereignty Restoration Act</a>, a perennial fringe attempt to withdraw from the UN, is as unlikely as ever to succeed, proposals supported by high-profile Republicans are more troubling.</p> <p>For example, Senators Ted Cruz (Texas) and Lindsey Graham (South Carolina) have proposed defunding the UN in response to a <a href="https://www.passblue.com/2016/12/23/defying-trump-in-momentous-vote-un-security-council-condemns-israeli-settlements/">Security Council resolution </a>condemning Israel's violations of international law. That the resolution passed, in late December 2016, only because the Obama administration chose not to veto it is conveniently forgotten. So, too, is the fact that millions of people who rely on the UN's humanitarian agencies for their basic needs would suffer if financing were withheld. In the words of a former presidential candidate, Rick Santorum of Pennsylvania, this is an <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/josh-rogin/wp/2016/12/28/inside-the-coming-war-between-the-united-states-and-the-united-nations/?utm_term=.d55631dc7f6b">"opportunity for those of us who are very anti-UN" to "deconstruct it."</a></p> <p>Despite longstanding hostility to the UN, the White House budget, both the interim and for 2018, is most likely to encounter opposition in Congress. Even if it doesn't succeed, it is deeply disconcerting, implying a failure to understand how valuable the UN is to the US and how useful it could be to the Trump administration. Trump's UN envoy, Nikki Haley, has already demonstrated the organization's utility as a soapbox. It could also serve as the forum for unconventional meetings if Mar-a-Lago falls out of favor.</p> <p>The UN is central to the rules-based international order the US has built since World War II. The order cements American power and inoculates the country against global power shifts. As former US Ambassador Susan Rice memorably put it: "<a href="https://2009-2017-usun.state.gov/remarks/4975">The Security Council can't even issue a press release without America's blessing</a>."</p> <p>Like their allies in Europe, US administrations have always acknowledged, albeit more reluctantly at times, the UN's role in furthering their interests. After 9/11, President George W. Bush may have sought to justify "coalitions of the willing," but he also reaffirmed America's commitment to the UN, noting that "<a href="http://nssarchive.us/national-security-strategy-2002/">no nation can build a safer, better world alone."</a> The invasion of Iraq by the US without the UN's blessing arguably ended up harming the US more than the UN.</p> <p>If Trump still wants to put "America first" and adopt a narrower definition of US interests, the UN will be crucial in picking up the slack in promoting stability across the globe. Europe continues to ride out a period of turmoil brought on by political and economic challenges from within and without, notably a more adventurous Russia. Meanwhile, the major emerging economies, except for China, seem disinclined to play a global police, humanitarian or peace-broker role.</p> <p>The UN is a <a href="https://betterworldcampaign.org/us-un-partnership/importance-of-funding-the-un/">vital tool</a> for advancing Trump's <a href="https://www.whitehouse.gov/america-first-foreign-policy">foreign policy priorities</a> by <a href="https://www.brookings.edu/blog/order-from-chaos/2017/01/11/why-trump-needs-the-united-nations/">strengthening international efforts to counter terrorism</a> and by creating conditions for trade to flourish. It also provides a mechanism for US allies, in <a href="https://blogs.state.gov/stories/2017/02/28/en/president-trump-addresses-joint-session-congress-call-direct-robust-and">his words</a>, "to take a direct and meaningful role in both strategic and military operations, and pay their fair share of the cost."</p> <p>And the UN is cheap. Its interventions are far more <a href="http://www.rand.org/content/dam/rand/pubs/testimonies/2007/RAND_CT284.pdf">cost-effective</a> than those of the US. The organization's annual peacekeeping budget, which currently covers 16 operations on four continents, is roughly equivalent to what the US spent in a month in Afghanistan at the height of the war there.</p> <p>Other countries provide more than 80 percent of the UN's shoestring regular budget, which, by the way, is a <a href="https://www.statista.com/statistics/259173/pizza-carry-out-consumer-spending-in-the-us-qs">sixth of what Americans spent on carry-out pizza in 2015</a>. US funding to the UN represents just <a href="https://betterworldcampaign.org/news-room/press-releases/better-world-campaign-and-una-usa-warn-against-withholding-u-s-funding-for-the-united-nations/">0.1 percent of the federal budget</a> and is generally <a href="https://betterworldcampaign.org/us-un-partnership/public-opinion-polling/">supported by the American public</a>.</p> <p>Today, the UN is needed more than ever. The convergence of multiple crises has stretched the post-1945 international system to breaking point, threatening to reverse the gains of the past 70 years of the UN's existence. Yet instead of increased engagement with the UN, national outlooks are narrowing.</p> <p>While Obama's record at the UN was far from perfect (the US continued to <a href="http://foreignpolicy.com/2015/06/01/israels-shield/">shield its allies</a> from criticism and opposed <a href="https://www.hrw.org/news/2014/03/24/truth-about-united-states-drone-program">proposals</a> it disliked), the eight years of his administration showed what constructive US engagement can achieve, from helping to secure the Paris Agreement to negotiating the Iran nuclear deal. And in Secretary-General António Guterres, the US has a strong partner in such areas as <a href="https://www.un.org/press/en/2017/sgsm18453.doc.htm">counterterrorism, UN management reform</a> and tackling <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/08/world/americas/united-nations-antonio-guterres-peackeepers.html?_r=0">sexual abuse by UN peacekeepers</a>.</p> <p>To put America first, Trump must put the UN second. Channeling the farsighted leadership of the UN's founding father, Franklin D. Roosevelt, is the best way to make America great again.</p> <p><em>A version of this essay first appeared in Huffington Post.</em></p> <p> </p>
This <a target="_blank" href="https://www.passblue.com/2017/05/18/if-americas-first-europe-asks-who-should-be-second/">article</a> first appeared on <a target="_blank" href="https://www.passblue.com">PassBlue</a> and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.
Republish our articles for free, online or in print, under a Creative Commons license.
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All-time CM Voting Ends On Sunday
PNE’s search for the Club’s All-time XI central midfield partnership is coming to a close.
The poll will end on Sunday, meaning you have just three more days to affect the current standings. So, who will get your vote?
Will you pick Paul McKenna to join Alan Kelly Snr, Graham Alexander, Mark Lawrenson, Joe Marston, Ryan Kidd, Sir Tom Finney and David Eyres in the side?
The Chorley-born midfielder was a trainee at Deepdale before going on to make over 400 first team appearances for the Club and score 32 goals in the process.
Howard Kendall is another contender. The ex-Everton manager was an important component at PNE for four years, playing over 100 games for the Lilywhites.
Former Republic of Ireland international Brian Mooney is currently working his way up the voting ladder. He became a fans’ favourite at Deepdale in his time with the Club.
However, Sean Gregan looks like the front runner at the moment and, with over 250 appearances for PNE, who could argue that the ex-skipper also deserves a place in the select side.
So, to cast your vote, simply reply to the post on Facebook, or alternatively on Twitter name your selection followed by the ‘hashtag’ of #PNEXI.
You can also email your selection to media@pne.com.
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Route To The First Team
Academy Coach Andy Fensome believes that tonight’s match against Mansfield Town is a great opportunity for the players to show their long term worth to PNE.
North End kick off their FA Youth Cup 2013/14 campaign with a home tie against The Stags at Deepdale and Fensome is hoping to see some of the players involved impress enough to earn a similar opportunity to the one Academy midfielder Josh Brownhill has recently grasped.
“The boys can see there is a route to the first team,” explained Fensome, in an exclusive interview with PNE.Com.
“They can see that their teammates, people they have played alongside and people that have just been a year in front of them are actually getting to the first team, playing first team football.
“It is achievable if you are good enough and you work hard enough.
“With Josh going this year it has been fantastic for the lads that are in the squad now to see him progress.
“I think the managers comments after the game where Josh made his first team debut was basically that he didn’t know a lot about Josh originally, he played in the U21s game and the reserve games, he has done well and got the opportunity which has now led to him going and playing for the first team.
“So Josh being a mate of most of the youth team squad, the lads see what goes on, they can see Josh has made it in a very short space of time.
“He has played exceptionally well and they can see that hard work and graft will get rewards.”
Much like the players, Fensome and the rest of the backroom staff in the Academy setup are excited by the prospect of tonight’s match under the Deepdale lights and the former North End player is hoping to see the next crop of future Lilywhites embrace the atmosphere, surroundings and everything else that goes with the game come 7pm.
Fensome added: “It is an opportunity for the players to play on Deepdale and to play under the floodlights which is always a good occasion and the boys are really looking forward to the game at the moment.
“We will be asking them to harness there adrenaline and the excitement of going to play, but at the end of the day they are young professionals and are full time footballers and we are expecting them to hopefully go ahead and embrace that and hopefully enjoy themselves playing.
“Hopefully that will lead to them playing with confidence and getting the result they deserve.
“The boys have been working extremely hard in training this week.
“We went to watch Mansfield last week, myself and Andy Livingstone, we have given them a little bit of inside knowledge, hopefully how we think Mansfield are going to play, so we have told them that there is nothing to be scared of.
“They are playing at Deepdale and they should embrace that experience, enjoy that experience and go ahead and just play your football.
“If you work hard and play like I expect them to do and how I know they can do, then that is a great experience for them and hopefully they will enjoy it.”
With the exception of a couple of long term absentees, Academy manager Nick Harrison has a full squad to select from for the first round match and as well as being cheered on by the North End crowd, the rest of the Academy teams will also be in attendance to give those players a sneak peak of what their futures could hold in store for them if they apply themselves correctly.
Fensome continued: “Everybody is fighting fit, we have had a good week.
“Training has gone well and we are looking forward to the game.
“Everything has been building up to Friday night and as I said, hopefully they can all just go ahead and enjoy that and everyone who is in the squad or around the squad, whether you are fully fit or you are injured, is going to hopefully join together to help get the result we need.
“For the boys that are in and around the Academy who are 14, 15 year old lads who can almost touch youth team level, it is going to be good for them hopefully to see us play for the first time this year.
“See the boys that they know as teammates from last year and the year before, see them go and compete and hopefully it will inspire them to say that they want that scholarship and if they work hard enough and are good enough, then they will get their opportunity in the youth team maybe next year or the year after.”
You can cheer on the boys tonight at Deepdale against Mansfield Town from the Sir Tom Finney Stand which is open.
Preston North End are offering free admission to all Lilywhites season ticket holders and non-holders can enjoy the action for only £2.
Kick-off is at 7pm.
If you can’t make it to the game, you can listen live on PNE Player.
Anthony Wareing will be describing the action live with guest analyst Graeme Atkinson from 6.55pm.
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Grayson: Records Are Made To Be Broken
Preston North End might not have won at Bramall Lane since 1978, but manager Simon Grayson believes records like that are made to be broken.
The North End boss was still in school when the Lilywhites came away from Sheffield United with a 1-0 victory on 18th November, just under 35 years ago, but he is confident his side can continue their current winning form when they travel across the Pennines this weekend.
“I was still at school, primary school, well these records are there to be broken aren’t they?” he said at a press conference at Springfields.
“We always say that when people throw stats at you, that we want to go and win the game there, last year we came close to winning it, I thought we were in a very comfortable performance last year, even though it was at the back end of the season.
“It’s one of those games where we want to sustain the run that we’re on and make sure we don’t get beat.
“You look at them as a team, obviously they’re underperforming at this moment in time, they’ve got some good players there – they signed Marlon King this week as well.
“So, tough game for us, a team that’ll have a huge fanbase behind them but we go there in good sprits.”
Despite their early season struggles, the quality of Sheffield United’s squad is clear to see and ever-expanding – proven by their recent acquisitions of Jose Baxter and former Premier League striker Marlon King.
“You look through their squad, they’ve got Championship players in nearly every position,” Grayson commented.
“I looked at their back four this morning, you’ve got Tony McMahon, Neil Collins, McGuire and Matt Hill as well – so that’s not a bad back four that has got great experience.
“They’ve got one or two younger players in the midfield department, they’ve signed Baxter from Oldham who is a talented footballer, so they’ve underachieved but we want to make sure that we implement our own game and give them something to worry about.”
North End are coming off a satisfying 3-0 win over Stevenage at Deepdale, which made it three consecutive victories in League One.
The Lilywhites scored twice in the second half to seal the triumph over the Boro, and Grayson says he was pleased with the application of his players after a successful half time chat.
“I was pleased with the end product of it all, I felt at half time we needed to up the tempo without the ball and the urgency with it,” he said.
“Saying that, we still had three or four gilt edged chances – Bev hit the post, Humey did and should have scored with another header, Joel Byrom had an opportunity.
“I just felt we gave them too much space and a few too many opportunities ourselves but really second half we got that second goal which gave us that platform to go off and express ourselves a little bit more and come the end of the game it could have been a lot more comfortable score line than the three goals that we scored.”
Unlike when the 43-year-old first took charge at Deepdale, North End are currently enjoying a whole week between matches – rather than having to play on Tuesdays and Saturdays in quick succession.
And Grayson admits it is nice to have time to rest, as well as make the most of vital hours on the organisation of his squad at Springfields.
He said: “That’s nice and it also gives you time throughout the week to do a bit of recovery work but also to spend some time on the training pitch.
“We’re on Saturday to Saturday at the moment but once the winter months step in then I’m sure there will be a few cancelled games and you go into Saturday to Tuesday.
“But at this moment in time the players are enjoying what they’re doing, working hard on the training pitch to sustain what we’ve done since the start of the season.”
Recently, Preston have reaped the rewards of playing an effective 3-5-2 formation, with Keith Keane and Joel Byrom being the men in midfield.
The current competition in the squad for those spots is fierce though, as it is across the board for places in the starting XI.
“When you look at the midfield department that’s sat on the bench, you’ve got two Club captains in Mousinho and Welsh, who was player of the year last year, and Nicky Wroe, your leading goalscorer,” Grayson said.
“It tells you something about the other lads that are in there at the moment and doing a job that we’ve not had to change the team around for lack of form because they’re playing well and getting some results.
“Everybody will get an opportunity over the course of the season because that’s how it works, those lads will just have to be patient and work hard in training, which they’re doing.
“Some of them played in a game against Rochdale on Tuesday at the training ground and they have to maintain the level of fitness for when their ready to return to the team.”
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Larry Neumeister, Associated Press Larry Neumeister, Associated Press
https://www.pbs.org/newshour/nation/aclu-sues-over-plans-for-citizenship-question-on-2020-census
ACLU sues over plans for citizenship question on 2020 census
Nation Jun 6, 2018 12:30 PM EDT
NEW YORK — Civil rights lawyers sued the U.S. Commerce Department on Wednesday to try to stop plans to add a citizenship question to the 2020 census, calling it an unconstitutional attempt to discriminate against immigrants.
The Manhattan federal court lawsuit on behalf of immigrants’ rights groups blames racial animus for the recent announcement that the census will include a citizenship question for the first time since 1950.
The lawsuit, filed by the American Civil Liberties Union and others, claims the question intentionally discriminates against immigrants and will increase fear in their communities. It alleges census participation will be depressed, diluting the economic and political power of residents in places like New York City; Prince Georges’ County, Maryland; Houston; San Antonio, Texas; and the Florida counties of Miami-Dade, Broward and Orange.
The lawsuit predicts the citizenship question will result in at least two states losing a congressional seat. It alleges that the question was added unconstitutionally with discriminatory intent to diminish the political power and influence of Latinos, Asian-Americans, Arab-Americans and immigrant communities of color generally.
U.S. Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross announced the plan in March, saying the question was needed in part to help the government enforce the Voting Rights Act, a 1965 law meant to protect political representation of minority groups. The Commerce Department is responsible for the census.
The plan has resulted in several lawsuits, including one in California, the nation’s most populous state with the highest concentration of foreign-born residents, and another in New York brought by 17 Democratic attorneys general, the District of Columbia, six cities and the bipartisan U.S. Conference of Mayors.
The decennial census is required by the Constitution and used to determine the number of seats each state has in the House of Representatives, as well as how federal money is distributed to local communities.
The Justice Department did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Donna Lieberman, head of the New York Civil Liberties Union, said in a release that President Donald Trump’s administration was “shamelessly weaponizing the census to wage its war on communities of color, immigrants and the poor.”
She added: “New Yorkers refuse to be undercounted, discriminated against or driven into the shadows.”
Steven Choi, executive director of the New York Immigration Coalition, said the citizenship question “is toxic to New York’s four million immigrants and all New Yorkers, who stand to lose millions of dollars in federal aid and representation in Congress.”
Plaintiffs in the lawsuit include the coalition, the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee and other groups. Besides the Commerce Department and Ross, the Bureau of the Census and its director, Ron Jarmin, were also named as defendants.
READ MORE: Democrats fear immigrants will skip census with citizenship query
Left: An attendee holds her new country's flag and her naturalization papers as she is sworn in during a 2017 U.S. citizenship ceremony in Los Angeles. Photo by Mike Blake/Reuters
More than 20 cities and states sue government over census questions
House oversight panel to subpoena Trump appointee over citizenship question on 2020 Census
By Kevin Freking, Associated Press
AP Fact Check: What the Trump administration isn’t saying about 2020 census
By Hope Yen, Associated Press
Democrats fear immigrants will skip census with citizenship query
By Kevin Freking and Hope Yen, Associated Press
Citizenship question may result in less accurate 2020 census, says former bureau director
Politics Mar 27
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Photographs is a story-driven puzzler from the maker of You Must Build A Boat
You must build a tragic conclusion.
You Must Build A Boat and 10,000,000 creator Luca Redwood revealed a new game today: Photographs, a five-part puzzle game built on branching, interwoven stories, with art by Octavi "Pixelshuh" Navarro (best known for Thimbleweed Park) and music by Ben Prunty (best known for FTL).
"Photograph's big secret is that it's not a puzzle game," the press kit says. "It's five puzzle games. The game is divided into five distinct stories, set in five different times and locations. A player will learn how to solve progressively difficult puzzles in one story, and then move to the next story which has completely different gameplay."
The varied puzzles on display in its announcement trailer are the most striking thing about Photographs considering Redwood's previous hits both iterated on the match-3 formula. The game's official site describes its connecting storyline as tragic and mysterious, which is also a significant departure from the zaniness of You Must Build A Boat and 10,000,000—though it's arguably in line with the social despair of Redwood's other game, Smarter Than You.
Photographs is scheduled to release on PC in 2018.
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Skype, WhatsApp face increased privacy regulation in Europe
The European Commission wants to update its aging privacy rules for electronic communications services, bringing messaging apps under its umbrella for the first time
By Peter Sayer
Senior Editor, IDG News Service | PT
Peter Sayer
Skype, WhatsApp and services like them could soon fall under the same European Union regulations as telephone calls and SMS text messages, a leaked legislative draft reveals.
Although Skype and WhatsApp can both be used to make voice calls and send text messages, they don't fall under existing EU communications privacy legislation because they are data services that run over the top of an internet connection, rather than native functions of the network like phone calls and SMS.
But legislators want to bring such "over-the-top" services within the scope of rules protecting users' privacy with their proposed Privacy and Electronic Communications Regulation, a draft of which was obtained by Politico on Monday. The regulation is intended to replace the 2002 ePrivacy Directive.
The new regulation calls for all electronic communications to be confidential. Processing or interfering with such communications without the end users' consent, including by listening, tapping, storing, monitoring or other kinds of interception and surveillance, shall be prohibited, the draft regulation says.
The ePrivacy Directive was last updated in 2009, at the dawn of the smartphone app era, and much has changed for users of telecommunications services since.
For one thing, while mobile phone users still send billions of SMS text messages a day, usage of over-the-top messaging services overtook SMS years ago. By January 2015, WhatsApp said its messaging traffic alone exceeded that of SMS by 50 percent.
The draft regulation expands the definition of electronic communications to encompass new services delivered by apps rather than dedicated hardware.
Under the proposed rules, privacy is an option -- but it's one that must always be turned on by default, allowing users to opt out of it, rather than requiring them to opt in.
Article 10 of the leaked draft, titled "Privacy by design," requires: "The settings of all the components of the terminal equipment placed on the market shall be configured to, by default, prevent third parties from storing information, processing information already stored in the terminal equipment and preventing the use by third parties of the equipment's processing capabilities."
Furthermore, it says, "Software placed on the market permitting electronic communications, including the retrieval and presentation of information on the Internet, shall be configured to by default prevent third parties from storing information on the terminal equipment of an end-user or processing information already stored on that equipment."
The draft regulation ought to put an end to spam, with its stipulation (in Article 16, Unsolicited communications) that, "The use of electronic communications services by natural or legal persons for the purposes of transmitting direct marketing communications is allowed only in respect of end-users who have given their prior consent."
One of the more controversial provisions of the 2009 update to the ePrivacy laws was the requirement that websites targeting EU readers should request permission before setting cookies.
Under the new draft, that requirement will be softened in a number of ways. Sites can look at browser settings allowing or rejecting cookies and apply those without having to ask the user, while cookies essential to the operation of a site can be set without notice. The preamble to the regulation gives examples of essential uses, such as to remember language preferences, or to keep track of users' input when filling in forms over several pages.
But there are some warning signs: "Cookies can also be a legitimate and useful tool, for example, in measuring web traffic to a site," the draft's preamble notes without further explanation. Most website visitors would not object to their visit being counted in this way by the site's operator, which is already aware of it. The privacy issues arise when information about the visit is tracked by a third party, correlated with all the other sites visited by the same user, and then sold on to others.
Peter Sayer covers enterprise applications for CIO.com.
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Tally Energy Services racks up over $130 mln
Houston-based Tally Energy Services, a newly launched firm focused on North America shale, has raised over $130 million in funding. Tally’s backers are RedBird Capital Partners and Sallyport Investments.
HOUSTON–(BUSINESS WIRE)–Tally Energy Services, a private equity backed firm with a buy and build strategy in specialized North American shale products and services, recently launched its operations in Houston, Texas. With sponsorship from RedBird Capital Partners and Sallyport Investments, Tally Energy Services raised $130MM+ of capital commitments with additional equity available for substantially larger acquisitions. Tally is principally focused on directional drilling, completion equipment, and artificial lift.
Led by CEO Chris Dorros, the firm recently completed two Texas-based acquisitions: Terra Directional Services, a full-service directional drilling company specializing in horizontal wells for shale projects throughout the United States, and Tech-Flo Consulting, a worldwide supplier of hydraulic lift systems.
Douglas L. Foshee joins Tally Energy Services as Chairman of the Board. As founder and owner of Sallyport Investments, LLC, Foshee has more than thirty years in the energy industry. He is the former chairman, president, and chief executive officer of El Paso Corporation, which owned North America’s largest natural gas pipeline system and one of North America’s largest natural gas producers prior to its merger with Kinder Morgan, Inc. in 2012, one of the largest mergers in the energy industry.
Tally Energy Services is currently seeking additional investment opportunities in US technical oilfield products and services companies with proven and sustainable business models and management teams desiring an experienced and well-capitalized strategic partner to help facilitate growth.
“Tally Energy has an important role to play in today’s dynamic oil and gas sector. As new opportunities emerge for specialized companies that have adapted to the new industry environment, we are well positioned to develop collaborative partnerships with skilled leadership teams that are prepared to build on their operational successes and are ready to drive significant growth,” said Dorros. “Our goal is to assist these companies in the achievement of their business objectives and deliver solid returns for our investors through organic growth, operational improvements and strategic acquisitions.”
The seismic shift in the global oil markets created fundamental changes for the US shale industry. The imbalance in supply and demand forced a shift from development to execution, focusing on efficiency and technology to reduce costs. Those reductions in cost are lowering shale breakevens and making the US more resilient to price declines. Tally Energy Services’ objective is to grow innovative businesses by focusing on areas most profoundly affecting success: wellbore placement, reservoir communication and bringing hydrocarbons to the surface.
About Tally Energy Services
Tally Energy Services is a private-equity backed firm focused on North America shale. With a solid buy and build strategy, the firm seeks innovative US companies in technical oilfield products and services with opportunities for growth, consolidation, and differentiation. Through strategic guidance, its pragmatic approach and operational expertise, Tally Energy drives transformation that unlocks each company’s potential with a long-term goal of achieving best-case outcomes for its businesses and investors. Tally Energy Services: www.tallyenergy.com
About Redbird Capital Partners
Founded in 2013, RedBird Capital Partners is a principal investment firm focused on transformational growth equity investments in partnership with entrepreneurs and family owned businesses. To date, the firm has led over $1.5 billion of equity investments in ten platform companies in North America. RedBird typically invests in proven business models with experienced management teams across four industry verticals: Communications; Sports, Leisure & Hospitality; Energy & Industrials; and Financial & Business Services. RedBird’s “Investing to Build” philosophy is aimed at creating long-term partnerships with entrepreneurs and family offices with the objective of building market leading businesses in the industry verticals within its domain expertise. RedBird has offices in New York and Dallas. Redbird Capital Partners: http://redbirdcap.com
About Sallyport Investments
Founded by Doug Foshee in 2012, Sallyport Investments provides capital and leadership to companies in the Upstream, Midstream and Service Sectors of the Energy Industry. The firm partners with companies in which it invests, working side-by-side with management teams to create great businesses and long-term value. By staying focused on long-term value creation, Sallyport creates superior investment returns and achieves its own financial and philanthropic goals. Sallyport Investments: http://sallyport.net
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Landlord/Tenant - Leases
Leases and Military Personnel on Active Duty
Ending a Lease because of a Duty Order
If a service member on active duty with the United States military leases property for residence, business, or agriculture and is later ordered to a new location, the law provides some protection to the service member. If the order is a temporary duty order for more than 3 months or an order for permanent change of station, that service member’s responsibility to pay is capped. The service member cannot be ordered to pay for more than:
30 days rent after written notice and a copy of the military orders are given to the landlord; and
the cost of repairing any damage to the premises caused by an act or failure to act of the service member.
Read the Law: Maryland Code, Real Property Section 8-212.1, 50 USC Section 3955
Termination Date
For month-to-month premises leases, termination is effective 30 days after the date the next rent payment is due once the landlord has received notice of termination. For example, if rent is due on the first of every month, and the service member mails a termination notice to the landlord on March 1st, the next date rent is due will be April 1st. That means that termination of the lease will occur on May 1st.
For all other premises rentals, the lease will terminate on the last day of the month after the month in which the service member delivers proper notice. For example, if the service member has a year-long lease, and notice of termination is given on March 15th, the lease would terminate on April 30th.
Read the Law: 50 USC Section 3955(d)
Refund of Rent or Deposits
If rent has been paid in advance, the landlord must refund the unearned rent. The service member pays only for the months before the lease is terminated.
Once the lease has been lawfully terminated, the landlord must return the security deposit. The landlord may not hold the security deposit or the service member’s personal property, or block the service member from taking personal property because of a claim for rent after the lease termination date. Doing so is a misdemeanor, punishable by a fine or imprisonment of not more than one year.
Read the Law: 50 USC Section 3955(f), 50 USC Section 3955(h)
Eviction or Distress
A landlord needs a court order to evict a service member or dependents from a premises used or intended to be used as a primary residence if the monthly rent is not over a specific dollar amount. That amount is calculated by a formula based on inflation and published by the Secretary of Defense in the Federal Register each year. In 2017, the amount is $3584.99.
TIP: Use the search terms: "Servicemembers Civil Relief Act," "Federal Register," "housing price inflation," and the current year to find the most up-to-date amount.
A landlord needs a court order take the service member’s (or their dependents’) personal property for nonpayment of rent. (This legal action is called “distress.”)
Read the Law: 50 USC Section 3951(a)
Stay of Eviction or Distress
If a service member’s ability to pay rent is materially affected by military service and the service member asks the court, the court must delay (stay) proceedings for 3 months. The court may also delay proceedings on its own, even if the service member does not ask. The court can make the delay longer or shorter in the interest of fairness and justice.
The court may also make adjustments to the lease to help both the service member and the landlord.
If the court grants the service member a stay, the court may also grant any relief to the landlord that the court thinks is just.
Any person who knowingly participates in an eviction or distress in violation of this law is subject to federal penalties of a fine or imprisonment for up to one year, or both.
If ordered by the court, the Secretary of Defense, etc., must order that a portion of the service member’s pay be put aside toward paying the court order. The amount of money put aside is subject to the rules of the Secretary of Defense governing how much may be taken from a service member’s pay.
Read the Law: 50 USC Section 50, Section 3951, Section 3952, 82 Federal Register 10,762 (February 15, 2017)
Baltimore Neighborhoods, Inc. (BNI); Edited by Ashley Worth, Esq.
Last Updated: Sun, 04/07/2019 - 4:14 am
ASK A MARYLAND
LAW LIBRARIAN
Submit a legal information question to the Thurgood Marshall State Law Library
Maryland Courts
Self-Help Center
Call or chat with a lawyer about your civil legal matter, at no cost
8:30 am - 8:00 pm, Mon - Fri
Servicemembers Civil Relief Act
Video - Rent Court for Landlords
Video - Rent Court for Tenants
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Kelly's Heels: Dig In!: A Popboomerang Compilation
Jason MacNeil
Kelly's Heels
Dig In!: a Popboomerang Compilation
Label: Popboomerang
UK Release Date: Available as import
Kelly's Heels are actually a new band in name only. Originally forming out of a British group called the Ashes, Kelly's Heels was invited back to New York's International Pop Overthrow in the late '90s. The group has released four under-the-radar albums and they've continued a power pop/pop punk/every other power pop punk tradition to develop into a fine, hook-filled trio. This album takes the best of the band's first three albums and throws them together. So while there might be some duller moments on 1997's Gone Off Pop?!?, 1999's Blunt Cut, and 2002's Bent Over Backwards, there is nary a filler on this 19-track album that features some remixes and demos. Comparisons to the Beatles, Kinks, and Lovin' Spoonful are cited, but there is more happy-go-lucky summer pop à la the Beach Boys on the frantic "Sabrina". "The pedestal they made for her / The clothes that they parade for her / Are nothing that she's after / And they just don't understand", sings lead singer Bob Kelly, before a catchy, jangle-soaked guitar takes over. Fans of early Costello and Sloan should enjoy this primer, which comes complete with hands claps and McCartney-esque head shakes.
"Don't Get Me Started" tones the record down and is tighter and more precise, relying on the rhythm section to steer the song. It also adheres to the tradition of most '60s-era songs in that it says all it needs to say in just over two minutes, with Kelly giving some great vocals as a tambourine works double-time in the chorus. Ditto for "Tell Me If It's Over", a song that seems to be ripped from "The Guide to Sugar-Coated Power Pop Vol. 1". When Kelly and company take the album into a softer pop mold on "You Don't Know Her", it's moderately successful, but it's also a song they could probably do in their sleep. Kelly's Heels would be the perfect band if Tom Hanks lived in Sydney and decided to do a second That Thing You Do! film, judging by the cheery and grin-inducing "The Easy Way". Here the band finds a gem of a hook and squeezes everything out of it.
"She Knows", which Kely describes in the liner notes as a song about "non-celebrity stalking," doesn't stray from their brand of pop, although it tends to be harder than almost everything else thus far, barring "The Easy Way". This is the point when you realize that what you've heard in the first half is a good indication of what you'll hear in the second half, remixes and demos aside. "Can You Count the Stars" is yet another summer driving tune that breezes in as quickly as it fades out, Kelly's Heels packing as much into the 150 seconds as they can. Speaking of fade outs, the ballad-based, mid-tempo "Faded Out" is more in line with the Lovin' Spoonful and a dash of Eric Burdon wearing out his welcome with the Animals. It's back to a straightforward, non-fat power pop model on "Making Me Go On", which resembles an overseas version of Gin Blossoms. "Light in the Dark" has some psychedelic flair, but seems par for the course on this record.
Most pop bands have a hard time performing these type of songs without either being overtly repetitive or losing the excitement in some cases. But this label, much like Jeremy Morris's Jam Recordings, intends to give these bands as much exposure as possible. And if they're as talented as Kelly's Heels, they have little to worry about. The band hit the homestretch with a soft "Kitten Heels" that has Kelly's warbled vocals resembling a spry Tiny Tim in the opening verse. "Small a" has large amounts of jangle and one song tends to blend into the other by this point. Although I assume the band's name is a play on words (Achilles' Heel?), they have very few weaknesses.
kelly's heels dig in!: a popboomerang compilation
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The 2019 Sci-Fi Film Guide
Pokémon, Star Wars, and Godzilla? This is going to be a good year.
By Darren Orf
Michael Stillwell
A new year means new sci-fi, and there's lots to be excited about. Whether you're into superheroes, kaiju, evil robots, or a galaxy far, far away, 2019 has a little bit of everything.
Here are all the films for every sci-fi fan to keep in mind, along with some preliminary expectations for the film. We'll update this list with our thoughts when films release and when more are announced for the 2019 calendar year.
Get ready to spend some time at the movies.
Release: January 11, 2019
Verdict: Skip
Seems like there was something behind those numerous delays. This latest sci-fi flick starring Keanu Reeves comes with an interesting premise that dissolves into a lackluster story. Unless you have a love for bad films, this one is definitely worth avoiding.
Release: January 18, 2019 (on Netflix only)
It's a familiar story. Earth is toxic because of humanity's inability to save its celestial home, now surviving humans, living after near-complete environmental collapse, are going to try their luck on IO, Jupiter's fifth moon. Sadly, the film doesn't deliver on its interesting central theme, leaving behind a film that feels half-baked at best.
Verdict: Maybe
In 2016, M. Night Shyamalan released Split, an unassuming psychological thriller starring James McAvoy as a recluse suffering from split personality disorder. But what appeared to be a solid horror film doubled as a surprise sequel to Shyamalan's Unbreakable, a film made 16 years prior. Shyamalan, true to form, makes some surprising twists and turns for a horror film that keeps you engaged. If you haven't seen the first two films, this one won't offer you much, but it's a fitting ending to one of Hollywood's weirdest superhero franchises.
Release: February 14, 2018
Based on a manga of the same name (sort of), Alita: Battle Angel is unlike anything we've seen before. Weirdly huge eyes aside, this Robert Rodriguez feature is chock-full of emotion and action in equal measure. Hollywood isn't the best at adapting manga, and Alita is a valiant effort, but much like sci-fi films Valerian and Ghost in the Shell, Alita seems to be more interested in selling dazzling special effects than a deeply engaging story.
Caught in a Kree explosion, Carol Danvers is bestowed awesome powers, transforming into Ms. Marvel but known in today's comic circles as Captain Marvel. Brie Larson plays the role of this souped-up superhuman in the character's first Marvel appearance, though she's already slated to joined the cast in Avengers: Endgame. As with so, so, so many Marvel films before, you can be confident this one will be interesting but you have to be fully onboard the Marvel train to get the most out of it.
Captive State
Most alien invasion movies focus on the “invasion” part, but what happens after humans have been subjugated? Captive State answers the question by setting up a world already a decade deep into its otherworldly occupation. While the film's premise is interesting (and John Goodman is great), the film doesn't nail the execution and comes off as a low-budget sci-fi flick that doesn't have enough fun with the material.
Release: April 5, 2019
Verdict: Must See
Also known as Captain Marvel but from an entirely separate publishing company, Billy Batson's alter ego, summoned by the word "Shazam!" isn't your standard DC film fare. Where Superman and Batman are dark and brooding (and don't get us started on the Justice League), Shazam! is the exact opposite. Billed more like a coming-of-age story than your typical superhero yarn, Shazam! breaks the DC mold—a mold that's definitely worth breaking.
It's not a reboot anyone asked for, but Mike Mignola's Hellboy comic is more than worth the revisit. This film was originally conceived as a sequel to Guillermo del Toro's Hellboy: The Golden Army, but creative differences morphed into a reboot with a new director (Neil Marshall) and a new Hellboy (David Harbour). But this reboot fails to live up to the original, missing a lot of the greatness that made the original so wonderful to watch. We'll stick del Toro's version.
Verdict: Must watch
Well, it's all come down to this. After the stunning events of Avengers: Infinity War, our heroes continue the fight against Thanos. Will they be successful? (Comics history would suggest yes). This one is worth the watch just for the spectacle of it all—even if you're not partial to drawn-out displays of superheroics.
It's just weird enough to be good.
Five years after Gareth Edwards's Godzilla, the King of Monsters returns. While the original reboot film had some bright spots, it ultimately collapsed under a sloppy script and a weak connection to its more human elements. King of Monsters doesn't help things with some eye-rolling plot details and poor acting. Hollywood just can't seem to get this irradiated lizard right.
Preliminary Verdict: Looks promising
X-Men: Dark Phoenix is a follow-up to 2016’s X-Men: Apocalypse, which was a rare miss for the mutant franchise. Phoenix will deal with Jean Grey’s cosmic dark side while hopefully avoiding the shortcomings that doomed X-Men: The Last Stand (a film that no longer exists in canon thanks to some time-travel shenanigans). The creative team has expressed that they wish to adhere more closely to comic writer Chris Claremont’s source material, but we’ll have to wait until June to see if they can pull it off.
A fourth MiB film isn't exactly what the world needs right now, but 2012's Men in Black 3 was just good enough (thanks Josh Brolin) to keep us interested in the franchise. Considering this one stars Chris Hemsworth, Tessa Thompson, and Liam Neeson, MiB: International is shaping into a worthwhile watch.
Preliminary verdict: Must watch
Spider-Man: Homecoming was one of our favorite superhero movies in recent memory. Tom Holland finally delivers a pitch-perfect Peter Parker, and we're immensely excited to see where he takes the character next. A great sequel would also be a fitting tribute to the character's creator, Stan Lee, who passed away in November last year.
Release: August 2, 2019
Not that we need another superhero movie or anything, but The New Mutants at least looks like a refreshing take on the genre, mostly taking place inside an insane asylum (from what we can tell from the trailer). In the world of comic films, the X-Men have always been slightly more competent at making something worth watching, especially when compared to DC films. Fingers crossed that the mutants can strike gold again with The New Mutants.
Roy McBride (Brad Pitt) wants to figure out why his father's mission to find extra-terrestrial life on Neptune failed, setting the stage for the main events of Ad Astra. Director James Gray says that the film will be "the most realistic depiction of space travel that’s been put in a movie." We'll see about that.
Finding a replacement for Heath Ledger's Joker is an impossible task, but if you had to find someone to match Ledger's impressive creep factor, Joaquin Phoenix would be at the top of our list. Taking up the mantle of Batman's most famous villain, Phoenix will have big shoes to fill (sans Jared Leto) if he wants to be remembered for the maniacal trickster. But looking at some of his other credits (The Master, Her) and DC's ability to turn out a good film once in a while (Wonder Woman), Joker has the possibility of surprising.
Skydance
With a bit of Looper tossed in, Gemini Man follows Henry Brogen (Will Smith) as an aging assassin who must survive an encounter with his most deadly enemy—himself. This one will likely be a head trip from Ang Lee, but we're here for it.
Orion Pictures
Release: November 1, 2019
Preliminary verdict: Here we go again ...
We have absolutely no idea what's going with this franchise anymore, but Terminator 6 has going for it what other sequels post-T2 don't—James Cameron is involved. With director Tim Miller, Cameron helped develop the story and will be on board as producer. Hopefully Cameron and Miller can help clean up this mess.
If you, like us, grew up playing your Sega Genesis every day between the hours of 4 p.m. and 10 p.m., then you likely have an affinity for the console’s flagship character and his friends, and so will happily see how they translate to the big screen despite your evolution into adulthood, and theirs into CG, when Sonic the Hedgehog hits theaters on November 8.
But if you’re still wavering, don’t let the snark kings on your social feed sway you into skipping Sonic just yet. Here are five reasons why this strange, possibly misguided movie could be much better than everyone thinks.
Release: December 20, 2019
Saving the big boy for last. After a tumultuous year with The Last Jedi (which we loved) and Solo (which we didn't love), Disney has given the franchise back to J. J. Abrams in hopes of righting the ship. This new era of Star Wars doesn't quite live up to its original trilogy, but new Star Wars is new Star Wars. We're in theater opening night.
Delayed until 2020
Chaos Walking
Based on Patrick Ness's The Knife of Never Letting Go, Chaos Walking has the trappings of other YA novels that have been less than enthusiastically received (i.e. Divergent and Maze Runner). But with producers like Robert Zemeckis and leads like Tom Holland and Daisy Ridley, this one just might turn out differently. A post-apocalyptic tale where only men have survived a deadly disease, the hero Tom Hewitt discovers that things aren't what they seem when he stumbles upon Viola Eade (Daisy Ridley). We're intrigued.
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Debate Continues: Can New Technology Save Nuclear Power?
01/01/2019 | Kennedy Maize
Nuclear power provides carbon-free electricity for a warming world. But is its use still practical, can it still be economic, is its promise still achievable, and is nuclear a key to combating climate change? So far, nuclear power has fallen short of those goals. Looking at advanced nuclear technologies, it’s not certain that will change.
Japan’s Toshiba Corp. in November said it will scrap its NuGeneration subsidiary and the planned Moorside nuclear station in Britain. Toshiba, owner of Westinghouse’s advanced nuclear technology, said it would take a $162 million hit for killing the project. The Guardian newspaper commented, “The decision represents a major blow to the government’s ambitions for new nuclear and leaves a huge hole in energy policy. The plant would have provided about 7% of UK electricity.”
The Moorside failure is a symbol of the problems that have plagued the latest generation (Generation III, or Gen III) of large, advanced light-water nuclear reactors. Industry and government have offered advanced nuclear designs as a salvation, with a new generation of nuclear plants aimed at the goal of a carbon-free generating technology.
A joint venture of Iberdrola, GDF SUEZ, and Scottish and Southern Energy (SSE) acquired the 470-acre Moorside site in rural Cumbria near the UK’s nuclear reprocessing plant at Sellafield in 2009, aiming to develop a nuclear station. The British government enthusiastically signed on. Toshiba took over in 2013, naming its venture NuGeneration (NuGen). The project called for three Westinghouse-designed 1,100-MW AP1000 units, a third-generation reactor design some 20 years in incubation. But the AP1000 has run into serious problems in projects in South Carolina and Georgia in the U.S. The V.C. Summer expansion in South Carolina was abandoned; the Vogtle project in Georgia (Figure 1) is far behind schedule and way over budget.
1. Work continues at the expansion of the Vogtle nuclear plant near Waynesboro, Georgia, where two AP1000 reactors are being built at the site. Here workers install safety shields on Unit 3. The expansion project has moved forward despite numerous construction delays and billions of dollars in cost overruns. Courtesy: Georgia Power
Toshiba pulled the plug on Moorside (Figure 2) in the wake of the U.S. problems, issues that led Toshiba’s Westinghouse subsidiary into bankruptcy protection in 2017. In a written statement, Toshiba said it “recognizes that the economically rational decision is to withdraw from the UK nuclear power plant construction project, and has resolved steps to wind up NuGen.”
2. Toshiba in November 2018 pulled the plug on its nuclear project at Moorside, in the countryside near Sellafield, in Cumbria, UK. The project is likely to revert to the British government, which could offer it to other developers. South Korea’s state-owned Korea Electric Power Corp. has previously shown interest. Courtesy: NuGeneration
South Korea’s state-owned Korea Electric Power Corp. (KEPCO) made a run at Moorside, offering to substitute its advanced APR1400 reactor design for the project. Toshiba has rejected the offer. The project is likely to revert to the British government, which could again offer it to nuclear developers, with KEPCO a likely bidder.
The Moorside collapse is emblematic of the difficulties facing the advanced light-water reactor (LWR) designs, particularly in Western markets where competitive pressures apply. In addition to the AP1000 struggles, France’s EPR advanced pressurized water reactor has experienced enormous problems during construction at the Olkiluoto site in Finland, where the utility TVO became the first purchaser of the technology, and at its home in France at the Flamanville nuclear station. Both projects are vastly over budget and far off schedule.
The promise of the advanced reactors (see sidebar) is to offer passive, as opposed to engineered, cooling using natural circulation. The Gen III units also provide simplified designs aimed at eliminating myriad electrical and plumbing complexities of previous reactors. They also are designed to have a smaller site footprint and less construction materials.
The Advanced Nuclear Playlist
Several advanced nuclear reactors are being marketed around the world. The designs have evolved through years of research and development.
AP1000. This 1,100-MW advanced pressurized water reactor, a product of Westinghouse Electric, has been under development for decades, incorporating passive safety features based on convection and conduction, and a simpler design. The AP1000 has had a mixed but largely unhappy history. Four units sold in the U.S., two to SCANA Corp. in South Carolina and two to Southern Company in Georgia, have experienced problems involving enormous cost overruns and failure to meet construction schedules. The utilities building the South Carolina units abandoned them. The two Georgia units remain problematic. There are four units under development in China; two connected to the grid in 2018, and two have experienced serious delays.
APR1400. Developed by Korea Electric Power Corp., this 1,400-MW pressurized water reactor (PWR) is based on the U.S. Combustion Engineering System 80+ design from the 1980s. One unit is operating at the Shin Kori station in South Korea, with three units under construction in South Korea and four in the United Arab Emirates. The units under construction have experienced delays.
EPR. France’s Areva designed this advanced pressurized water reactor, with Germany’s Siemens, to produce about 1,600 MW of electricity. Areva sold a unit to be built for Finnish utility TVO, along with a unit at EDF’s Flamanville station. Areva ran into problems at both sites, with costs escalating wildly and schedules turning into fiction. Eventually, EDF acquired Areva. Two EPR units are under construction in China; Taishan Unit 1 was connected to the grid in June and Unit 2 is expected to begin operating sometime in 2019. Two units in the UK at Hinkley Point are scheduled for completion in 2025, although that date is doubtful.
ESBWR. This “economic simplified boiling water reactor” from GE-Hitachi (GEH) is the only boiling water reactor among the Gen III designs. The 1,600-MW design has so far made no impact on the market, although a couple of U.S. utilities have expressed interest. GEH has suggested downsizing the design to about 300 MW and competing for the as-yet-unknown market for small modular reactors.
Hualong One (HPR1000). The Chinese government developed this 1,000-MW PWR design, based on French reactor technology. China General Nuclear Power Group and China National Nuclear Corp. have announced five projects in China. The vendors have also aggressively pursued foreign markets, with two units planned for Pakistan’s Karachi nuclear power complex. Construction is planned to start in 2020 for a unit in Argentina. China is aggressively pushing an export strategy for its Hualong One, with China General Nuclear Power Group and China National Nuclear Corp. in a joint venture to promote the technology abroad. UK nuclear regulators are reviewing the plant design, a process that could be completed in 2021.
VVER-1200. Russia developed its version of the pressurized water reactor, the water-water energetic reactor (VVER), in the 1970s, patterned on U.S. PWR technology (Western wags sometimes referred to it as the “Eastinghouse” reactor). The Soviet Union sold the earliest VVER reactors to its satellite countries such as East Germany and Hungary, as they were unlikely to be diverted to produce weapons’ grade material—unlike the graphite-moderated, water-cooled RBMK designs, which produced both power and weapons-grade plutonium. The Chernobyl reactor that caught fire and exploded in 1986 in Ukraine was an RBMK design. The latest VVER-1200, a 1,200-MW PWR, is designed for both domestic use and export. One unit is operating in Russia, at Novovoronezh, with other units under construction at other Russian sites, along with sites in Belarus, Turkey, and Bangladesh.
Are advanced nuclear reactor designs the answer to the decades-long doldrums for nuclear power? For the U.S., a National Academy of Sciences (NAS) panel led by long-time nuclear advocate M. Granger Morgan of Carnegie Mellon University, issued a pessimistic report last July—US nuclear power: The vanishing low-carbon wedge.
The academy’s report found, “While advanced reactor designs are sometimes held up as a potential solution to nuclear power’s challenges, our assessment of the advanced fission enterprise suggests that no US design will be commercialized before midcentury.” That’s a chilling indictment for all advanced LWRs. The crux of the Morgan report is an assessment that the economic hurdles for nuclear in the U.S. are insurmountable.
Economist Edward Kee, principal of the Nuclear Economics Consulting Group and a veteran analyst of nuclear economics, largely agrees with the report. But Kee argues that advanced nuclear has a clearer path outside the conventional developed-world market, including the U.S., where market competition has become an organizing principle. Kee told POWER that advanced nuclear projects are going well elsewhere. He notes that the oft-reviled AP1000 has reached full power at China’s Sanmen 1 site (Figure 3).
3. An AP1000 reactor reached full power at the Sanmen 1 site in China this past summer. Some nuclear power analysts say advanced technology projects may have a better chance of success outside of the U.S., in areas where competitive economic pressures are not as great. Courtesy: State Power Investment Corp.
Kee has examined the economics of all the advanced reactors now operating and under construction, concluding they are generally economically viable, although he concedes that data is murky from vendors in closed economies such as China and Russia. The projects outside the U.S. and Europe, he said, benefit from conscious state decisions to create viable supply chains and scale economies by committing to multiple units.
For Kee, the key to success of advanced LWR nuclear is government. Government, he argues, has to assume risks that private-sector investors are unable to shoulder in order to yield rewards—variables such as fuel diversity, emissions reductions, and the like, that private markets cannot foresee. “Government ownership, directly or indirectly, is almost necessary,” he said. Nuclear plants, he said, are a “100-year commitment,” far beyond the economic horizon of private investors. “Who is going to invest in this kind of project, where there is maybe 10 years of investment with no revenue, then a 60- [to] 80-year life?”
Peter Bradford, a veteran electric utility regulator and nuclear skeptic who served on the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) from 1977 to 1982, agrees that nuclear power in the U.S. is priced out of the market. “Even if, for once, they could contain or level out the costs,” he told POWER, “new nuclear is so far outside the competitive range. They have to cut costs and they can’t cut costs without building a bunch [of reactors]. That really isn’t in the cards.”
Nor does Bradford see new nuclear as a way to combat global warming. “Even if it is scaled up much faster than anything now in prospect, it cannot provide more than 10% to 15% of the greenhouse gas displacement that is likely to be needed by mid-century. Not only can nuclear power not stop global warming, it is probably not even an essential part of the solution to global warming,” he wrote in 2006. Since then, he argues, the declining costs of renewables and energy efficiency swamp nuclear economics even further.
While advocates call for setting a price on carbon to reward carbon-free generation, Bradford said that is a weak reed. “At any given level” of carbon prices, he said, “it is going to wind up benefiting renewables and storage,” not nuclear. A reasonable carbon price, he argued, “might not be enough to keep existing plants running.”
SMRs to the Rescue?
Given the problems with large, advanced nuclear reactor technologies, the focus of many energy policy analysts, government, and much of the nuclear industry has been on small modular reactors (SMRs). So far, there are SMR activities in various degrees of development in the U.S., Canada, the UK, France, Russia, China, and Japan.
Morgan’s NAS panel looked at downsized nuclear. The report said, “If large reactors constitute ‘bet the company’ investments and advanced U.S. designs are unlikely to emerge, the only remaining course of action by which the domestic nuclear industry could contribute a ‘carbon-free wedge’ in the near term is to develop and deploy smaller light water reactors.”
The less-than-300-MW small reactors offer lower individual unit costs, the prospects of off-site fabrication to lower construction costs, and the ability to follow growth in demand rather than anticipate it, by adding units as the market increases. But while smaller nuclear reactors are an appealing technological approach to keeping nuclear in the generating mix, they come with their own set of problems.
On closer inspection, said the NAS panel, “Our results reveal that while one light water SMR module would indeed cost much less than a large LWR, it is highly likely that the cost per unit of power will be higher. In other words, light water SMRs do make nuclear power more affordable but not necessarily more economically competitive for power generation.”
Given the “economic premium” of SMRs, along with “the considerable regulatory burden associated with any nuclear reactor, we do not see a clear path forward for the United States to deploy sufficient numbers of SMRs in the electric power sector to make a significant contribution to greenhouse gas mitigation by the middle of this century,” the report says. Economist Kee echoed that conclusion. When it comes to SMRs, he said there “is a lot of work to do and not much time to do it.”
SMRs also face a challenge of demonstrating their viability: Making an economic or climate impact requires many reactors. Neil Alexander, a Canadian nuclear consultant, wrote recently, “Everything about SMRs such as the cost of construction, availability of fuel, cost of shared services, availability of trained operators, and cost of research needed to resolve emerging challenges, only work economically when the unit is in a fleet. A FOAK [first-of-a-kind] cannot stand alone and the barrier to entry that the industry faces is more akin to the ‘First Dozen of a Kind.’ ”
Portland, Oregon-based NuScale appears to be the leader in developing SMR technology (Figure 4). It is taking Alexander’s advice. NuScale has a customer for a 12-unit (720-MW) station: Utah Associated Municipal Power System (UAMPS), which has a site at the Department of Energy’s (DOE’s) Idaho National Laboratory (INL). UAMPS will own the project and Energy Northwest, a municipal joint action agency that operates the Columbia nuclear station near Richland, Washington, will run the plant. Columbia is a 1,100-MW boiling water reactor.
4. NuScale is a leading developer of small modular reactor (SMR) technology. It created the design shown in this rendering and has a customer for a 12-unit, 720-MW power station to be built in Idaho. Courtesy: NuScale
NuScale recently selected BWX Technologies (BWXT) of Lynchburg, Virginia, to begin engineering work leading up to the manufacture of the 60-MW NuScale reactors. BWXT, created after reactor builder Babcock & Wilcox (B&W) emerged from bankruptcy in 2006, has deep experience in the U.S. naval reactor program. NuScale has received a commitment of some $200 million from the DOE. Global engineering firm Fluor Corp. is the majority investor in NuScale.
Ironically, BWXT was the early leader in the SMR race, with its 195-MW mPower pressurized water reactor design. After spending some $400 million on the mPower venture (including $100 million from the DOE), B&W declared it officially dead in March 2017. Rod Adams, who worked on the project for B&W, had this epitaph for the mPower project, “There was simply too much work left to do, too much money left to invest, and an insufficient level of interest in the product to allow continued expenditures to clear corporate decision hurdles.”
NuScale still has a long way to go to demonstrate the validity of its SMR. The company said it expects the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) will approve the NuScale reactor design in September 2020. UAMPS will also have to get NRC approval for a combined construction and operating license for the site at INL. Nonetheless, NuScale’s optimistic schedule projects commercial operation “by the mid-2020s.”
Past experience suggests that nuclear construction schedules are made to be broken. SMRs pose unique challenges to federal regulators, both in the reactor designs and in operational issues such as staffing levels and communications among 12 discrete units, particularly if they are used to follow load. Additionally, power prices in the Western U.S. are already low and natural gas is driving them lower.
Recognizing the challenges to deploying SMRs, the DOE in November issued a report suggesting state standards and incentives, modeled on those boosting renewables, be applied to SMR technology. But, as POWER reported, “To make a meaningful impact, nearly $10 billion in incentives would be needed to deploy 6 GW of SMR capacity by 2035.”
Beyond the LWR?
Several efforts are in place to replace conventional LWRs with other approaches to splitting atoms to generate power. Admittedly longshots, these build-on technologies go back to the early days of civilian nuclear power, and were previously abandoned in favor of the proven LWR designs.
The highest profile of the LWR apostates is TerraPower, based in Bellevue, Washington, and backed by Microsoft founder and multi-billionaire Bill Gates. Founded in 2006, TerraPower is working on a liquid-sodium-cooled breeder-burner machine (Figure 5) that can run on uranium waste, while it generates power and plutonium, with the plutonium used to generate more power, all in a continuous process.
5. TerraPower, a Bellevue, Washington-based company supported by Microsoft founder Bill Gates, is developing a liquid-sodium-cooled breeder-burner unit that can run on uranium waste, as it generates power and plutonium, with the plutonium used to produce more power in a continuous process. Courtesy: TerraPower
Liquid sodium has advantages over pressurized water as a coolant, including better heat transfer. It also does not act as a moderator to slow neutrons, which allows for breeding plutonium. Sodium coolant has its own set of problems. Sodium catches fire when exposed to oxygen so coolant leaks can be devastating, as has happened in the past.
Nuclear power father Adm. Hyman Rickover, after a bad experience with the Seawolf-class submarine sodium-cooled reactor—the second subs to use LWR technology after the USS Nautilus—commented that sodium-cooled systems were “expensive to build, complex to operate, susceptible to prolonged shutdown as a result of even minor malfunctions, and difficult and time-consuming to repair.” TerraPower hopes to have commercial machines operating in the late 2020s, but industry insiders have reported that the company’s prototype reactor being built in China has experienced major problems.
Another approach to bypass LWRs is the molten salt reactor, long a favorite of nuclear pioneer Alvin Weinberg. A Canadian firm, Terrestrial Energy, is pushing a 190-MW SMR design using the technology Weinberg developed at Oak Ridge National Lab in the mid-1960s. Molten salt technology operates at close to atmospheric temperature and combines the fuel and the coolant. Terrestrial plans to use the technology to power an SMR, with a target date for the late 2020s. Molten salt poses new engineering challenges for nuclear reactors. One nuclear observer commented, “I prefer solid fuel” to the liquid fuel-coolant in the molten salt reactor.
Finally, developers are looking at abandoning uranium as the primary nuclear fuel. Instead, the idea is to use thorium, one of the most-common elements on the planet. Thorium is a slightly radioactive metal. But thorium is not fissile—able to undergo nuclear fission—so it has to be irradiated with enriched uranium in order to be transmuted into fissile U-233.
Thorium’s chief attribute is that the fuel is so plentiful. Terrestrial Energy has shown interest in using thorium in its molten salt reactors, along with low-enriched uranium that is used in the design it is pursuing in Canada. Skeptics suggest that thorium is an answer in search of a question, given the easy availability of uranium, particularly in seawater. Uranium shortages, forecast in the 1960s when advocates first suggested using thorium, have never materialized.
The Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS) is currently wrapping up a study of the new, non-LWR reactor designs. Physicist Ed Lyman, a veteran UCS staffer, told POWER, “Our overall conclusion is that vendors, DOE, and advocates are greatly exaggerating the benefits” of the technologies. “The whole landscape is not compelling. We question whether the best direction for nuclear power is to go off on these more exotic tangents,” rather than focus on making LWRs cheaper and safer. “That’s potentially a better near term” investment, he said.
The original generations of civilian nuclear power failed to live up to their promises. The U.S. nuclear industry stalled in the mid-1970s and has not recovered, despite repeated government and industry attempts at a restart.
Gen III reactors were aimed at overcoming the perceived safety and economic shortcomings of the original machines. As those new designs appear to be falling short, attention has shifted to SMRs or new approaches that abandon traditional light-water technology. Whether they will live up to their billing remains a serious, open question. ■
—Kennedy Maize is a long-time energy journalist and frequent contributor to POWER.
Digital leader ABB provides Enel Green Power with predictive software for sustainable hydro operations
Victaulic® Acquires Globe Fire Sprinkler
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Two leading, century-old companies bring added support to fire protection customers, industry EASTON, Pa., July…
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Religious denomination among Evangelical Protestants who feel a sense of spiritual peace and wellbeing at least once a week by views about same-sex marriage
Religious denomination among Evangelical Protestants who feel a sense of spiritual peace and wellbeing at least once a week by views about same-sex marriage (2014) Switch to: Views about same-sex marriage among Evangelical Protestants who feel a sense of spiritual peace and wellbeing at least once a week by religious denomination
% of Evangelical Protestants who feel a sense of spiritual peace and wellbeing at least once a week who are…
Views about same-sex marriage
African Methodist Episcopal Church
American Baptist Churches USA
Apostolic Pentecostal (Evangelical Trad.)
Apostolic Pentecostal (Historically Black Protestant Trad.)
Christian Churches and Churches of Christ
Christian Methodist Episcopal Church
Christian Reformed Church
Church of God (Anderson, Indiana)
Church of God (Cleveland, Tennessee)
Church of God in Christ
Church of God of the Apostolic Faith
Community Church (Evangelical Trad.)
Conservative Baptist Association of America
Conservative Congregational Christian Conference
Deist
Eclectic, a bit of everything, "I have my own beliefs"
Evangelical Lutheran Church in America (ELCA)
Foursquare Church
Free Methodist Church
Free Will Baptist
General Association of Regular Baptist Churches
Humanist
Independent Baptist (Evangelical Trad.)
Independent Baptist (Historically Black Protestant Trad.)
Interdenominational (Evangelical Trad.)
Interdenominational (Mainline Trad.)
Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod
Missionary Baptist (Evangelical Trad.)
Missionary Baptist (Historically Black Protestant Trad.)
National Baptist Convention
Nondenominational charismatic
Nondenominational Christian (Evangelical Trad.)
Nondenominational evangelical
Nondenominational fundamentalist
Nondenominational Pentecostal (Evangelical Trad.)
Nothing in particular (religion important)
Nothing in particular (religion not important)
Other Adventist (Evangelical Trad.)
Other Baptist (Evangelical Trad.)
Other Baptist (Historically Black Protestant Trad.)
Other Baptist (Mainline Trad.)
Other Congregationalist (Evangelical Trad.)
Other Congregationalist (Mainline Trad.)
Other Episcopalian/Anglican (Mainline Trad.)
Other Holiness (Evangelical Trad.)
Other in the "Unitarian and other liberal faiths" family
Other in the New Age family
Other Lutheran (Evangelical Trad.)
Other Lutheran (Mainline Trad.)
Other Metaphysical Christian ("Other Christian" Trad.)
Other Methodist (Historically Black Protestant Trad.)
Other Methodist (Mainline Trad.)
Other Mormon
Other Nondenominational (Evangelical Trad.)
Other Nondenominational (Mainline Trad.)
Other Orthodox Christian
Other Pentecostal (Evangelical Trad.)
Other Pentecostal (Historically Black Protestant Trad.)
Other Presbyterian (Evangelical Trad.)
Other Presbyterian (Mainline Trad.)
Other Reformed (Evangelical Trad.)
Other Reformed (Mainline Trad.)
Other Restorationist (Evangelical Trad.)
Other Restorationist (Mainline Trad.)
Others in "Other Christian" Tradition
Pagan or Wiccan
Pentecostal Church of God
Pentecostal Holiness Church
Presbyterian Church (USA)
Presbyterian Church in America
Progressive Baptist Convention
Reformed Church in America
Seventh-day Adventist
United Pentecostal Church International
Wesleyan Church
< 1% < 1% < 1% < 1% 1% < 1% 4% < 1% < 1% < 1% < 1% 1% < 1% 1% < 1% < 1% < 1% 1% 6% < 1% < 1% < 1% < 1% < 1% < 1% < 1% < 1% 1% 1% < 1% < 1% < 1% < 1% 10% < 1% 4% < 1% 7% < 1% < 1% < 1% 3% 1% 7% 1% < 1% < 1% < 1% < 1% < 1% 5% < 1% < 1% < 1% < 1% < 1% < 1% < 1% < 1% 2% < 1% < 1% < 1% < 1% < 1% 7% < 1% < 1% 4% < 1% 2% < 1% < 1% < 1% < 1% < 1% < 1% < 1% < 1% < 1% < 1% 2% < 1% < 1% < 1% 3% 19% < 1% < 1% < 1% < 1% < 1% < 1% < 1% 1% 1% 1,306
< 1% < 1% < 1% < 1% < 1% < 1% 7% < 1% < 1% < 1% < 1% < 1% < 1% 2% < 1% 1% < 1% 1% 6% < 1% < 1% < 1% < 1% < 1% < 1% < 1% < 1% < 1% 1% 1% < 1% < 1% < 1% 10% < 1% 2% < 1% 3% 1% < 1% < 1% 3% < 1% 9% 1% 1% < 1% < 1% < 1% < 1% 4% < 1% < 1% < 1% < 1% < 1% < 1% < 1% < 1% 1% < 1% < 1% < 1% < 1% < 1% 5% < 1% < 1% 5% < 1% 1% < 1% < 1% < 1% < 1% < 1% < 1% < 1% < 1% 1% < 1% 1% < 1% < 1% < 1% 2% 25% < 1% < 1% < 1% < 1% < 1% < 1% < 1% < 1% < 1% 4,288
< 1% < 1% < 1% < 1% < 1% < 1% 4% < 1% < 1% 1% < 1% < 1% < 1% 2% < 1% 2% < 1% < 1% 6% 1% < 1% < 1% < 1% < 1% < 1% < 1% < 1% < 1% < 1% 1% < 1% < 1% < 1% 8% < 1% 3% < 1% 3% 1% < 1% < 1% 2% 1% 7% 1% < 1% < 1% < 1% < 1% < 1% 5% < 1% < 1% < 1% < 1% < 1% < 1% < 1% < 1% 2% < 1% < 1% < 1% < 1% < 1% 8% < 1% < 1% 5% < 1% 4% < 1% < 1% < 1% < 1% < 1% < 1% < 1% < 1% < 1% < 1% 2% < 1% < 1% < 1% 5% 23% < 1% < 1% < 1% < 1% < 1% < 1% < 1% < 1% < 1% 383
Learn More: Assemblies of God, Churches of Christ, Independent Baptist (Evangelical Trad.), Interdenominational (Evangelical Trad.), Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod, Nondenominational charismatic, Nondenominational evangelical, Presbyterian Church in America, Seventh-day Adventist, Southern Baptist Convention
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10 May 2010
Williams sisters reach quarters at Italian Open
May 10, 2010 Category: Sports Posted by: adminphilasun
By Alessandra Rizzo
ABOVE PHOTO: Serena Williams of the US returns the ball to Switzerland’s Timea Bacsinszky during their match at the Italian Open tennis tournament, in Rome, Tuesday, May 4, 2010. Williams won 7-6(2), 6-1.
(AP Photo/Alessandra Tarantino)
ROME —Top-ranked Serena Williams and older sister Venus each recently advanced to the quarterfinals at the Italian Open.
Serena Williams, in her first tournament in three months, defeated Andrea Petkovic of Germany 6-2, 3-6, 6-0. Venus ousted Shahar Peer of Israel 6-3, 6-4.
Both sisters are back from knee injuries and could meet in the semifinals.
Second-ranked Caroline Wozniacki of Denmark lost her third-round match to Maria Jose Martinez Sanchez of Spain, and eighth-seeded Agnieszka Radwanska of Poland was ousted by Czech player Lucie Safarova, who rallied to win 1-6, 6-3, 7-6 (1).
Serena had been off the tour since she won the singles and doubles titles at the Australian Open, and she was entered in Rome thanks to a wild card.
Against the 49th-ranked Petkovic, Serena said she felt “rusty.” Her game was erratic at times and a mid-match slump cost her the second set. She finished with nearly as many unforced errors (21) as winners (25).
“I definitely felt extremely rusty today,” Serena said. “I’m glad I was able to win because at least I can be guaranteed another match. I think I definitely need it.”
Serena got off to a good start, winning the first set with a five-game streak. But she quickly fell behind 4-1 in the second, came back to 4-3 but conceded another decisive break to Petkovic. In the third set, she picked up her game and played aggressively.
Serena next plays Maria Kirilenko of Russia, who defeated Dominika Cibulkova of Slovakia 4-6, 6-1, 6-1.
Serena said that after three months off she needs to stay healthy and play. That’s why, she explained, she decided to skip social events at home and come to play the clay-court event in Rome instead.
Serena said she told herself to “forget Oprah and Anna Wintour”—who co-chaired the annual Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Costume Institute Gala Benefit on last Monday in New York.
“I was supposed to be there. I had a fabulous dress,” Serena said. “It hurt me … I wanted to really be there, but this is my career and I need the extra match.”
The fourth-seeded Venus, who had been sidelined with a knee problem since losing the Key Biscayne final, was solid against Peer. In the first set, she dropped only four points on serve. In the second, she saved two break points at 3-4 before getting the decisive break in the next game.
Venus said she was especially happy with her serve and movement on clay.
She will have a tough quarterfinal against Jelena Jankovic, who rolled to a 6-2, 6-0 victory over Yanina Wickmayer of Belgium. The Serb player ousted Venus in the 2008 quarterfinals on her way to her second Rome title.
In other action, Nadia Petrova of Russia won 6-0, 3-6, 6-2 against Alexandra Dulgheru of Romania, who knocked out defending champion Dinara Safina.
U.S. Open: Serena Williams rolls 6-0, 6-0 Serena Williams back in Wimbledon final again Venus & Serena–revealing biopic examines roots and rise of world-class Williams sisters
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“Our Bodies, Ourselves” has long been referred to as the “women’s health bible.” The most recent edition, published in 2011, was selected by Library Journal as one of the best consumer health books of the year.
In addition to providing evidence-based information reviewed by medical experts, all of OBOS’s books address the political, economic and social forces that shape women’s health. Each title also includes personal stories and experiences, along with resources for additional support and political engagement.
As of June 2018, the organization has transitioned to a volunteer-led organization and has no plans to update “Our Bodies, Ourselves.”
Learn more about each book:
Our Bodies, Ourselves
Our Bodies, Ourselves: Pregnancy and Birth
Our Bodies, Ourselves: Menopause
Other health books by Our Bodies Ourselves founders
Spanish-language texts:
Learn about the early history of “Our Bodies, Ourselves” ->
De Camino a la Maternidad — Guide to pregnancy and birth, produced in conjunction with Childbirth Connection
Nuestros Cuerpos, Nuestras Vidas — Cultural adaptation of “Our Bodies, Ourselves”
Promotoras de Salud Training Guide — Companion curriculum guide for community health workers
CLINIC DISCOUNTS
“Our Bodies, Ourselves” titles are available at a 70 percent discount to health clinics and nonprofit organizations providing health counseling services. Simon & Schuster requires the purchaser to provide a statement, filed with a state or federal agency, indicating health services or health education as a primary purpose of the purchaser, and an IRS license number for tax exemption. A minimum of 12 copies must be purchased per order; copies cannot be offered for resale.
To place an order, contact Simon & Schuster’s Special Sales department: 212-698-2105
Examination and Review Copies
If you are a professor, you can request an examination copy of “Our Bodies, Ourselves” titles in the academic resources section of the Simon & Schuster website.
If you work in the media and would like a review copy, please contact Simon & Schuster’s publicity department.
Our Bodies, Ourselves 2011
Other Books by the BWHBC & OBOS Founders
Our Bodies, Ourselves: The Nine U.S. Editions
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Science Fiction Books──────────All CategoriesGaming Board Games & Card Games DVD & Blu-ray Collectables & Hobbies Music & Books Technology Toys & Games Sports & Outdoors Clothing Home & Garden
Home / Fiction / Science Fiction Books / A Sense of Infinity by Howard L. Myers (Book, 2009)
A Sense of Infinity by Howard L. Myers (Book, 2009)
NewCondition BK0813
in Science Fiction Books
1. Howard L. Myers, during his brief but impressive career, was published in all the leading science fiction magazines in the 1960s and 1970s. This book is a treasure trove of some of the best writing of that period.
2. The Creatures of Man, a previous collection of Myers’ stories, was praised by Library Bookwatch as “. . . a 1960s classic . . . All [the stories] are choice reads.”
3. Advertising in Locus, more.
4. Featured book on Baen.com.
· In a post-apocalyptic world, telepaths are common, but young Starn had no trace of telepathic ability, and was persecuted by those who had the talent—until he discovered he possessed an even more unusual ability.
· A criminal mastermind has been captured by the Space Patrol, and a Patrol ship is carrying him to a prison planet. Escape seems impossible, but he has a secret weapon. It’s only water—but water with a very unusual property.
· In the afterlife, it turns out that one’s existence is dependent on being remembered by the living. As you are forgotten, you shrink. How do you avoid this? Why, hire an unearthly public relations firm, of course.
These stories and more, including two full-length novels, fill a large volume of entertaining space adventure and humorous fantasy Inventive by a writer noted for original ideas developed with a sardonic wit.
Howard L. Myers was a prolific writer of science fiction, publishing short fiction in all the leading SF magazines, as well as the novel Cloud Chamber. His stories also were reprinted in many anthologies. His promising career was cut short when he died at the age of 41.
Format Mass Market
Colour Black & White
Recommended Ages Mature Readers (ages 16+)
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Updated January 30
Watch videos: Portland musicians mark 1969 rooftop concert by The Beatles with their own
Fifty years ago, The Beatles staged an unannounced concert – their last – from a rooftop on Savile Row in London.
A handful of Portland musicians proved their love of The Beatles – and their cold-weather mettle – on Wednesday by staging a rooftop concert downtown.
The event marked a similar concert by The Beatles on Jan. 30, 1969, atop 3 Savile Row in London.
It was the band’s final public performance.
Just like the concert in London 50 years ago, Wednesday’s event wasn’t publicly announced.
The musicians played from a rooftop at One City Center, overlooking Monument Square.
Portland musicians, from left, Jeff Beam, John Nels, Kate Beever, Sam Peisner and Elliot Heeschen, perform songs by The Beatles from a terrace at One City Center in Portland on Wednesday in an iPhone panorama photo. Not included in photo is vocalist Mat Zaro.
Here is a report by:
Marisa Iati
Like any good story, the documentary about the making of the Beatles’ latest album – neither of which existed yet – needed a climax.
It was Jan. 30, 1969, and the world-renowned rock band decided to stage a performance on the roof of their Apple Corps building in London for family, friends and a cast of film cameras. The 42-minute show became the grand finale of their documentary, “Let It Be.”
It was also the last public performance that the most commercially successful band in history would ever give. As police shut down the show for causing a ruckus, John Lennon declared: “I’d like to say thank you on behalf of the group and ourselves, and I hope we passed the audition.”
“It wasn’t an audition,” said Beatles historian Mark Lewisohn. “But they always had the perfect lines.”
This week filmmaker Peter Jackson announced that he would use 55 hours of previously unreleased footage from “Let It Be” for a new movie, according to Rolling Stone.
The band’s rooftop performance didn’t capture much attention at the time. That evening’s BBC News bulletin didn’t mention it, Lewisohn said, and the next day’s newspapers ran stories about it on the inside. People who gathered on the street during the show couldn’t see the band and weren’t even sure it was the Beatles.
But to those who watched from atop of the office on Savile Row and from nearby rooftops, the lunchtime performance was a chance to see a band that was just as sharp and strong as ever. The Beatles were candid with the cameras because they knew the film’s editing was within their control, Lewisohn said. The album and documentary project, initially called “Get Back,” was meant to showcase the band’s music without studio artifice.
Before they decided to play on the rooftop, the Beatles argued over where to perform, according to Philip Norman’s book, “Shout!: The Beatles in Their Generation.” Los Angeles? A Tunisian amphitheater? On board an ocean liner? In the midst of the argument, Lennon muttered, “I’m warming to the idea of having it in an asylum.”
The asylum proved unnecessary. Keyboardist Billy Preston, who performed with the Beatles on the rooftop, said the location was Lennon’s idea. They announced it the night before the performance and worked into the night to prepare.
“They were worrying about where they could play and how to fit everyone into a concert hall,” Preston said in Andy Babiuk’s book, “Beatles Gear: All the Fab Four’s Instruments from Stage to Studio.” “They didn’t want to tour, they wanted to do one concert where everyone could come.”
“Everyone” turned out to be about 30 people: Lennon’s wife, Yoko Ono; Ringo Starr’s wife, Maureen Starkey Tigrett; an American executive from Capitol Records; people who worked in the Apple Corps building; people visiting the building; still photographers and the film crew. Lennon and Starr, both 28, wore their wives’ coats during the performance to protect against the cold. George Harrison, 25, donned green trousers.
The Beatles – from left, John Lennon, Ringo Starr, Paul McCartney and George Harrison.
Engineer Alan Parsons told Guitar Player that another engineer recording the concert sent him to buy pantyhose to put over the microphones to minimize noise from the wind.
“I walked into this department store and said, ‘I need three pair of pantyhose. It doesn’t matter what size,'” Parsons told the website. “They thought I was either a bank robber or a cross dresser.”
The show’s setup was meant to create the feel of a live performance but the sound quality of a studio recording. Cables running from the roof to the basement studio captured the music, while speakers tilted downward to face pedestrians on the street. The band played “Get Back,” “Don’t Let Me Down,” “I’ve Got A Feeling,” “The One After 909” and “Dig A Pony” – some multiple times.
Although the Beatles had not performed live in more than two years, Lewisohn said the show went off without a hitch.
“Their timing is perfect, and their harmonies are perfect, and the musicianship was perfect, and everything worked,” he said.
Director Peter Jackson making new film of Beatles in studio
Behind the scenes, the band’s unity was being held together by a thread. They disagreed about their management. Harrison walked out of a rehearsal, declaring in a temporary moment of anger that he was quitting the band. The members frequently discussed breaking up.
By then, the Beatles had sold hundreds of millions of records, dominating the charts in the 1960s.
After they recorded their album “Abbey Road,” the Beatles went their separate ways in August 1969. Shortly after they publicized the split the next April, they released another album, “Let It Be,” with songs they had sung on the rooftop and on other days that month. A documentary by the same name featured film from the rooftop concert and chronicled the album’s creation.
Both were forever clouded by their releases coinciding with the announcement that the Beatles would not play together again, Lewisohn said. But on the day of the rooftop concert, no one would have been able to tell that the band’s days were numbered. Like many shows before it, Lewisohn said the performance was brilliant.
“Everything was right with the Beatles,” he said. “Always.”
John Ford film festival offers a primer on celebrated director from Maine
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Gay male syphilis rate 40 times higher than others
By Matt Hennie | Sep 23, 2016 | 12:51 PM
A first-ever look at state-by-state numbers of syphilis infections shows that the sexually transmitted disease is hitting gay men the hardest, particularly those in the South.
The rate of syphilis among gay men is at least 40 times the rate of heterosexual men and the cases of syphilis among gay men continue to account for about 70 percent of all reported infections in men, according to a study released Thursday by the Centers for Disease Control & Prevention during the 2016 STD Conference.
“These analyses will help CDC and others to better pinpoint efforts to address syphilis among those at greatest risk," said Alex de Voux, an officer with the CDC's Epidemic Intelligence Service who presented the study.
"This data highlights the need to continue syphilis and STD prevention initiatives with concentration in states that are disproportionately affected," she added.
Syphilis has been on the rise among gay men since 2000 and by 2013, men who have sex with men accounted for 75 percent of syphilis cases. But for the first time, the CDC study showed syphilis cases and rates of infection among gay men by state. In the 44 states examined, the syphilis rate for gay men was at least 40 times the rate for straight men. For all states in the study, the syphilis rate for gay men is 107 times the rate for heterosexual men.
What the study found in the South was bleak. The highest rates of syphilis among gay men were seen in North Carolina, Mississippi, Louisiana and South Carolina. Those four states showed syphilis rates among gay men at nearly twice the national average of 309 cases per 100,000 people. Across all states, the rate for heterosexual men is 2.9 per 100,000 people.
The study looked at the rate of syphilis infections among gay men in 44 states, but Georgia wasn't included. That's because Georgia is one of six states that report the sex of the partner in syphilis cases to the National Notifiable Diseases Surveillance System but didn't meet a threshold of reporting it for at least 70 percent of the male cases in 2015. Georgia, though, has been a leader in syphilis among gay men and had a rate nearly twice that of the national average in 2014, according to a CDC report.
The CDC hopes that by calculating the syphilis rate among gay men will help the federal health agency monitor trends in diagnoses, better quantify discrepancies seen in gay man and determine where to best allocate prevention resources.
A second study presented Thursday showed that among 20 U.S. cities – including Atlanta – syphilis screening among gay men is on the rise. In a six-year span from 2008 to 2014, syphilis screening among gay men increased from 38 percent to 49 percent, according to the study presented by Cyprian Wejnert, a CDC epidemiologist.
Among those screened, positive tests increased from 9 percent to 11 percent, according to the study.
The findings suggest that providers are increasingly aware of the risk and need for annual screening for syphilis among MSM, but rates are still low among MSM at high risk for the disease.
Screening was most common among MSM at highest risk, including those who were HIV-positive (68 percent), and those with more than 10 sexual partners in the past 12 months (65 percent). Diagnoses increases were greatest among MSM who were black (9 percent to 14 percent), HIV-positive (15 percent to 21 percent), and those with 10 or more sexual partners (11 percent to 17 percent).
Among gay men, syphilis isn't the only concern. Gonorrhea scores high too. And the CDC warned this week that the treatment for that is showing signs of failing.
UPDATE | The story has been updated to clarify why Georgia was not included in the study. Also, additional clarification was added to show that the rate of syphilis among gay man is 107 times the rate of heterosexual men for all 44 states in the study.
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Andrew McCabe confirms Rod Rosenstein seriously considered wearing a wire during meetings with Trump
Travis Gettys
Former acting FBI director Andrew McCabe confirmed that deputy attorney general Rod Rosenstein considered wearing a wire during his meetings with President Donald Trump.
Rosenstein reportedly wanted to record his conversations with the president to use as evidence to remove him from office, which a Justice Department official described as “sarcastic” comments, but McCabe told CBS News that those efforts were serious.
“The most illuminating and surprising thing in the interview to me were these eight days in May when all of these things were happening behind the scenes that the American people really didn’t know about,” said “60 Minutes” reporter Scott Pelley.
“There were meetings at the Justice Department at which it was discussed whether the vice president and a majority of the Cabinet could be brought together to remove the president of the United States under the 25th Amendment,” Pelley added. “These were the eight days from Comey’s firing to the point that Robert Mueller was appointed special counsel. And the highest levels of American law enforcement were trying to figure out what do with the president.”
McCabe, who has written a new book, “The Threat: How the FBI Protects America in the Age of Terror and Trump,” confirmed that Rosenstein considered wearing a wire, and Pelley said the deputy attorney general was not joking around.
“McCabe in interview says no, it came up more than once and it was so serious that he took it to the lawyers at the FBI to discuss it,” Pelley said.
Things are not looking good for Republican Senator Susan Collins’ reelection
Sarah K. Burris
Things are not looking good for Sen. Susan Collins (R-ME), who is up for reelection in 2020.
Collins has made a series of votes that are far more conservative than the people in her home state. Collins is one of very few Republicans willing to say that she is pro-choice. Planned Parenthood eve awarded her with an ally award.
When she met with Judge Brett Kavanaugh, however, she said that he believed Roe v. Wade was the law of the land, making her believe that he would never act to undermine it. Then Kavanaugh ruled to allow such strict abortion laws in Louisiana that it would leave just one clinic left for the entire state.
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The Paris Spy by Susan Elia MacNeal: Reading Room Review
The Paris Spy by Susan Elia MacNeal is #7 in the Maggie Hope Mystery series set during WWII. I have been an ardent fan of this series since the beginning, and I was rather surprised when I realized that we were to the seventh title already. Time really does fly when you’re having fun, or when you’re reading an amazing series. What first engaged me in this series was the absolute connection to Maggie in her surroundings, war-torn London. MacNeal had brought the feeling of walking down a bomb ravaged street in London in 1939 into sharp focus for readers. Through Maggie Hope, we see history as if it’s unfolding before us. And, here we are at book #7, and the author has never wavered from bringing the reader into the scene, immersing us into a time and place where history so affected our future.
It is now 1942, and Maggie, through her called-in favor from the Queen of England, is in Paris, which is occupied by the Germans, as is the rest of France--well, except for Vichy France, whose rule is maintained by a Nazi-collaborating Frenchman. But it is Paris, the city of lights, where Maggie awaits her documentation allowing her to enter daily life in this tightly controlled German military zone. What she finds when she does get her new identification and papers is a city covered in swastika banners and muted life. The city of lights has lost its once brilliant color and amore. Posing as an Irish young woman who has come to Paris to shop for her bridal trousseau, Maggie settles into the Ritz Hotel, where the German Luftwaffe is headquartered. Because Ireland is neutral in the War, she is granted freedom to move around as she pleases. But, of course, there is always the watchful eye of the Gestapo and whoever may be collaborating with them. “Trust no one” is advice that is given to Maggie upon her entry into Paris. Her real purpose in getting herself smuggled into this dangerous place as a spy is to find a SOE, Special Operations Executive, agent whose communications have gone rather odd of late. Also, Maggie is in pursuit of her half-sister, who was last seen in Paris when she escaped from the safety of the SOE handlers.
The characters include some with whom we are familiar from earlier books, and it certainly is to the reader’s advantage to have read the preceding six stories in the series, as the bonds with those characters will be stronger. Of course, the story is so captivating that prior reading isn't essential. There is also a whole new cast of characters, consisting of German officers and French spies and the lovely addition of Coco Chanel. Coco’s befriending of Maggie is another avenue of exploring the conditions of occupied Paris, how the fashion capitol of the world dealt with fashion and its continuation through the hardships of war. Also, the inclusion of Maggie’s friends and fellow agents, Hugh Thompson and Sarah Sanderson, who are undercover as part of the Paris ballet company, is a window into the arts in Paris at this time. The Germans may have been monsters, but their interest in the finer things of life allowed the artistic and musical talent to survive, albeit under the strict regulations and pillaging of the Nazi regime.
On the line in these behind-the-scenes war efforts is the Allied invasion of France, keeping the location of Normandy a secret. It’s a win or lose the war move that Churchill and those working in the secret organizations of the British war-fighting machine are desperate to protect at all costs. Sacrifice has never meant more or been so great. Evil has never been more threatening to take over. Maggie and her fellow spies know what is at stake.
This book may be my favorite yet in the Maggie Hope series, mainly because the history of Paris under Nazi rule is such a fascinating subject, and Susan Elia MacNeal spins a suspenseful, gripping story out of real people and circumstances, facing peril with their every step. There is no comfort of home or time off for the participants in this drama. Every day is a challenge to make it through alive. The story will seize you with its life and death struggles in a fight to prevent the Nazi takeover of the world. The author recreates the feelings and sacrifices of these brave spies in this powerful narrative that will make it all too real to the reader.
I received an advanced copy of this book from the publisher for an honest review.
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The Paris Spy by Susan Elia MacNeal: Reading Room ...
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‘Extreme Makeover: Home Edition” is…
‘Extreme Makeover: Home Edition” is casting deserving families for the series reboot
“Extreme Makeover: Home Edition” is getting a reboot on HGTV in 2020.
HGTV is now casting for a reboot of the renovation series “Extreme Makeover: Home Edition,” which begins shooting in the greater Los Angeles area at the end of this summer.
When the series returns in 2020 with ten episodes, fans can expect to see homeowners known for giving back to the community — but with hardship stories of their own — get custom new digs.
And here’s a twist: renters and people looking to relocate are also eligible for the series reboot.
“If there is a family out there and they have a home that just doesn’t work for them anymore and it just needs to be remodeled, that is something we’re looking at doing. It doesn’t have to be a knockdown,” said Brady Connell, an executive producer on the show.
‘Extreme Makeover: Home Edition’ is returning with a brand-new season on HGTV
The original “Extreme Makeover: Home Edition” aired on ABC from 2003-2012 with host Ty Pennington, who was famous for giving the order, “Bus driver, move that bus!” parked in front of the home before every reveal. It was the highest-rated series of its kind, averaging roughly 16 million viewers an episode during its peak years of 2004-2005.
Each episode still promises to be a race to complete a custom, extensive renovation for which everything, from the efforts of skilled workers to all of the materials, is donated by the community.
“It was when people stepped up to help the family that I personally got very emotionally involved in the storyline,” said Connell, who recalled being on the set of the series’ previous incarnation. “Often I would walk around the site at 2 o’clock in the morning, and I would see volunteers out there doing landscaping or painting, and there were no cameras around. Those are little moments where I’d sit back and say, ‘Wow! People really do this for each other.’ It’s one of the great things about this show.”
To apply, visit www.emhe.tv.
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Sammy Ameobi ‘fighting fit’ for Nottingham Forest challenge
Sammy Ameobi
Sammy Ameobi says he’s fighting fit and raring to go for the 2019/20 Championship season with new club Nottingham Forest.
The 27-year-old became Martin O’Neill’s first signing of the summer by penning a one-year deal at the City Ground on Monday afternoon.
Ameobi, a former Newcastle United and England U21 international, joined on a free after leaving relegated Bolton Wanderers.
And he can’t wait to excite the Reds fans.
“I’m very happy,” the winger told Forest’s official website. “Obviously I know the history of this club, it’s a really great club and I’m happy to be a part of it moving forward.
“I’ve played against Forest a few times recently and I know the quality of the players here. The stadium is also a fantastic place to be so that was a massive attraction and a reason for me moving here.
“I’m hoping to excite people. I’m a player who likes to create opportunities and score goals so hopefully I can do that this season. I’ve had my holidays, I’ve come back fighting fit and now I’m raring to go.”
Three clubs chasing Mansfield Town striker Danny Rose, while Sunderland boss is given a free hand in transfer market, and Portsmouth star wants to leave
Where are they now? - Revisiting Great Britain's 2012 Olympic Games football team
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FIRST VIDEO: Snowden receives Sam Adams Award in Moscow
Still from Wikileaks
The first videos of NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden have surfaced since he received asylum in Russia. The footage, provided by WikiLeaks, was taken during the Sam Adams Associates for Integrity in Intelligence awards ceremony.
The video fragments of a meeting, attended by the former CIA analyst Ray McGovern, former NSA executive Thomas Andrews Drake and former FBI agent Coleen Rowley, Jesselyn Radack of the Government Accountability Project, and Sarah Harrison of WikiLeaks – all whistleblowers in their own respects – were released by WikiLeaks on Friday.
In the first video appearance since he was granted asylum in Russia, Snowden spoke about US government transparency and dangers to democracy caused by the NSA mass spying programs.
“This is not about any sort of particular program, this is about a trend in the relationship between the governing and the governed in America,” Snowden said speaking about the government transparency situation in the US. “That is increasingly coming into conflict with what we expect as a free and democratic people. If we can’t understand the policies and the programs of our government, we cannot grant our consent in regulating them.”
“As someone very clever said recently, we don’t have an oversight problem in the US we have an undersight problem.”
The problem has grown up to a point where Americans have “an executive, the Department of Justice, that’s unwilling to prosecute high officials who lied to Congress and the country on camera but they’ll stop at nothing to prosecute someone who told them the truth,” Snowden added.
Snowden has expressed his satisfaction that people around the globe are starting to understand mass surveillance doesn’t increase safety at all.
“People all over the world are realizing that these programs don’t make us more safe, they hurt our economy, they hurt our country they limit our ability to speak and think and live and be creative, to have relationships, to associate freely.”
There is a huge difference between surveillance programs aimed at increasing security and Big Brother mass surveillance, the NSA leaker added.
“There’s a far cry between legal programs, legitimate spying, legitimate law enforcement where it’s targeted, it’s based on reasonable suspicion, an individualized suspicion, and a warranted action – and a sort of dragnet mass surveillance that puts entire populations under a sort of eye that sees everything, even when it’s not needed.”
Although it is known that the ceremony took place in Moscow, the exact location remains a mystery for security reasons. In an exclusive interview with RT Julian Assange said Edward Snowden is safe in Russia, but the fates of journalists who helped him and published his leaks are now of more concern for WikiLeaks.
After a meeting with Snowden, the four whistleblowers – former NSA executive Thomas Andrews Drake, former CIA analyst Ray McGovern, former FBI agent Coleen Rowley and Jesselyn Radack of the Government Accountability Project – all met in RT’s to share their thoughts on Snowden and tell their stories.
Of Snowden, Jesselyn Radack said that “he looked great. He seemed very centered and brilliant, smart, funny, very engaged. I thought he looked very well.”
Ray McGovern, called Snowden “an extraordinary person” who has “no regrets” for his actions.
Thomas Andrews Drake is a former NSA senior executive and a whistleblower indicted in 2010 for espionage after leaking documents to the press that alleged that the intelligence organization had committed fraud, waste and abuse against the American people. For his whistleblowing activities, Drake was honored in 2011 with the Ridenhour Prize for Truth-Telling and co-recipient of the Sam Adams Associates for Integrity in Intelligence award.
In the studio he recalled his experience being a whistleblower.
“I disclosed high crimes and misdemeanors by the US government while at the National Security Agency (NSA). That involved both secret surveillance and massive fraud, waste and abuse. And no regrets at all in blowing the whistle, recognizing that I paid a very high price,” Drake told RT.
Coleen Rowley is a former FBI agent and whistleblower. In 2002, Rowley testified to the Senate Judiciary Committee revealing problems facing the US intelligence community by highlighting some of the pre 9/11 intelligence lapses.
“When you saw this 180-degree switch to the war paradigm and the use of intelligence rather than judicial process, due process, you know, the law of interrogation – I had to speak out and explain the failures of 9/11.” Rowley told RT.
For her activity TIME magazine chose her as one of three whistleblower persons of the year.
Former ethics adviser to the Department of Justice, Jesselyn Radack, became a whistleblower after she exposed the FBI for committing violations in their interrogation of John Walker Lindh, an alleged Taliban fighter captured in 2001 in Afghanistan, without an attorney present. She also exposed the Department of Justice for allegedly attempting to suppress that information. “The justice department was willing to cut corners to prosecute people,” she told RT.
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BION BriefsVideosVintage + Historical OdditiesWeird News
Victoria Woodhull, the First Woman to Run for President
Victoria Woodhull was the first female presidential candidate in the US and so much more.
Adrian — September 28, 2016
As a stockbroker, a newspaper editor, and a women’s rights activist, Woodhull’s story is fascinating. She was also the first woman to run for the highest office, and she did it in 1872!
First Female Stockbroker
CC Harvard Art Museum
Woodhull came from humble beginnings. Her mother believed herself to be clairvoyant, and her father was a snake oil salesman, leaving the family destitute and often in trouble with the law.
It was actually due to her following in her mother’s mystic footsteps that led to one of Woodhull’s first financial successes.
She and her sister Tennessee met wealthy widower Cornelius Vanderbilt when they served as mediums to help him contact the spirit of his dead wife.
Vanderbilt was so impressed with their mystic skills that he kept them on and asked them to help him with financial advice from the spirits. The sisters performed the task so well that Vanderbilt backed them in starting the first woman-owned brokerage firm on Wall Street.
The brokerage was so successful that Victoria and her sister started printing a weekly journal in 1870 called Woodhull and Claflin’s Weekly.
On April 2, 1870, Woodhull announced her intentions to run for president by writing a letter to the New York Herald.
[…] believing as I do that the prejudices which still exist in the popular mind against women in public life will soon disappear, I now announce myself as candidate for the Presidency.
Caricature of Victoria Woodhull|CC Library of Congress
A woman running for president before women even had the right to vote would be controversial enough, but the difficulties of Woodhull’s run didn’t end there.
She was a suffragette, a proponent of free love, and a strong believer that men’s romantic indiscretions should not be swept under the rug and ignored.
Now, the free love principle might not be what you think. It was the idea that people should have the right to marry, divorce, and have children without government interference.
It was this belief that landed her in so much trouble as the election rolled near.
Prominent Rev. Henry Ward Beecher, the brother to author Harriet Beecher Stowe, set himself up in opposition to Woodhull and spoke out against her free love principals. Using her weekly publication as a platform, Woodhull published a story about an extramarital affair that Rev. Beecher had with a parishioner.
She wasn’t looking to pass moral judgment on the reverend’s actions, but she did want to expose the double standard between men and women.
Upon reading the story, the public was not outraged about the preacher’s infidelity but chose to be upset about the fact that Woodhull had published the story.
She was arrested on charges of distributing indecent material through the mail, and she spent Election Day behind bars.
As if being arrested for telling the truth wasn’t punishment enough, the controversy inspired cartoonist Thomas Nast to draw this caricature of Woodhull as Mrs. Satan.
The image depicts a wife carrying her children and drunk husband and saying to Woodhull, “Get thee behind me, (Mrs.) Satan! I’d rather travel the hardest path of matrimony than follow your footsteps.”
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About the Author Adrian
Lover of books, TV, and stories in all forms.
neil lopez
Fun Fact: Neither she, nor any woman at the time, could actually vote for her presidency.
Thank u guys, i like reading books of any kind
Dr.Robert Phillips DD.
Hillary Clinton is not Making History as the ( first ) woman to be a presidential candidate of the United States she is simply following in the footsteps of Victoria Woodhull who ran in 1870
amazingly there are striking similarities… (IE) Victoria was arrested on charges of distributing indecent material through the mail , compare that to the Hillary E-mail scandal for which she maybe Indicted and possibly on the day she is nominated by the democrats convention.
Victoria was a suffragette, a proponent of free love, and a strong believer that men’s romantic indiscretions should not be swept under the rug and ignored. so is Hillary when it comes to her husband Bill Clinton, she will never let him live it down about all his indiscretions .
Hillary claims to be a pioneer in the field of politics but nothing is further from the truth, she is not a pioneer just someone who is in the shadows of historical facts and wants to blind the general public with lime light and lies But nothing detracts from the fact that Woodhull and other women made history by attempting to run for the highest office in the land long before Hillary hit the scene.
Lisa Shaw
I talk fast. Great video.
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But you are A CHOSEN RACE, A royal PRIESTHOOD, A HOLY NATION, A PEOPLE FOR God's OWN POSSESSION, so that you may proclaim the excellencies of Him who has called you out of darkness into His marvelous light; for you once were NOT A PEOPLE, but now you are THE PEOPLE OF GOD; you had NOT RECEIVED MERCY, but now you have RECEIVED MERCY.
-1 Peter 2:9-10
Human beings have always placed a lot of value on their group identities. We tend to feel most comfortable with people we identify as being like ourselves. These kinds of people become “our people” and people of other groups can easily arouse our suspicions and fears. We group-identify in all kinds of ways: by language, physical appearances, cultural beliefs and practices, economic status, etc. Today’s heated political discussion and commentary frequently mentions the way “identity politics” is used to galvanize support for parties and candidates. Most people condemn what they perceive to be identity politics or at least condemn their political opponents for it. The national motto of the United States is the Latin saying, E Pluribus Unum, which means, “Out of many, one.” We like to think of ourselves as a “melting pot” of diverse peoples who form one united nation – united in allegiance to the ideals of democracy, equality under the law, the rule of law and the guarantee of basic human rights for all. That is a wonderful foundation for our nation and one we should all work to preserve.
However, even with such a wonderful heritage, fractures and harmful divisions continue to plague us and the resolution of these differences through adherence to the ideals of our way of government sometimes seems threatened. This is because we humans so easily succumb to an “us vs. them” mentality, a fact which would-be leaders exploit to their advantage. It has led to the hatred, persecution, violence and all-out wars plaguing our race from the dawn of history to the present day. God does have a solution for this problem and we find it in what the Apostle Peter says in 1 Peter 2:9-10, quoted above.
Peter is writing to people from at least two diverse groups, Jews and Greeks, who have become one through faith in Christ. He says that they have become “a chosen race, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, a people for God’s own possession…” Notice how each of these describe categories over which people divide. They divide by “race” (that is, descent from a common ancestor), status (“we deserve to rule”), “we are holy”, that is “we are unique”, and especially the idea that God or “the gods” favor us. But in this case it is all turned to the opposite purpose. Instead of being a call to fear or dominate others, these names for the new nation God formed with the coming of Christ, point to their role in solving the problem of human divisions and animosities.
Notice first the reason Peter gives for God calling Christians by these exalted names, for giving them a very special group identity: in order that they might proclaim the excellencies of Him who called them out of darkness into His marvelous light! It is not so they can exalt themselves over others but to exalt Him who rescued them from darkness and revealed His glory to them. They are not called to force others to believe but to give them evidence of God’s goodness and thus draw them willingly to surrender to Him. They are chosen to serve as Christ did, to seek the lost and help them come to God. They are God’s special possession, the instrument by which He saves a selfish and fear-filled world.
Under the Old Covenant, God sought to preserve a people through whom He would lay a foundation of truth and righteousness. The people of God under that covenant were given many rules that would separate them from the nations around them. They were to guard the messages and prophecies until the time came for their fulfillment. But once Christ came, God formed a new people for Himself which included those Jews who believed in Jesus but also included people from every tribe, kindred, tongue and nation who likewise follow Christ. The job of this new nation was to share the good news with all nations and invite them to the feast of God’s kingdom, offered freely through the blood of the Lamb. If the members of this new nation preserved their identity and made it primary, then they could never enter into the world’s wars and conflicts. Christ taught them to love those who were their enemies and who persecuted them, to overcome animosity and fear with love and the faithful proclamation of the gospel.
The problem comes when Christians forget that their racial, national, or other identities are as nothing when compared to their identity in Christ. Any appeal to ethnic solidarity, nationalism, or any other group identity other than that of being a follower of the Lamb, must take second place. Sadly, many Christians down through the centuries have allowed just such rival claims to supersede those of Christ. The results have always been disastrous, not only from a purely human perspective but from the perspective of Christ’s kingdom. When the Hutus slaughtered nearly a million Tutsis in Rwanda the saddest thing about it was that both groups were largely Christian! Tribal identity superseded Christian identity. When the European powers went to war in 1914, Europe was a solidly Christian continent. Even when threatened by non-Christian groups, Christians who make their identity in Christ paramount will follow His example and teaching by not returning evil for evil.
So what is your primary group identity?Is it based on your skin color, your national origin, your political party, your sex, your economic status?Whatever it is, other than your identity as a Christian, it is an idol and needs to be abandoned.Not until enough Christians have forsaken these idols will Christ’s kingdom make real progress in the world and the fractious divisions among all people be healed.
June 1, 2019 by Harry Criswell.
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The Waldo Canyon fire in Colorado Springs, Colo. (Gaylon Wampler)
We started the fire: Global warming burns the West
How climate change and bad policy caused the massive fires currently devastating the West
Check out this article! https://www.salon.com/2012/07/03/we_started_the_fire_global_warming_burns_the_southwest/
Richard Schiffman
July 3, 2012 3:45PM (UTC)
If you want proof that the earth’s climate is changing, go virtually anywhere in the Southwest in the summer. Chances are high that you will see a brown line of haze on the horizon and smell smoke in the air from a forest fire somewhere in the arid region.
I spend my summers in a grove of ponderosa and pinon in the mountains of northern New Mexico. When I bought the land bordering the Carson National Forest 20 years ago, there had not been a forest fire to speak of on the mountain in living memory. Then a massive blaze in May 1996 burned 7,600 acres on the slopes above my adobe cabin and destroyed 27 of my neighbors' homes in a matter of hours. Smoke from the fire resembled the mushroom cloud from an atomic blast and was visible for over a 1,000 square miles of high desert.
Fire itself is not a sign of climate change. Lightning-strike fires are natural events in forests that help to maintain their ecological balance, thinning out overcrowded woodlands, enriching the soil with fresh carbon and creating clearings where the bushes, forbs and grasses, loved by wildlife, can flourish. What is not natural, however, is the size of some of the recent blazes, their sheer destructive power.
Massive fires in Arizona, Texas and New Mexico last summer -- the largest recorded to date in each of those states -- scorched over 700,000 acres, destroying thousands of homes. And fire experts expect this summer to be even worse in parts of the intermountain West which experienced the hottest spring on record and where drought conditions now prevail. A huge windswept fire still smoldering in the isolated Gila National Forest of southern New Mexico has destroyed over 265 square miles, topping last years Los Alamos blaze as the biggest in the state’s history. Another fire now blazing near Colorado Springs -- the most destructive in Colorado history -- has burned hundreds of homes and caused the evacuation of thousands more.
Headline fires like these have become routine events in recent years. Light winter snowpacks, early melt-offs in the spring, and hot and dry summers were blamed in a 2006 report by the University of Arizona for a steady rise in fire activity that has been happening throughout the intermountain West since the mid-1980s.
These findings were echoed in a study published in June in Ecosphere, the peer-reviewed journal of the Ecological Society of America. The report’s coauthor, Texas Tech University climate scientist Katharine Hayhoe, says that scientists now have enough information to confidently tie the increase in the number and severity of fires to climate change. Hayhoe told Mother Jones magazine that, "Scientists found compelling agreement in long-term models that more fires would occur at mid-to-high latitude areas like North America."
That is because there appears to have been a northward shift of the jet-stream, weakening the annual summer monsoon which brings forests in the region most of their yearly rainfall. When trees are low in moisture content and winds are hot and dry, you have a prescription for the sort of high intensity mega-fires that have been sweeping the American West. These risks have been compounded by spreading insect infestations like the spruce budworm. Drought-stressed trees are unable to defend themselves against insect pests which have been wiping out huge swaths of high altitude forest, rendering the dead standing trees into kindling waiting to ignite.
Climate change affects every location differently. The rule of thumb is that wet areas will get wetter, while dry regions will receive even less rain than usual. Projections based on a computer analysis of 18 different climate models suggests that this is already happening in the Southwest, and that the region will get progressively drier and hotter in coming decades.
In much of the Southwest this year, there is no sign yet of the annual summer monsoon, temperature records are being broken, wells and springs are drying out, irrigation ditches are bone dry, farm crops are withering.
Arid spells are nothing new there. Tree ring data going back thousands of years reveals that hot and dry periods have alternated with cooler, wetter times. A decades-long drought is believed to have caused the historic migration of the native Anasazi people from western New Mexico and Arizona to the more hospitable Rio Grande valley in the late 12th and 13th centuries. Yet curiously there is no evidence that this period witnessed the massive fires that we are seeing today. Forest researchers say that is because the spate of recent fires is not just the product of global warming, but also, ironically, of the fire suppression policy pursued by the U.S. Forest Service over the last century.
If you are old enough, you may remember all of those Smokey the Bear commercials -- "Only YOU Can Prevent Forest Fires" Well, America throughout the 20th century took the message of protecting our forests to heart. Aggressive fire-fighting policies were spectacularly effective. With few fires to thin them out, however, Western forests soon became thick and overgrown, an unhealthy condition that did not exist before humans interfered with the natural fire cycle.
The net result is that, when fires do start nowadays, the unnaturally high “fuel loads” can make those blazes unstoppable. Instead of the small, low intensity ground fires of the past, today’s wildfires are frequently raging crown fires incinerating trees like matchsticks and destroying virtually every plant and animal over an area of dozens or even hundreds of square miles. If these mega-fires continue, we may lose a large proportion of our Southwestern forestlands before the present century is over.
And many of these forests will never grow back. This according to Craig Allen, a research ecologist with the U.S. Geological Survey in Los Alamos, New Mexico who says that one of the effects of climate change in the Southwest is that many areas which once supported healthy forests will revert to grass and scrublands as higher temperatures “drive our forests off the mountains.” A process similar to the ongoing desertification of the Sahel in North Africa is already taking place in our own backyard.
The Forest Service is doing what it can -- reintroducing low grade fire through controlled burns and mechanically thinning overgrown forests near towns -- to address the escalating danger of mega-fires. But so long as the region continues warming and drying out, these efforts may prove to be too little too late. And it isn’t just forests that are at risk from climate change. Expect water shortages in urban areas from Los Angeles to Dallas and heat waves such as occurred in Europe during the summer of 2006 in which over 30,000 people died.
“You can probably bet your house that, unless we do something about these greenhouse gas emissions, the mega-droughts of the future are going to be a lot hotter than the ones of the past,” says Jonathan Overpeck, a climate scientist at the University of Arizona, one of the authors of the Nobel-Prize-winning work of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.
Moreover, as low rainfall drives water prices higher, agriculture in many areas will become prohibitively expensive. Erratic weather will also increase the severity and frequency of floods and dust storms, perhaps even creating another Dust Bowl like the one that ravaged the southern plains during a prolonged drought in the 1930s.
Americans often imagine that climate change is someone else’s problem. We are told that that the worst hit areas will be low-lying Pacific islands, monsoon dependent regions in South Asia, and countries bordering the Sahara where the desert is currently advancing.
But anyone who thinks that the poor in the global south will be the only ones to suffer should look to the American Southwest. If we don't act now to cut greenhouse gas emissions and slow down the climate change juggernaut, the fires that are sweeping the southern Rockies this summer will be a sneak preview of worse that is yet to come.
Richard Schiffman is the author of two books and a poet based in New York City as well as a former freelance journalist for National Public Radio. His work has appeared in the New York Times, The Christian Science Monitor and leading literary journals. His radio stories have been heard on "Morning Edition," "All Things Considered," Weekend Edition and Monitor Radio.
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Marsha Blackburn, Ted Cruz (AP/Brian Dowling/Reuters/Joe Mitchell)
Wingnuts' "amnesty" idiocy: How to beat a term to death until it loses all meaning
President Obama's executive action is already being derided by Ted Cruz et al. as "amnesty." Meaning what, exactly?
Check out this article! https://www.salon.com/2014/11/24/wingnuts_amnesty_idiocy_how_to_beat_a_term_to_death_until_it_loses_all_meaning/
Jim Newell
November 24, 2014 4:59PM (UTC)
Happy Imperial Royal Amnesty day, everyone! After a great long wait, President Obama finally announced his plan last week to grant Total Amnesty to every undocumented immigrant, forever. (That, or delay the threat of deportation for a couple of years to certain classes of undocumented immigrants.) He also said he would give free cars and cellphones to all undocumented immigrants and seize all private property owned by Republican voters and nationalize of the means of production. Say whaaa? What's he smoking??
No but really. No matter whether Obama's plan gives one undocumented immigrant or 5 million undocumented immigrants the opportunity to apply for temporary deportation relief, those most viciously opposed to it have been gleefully happy to dub the action "amnesty." Each opponent can personalize the word to his or her suiting through the use of colorful adjectives. Sen. Ted Cruz's recent column, directing the Republican Party to throw its fit over executive and judicial nominations, mentions "amnesty" nine times, including such permutations as "executive amnesty" and "illegal amnesty." (The action is indeed "executive"; the courts have not weighed in on its legality.) Conservative voter fraud guru Hans von Spakovsky describes it as "unilateral amnesty." "Amnesty" is a plain hamburger, with choice toppings available at the Fixin's Bar.
During recent legislative debates over comprehensive immigration reform, in 2006-07 and 2013-14, "amnesty" began at a certain threshold: a path to citizenship, or some other permanent legal status, for those living in the country illegally. Even this was a stretch of the word: Residing unlawfully in the United States is a civil offense that merits a civil remedy. The most common civil remedy is deportation to country of origin. In the Gang of Eight bill that passed the Senate in 2013, the (fairly arduous) path to citizenship that was offered still imposed civil remedies in the form of fines. So it wasn't unconditional. On the other hand, "amnesties" can be conditional. One program that most agree was "amnesty" was the one Gerald Ford offered to Vietnam-era draft dodgers: amnesty in exchange for a period working in some form of civil service. (Eventually Jimmy Carter just started giving out pardons.)
What President Obama announced in his prime-time address Thursday was not a path to citizenship or permanent legal status. Even the Royal Imperial Darth Vader Tyrant President understands that that is not within his power. It will merely defer deportations for, say, those who have family here and haven't committed any crimes. But the term "amnesty" will still be applied by the program's critics, and they'll be able to get away with that because, hey, freedom of speech.
Slate's Betsy Woodruff tried to nail down Republican lawmakers on the threshold for "amnesty." She got mixed results, indicating that "amnesty" may simply be a political term devoid of any concrete meaning. Sen. John Boozman, for example, gives several answers:
I then asked Arkansas’ Sen. John Boozman what he meant when he used the A-word.
“It’s behavior that you don’t want to reward,” he said. “And so if somebody enters the country illegally and then is given the ability to move to the front of the line, as opposed to somebody who goes through the normal process, then I would call that amnesty.”
“It would be a pathway to citizenship,” he said.
According to that definition, the president’s executive action on immigration is not amnesty.
“The sticking point would be in the details,” Boozman added. “That might require whatever.”
Sen. Deb Fischer says, "I don't know!" and laughs when asked whether Obama's executive actions would amount to amnesty. Sen. Johnny Isakson refers to the dictionary definition of amnesty as "forgiveness." This answer offers no insight into its meaning in a political context, but it does suggest that Johnny Isakson views "forgiveness" in a pejorative light.
Others, like Boozman, dodge the question by saying they'll have to wait to see the details to determine whether it constitutes "amnesty." This sudden and convenient enthusiasm for sober-minded assessment is an amusing turn. Thus far they haven't needed to see the details to determine that they don't like it.
Going forward, there's not going to be much point to telling Republicans they're wrong to use "amnesty" in the context of this executive action, even if they're using it more trigger-happily than they might have previously. There's some subjectivity to it. But now that the bar's been set this low, there's little chance of it ever reverting to someplace higher. Woodruff defines the low bar as "bad immigration policy." We'd say that "amnesty," in conservative circles, now refers to an ICE policy of anything less than maximal deportations -- no temporary legal status, no deferments, no discretion or prioritization, no nothing beyond, as the term of art would have it, "roundin' 'em up and throwin' 'em all back over the fence."
The Republican Party position on immigration reform is to pursue a piecemeal approach: first secure the border, and then "deal" with what to do about those 11 million undocumented immigrants already here. In reality this means that Republicans first want a bill to secure the border and then plan to do nothing -- which is why Democrats, after all, insist on a comprehensive approach. Let's imagine for a second, though, that border security legislation is passed and satisfactorily low levels of illegal border crossings measured. Republicans then sit down to draft a bill for that second part. What do they write? Their "amnesty" rhetoric will have left them with no wiggle room to write anything that wouldn't piss off their voting base. But again, they can deal with that, uhh, later.
Jim Newell covers politics and media for Salon.
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(meunierd via Shutterstock)
Junipero Serra, dubious saint: The pope's canonization of the controversial missionary follows a long line of questionable halos
Native American tribes have condemned Serra's canonization, citing human rights violations
Check out this article! https://www.salon.com/2015/09/24/junipero_serra_dubious_saint_the_popes_canonization_of_the_controversial_missionary_follows_a_long_line_of_questionable_halos/
September 24, 2015 8:16PM (UTC)
In the flurry of this week's frenzy of papal excitement, his holiness has still managed to attract his fair share of controversy. Performing the first ever canonization in the U.S. at the Basilica of the National Shrine of the Immaculate Conception Wednesday, he made a saint of Spanish missionary Junipero Serra. Fifty Native American tribes, however, have condemned the action, citing the human rights violations of Catholic missionaries, and Serra in particular. But Serra's just the latest in a long line of incredibly questionable individuals the Catholic Church has decided deserve halos.
Speaking during the canonization mass, Francis told the crowd, "Junipero Serra left his native land and its way of life. He was excited about blazing trails, going forth to meet many people, learning and valuing their particular customs and ways of life." And he said, "Junipero sought to defend the dignity of the native community, to protect it from those who had mistreated and abused it." As the first Latino pope, the act of canonizing Serra is an intentional statement about Francis' own identity and his role as a leader from the new world, for a new church.
But as Simon Moya-Smith explains for CNN, "Serra is also documented as being an extreme and unapologetic abuser of the indigenous peoples of the Pacific Coast." The history of Catholic missionaries is definitely not one of cheerfully bringing Jesus to an eager audience. Moya-Smith cites Elias Castillo's "A Cross of Thorns: The Enslavement of California's Indians by the Spanish Missions," which claims that Serra celebrated the deaths of Native American children as a "harvest."
And while some historians say he protected the indigenous people he lived among, Serra also flogged them in punishment. Ohlone-Costanoan Esselen Nation chairwoman Louise Miranda-Ramirez told the San Jose Mercury News this week, "The church overlooks the fact that he was responsible for whippings ...."They say if you look into the eyes of a saint, you can see the image of God. Can you say that about Serra?"
Of the more than 10,000 saints the Church has already canonized, Serra no doubt ranks substantially below St. Francis or St. Therese of Lisieux in terms of positive P.R., but he's not alone at the bottom. In 1969, nearly 100 saints found themselves demoted, kind of like Pluto or the brontosaurus have been, for being insufficiently credible historical figures. Sorry, St. Christopher. There's a long list of Catholic saints who were vocally anti-Semitic, including St. Cyril, who famously expelled Jews from Alexandria. Even beloved St. Augustine took a seriously hard line against the Jewish people.
St. Olga, meanwhile, was a vicious mass murderer — but of course, her conversion to Christianity changed all that, right? Saint Catherine of Siena — along with multiple other saints both female and male — is venerated for what would now likely be diagnosed as an extreme eating disorder. And here's a description of St. Christina the Astonishing: "She would roll in fire or handle it without harm, stand in freezing water in the winter for hours, spend long periods in tombs, or allow herself to be dragged under water by a mill wheel, though she never sustained injury." Well, that is astonishing.
When you start exploring, you soon learn that the number of cruel, crazy and just plain nonexistent individuals who make up the league of Catholic saints is stunning. But now that we're living in the 21st century and all pretty much agree that anti-Semitism and eating fetid sores — not to mention human rights violations against indigenous peoples — are bad ideas, it'd be awesome if the Catholic Church reconsidered some of its criteria for elevating someone in its holy ranks. It might even be a miracle.
Catholicism Junipero Serra Pope Francis
My priest was an accused abuser
Catholic Church tightens rules
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(iStock/Salon)
Playing on fear and fun, hospitals follow Pharma in direct-to-consumer advertising
Last year, hospitals nationwide spent more than $450 million on advertising
Check out this article! https://www.salon.com/2018/11/23/playing-on-fear-and-fun-hospitals-follow-pharma-in-direct-to-consumer-advertising_partner/
November 24, 2018 2:00AM (UTC)
This article originally appeared on Kaiser Health News.
The scene is shadowy, and the background music foreboding. On the TV screen, a stream of beleaguered humans stand in an unending line.
“If you’re waiting patiently for a liver transplant, it could cost you your life,” warns the narrator.
One man pulls another out of the queue, signaling an escape. Both smile.
Is this a dystopian video game? Gritty drama? Neither. It is a commercial for the living-donor liver transplant center at the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center, an academic hospital embroiled in a high-profile battle with the region’s dominant health plan and now making a play to a national audience.
Hospitals are using TV spots like this one to attract lucrative patients into their hospitals as health care costs and industry competition escalate. Some institutions use them to build national and international brands on niche but high-priced health services. They’re often procedures involving expensive technology that benefit only a sliver of the population. But they could lure wealthy patients seeking high-end care and can also give hospitals some leverage with insurers.
“Hospitals are competing, just like any other business,” said Mark Fratrik, an economist at BIA Advisory Services, a media consulting firm.
UPMC’s ad has been airing nationally this year during cable news shows. Advertising research company iSpot.tv estimates the campaign’s cost at more than $3 million since it first aired in early September. The commercial is aimed at the estimated 14,000 people on the United States liver transplant list, hospital officials said.
But some analysts worry that these hospital advertisements are incomplete or misleading.
“We have choices about where we seek medical care,” said Dr. Yael Schenker, an associate professor of medicine at the University of Pittsburgh, who has researched hospital advertising but was not involved with the liver transplant ad. “We want to spend our money wisely, and need information about the quality and cost of health care services. Health care advertising — which purports to offer that information and fill that need for consumers — really doesn’t.”
Last year, hospitals nationwide spent more than $450 million on advertising overall, according to figures from Kantar Media, a firm that monitors ad spending. That comes on the heels of a surge between 2011 and 2015, during which time hospitals and health systems upped their ad spending by 41 percent, according to figures published by Advertising Age, which tracks marketing trends. By 2015, hospital ad spending accounted for close to a quarter of all health care-related advertising, according to the Advertising Age report.
The UPMC ad is just one flavor. New York City’s Hospital for Special Surgery, an orthopedic hospital, launched its own national campaign this year — a minute-long spot featuring jaunty electronic music and people of all ages dancing, jogging and doing yoga and gymnastics. “How you move,” the text asserts, “is why we’re here.”
John Englehart, the hospital’s chief marketing officer, said the campaign is meant to introduce potential patients to HSS from around the country, but he said it should be viewed with other informational materials, such as independent rankings. He wouldn’t comment on how much the hospital has spent on its ad, though iSpot places its value at about $325,000.
A nationally broadcast ad for Yale New Haven Hospital, in Connecticut, shows a cancer survivor at a bicycle race telling viewers the hospital “did give me my life back.” That spot had a far shorter campaign life, and iSpot estimates its value around $11,000. The hospital did not provide comment, despite multiple requests.
Until now, hospital-to-patient marketing has stayed out of the spotlight, as politicians are focused on high drug costs and warn they will crack down on advertising by the pharmaceutical industry. (Pharma ads make up the bulk of paid health care marketing, though hospitals constitute the majority of health care spending.)
Unlike prescription drugs, whose commercials require special approval from the federal Food and Drug Administration, ads for hospitals and health systems are regulated by the Federal Trade Commission, which oversees the marketing of consumer goods.
Or as Schenker put it, “We’re treating them the same way we treat ads for cars and cereal.” But when it comes to health care versus other commodities, “it’s not as easy to figure out if we’ve made a good choice,” she said.
Direct marketing from hospitals and health care centers is by no means a new phenomenon. Billboards and TV ads for spinal surgery and cancer treatments date back years.
But “there’s more money in hospitals’ coffers these days to [market services] more. And why not?” said Robert Berenson, a health care expert at the Urban Institute, a think tank in Washington, D.C.
An ad like UPMC’s highlighting its live-donor liver transplant program signals prestige.
It caters to patients from around the country and even abroad who are often wealthier, or out-of-network, or covered by higher-paying private insurance, noted Paul Ginsburg, a health economist at the University of Southern California. All are more profitable audiences. (UPMC said it has provided live transplants to patients of all stripes, including those covered by Medicaid, which insures low-income people and pays hospitals less.)
Gerard Anderson, a Johns Hopkins health policy professor and expert on health care pricing, said the ad also can communicate to local consumers that, if they sign up with UPMC — as opposed to a competing hospital — they’re more likely to get better care.
“You’re differentiating yourself from everyone else by saying, ‘I can do this very sophisticated thing that no one else can do. Therefore, sign up with me,’” Anderson said.
Or as Berenson put it: “There are not that many people with liver transplants. There’s some halo effect. They’re trying to get people to recognize the name and go for other services.”
But there is no evidence to suggest that excelling in one particular, complex procedure tracks with providing good care overall.
UPMC casts its campaign as an outreach effort meant to inform people who need liver transplants of a potentially lifesaving option. It is not meant to imply anything further, hospital representatives said. “This is truly an awareness educational campaign,” said Dean Walters, UPMC’s chief marketing officer. He said 14,000 people in the United States need a liver transplant, and that number grows every year. “This is about making sure consumers are aware of this option.”
Walters would not disclose how much UPMC has spent on this particular campaign, though he acknowledged the hospital has made a “financial commitment” to promoting this service. According to Kantar, the marketing firm, UPMC spent more than $4 million on advertising in the first six months of 2018.
Englehart said HSS’ ad is meant to dispel any illusion that the hospital is catering to wealthy patients only — though he also said their campaign is meant to enhance HSS’ reputation both nationally and internationally.
Many health economists suggested the payoff can extend well beyond tapping into the market of potential American or foreign patients. A campaign like this one helps hospitals gain negotiating power in their ongoing struggle with insurers over reimbursement rates.
A hospital that successfully brands itself as excellent or prestigious — even in one procedure or specialty — can leverage that identity when bargaining with insurers.
“They want Hospital A in their network even more, which means Hospital A can extract more from insurers — mainly in the form of higher prices,” said Martin Gaynor, a health care economist at Carnegie Mellon University and former head of the FTC’s Bureau of Economics.
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Izabella Adkins ‘21 started rock climbing five years ago when she was in fifth grade. “I joined the Rocks and Ropes Climbing Team and immediately loved it,” she said. Izabella is currently on the Competition Team, competing in both Bouldering and Sport Climbing. “I really enjoy bouldering because the movements are more dynamic.”
Izabella mostly climbs indoors in climbing gyms because it is easier to train for competition but she also loves to climb outside. “I stay motivated mainly because I love the sport and the community but also through competition,” Izabella said. “I really love competing; the route setters always create such cool routes and I thrive as an athlete under the pressure of competition.” Climbing is a growing sport and will be included in the Olympics for the first time in 2020.
Izabella first saw the show American Ninja Warrior a few years ago. “I always thought it looked so fun but I didn't have the equipment to train for it and the closest ninja gym is a two-hour drive away. Then last summer, when my younger sister became interested in the sport as well, we decided to start building a course in our back yard. We currently have about 20 obstacles from the show and we are constantly changing and adding new ones.” Izabella and her sister started competing in ninja in January through the Ultimate Ninja Athlete Association (UNAA). Izabella placed first at the area qualifier in Phoenix earlier this year.
Izabella recently placed third in the regional competition in San Diego at the beginning of March. She qualified to compete for the World Finals coming up in July in Minneapolis!
“Three years from now,” Izabella said, “I will finally be old enough to compete on the show, so until then I am just training. My goal is to complete all four stages of Mt. Midoriyama and become the youngest and first female finisher of the course.” Only two people have completed the entire course.
“Ninja has so many obstacles,” said Izabella. “I’ve learned that, like in life, even when you conquer one obstacle, there will always be another obstacle ahead. You just have to keep going and trust that your past experience will help you.”
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Saturday Morning Commentary: Is Anybody Paying Attention?
As I contemplated today's post, I hesitated about bringing it to you. My desire is always to enlighten and to encourage. But I'm afraid that what I have to say today is frightening. Yet it must be brought to light. And considering my rant yesterday, I just want to ask all the socialists who consider themselves Sooo compassionate ..... why aren't you speaking out about the death and the violence at our southern border? How can you, or for that matter, anyone ignore the 49 mutilated, decapitated bodies that were recently dumped on a highway connecting the northern Mexican town of Monterrey to the U.S. border? Where is the media? Where is the Administration?
And this isn't the first occurrence. Since 2006, nearly 50,000 people have been killed south of our border. We are all aware that the drug cartels are upping the ante in their attempt to control and grow drug traffic between Mexico and the U.S. It is a billion-dollar business and innocent lives are an expendable commodity. But what alarms me is that it's not just the drug cartels we are dealing with here.
Earlier this year, at a House Foreign Affair's Committee hearing, former Chief of Operations of the DEA, Michael Braun, reported that the Iranian-supported terrorist group Hezbollah has spread its influence all the way to the U.S. border with Mexico. Braun said Hezbollah and other terrorist groups understand that the Mexican cartels are already operating successfully inside the United States. And they wish to exploit that vulnerability.
“If anyone thinks for one moment that these terrorist organizations do not understand that the Mexican drug trafficking cartels now dominate drug trafficking in our country – reportedly in more than 250 cities – than they are very stupid or very naive,” he said.
“Hezbollah are absolute masters at forming close relationships with existing organized crime groups around the world that helps them facilitate what they need to do to move their agendas forward,” Braun stated. “And if anyone thinks for a moment that they don’t have their eye on the southwest border and ALL of our country, then they couldn’t be more wrong.”
Remember the plot, recently uncovered by the DEA, involving an Iranian operative who was planning to allegedly assassinate the Saudi ambassador during a trip to Washington, D.C? There was no need to try to avoid detection coming into U.S. airports. Our porous southern border makes it easy for these operatives to sneak into the country. Indeed, government investigators uncovered the connection between Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps-Quds Force and the Zeta drug cartel in the foiled assassination attempt on U.S. soil.
Braun said Quds Force and Hezbollah work “very, very hard” to develop relationships with criminal groups that already have in place systems for illegal activities, including drug and human trafficking, money laundering and forged document operations.
“And by developing those relations it provides them with the ability to operate far from home in our neighborhood and – as I said earlier – on our doorstep,” he asserted.
So does any of this concern anyone else besides me? Why is this not being reported from every news outlet in the nation? Should we really be more concerned about Roger Clemens' steroid use? Is this what our Congress finds more important than U.S. Security? After all, national security is the ONE area the Government is SUPPOSED to undertake on our behalf!
Is anyone else just a little bit troubled that an increasing number of the nearly 50,000 Mexican dead have been decapitated? And their hands have been cut off? I don't want to sound morbid, but this is barbaric and extremely upsetting.
The combination of ruthless drug cartels and radical terrorists is not a good thing, no matter where it occurs. But when it is just across our southern border, and we are not receiving any information from our government officials --- no warnings; and no apparent plan to stop it or defend against it --- then I can't help but wonder, what's next?
When does the violence spill over into the U.S.? In what other ways have these terrorist groups infiltrated our country? What is their agenda? How many more innocent victims have to die before this situation is addressed --- openly and transparently by the media and the Government?
We can no longer ignore the facts. We ARE vulnerable, and without any semblance of a Border fence, what's to stop these terrorists (and the killings) from continuing? How long before American citizens become the next victims? The final words of Michael Braun haunt me .... "I think there’s going to be hell to pay in the not too distant future,” he said. May God protect us!
Psalm 140:1 "Rescue me, LORD, from evildoers; protect me from the violent."
Labels: Mindset, National Security, Politics, Security
I am very glad you posted something about this topic. It's a huge problem that is just not being dealt with or even discussed. I occasionally have the opportunity to talk to people that have either worked on the border or have lived there in recent times and the things they witness & deal with are very concerning. I recently visited with an elderly lady that lives very, very close to us that had 3 illegals trying to get in her door about 3 in the morning. She was home alone. She moved a chair in front of the door where she could be seen, sat in it with a rifle across her lap. As soon as they saw that they ran off. Amazing story of a lady that knows how to take care of herself, but the point is, it should not be coming to that. This did not occur on the border either, like I said it was in a community close to us. CZ
Belle Ringer May 20, 2012 at 5:28 PM
What is alarming to me is that the enemy is becoming bolder in carrying out these heinous murders. You used to hear about an occasional body showing up, but now the deaths number in the 20's, 30's and this time, nearly 50 at a time! It is fast becoming apparent that our government, who is charged to protect us by the Constitution, is not going to be there for us. And the enemy knows it! So individual citizens, like your friend, have to protect themselves. I can't believe how fast we are deteriorating as a country!
They ARE among us - have to be ! For our " leader " to state that the fence is essentially complete when - as G. Beck has pointed out - it really is only 5% complete, suggests to me the lack of seriousness in HIS carrying out the duties of Commander in Chief. I cannot believe we have allowed our citizenry to equate the performance of Washington, Jefferson etc. to this nonsense.
I, too, am completely mystified as to the reasoning behind the false statements about the border fence and the seemingly indifference to the plight of people on BOTH sides of the border. I would think that decapitated bodies would be of prime interest to any head of state, but when the loss of life is possibly associated with Hezbollah, then don't you think the citizens are due at least a warning, if not a full investigation, as well as full protection of the U.S. government?
love your blog-keep up the good work. thank you for speaking the truth.
And thanks for your encouragement. It's because of people like you that I keep writing.
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You are here: Home » Love World Music » What Is Chance The Rapper Wearing On The Cover Of Coloring Book
What Is Chance The Rapper Wearing On The Cover Of Coloring Book
Chance focused primarily on the best records from his recently released project Coloring Book before fireworks were launched from. someone must wonder why it’s taken so long for a Chicago rapper to.
Thug and Chance previously collaborated on "Mixtape" from Chance The Rapper’s Coloring Book album. Later they released another track called "Big Bs." In a recent interview on Pitchfork’s In Sight Out.
Chance the Rapper is feeling the heat on the legal front. Chance the Rapper is one of the country’s most popular and populist rappers in the game today. Not only did his last full-length release,
The c-word, ‘cunt’, is perhaps the most offensive word in the English language, and consequently it has never been researched in depth. Hugh Rawson’s Dictionary Of Invective contains the most detailed study of what he calls "The most heavily tabooed of all English words" (1989), though his article is only five pages long. Cunt: A Cultural History Of The C-Word is therefore intended as the.
Something similar happened when the site published a concert review that discussed the “emotional disconnect” that the writer felt while listening to Chance The Rapper’s Coloring Book. Chance. the.
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Chancellor Jonathan Bennett (born April 16, 1993), known professionally as Chance the Rapper, is an American rapper, singer, songwriter, actor and activist. Born in Chicago, Illinois, Chance the Rapper began to gain mainstream recognition in 2013, after releasing his second mixtape, Acid Rap, which gained critical praise.He then released his third mixtape, Coloring Book, in 2016, which also.
Differences Between The Origins Of The Blues And The Origins Of Jazz Mar 11, 2004 · Marketplace of Ideas: But First, The Bill A Personal Commentary On American. and European Cultural Funding By William Osborne (Originally published on ArtsJournal.com March 11, 2004) A New Orleans Jazz History, 1895-1927. Jelly combined elements of ragtime, minstrelsy, blues, marches and stomps into a jazz gumbo which anticipated many of the characteristic
Chance the Rapper reinterpreted Stevie. a laid-back version of “Juke Jam” from his 2016 mixtape Coloring Book, highlighted by soulful harmony vocals and breezy washes of brass. The rapper also.
Competition fuels him like no other rapper. t matter: Chance will take it over. The thing that launched his incredible year was his impeccable “Ultralight Beam” verse. Not only did this verse build.
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But the new mixtape-LP from fellow Chicagoan Chance the Rapper (who had a major appearance on TLOP’s “Ultralight Beam”) truly lives up to that promise. Coloring Book is the richest. local.
The solution? Eccentric millionaires with good intentions, like Chance the Rapper! The Chicago native just bought Chicagoist, and also dropped four new songs. Chicagoist, the second site founded under.
Chance The Rapper served as the host on this week’s episode of Saturday Night Live, leaning on the comedic talents he teased in his “Chance The Wrapper” Kit-Kit commercials. During a “Rap History”.
May 17, 2019 · A Florida woman has been arrested after she posted a bizarre Facebook status threatening to ‘shoot everyone’ at the nearest elementary school. Juliana Cote, 26, of Tampa, was charged with written.
Do you need a little extra help with trying to find a song, singer or band? Sometimes it can be hard to find a song title based on just a few words or by the melody. You may even know most of the words to a song but still can’t figure out the title because the title isn’t even in the lyrics.
Chance the Rapper, as you might guess, has a pretty fascinating life. He was asked to do a Muhammad Ali tribute at the ESPYs. His album Coloring Book is full of a rich cast. He worked for actual.
Today Chance is back again, this time around as Chance the Rapper’s ‘3’ New Era Cap Now Available. for all of our wearing enjoyment. The hat is a black snapback cap rocking a number 3 on the front.
1. ENTERTAINMENT LAWYER 01/02 **#1** Our celebrity CEO is running out of tricks up his sleeve. He had big plans for that new car model. It was supposed to be a.
Indian Classical Music Is Mainly Divided Into Two Branches Satavahana Empire (230 BC – AD 220) Kuninda Kingdom (200 BC – AD 300) Mitra Dynasty (c. 150 – c. 50 BC) Shunga Empire (185–73 BC) Indo-Greek Kingdom The world in 1900 was divided broadly into five family systems – the European (including the New World settlements), the sub-Saharan African, the East Asian, the South
What Musical Being Revived On Broadway Next Year Will Opera Star Renee Fleming Be Singing In Lauren Borselli, 26, of 214 Foch St., Ellwood City, was charged with simple assault and harassment after an incident around 5:30 p.m. Sunday at her home. Ellwood City police said Borselli attacked. He frequently sings with the house group, The Guy’s All Star Shoe Band. Guys are called on to follow musical guests from all
Aside from simply knowing that Chance the Rapper and Kanye West have been in the studio together. There is barely any available information pertaining to the follow-up to Coloring Book but it feels.
“I’m working on the SoundCloud thing,” tweeted the Chicago rapper last night (July 13). Chance has a good relationship with SoundCloud, having released his Coloring Book album on the streaming.
PRIMO, the largest independent national magazine for and about Italian Americans, provides quality journalism on Italian American history, heritage, and achievements. PRIMO discusses topics of importance to Italian Americans with articles on Italian art, language, travel, food and wine.
Chance The Rapper just got. two on the way and now the Chicago-proud rapper has announced a list of tour stops and festival performances he’s set to attend after his upcoming album drops. The.
The CTC Wellness Foundation and Temple University will be hosting an annual vigil to remember and honor members of the Temple University family whom we have lost in the past year.
Just after July 4, ESPN called up Chance the Rapper and asked if he would perform a song at the ESPYs, in tribute to Muhammad Ali. Maybe “Blessings,” from Coloring Book, the ecstatic. need to sign.
Thanks for stopping by to checkout the NotSoBoringLife.com giant list of hobbies. If you are sitting at your computer, bored out of your mind, looking for a new hobby give this list a try. It’s the easiest way to find a new hobby. Also check our list to make sure your current hobbies are on […]
WATCH: Contest Winners, Tank And The Bangas, Deliver a Stunning Tiny Desk Concert Debut Watch Chance The Rapper, Third Story and The Social. Grab a copy of his album Coloring Book on iTunes below.
Mar 08, 2018 · From SZA and Charli XCX to Gucci Mane and Jake Paul, 25 writers — John Jeremiah Sullivan, Angela Flournoy, Hanif Abdurraqib and more — tell us what’s happening to pop.
Chance the Rapper released his new mixtape, Coloring Book, on Thursday. It includes the “No Problem” track he released earlier on the day he dropped his third mixtape, which features Lil Wayne and 2.
Filled under: Love World Music By: admin Posted on: June 12, 2019 Comments are disabled!
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Liverpool Defender Edges Closer Towards Injury Return With Appearance For Under-23s
Liverpool defender Nathaniel Clyne has further stepped up his recovery from injury after being named in Liverpool's Under-23 squad for their game on Wednesday night.
The Red's Under-23 side is set to face Middlesborough in the last 16 of the Premier League Cup and the surprise addition to the squad was the 26-year-old who continues to work towards his return.
The right back last featured for the senior team in Liverpool's pre-season friendly against Tranmere in June, and has not featured for the first team this season due to a back injury he picked up during the game.
Michael Regan/GettyImages
However, he began his comeback to competitive action in another Under-23 game last month and managed to play the full 90 minutes after being told he would only play one half.
Speaking to the Daily Express after the game, Under-23's manager Neil Critchley revealed that Clyne insisted he was in fact fit enough to continue throughout the game and that he set the rest of the side a good example of the right attitude to have.
He said: “He has not played for seven months and the plan was to see how long he would go for. He kept putting his thumb up and saying he was OK. He obviously wanted to see out the 90 minutes, which was great for him.
🔴 We're underway. 🔴
Catch #LFCU23s live right now, on @LFCTV GO 👉 https://t.co/yYziCWkeuh pic.twitter.com/Fiy77QufiB
— Liverpool FC (@LFC) March 21, 2018
“I thought he was a great example to our players in the way he managed himself during the game, as well as Joe Gomez.”
Clyne signed for Liverpool from Southampton in 2015, and has since made 93 appearances in all competitions for his side - including 37 of Liverpool's 38 Premier League games last season.
Since his injury, the responsibility at right back has been filled by the likes of Joe Gomez and more notably Trent Alexander-Arnold, meaning Clyne will face some stiff competition to regain his place in Klopp's starting 11 once he fully recovers from his injury. However, Liverpool fans will just be happy to see Clyne back in competitive action.
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First Nations look to grow marijuana industry for economic highs
Indigenous Roots growing facility in the works, to be built in Armstrong
Canada’s marijuana industry is expanding rapidly and some First Nations are looking to cash in on the emerging economic opportunities.
Phil Fontaine, an Indigenous politician turned marijuana executive, has spent the last year travelling the country and talking to First Nations about jobs, wealth and training opportunities the burgeoning marijuana business could bring.
“Everywhere we’ve been, it’s been the same reaction, interest, excitement. First Nations are speaking about possibilities and potential. So it’s been very encouraging,” said the former national chief of the Assembly of First Nations.
Marijuana businesses represent “tremendous potential” for First Nations, partially because communities are able to get in on the ground floor, instead of fighting to catch up years later as has traditionally been the case, Fontaine said.
“This is a unique opportunity. This sector is different than any other the Indigenous community has experienced. Everyone is starting off at the same point,” he said in a telephone interview.
Fontaine is the CEO of Indigenous Roots, a medical marijuana company operated by and for First Nations across Canada.
The company is a joint venture with Cronos Group, a medial-marijuana grower licensed by Health Canada. Once Indigenous Roots is operating, its profits will be split evenly between partner First Nations and Cronos.
Though recreational marijuana is set to become legal this summer, Indigenous Roots will focus on supplying prescription pot to First Nations communities, which Fontaine said have traditionally had lower access to the drug.
“We want to make sure that this particular service is made available to our communities in every part of the country,” he said.
Plans are in the works to build an Indigenous Roots growing facility next to an existing Cronos facility in Armstrong, B.C., with the aim of serving patients by the end of 2018, Cronos CEO Mike Gorenstein said in an interview.
Current Cronos workers will train First Nations employees to run the Indigenous Roots operation, he said.
“Long term and medium term, this is meant to be an Indigenous-operated company,” Gorenstein said. “Our commitment is to make sure that any knowledge that we have or we continue to gain, that we’re sharing and we’re always there to support.”
The new facility will create between 30 and 50 jobs, plus other opportunities in marketing, sales and accounting, Gorenstein said. Future operations will likely be even bigger, he added.
A cannabis company in northern Ontario has also teamed up with local Indigenous communities.
Forty-nine First Nations have invested in 48North Cannabis, representing about 20 per cent of the company’s current shareholder base, said CEO Alison Gordon.
48North also has community benefit agreements with two Indigenous communities near its operations in Kirkland Lake, Ont. The company provides preferential hiring, and funding for drug and alcohol education, Gordon said.
The company is waiting final approval from Health Canada before sending medical marijuana to market, and is eyeing the recreational market, Gordon said.
First Nations will help direct the company’s growth, she added.
“It’s just part of our DNA. I mean, we want to work with our First Nations partners to figure out how to create products and brands that would be important to their communities, to help educate their communities.”
Other communities in B.C. believe cannabis could be a boon and are asking the provincial government to help ensure they get a piece of the emerging market.
In recent submissions to the government’s consultation on cannabis regulations, the Lake Cowichan and Ucluelet First Nations urged the province to implement a rule that requires a certain percentage of marijuana products be grown by Indigenous cultivators.
“It is obvious that there is potential for cannabis to become an economic foundation for some First Nations communities,” says the submission from the Ucluelet First Nation. “With proper consultation about regulation, this potential could be celebrated and fostered.”
Gemma Karstens-Smith, The Canadian Press
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Skoda UK appoints new Head of press and PR
Skoda UK aapoints new Head of Press and PR
ŠKODA UK has appointed Pietro Panarisi as its new Head of Press and PR.
Pietro is returning to the brand having spent two years as Head of Press and PR at Volkswagen Commercial Vehicles. In his new role, Pietro will report to Alasdair Stewart, Director of ŠKODA UK, and will be responsible for all aspects of the brand's PR strategy.
With more than 14 years of PR experience, Pietro brings extensive knowledge of the ŠKODA brand, having held the position of Product Affairs Manager between 2010 and 2013. During his time at ŠKODA, Pietro was involved in the biggest product expansion in the brand's history and was responsible for a number of high-profile PR campaigns – including the setting of a new Land Speed Record in a modified Octavia vRS.
Alasdair Stewart, Director for ŠKODA UK, said: “We're delighted to be welcoming Pietro back to the ŠKODA family. His creativity and passion for the brand will be invaluable as ŠKODA continues to expand with new models and exciting new projects."
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Chinese government behind Kakao Talk attack?
The popular Kakao Talk Android app has been hacked, and investigators are concerned the finger is pointing towards the Chinese government as the culprit. This is hot on the heels of the recent Tibetan spear phishing attack. The app, a messaging and chat application developed by a South Korean firm, is popular with the Tibetan community because it is considered more secure than a similar app called WeChat developed by Chinese operator Tencent. Users were worried that the Chinese government would be able to monitor communications through WeChat.
Citizen Lab said the compromised version of Kakao Talk worked in the same way as the legitimate app but contained a much longer list of permission requests. As Citizen Lab points out, Tibetan activists often circumvent the official Google Play app store to get around restrictions placed on it. This leaves them more open to the possibility of installing malicious apps.
Another aspect of the compromised app, which Citizen Lab calls “troubling and curious”, is its ability to intercept text messages and search them for a specific code sent by the attacker. If it is detected, the app replies to the text giving technical information such as the base station ID, tower ID, mobile network code and mobile area code. It does all this without the user's knowledge.
This information is only useful to actors with access to the cellular communications provider and its technical infrastructure, such as large businesses and government. It almost certainly represents the information that a cellular service provider requires to initiate eavesdropping, often referred to as ‘trap & trace'. Actors at this level would also have access to the data required to perform radio frequency triangulation based on the signal data from multiple towers, placing the user within a small geographical area.
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Reptiles Can't Fly. But This One Glides Like a Pro.
From: Flying Monsters with David Attenborough
Draco, a type of lizard that lives in trees in Southeast Asia, has evolved flaps of skin on its flanks. When opened, they extend the width of its body, enabling it to glide gracefully through the air.
Something remarkable happened 200 million years ago. For the first time, backboned creatures left the ground and took to the skies. They were reptiles called pterosaurs, and over millions of years, they evolved into a huge variety of species, some the size of airplanes. But why and how did these magnificent beasts fly, and why did they suddenly vanish? Join David Attenborough, the world's leading naturalist, and a team of scientists across the globe on a quest to unravel one of the science world's more enduring mysteries.
David Attenborough is the world's leading natural history broadcaster. His distinguished career in television spans more than 50 years. His films and series have won nearly every major award in television, including several British Academy awards, a fellowship and several Emmys.
Attenborough joined the BBC in 1952, initially working in the Television Talks Department. In 1954, he launched the first of his famous Zoo Quest series, which, over the next 10 years, took him to the wilder parts of the world.
Following Eastwards with Attenborough, a natural history series set in Southeast Asia, and The Tribal Eye, examining tribal art, Attenborough wrote and presented the 13-part series Life On Earth, first broadcast in 1979. In 1984, came its sequel The Living Planet, and in 1990 followed the final part of the trilogy, The Trials of Life.
Throughout the 1990s, Attenborough presented natural history series that reached global audiences. In 1996, Attenborough in Paradise fulfilled a lifelong ambition for Attenborough to make a film dedicated to the elusive and beautiful birds of paradise. In 1997, he narrated the award-winning The Wildlife Specials, marking 40 years of the BBC's Natural History Unit.
In autumn 2000, Attenborough presented State of the Planet and in 2001 he narrated The Blue Planet. In 2006, he narrated Planet Earth and presented the environmental series Climate Chaos: Are We Changing Planet Earth?
In 2009, Attenborough wrote and narrated the BBC version of The Link and narrated the series Nature's Great Events. He also made his first production outside of the BBC with Atlantic Productions and Producer Anthony Geffen with First Life, for which he won two Emmys: Outstanding Nature Programming and Outstanding Individual in a Craft: Writing.
Attenborough was knighted in 1985. Over the years, he has received several honorary degrees and a number of prestigious awards, including Fellowship of the Royal Society. He has served as a Trustee of the British Museum and the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, and as President of the Royal Society for Nature Conservation.
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By Kat Thomas
Observer Staff Observer
How Your Favorite Star Wars Character Has Been Altered By The Mandela Effect
Why do half of us remember Star Wars differently? Because CERN is shifting time and space around us
"Your eyes can deceive you. Don't trust them."--Obi-Wan Kenobi
Star Wars is one of the most beloved of franchises. Fanboys (and Fangirls) still flock to watch and rewatch these movies forty plus years later. Yet, everytime a nerd (or at this point mainstreamer) rewatches this space saga, there's a pause as some of us are perplexed by how certain elements of the movie are recalled differently than how they appear in 2019 on the big, little, or little little (mobile...) screen. Many many people are absolutely sure they remember movie differently leading to an existential debate about The Mandela Effect versus False Memories.
The Mandela Effect has recently become an internet phenomenon on the coconut telegraph. To explain it, you must first accept the concept of the multiverse theory, also known as an omniverse. The multiverse is a hypothetical group of multiple universes (including the universe in which we live); together, these universes (universi?) comprise everything that exists: the entirety of space, time, matter, energy, and the physical laws and constants that describe them.
If you want to get really heady, time is really a byproduct from shifting from one multiverse to another like different frames on the Universe's celluloid film.... But as we all keep shifting from one universe to another, a wacky byproduct that occurs is certain people might remember history and popular culture from their past timeline, and not the one they are presently in...
The Mandela Effect was coined in 2010 in regards to one such issue: the death of Nelson Mandela, South African anti-apartheid revolutionary and political leader. Many people remember being certain that he died while in prison, in the 80s. But in this timeline, his actual death was on December 5th, 2013. Other such examples include memories of the Berenstain Bears' name previously being spelled as Berenstein (which for me they were) and of a 1990s movie titled Shazaam starring comedian Sinbad as a genie (totally remember this one too, but doesn't exist in this timeline at all). That being said, enough people remember and discuss its existence to the point that Sinbad actually made a parody video of it in this timeline for College Humor.
Now at this point, the realists will probably be speaking up with the other option: that these incidents are just False Memories. Merely instances in which a person recalls something that did not happen or that something happened differently from the way it happened. And there's some smart people in this corner starting with psychological pioneers Pierre Janet and Sigmund Freud. Unfortunately the by-product for remembering this alternative timeline and not believing your truth is the feeling that one has issues with their memory (or even sanity).
So whether you believe the following Star Wars examples are a direct result of The Mandela Effect or False Memories you should recognize there's definitely some sort of Force at work here Luke!
Darth Vader - "Luke, I Am Your Father"
Ah yes, that the iconic scene between Luke Skywalker and Darth Vader, where Luke discovers that his lineage... that Vader is really his father.
Many remember the iconic line to be:
"Luke I Am Your Father."
But in today's timeline the line as the following:
"No, I Am Your Father."
So many people remember that line as the former, but today if you watch any version of the movie it's actually the later. That doesn't stop many of us from remembering the line to involve the citing of Luke's name.
And this includes the actor who portrayed Darth Vader, James Earl Jones... There's multiple YouTube videos where you can see this actor being interviewed on the news and quoting it the former way.
You can check such out as: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rSHJHBuk02o
Those who side on the later side of the debate note that the reason we all remember the line with the the word Luke at the beginning of the sentence, is that Darth Vader is in fact speaking to Skywalker. Thus rendering us to believe that Vader addressed Luke directly before uttering the iconic statement. This theory also cites that another reason we remember the line in this way is because other forms of media then started picking up on the "mistake." Films such Tommy Boy and Austin Powers and TV shows such as The Simpsons and Psyche referenced or parodied the classic line as Insert Whatever Name You'd Like Here, I Am Your Father... That being said if we are constantly shifting timelines with The Mandela Effect than naturally there would be a residual echo from previous timelines.
CP3O Was Originally All Gold
Another glitch in the Matrix of the timeline we are in now is that Star Wars character C3PO has a silver leg. For many of us the Droid C-3PO was totally remembered to be entirely gold. I'm definitely in this boat, as the first time I saw this Droid with a silver appendage I didn't know what was going on....
The Fan controversy was enough that in 2015, during the release of The Force Awakens, Anthony Daniels (the actor who plays C-3PO in the Star Wars movies) was interviewed by USA Today in an article headlined: Anthony Daniels confirms it: C-3PO's always had a silver leg... 'til now. In it Daniels claimed that lighting had a lot to do with the lack of noticement of the silver colored leg. "It would reflect the gold leg, and it would reflect in the desert, so it acted more of like a mirror," said Daniels. In this timeline the use of the different colored leg was used as a symbol to indicate that C-3PO had been patched together, a byproduct of a ongoing war with the Dark Side.
So silver or gold, these might or might not be the Droids you're looking for...
Han Solo Shot First
This is not so much a Mandela Effect change as it is a change in societal morals.
"Han Shot First" refers to a controversial change made to a scene in the original 1977 Star Wars in which Han Solo (played by Harrison Ford) is confronted by the bounty hunter Greedo (played by Paul Blake) in the Mos Eisley Cantina.
In the original version of the scene, Han grabs his gun and point blank shoots Greedo dead. Later versions were edited so that Greedo attempts to fire at Han first. Allegedly Director George Lucas altered the scene to give Solo more justification for acting in self-defense. But many many fans and commentators opposed the change, feeling it weakened Solo's character.
So as of right now our 1977 version contains the act of Han shooting first, but if we keep shifting from parallel reality to parallel reality we might land on one where Greedo always drew first!
The Mandela Effect or False Memories you decide...!
Kat Thomas is the Editor in Chief of Edible Skinny, a site dedicated to making your life postcard worthy. She is also the CEO of the creative media company This Way Adventures. You can find more about both brands at http://www.thiswayadventures.com
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Bosch Ends Photovoltaics Activities
Published: Wednesday, 27 March 2013 09:01
Bosch is to discontinue its activities in crystalline photovoltaics. Bosch’s manufacture of ingots, wafers, cells, and modules will be ceased at beginning of 2014.
As far as possible, individual units are to be sold quickly. All development and marketing activities are likewise to be ended. The module plant in Vénissieux, France, is to be sold. Plans to construct a manufacturing facility in Malaysia will be ended.
Bosch plans to sell its shares in aleo solar AG. Bosch Solar CISTech GmbH in Brandenburg, Germany, will be continued – as before – as a development center for thin - film technology. Its future alignment will be decided at a later date.
Failure to achieve competitiveness
Over the past years, Bosch Solar Energy has tried unsuccessfully to achieve a competitive position. Due to global overcapacity, which has since become huge, nearly the entire industry is sustaining heavy losses. Dr. Stefan Hartung, the chairman of the Bosch Solar Energy AG supervisory board and member of the Robert Bosch GmbH management board responsible for the Energy and Building Technology business sector, sums up the situation as follows: “Despite extensive measures to reduce manufacturing cost over the past year, we were unable to offset the drop in prices, which was as much as 40 percent.”
As announced in January
2013, the losses of the Solar Energy division came to some one billion euros last year. The division currently employs some 3,000 associates, roughly 850 of them at aleo solar AG and some 150 at CISTech.
All possible alternatives examined
“Over recent months, Bosch has comprehensively examined every aspect of its solar business. We have considered the latest technological advances, cost - reduction potential, and strategic alignment. And there have also been talks with potential partners. However, none of these possibilities resulted in a solution for the Solar Energy division that would be economically viable over the long term.
We deeply regret this,” said Dr Volkmar Denner, the chairman of the Bosch board of management. Stefan Hartung added: “We know full well that associates face a difficult time.
Together with the employee representatives, we will search for solutions that are as acceptable as possible. We appreciate the hard work done by our Solar Energy associates. Over the past year, our associates have fought hard for the future of their division. For this, we owe them our thanks. Nonetheless, our joint efforts to achieve long - term economic stability failed to bear fruit.”
Effective April 1, 2013, the supervisory board of Bosch Solar Energy AG has appointed Dr. Steffen Haack chairman of the management board, with responsibility for sales and technology. In addition, Franc Gruber has been appointed the management board member responsible for commercial affairs.
Haack has been the management board member responsible for sales since August 1, 2012. Gruber has worked for Bosch in various executive commercial functions within and outside Germany since January 1, 2000, most recently in the corporate controlling department.
The present chairman of the board of management of Bosch Solar Energy AG, Holger von Hebel, and the management board members Dr. Volker Nadenau and Jürgen Pressl will resign from the company board of management effective March 31, 2013.
Commenting on these changes, Stefan Hartung said: “In Steffen Haack and Franc Gruber, we have experienced board members who will initiate the steps that are now necessary and see them through to completion. We would like to thank Holger von Hebel, Volker Nadenau, and Jürgen Pressl for their dedication.”
Tags: solar industry news, e-lec.org
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‘Ender’s Game’ Production Photo Shows Asa Butterfield and Co-stars in Training
Posted on Wednesday, April 4th, 2012 by Angie Han
After many long years of tortured development, production is actually, finally underway on the live-action cinematic adaptation of Ender’s Game under the direction of Gavin Hood (Wolverine). Asa Butterfield (Hugo) stars as young Ender Wiggin, an unusually talented child who’s drafted into an elite military program that trains children to fight against an alien race called the Formics.
Considering how beloved the source material by Orson Scott Card is and how long readers have been waiting to see it hit the big screen, Hood and company have some seriously high expectations to live up to. While it’ll be some time before we find out just how the movie version compares, early set photos offer hints of what we’re in for. Hit the jump to check ’em out.
The very first set photo, released with the launch of the official production blog last month, isn’t much to look at — it’s just Butterfield’s chair — and the second, from last week, only shows a door on the set. Today’s latest snapshot, however, gives us a look at Butterfield and some of his co-stars prepping for their roles.
The most recent update was put up with a little blurb explaining just what we’re looking at here:
“Houston, we have a problem. We don’t know how to land the Shuttle.” Good thing it’s just a simulator safely on the ground at SPACE CAMP in Huntsville, Alabama. Aramis, Moises, Asa & Suraj (pictured above from a monitor in the MISSION CONTROL ROOM ) and the rest of our cast agreed that to do Ender’s Game right, they had to train as though they were really headed into ZERO G. And this wasn’t just an afternoon spent taking a vanity tour. From the Manned Maneuvering Unit (MMU), which simulates extra-vehicular shuttle missions in Earth’s orbit, to the microgravity training chair that prepared astronauts for moonwalks during the Apollo program, the week at Space Camp was genuine prep for the feeling of reality that this movie deserves. And after all, the army that trains together stays together.
The kids named in the commentary are Aramis Knight, who plays Bean; Moises Arias, who plays Bonzo; Butterfield, who of course plays Ender; and Suraj Partha, who plays Alai. (I can’t make out who the man in the blue suit is, but given the context it’s possible he’s someone associated with the Huntsville space camp.) Since the actors don’t appear to be in costume, there’s only so much we can glean from the picture, but still: Looking good!
Also starring Abigail Breslin, Hailee Steinfeld, Viola Davis, Harrison Ford, and Ben Kingsley, Ender’s Game is targeting a March 2013 release.
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Action/Adventure, Adaptation, Sci-Fi, Aramis Knight, Asa Butterfield, Enders-Game, Gavin-Hood, Moises Arias, Suraj Partha
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Oct 19, 2017, 05:56AM
William Bryk
I enjoy good public speaking.
When you’re livin’ on your knees
You rise up!
Tell your brother that
He’s gotta rise up!
Tell your sister that
She’s gotta rise up!
—From Hamilton: An American Musical.
It’s raining today here in Antrim, New Hampshire. There’s a small chip in my windshield: a repair team will come out this afternoon to see whether it can be filled or the whole thing has to be replaced. This is all covered by my insurance, so I’m happy.
The Antrim Town Democratic Committee elected me a delegate to the party’s State Convention. The date of the convention conflicted with my town’s Home and Harvest Festival, which is a major community event. The other town party officers chose to staff the Antrim Town Democrats’ table at the Festival. So I told my town chair that I would go to the convention.
The convention’s theme, repeated on the delegates’ credentials and the convention’s brochures, was “Rise Up!” I thought this a plain reference to Lin-Manuel Miranda’s Hamilton, although no one with whom I talked in the party leadership agreed with me. It was held in Manchester Memorial High School on a sunny, humid day in an auditorium without air conditioning. I was not in a suit, but what the British Army would call undress: chino slacks, gray pinstripe button-down shirt, black Bluchers, a tie, and a blue blazer: all of it Brooks Brothers save the tie. The blazer came off within 15 minutes and I loosened the tie.
After leaving the auditorium to cool off and leave the blazer in my car, I spent some time chatting with the charming Kris Mueller, a successful businesswoman who doubles in brass as chair of the Merrimack County Democratic Committee. She had stepped out for many the same reasons as I had. After all, one goes to conventions to meet and greet and develop friendships and alliances. At every break in the action, I went about seeking out acquaintances from previous meetings.
Most of the business involved amending the Party’s constitution, which was done without opposition. This might well be simply because the amendments were long, technical, and actually seemed to place some restraints on the power of the party leadership. This may reflect the leadership’s acknowledgement of some tension between the local activists, who do the hard work of turning out the vote, and the party leadership, who do the hard work of fundraising, candidate recruiting, and meeting the many reporting requirements for the operation of a party organization.
This stems from last year’s presidential primary, in which a Jewish democratic socialist from Vermont smashed a former Secretary of State, roughly 60-40. However, when the delegates voted at the National Convention, the delegation broke 50-50 because the super-delegates—party and public officials—all voted for Mrs. Clinton as they saw her as the safe choice. Given that she lost in November after waging a grossly mismanaged campaign in which she ineptly insulted many voters as “deplorables,” some folks think that supporting her nomination under those circumstances was not only anti-democratic but simply bad politics.
This is the off-year for New Hampshire elections: there are some municipal elections here and there which are all non-partisan, although everyone knows the candidates’ party affiliation.
After dealing with the amendment of the Party’s constitution, there came the entertainment. I enjoy good public speaking and so I delighted in several good speakers. The party leadership spoke: the chairman of the party, the co-chairs of the convention, the chairs of the Credentials and the Rules Committees. None were droning bores.
New Hampshire’s U.S. Senators spoke: Jeanne Shaheen knew what an audience of New Hampshire Democrats wanted to hear and gave it to them. Maggie Hassan spoke quite well, with a smooth delivery and the gift of a Pavlova for spinning around difficult issues. My Congresswoman, Ann McLane Kuster, who in person is warm and charming, and, candidly, far more attractive than in her official photographs, delivered a brief, rousing speech.
Steve Marchand, former mayor of Portsmouth, candidate for Governor, and a professional auditor—a man who knows how to follow the money—delivered a gutsy, blunt, good-humored talk.
Then the traveling road show began speaking, of people from elsewhere who may be visiting New Hampshire in anticipation of the 2010 “First-in-the-Nation” presidential primary. New Hampshire has sent only one president to the White House, Franklin Pierce, a Democrat and former state party chairman who was quietly defamed by one of the party apparatchiks for no articulated reason.
Maura Healey, the Attorney General of Massachusetts, the first openly gay elected Attorney General in American history, delivered an intelligent, carefully crafted speech, underlining her birth and girlhood in New Hampshire while outlining her litigation to defend the Affordable Care Act and stop the Trump Muslim travel ban.
But the star performer was Jason Kander, 39, former Secretary of State of Missouri, a former Army intelligence officer, the fellow who, when he ran for U.S. Senator and narrowly lost in 2016, used a television commercial of himself, blindfolded, assembling an assault rifle, a discipline he had to master as a soldier.
It’s a great commercial. Under attack by Roy Blunt, the Republican incumbent, and the National Rifle Association for not understanding guns, he puts the weapon together while going through his record in the Army and his support for the Second Amendment while supporting background checks for gun buyers, finishing in less than 30 seconds with a dare: “I approved this message because I’d like to see Senator Blunt do this.” Blunt did not take the dare.
Kander now operates Let America Vote, which opposes the Trump administration’s efforts to make voter registration vote more difficult. He’d clearly made this speech before: about the resistance he’s seen to Donald Trump, what Democrats need to remember about themselves, the story of the Afghani translator who surprised him by not caring that he was Jewish, and a reminder that he’s the guy from the ad assembling the rifle while blindfolded.
"If this were a season of The Apprentice, Trump would’ve fired Trump! Donald Trump won the election, but he did not win the argument!"
He was down-to-earth, yet eloquent, often funny, and passionate, speaking without notes. He was interrupted by eight standing ovations. I kept count. Of course, he was throwing a lot of red meat to an audience that wanted to get it and they did. Yet it was a great performance.
In 1894, two-term Congressman William Jennings Bryan of Nebraska was defeated for the U.S. Senate. Two years later, he addressed the Democratic National Convention to second a proposed platform plank. He spoke near midnight. He delivered a speech he’d been polishing for some four or five years throughout rural Nebraska. We remember it as the Cross of Gold. He brought the convention to its feet. On the following day, the convention nominated him for President of the United States.
In the afternoon, I attended a lecture for prospective candidates. The party always has to recruit people to run for the legislature, the General Court. The pay is $100/year. That may explain why they have to recruit. As is increasingly the case, I find that the lecturers at such events are young enough to be my children, if I had any, and if I’d married at 20 like my father, grandchildren. Life did not take me down that path. I’m generally contented with my life, but I think sometimes about what my life would’ve been if my beloved wife and I had borne children. My parents had seven children. Those seven have yielded four grandchildren.
That may be a measure of how times have changed.
As I wrote some months ago, I ran into my State Representative, Marjorie Porter, who’s a friend, while shopping for groceries. During our chat, she asked whether I’d consider running for State Representative. I held my tongue for a moment and said yes. So let us see. There are 400 State Representatives for a state with two Congressional Districts. It’s quite possible to canvass the district for less than $1000 and, if one goes door to door, get elected. As you can tell, I’d do it for the honor. After all, Members of the British Parliament were not paid before 1910. They served for the honor.
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The community comprising the Springville-Griffith Institute Central School District (Village of Springville, Towns of Ashford, Aurora, Boston, Colden, Collins, Concord, East Otto, Sardinia and Yorkshire) is a vital, growing area hugging the Cattaraugus Creek, straddling southern Erie and northern Cattaraugus Counties.
Route 219, the trail for Buffalo area and Canadian skiers, golfers and vacationers, travels through the community and offers a 35-minute city commute. Its small town charm, including a historic farmer’s market/auction, is complemented by national corporate retailers.
The Springville area offers a wide variety of unique shops and small businesses, world-class hunting and fishing in woods and streams, hiking and plenty of activities for families. In the heart of ski country, there are five resorts from 15 minutes to an hour away. Springville is a crossroads for county snowmobile trails and state and county parks abound in the area.
Bertrand Chaffee Hospital serves both acute and preventative health needs. Community organizations including Springville Youth, Inc. (SYI) and Boys and Girls Clubs offer swimming and a wide variety of recreational activities for kids. Day care and Universal Pre-School are available at a private center and through a church. Nearly a dozen religious denominations are active in the area. Housing is plentiful with architecture ranging from contemporary to traditional.
Like Springville’s downtown, the S-GI school district has a rich history. Established in 1830, the school was centralized in 1941 and 1953 to combine 33 separate schools. The high school is the oldest of the district school buildings, built in 1952. Colden Elementary became more than two rooms in 1954 with Springville Elementary constructed in 1957 and the Middle School in 1977. The S-GI district currently serves about 2,100 students and has one of the largest areas of any New York district at nearly 141 square miles.
Connections for Kids
Family Support Center
Social & Emotional Health
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Be Green When You Clean
Grist - Environmental News and Commentary
Grist - Environmental News and Commentary - If you think of your home as a haven from pollution, we've got some bummer news. Levels of pollutants in indoor air can be from two to more than 100 times higher than outdoors, according to the U.S. EPA. That indoor pollution is due in large part to volatile organic compounds (VOCs) that evaporate, or "offgas," from home decorating and cleaning products.
So if the weather cooperates, step one for green cleaners is: Open a window and let those pollutants out! Yet even in the spring and summer, when a vase of daffodils can fill a room with a lovely natural scent, many consumers stubbornly keep using synthetic room fresheners and fragranced cleaning products that are full of VOCs and other toxic chemicals. These can make our indoor air unhealthy, provoke skin, eye, and respiratory reactions, and harm the natural environment.
Take those so-called air fresheners. According to a study published in New Scientist in 1999, in homes where aerosol sprays and air fresheners were used frequently, mothers experienced 25 percent more headaches and were 19 percent more likely to suffer from depression, and infants under six months of age had 30 percent more ear infections and 22 percent higher incidence of diarrhea.
In choosing alternatives, however, consumers need to be alert to greenwashing. "Just because a product says it's natural doesn't mean it's nontoxic," says Jeffrey Hollender, CEO of Seventh Generation, which produces genuinely eco-friendly cleaning supplies and household products. The word "natural" is undefined and unregulated by the government and can be applied to just about anything under the sun -- including plastic, which comes from naturally occurring petroleum. Because no standards exist, claims such as "nontoxic," "eco-safe," and "environmentally friendly" are also meaningless, according to Consumers Reports' Eco-labels website. Click here to keep reading.
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The Canicula Is The Rio Grande Valley’s Hottest And Most Dangerous Time For Border Crossings
Border patrol and area residents alike grapple with how much to help migrants crossing illegally during the season’s deadly heat.
By Michael MarksAugust 27, 2018 7:14 amBorder & Immigration, Health & Science
Miguel Gutierrez Jr. /KUT News
The Rio Grande River, at Laredo, Texas, is part of the border between the United States and Mexico.
You’ve almost certainly heard about the dog days of summer, but do you know about canicula? You probably do if you’re from the Rio Grande Valley. Otherwise, perhaps not.
It’s a term in the Valley that’s shorthand for the peak of summer heat, but it’s not just a weather term. The canicula seeps into most every part of day-to-day life, which, on the border, includes immigrants trying to cross into the United States. It’s something that Houston-based reporter Molly Hennessy-Fiske considered in a recent piece for the Los Angeles Times.
Hennessy-Fiske says the term “canicula” comes from the Canis Major constellation, whose brightest star, Sirius, is known as the “great dog.”
“It has superstitions surrounding it,” Hennessy-Fiske says. “[It] has to do with the time of year that it comes because it’s the 40 hottest days of the year…into July and August.”
Hennessy-Fiske, who regularly reports on immigration at the southern border, says when she’s working there during the summer, everyone from customs agents at border crossings to restaurant servers talk about the canicula.
“Everywhere I would go, it was…something you could use as kind of a conversation starter,” she says. “Everyone would have something to say about it.”
Responses and superstitions related to the canicula vary widely. Hennessy-Fiske says people avoid having major surgeries and tend to keep children inside because of the heat. But they also pay attention to its patterns.
“If the canicula starts super hot, [they believe] it’s gonna end super hot,” she says. “This year, it started, as you might imagine, super hot, and so people knew they were in for a long haul.”
This factors into immigration because people use the canicula to gauge the risk of crossing into the United States at the border along the Rio Grande Valley – a notoriously hot, deadly region in the summer. Hennessy-Fiske says even in the past week, the border patrol has found the dead bodies of migrants, as well as people suffering from heat exhaustion.
Hennessy-Fiske says during the canicula, border agents and others along the U.S. side of the border feel greater pressure to help people crossing illegally, because of the elevated risk of dying from the heat.
“One of the commanders I talked to said, ‘Well, you know, you’d have to be inhuman not to offer somebody water.’ But, then, if you’re offering someone a ride, then that’s harboring and so that’s something different,” Hennessy-Fiske says.
Written by Caroline Covington.
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A Political Defendant Faces a Political Judiciary
Texas judges run in partisan elections, and sometimes what they do as politicians gets in the way of what they're supposed to do as judges.
by Ross Ramsey May 21, 2012 6 AM
Tom DeLay, shown after his trial in 2011. DeLay, who was convicted of conspiracy and money-laundering, was found innocent of all charges by the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals in 2014. Bob Daemmrich
Tom DeLay can be hard to like.
The former House majority leader seems to see everything through a partisan lens. He says remarkably caustic things about his foes. When you think it might be a good time for him to be humble, he puts on a matador outfit and dances across your TV screen.
But put that aside if you’re able.
He goes to court on Wednesday in Austin, hoping to overturn his convictions for laundering campaign finances and for conspiring to launder that money, and to thus get out of a three-year prison term that hasn’t started yet. Another count drew him a sentence of five years of community supervision. He was convicted of trying to swap illegal corporate contributions for legal contributions that could be used in Texas legislative races.
The state’s 3rd Court of Appeals, a six-judge outfit made up of four Republicans and two Democrats, will hear his case this week. DeLay wants one of those Democrats — Judge Diane Henson of Austin — off the panel.
She appeared, as candidates will, on the stage of the state Democratic convention in 2006, preaching fire and brimstone, as candidates do. DeLay had a special place with the Texas Democratic Party at the time, kind of like the status Nancy Pelosi has with the national Republican Party.
He was their Voldemort.
For a shining moment, he seemed to be in the first line of every Democratic fundraising letter, the force against which the Democrats could raise their money and rally their supporters.
That was the context for Henson’s speech to the Democrats in 2006. Here’s how she started: “My name is Diane Henson. I’m running for Place 3 on the 3rd Court of Appeals, which is the court that sits in Austin next to the state Capitol. It is the court of appeals that would hear the appeal of Tom DeLay, if by chance he was convicted.”
Well, he was. And it is. And by the luck of the draw and the tuck of the tail, she is one of the three judges on the panel that is supposed to hear his appeal.
She wasn’t supposed to be on the panel. But one judge recused himself — he didn’t say why, and he doesn’t have to — and another asked to be removed. Both, incidentally, are Republicans who are up for re-election this year. One of their replacements then recused himself, leaving a pool of just three judges from which to choose a three-judge panel.
One of the three is Henson. That’s like discovering someone on the Dancing With the Stars panel doesn’t like sequins.
DeLay’s lawyer, Brian Wice of Houston, suggested in a letter to the Court of Appeals that Henson, given her comments, might want to recuse herself. When that didn’t change anything, he filed a formal motion with the court asking that she recuse herself because “a reasonable member of the public would harbor doubts that Henson was impartial.” He’s asking that the full court meet to decide the matter and he suggests that the Texas Supreme Court could appoint a replacement if too many of the appeals court’s judges have the sniffles, or conflicts of interest.
The court isn’t obligated to make any changes. Wice could, in his words, be “stuck like Chuck” here. He said (remember who the client is and what his arguments have been throughout the history of the case) that if Henson hears the case, there would always be an asterisk next to the decision. “This case is only about politics,” he said. “That’s all it’s ever been about.”
You don’t have to buy that, or believe that Henson is anything other than a fair-minded judge with the ability to look at DeLay’s case the same way she’d look at anything else.
But appearances matter. What judges do is largely done quietly and outside the view of the public. Save the argument about whether we should be holding partisan judicial elections at all.
This is a trust thing, and they have to act like this is a fair question: How would this look different if she was biased against DeLay and acted on her bias?
Just because he can be irritating doesn’t mean he’s wrong.
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Royal Commission findings are good news for ag5 months, 1 week ago
Banking Royal Commission findings are good news says ag legal specialist
7 Feb 2019, 3:30 p.m.
The Hayne Royal Commission has brought to light some long-sidelined issues
The four key agriculture-related recommendations produced by the Hayne Royal Commission into financial sector misconduct are sensible, practical initiatives which should be implemented as soon as possible.
That’s the conclusion of Professor Michael Adams, the University of New England’s Law School’s new head, and a consultant to a major law firm.
He supports a bipartisan effort to get the recommendations implemented as quickly as possible.
“The Royal Commission into Misconduct in the Banking, Superannuation and Financial Services Industry has brought to light some long-sidelined issues,” Prof. Adams said.
“The recommendations relating to agriculture have been discussed in the past, but there hasn’t been the impetus necessary to ensure that these ideas were acted on.
“The Royal Commission has provided that impetus.”
Professor Adams has been an international expert in corporate law and governance for 30 years.
He makes the following comments on the key farm sector recommendations:
- The concept of a national scheme of farm debt mediation has long been debated.
The Royal Commission recommends that the time for debate is past, and the scheme should be enacted into law by parliament.
The federal government has committed to action on this recommendation, although few details have been provided.
In practice, such a scheme must help lenders and borrowers to agree on practical measures to address financial difficulties.
The mediation should be activated as soon as the loan becomes distressed and not as a last measure before enforcement, such as foreclosure.
- The amendment of land valuation standards to account for external events that impact on the realisable value of the property could have credit lending implications for farmers, as loans require security based upon a valuation.
This should be considered throughout the loan decision process.
The government supports this amendment and will instruct the Australian Prudential Regulation Authority (APRA) to act on it.
Professor Michael Adams
- Recommendation 1.13 recommends that the Australian Banking Association (ABA) amend the Banking Code to ensure banks cannot charge default interest on loans secured by agricultural land.
The proviso would be triggered by a declaration that the land is subject to drought or other natural disaster.
This would be legally enforceable.
- I am sure many farmers will welcome a specific recommendation (1.14) relating to distressed agricultural loans at a time when much of the agricultural sector is grappling with either acute drought or flood.
The recommendation requires banks, when dealing with distressed agricultural loans, to use only experienced agricultural bankers and offer farm debt mediation as soon as possible.
Additionally, there would be a requirement to manage distressed loans on the basis of the best outcome for the borrower and the bank, rather than outsource the problem to an external administrator.
- Finally, lenders would be required to cease charging default interest when there is no realistic prospect of recovering the amount charge (this is linked to recommendation 1.13).
The Government supports lenders acting on this recommendation.
The story Royal Commission findings are good news for ag first appeared on Farm Online.
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Home » Events » Mammon's Kingdom: Money, Greed and Selfishness
Mammon's Kingdom: Money, Greed and Selfishness
with David Marquand
former Labour MP and Chief Advisor to the President of the European Commission
Tuesday 17th June 2014
St Faith's Chapel, Crypt of St Paul's Cathedral
The follies and failures of bankers, regulators and governments have loomed large in public debate over the past five years. David Marquand, leading political philosopher and former Labour MP, sees a wider issue. The heart of the problem, he argues, is a profound crisis in our moral economy, public culture and democracy - the empire of money has remorselessly narrowed the space for common life and inequality has soared. A new public framework, based on the values of stewardship, democratic dialogue, civic engagement and freedom from humiliation is needed to steer our course away from the disastrous consequences of our present path.
Presenting the thesis of his latest book, Mammon's Kingdom, David Marquand will speak with a panel of business, political and theological experts on how to bring about a fundamental shift in our public discourse and approach to personal values in order to better serve the common good. Is our individualist approach to money and greed the root cause of our societal problems? What alternatives are there to current political and economic systems, and is there enough public will to see significant change?
With responses from:
Ryan Bourne, Head of Public Policy at the Institute of Economic Affairs
Prof Tina Beattie, Professor of Catholic Studies at Roehampton University
Will Hutton, Journalist and Principal of Hertford College, Oxford
Chaired by Bishop Peter Selby, Interim Co-Director of St Paul's Institute
This event is free and open to all. Questions from the audience will be taken and a book-signing will follow the event. Places are limited and registration is essential.
To register for tickets please visit: http://mammonskingdom.eventbrite.com
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How a forbidden love affair sent her to a Gulag camp
A survivor of the Soviet Union's brutal prison camps describes her nightmarish time there.
Kim Hjelmgaard, USA TODAY
Published 11:54 a.m. ET Dec. 28, 2016 | Updated 5:31 a.m. ET Dec. 29, 2016
The Soviet Union collapsed 25 years ago on Christmas Day. “Today, it’s a new day ... God forbid the sad errors of our history are repeated,” a TV newscaster said on on Dec. 25, 1991. One of the cruelest "sad errors" was dictator Josef Stalin's Gulag prison system — forced labor camps for millions of criminals and political dissidents.
The inmates built roads and railways and worked in mines and in the Soviet Union’s vast timber industry. Millions died from exposure, starvation, disease.
“There’s not much interest in these people anymore,” said Lyudmila Sadovnikova of the Gulag History Museum in Moscow. “But there absolutely should be. Almost every family in Russia is connected to this tragedy in some way.”
This 87-year-old Gulag survivor will never forget the day authorities came to take her away. USA TODAY NETWORK
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, the celebrated author who chronicled the nightmare conditions that political prisoners faced in "The Gulag Archipelago," wrote that "people were arrested who were guilty of nothing, and were therefore unprepared to put up any resistance whatsoever."
It has been 63 years since the Gulag camps were disbanded. Only about 3,600 of 18 million prisoners are still alive to bear witness to this dark period. That is why the story about 87-year-old Lyudmila Alekseevna Khachatryan is so important, and why she will never forget the date Nov. 20.
Collapse of the Soviet Union 25th anniversary.
(Photo: USA TODAY)
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MOSCOW — “It was the destiny of the Soviet Union to disappear,” Lyudmila Khachatryan said a quarter-century later as she sat in the living room of her drab Soviet-era concrete apartment. “I miss nothing from this time."
Khachatryan was 18 when she was arrested on the doorstep of her family home on the Raushskaya Embankment near Red Square. She has documents about her captivity, and the Gulag History Museum has recorded 25 hours of her testimony. Many details cannot be confirmed, but old photos and a still sharp memory tell the story.
Born on New Year’s Eve in 1929 to a wealthy military family, Khachatryan was a lively girl. She did well in school. But she had a contrarian streak that often got her in trouble.
“My mother was always saying to me: ‘Why do I get so much hassle and grief from you when other children I know are not nearly as naughty? Why, Child?’”
That's why Khachatryan’s life of crime started early. At age 8, she stole money from her mother’s purse to buy a statue of Lenin to bring to school. Khachatryan’s teacher had asked her to buy the statue, but her parents had refused on principle. They hated the Communist Party.
“They were more mad that I had bought a statue of Lenin than that I was a thief,” she said of the porcelain statue that portrayed Lenin with a full head of dark, curly hair. Most likenesses show him bald.
When her parents discovered what she had done, they whipped her with a belt. “After that, I never stole anything again,” she said.
But 10 years later, she committed a crime that only the oppressive Soviet system would recognize and punish her by sending her to the Gulags: “What was I guilty of? I can say it in one word: Love.”
Love to a foreigner.
He was a military officer from Montenegro, at the time part of Soviet ally Yugoslavia. They had met by chance at a medical clinic. She was 17. He was a few years older and had come to Russia to study at one of its prestigious military academies.
For several months they met surreptitiously by the banks of Moskva River in central Moscow.
He regaled her with dramatic stories of Red Army battlefield victories and boasted that he had been personally selected by Yugoslav leader Josip Tito to get a Soviet education. She wore her mother’s makeup and on one occasion it smeared. A gentleman, he mentioned it only once.
“It was one of the last times I saw him. We had just said goodbye and he turned and said over his shoulder, ‘As soon as you get home please look in the mirror and never do the same again.’ So I ran home, over the bridge, entered the house, and because we had a lot of mirrors in the hall I immediately saw what he meant. There were black dots all over my face from the mascara. It had been snowing.”
They married in secret.
Because of her age — at 17, Khachatryan was too young, according to Soviet law — the union was formalized by the Yugoslav ambassador in the embassy. In Yugoslavia, the legal marriage age was 16.
“I had no plans to tell my mother,” Khachatryan said. “Of course, she found out about it later.”
Around this time, the relationship between Stalin and Tito began to sour. Soon, there was a split.
Yugoslav nationals, including Khachatryan’s new husband, were deported. Anyone who had communicated with foreigners was rounded up and detained.
Khachatryan was one of them.
“There was no way to reach him. He was simply gone,” she said.
"When the NKVD (later KGB) came to arrest me they told my mother they would bring me back home that same evening. It was near Artillery Day (which commemorates the Battle of Stalingrad against Nazi Germany) and because my father was an officer it was an important time for us,” she said.
“They didn't even let me take any warm clothes with me. My mother said, ‘At least let this girl take a sweater,’ but they told her, ‘No, No, don't worry we'll bring her back in the evening.'
“We were about to go to a party to celebrate the holiday. My mother was wearing the most beautiful dress and my father was in his full military uniform. I am glad I decided to take my mother’s advice.”
She brought the sweater. It would prove useful. She would be away nearly seven years.
After her arrest, Khachaturian was taken to Moscow’s Lefortova prison, where she was interrogated.
“They removed all my clothes. And in all my holes they put their fingers. It’s a terrible sin. But the most horrible thing that occurred to me at this point was that I would never see my parents again.
The Soviet-era actress Tatiana Kirillovna Okunevskaya. She spent time in the same prison camp as Khachatryan.
(Photo: Kim Hjelmgaard, USA TODAY)
“I don’t remember if they washed me or let me wash before putting me in the cell. You could not bring anything metal in there. They cut out two zippers from my dress. All my underwear and the metal bits on my bra — they took those. They even cut out my initials from my handkerchief.
“They took pictures of me because I was shedding so many tears. It was like a game to them. The ceiling of the cell was painted a brilliant white color whereas the walls were very dark green and it gave this very visual sense of having pressure constantly exerted on you. The walls closed in on you."
First prison, then the Gulag
For Khachatryan, there was no trial. Only a verdict.
“My sentencing was done by a real Soviet-Communist type. Big. Fat. He said, ‘Lyudmila Alekseevna Khachatryan!: In the name of the Soviet Union, blah blah blah, after members of the NKVD, blah blah blah. You have been given a term of work in the camps of eight years!’ I started to shout at him, then realized a girl next to me had received 15 years. I had gotten off lightly.”
She had been in Moscow’s Lefortova prison for three months. She now understood that she would never see or hear from her secret husband again. The next day, she was put on a train bound for the Soviet Union’s northernmost reaches.
Khachatryan was brought to an area that appeared to be filled with wooden churches.
It was the Kargopol-lag camp in the Arkhangelsk region — the Russian Arctic. Here, it was not unusual for winter temperatures to plummet to 49 degrees below zero, and to stay there for weeks.
Gulag survivor Lyudmila Alekseevna Khachatryan in her Moscow apartment on Nov. 21. Russian is marking this month 25 years since the collapse of the Soviet Union.(Photo: Kim Hjelmgaard, USA TODAY)
Lyudmila Alekseevna Khachatryan's apartment building in Moscow.(Photo: Kim Hjelmgaard, USA TODAY)
A copy of a document reportedly signed (in red) by Soviet dictator Josef Stalin authorizing executions at a labor camp.(Photo: Kim Hjelmgaard, USA TODAY)
An example of a Gulag prison bed seen at a museum in Moscow on Nov. 19.(Photo: Kim Hjelmgaard, USA TODAY)
A survivor of Josef Stalin's Soviet-era Gulag labor camps Lyudmila Alekseevna Khachatryan in her apartment in Moscow on Nov. 21.(Photo: Kim Hjelmgaard, USA TODAY)
What looked like wooden churches turned out to be just some of the many structures that formed part of the vast camp. It was situated on a massive territory that had several train stations, dozens of barracks, administration buildings and more. “You can’t imagine how big it was,” she said.
Anne Applebaum, whose book Gulag: A History of the Soviet Camps won the 2004 Pulitzer Prize, has written that some of these camps had grown from “containing nothing more than a few huts and some barbed wire (to) become true industrial giants.” The largest housed nearly 200,000 prisoners. Applebaum estimates that Kargopol-lag, a forestry camp, was home to abut 30,000 prisoners.
At first, Khachatryan was quarantined for two weeks so camp officials could assess her health and fitness. During the day, she was put to work cleaning and re-cleaning barrack floors. If she complained, which she did initially, she would be given an injection that made her lose consciousness.
Lyudmila Alekseevna Khachatryan shows a video in her apartment. The video is of a get-together of Gulag survivors. A picture of 'The Gulag Archipelago' author Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn is visible on the wall (top, left).
At night, interrogators would try to break her resolve through humiliation, sleep deprivation, intimidation and other psychological tactics. There were few meals and she was hungry all the time.
“It was so cold and the blanket in the cell was thin. Sometimes they would wake me every 15 minutes. I was happy I brought the sweater. I would put my legs in the sleeves to warm them.”
Eventually, through a stroke of luck, Khachatryan was able to get a letter to her parents to tell them where she was. They knew she had been detained, but had no idea where. A fellow inmate whose five-year term was coming to an end agreed to smuggle out the missive. It was an extraordinarily courageous act considering discovery could have meant re-imprisonment or even a charge of collaboration resulting in execution by firing squad. Stalin personally signed off on these death lists, the Gulag museum says.
The letter probably saved her life. Within a few weeks, Khachatryan’s father appeared at the camp.
But there was a second piece of luck that would prove equally decisive.
Her father and the camp’s chief warden had served together under the same general in World War II. While they did not know each other at the time, it was a sufficient excuse to share a bottle of brandy.
The two men drank late into the evening. Before dawn, Khachatryan’s father came to her cell. Still drunk, he told his daughter: “Your fate has been decided. You will work in the camp’s theater.”
Although Khachatryan had no formal experience as a performer, for more than five years until her release in 1953, she was partly occupied playing an American spy on the stage.
'He would simply not die'
An area close to Lyudmila Alekseevna Khachatryan's apartment in south Moscow.
Nov. 20 is a black day on Khachatryan’s calendar. She does not answer the phone. The television is switched off. She refuses the company of all but close friends or other Gulag survivors. When she was younger and more agile she would travel to the cemetery to ask her parents’ forgiveness. She hasn’t done so in years.
Nov. 20 is the day Khachatryan was arrested. She was released shortly after Stalin died on March 5, 1953. She was 24.
“It was all my fault and after all these years I feel this responsibility still,” she said.
As she spoke on the eve of this anniversary, Khachatryan traced with her thumb a small circle over and over across a wooden cup holder. Later she would do the same motion, square this time, on the back of an empty picture frame. The more she spoke about her family, the more she continued tracing.
“I made it so hard for them. I was their only child. They did so much for me.”
This year, Khachatryan spent Nov. 20 with just one person, her doctor. They ordered pizza and shared a bottle of wine. Previously, this day would be filled with a roomful of people, most of them Gulag survivors. They understood one another even if they did not always agree. About politics, money, the path Russia was on, whether people should be more interested in people like them.
“A lot of people are divided about the old Soviet Union. Some say, ‘If Stalin was in charge the buses would run on time.’ Others say, ‘Why should we care about these Gulag survivors? They worked outdoors, in the fresh air, the work was not so hard, the government fed and housed them.’”
Virtually all of Khachatryan’s friends have died.
Yet she does not feel especially abandoned by the government or anyone else in part because she never really felt supported by them. Officially, she was compensated 8,100 rubles (about $130) for each year she spent in the camp. Yet she did not receive the money until Dec. 17, 1991 — eight days before the Soviet Union fell apart. When she went to claim the money a few weeks later, Russia’s economic collapse and runaway inflation had turned this payment into dust.
For years, Khachatryan refused to talk about her experiences, fearing the potential consequences. “I was worried. I could go back to prison. The Soviet Union had not been declared dead for that long.”
Lyudmila Alekseevna Khachatryan was compensated less than a $800 for the nearly seven years she spent in a Gulag labor camp. She was finally paid the money about a week before the Soviet Union collapsed. This is the document she was given. When she went to collect the money Russia's runaway inflation had made it worthless.
After her release, she had moved to Kharkiv, in eastern Ukraine. There, her mother took her to church and made her pray that she would never again contact “the Yugoslav,” as she now calls her first husband.
Kachatryan found work in a cultural center, giving art lessons to military officers and performing on the side. She married again. Then for a third time. She had a son, but he died of leukemia at an early age. She finds it too upsetting to talk about him now.
These days, a social worker visits Kachatryan once a week and brings her supplies. Recently, the government purchased her a refrigerator, a microwave and a washing machine. This was not because she is a Gulag survivor but because her third husband, an Armenian who had also been imprisoned in Stalin’s camps — for falling in love with a German girl — was due money for being a World War II veteran. A musician, he died in 1997. The time they had together was a happy one.
“Nothing teaches people if they don’t want to see. For me, Lenin was Russia’s butcher No. 1 and Stalin was No. 2. Lenin started it all. He was worse. That’s what people need to know.”
There was something else she wanted to say: “Listen to me."
“Toward the end — this was early 1953 — we would run every day to the camp doctor and ask whether Stalin was alive or going to die that day. We knew that he was very ill at this point. And every day the doctor would say 'die.' But he always lived. He would simply not die.
“Then one day they announced it over a loudspeaker. Everybody was really shocked and confused. No one had any idea what to do. Not even the guards. Finally, someone took charge and told us to gather together so we could pay our respects. At this moment we were all sitting on the ground and so they told us to stand up so we could properly honor the greatest leader of our nation.
“But a friend of mine — an actress who before her imprisonment (Yugoslav leader) Tito fell in love with and would send her black roses — she refused to stand up.
"Eventually, someone started to shout at her: ‘Stand!’ ‘Stand!’ Then others joined in, before finally people were just screaming at her: ‘Bitch, get up!’ ‘Bitch, stand up!’ She never did.”
Price of courtship
Until a few months ago, Khachatryan had kept her promise to her mother and never attempted to make contact with “the Yugoslav.” But a chance encounter with the grandchild of a military officer who had known him convinced her that now might be a good time to write a letter about what had befallen her.
It was too late. The letter reached his home a few weeks after he died. She found out that he had gone on to have a distinguished military career, but learned few details about his personal life.
The only existing picture of Lyudmila Alekseevna Khachatryan and 'the Yugoslav.'
Khachatryan did not think readers of her account need to know his name, although she did share it in the end. She also shared the single picture she has of them together, as well as a personal dedication the actress had written in a book she published about life in the camps.
In her letter to "the Yugoslav," Khachatryan briefly described the price she paid for their courtship. She did not ask him any questions about their time together or anything else. She didn’t want to know.
Follow Kim Hjelmgaard on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram.
© 2019 tcpalm.com, All rights reserved.
How a forbidden love affair sent her to a Gulag camp A survivor of the Soviet Union's brutal prison camps describes her nightmarish time there. Check out this story on tcpalm.com: http://usat.ly/2htsG4r
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Screenwriter Audrey Wells Who Wrote 'Under The Tuscan Sun' Passes Away At 58
9 October 2018, 7:07 am EDT By MJ de Castro Tech Times
After her long battle with cancer, accomplished screenwriter Audrey Wells passed away on Oct. 4. Wells was 58 years old.
Wells had a long career in the entertainment industry. She was the woman behind the screenplay of films such as Under The Tuscan Sun, which she also directed. The movie starred multi-awarded actress Diane Lane.
She also penned Shall We Dance, and The Truth About Cats and Dogs. Additionally, she adapted the screenplay for The Hate U Give, which was just recently released by Fox.
Wells' Vibrant Life
According to her husband, Brian Larky, Wells fought for the last five and a half years with her illness and she passed away surrounded by immense love. In her fight, she never lost her light. Her sickness did not stop traveling, working, living, and her joy was still intact, together with her positive disposition and wonder.
"She was, simply, the most incredible wife and partner imaginable, and she knew always that she was loved by Tatiana, me, and the friends who were her chosen family," he added.
Her passing was announced by her representatives at United Talent Agency. The company's co-president, David Kramer, shared that Wells was truly one of their beloved clients and was an amazing friend.
"It was impossible not to fall in love with her and the passion that brought her stories to life," Kramer added.
Wells' Newest Project
Wells' latest project confronts police and racial tension in the country as it tells the story of an underprivileged African-American high school student, Starr Carter, who goes to a prep school that is attended by mostly white students.
The film's lead character witnesses an unfortunate event — the shooting of her childhood friend, Khalil, by a police officer.
Fox also shared that it is heartbroken by the news. The company mentoined that Wells had a voice of bravery and empowerment, and her projects will continue to live through the strong, courageous, and driven female characters that she brought to live through her writing.
The prolific writer and director was born in San Francisco. Before her rise as a screenwriter, she worked as a disc jockey. Wells stated that this gave her inspiration for what to pen about when she entered film school.
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WebGL and the future of the web
Tristan Louis
At the recent Web 2.0 Expo New York, Google unveiled MapGL, a version of their popular maps product which uses WebGL, the new Web Based Graphics Library Standard. With this effort, Google is working on mainstreaming a technology that may be key to the future of web applications.
What is WebGL?
At its most basic level, WebGL represents a set of extensions to JavaScript that allows developers to write code that can use the processing power of a user’s computer to create 3D graphics that update in real time. The standard is supported by Apple, Google and the Mozilla foundation but Microsoft has not yet lent its support to the nascent standard (I suspect it’s only a question of time as most of the browser world has announced support for the format). Today, you need a fairly recent computer and the latest version of either the Chrome, Mozilla, or Opera web browser.
The applications can now run and modify fairly complex 3D web-based applications. This is going to be a huge boon for online games, as can be witnessed from early examples like the recent implementations of web-based versions of Quake and X-wing, and also have substantial other uses. For example, the Google body browser allows users to get a better sense of how the human body works and someone put together a very convincing webgl photo editor that can handle a substantial amount of the basic image editing needs most people have. In science, a lot of representation can now be fred so scientist can experiment with different views of the data on an experiment.
In the future, one could see a lot of data set being presented in 3D using this technology, with the ability to access and manipulate data in real-time and see rich representations of that data immediately.
For a long time, web applications have been limited to running within the context of a browser and thus sandboxed away from the rest of the operating system. With WebGL, we’re seeing that barrier broken down for the first time and is creating a precedent for the future growth of web applications.
In a way, this is an interesting return to ideas that existed almost 15 years ago. Back then, Microsoft was interested in merging their browser with the operating system. Early alpha versions of IE 7.0 actually had a deeper level of integration with Windows but fears around anti-trust regulations led the company to pull those extensions out.
To open up the web to deeper level of integrations with lower level processes could mean a variety of new possibilities. While web applications have long been limited by the browser sandbox, webGL now opens the door for a substantially improved experience as it gives the web access to a lot of the power that has been resident on users’ desktops. For a couple of decades, the web has been sipping that power through a straw but with WebGL, it’s as if the straw had been replaced by a firehose when it comes to graphic processing power.
For almost two decades now, many people have tried to make 3D on the web a reality (a little known fact, for example, is that Mike McCue, the man behind TellMe and now Flipboard, got his web start with a plugin that allowed the Netscape browser to display complex 3-D models) but many of those effort failed. A large reason for those early failure was that the different solutions presented were often limited to what the web browser could handle and until recently, it was considered a big no-no for the browser to access any low level processes.
But a few entrepreneurs had a more long term vision. In the 1990s, Marc Andreessen quipped that his browser would reduce the Windows operating system to “a set of poorly debugged device drivers”. While many have laughed this off as bravura on the part of a young man (he was in his 20s then), the concept of the web browser as central to computing experience is no laughing matter and it appears that the browser is now getting to that point where it could truly reduce operating systems to what he had envisioned in the 90s.
While 3D processing is but one frontier being broken by WebGL, it is an important one because, for the first time, web browsers are given access to low level processing without requiring plug-ins or authorization from the end-user. This will, of course, represent a set of new security challenges as code that is interpreted by 3D rendering engine gets pretty close to the heart of the machine (and traditionally, the code that has been allowed this privilege has been tightly controlled at the distribution channel level, with 3D gaming being mostly manufactured and distributed by a few people. By contrast, the whole web is mostly open to everyone with few or no limitations, opening it up as a potential attack vector).
Now that this frontier has been broken (and one could say that the door was initially opened when HTML5 was allowed to do geolocation), imagine what some of the next offerings that will build on this precedent could bring: in the future, we could see web applications being allowed to access cameras, microphones, accelerometers, and other parts of electronic devices across all web browsers. This could mean that applications that now run on your desktop could truly break free from that format and run exclusively from the web.
In the past few years, the idea of breaking down applications into smaller and smaller components to be distributed through an app store has taken hold of the computing industry, potentially challenging the idea of applications running from the web itself. With the rise of WebGL, the graphic rendering portion of those applications is something that now has accomplished feature parity. Sound will be next and access to device components will probably follow.
Web applications’ future has been challenged by apps and the web has answered the challenge, allowing for a set of offerings that will be richer and will present themselves in a way that will make it hard to differentiate between a native and a web application, Eventually, we will see WebGL being implemented on mobile devices browsers (the processing power is there and I suspect it’s something we will see appearing within a couple of years), radically reshaping the web app vs. store app debate.
With WebGL, we’re seeing a future that renders the web exciting again. It’s a technology worth keeping and eye on. Now may not be the time to develop on it (unless you’re developing web-based games for computers) but within the next 12-24 months, it is a skill that will be required of most Javascript developers.
Writing and working on the internet since 1993, I've launched six companies, of which two went public and three were sold. This is my personal site and all opinions here are mine.
An Occupation
Pushing beyond standardization
The Twitter Platform
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Home Topics Dosseh
Dosseh
Full list of winners at the 2019 BET Awards
Regina Hall hosted the 19th annual BET Awards ceremony, which aired live from the Microsoft Theater in Los Angeles.
BET: Burna Boy wins ‘Best International Act’
Afro-fusion artist, Damini Ogulu aka Burna Boy clinched the coveted ‘Best International Act’ award at the BET on Monday.
Full List: Teni, Burna boy, Mr Eazi bag 2019 BET award-nominations
Popular Nigerian musicians, Teni, Mr Eazi, and Burna Boy have been nominated alongside Cardi B, Drake and Nipsey Hussle for the 2019 BET awards.
Burna Boy, Teni, Mr Eazi nominated for BET awards
Nigerian music stars Burna Boy, Teni and Mr Eazi have been nominated in different categories for the Black Entertainment Television (BET) awards.
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Man who allegedly attacked Tacoma immigrant detention center identified
In a statement, police said shots were fired. After initially taking cover, police found the man. He was dead.
The Pierce County Medical Examiner’s Office identified the man as Willem Van Spronsen, 69, of Vashon Island.
Police said he was wearing a satchel and gear that contained flares.
The four officers involved in the shooting were placed on paid administrative leave.
The detention center is run by the GEO Group for the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). It holds migrants awaiting hearings and deportation. It has a capacity to hold 1,575 people.
A spokeswoman for ICE confirmed the shooting and referred media to Tacoma Police.
“No ICE employees were harmed nor involved in this tragic event,” said spokeswoman Tanya Roman. ICE closed the facility to visitors for the day.
The detention center is the scene of almost daily activity ranging from protests to aid stations set up by humanitarian groups. Ten people were arrested in June 2018 after about 40 protesters blocked the street leading to the facility.
Protesters object to the U.S. government’s policies toward undocumented migrants.
On Saturday morning, three members of the Vashon Island Unitarian Fellowship were setting up an aid station with snacks and drinks as they have done once a month for the past nine years. But instead of staging outside the detention center’s entrance, the group were at a police roadblock at St. Paul Avenue and East Minneapolis Street.
The refreshments are for the families who visit loved ones inside the detention center.
“We didn’t know,” volunteer Robert Blauvelt said of the shooting. “We just showed up and an officer said it’s an active crime scene.”
A picnic, planned by resistance group La Resistencia, was planned for 12:30-4 p.m. on Saturday outside the detention center. On their Facebook page, the group said it had been moved to Sunday following the shooting.
ICE sweeps and arrests of undocumented immigrant families in major cities across the nation are scheduled for Sunday.
Related stories from Tacoma News Tribune
A roundup of events in recent years at the Northwest Detention Center
Investigators work the scene of an officer involved shooting outside the Northwest Detention Center in Tacoma, Wash., on Saturday, July 13, 2019. Tacoma police shot dead a man who was reportedly throwing incendiary devices at an immigrant detention center on the Tacoma tideflats early Saturday morning. Joshua Bessex joshua.bessex@gateline.com
Investigators work the scene of an officer involved shooting outside the Northwest Detention Center in Tacoma, Wash., on Saturday, July 13, 2019. Tacoma police shot dead a man who was reportedly throwing incendiary devices at an immigrant detention center on the Tacoma tideflats early Saturday morning.
The Tacoma City Council plans to send a letter to Congress asking for help monitoring the Northwest Detention Center. Dean J. Koepfler News Tribune file photo
Craig Sailor
Craig Sailor has worked for The News Tribune for 20 years as a reporter, editor and photographer. He previously worked at The Olympian and at other newspapers in Nevada and California.
As burial trends change, cemeteries are working to adapt
Mayor Jenny Durkan introduces Hall of Famer Ron Francis as first GM of Seattle’s new NHL team
More than 4,000 affected by widespread power outage in Lakewood
A power outage in Lakewood is affecting at least dozens of customers, according to Tacoma Public Utilities. The cause was not immediately known.
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Get a grip, Proctor. Dense developments help preserve Tacoma, not destroy it
Parents using marijuana are more likely to discipline, abuse children, study says
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Public hearings coming on Transource project
The Pennsylvania Public Utility Commission will host eight public input hearings in May to gather comments regarding the east and west transmission line applications submitted by Transource Energy.
Hearings will be held May 9 at 1 and 6 p.m. and May 14 at 1 and 6 p.m. at the Airville Volunteer Fire Department in Airville, York County; and at 1 and 6 p.m. May 22 and 1 and 6 p.m. May 23 at New Franklin Volunteer Fire Department Social Hall near Chambersburg.
Transource, the company hired by PJM Interconnection, wants to construct a proposed $320 million electric system upgrade with approximately 40 miles of new 230-kV overhead transmission lines across Franklin and York counties.
Transource filed applications to build the project with the Pennsylvania Public Utility Commission and the Maryland Public Service Commission in December 2017.
The application is currently under review by the state PUC and will be evaluated based on the merits of the project.
According to the PUC, "the proposed route must be established as the best out of other alternatives, considering safety, environment impacts, impacts on scenic and historic sights, existing land use, soil and sedimentation, plant and wildlife habitats, terrain, hydrology and landscape."
The application must also include information on landowners, safety considerations and a statement of need—which could include showing benefits such as improved reliability, increased economic development, reduced consumer costs and an increased demand.
The project has inspired a grassroots movement, Stop Transource Franklin County, comprised of local residents who hope to stop the power line project, citing concerns over health, safety, aesthetics and property value.
Because the application has been contested, the PUC has assigned the proceedings to an administrative law judge, who will oversee formal hearings for landowners and community members which are conducted like a court case and open to the public.
PUC Administrative Law Judges Elizabeth H. Barnes and Andrew M. Calvelli will preside over the public input hearings.
The PUC's Office of Consumer Advocate offers the following tips for those who would like to participate in the hearings:
Come early. If possible, try to be there at least 10 to 15 minutes before the meeting's start time. Sign up if you want to testify. Witnesses are usually called to testify in the order they have signed in. Prepare what you want to say in advance. If you are nervous about speaking in public, you may want to write out your statement and read it during the hearing. Be prepared to be sworn in. Unless you are sworn in as a witness, your testimony will not become part of the record in the proceeding. Add your own experience. When you testify, give specific examples to support the issues you address. If there are many speakers, the judge may set a time limit for each witness. Speak slowly and clearly. Make sure you are understood. Written statements. If you have a written statement or other papers that you want to give to the judge as evidence, bring extra copies with you. One goes to the judge and two to the court reporter. You should also bring copies to give to the active parties in the proceeding. Questions. You may be asked a question during testimony. Answer as best you can. It is OK if you do not know the answer. Assistance from the OCA. If you need information about the proceeding or about how to testify, contact the OCA at 800-684-6560.
In addition to the public input hearings, the litigation schedule included in the procedural order calls for potential site views to occur in May and/or June 2018, depending on weather; the filing of testimony, starting in late July 2018; evidentiary hearings in December 2018; and the submission of briefs and reply briefs in February 2019.
If approved by the PUC, construction could begin in 2019, with an in-service date of mid-2020.
For more information on the project, visit TransourceEnergy.com/Projects/Independence or visit the PUC’s website at www.puc.pa.gov for recent news releases and video of select proceedings, or www.stoptransourcepa.org.
Contact Andrea Rose at arose@therecordherald.com or 717-762-2151
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Aboriginal youth overrepresented in Canadian justice system, data shows
By Kristy KirkupThe Canadian Press
Tues., April 26, 2016timer3 min. read
OTTAWA—Figures from the Justice Department paint a dark picture of the state of indigenous incarceration, with aboriginal youth seriously overrepresented in the criminal justice system.
Data recently provided by the department to brief Justice Minister Jody Wilson-Raybould says indigenous youth account for only seven per cent of the overall population, but make up 41 per cent of those entering the justice system.
The documents, obtained by The Canadian Press, also say the problem has ballooned over the last decade and point to bias in the policing, justice and corrections systems.
Inflated incarceration rates are, in fact, the product of a tangled web of problems plaguing indigenous communities, including educational failures and a lack of mental-health resources, said Charlie Angus, the NDP indigenous affairs critic.
“The result is all of Canadian society is paying the price in the outrageous numbers for education rates, spikes in suicide, victims of violence and incarceration,” Angus said.
“You can track the results: the lower education outcomes, the higher suicides, the higher victim of violence rates, the outrageous numbers of incarcerated people. It runs ... through the government’s denial of services and limiting of opportunities for indigenous children and youth.”
Correctional Investigator Howard Sapers, who has extensively documented challenges for aboriginal offenders inside the federal system, called the figures “atrocious” and said they reflect systemic failures.
“The criminal justice system is really a barometer of those failures,” Sapers said in an interview.
“We have some prescriptions that we think would be helpful when it comes to particularly the administration of federal corrections, but you know, it would be so much better to prevent the harm to begin with than it is to try and prescribe a cure once people are already ... within that system.”
One of the central problems is the state of the child-welfare system, Sen. Murray Sinclair said Tuesday,
The former chair of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission said indigenous children continue to be apprehended on the basis that families cannot be trusted, but says the system often fails to place children in safe environments.
Sinclair said the figures are an “indictment of both systems” and stressed that they should not be looked at separately.
“The child-welfare system and the model that it is following, is at the centre of those numbers and can’t and shouldn’t be ignored, even for adults,” he said in an interview.
Sinclair recalls that in a survey conducted in 1991, more than 70 per cent of adult inmates in the federal system had prior experience with the child welfare system.
“The failure of one ... is a reflection of failure of the other,” he said.
The high rates of indigenous youth in custody is clearly a matter for concern, Wilson-Raybould’s spokesman said in a statement Tuesday.
“The minister’s mandate letter directs her to review the changes in our criminal justice system and sentencing reforms over the past decade with a view to, among other things, reducing the rate of incarceration amongst indigenous Canadians,” Andrew Gowing said.
“The minister is working with the minister of public safety, the commissioner of the Correctional Service of Canada and others to examine the factors which lead to people becoming involved in, or are at risk of being involved in, the justice system.”
Wilson-Raybould, a former First Nations leader herself, is aware incarceration is often a reflection of disadvantage in the areas of education, employment, health, and mental health, Gowing added.
Words remain cold comfort for suffering indigenous youth, Angus said.
“I think what we see in these documents is the government is aware of the racial lens that is being applied to indigenous people, so talk really isn’t good enough,” he said.
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Gary’s ranked No. 17 and Brown is 20th on the list. Montverde Academy’s R.J. Barrett is ranked No. 1.
Gary, 6-foot-5, averaged 15.9 points a game as a freshman last season.
The 6-6 Brown averaged 11 points a game in helping the Falcons to the Class 3A state championship. He has offers from Auburn, Clemson, Georgia, Georgia Tech, Georgia State, Oklahoma State and Wake Forest.
Gray hoops games moving
Gray Collegiate will play its boys and girls home basketball games at Adams Gymnasium on the campus of Allen University next season.
The move is to accommodate the anticipated bigger crowds, especially the boys with the addition of Jalek Felton, the state’s top prospect. GCA’s in the same region with Keenan and C.A. Johnson.
North Central’s Bowers earns MVP
North Central’s Tyler Bowers was named MVP for the North Class 2A/3A team at last week’s South Carolina All-Star Baseball games in Myrtle Beach.
Bowers went 2-for-5 with three RBIs in helping his team to a 2-0 record. He was an all-Midlands selection and signed to play at Florence-Darlington Tech.
More All-Star games
The SC-NC Select Baseball game, North-South Soccer and softball games will be held this week.
The SC-NC Baseball games will be on Wednesday and Thursday at USA Baseball Complex in Cary, N.C. A.C. Flora’s Josh Hernandez, Dutch Fork’s T.J. Shook and Newberry’s Ryne Huggins will play in the game.
The softball games will be on Wednesday and Thursday at USC Aiken, and eight Midlands players will take part in the games.
The North-South Soccer Classic games will be held, beginning at noon, at Rock Hill’s District Three Stadium. Twenty players from the Midlands will play.
SC Director’s Cup standings
Seven Midlands schools finished in the top 10 of the South Carolina Athletic Administrator Association Director’s Cup standings.
In Class 4A, Lexington was third, Dutch Fork fourth and Spring Valley 10th. In Class 3A, A.C. Flora was No. 2, Chapin No. 5 and Dreher No. 9. Mid-Carolina was No. 8 in Class 2A.
Lou Bezjak
Picks and previews for high school football state semifinals
By Lou Bezjak
Previews of this week’s two Midlands and picks for all of Friday’s state semifinals: Fort Dorchester at Dutch Fork and Brookland-Cayce at Dillon
MORE LOU BEZJAK
Picks and previews for third week of high school football playoffs
Lower Richland basks in last-second win; Spring Valley defense steps up in Tindall’s absence
High school football playoff picks and previews of top games
Bold predictions for SC high school football playoffs
High school football Week 10 picks and previews of top games
Breaking down playoff scenarios for Midlands football teams
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Philip Collins
April 18 2019, 5:00pm, The Times
Thatcher can teach green activists a lesson
The former prime minister was the first leader to realise that market forces can be the best way to tackle climate change
The inconvenient truth about climate change is that it does not fit into domestic politics. The protesters of Extinction Rebellion have been disrupting human traffic in London and other cities to draw our attention to the fact that the world is warming up. Yet we know this and have known it for a long time. There’s another reason why climate change has not become a big political issue.
On November 8, 1989, in a speech to the general assembly of the United Nations, Margaret Thatcher warned that careless human custody of the planet was creating “change to the sea around us, change to the atmosphere above, leading in turn to change in the world’s climate, which could alter the way we live in the most…
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Will Ferrell’s Funny or Die Exploring Potential Sale (Report)
The comedy website is working with investment bank Moelis & Co. to contact potential buyers
Gina Hall | November 11, 2014 @ 3:25 PM Last Updated: November 11, 2014 @ 3:39 PM
Funny or Die
Funny or Die hired a financial adviser to explore a possible sale.
The video site founded by Will Ferrell, Adam McKay and Chris Henchy is working with investment bank Moelis & Co. to contact potential buyers, according to a report from Bloomberg News.
The site frequently captures the pop culture zeitgeist with hilarious videos that leverage some of Hollywood’s biggest stars like on Zach Galifianakis‘ “Between Two Ferns.” Time Warner Inc. holds a minority stake in Funny or Die and the site was incubated at CAA and was funded by SV Angel and Sequoia Capital.
Also read: Keira Knightley Hung Out With Facebook, Google Founders But Didn’t Know Who They Were (Video)
Funny or Die launched with a clip of Will Ferrell arguing with a McKay’s child in a piece called “The Landlord.” Since then stars like James Franco, Samuel L. Jackson, Anne Hathaway, Charlie Sheen, Christina Hendricks, Ellen Page and Bette Midler have shot videos for the site. The company entered into an agreement with HBO to create half-hour series and specials, earlier this year HBO’s Funny or Die-produced Sarah Silverman special won an Emmy. Funny or Die also produced “Spoils of Babylon” for IFC and “Drunk History” for Comedy Central.
Also read: Funny or Die Launches Editorial News Vertical
Internet platforms have proven fertile testing ground for content to leap to television or film, but they have also built up their own value to advertisers. In May, Maker Studios sold to Disney for $500 million.
Funny or Die has not returned TheWrap’s request for comment.
Bette Midler Needs $174 Million to Plant a Tree on the Moon (Video)
By Ryan O'Connell | November 6, 2014 @ 8:55 AM
Natasha Lyonne Replaces Michael Keaton in ‘Beetlejuice 2’ Funny or Die Spoof (Video)
By Ryan O'Connell | October 28, 2014 @ 10:17 AM
Funny or Die Launches Editorial News Vertical
By Greg Gilman | October 8, 2014 @ 8:37 AM
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Print This Week
Virtual Newspaper
Can IBM remake itself with hybrid cloud play Red Hat?
Assif Shameen 20/11/2018, 9:04pm
SINGAPORE (Nov 19): Legendary corporate icons can plunge from their exalted status to irrelevance in little or no time. The unfolding saga of General Electric, the world’s largest company by market capitalisation until Microsoft overtook it at the start of the tech boom in 1999, is a case in point. GE, which has been slowly shedding assets since the global financial crisis in 2008, has seen its downward slide escalate over the past two years. Its once lofty stock has plunged 77% from its recent July 2016 peak, and is down 87% from its July 2000 all-time high when it initially rebranded itself as an “industrial internet” company.
A much slower unravelling is seen at another tottering global corporate icon, IBM, or International Business Machines, a pioneering tech company that is now a shadow of its former self. IBM stock is down over 40% from its peak five years ago despite US$50 billion ($60 billion) in share buybacks.
Last week, IBM announced that it was acquiring hybrid cloud player Red Hat for US$36 billion in an all-cash transaction. It hopes the “transformational deal” — the largest in the history of software — will help expedite its makeover from a has-been teetering on the brink of disaster into a player in the tech space. The two companies have been partners for nearly 20 years. IBM is trying to sell the Red Hat deal, the largest in its 107-year history, as a “game changer”. The combination, it claims, will make it the world’s No 1 hybrid cloud provider, “offering companies the only open cloud solution that can help them unlock the full value of the cloud for their businesses”.
To be sure, IBM has stumbled many a time in recent decades, only to reinvent itself and, much to the chagrin of investors, falter again. The Armonk, New York-based company, originally called The Computing-Tabulating-Recording Co, nicknamed “Big Blue”, dominated mainframe computers used by corporates in the 1960s and 1970s, only to see its position undermined, initially by mini computers and later by personal computers popularised by Apple in the late 1970s. Although it eventually took a plunge into the new era in 1980 by making PCs, it made the fatal error of licensing the software from a then-upstart called Microsoft. In the PC era, the real money was not in making low-margin Apple clones, but the software. By the late 1980s, rival PC makers such as Dell, Hewlett-Packard and Compaq had left IBM PCs in the dust.
IBM has long branded itself as an integrated company that bundled hardware, software and services to corporate clients. In 1992, it posted US$8 billion in annual losses, a record at the time, causing its stock to plunge 75% from its 1987 peak to just over US$10. It brought an outsider called Lou Gerstner from cigarette and cookie maker RJR Nabisco to steady the ship. Gerstner began refocusing IBM as more of a software, solutions and services firm away from its hardware roots. Its PC business was sold to Beijing-based Lenovo Group in 2004. IBM bought the consultancy arm of PWC, but continued to shrink in size.
By 2011, IBM was again in trouble. As part of yet another makeover, it installed a woman, Virginia “Ginni” Rometty, as CEO, and resurrected Watson, its home-grown artificial intelligence program, just as investors were starting to chase hot technologies like AI. It also lured billionaire value investor Warren Buffett, CEO of Berkshire Hathaway, to buy into its juicy rejuvenation story. Buffett began building a stake, citing its “leading position in the tech space and its desire to return billions of dollars in additional funds to investors over the next five years”.
IBM stock rebounded 35% after Buffett started buying, to peak at US$215 in March 2013. At the height, Berkshire owned 81.3 million shares, or nearly 9.9%, of IBM. Yet, as IBM reported revenue declines for 18 consecutive quarters, the Oracle of Omaha quietly began unloading his stake and by early this year, he had completely washed his hands of Big Blue. Buffett cited “big, strong competitors” such as Amazon.com, Microsoft, Cisco, Dell-EMC and Oracle as a reason for IBM not achieving what he expected it to when he first took a liking to the stock. In the six years he owned the stock originally bought for nearly US$15 billion, Buffett barely broke even despite a mouthwatering 5% annual dividend.
Fork in the road
To understand the dire shape IBM is in, look no further than its quarterly reports for the last 28 quarters, or seven years. Not only have its revenues steadily declined over that time but its earnings too have barely grown, staying at a low-single-digit rate for years, despite fancy financial engineering including hefty share buybacks.
In some ways, IBM had reached a fork in the road where it had to make a deal, any deal, because maintaining the status quo was no longer an option. Financial engineering works, until it does not. No company, not even a storied one such as IBM, can keep borrowing to pay dividends and buy back shares when its revenues are shrinking and margins in most segments are under pressure.
Today, more than half its revenue comes from long-term services contracts and software licences, and 15% from hardware. The real “growth segment” of IBM, which it calls “Strategic Imperatives”, accounts for less than 30% of its revenues. So, even if its new businesses like cloud and Watson grow at a rapid rate, they will not really move the needle.
Cloud is the current holy grail of computing. Instead of storing, accessing and processing data on their own servers, corporate clients have for nearly a decade been gradually shifting more of their data to remote servers either through public cloud infrastructure managed by the likes of Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft’s Azure and Google Cloud Platform, or private cloud remote servers that the corporates manage themselves or outsource to someone to manage them exclusively for their use. There are also, increasingly, companies that use both public and private cloud remote servers, as well as keeping some key data on-premises in what is called a hybrid cloud strategy. Large companies such as JPMorgan Chase & Co and Sony have had serious data breaches in recent years and, as a precaution, want to keep some of the most essential data on-premises even though they believe most of it should be in the cloud or on remote servers.
The acquisition of Red Hat comes relatively late in CEO Rometty’s seven-year tenure and is seen as a concession that IBM’s current strategy of trying to grow organically just isn’t working. Instead of expanding into the cloud space early, IBM dragged its feet only to find others had built an insurmountable lead. Instead of making transformational acquisitions like of Salesforce.com or ServiceNow when it had the cash and their stocks were trading at a third of their current price, IBM bet on its own ability to keep growing. Indeed, IBM’s own software business has sputtered in recent years. Its total cloud revenues, including Infrastructure as a Service, and Platform as a Service, amounted to just over US$2 billion last year, or less than one-tenth of Amazon’s AWS annual revenues. And while AWS is still growing at 40% annually, IBM’s cloud revenues have barely grown at double-digit rates in recent quarters.
Red Hat is a juggernaut in open source computing using Linux. It is also a player in virtualisation, a software that helps corporates reduce the number of physical servers they use and cut the energy required to power and cool them. It is a major player in middleware, which is software that sits between an operating system and an application. In addition, it makes software that helps companies integrate data between public cloud and on-premises servers. It has a burgeoning private cloud platform or container orchestration business that includes Open Stack and Open Shift.
Red Hat has built a reputation as the “Switzerland of Cloud”, where its software remains neutral between competing cloud environments as companies move data from one to another. Cloud services providers have also traditionally boxed their corporate customers into proprietary systems that prevent them from offering connections into their on-premises technology. Red Hat’s neutrality allows companies to access data from the competing public cloud infrastructure of AWS, Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud without batting an eyelid.
IBM sees a near US$1 trillion opportunity in hybrid cloud by 2020. An average mid-sized firm in the US has up to a thousand applications running across five to 16 different clouds. Currently, companies have migrated between 10% to 20% of their data to the cloud. The main driver of this shift is cost savings. If you were JPMorgan or General Motors, why would you keep all your data processing and storage in-house when you can put it on a remote server and let Amazon or Google do everything for you? Yet many companies have been reluctant to embrace the cloud for fear that their workload or data would become locked into a specific cloud environment. Red Hat’s OpenShift container software helps IBM access data from on-premises servers to, and between, cloud service providers using open source software.
Another slow-growing company
But while Red Hat may give it an entry into the hybrid cloud business, IBM is actually buying a slow-growing company like itself. More than half of Red Hat’s revenue this year will be generated by its traditional on-premises server operating-system business, which is not directly tied to the cloud and has a slowing growth rate, notes Toni Sacconaghi of Sanford C Bernstein in a recent report. Moreover, IBM may be getting into cloud services in a big way a bit too late. Cloud is no longer a hot new thing. RBC Capital Markets in a recent report notes that cloud service providers’ capital expenditures grew an annualised 32% in the last quarter compared with a whopping 66% growth in the previous one. The slowdown in capital expenditure is sign that growth expectations at end-user firms are moderating.
Still, there is no doubt that there is a long runway left for cloud services providers, not just in cloud infrastructure but also Platform-as-a-Service where Salesforce.com or ServiceNow are key players, and Software-as-a-Service, where WorkDay and Shopify are players. Whether IBM can muscle in and take market share from the incumbents that are likely to expand their hybrid cloud services over time is another story. Clearly, IBM’s best days are over and while the Red Hat deal is a nice new twist in its storyline, it is unlikely to a catapult it to the frontlines of tech alongside current giant innovators Amazon, Microsoft, Apple and Google’s parent Alphabet.
Assif Shameen is a technology writer based in North America
This story appears in The Edge Singapore (Issue 857, week of Nov 19) which is on sale now. Subscribe here
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2019: a year for justice
Hina Jilani Mary Robinson justice SDGs human rights ethical leadership Equality for girls & women
Sam Muller, Mary Robinson, Minister Garavano, Hina Jilani and Sabrina Mahtani, discuss the importance of access to justice now, in The Hague February 2019. (Credit: Netherlands MoFA)
Hina Jilani and Mary Robinson launched The Elders' new access to justice programme at the Peace Palace in The Hague, at the culmination of a week of events on justice.
This year, 2019, is an important year for justice, as it’s the first time member States report to the United Nations on the progress they're making under the Sustainable Development Goals towards peace and justice, which is included as goal 16.
The Elders' launch was positioned alongside the final meeting of the ‘Task Force on Justice’, in which 200 justice experts from across the world came together to prepare a report on how people-centred justice must be prioritised as a central part of development. Ministers from 20 countries also gathered in the Peace Palace, at the invitation of the Dutch government, to affirm their commitment to advancing access to justice domestically. Read the declaration that was adopted at the ministerial meeting.
Mary Robinson explains why The Elders have started to work on Access to Justice. (Credit: Netherlands MoFA)
At the Elders’ launch, Mary Robinson, Chair of the Elders, introduced the new programme by explaining why the Elders are focusing on access to justice. In a time of rising populism and isolationism, the risks of injustice are all the greater, and despite States signing up to justice under the SDGs, all states are failing to provide equal access to all in their jurisdictions. In the last 10 years, the problem of lack of access to justice has worsened, threatening peace and stability. This is why The Elders believe that leaders must be held to their words.
Mary Robinson went on to explain there needs to be greater and smarter investment in justice, legal systems must be reformed and modernised so they are responsive, innovative, and inclusive. The Elders will amplify grassroots voices calling for this, taking them to heads of State and other leaders, and seek to make a transformative change over these crucial next few years.
A panel discussion followed, that was moderated by the Director of HiiL, Sam Muller, which focuses on innovations in the delivery of justice services. For the discussion, Mary Robinson was joined by fellow Elder Hina Jilani, together with the Minister of Justice of Argentina, Germán Garavano, with Sabrina Mahtani, co-founder of local justice NGO AdvocAid in Sierra Leone and new Policy Advisor on Access to Justice for The Elders.
The panel discussed the nexus between human rights and access to justice, observing that often a focus on rights fails to focus on the need for access to a remedy and that this is, critically, where access to justice comes in.
Minister Garavano spoke about his Ministry’s pathbreaking work in Argentina setting up a network of 90 offices across the country who have helped 700,000 people or 1.5% of the population access solutions to their justice problems, by bringing together a range of different sectors to solve people’s problems in an holistic manner, at a comparatively low cost.
Hina Jilani spoke from her experience as a litigator, and her frustration that so often the law and administrative structures needed to protect the vulnerable aren’t in place, and about the needs that many have not just for legal relief but for holistic support and protection.
Sabrina Mahtani illustrated the discussion with practical examples of how justice services, whether formal or informal, can help some of the worlds most vulnerable women. She described AdvocAid’s recent success in winning an appeal against a death sentence for a victim of domestic violence who had killed her abuser. And proposed how informal grassroots systems can be used to solve minor infractions, relieving pressure off the formal justice system.
Hina Jilani, co-chair of the Task Force on Justice, with Task Force colleagues in the Peace Palace, The Hague February 2019.
The discussion was followed by audience questions which included discussion of how those resisting reforms can be encouraged to lead change towards people-centred justice.
Hina Jilani closed the session with a reminder that the notion of justice entails certain intrinsic values, such as equal treatment and dignity. She noted that when Nelson Mandela founded The Elders he charged them with a mandate that they help make the invisible, visible and give a voice to those without - something that will be at the heart of the Access to Justice programme.
Pioneering lawyer and pro-democracy campaigner; a leading activist in Pakistan's women's movement and international champion of human rights.
The Elders' Access to Justice programme launch
The Elders are launching a new programme on Access to Justice because without justice, the SDGs cannot be achieved.
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FIRE > SANTA FE INDEPENDENT SCHOOL DISTRICT v. JANE DOE, INDIVIDUALLY AND AS NEXT FRIEND FOR HER MINOR CHILDREN, JANE AND JOHN DOE, et al.
First Amendment Library
SANTA FE INDEPENDENT SCHOOL DISTRICT v. JANE DOE, INDIVIDUALLY AND AS NEXT FRIEND FOR HER MINOR CHILDREN, JANE AND JOHN DOE, et al., 530 U.S. 290 (2000)
Argued:
Decided:
Decided by:
Rehnquist Court, 1999
Affirmed (includes modified). Petitioning party did not receive a favorable disposition.
See Opinion tab for full case information.
John Stevens Sandra O’Connor Anthony Kennedy David Souter Ruth Ginsburg Stephen Breyer
No opinions found
William Rehnquist Antonin Scalia Clarence Thomas
SANTA FE INDEPENDENT SCHOOL DISTRICT
DOE, individually and as next friend for
HER MINOR CHILDREN, et al.
No. 99-62.
United States Supreme Court.
Argued March 29, 2000.
Decided June 19, 2000.
CERTIORARI TO THE UNITED STATES COURT OF APPEALS FOR THE FIFTH CIRCUIT
*291 *292 Stevens, J., delivered the opinion of the Court, in which O’Connor, Kennedy, Souter, Ginsburg, and Breyer, JJ., joined. Rehnquist, *293 C. J., filed a dissenting opinion, in which Scalia and Thomas, JJ., joined, post, p. 318.
Jay Alan Sekulow argued the cause for petitioner. With him on the briefs were Colby M. May, James M. Henderson, Sr., Mark N. Troobnick, Walter M. Weber, Paul D. Clement, John G. Stepanovich, Thomas P. Monaghan, Stuart J. Roth, John P. Tuskey, Joel H. Thornton, David A. Cortman, and Kelly Shackelford.
John Cornyn, Attorney General of Texas, argued the cause for the State of Texas et al. as amici curiae urging reversal. With him on the brief were Andy Taylor, First Assistant Attorney General, Linda S. Eads, Deputy Attorney General, Gregory S. Coleman, Solicitor General, Julie Caruthers Parsley, Deputy Solicitor General, and Meredith B. Parenti, Assistant Solicitor General.
Anthony P. Griffin argued the cause for respondents. With him on the briefs were Douglas Laycock and Steven R. Shapiro.[*]
*294 Justice Stevens, delivered the opinion of the Court.
Prior to 1995, the Santa Fe High School student who occupied the school’s elective office of student council chaplain delivered a prayer over the public address system before each varsity football game for the entire season. This practice, along with others, was challenged in District Court as a violation of the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment. While these proceedings were pending in the District Court, the school district adopted a different policy that permits, but does not require, prayer initiated and led by a student at all home games. The District Court entered an order modifying that policy to permit only nonsectarian, nonproselytizing prayer. The Court of Appeals held that, even as modified by the District Court, the football prayer policy was invalid. We granted the school district’s petition for certiorari to review that holding.
The Santa Fe Independent School District (District) is a political subdivision of the State of Texas, responsible for the education of more than 4,000 students in a small community in the southern part of the State. The District includes the Santa Fe High School, two primary schools, an intermediate school and the junior high school. Respondents are two sets of current or former students and their respective mothers. One family is Mormon and the other is Catholic. The District Court permitted respondents (Does) to litigate anonymously to protect them from intimidation or harassment.[1]
*295 Respondents commenced this action in April 1995 and moved for a temporary restraining order to prevent the District from violating the Establishment Clause at the imminent graduation exercises. In their complaint the Does alleged that the District had engaged in several proselytizing practices, such as promoting attendance at a Baptist revival meeting, encouraging membership in religious clubs, chastising children who held minority religious beliefs, and distributing Gideon Bibles on school premises. They also alleged that the District allowed students to read Christian invocations and benedictions from the stage at graduation ceremonies,[2] and to deliver overtly Christian prayers over the public address system at home football games.
On May 10, 1995, the District Court entered an interim order addressing a number of different issues.[3] With respect *296 to the impending graduation, the order provided that “non-denominational prayer” consisting of “an invocation and/or benediction” could be presented by a senior student or students selected by members of the graduating class. The text of the prayer was to be determined by the students, without scrutiny or preapproval by school officials. References to particular religious figures “such as Mohammed, Jesus, Buddha, or the like” would be permitted “as long as the general thrust of the prayer is non-proselytizing.” App. 32.
In response to that portion of the order, the District adopted a series of policies over several months dealing with prayer at school functions. The policies enacted in May and July for graduation ceremonies provided the format for the August and October policies for football games. The May policy provided:
“`The board has chosen to permit the graduating senior class, with the advice and counsel of the senior class principal or designee, to elect by secret ballot to choose whether an invocation and benediction shall be part of the graduation exercise. If so chosen the class shall elect by secret ballot, from a list of student volunteers, students to deliver nonsectarian, nonproselytizing invocations and benedictions for the purpose of solemnizing *297 their graduation ceremonies.’ ” 168 F. 3d 806, 811 (CA5 1999) (emphasis deleted).
The parties stipulated that after this policy was adopted, “the senior class held an election to determine whether to have an invocation and benediction at the commencement [and that the] class voted, by secret ballot, to include prayer at the high school graduation.” App. 52. In a second vote the class elected two seniors to deliver the invocation and benediction.[4]
In July, the District enacted another policy eliminating the requirement that invocations and benedictions be “nonsectarian and nonproselytising,” but also providing that if the District were to be enjoined from enforcing that policy, the May policy would automatically become effective.
The August policy, which was titled “Prayer at Football Games,” was similar to the July policy for graduations. It also authorized two student elections, the first to determine whether “invocations” should be delivered, and the second to select the spokesperson to deliver them. Like the July policy, it contained two parts, an initial statement that omitted any requirement that the content of the invocation be “nonsectarian and nonproselytising,” and a fallback provision that automatically added that limitation if the preferred policy should be enjoined. On August 31, 1995, according to the parties’ stipulation: “[T]he district’s high school students voted to determine whether a student would deliver prayer at varsity football games. . . . The students chose to allow a *298 student to say a prayer at football games.” Id., at 65. A week later, in a separate election, they selected a student “to deliver the prayer at varsity football games.” Id., at 66.
The final policy (October policy) is essentially the same as the August policy, though it omits the word “prayer” from its title, and refers to “messages” and “statements” as well as “invocations.”[5] It is the validity of that policy that is before us.[6]
*299 The District Court did enter an order precluding enforcement of the first, open-ended policy. Relying on our decision in Lee v. Weisman, 505 U. S. 577 (1992), it held that the school’s “action must not `coerce anyone to support or participate in’ a religious exercise.” App. to Pet. for Cert. E7. Applying that test, it concluded that the graduation prayers appealed “to distinctively Christian beliefs,”[7] and that delivering a prayer “over the school’s public address system prior to each football and baseball game coerces student participation in religious events.”[8] Both parties appealed, the District contending that the enjoined portion of the October policy was permissible and the Does contending that both alternatives violated the Establishment Clause. The Court of Appeals majority agreed with the Does.
The decision of the Court of Appeals followed Fifth Circuit precedent that had announced two rules. In Jones v. Clear Creek Independent School Dist., 977 F. 2d 963 (1992), that court held that student-led prayer that was approved by a vote of the students and was nonsectarian and nonproselytizing was permissible at high school graduation ceremonies. On the other hand, in later cases the Fifth Circuit made it clear that the Clear Creek rule applied only to high school *300 graduations and that school-encouraged prayer was constitutionally impermissible at school-related sporting events. Thus, in Doe v. Duncanville Independent School Dist., 70 F. 3d 402 (1995), it had described a high school graduation as “a significant, once in-a-lifetime event” to be contrasted with athletic events in “a setting that is far less solemn and extraordinary.” Id., at 406-407.[9]
In its opinion in this case, the Court of Appeals explained:
“The controlling feature here is the same as in Dun- canville: The prayers are to be delivered at football games —hardly the sober type of annual event that can be appropriately solemnized with prayer. The distinction to which [the District] points is simply one without difference. Regardless of whether the prayers are selected by vote or spontaneously initiated at these frequently-recurring, informal, school-sponsored events, school officials are present and have the authority to stop the prayers. Thus, as we indicated in Duncan- ville, our decision in Clear Creek II hinged on the singular context and singularly serious nature of a graduation ceremony. Outside that nurturing context, a Clear Creek Prayer Policy cannot survive. We therefore reverse the district court’s holding that [the District’s] alternative Clear Creek Prayer Policy can be extended to football games, irrespective of the presence of the nonsectarian, nonproselytizing restrictions.” 168 F. 3d, at 823.
The dissenting judge rejected the majority’s distinction between graduation ceremonies and football games. In his *301 opinion the District’s October policy created a limited public forum that had a secular purpose[10] and provided neutral accommodation of noncoerced, private, religious speech.[11]
We granted the District’s petition for certiorari, limited to the following question: “Whether petitioner’s policy permitting student-led, student-initiated prayer at football games violates the Establishment Clause.” 528 U. S. 1002 (1999). We conclude, as did the Court of Appeals, that it does.
The first Clause in the First Amendment to the Federal Constitution provides that “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.” The Fourteenth Amendment imposes those substantive limitations on the legislative power of the States and their political subdivisions. Wallace v. Jaffree, 472 U. S. 38, 49-50 (1985). In Lee v. Weisman, 505 U. S. 577 (1992), we held that a prayer delivered by a rabbi at a middle school graduation ceremony violated that Clause. Although this case involves student prayer at a different *302 type of school function, our analysis is properly guided by the principles that we endorsed in Lee.
As we held in that case:
“The principle that government may accommodate the free exercise of religion does not supersede the fundamental limitations imposed by the Establishment Clause. It is beyond dispute that, at a minimum, the Constitution guarantees that government may not coerce anyone to support or participate in religion or its exercise, or otherwise act in a way which `establishes a [state] religion or religious faith, or tends to do so.’ ” Id., at 587 (citations omitted) (quoting Lynch v. Don- nelly, 465 U. S. 668, 678 (1984)).
In this case the District first argues that this principle is inapplicable to its October policy because the messages are private student speech, not public speech. It reminds us that “there is a crucial difference between government speech endorsing religion, which the Establishment Clause forbids, and private speech endorsing religion, which the Free Speech and Free Exercise Clauses protect.” Board of Ed. of Westside Community Schools (Dist. 66) v. Mergens, 496 U. S. 226, 250 (1990) (opinion of O’Connor, J.). We certainly agree with that distinction, but we are not persuaded that the pregame invocations should be regarded as “private speech.”
These invocations are authorized by a government policy and take place on government property at governmentsponsored school-related events. Of course, not every message delivered under such circumstances is the government’s own. We have held, for example, that an individual’s contribution to a government-created forum was not government speech. See Rosenberger v. Rector and Visitors of Univ. of Va., 515 U. S. 819 (1995). Although the District relies heavily on Rosenberger and similar cases involving such *303 forums,[12] it is clear that the pregame ceremony is not the type of forum discussed in those cases.[13] The Santa Fe school officials simply do not “evince either `by policy or by practice,’ any intent to open the [pregame ceremony] to `indiscriminate use,’ . . . by the student body generally.” Hazelwood School Dist. v. Kuhlmeier, 484 U. S. 260, 270 (1988) (quoting Perry Ed. Assn. v. Perry Local Educators’ Assn., 460 U. S. 37, 47 (1983)). Rather, the school allows only one student, the same student for the entire season, to give the invocation. The statement or invocation, moreover, is subject to particular regulations that confine the content and topic of the student’s message, see infra, at 306— 307, 309. By comparison, in Perry we rejected a claim that the school had created a limited public forum in its school mail system despite the fact that it had allowed far more speakers to address a much broader range of topics than the policy at issue here.[14] As we concluded in Perry, “selective access does not transform government property into a public forum.” 460 U. S., at 47.
*304 Granting only one student access to the stage at a time does not, of course, necessarily preclude a finding that a school has created a limited public forum. Here, however, Santa Fe’s student election system ensures that only those messages deemed “appropriate” under the District’s policy may be delivered. That is, the majoritarian process implemented by the District guarantees, by definition, that minority candidates will never prevail and that their views will be effectively silenced.
Recently, in Board of Regents of Univ. of Wis. System v. Southworth, 529 U. S. 217 (2000), we explained why student elections that determine, by majority vote, which expressive activities shall receive or not receive school benefits are constitutionally problematic:
“To the extent the referendum substitutes majority determinations for viewpoint neutrality it would undermine the constitutional protection the program requires. The whole theory of viewpoint neutrality is that minority views are treated with the same respect as are majority views. Access to a public forum, for instance, does not depend upon majoritarian consent. That principle is controlling here.” Id., at 235.
Like the student referendum for funding in Southworth, this student election does nothing to protect minority views but rather places the students who hold such views at the mercy of the majority.[15] Because “fundamental rights may not be *305 submitted to vote; they depend on the outcome of no elections,” West Virginia Bd. of Ed. v. Barnette, 319 U. S. 624, 638 (1943), the District’s elections are insufficient safeguards of diverse student speech.
In Lee, the school district made the related argument that its policy of endorsing only “civic or nonsectarian” prayer was acceptable because it minimized the intrusion on the audience as a whole. We rejected that claim by explaining that such a majoritarian policy “does not lessen the offense or isolation to the objectors. At best it narrows their number, at worst increases their sense of isolation and affront.” 505 U. S., at 594. Similarly, while Santa Fe’s majoritarian election might ensure that most of the students are represented, it does nothing to protect the minority; indeed, it likely serves to intensify their offense.
Moreover, the District has failed to divorce itself from the religious content in the invocations. It has not succeeded in doing so, either by claiming that its policy is “`one of neutrality rather than endorsement’ “[16] or by characterizing the individual student as the “circuit-breaker”[17] in the process. Contrary to the District’s repeated assertions that it has adopted a “hands-off” approach to the pregame invocation, the realities of the situation plainly reveal that its policy involves both perceived and actual endorsement of religion. In this case, as we found in Lee, the “degree of school involvement” makes it clear that the pregame prayers bear “the imprint of the State and thus put school-age children who objected in an untenable position.” Id., at 590.
The District has attempted to disentangle itself from the religious messages by developing the two-step student *306 election process. The text of the October policy, however, exposes the extent of the school’s entanglement. The elections take place at all only because the school “board has chosen to permit students to deliver a brief invocation and/or message.” App. 104 (emphasis added). The elections thus “shall” be conducted “by the high school student council” and “[u]pon advice and direction of the high school principal.” Id., at 104-105. The decision whether to deliver a message is first made by majority vote of the entire student body, followed by a choice of the speaker in a separate, similar majority election. Even though the particular words used by the speaker are not determined by those votes, the policy mandates that the “statement or invocation” be “consistent with the goals and purposes of this policy,” which are “to solemnize the event, to promote good sportsmanship and student safety, and to establish the appropriate environment for the competition.” Ibid.
In addition to involving the school in the selection of the speaker, the policy, by its terms, invites and encourages religious messages. The policy itself states that the purpose of the message is “to solemnize the event.” A religious message is the most obvious method of solemnizing an event. Moreover, the requirements that the message “promote good sportsmanship” and “establish the appropriate environment for competition” further narrow the types of message deemed appropriate, suggesting that a solemn, yet nonreligious, message, such as commentary on United States foreign policy, would be prohibited.[18] Indeed, the only type of message that is expressly endorsed in the text is an “invocation”—a term that primarily describes an appeal for divine *307 assistance.[19] In fact, as used in the past at Santa Fe High School, an “invocation” has always entailed a focused religious message. Thus, the expressed purposes of the policy encourage the selection of a religious message, and that is precisely how the students understand the policy. The results of the elections described in the parties’ stipulation[20] make it clear that the students understood that the central question before them was whether prayer should be a part of the pregame ceremony.[21] We recognize the important role that public worship plays in many communities, as well as the sincere desire to include public prayer as a part of various occasions so as to mark those occasions’ significance. But such religious activity in public schools, as elsewhere, must comport with the First Amendment.
The actual or perceived endorsement of the message, moreover, is established by factors beyond just the text of the policy. Once the student speaker is selected and the message composed, the invocation is then delivered to a large audience assembled as part of a regularly scheduled, school-sponsored function conducted on school property. The message is broadcast over the school’s public address system, which remains subject to the control of school officials. It is fair to assume that the pregame ceremony is *308 clothed in the traditional indicia of school sporting events, which generally include not just the team, but also cheerleaders and band members dressed in uniforms sporting the school name and mascot. The school’s name is likely written in large print across the field and on banners and flags. The crowd will certainly include many who display the school colors and insignia on their school T-shirts, jackets, or hats and who may also be waving signs displaying the school name. It is in a setting such as this that “[t]he board has chosen to permit” the elected student to rise and give the “statement or invocation.”
In this context the members of the listening audience must perceive the pregame message as a public expression of the views of the majority of the student body delivered with the approval of the school administration. In cases involving state participation in a religious activity, one of the relevant questions is “whether an objective observer, acquainted with the text, legislative history, and implementation of the statute, would perceive it as a state endorsement of prayer in public schools.” Wallace, 472 U. S., at 73, 76 (O’Connor, J., concurring in judgment); see also Capitol Square Review and Advisory Bd. v. Pinette, 515 U. S. 753, 777 (1995) (O’Connor, J., concurring in part and concurring in judgment). Regardless of the listener’s support for, or objection to, the message, an objective Santa Fe High School student will unquestionably perceive the inevitable pregame prayer as stamped with her school’s seal of approval.
The text and history of this policy, moreover, reinforce our objective student’s perception that the prayer is, in actuality, encouraged by the school. When a governmental entity professes a secular purpose for an arguably religious policy, the government’s characterization is, of course, entitled to some deference. But it is nonetheless the duty of the courts to “distinguis[h] a sham secular purpose from a sincere one.” Wallace, 472 U. S., at 75 (O’Connor, J., concurring in judgment).
*309 According to the District, the secular purposes of the policy are to “foste[r] free expression of private persons . . . as well [as to] solemniz[e] sporting events, promot[e] good sportsmanship and student safety, and establis[h] an appropriate environment for competition.” Brief for Petitioner 14. We note, however, that the District’s approval of only one specific kind of message, an “invocation,” is not necessary to further any of these purposes. Additionally, the fact that only one student is permitted to give a content-limited message suggests that this policy does little to “foste[r] free expression.” Furthermore, regardless of whether one considers a sporting event an appropriate occasion for solemnity, the use of an invocation to foster such solemnity is impermissible when, in actuality, it constitutes prayer sponsored by the school. And it is unclear what type of message would be both appropriately “solemnizing” under the District’s policy and yet nonreligious.
Most striking to us is the evolution of the current policy from the long-sanctioned office of “Student Chaplain” to the candidly titled “Prayer at Football Games” regulation. This history indicates that the District intended to preserve the practice of prayer before football games. The conclusion that the District viewed the October policy simply as a continuation of the previous policies is dramatically illustrated by the fact that the school did not conduct a new election, pursuant to the current policy, to replace the results of the previous election, which occurred under the former policy. Given these observations, and in light of the school’s history of regular delivery of a student-led prayer at athletic events, it is reasonable to infer that the specific purpose of the policy was to preserve a popular “state-sponsored religious practice.” Lee, 505 U. S., at 596.
School sponsorship of a religious message is impermissible because it sends the ancillary message to members of the audience who are nonadherants “that they are outsiders, not full members of the political community, and an accompanying *310 message to adherants that they are insiders, favored members of the political community.” Lynch, 465 U. S., at 688 (O’Connor, J., concurring). The delivery of such a message—over the school’s public address system, by a speaker representing the student body, under the supervision of school faculty, and pursuant to a school policy that explicitly and implicitly encourages public prayer—is not properly characterized as “private” speech.
The District next argues that its football policy is distinguishable from the graduation prayer in Lee because it does not coerce students to participate in religious observances. Its argument has two parts: first, that there is no impermissible government coercion because the pregame messages are the product of student choices; and second, that there is really no coercion at all because attendance at an extracurricular event, unlike a graduation ceremony, is voluntary.
The reasons just discussed explaining why the alleged “circuit-breaker” mechanism of the dual elections and student speaker do not turn public speech into private speech also demonstrate why these mechanisms do not insulate the school from the coercive element of the final message. In fact, this aspect of the District’s argument exposes anew the concerns that are created by the majoritarian election system. The parties’ stipulation clearly states that the issue resolved in the first election was “whether a student would deliver prayer at varsity football games,” App. 65, and the controversy in this case demonstrates that the views of the students are not unanimous on that issue.
One of the purposes served by the Establishment Clause is to remove debate over this kind of issue from governmental supervision or control. We explained in Lee that the “preservation and transmission of religious beliefs and worship is a responsibility and a choice committed to the private sphere.” 505 U. S., at 589. The two student elections authorized *311 by the policy, coupled with the debates that presumably must precede each, impermissibly invade that private sphere. The election mechanism, when considered in light of the history in which the policy in question evolved, reflects a device the District put in place that determines whether religious messages will be delivered at home football games. The mechanism encourages divisiveness along religious lines in a public school setting, a result at odds with the Establishment Clause. Although it is true that the ultimate choice of student speaker is”attributable to the students,” Brief for Petitioner 40, the District’s decision to hold the constitutionally problematic election is clearly “a choice attributable to the State,” Lee, 505 U. S., at 587.
The District further argues that attendance at the commencement ceremonies at issue in Lee “differs dramatically” from attendance at high school football games, which it contends “are of no more than passing interest to many students” and are “decidedly extracurricular,” thus dissipating any coercion. Brief for Petitioner 41. Attendance at a high school football game, unlike showing up for class, is certainly not required in order to receive a diploma. Moreover, we may assume that the District is correct in arguing that the informal pressure to attend an athletic event is not as strong as a senior’s desire to attend her own graduation ceremony.
There are some students, however, such as cheerleaders, members of the band, and, of course, the team members themselves, for whom seasonal commitments mandate their attendance, sometimes for class credit. The District also minimizes the importance to many students of attending and participating in extracurricular activities as part of a complete educational experience. As we noted in Lee, “[l]aw reaches past formalism.” 505 U. S., at 595. To assert that high school students do not feel immense social pressure, or have a truly genuine desire, to be involved in the extracurricular event that is American high school football is “formalistic in the extreme.” Ibid. We stressed in Lee the *312 obvious observation that “adolescents are often susceptible to pressure from their peers towards conformity, and that the influence is strongest in matters of social convention.” Id., at 593. High school home football games are traditional gatherings of a school community; they bring together students and faculty as well as friends and family from years present and past to root for a common cause. Undoubtedly, the games are not important to some students, and they voluntarily choose not to attend. For many others, however, the choice between attending these games and avoiding personally offensive religious rituals is in no practical sense an easy one. The Constitution, moreover, demands that the school may not force this difficult choice upon these students for “[i]t is a tenet of the First Amendment that the State cannot require one of its citizens to forfeit his or her rights and benefits as the price of resisting conformance to statesponsored religious practice.” Id., at 596.
Even if we regard every high school student’s decision to attend a home football game as purely voluntary, we are nevertheless persuaded that the delivery of a pregame prayer has the improper effect of coercing those present to participate in an act of religious worship. For “the government may no more use social pressure to enforce orthodoxy than it may use more direct means.” Id., at 594. As in Lee, “[w]hat to most believers may seem nothing more than a reasonable request that the nonbeliever respect their religious practices, in a school context may appear to the nonbeliever or dissenter to be an attempt to employ the machinery of the State to enforce a religious orthodoxy.” Id., at 592. The constitutional command will not permit the District “to exact religious conformity from a student as the price” of joining her classmates at a varsity football game.[22]
*313 The Religion Clauses of the First Amendment prevent the government from making any law respecting the establishment of religion or prohibiting the free exercise thereof. By no means do these commands impose a prohibition on all religious activity in our public schools. See, e. g., Lamb’s Chapel v. Center Moriches Union Free School Dist., 508 U. S. 384, 395 (1993); Board of Ed. of Westside Community Schools (Dist. 66) v. Mergens, 496 U. S. 226 (1990); Wallace, 472 U. S., at 59. Indeed, the common purpose of the Religion Clauses “is to secure religious liberty.” Engel v. Vitale, 370 U. S. 421, 430 (1962). Thus, nothing in the Constitution as interpreted by this Court prohibits any public school student from voluntarily praying at any time before, during, or after the schoolday. But the religious liberty protected by the Constitution is abridged when the State affirmatively sponsors the particular religious practice of prayer.
Finally, the District argues repeatedly that the Does have made a premature facial challenge to the October policy that necessarily must fail. The District emphasizes, quite correctly, that until a student actually delivers a solemnizing message under the latest version of the policy, there can be no certainty that any of the statements or invocations will be religious. Thus, it concludes, the October policy necessarily survives a facial challenge.
This argument, however, assumes that we are concerned only with the serious constitutional injury that occurs when a student is forced to participate in an act of religious worship *314 because she chooses to attend a school event. But the Constitution also requires that we keep in mind “the myriad, subtle ways in which Establishment Clause values can be eroded,” Lynch, 465 U. S., at 694 (O’Connor, J., concurring), and that we guard against other different, yet equally important, constitutional injuries. One is the mere passage by the District of a policy that has the purpose and perception of government establishment of religion. Another is the implementation of a governmental electoral process that subjects the issue of prayer to a majoritarian vote.
The District argues that the facial challenge must fail because “Santa Fe’s Football Policy cannot be invalidated on the basis of some `possibility or even likelihood’ of an unconstitutional application.” Brief for Petitioner 17 (quoting Bowen v. Kendrick, 487 U. S. 589, 613 (1988)). Our Establishment Clause cases involving facial challenges, however, have not focused solely on the possible applications of the statute, but rather have considered whether the statute has an unconstitutional purpose. Writing for the Court in Bowen, The Chief Justice concluded that “[a]s in previous cases involving facial challenges on Establishment Clause grounds, e. g., Edwards v. Aguillard, [482 U. S. 578 (1987)]; Mueller v. Allen, 463 U. S. 388 (1983), we assess the constitutionality of an enactment by reference to the three factors first articulated in Lemon v. Kurtzman, 403 U. S. 602, 612 (1971) . . . , which guides `[t]he general nature of our inquiry in this area,’ Mueller v. Allen, supra, at 394.” 487 U. S., at 602. Under the Lemon standard, a court must invalidate a statute if it lacks “a secular legislative purpose.” Lemon v. Kurtzman, 403 U. S. 602, 612 (1971). It is therefore proper, as part of this facial challenge, for us to examine the purpose of the October policy.
As discussed, supra, at 306-307, 309, the text of the October policy alone reveals that it has an unconstitutional purpose. The plain language of the policy clearly spells out the extent of school involvement in both the election of the speaker *315 and the content of the message. Additionally, the text of the October policy specifies only one, clearly preferred message—that of Santa Fe’s traditional religious “invocation.” Finally, the extremely selective access of the policy and other content restrictions confirm that it is not a content-neutral regulation that creates a limited public forum for the expression of student speech. Our examination, however, need not stop at an analysis of the text of the policy.
This case comes to us as the latest step in developing litigation brought as a challenge to institutional practices that unquestionably violated the Establishment Clause. One of those practices was the District’s long-established tradition of sanctioning student-led prayer at varsity football games. The narrow question before us is whether implementation of the October policy insulates the continuation of such prayers from constitutional scrutiny. It does not. Our inquiry into this question not only can, but must, include an examination of the circumstances surrounding its enactment. Whether a government activity violates the Establishment Clause is “in large part a legal question to be answered on the basis of judicial interpretation of social facts. . . . Every government practice must be judged in its unique circumstances . . . .” Lynch, 465 U. S., at 693-694 (O’Connor, J., concurring). Our discussion in the previous sections, supra, at 307-310, demonstrates that in this case the District’s direct involvement with school prayer exceeds constitutional limits.
The District, nevertheless, asks us to pretend that we do not recognize what every Santa Fe High School student understands clearly—that this policy is about prayer. The District further asks us to accept what is obviously untrue: that these messages are necessary to “solemnize” a football game and that this single-student, year-long position is essential to the protection of student speech. We refuse to turn a blind eye to the context in which this policy arose, and that context quells any doubt that this policy was implemented with the purpose of endorsing school prayer.
*316 Therefore, the simple enactment of this policy, with the purpose and perception of school endorsement of student prayer, was a constitutional violation. We need not wait for the inevitable to confirm and magnify the constitutional injury. In Wallace, for example, we invalidated Alabama’s as yet unimplemented and voluntary “moment of silence” statute based on our conclusion that it was enacted “for the sole purpose of expressing the State’s endorsement of prayer activities for one minute at the beginning of each school day.” 472 U. S., at 60; see also Church of Lukumi Babalu Aye, Inc. v. Hialeah, 508 U. S. 520, 532 (1993). Therefore, even if no Santa Fe High School student were ever to offer a religious message, the October policy fails a facial challenge because the attempt by the District to encourage prayer is also at issue. Government efforts to endorse religion cannot evade constitutional reproach based solely on the remote possibility that those attempts may fail.
This policy likewise does not survive a facial challenge because it impermissibly imposes upon the student body a majoritarian election on the issue of prayer. Through its election scheme, the District has established a governmental electoral mechanism that turns the school into a forum for religious debate. It further empowers the student body majority with the authority to subject students of minority views to constitutionally improper messages. The award of that power alone, regardless of the students’ ultimate use of it, is not acceptable.[23] Like the referendum in Board of Regents of Univ. of Wis. System v. Southworth, 529 U. S. *317 217 (2000), the election mechanism established by the District undermines the essential protection of minority viewpoints. Such a system encourages divisiveness along religious lines and threatens the imposition of coercion upon those students not desiring to participate in a religious exercise. Simply by establishing this school-related procedure, which entrusts the inherently nongovernmental subject of religion to a majoritarian vote, a constitutional violation has occurred.[24] No further injury is required for the policy to fail a facial challenge.
To properly examine this policy on its face, we “must be deemed aware of the history and context of the community and forum,” Pinette, 515 U. S., at 780 (O’Connor, J., concurring in part and concurring in judgment). Our examination of those circumstances above leads to the conclusion that this policy does not provide the District with the constitutional safe harbor it sought. The policy is invalid on its face because it establishes an improper majoritarian election on religion, and unquestionably has the purpose and creates the perception of encouraging the delivery of prayer at a series of important school events.
The judgment of the Court of Appeals is, accordingly, affirmed.
*318 Chief Justice Rehnquist, with whom Justice Scalia and Justice Thomas join, dissenting.
The Court distorts existing precedent to conclude that the school district’s student-message program is invalid on its face under the Establishment Clause. But even more disturbing than its holding is the tone of the Court’s opinion; it bristles with hostility to all things religious in public life. Neither the holding nor the tone of the opinion is faithful to the meaning of the Establishment Clause, when it is recalled that George Washington himself, at the request of the very Congress which passed the Bill of Rights, proclaimed a day of “public thanksgiving and prayer, to be observed by acknowledging with grateful hearts the many and signal favors of Almighty God.” Presidential Proclamation, 1 Messages and Papers of the Presidents, 1789-1897, p. 64 (J. Richardson ed. 1897).
We do not learn until late in the Court’s opinion that respondents in this case challenged the district’s studentmessage program at football games before it had been put into practice. As the Court explained in United States v. Salerno, 481 U. S. 739, 745 (1987), the fact that a policy might “operate unconstitutionally under some conceivable set of circumstances is insufficient to render it wholly invalid.” See also Bowen v. Kendrick, 487 U. S. 589, 612 (1988). While there is an exception to this principle in the First Amendment overbreadth context because of our concern that people may refrain from speech out of fear of prosecution, Los Angeles Police Dept. v. United Reporting Publishing Corp., 528 U. S. 32, 38-40 (1999), there is no similar justification for Establishment Clause cases. No speech will be “chilled” by the existence of a government policy that might unconstitutionally endorse religion over nonreligion. Therefore, the question is not whether the district’s policy may be applied in violation of the Establishment Clause, but whether it inevitably will be.
*319 The Court, venturing into the realm of prophecy, decides that it “need not wait for the inevitable” and invalidates the district’s policy on its face. See ante, at 316. To do so, it applies the most rigid version of the oft-criticized test of Lemon v. Kurtzman, 403 U. S. 602 (1971).[1]
Lemon has had a checkered career in the decisional law of this Court. See, e. g., Lamb’s Chapel v. Center Moriches Union Free School Dist., 508 U. S. 384, 398-399 (1993) (Scalia, J., concurring in judgment) (collecting opinions criticizing Lemon ); Wallace v. Jaffree, 472 U. S. 38, 108-114 (1985) (Rehnquist, J., dissenting) (stating that Lemon `s “three-part test represents a determined effort to craft a workable rule from a historically faulty doctrine; but the rule can only be as sound as the doctrine it attempts to service” (internal quotation marks omitted)); Committee for Public Ed. and Religious Liberty v. Regan, 444 U. S. 646, 671 (1980) (Stevens, J., dissenting) (deriding “the sisyphean task of trying to patch together the blurred, indistinct, and variable barrier described in Lemon “). We have even gone so far as to state that it has never been binding on us. Lynch v. Donnelly, 465 U. S. 668, 679 (1984) (“[W]e have repeatedly emphasized our unwillingness to be confined to any single test or criterion in this sensitive area. . . . In two cases, the Court did not even apply the Lemon `test’ [citing Marsh *320 v. Chambers, 463 U. S. 783 (1983), and Larson v. Valente, 456 U. S. 228 (1982)]”). Indeed, in Lee v. Weisman, 505 U. S. 577 (1992), an opinion upon which the Court relies heavily today, we mentioned, but did not feel compelled to apply, the Lemon test. See also Agostini v. Felton, 521 U. S. 203, 233 (1997) (stating that Lemon `s entanglement test is merely “an aspect of the inquiry into a statute’s effect”); Hunt v. McNair, 413 U. S. 734, 741 (1973) (stating that the Lemon factors are “no more than helpful signposts”).
Even if it were appropriate to apply the Lemon test here, the district’s student-message policy should not be invalidated on its face. The Court applies Lemon and holds that the “policy is invalid on its face because it establishes an improper majoritarian election on religion, and unquestionably has the purpose and creates the perception of encouraging the delivery of prayer at a series of important school events.” Ante, at 317. The Court’s reliance on each of these conclusions misses the mark.
First, the Court misconstrues the nature of the “majoritarian election” permitted by the policy as being an election on “prayer” and “religion.”[2] See ante, at 314, 317. To the contrary, the election permitted by the policy is a two-fold process whereby students vote first on whether to have a student speaker before football games at all, and second, if the students vote to have such a speaker, on who that speaker will be. App. 104-105. It is conceivable that the election could become one in which student candidates campaign on platforms that focus on whether or not they will *321 pray if elected. It is also conceivable that the election could lead to a Christian prayer before 90 percent of the football games. If, upon implementation, the policy operated in this fashion, we would have a record before us to review whether the policy, as applied, violated the Establishment Clause or unduly suppressed minority viewpoints. But it is possible that the students might vote not to have a pregame speaker, in which case there would be no threat of a constitutional violation. It is also possible that the election would not focus on prayer, but on public speaking ability or social popularity. And if student campaigning did begin to focus on prayer, the school might decide to implement reasonable campaign restrictions.[3]
But the Court ignores these possibilities by holding that merely granting the student body the power to elect a speaker that may choose to pray, “regardless of the students’ ultimate use of it, is not acceptable.” Ante, at 316. The Court so holds despite that any speech that may occur as a result of the election process here would be private, not government, speech. The elected student, not the government, would choose what to say. Support for the Court’s holding cannot be found in any of our cases. And it essentially invalidates all student elections. A newly elected student body president, or even a newly elected prom king or queen, could use opportunities for public speaking to say prayers. Under the Court’s view, the mere grant of power *322 to the students to vote for such offices, in light of the fear that those elected might publicly pray, violates the Establishment Clause.
Second, with respect to the policy’s purpose, the Court holds that “the simple enactment of this policy, with the purpose and perception of school endorsement of student prayer, was a constitutional violation.” Ante, at 316. But the policy itself has plausible secular purposes: “[T]o solemnize the event, to promote good sportsmanship and student safety, and to establish the appropriate environment for the competition.” App. 104-105. Where a governmental body “expresses a plausible secular purpose” for an enactment, “courts should generally defer to that stated intent.” Wallace, 472 U. S., at 74-75 (O’Connor, J., concurring in judgment); see also Mueller v. Allen, 463 U. S. 388, 394-395 (1983) (stressing this Court’s “reluctance to attribute unconstitutional motives to the States, particularly when a plausible secular purpose for the State’s program may be discerned from the face of the statute”). The Court grants no deference to—and appears openly hostile toward—the policy’s stated purposes, and wastes no time in concluding that they are a sham.
For example, the Court dismisses the secular purpose of solemnization by claiming that it “invites and encourages religious messages.” Ante, at 306; Cf. Lynch, 465 U. S., at 693 (O’Connor, J., concurring) (discussing the “legitimate secular purposes of solemnizing public occasions”). The Court so concludes based on its rather strange view that a “religious message is the most obvious means of solemnizing an event.” Ante, at 306. But it is easy to think of solemn messages that are not religious in nature, for example urging that a game be fought fairly. And sporting events often begin with a solemn rendition of our national anthem, with its concluding verse “And this be our motto: `In God is our trust.’ ” Under the Court’s logic, a public school that sponsors *323 the singing of the national anthem before football games violates the Establishment Clause. Although the Court apparently believes that solemnizing football games is an illegitimate purpose, the voters in the school district seem to disagree. Nothing in the Establishment Clause prevents them from making this choice.[4]
The Court bases its conclusion that the true purpose of the policy is to endorse student prayer on its view of the school district’s history of Establishment Clause violations and the context in which the policy was written, that is, as “the latest step in developing litigation brought as a challenge to institutional practices that unquestionably violated the Establishment Clause.” Ante, at 308-309, 315. But the context— attempted compliance with a District Court order—actually demonstrates that the school district was acting diligently to come within the governing constitutional law. The District Court ordered the school district to formulate a policy consistent with Fifth Circuit precedent, which permitted a school district to have a prayer-only policy. See Jones v. Clear Creek Independent School Dist., 977 F. 2d 963 (CA5 1992). But the school district went further than required by the District Court order and eventually settled on a policy that gave the student speaker a choice to deliver either an *324 invocation or a message. In so doing, the school district exhibited a willingness to comply with, and exceed, Establishment Clause restrictions. Thus, the policy cannot be viewed as having a sectarian purpose.[5]
The Court also relies on our decision in Lee v. Weisman, 505 U. S. 577 (1992), to support its conclusion. In Lee, we concluded that the content of the speech at issue, a graduation prayer given by a rabbi, was “directed and controlled” by a school official. Id., at 588. In other words, at issue in Lee was government speech. Here, by contrast, the potential speech at issue, if the policy had been allowed to proceed, would be a message or invocation selected or created by a student. That is, if there were speech at issue here, it would be private speech. The “crucial difference between government speech endorsing religion, which the Establishment Clause forbids, and private speech endorsing religion, which the Free Speech and Free Exercise Clauses protect,” applies with particular force to the question of endorsement. Board of Ed. of Westside Community Schools (Dist. 66) v. Mergens, 496 U. S. 226, 250 (1990) (plurality opinion) (emphasis in original).
Had the policy been put into practice, the students may have chosen a speaker according to wholly secular criteria— like good public speaking skills or social popularity—and the student speaker may have chosen, on her own accord, to deliver a religious message. Such an application of the policy *325 would likely pass constitutional muster. See Lee, supra, at 630, n. 8 (Souter, J., concurring) (“If the State had chosen its graduation day speakers according to wholly secular criteria, and if one of those speakers (not a state actor) had individually chosen to deliver a religious message, it would be harder to attribute an endorsement of religion to the State”).
Finally, the Court seems to demand that a government policy be completely neutral as to content or be considered one that endorses religion. See ante, at 305. This is undoubtedly a new requirement, as our Establishment Clause jurisprudence simply does not mandate “content neutrality.” That concept is found in our First Amendment speech cases and is used as a guide for determining when we apply strict scrutiny. For example, we look to “content neutrality” in reviewing loudness restrictions imposed on speech in public forums, see Ward v. Rock Against Racism, 491 U. S. 781 (1989), and regulations against picketing, see Boos v. Barry, 485 U. S. 312 (1988). The Court seems to think that the fact that the policy is not content neutral somehow controls the Establishment Clause inquiry. See ante, at 305.
But even our speech jurisprudence would not require that all public school actions with respect to student speech be content neutral. See, e. g., Bethel School Dist. No. 403 v. Fraser, 478 U. S. 675 (1986) (allowing the imposition of sanctions against a student speaker who, in nominating a fellow student for elective office during an assembly, referred to his candidate in terms of an elaborate sexually explicit metaphor). Schools do not violate the First Amendment every time they restrict student speech to certain categories. But under the Court’s view, a school policy under which the student body president is to solemnize the graduation ceremony by giving a favorable introduction to the guest speaker would be facially unconstitutional. Solemnization “invites and encourages” prayer and the policy’s content limitations *326 prohibit the student body president from giving a solemn, yet nonreligious, message like “commentary on United States foreign policy.” See ante, at 306.
The policy at issue here may be applied in an unconstitutional manner, but it will be time enough to invalidate it if that is found to be the case. I would reverse the judgment of the Court of Appeals.
[*] Briefs of amici curiae urging reversal were filed for the Christian Legal Society by Steffen N. Johnson, Stephen M. Shapiro, Michael W. McConnell, and Kimberlee W. Colby; for Liberty Counsel et al. by Mathew D. Staver and Jerry Falwell, Jr.; for the Northstar Legal Center by Jordan W. Lorence; for Spearman Independent School District et al. by Roger D. Hepworth; for the Texas Association of School Boards Legal Assistance Fund by David M. Feldman and Myra C. Schexnayder; for the Texas Justice Foundation et al. by Linda L. Schlueter; for Senator James M. Inhofe et al. by Barry C. Hodge; for Congressman Steve Largent et al. by Brett M. Kavanaugh; for Marian Ward et al. by Kelly J. Coghlan; and for Texas Public School Students et al. by John L. Carter.
Briefs of amici curiae urging affirmance were filed for the American Jewish Congress et al. by Walter E. Dellinger and Marc D. Stern; and for the Baptist Joint Committee on Public Affairs et al. by Derek H. Davis and Melissa Rogers.
Briefs of amici curiae were filed for the Rutherford Institute by John W. Whitehead, Steven H. Aden, and James A. Hayes, Jr.; and for the Student Press Law Center by Richard A. Simpson and S. Mark Goodman.
[1] A decision, the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals noted, that many District officials “apparently neither agreed with nor particularly respected.” 168 F. 3d 806, 809,n. 1 (CA5 1999). About a month after the complaint was filed, the District Court entered an order that provided, in part: “[A]ny further attempt on the part of Districtor school administration, officials,counsellors,teachers, employees or servants of the School District,parents,students or anyone else, overtly or covertly to ferret out the identities of the Plaintiffs in this cause, by means of bogus petitions, questionnaires, individual interrogation, or downright `snooping’, will cease immediately. ANYONE TAKING ANY ACTION ON SCHOOL PROPERTY, DURING SCHOOL HOURS, OR WITH SCHOOL RESOURCES OR APPROVAL FOR PURPOSES OF ATTEMPTING TO ELICIT THE NAMES OR IDENTITIES OF THE PLAINTIFFS IN THIS CAUSE OF ACTION, BY OR ON BEHALF OF ANY OF THESE INDIVIDUALS, WILL FACE THE HARSHEST POSSIBLE CONTEMPT SANCTIONS FROM THIS COURT, AND MAY ADDITIONALLY FACE CRIMINAL LIABILITY. The Court wants these proceedings addressed on their merits, and not on the basis of intimidation or harassment of the participants on either side.” App. 34-35.
[2] At the 1994 graduation ceremony the senior class president delivered this invocation: “Please bow your heads. “Dear heavenly Father, thank you for allowing us to gather here safely tonight. We thank you for the wonderful year you have allowed us to spend together as students of Santa Fe. We thank you for our teachers who have devoted many hours to each of us. Thank you, Lord, for our parents and may each one receive the special blessing. We pray also for a blessing and guidance as each student moves forward in the future. Lord, bless this ceremony and give us all a safe journey home. In Jesus’ name we pray.” Id., at 19.
[3] For example, it prohibited school officials from endorsing or participating in the baccalaureate ceremony sponsored by the Santa Fe Ministerial Alliance, and ordered the District to establish policies to deal with “manifest First Amendment infractions of teachers, counsellors, or other District or school officials or personnel, such as ridiculing, berating or holding up for inappropriate scrutiny or examination the beliefs of any individual students. Similarly, the School District will establish or clarify existing procedures for excluding overt or covert sectarian and proselytizing religious teaching, such as the use of blatantly denominational religious terms in spelling lessons, denominational religious songs and poems in English or choir classes, denominational religious stories and parables in grammar lessons and the like, while at the same time allowing for frank and open discussion of moral, religious, and societal views and beliefs, which are non-denominational and non-judgmental.” Id., at 34.
[4] The student giving the invocation thanked the Lord for keeping the class safe through 12 years of school and for gracing their lives with two special people and closed: “Lord, we ask that You keep Your hand upon us during this ceremony and to help us keep You in our hearts through the rest of our lives. In God’s name we pray. Amen.” Id., at 53. The student benediction was similar in content and closed: “Lord, we ask for Your protection as we depart to our next destination and watch over us as we go our separate ways. Grant each of us a safe trip and keep us secure throughout the night. In Your name we pray. Amen.” Id., at 54.
[5] Despite these changes, the school did not conduct another election, under the October policy, to supersede the results of the August policy election.
[6] It provides:
“STUDENT ACTIVITIES:
“PRE-GAME CEREMONIES AT FOOTBALL GAMES
“The board has chosen to permit students to deliver a brief invocation and/or message to be delivered during the pre-game ceremonies of home varsity football games to solemnize the event, to promote good sportsmanship and student safety, and to establish the appropriate environment for the competition.
“Upon advice and direction of the high school principal, each spring, the high school student council shall conduct an election, by the high school student body, by secret ballot, to determine whether such a statement or invocation will be a part of the pre-game ceremonies and if so, shall elect a student, from a list of student volunteers, to deliver the statement or invocation. The student volunteer who is selected by his or her classmates may decide what message and/or invocation to deliver, consistent with the goals and purposes of this policy.
“If the District is enjoined by a court order from the enforcement of this policy, then and only then will the following policy automatically become the applicable policy of the school district.
“Upon advice and direction of the high school principal, each spring, the high school student council shall conduct an election, by the high school student body, by secret ballot, to determine whether such a message or invocation will be a part of the pre-game ceremonies and if so, shall elect a student, from a list of student volunteers, to deliver the statement or invocation. The student volunteer who is selected by his or her classmates may decide what statement or invocation to deliver, consistent with the goals and purposes of this policy. Any message and/or invocation delivered by a student must be nonsectarian and nonproselytizing.” Id., at 104-105.
[7] “The graduation prayers at issue in the instant case, in contrast, are infused with explicit references to Jesus Christ and otherwise appeal to distinctively Christian beliefs. The Court accordingly finds that use of these prayers during graduation ceremonies, considered in light of the overall manner in which they were delivered, violated the Establishment Clause.” App. to Pet. for Cert. E8.
[8] Id., at E8—E9.
[9] Because the dissent overlooks this case, it incorrectly assumes that a “prayer-only policy” at football games was permissible in the Fifth Circuit. See post, at 323 (opinion of Rehnquist, C. J.).
[10] “There are in fact several secular reasons for allowing a brief, serious message before football games—some of which [the District] has listed in its policy. At sporting events, messages and/or invocations can promote, among other things, honest and fair play, clean competition, individual challenge to be one’s best, importance of team work, and many more goals that the majority could conceive would it only pause to do so.
“Having again relinquished all editorial control, [the District] has created a limited public forum for the students to give brief statements or prayers concerning the value of those goals and the methods for achieving them.” 168 F. 3d, at 835.
[11] “The majority fails to realize that what is at issue in this facial challenge to this school policy is the neutral accommodation of non-coerced, private, religious speech, which allows students, selected by students, to express their personal viewpoints. The state is not involved. The school board has neither scripted, supervised, endorsed, suggested, nor edited these personal viewpoints. Yet the majority imposes a judicial curse upon sectarian religious speech.” Id., at 836.
[12] See, e. g., Brief for Petitioner 44-48, citing Rosenberger v. Rector and Visitors of Univ. of Va., 515 U. S. 819 (1995) (limited public forum); Widmar v. Vincent, 454 U. S. 263 (1981) (limited public forum); Capitol Square Review and Advisory Bd. v. Pinette, 515 U. S. 753 (1995) (traditional public forum); Lamb’s Chapel v. Center Moriches Union Free School Dist., 508 U. S. 384 (1993) (limited public forum). Although the District relies on these public forum cases, it does not actually argue that the pregame ceremony constitutes such a forum.
[13] A conclusion that the District had created a public forum would help shed light on whether the resulting speech is public or private, but we also note that we have never held the mere creation of a public forum shields the government entity from scrutiny under the Establishment Clause. See, e. g., Pinette, 515 U. S., at 772 (O’Connor, J., concurring in part and concurring in judgment) (“I see no necessity to carve out . . . an exception to the endorsement test for the public forum context”).
[14] The school’s internal mail system in Perry was open to various private organizations such as “[l]ocal parochial schools, church groups, YMCA’s, and Cub Scout units.” 460 U. S., at 39, n. 2.
[15] If instead of a choice between an invocation and no pregame message, the first election determined whether a political speech should be made, and the second election determined whether the speaker should be a Democrat or a Republican, it would be rather clear that the public address system was being used to deliver a partisan message reflecting the viewpoint of the majority rather than a random statement by a private individual.
The fact that the District’s policy provides for the election of the speaker only after the majority has voted on her message identifies an obvious distinction between this case and the typical election of a “student body president, or even a newly elected prom king or queen.” Post, at 321.
[16] Brief for Petitioner 19 (quoting Board of Ed. of Westside Community Schools (Dist. 66) v. Mergens, 496 U. S. 226, 248 (1990) (plurality opinion)).
[17] Tr. of Oral Arg. 7.
[18] The Chief Justice’s hypothetical of the student body president asked by the school to introduce a guest speaker with a biography of her accomplishments, see post, at 325 (dissenting opinion), obviously would pose no problems under the Establishment Clause.
[19] See, e. g., Webster’s Third New International Dictionary 1190 (1993) (defining “invocation” as “a prayer of entreaty that is usu[ally] a call for the divine presence and is offered at the beginning of a meeting or service of worship”).
[20] See supra, at 297-298, and n. 4.
[21] Even if the plain language of the October policy were facially neutral, “the Establishment Clause forbids a State to hide behind the application of formally neutral criteria and remain studiously oblivious to the effects of its actions.” Capitol Square Review and Advisory Bd. v. Pinette, 515 U. S., at 777 (O’Connor, J., concurring in part and concurring in judgment); see also Church of Lukumi Babalu Aye, Inc. v. Hialeah, 508 U. S. 520, 534-535 (1993) (making the same point in the Free Exercise Clause context).
[22] “We think the Government’s position that this interest suffices to force students to choose between compliance or forfeiture demonstrates fundamental inconsistency in its argumentation. It fails to acknowledge that what for many of Deborah’s classmates and their parents was a spiritual imperative was for Daniel and Deborah Weisman religious conformance compelled by the State. While in some societies the wishes of the majority might prevail, the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment is addressed to this contingency and rejects the balance urged upon us. The Constitution forbids the State to exact religious conformity from a student as the price of attending her own high school graduation. This is the calculus the Constitution commands.” Lee, 505 U. S., at 595-596.
[23] The Chief Justice accuses us of “essentially invalidat[ing] all student elections,” see post, at 321. This is obvious hyperbole. We have concluded that the resulting religious message under this policy would be attributable to the school, not just the student, see supra, at 301-310. For this reason, we now hold only that the District’s decision to allow the student majority to control whether students of minority views are subjected to a school-sponsored prayer violates the Establishment Clause.
[24] The Chief Justice contends that we have “misconstrue[d] the nature . . .[of] the policy as being an election on `prayer’ and `religion,’ ” post, at 320. We therefore reiterate that the District has stipulated to the facts that the most recent election was held “to determine whether a student would deliver prayer at varsity football games,” that the “students chose to allow a student to say a prayer at football games,” and that a second election was then held “to determine which student would deliver the prayer. ” App. 65-66 (emphases added). Furthermore, the policy was titled “Prayer at Football Games.” Id., at 99 (emphasis added). Although the District has since eliminated the word “prayer” from the policy, it apparently viewed that change as sufficiently minor as to make holding a new election unnecessary.
[1] The Court rightly points out that in facial challenges in the Establishment Clause context, we have looked to Lemon `s three factors to “guid[e] [t]he general nature of our inquiry.” Ante, at 314 (internal quotation marks omitted) (citing Bowen v. Kendrick, 487 U. S. 589, 602 (1988)). In Bowen, we looked to Lemon as such a guide and determined that a federal grant program was not invalid on its face, noting that “[i]t has not been the Court’s practice, in considering facial challenges to statutes of this kind, to strike them down in anticipation that particular applications may result in unconstitutional use of funds.” 487 U. S., at 612 (internal quotation marks omitted). But here the Court, rather than looking to Lemon as a guide, applies Lemon `s factors stringently and ignores Bowen `s admonition that mere anticipation of unconstitutional applications does not warrant striking a policy on its face.
[2] The Court attempts to support its misinterpretation of the nature of the election process by noting that the district stipulated to facts about the most recent election. See ante, at 317, n. 24. Of course, the most recent election was conducted under the previous policy—a policy that required an elected student speaker to give a pregame invocation. See App. 65-66, 99-100. There has not been an election under the policy at issue here, which expressly allows the student speaker to give a message as opposed to an invocation.
[3] The Court’s reliance on language regarding the student referendum in Board of Regents of Univ. of Wis. System v. Southworth, 529 U. S. 217 (2000), to support its conclusion with respect to the election process is misplaced. That case primarily concerned free speech, and, more particularly, mandated financial support of a public forum. But as stated above, if this case were in the “as applied” context and we were presented with the appropriate record, our language in Southworth could become more applicable. In fact, Southworth itself demonstrates the impropriety of making a decision with respect to the election process without a record of its operation. There we remanded in part for a determination of how the referendum functions. See id., at 235-236.
[4] The Court also determines that the use of the term “invocation” in the policy is an express endorsement of that type of message over all others. See ante, at 306-307. A less cynical view of the policy’s text is that it permits many types of messages, including invocations. That a policy tolerates religion does not mean that it improperly endorses it. Indeed, as the majority reluctantly admits, the Free Exercise Clause mandates such tolerance. See ante, at 313 (“[N]othing in the Constitution as interpreted by this Court prohibits any public school student from voluntarily praying at any time before, during, or after the schoolday”); see also Lynch v. Donnelly, 465 U. S. 668, 673 (1984) (“Nor does the Constitution require complete separation of church and state; it affirmatively mandates accommodation, not merely tolerance, of all religions, and forbids hostility toward any”).
[5] Wallace v. Jaffree, 472 U. S. 38 (1985), is distinguishable on these grounds. There we struck down an Alabama statute that added an express reference to prayer to an existing statute providing a moment of silence for meditation. Id., at 59. Here the school district added a secular alternative to a policy that originally provided only for prayer. More importantly, in Wallace, there was “unrebutted evidence” that pointed to a wholly religious purpose, id., at 58, and Alabama “conceded in the courts below that the purpose of the statute was to make prayer part of daily classroom activity,” id., at 77-78 (O’Connor, J., concurring in judgment). There is no such evidence or concession here.
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Public editor: The fight against ‘fake news’
Globe and Mail Public Editor Sylvia Stead.
Sylvia Stead
Updated 2017-11-25T15:44:59.795Z
Earlier this week, I received a complaint about a Globe investigation into a fake news site. The writer, who is a Canadian professor, called the article "fake news."
The Globe story labelled "Media and 'Fake News'" had the headline "NATO research centre sets sights on Canadian website over pro-Russia disinformation".
The article, by chief political writer Campbell Clark and senior international correspondent Mark MacKinnon, addressed the issue of "fake news" head on. It noted NATO's Strategic Communications Centre of Excellence was monitoring a website for pro-Russia propaganda and disinformation.
The site, globalresearch.ca, has published articles that claim the Assad regime was not behind the chemical weapon attack in April, suggesting it was a hoax. It has also said the Sept. 11 attacks were orchestrated by the CIA.
The professor writing in didn't question these weird theories. Instead he accused the reporters of taking "their marching orders from NATO hacks to attack the credibility of an independent news outlet." After a to-and-fro about what is credible news, the professor was unconvinced, saying the pro-Russian site was "giving us the other side."
It is important to be skeptical about what you read, but his argument is a red herring. Listening to the other side is important for a different point of view or to learn new facts. There is no justification for incorporating unsubstantiated or made-up news into a story.
Most of you know the difference between credible news and conspiracy-based sites, and are rightly suspicious of those who throw out accusations of fake news, usually to decry news they don't like.
One definition of "fake news" is "deliberate misinformation created for political purposes or financial gain." Of course, there have always been those drawn to developing or following conspiracy theories, but now they have their internet bubbles to reinforce each other.
During the U.S. election, there were overseas bots and sites promoting "fake news." Some in Macedonia made thousands of dollars with pro-Trump "fake news" websites. According to an investigation in Wired, a fake story of "the imminent criminal indictment of Hillary Clinton" was very popular.
Credible journalism has standards for correcting errors and explains its sources.
Earlier this month, The Globe announced it was the first Canadian partner to join other major media in The Trust Project, an international initiative that authenticates stories from project members through websites such as Google, Twitter and Facebook.
The principles include a correction policy, written standards and labelling whether an article is news, opinion or advertising. Search engines and platforms including Google and Facebook will use indicators on articles from the media partners that are part of this project.
This project is just one measure, and it doesn't mean The Globe and Mail doesn't recognize its fallibility. We make mistakes most days, but we correct them transparently. And the Globe's updated Code of Conduct, the standards for its journalism, appears on the homepage.
The professor's protest is just one of more than about 700 questions or complaints I deal with each year. The vast majority are from subscribers who appreciate much of what The Globe does but are disappointed when they see a typo, grammatical mistake, an opinion that angers or an issue not covered.
None of this includes the write-in campaigns, which this year hit close to 4,000 e-mails. One recent organized outrage concerned an article by Vanessa Gera, an Associated Press correspondent in Warsaw. It was about the Polish president condemning the racism, anti-Semitism and white supremacist views of some of the 60,000 people who marched on Poland's Independence Day.
Even though President Andrzej Duda clearly spoke out against this display of fascism and racism, the letter campaign writers decried press coverage that, they argue, leads worldwide audiences to "dislike Poland and Poles, creating negative stereotypes…" The campaigners may not like the coverage, but it is entirely necessary to shine a very strong light on white nationalism wherever it happens.
These campaigns aside, the e-mails I receive help inform and shape the paper's coverage, and hold The Globe to its standards. The readers' role in maintaining fair and accurate media cannot be overstated.
The most important news of the day in one email
MEDIA and 'FAKE NEWS'
NATO research centre sets sights on Canadian website over pro-Russia disinformation Subscriber content
The press vs. the President: Are the media biased against Trump?
Digital ‘totalitarian marketing’ threatens privacy and security, former advertising executive says
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TGP Predicts 2017: The World Series
The drought is over and the Cleveland Indians are your 2017 World Series Champions!! Short, sweet and to the point but that’s how I feel. The Indians are a young team, a deep team and an experienced team after taking the Chicago Cubs to the brink in seven games in the 2016 World Series. Behind the arms of Corey Kluber, Danny Salazar, Andrew Miller and others the Cleveland Indians are just going to be too tough for anyone to handle in my opinion this season.
Don’t get me wrong, the Washington Nationals are tough and they will let the Indians know that they have been in a fight but the bullpen for the Nats may be the difference maker. Without a true closer and without a deep and dominant bullpen that is capable of giving five-plus shutout innings of work on any given night I find it hard to believe that Bryce Harper and company will be able to keep up over a seven game series.
I think this series goes at least six games and may go seven games but at the end of the day I think the World Series championship goes back to Cleveland, finally. The Indians paid their dues last season as the watched Chicago celebrate breaking their curse and drought and now it’s time for redemption. Let me be the first to congratulate the 2017 Cleveland Indians on their World Series victory.
Labels: Boston Red Sox, Chicago Cubs, Cleveland Indians, Houston Astros, New York Mets, New York Yankees, Playoffs, Postseason, predictions, Toronto Blue Jays, Washington Nationals, World Series
It's Just Money...
A few days ago, the Associated Press reported that the New York Yankees had fallen to third in total payroll behind the Los Angeles Dodgers and the Detroit Tigers. The AP report put the Yankees 2017 Payroll at $195 million.
Researching another sports contract site (spotrac.com), it appears that the Yankees may still hold second place by a few million. Spotrac has the total Yankees payroll at $201,539,699. The figure includes not only the dead contract for Alex Rodriguez (referred to as Retained Salary) of $21 million, but also $5.5 million that the Yankees are paying toward the contract for Houston Astros starting catcher Brian McCann.
There is also money allocated to Ruben Tejada and Ji-Man Choi that count toward the total payroll even though they are not on the major league roster.
CC Sabathia is the highest paid Yankee at $25 million. But the killer is the total of $34,142,857 the Yankees spend to have the luxury of carrying Jacoby Ellsbury and Chase Headley on the roster (ugh!).
According to Spotrac, the Boston Red Sox actually have the third highest payroll (just more than $50,000 above the Tigers). The Red Sox carry the most dollars for “buried” contracts (players currently in the minor leagues) at just over $22 million for Rusney Castillo and Allen Craig.
I had assumed that the Yankees had the most dead contracts with the heavy A-Rod cost, but I was wrong. The Dodgers have over $38 million, with the majority going toward former outfielder Carl Crawford who is slightly more expensive than A-Rod).
When you look at just the 2017 cost of the 25-man roster, the Yankees fall to fourth at $168 million although just a couple of million dollars separate them from the leaders (Chicago Cubs, San Francisco Giants, and Detroit Tigers). The Dodgers fell to seventh with just under $156 million.
It’s amazing but as of right now, the Yankees are tenth on total payroll for 2018 with $104 million committed. The plan is playing out exactly as prescribed by Managing General Partner Hal Steinbrenner. As long as the young Baby Bombers continue to thrive, it should make the possibility of Bryce Harper in Pinstripes more than just a Pinstriped Dream.
CC Sabathia did it. He pitched his finest opening start in eight seasons with the Yankees to pick up his first win of the year, 5-0 over the Tampa Bay Rays. CC went 5 strong innings, while only allowing 3 hits, no runs and 2 walks. He struck out 2. By the 4th inning, CC was sweating so profusely, it seemed liked it was raining inside of the domed Tropicana Field. Whatever it takes.
Ronald Torreyes was the unlikely first Yankee to homer this year when he connected for a two run shot off Rays pitcher Jake Odorizzi in the 3rd inning. I would have guessed anybody but Torreyes, but I am glad that he is proving me wrong.
Things got a little dicey in the 8th. Jonathan Holder allowed a couple of baserunners and was pulled for Dellin Betances who walked the first batter he faced to load the bases. Fortunately, he worked out of trouble and the Yankees escaped the inning without allowing any runs.
I don’t want to criticize Manager Joe Girardi, but I would have gone with Bryan Mitchell for a second inning rather than bringing in Tyler Clippard in the 7th. Mitchell, in relief of Sabathia, only needed 9 pitches to record three outs in the 6th. Bringing in Clippard felt too “formula driven”. I would have pitched Mitchell in the 7th to give me the option of Clippard or Betances in the 8th. Plus, if Mitchell is in competition for the fifth rotation spot, it's best to keep him stretched out. Oh well, it worked out so I’m not going to complain and Girardi knows the pen better than I do.
Aroldis Chapman was his usual stellar self in the 9th even though it was a non-save situation. It was his first regular season game since winning the World Series last fall. He looks much better in the Yankee Road Gray uni over Cubs gear.
For the game, Matt Holliday added a RBI in the third. It was an unusual play in that the Rays left fielder Peter Bourjos, a newcomer to Tropicana Field, lost sight of the ball in the rafters and it fell for a double. Chase Headley also homered and drove in a total of 2 runs. Gary Sanchez had another 0-for-5 day, with 2 strikeouts. The strikeouts that Aaron Judge has eliminated have seemed to found their way to Gary’s bat.
The Yankees can take the 3-game series in today’s getaway game with the Rays. Michael Pineda gets the start and will face right-hander Alex Cobb in the 7:10 pm EST game. Good thing the Yankees have the day off tomorrow with the travel to Baltimore, Maryland.
Have a great Wednesday!
Labels: Alex Rodriguez, Aroldis Chapman, Brian McCann, Bryan Mitchell, CC Sabathia, Chase Headley, Dellin Betances, Joe Girardi, Matt Holliday, MLB, Rays, Ronald Torreyes, Spotrac, Tyler Clippard, Yankees
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A battle cry for inclusion: The Shape of Water triumphs in Oscars of seismic change
Guillermo del Toro’s outcast fantasy wins best picture in a ceremony that called for more representation and female empowerment in Hollywood
Helen Mirren’s jet ski to BB8 backstage: Oscars 2018 – in pictures
Oscars 2018: Full list of winners
Rory Carroll in Los Angeles
@rorycarroll72
Mon 5 Mar 2018 01.42 EST Last modified on Thu 8 Mar 2018 06.01 EST
Seven must-see moments from the Oscars 2018 - video
The Shape of Water, a romantic fable about a janitor who falls in love with a sea creature, has swept top honours at the Oscars in a ceremony that turned into a battle cry for inclusion and female empowerment.
Guillermo del Toro’s cold war-era fantasy about the triumph of outcasts fended off the satirical horror Get Out and the drama Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri, to take best picture and director, continuing a winning streak for Mexican film-makers in Hollywood.
The 90th Academy Awards turned Sunday night’s ceremony in Los Angeles into a celebration and exhortation of representation and inclusion, after a year marked by seismic cultural change in Hollywood that rippled across the world.
This video has been removed. This could be because it launched early, our rights have expired, there was a legal issue, or for another reason.
'Stand with me': Frances McDormand gets every female Oscar nominee on their feet – video
Frances McDormand, who won the best actress award for playing a grieving, furious mother in Three Billboards, created one of the night’s most memorable tableaux by asking all the female nominees in the Dolby theatre to stand up. “Look around,” she said. “We all have stories to tell and projects we need financing.”
She finished her speech saying: “I have two words to say: inclusion rider”, a reference to a little known contract clause that lets actors demand diversity on both sides of the camera. Backstage, she stressed this is a new era. “We’re not going back. It changes now ... power in rules.”
Helen Mirren on a jet ski and BB8 backstage: Oscars 2018 highlights – in pictures
The acting awards went as expected. Gary Oldman won best actor for depicting Winston Churchill in Darkest Hour. “Put the kettle on,” he told his 99-year-old mother, watching on the sofa at home. “I’m bringing Oscar home.”
Sam Rockwell won best supporting actor for playing a racist cop in Three Billboards and Allison Janney won best supporting actress for playing an unforgiving mother in I, Tonya.
Greta Gerwig’s acclaimed coming of age story Lady Bird and Steven Spielberg’s The Post left empty-handed, though Jordan Peele’s Get Out won best original screenplay, prompting a rapturous standing ovation that cemented his elevation to Hollywood’s elite. Christopher Nolan’s war epic Dunkirk and Paul Thomas Anderson’s dark romance Phantom Thread took a clutch of technical awards.
James Ivory, 89, became the oldest winner of an Oscar for the gay coming of age drama Call Me by Your Name, in the best adapted screenplay category.
A crystal stage, clips of classic films and appearances by veteran stars projected a nostalgic glow, but the ceremony crackled with contemporary politics and social activism related to sexual misconduct and immigration rights.
Ashley Judd, Annabella Sciorra and Salma Hayek. Photograph: Craig Sjodin/Getty Images
Salma Hayek, Ashley Judd and Annabella Sciorra, who went public with allegations of sexual misconduct against the disgraced producer Harvey Weinstein, jointly presented an emotional montage that channelled the anger and hope of the #MeToo and Time’s Up movements. The movement’s leaders had decided to stand down for the night, in contrast to the Golden Globes, whose attendees expressed solidarity by wearing black, but Hollywood’s mood of reckoning still permeated proceedings.
Along with jewellery, the traditional gift bags for top nominees included pepper spray and a “phobia-relief” therapy session. On the red carpet, most stars shunned the E! News presenter Ryan Seacrest because of sexual harassment accusations, which he denies.
The host, Jimmy Kimmel, joked in the opening monologue that the Oscar statue set an example for Hollywood: “He keeps his hands where you can see them, never says a rude word, and literally doesn’t have a penis.” This was the year that men screwed up so badly “women started dating fish”, he said, referencing The Shape of Water.
Kimmel also addressed last year’s fiasco, when the wrong best picture was announced. “This year, when you hear your name called, don’t get up right away,” he told the audience. “Give us a minute.”
Warren Beatty and Faye Dunaway, who initially, incorrectly announced La La Land instead of Moonlight the winner last year, surprisingly returned to present the best picture award – this time without a hitch.
Del Toro’s victory was the fourth time a Mexican director has taken Oscar honours in the last five years, following Alfonso Cuarón in 2014 and Alejandro González Iñárritu in 2015 and 2016.
“I am an immigrant,” said Del Toro in a veiled rebuke to President Donald Trump’s immigration crackdown. “The greatest thing art does and our industry does is erase the lands in the sand. We should continue doing that when the world tells us to make them deeper.”
Backstage, the director said artists have to honour their roots and said he would be bringing his statues to his parents in Mexico. “I’m going home with these two babies.”
'Representation matters': Coco director thanks the people of Mexico – video
Coco, about a Mexican boy’s journey to the underworld, won best animated film and best original song, prompting cries of “Viva Mexico” from the stage. Latino talent triumphed again when the Chilean drama A Fantastic Woman, starring trans actor Daniela Vega in the lead, won best foreign film. The drama was the first Oscar winner to feature both a transgender storyline and star an openly trans performer.
Weinstein, an Oscar svengali who in previous years was thanked more times than God, was nowhere in sight, banished from the Academy last October after multiple allegations of his predations triggered the #MeToo avalanche.
But a jarring moment came when the retired basketball star Kobe Bryant won an Oscar for an animated short based on his farewell letter to the sport, prompting accusations of double standards among Oscar voters, given a rape accusation made against Bryant in 2003 – a case that was dropped when his accuser refused to testify and settled out of court.
Amazon’s The Big Sick and Netflix’s Mudbound won nothing, but Netflix’s film about Russian doping, Icarus, took best documentary, suggesting the Academy’s resistance to streaming services is weakening.
Blade Runner 2049 won two Oscars, with veteran cinematographer Roger Deakins collecting his first statue after 13 previous nominations.
Kimmel promised a jet ski to the winner who made the shortest speech, weaving in a quiz show vibe to balance the politics. The show ended with Mark Bridges, the Phantom Thread costume designer, scooting across the stage atop the machine. His speech had clocked in at just over 30 seconds.
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Blinded by the Light review – Bruce Springsteen inspires mawkish misfire
Gurinder Chadha heads back to the Bend it Like Beckham template for a contrived and unconvincing coming of age tale
@benfraserlee
Mon 28 Jan 2019 13.29 EST Last modified on Thu 14 Mar 2019 13.48 EDT
Viveik Kalra, Nell Williams and Aaron Phagura in Blinded by the Light. Photograph: Nick Wall/Courtesy of Sundance Institute | photo by Nick Wall
In Gurinder Chadha’s 2002 hit Bend it Like Beckham, there was palpable magic kicked from the screen into the audience, a vibrant, warm surprise that, at the time, broke box office records in the UK. Her output since has been less magnetic, from Angus, Thongs and Perfect Snogging to It’s A Wonderful Afterlife, but in an attempt to recall prior glory, she’s taken the Beckham formula and replaced football with music in Blinded by the Light, a shameless crowd-pleaser that contorts the music of Bruce Springsteen into a coming-of-age narrative.
The Souvenir review – a sly stab of posh social realism
Inspired by the life of the Guardian journalist Sarfraz Manzoor, who also co-wrote the script, the film takes place in Luton in 1987 and focuses on Javed (Viveik Kalra), a teenager who struggles to find a balance between his life in and outside of the home. Expectations from his Pakistani father conflict with how he sees his own life and future while the lingering threat of an arranged marriage clashes with his desire to find a girlfriend. As he starts his first year of the local sixth form college, Javed’s world is opened up when a new friend introduces him to the music of Bruce Springsteen, who might no longer be seen as cool by his peers but whose lyrics inspire him to take control of his destiny.
There’s something undeniably seductive about the familiarity of the set-up, the feelgood British comedy with emotional beats signposted a mile away, a comfort food feast from a director who gave us one of the last decade’s most memorable examples. The backdrop also allows for some powerful commentary, a time of great division and hardship in a town that wasn’t entirely welcoming to a Pakistani British family. For the first 20 minutes or so, there are broad pleasures to be had with Kalra as a charming protagonist as well as some stinging examples of vile racism. It seems as if the wheels are in motion for an audience-friendly smash that also has something serious on its mind. But then The Boss arrives …
Javed’s immersion in the music of Springsteen takes place during the great storm of 1987 and in a silly, messily handled sequence, he’s inspired to frolic in the wind as lyrics appear on the screen and video footage plays on a wall. It’s one of many awkward attempts to truly embed Springsteen’s music in the film, rather than just having it play as a soundtrack and while ambitious, Chadha can’t seem to make them work. Semi-musical sequences involving Javed singing and dancing along at school or in the town of Luton should be rousing but instead they’re sort of embarrassing as well as confusing, lifting us out of reality and dropping us in fantasy territory.
His obsession with Springsteen is portrayed as charming but as the film progresses, it becomes rather annoying, earnestly quoting him at any given moment or mansplaining his importance to his new anarchist girlfriend. The script becomes as over-reliant on his music as Javed is, resorting to his lyrics to make profound statements rather than inventing anything original. The film takes place on such a broad level that characters are reduced to caricatures and the forced emotional conflict has the depth of a daytime soap, true involvement in the story ebbing away with each scene. Stuck with perfunctory dialogue (“If you walk out that door, you’re never coming back!” etc), the cast struggle to sell us on what starts to feel like a low-rent stage production. There’s a scrappiness to the structure with plot points and cliches casually tossed in without the slickness needed to make familiar material such as this truly shine. It’s especially notable near the end when Hayley Atwell’s stock inspirational teacher reels off an unconvincing monologue that ends up with Javed winning a trip to New Jersey, cueing up an atrociously green-screened montage.
Inevitable comparisons to both Bend it Like Beckham and previous Sundance breakout Sing Street do the film no favours, that infectious charm never truly arriving. There’s something so constructed and suffocating about watching a tried and tested formula not working, the over-sentimental string-pulling on show for all to see. It’s all-too-easy to give a pass to a film such as this, given its earnest intentions but wanting us to feel good is very different to actually making us feel good and no amount of blaring Springsteen songs can disguise the fact that this is a misfire. Blinded by the Light has the subtlety of a flashlight, one that’s being repeatedly flashed in the face, desperate for a reaction.
Blinded by the Light is showing at the Sundance film festival
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Tallest building in Africa
Author: Stephen Kamau
Category: Photo, Facts and Life Hacks
This article summarizes the tallest buildings in Africa 2018. There are over 100 tall buildings in Africa according to the report of the Council on Tall Buildings and Urban Habitat (CTBUH). Go through this article and get to know which building is the tallest building in Africa.
So within which African country can we find the tallest building in Africa? This article will provide you withinformation about the tallest buildings in Africa. Read the article to get information regarding the tallest buildings in Africa, their heights and location.
This article ranks some of the tallest buildings on the African continent. Comparison is drawn based on the height of each building. In the late 90s, there were only a hand full of tall buildings in Africa which included some of the major financial centres and commercial centres. South Africa is considered as the country with the tallest building in Africa. Continue reading to know more about the tallest buildings on the African continent with their heights, location and floors.
READ ALSO: List of richest countries in Africa
List of the tallest buildings in Africa
Here are the 10 tallest building on the African continent.
1. Carlton Centre – Johannesburg, South Africa
The Carlton Center in Johannesburg is considered as the tallest building on the African continent. The height of the building is 223 meters which is around 730 ft. The building consist of 50 floors, referred to as the tallest shopping mall and skyscraper in South Africa. Carlton Centre has been a dominating champion of the tallest building in Africa for 39 years. The construction of the building was completed in the year 1973. The architect-designers of the Carlton building are Murray & Roberts; Skidmore, Owings & Merrill LLP and W. Rhodes - Harrison Hoffe & Partners.
2. Hassan II Mosque – Casablanca, Morocco
The Hassan II Mosque is the second largest building in the African continent with a height of 210 meters which is around 689 ft. In the year 1993, the construction of the Hassan II Mosque was completed. The Hassan II Mosque is considered as the seventh largest Mosque in the world. The architect designer of the Hassan II Mosque is Michel Pinseau and built by Bouygues.
READ ALSO: Best architects in Kenya - list of architectural firms in Kenya
3. Britam Tower – Nairobi, Kenya
The Britam Tower in Nairobi is the third largest building in the entire Africa continent. The height of the building is 200.1 meter which is around 656 ft. The building consists of 31 floors and the construction of the building was completed in the year 2017. The architect-designers of the Britam Tower are GAPP Architects & Urban Designers and Triad Architects. The Britam Tower is considered as the third tallest building in Africa.
4. Ponte City Apartments – Johannesburg, South Africa
The Ponte City Apartments come under the fourth largest building in the entire African continent. The height of the Ponte City Apartment is 173 meter which is around 568 ft. The building consists of 54 floors and considered as the tallest residential skyscrapers in Africa. In the year 1975, the construction of the building was completed. The architect designers of the building are Manfred Hermer Grosskopff & Lombart.
READ ALSO: Features and symbolism of Swahili architecture
5. UAP Tower – Nairobi Kenya
The UAP Tower is considered as the fifth largest building in Africa. The height of the UAP Tower is 163 meter which is around 535 ft. In the year 2016, the construction of the building was finished with an arrangement of 33 floors. The UAP building is considered as the second tallest building in Nairobi, Kenya. The owner of the building is UAP Old Mutual Holdings. The UAP Tower is considered as the second tallest building in East Africa after the Britam Tower in Nairobi.
6. NECOM House – Lagos, Nigeria
The NECOM House is considered as the sixth tallest building in the African continent. The NECOM House was formerly known as the NITEL Tower and before that, it was the NET Building. The building consists of 32 floors and the construction of the building was completed in 1979. The height of the building is 160.3 meter which is around 526 ft. The architect designer of the building was Nickson Borys & Partners.
7. PSPF Towers (Tower B) – Dar Es Salaam, Tanzania
The PSPF Towers (Tower B) is considered as the seventh largest building in entire Africa. The height of the building is 153 meter which is around 502 ft. The construction of the building started in 2011 and the construction was finished in 2014. With a capacity of 35 floors, the building is kept functional for official purpose.
READ ALSO: 6 refreshing reasons why Africa’s tallest skyscraper being built in Nairobi will cost Ksh20 billion (photos)
8. PSPF Towers (Tower A) - Dar Es Salaam, Tanzania
The PSPF Towers (Tower A) is considered as the eight largest building in entire Africa. The height of the building is 152.7 meter which is around 501 ft. The construction of the building was started in 2011 and the construction finished in 2014. With a total capacity of 35 floors, the building is used for official purposes.
9. Marble Towers - Johannesburg, South Africa
The Marble Towers is a skyscraper in the Central Business District of Johannesburg, South Africa. The height of the building is 152.1 meter which is around 499 ft. The building consists of 32 floors above the ground and 3 floors below the ground. The building is kept functional for official purpose and is referred as the 3rd tallest building in South Africa.
READ ALSO: PHOTOS: Find Out The Five Tallest Buildings In Nairobi
10. Pearl Dawn – Durban, South Africa
This building is considered as the tenth tallest building in Africa. The height of the building is 152 meter which is around 499 feet. The construction of the building started in 2006 and the construction finished in 2010. The building is used for residential purpose with 31 floors and 120 apartments. The architect designer of the building was Seedat & Seedat.
The above buildings are the top 10 tallest buildings in Africa, ranked in accordance with their respective heights. So what do you think about the tallest building in Africa?
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Interesting details about Lindsay Mills, Edward Snowden's wife, bio, career, family
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UCB welcomes young researchers
UCB held a lecture for its youngest students to date when primary school children were welcomed to McIntyre House.
More than 50 pupils aged 6–10, attended a university-style lecture on research methods and how they can apply them to their school projects.
As part of their visit, the children spoke to lecturers and were given a tour of the new building. They were particularly impressed by the facilities in ThinkSpace, with one child remarking it was “quiet and green, like being in the countryside.”
“I have learned that, if you are researching something, someone has probably written research in that area before,” said a pupil. “So it’s a good idea to use libraries to find books and journals on that subject.”
It has been a lovely opportunity for the pupils to see how real research works and to find out about ethical research methods. It will be very useful for our school project. The pupils thoroughly enjoyed the tour of McIntyre House, especially because they are the first school children to do so.
Lauren Graftor, a teacher at Colmore Junior School,
UCB was delighted to welcome this group of young researchers. They were keen to learn more about the ways to gather information to support their own projects. Their levels of maturity and responses to being in a university environment were impressive and we certainly feel that there are some talented future researchers out there. We are looking forward to hearing all about the childrens findings when they return in July for the Young Researchers conference.
Debbie Reel, lecturer at UCB’s School of Education and Community
The pupils’ visit was part of the Young Researchers Project, an initiative led by Colmore Partnership Teaching School Alliance (CPTSA), a group of 11 schools committed to making a positive impact on children’s life choices, creating opportunities for professional development and achieving excellence. The CPTSA was represented at UCB by teachers and pupils from Colmore Infant and Nursery School, Colmore Junior School, Rookery Primary, Lyndon Green Infant School and WoodthorpePrimary School.
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SPACE ISSUES | Village Voice
SPACE ISSUES
by Danny King
Curated by the terrific critic Ashley Clark — whose book on Spike Lee’s Bamboozled is set to be published by The Critical Press in October 2015 — BAM’s high-concept “Space Is the Place: Afrofuturism on Film” incorporates a diverse assortment of work (science fiction, documentary, music video) to explore “alternate and imagined black futures and pasts.” The title of the series comes from the same-named 1974 movie (screening on April 9), which features the only fictional film performance by the jazz musician and mystic Sun Ra. Other notable selections include Dick Fontaine’s hip-hop doc Beat This!: A Hip Hop History, which opens the series tonight; Stephen Norrington’s Blade (4/10), starring Wesley Snipes; John Sayles’s indie-sci-fi effort The Brother From Another Planet (4/10); and the great director Shirley Clarke’s final film, Ornette: Made in America (4/11), which — in the words of the Voice‘s Melissa Anderson — “tinkers with and discards the conventions of the bio doc just as its pioneering musician subject exploded those of jazz.”
April 3-15, 7 p.m., 2015
More:BAM Rose CinemasCulture
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Looking Down Tremont Street, Boston, MA
Arthur Clifton Goodwin earned the moniker ‘Sloppy Weather Goodwin’ for his tendency to work in all seasons, especially Boston’s bone-chilling winters, as seen in Looking Down Tremont Street, Boston, MA. The painting illustrates his talent for capturing the ordinary moments of city life, as a pair of strollers make their way along the wet path toward the head-houses of the Boylston Street transit station, which joins nearby Park Street as the two oldest subway stations in the country.
The overcast sky allows for very little play of sunlight and color, yet Goodwin’s impressionist style is evident in the lively strokes of pigment used to render the figures, the spindly trees, the carriages lined along the curb and even the puffs of smoke rising from the buildings. While this view of Boylston Street station remains largely unchanged over a century later, Goodwin’s depiction also offers a sense of nostalgia, as the stately mansard-roofed Hotel Pelham in the center was demolished in 1916 and is now the home to the Little Building, an Emerson College dormitory.
Private collection, Wellesley, Massachusetts
With Vose Galleries, Boston, inventory no. 31142, April 1994
Returned to private collection, Wellesley, Massachusetts, September 1994
With Vose Galleries, Boston, inventory no. 31927, December 1996
To private collection, Boston, Massachusetts, February 1998 to present
1). Previous Vose Galleries label, inventory no. 31927
2). The Casson Galleries / 573 Boylston St. / Boston / At Copley Square
by Arthur C. Goodwin (1864-1929)
16 ¼ x 20 1/8 inches
Signed and dated lower left: A. C. GOODWIN / ’10 –
Newcomb-Macklin frame
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Sheriff mourns loss of aunt, longtime department employee
APPLE VALLEY — When John McMahon joined the San Bernardino County Sheriff’s Department in 1985, he had a familiar connection — his aunt, Kathy Cardwell, had joined the Academy the year before.
Cardwell was already well known among the deputies and detectives at the department during her time working as a public safety dispatcher a few years before.
“She was known as the voice of calm, even through chaos. Deputies loved it when Kathy was on the radio because she never got flustered,” said McMahon, who is now the county sheriff.
Cardwell immediately connected with the young deputies and detectives joining the ranks of the department every year. She exemplified the Department’s credo of treating each other like family, according to McMahon.
“She was like a mother figure to many at the department. She cared so much for all those deputies and detectives. She was a role model and a mentor to many,” McMahon said.
Kathleen Cardwell, of Apple Valley, died on March 10, from lung cancer. She is survived by her sons, their families, her brother and his family, which includes the Sheriff.
McMahon said Cardwell was his father’s “only sister.” McMahon had the chance to grow up with his aunt and her family when they moved from Chicago to Apple Valley in the 1970s, shortly after the McMahons moved to the area themselves.
“We were all very close. We lived by each other and grew up together,” McMahon said.
Cardwell became a full-time deputy working in courts and corrections by 1984. She became a detective in 2000, working in the specialized investigations division until 2006, where she retired as a licensed polygrapher.
McMahon said Cardwell was cherished by many at the department for her gracious, friendly nature and way of taking anyone under her wing. Cardwell conducted a number of background investigations of people joining the department, McMahon said, and “treated each and every one like family.”
“Some of the ones who got their background investigations done by her still remember her for her friendliness," he said. "Folks just gravitated towards her because she was so nice.
“Kathy made an impact on a lot of people at the Sheriff’s Department and out of it. Many people will remember her fondly.”
Funeral services for Cardwell will be held at Our Lady of the Desert Catholic Church, 18386 Corwin Road, in Apple Valley at 10:30 am on Monday.
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Vcodex founder Iain Richardson is an experienced expert witness in patent litigation cases. Professor Richardson has testified at deposition and trial at numerous cases since 2007. He is the author of four books and many research papers on video compression coding. Professor Richardson has a deep knowledge of software and hardware technology for video coding and the ability to explain complex technical issues in a highly accessible way.
In our experience, we can add the most value to a patent litigation case if we are engaged at an early stage of proceedings. We help our clients develop effective strategies for product analysis, source code examination and prior art review.
In a complex patent litigation case at the United States International Trade Commission involving H.264 video compression technology, Professor Richardson was called to testify on the validity of a patent. He spent only 30 minutes on the witness stand. Our client was delighted because as a result of the strength of Professor Richardson's expert analysis, the opposition dropped its invalidity case.
Some cases at which Prof. Iain Richardson has testified:
Patent Trial and Appeal Board, Inter Partes Review IPR2015-00302, 2015
United States International Trade Commission Investigation 337-TA-885, 2013
United States District Court (Southern District of California) Case No. 3:10-cv-02618, 2012
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Virgil Walker & Jonathan Norton
How Should Christians Use Social Media?
Last quarter, Facebook announced that it had 1.19 billion active monthly users. Of those, 728 million of these users logging in daily. In addition, Twitter logged 304 million active monthly users with more than half of these users tweeting messages daily. If Facebook and Twitter were their own country, combined they come close to rivaling the population size of both China and the United States. Many believe there is still more growth to come for both platforms...
Tagged: social media, facebook, twitter, comments, love, relationships, kindness, compassion, humility, gentleness, patience, respect, online, Internet, encouragement, encourage
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Duluth Police Department Adding Another K-9
There will soon be another K-9 on the Duluth Police Department. On Monday night, the city council gave the green light for the Duluth Transit Authority to spend $112,801 on a K-9 officer.
The Duluth Police Department and Duluth Transit Authority are partnering to purchase a new K-9 that can sniff out explosives. The K-9 will cost less than $13,000. The funding for the K-9 is coming from local donors, and the money has been donated specifically to be spent on the K-9 program.
Sgt. Kelly Greenwalt, Duluth Police Department K-9 Coordinator, says having this new K-9 will help improve security both at the Duluth Transit Center and around the city.
The Duluth Police Department will soon be adding a K-9 that can sniff out explosives. On Monday night, the city council gave the Duluth Transit Authority the green light to spend $112,801 on a K-9 officer.
A couple weeks ago at the Operation K-9 Event, Luna was introduced as a member of the Duluth Police Department team. Now more new paws are going to be joining the force. The department will be adding a single purpose explosives K-9.
"We're always trying to best use our resources, and reallocate resources where we need it," said Sgt. Greenwalt.
Right now the department has two other explosive detection K-9's, but they are also patrol dogs, tactical dogs, and explosive detection dogs.
Sgt. Greenwalt says this can put a big burden on the handler, but he says having the new K-9 will hopefully alleviate some of the responsibilities of the other handlers.
The new K-9 will be used to patrol at the Duluth Transit Center, but also around the city. Sgt. Greenwalt says the point of having it is to be ready for anything that may happen.
"It will help out if there's any threats associated with the buses, or we can use this dog for dignitary visits on the bus routes, we can use it for Grandma's Marathon. That sort of thing," said Sgt. Greenwalt.
Sgt. Greenwalt says while it doesn't happen often, they had had threats in the area, and no dogs available.
"It's one of those things where you don't want to not have it if it happens, so we're planning for the worst case scenario," said Sgt. Greenwalt.
And while we just had Grandma's Marathon, the Tall Ships Festival is right around the corner, so this just adds one more officer to help patrol during those kinds of events.
"It's that layer of security that you need when you have big events like that, and you have a city this size that has the potential," said Sgt. Greenwalt.
This will be the fourth K-9 for the department. Sgt. Greenwalt says the dog is going to be training in September, and they hope to have it in the field by the end of this year.
Duluth Police will also be adding another in January to bring the total to five.
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Networking Event Introduces Local Talent to National Producers
Top TV executives were in the Northland on Wednesday night as part of a national event that is planned for our region in the fall.
The Catalyst Content Festival that will be held in Duluth will bring independent creators together with entertainment industry executives, agents, and producers.
A networking event was held on Wednesday night to introduce some of the festival's executive producers who are from Los Angeles, to local producers, actors, and actresses.
A networking event was held on Wednesday night to introduce some of the Catalyst Content Festival's executive producers from Los Angeles to local producers, actors, and actresses.
They all gathered at a private Duluth home where they enjoyed food catered by OMC Smokehouse, and beer from Bent Paddle Brewing Company.
Nathan Lipinski is the CEO for local software development company MC-Cubed, but is also a producer for a local talent group. Lipinski says Wednesday's event helps get the word out about the festival, and shows the executive producers all Duluth has to offer.
"I think it's a really important asset because we're showing that we are capable of hosting arts here in addition to supporting that kind of community," said Lipinkski. "I think as more people find out how great Duluth is, and move up from the Twin Cities, that community will keep growing and growing," he said.
The NorShor Theatre, Zeitgeist Arts Cafe, Fitgers, GreySolon, and Duluth Depot will host events for the Catalyst Content Festival, according to the festival's website.
Officials say the festival will add to the creative arts scene that already brings in about $40 million annually to Duluth. It's estimated this will bring in about $1.5 million in new revenue.
The festival is expected to bring in about 1500 people, and will be held October 9-13.
The website shows tickets are available now. They can be found here.
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(Just Kidding?) WeHo Announces Street Signs Counting Down Trump’s Exit
Tuesday - January 2, 2018 by Nick Cutelli | 7 Comments
EDITOR’S NOTE: This is the first in a series of occasional (Just Kidding?) columns by comedic actor, host and writer Nick Cutelli that play off the craziness of life in WeHo and the rest of the world we live in. Remember that laughter has been proven (if you believe in science) to be good for your health.
Recently the City of West Hollywood has been focusing on improving traffic control along Santa Monica Boulevard and Fountain Avenue. Additional crosswalks, traffic lights and speed indicators have been installed on Santa Monica Boulevard and are planned on Fountain Avenue to help promote safe driving. Even with all these upgrades in place, recent studies and social media polls show that drivers are still suffering from road rage and traffic depression that can be linked to the 2016 presidential election. University studies show that cities with Trump buildings can have what medical experts call a “political depression radius” of around 50 miles affecting their driving population.
To help combat this “election depression” the City of West Hollywood is working with the private sector to design and develop “Trump’s Done in Office” digital countdown signs. The signs will feature a digital countdown to the second of when the President’s four-year term in office will end.
The digital lights will be made with a high end light technology so powerful that even astronauts on the international space station can see it, when they’re feeling depressed. The sign pole and frame will, ironically, be made of the same bulletproof material that cars in the president’s motorcade use.
Those materials were instantly donated by the Secret Service once they heard news of the idea. It’s said that they sent enough materials to construct 100 miles of “Trump’s Done in Office” signs. The construction process alone will create 500 to 1,000 new jobs, and experts compare this project to former President Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal initiative.
Aside from providing a count down clock, the signs will include other features. They’ll flash inspirational quotes such as “Drive safe so you can vote for a new president,” “Slow Down. Don’t drive like Trumps on the road,” and “The Plague was worse…kind of.” The signs also will suggest future candidates that you might be interested in. Currently the sign is only programmed for Democratic candidates, since it can only be programmed with three names. A Republican update in is the works to accommodate the 20 to 50 candidates that usually run for the GOP presidential nomination, but it could be some time before it is released.
Another advanced feature will be a satellite feed linked to a network that will provide drivers with a notice of the president’s impeachment, in the event that it happens. The satellite technology is based on former President Ronald Reagan’s “Star Wars” defense system, which he promoted during the Cold War.
Once word got out that the City of West Hollywood was moving forward with the project, requests for orders started pouring in, first from the surrounding areas in California, but in a matter of hours they spread international. Countries in Europe, South America and Asia quickly put in orders. It’s estimated that Mexico alone has purchased one for every ten feet of roadway that it has.
West Hollywood residents already have expressed gratitude for the signs and have been preparing for the official release day. Thanks to the high level of donations and support for the release, West Hollywood residents have been able to rent out the ball drop that is used on New Years Eve in New York City’s Times Square to celebrate the signs. The fact that the ball drop is used more than once in a calendar year will go down in history. Experts say that it’s going to be a bigger celebration than when the United States celebrated the end of World War II.
As for the next phase, private sector businesses have announced several spin off developments from the “Trump’s Done in Office” signs. They weren’t able to go into details, but they did imply there would be phone apps, drones, text alerts and even professional actors dressed as the president holding up countdown clocks.
So be ready for a less stressful commute along Santa Monica Boulevard and Fountain Avenue in this new year as each day gets us one day closer to our president making his exit. Before that day arrives, remember that time flies when you’re driving safe.
Tags: donald trump, fountain avenue, just kidding?, nick cutelli, santa monica boulevard
About Nick Cutelli
Nick Cutelli is a native of the Midwest where he got his Bachelors of Fine Arts degree from Southeast Missouri State University. Then he shifted gears towards Chicago, where he trained and developed his writing skills at the famed Second City and Improv Olympic. Nick also is a freelance on-camera reporter for the City of West Hollywood’s WEHO TV News.
Neighbors Gather Outside the San Vicente Bungalows to Welcome Michelle Obama
Opinion: John Duran and Donald Trump Are Cut From the Same White-Privileged Cloth
Starting Tonight, WeHo Creates Safer Crosswalk Signaling for Santa Monica Boulevard at Robertson
Josh Kurpies
Wow, tough crowd here.
I do think this faux-article is funny, especially when it receives comments like those from @Erik Lake, but maybe hits a bit too close to home considering the death and recent injuries resulting from the vehicle collisions over the past several months along Fountain.
I wouldn’t mind seeing more of these articles, but hopefully they can be on matters that wouldn’t so easily be viewed as a dismissal of real community concerns.
LucidOne
History will prove this was an ignorant move. Look beyond MSM and you’ll understand a big shift is taking place.
SEEKER OF RIGHTEOUSNESS
I can’t discern whether Nick Cutelli is kind of poking fun at the ridiculous level of “Trump hatred” or not but I really could see the city council of West Hollywood spending our tax dollars this way, instead of, say, hiring a couple more deputies help the citizens.
Eric Lake
You people in California are truly nuts. Billions in debt, no water, fires all over and this is the kind of thing you choose to spend money on?
Tammy Tamponski
I think the last election had a 15% turnout? It was dismal, not enough people vote, it’s a crying shame!
the city doesn’t want new people voting, especially young voters. they have the same ole voters in every election and count on that.
While I too am not a fan (to say the least) I believe our City could better serve the future by urging, signing and doing anything possible to get people to REGISTER TO VOTE and then of course VOTE…provide transportation to the polls…stimulating YOUNG VOTERS to participate…and tough political in nature, champion POSITIVE CHANGE (excluding details of party or names, though it is implied).
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Glen Farley: Pats do it again against Redskins
Glen Farley
Washington Redskins head coach Joe Gibbs had said his team would “probably be the biggest underdog in the history of sports” heading into Sunday’s game at New England.
In response, Patriots quarterback Tom Brady accused Gibbs of “blowing smoke.”
In this case, where there was smoke, there was a raging fire.
That NFL inferno did it again Sunday, blowing yet another opponent off the field. The Pats extended their streak of season-opening wins by 17 or more points to eight with a 52-7 romp against a Redskins team that began the day with a more-than-respectable record of 4-2.
Halfway through the season, the Patriots are outscoring opponents by an average of 41.4-15.9 per game.
Yes, their average margin of victory is 25.5 points.
“It will take a lot to stop them,” Gibbs observed amidst the carnage that was the Redskins’ postgame locker room.
Goodness knows, the Redskins didn’t have it.
At day’s end, the Patriots had amassed 486 yards in total offense, totaled a franchise-record 34 first downs and controlled the ball for 37:49 of the game’s 60 minutes.
“It was a fun one,” Patriots fullback Heath Evans said. “It was just another Patriot team win.”
Put it this way: Tom Brady extended his NFL record for consecutive games to start a season with three or more touchdown passes to eight. He rushed for two TDs in a game for the first time in his career (heck, he’d never rushed for two in a season) – and he arguably wasn’t the star.
That distinction may have belonged to full-time linebacker and part-time tight end Mike Vrabel, who made a team-leading 13 tackles, recorded three sacks of Jason Campbell for 20 yards and forced three fumbles on defense. He made it a perfect 10-for-10 in his offensive career when he made his 10th reception – all for TDs.
“Looking across there,” said Gibbs, “I don’t know of a weakness they have.”
And when they sense a weakness in an opponent, they exploit it.
Once again, the tone was set at the outset. The Patriots scored on their opening possession for the eighth straight time this season when Brady capped a 14-play, 90-yard drive by scrambling in from the 3.
“I think it’s something that, when we come out of the locker room before the game, it’s just something that we’ve got to be able to start fast and get the team going,” said running back Kevin Faulk, who caught seven passes for 57 yards and carried five times for another 32.
By the time the Redskins scored, the Patriots had put 45 more on the board, building themselves a 52-0 lead that still wasn’t enough to satisfy some.
“You can’t ever be satisfied. You know what I’m saying?” asked cornerback Asante Samuel, who intercepted the 20th pass of his Patriots’ career.
“Unless (there’s) zero points, zero yards … You’re never satisfied, but, you know, we played a pretty good game.
“At the end on defense, we gave up the seven points. We’re disappointed from that end. We’ve just got to go out and see what happened on that drive and try to work on that.”
If there is anything the Patriots might need to work on, it would be their football etiquette – if such a thing does, in fact, exist.
Up 38 points in the fourth quarter, the Patriots went for a fourth-and-one at the Redskins’ 7, converting when Brady gained 2 yards on a sneak, setting up his third TD pass of the game (and 30th of the season), a 2-yard toss to wide receiver Wes Welker.
Up 45, with Matt Cassel on in relief later in the quarter, they converted a fourth-and-2 at the Washington 37, a 21-yard completion to wideout Jabar Gaffney leading to a 15-yard scramble by the backup QB for a TD that pushed the difference to 52.
“Just out there playing,” said Belichick. “Just out there playing.”
Presumably, this coming Sunday in Indianapolis, the 2007 team will experience something new when they play the 7-0 Colts.
Halfway through the regular season, they haven’t seen it yet.
Enterprise staff writer Glen Farley can be reached at gfarley@enterprisenews.com.
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GIOVANNI DI BALDUCCIO
(active 1315-1349)
Italian sculptor. He is first documented in 1317-18 in the cathedral workshop in Pisa, where he was being paid a modest daily wage. In 1349 he was asked, while living in Milan, to take charge of the cathedral works in Pisa, but he was still resident in Milan towards the end of 1349, and he may have died there soon afterwards. His style is known from four signed works, which have formed the basis for a reconstruction of his oeuvre: the tomb of Guarniero degli Antelminelli (c. 1327-28) in San Francesco, Sarzana; the pulpit in Santa Maria del Prato in San Casciano, near Florence; the shrine of St Peter Martyr (dated 1339) in Sant'Eustorgio, Milan; and the architrave (1347) from the main portal of Santa Maria di Brera, Milan (fragments in Castello Sforzesco, Milan).
Giovanni developed a distinctive, slightly mannered modelling style based on that of Giovanni Pisano, but he made no attempt to adopt the latter's powerful plasticity and dramatic expressiveness. Through his work in Milan, he introduced into Lombardy the formal vocabulary of Tuscan Gothic sculpture, of the kind that had been developed by Nicola and Giovanni Pisano and by such Sienese sculptors of the early 14th century as Gano di Fazio and Tino di Camaino.
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WATCH: 'Cats' (2019) BTS First Look
MasterChef's George Calombaris in hot water
MasterChef judge George Calombaris sparks outrage after strange comment
EXCLUSIVE: Sam Johnson reveals struggles to have a relationship after the suicide of his ex-girlfriend
It's official: Gossip Girl is being rebooted
MAFS' Jess and Ines pose near-nude and claim show is rigged
Former MAFS star Jono Pitman welcomes baby boy with Rebecca Pattison
Céline Dion reveals she has only ever kissed her late husband René Angélil
'I'm still in love with him' - by Blake Bakkila
Céline Dion continues to grieve the loss of her beloved husband, René Angélil.
The “My Heart Will Go On” singer, 48, talked to CBS’s Mo Rocca in an interview after her 1,000th performance on Saturday night in Las Vegas about the love of her life. On Jan. 14, Angélil died at the age of 73 after a long battle with throat cancer.
“Before he left, it was very, very difficult for all of us,” Dion said. “For me especially, and my children, to see the man of my life die a little bit more every day. And when he left, it was kind of a relief for me that the man that I love, the only man that I kissed, the only man that I loved.”
Dion confirmed that she has never kissed another man, as she continued her statement about how she has found peace in the wake of her husband’s tragic death.
“Yeah. I never kissed another man in my life,” she said. “So the man of my life was my partner, and we were one. So when he stopped suffering I said to myself, he’s okay. And he deserves not to suffer.”
When Rocca asked if she hoped to fall in love again, Dion said “not now.”
“I love. I love. I love him,” she said. “I’m still in love with him. And I have the love of my children. I have the love of my fans. I love the people that I work with. So my life is not empty of love. But there’s a song from Sia, ‘I go to sleep and imagine that you’re there with me.’ And I go to bed with him. And I come on stage with him. And so I’m still married to him.”
Rene Angelil and Celine Dion during The Andre Agassi Charitable Foundation's 10th Annual "Grand Slam for Children" Fundraiser - Backstage and Audience at MGM Grand Arena in Las Vegas, Nevada, United States.
Earlier in the interview, Dion shared the memory of her first meeting with Angélil when she was 12 years old.
“I thought he was very beautiful,” she said. “He looked great. I felt confident that this man was not treating me as a, ‘Oh, hi, little pumpkin.’ Or, ‘Hi, little sweetie,’ or like a little baby.”
At first, the couple had a strictly professional relationship. But eventually, they started dating and were married in 1994. They share two children, 15-year-old René-Charlesand 5-year-old twins Nelson and Eddy.
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William Cook appoints first female materials engineer
The first female materials engineer at William Cook Rail is encouraging more young women to consider careers in industry.
Cambridge graduate Rebecca Feldman is an important member of the team at the Leeds factory which manufactures high-value products for the global rail industry.
William Cook Rail is a world leader in passenger bogie and coupler systems and exports 80 per cent of its output.
Ms Feldman attended the female-only Newnham College at Cambridge University and read natural sciences, graduating in 2007.
She joined a graduate training scheme at a large steel company, where she was one of three women in an intake of 25.
Ms Feldman said: “At school and university I was always encouraged to do whatever I was interested in and enjoyed. I had supportive and inspiring teachers.
“When I started the graduate scheme, that’s when I thought I was in a minority. But it didn’t worry me. The most important thing is that you are capable of doing a good job. Gender should not matter.
“It would be a shame if girls and young women are put off rather than encouraged to see the benefits of working in industry.”
According to the Royal Academy of Engineering, the UK needs an additional 87,000 graduate level engineers each year between now and 2020, but the higher education system is only producing 46,000 engineering graduates.
Just eight per cent of the UK’s professional engineers are female, the lowest proportion of any European country, according to the academy.
McKinsey, the global consultancy, has found that companies with higher gender diversity are more likely to have above average financial returns.
Ms Feldman joined William Cook Rail two years ago. She provides technical and scientific support to the design and manufacturing team.
She said: “Industry is as much about brain power as physical power. It can be noisy, dirty and smelly. You have to wear a hard hat and steel toe caps rather than make-up and high heels.
“But I love science and its practical applications and I always wanted to be part of a team and taking a collaborative approach to something that has tangible results.
“Quite a few of my peers at university went into the City of London to make money working at banks or consultancies.
“That is a loss to the science and engineering communities. The City does not produce anything tangible. It is virtual, electronic money.
“I like being part of a team that manufactures useful things. We need trains to get around. We need machinery to get oil and gas out of the ground. We need structural components for bridges.
“I would encourage girls and young women to study science, technology, engineering and mathematics at school and university. There are so many opportunities in these fields and there is a shortage of these skills.
“There is no reason why girls and women cannot succeed in these subjects and bring great benefits to teams. The more varied a team is, the better it is. Different people bring different experiences and different ways of solving problems.”
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Oil_and_energy
Halliburton holds open house for new cement plant in Williston
By Renée Jean rjean@willistonherald.com
Chamber of commerce officials, community members and Halliburton officials gathered to cut a ribbon for the oilfield servicer company’s new home in the old Baker Hughes facility.
Photos by Renée Jean • Williston herald
Mayor Howard Klug, left, learns more about the “squiggly lines” on the screens in the background during a tour of Halliburton’s new facility on Wednesday.
This new cement plant is an addition to the existing facility that used to house Baker Hughes and now houses Halliburton.
Renée Jean • Williston herald
Iris Chacon in the command center for the cement plant in Halliburton’s new facility, which had an open house Wednesday.
Halliburton is a well-known brand in the oilfield industry for both its quality of service and its innovation, much of it tested and proved right here in the Bakken.
Wednesday, the industry giant gathered with some of its nearly 1,000 employees and community members to celebrate not only its 100th year as a company, but its new home in the old Baker Hughes facility, where it has built a much larger cement plant.
The new plant can manufacture 6,000 cubic feet per day of cement, or 180,000 cubic feet per month, of any of 35 different specialty blends that the company offers. Each of these blends has different properties, and is selected based on engineering criteria for individual wells.
In addition to greater volume, the new plant can also dual load from both sides, which is another point for better efficiency.
“The old plant had a bottleneck from a capacity standpoint,” said Thomas Johnson, Vice President of the Rockies. “And we were having to do certain things in the lab that we can now do physically in the bulk plant.”
The fate of the old plant has not been decided, but there are no plans to continue using it as a cement plant, Johnson added.
“There is more than enough capacity at the new plant to cover all the customer needs in North Dakota,” he said.
Cement has been a speciality of Halliburton’s since its humble Texas beginnings in 1919 by Erle Palmer Halliburton.
Halliburton had been an engineer with Perkins Cementing in California as a consulting engineer for drilling and well cementing. He was charged with developing new ideas, however they met with a fair amount of resistance.
He called his new company the New Method Oil Well Cementing Company. It’s inventory at the time included a borrowed pump, a wagon, a mule team and a wooden mixing box. His wife’s wedding ring, meanwhile, was the startup funding.
His revolutionary ideas were better, but didn’t really take off until he tamed a wild well in Oklahoma for the Skelly Oil Company. It was 1924, and the company’s name became Halliburton Oil Well Cementing Company, or HOWCO.
Halliburton continued to pursue innovative approaches to the production of oil and gas throughout his career. He retired in 1947 due to poor health, but the company continued, becoming Halliburton Services in 1962.
Halliburton has been in North Dakota markets for about half of its 100 years, according to Robert Harber, business development vice president for North America.
While Halliburton was present in the community in the 80s, it really began expanding its presence and investing more heavily in the Bakken during the latest oil boom.
“At that time, Halliburton really started to invest in the area from the standpoint of expanding facilities, crews, and product lines,” Harber said. “And that was through a lot of innovation and technology that we were able to bring to the industry, along with partnerships with our clients and vendors to supply this market.”
Not only did Halliburton invest in Williston, however, the community has made its share of investment as well, Harber added.
“It’s in a good place to have that infrastructure to support the workforce that our industry needs to have for a sustainable marketplace,” Harber said. “And some of that was the result of expanding facilities and investments made early on. It’s a great day here for Halliburton. We are renewing that investment, and it puts a better roof over the heads of our employees.”
Harber said the Bakken has done much of the front-end work that is making other shale plays go.
“Horizontal drilling didn’t start here,” Harber said. “But horizontal drilling into shale, this is one of the first places that that was executed. And what really changed it was being able to take the approach of encasing the well and completing certain parts of the well to make it more effective.”
That technological know-how has proved portable to many other shale plays, such as the Permian.
Completion technology is continuing to evolve and improve, Harber added, and he believes that the Bakken will continue to be at the center of these efforts for a long time to come.
“Our customers continue to see results that are encouraging enough, such that the cash flow potential continues to improve over time,” Harber said. “And it can continue to advance. (The Bakken) is not on a decline, it is on an incline.”
Farm_and_ranch
From Montana to North Dakota, support rolls in for seed-cleaning facility at WREC
State senator Brad Bekkedahl, NDSU President Dean Bresciani, Vice President of Agriculture Dr. Greg Lardy, SBARE Chairman Mark Birdsall, Williston Mayor Howard Klug, Executive Director for the North Dakota Crop Improvement and Seed Association Chad Anderson, Executive Director McKenzie County Job Development Authority Daniel Stenberg, Mountrail Williams Electric Cooperative’s Chris Brostuen, Richland County Commission Chairman Loren Young, Williams County farmer and chairman of the Joint Advisory Board for Williston Research Extension Center and Eastern Agriculture Research Center Tom Wheeler. In the background Allen Domagala with Hulsing and Associates and WREC Foundation Seed Manager Kyle Dragseth.
Richland County, Montana Commissioner Duane Mitchell was among those present for a groundbreaking for a seed-cleaning facility at WREC. He presented a check for $50,000.
New pledges for a seed cleaning facility at Williston Research Extension Center tallied up quickly late Wednesday afternoon. More than $250,000 from various entities was pledged for a plant expected to take the region’s Foundation Seed Program to new heights.
Richland County Commissioner Duane Mitchell was first up at the mic, with a $50,000 check from Richland County in Montana.
Mitchell said there had been some questions about the donation for a seed cleaning facility that is located in North Dakota, but said the facility is important to the entire region.
“I’d like to challenge everyone to help make this thing happen,” he said.
Tom Wheeler, a grower who has been active in efforts to get legislative funding for the new seed cleaning facility, noted that one-quarter to one-third of the seed produced by the Foundation Seed Program at WREC is sold into Montana. Wheeler is also chairman of the joint advisory committee for WREC and the Eastern Agricultural Research Center.
Ken Callahan, president of the Williston Basin Chapter of the American Petroleum Institute also had a challenge, this one to the oil and gas industry.
He presented a $5,000 check from API, and said the organization will be asking all its member oil and gas companies to match the donation.
Mountrail Williams Electric Coop had a $50,000 check, which was presented by Chris Brostuen.
While it took some thought to settle on a dollar amount, Brostuen said a donation was a “no-brainer.”
“In the coop’s history, farmers have always played a big part,” he said. “They drove the development of the coop back in the 40s and 50s.”
Even today, with all the oil and gas, farmers continue to be critical to the coop and to the region’s economy, Brostuen added.
Daniel Stenberg, executive director of the McKenzie County Job Development Authority, did not have a check just yet, but said they had a presentation on the facility Tuesday night, and will be asking County Commissioners to send a $100,000 check.
Williams County Commissioners indicated they, too, will be making a donation, though they have not yet discussed how much to give.
“Williams County is 100 percent committed to making sure this project takes off,” Commissioner Beau Anderson said.
Anderson has worked at the facility in the past.
“This is a little chunk of my heart,” he said. “This is a beautiful wheat crop, and it’s a beautiful evening to be kicking off a project that is going to be here a long time. I hope more than 60 years.”
Commissioner Cory Hanson added that it will be a great facility, and that it is exciting to see all the community members coming together on it.
Chad Anderson, with the North Dakota Crop Improvement and Seed Association, noting the close working relationship with the university system, presented a check for $25,000.
Mayor Howard Klug also spoke during the ceremony. Williston was an early contributor, pledging $250,000 through its STAR Fund earlier in the year for the seed facility.
“It is just us and us,” Klug said. “That is where it is.”
Klug explained that the sales tax supporting the STAR Fund is collected from everyone, whether in the oil industry or farming sector of the economy.
“It doesn’t take us long to figure out a project like this,” Klug said.
He said the facility has probably received the largest grant from the STAR fund program. That’s because the facility will help the whole region. Part of what Williston has been working toward is developing itself as a regional resource.
“Whatever we can do to make the region work, whether it is with your group, or working with the oil companies, we will work with anyone,” Klug said.
The seed cleaning facility broke ground ceremonially on Wednesday, but the real work is expected to begin in the fall, with a concrete slab, after which building walls will be raised as quickly as possible for work inside during the winter. Equipment will be installed in the summer, and the hope is to have the facility fully operational by the fall.
Donations are being accepted for the seed-cleaning facility. Those giving at least $100 will have their names on a wall of honor in the Ernie French Center. Contributions can be made over a period of time. Donations of grain can also be accepted. For details about that, call WREC at 701-774-7315.
Public_safety
20-year-old Williston man accused of breaking into truck, running from police
By Jamie Kelly editor@willistonherald.com
A 20-year-old man is facing multiple charges after police say he broke into a pickup truck early Tuesday morning and ran from officers after being confronted.
Jonathan Perez was charged Wednesday, July 10, with theft and breaking into a vehicle, both class C felonies, as well as class A misdemeanor counts of possession of a controlled substance and possession of drug paraphernalia and class B misdemeanor counts of fleeing a police officer and underage drinking. He was ordered held Wednesday on $10,000 bond.
Police were called to the 3300 block of 28th Street West around 3:36 a.m. on Tuesday after someone reported seeing a man with a flashlight getting into vehicles, according to an affidavit of probable cause filed in Northwest District Court. When an officer arrived, he spotted Perez leaning into a Ford F-350 pickup and holding a plastic bag filled with items.
When the officer told Perez to show his hands, Perez raised his hands and began to walk away while still holding his hands up, court records indicate. When the officer told Perez to stop, Perez fled.
Eventually, another officer saw Perez standing in the entryway of an office building in the 3200 block of 27th Street West, charging documents state. When the officer told Perez to come out, Perez ran toward the building’s elevator.
After a search of the building, the officer found Perez hiding in a stall in the women’s bathroom, investigators wrote in the probable cause affidavit. A breath test showed Perez’s blood alcohol content at .105.
Officers found a bag that Perez dropped while running from police and found it contained an Apple iPad, an iPhone, a radar detector, a watch and cologne, all of which belonged to the owner of the truck, court documents state. The total value of the items wa about $1,261.
After Perez was taken to the Williams County jail, correctional officers found a vape pen in his pocket with liquid that contained THC, according to charging documents.
Perez is due back in court Aug. 7 for a preliminary hearing.
Williston Downtowners plan three days of events for Williston
By Mitch Melberg mmelberg@willistonherald.com
Downtown Williston is the place to be this week with three full days of activities for the whole family to enjoy.
The second Summer Nights on Main of the season happens on Thursday, July 11, with popular band Slamabama returning to the stage, sponsored by Red Rock Ford in Williston. The street will be filled with food vendors, offering up tacos, snow cones, hot dogs and more. Laser tag and inflatables will set-up for the younger crowd to enjoy, with a beer gardens available to those 21 and older. Summer Nights is every Thursday from 5 to 9 p.m. throughout July and August.
On Friday, the Downtown businesses will turn Main Street into a smorgasbord of shopping for the annual Crazy Days sales, from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m.
Many businesses will be featuring sales, giveaways and more as part of the annual event. The day kicks off from 7:30 to 9:30 a.m. with the 66 cent breakfast, sponsored by KEYZ Radio and the Korner Lions Club. Along with doing a bit a shopping, food vendors will be set up along Main Street as well, so visitors can grab a bite while they grab some deals. Crazy Days will feature fun for the kids as well, with inflatables and train rides offered by members of the Williston High School boys basketball team.
On Saturday, July 13, The Main Street Market returns for the season from 9 a.m. to noon in the Hedderich’s lot. Vendors from around the area will be on site, selling produce and more. The market has been growing steadily each year, featuring vendors selling foods and crafts, with activities for the whole family to take part in. The market will run every Saturday throughout the summer.
“We love seeing the community come Downtown,” Downtowners Executive Director Daved Lundeen told the Williston Herald. “It’s really special to see how involved the community gets in our events to bring as many people as we do downtown. We think it’s really beneficial for Williston in general, and especially for downtown and our downtown businesses. We like to do anything we can support them, so the more people we can bring downtown, the happier we are.”
Watford City PD announces results of tobacco compliance checks
The Watford City Police Department recently completed a compliance check of businesses that sell tobacco and found 14 of 16 businesses refused to sell to minors.
The check was the first by the department, according to a news release put out Wednesday, July 10. The checks were done in partnership with Upper Missouri Health District, North Dakota Department of Health and McKenzie County School District.
Only two businesses, Long X Bottle Shop and Kum and Go gas station, sold tobacco or nicotine products to minors, police said. These businesses were warned instead of being cited, and trained on North Dakota tobacco laws.
The department plans to continue the compliance checks in the future, using grant funding from the Upper Missouri Health District and North Dakota Department of Health.
WCPD would like thank the following businesses for checking the IDs of our minors and refusing to sell tobacco or nicotine products.
- American Legion Bar
- Holiday Gas Station
- Cash Wise Foods
- Cash Wise Liquor
- Corner Post Gas Station
- Family Dollar (Main Street)
- Family Dollar (4th Ave Ne)
- Cenex
- One Stop Gas Station
- Jack and Jill’s Grocery Store
- Tobacco Depot
- Fox Hills Golf Course
- City Bar
- Twist Convenience Store
willistonherald.com
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Jan. 24, 2013 / 3:30 AM
Today is Thursday, Jan. 24, the 24th day of 2013 with 341 to follow.
The moon is waxing. The morning stars are Saturn and Venus. The evening stars are Mars, Jupiter, Uranus, Mercury and Neptune.
Those born on this date are under the sign of Aquarius. They include the Roman Emperor Hadrian in A.D. 76; English dramatist William Congreve in 1670; Frederick the Great of Prussia in 1712; British social reformer Edwin Chadwick in 1800; author Edith Wharton in 1862; abstract painter Robert Motherwell in 1915; sportscaster Jack Brickhouse in 1916; actor Ernest Borgnine in 1917; evangelist Oral Roberts in 1918; ballet dancer Maria Tallchief Paschen in 1925 (age 88); musicians Doug Kershaw in 1936 (age 77) and Ray Stevens in 1939 (age 74); singers Neil Diamond and Aaron Neville, both in 1941 (age 72); actor Sharon Tate in 1943; comedian John Belushi in 1949; actor Michael Ontkean in 1946 (age 67); singer Warren Zevon in 1947; actor Nastassja Kinski in 1961 (age 52); and Olympic gold medal-winning gymnast Mary Lou Retton in 1968 (age 45).
On this date in history:
In 1848, gold was discovered at John Sutter's mill near Sacramento, Calif. The discovery touched off the great gold rush of 1849.
In 1908, the first Boy Scout troop was organized in England by Robert Baden-Powell, a general in the British army.
In 1916, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that an income tax was unconstitutional.
In 1935, beer was sold in cans for the first time, in Richmond, Va.
In 1965, former British Prime Minister Winston Churchill died at age 91.
In 1990, Soviet forces shelled merchant ships blockading the harbor in the Azerbaijani capital of Baku.
In 1991, Saudi jet fighters shot down the first enemy planes of the Persian Gulf War, while U.S. forces sank an Iraqi minesweeper and forced Iraqi troops off an island near Kuwait.
In 1993, retired U.S. Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall, the first African-American to serve on the nation's highest court, died of cardiac arrest at age 84.
Also in 1993, Thomas A. Dorsey, known as the father of gospel music for adding rhythm to church hymns, died at 93.
In 1999, the International Olympic Committee expelled six IOC members amid charges that money and other compensation had been accepted from officials whose cities were bidding to host the Games.
Also in 1999, Jordan's King Hussein, who was seriously ill, named his son Abdullah crown prince. Abdullah replaced his father's younger brother as successor to the throne.
In 2003, a report said the global economic slowdown that began about two years previously wiped out 20 million jobs, bringing total world unemployment total to 180 million people.
In 2004, after years of denials, Pakistan admitted scientists may have sold nuclear designs to other nations probably "for personal financial gain."
In 2005, the U.S. Supreme Court rejected an attempt by Florida Gov. Jeb Bush to prevent the husband of Terri Schiavo from removing her life support system. Lower court rulings said the severely brain-damaged woman was in a "persistent vegetative state."
In 2007, three precision raids on predominantly Sunni-controlled areas of Baghdad allowed Iraqi and U.S. troops to regain control of the city.
Also in 2007, European defense officials said North Korea was sharing nuclear data on 2006's test explosion with Iran.
In 2008, Societe Generale, one of France's largest banks, blamed a $7 billion loss on what it called "fraudulent" stock dealings in European stock futures by an unauthorized employee.
Also in 2008, Italian Prime Minister Romano Prodi resigned after losing a confidence vote in the Senate.
In 2009, U.S. President Barack Obama said his proposed $825 billion economic stimulus plan will be a major investment in important U.S. domestic priorities such as energy, education, healthcare and infrastructure.
In 2010, Ethiopian Airlines Flight 409 carrying 90 people crashed into the Mediterranean Sea about half an hour after taking off from Beirut bound for Ethiopia. Officials said 23 people were killed.
Also in 2010, sectarian violence in Nigeria left one village of 3,000 residents virtually empty with hundreds of people believed dead and more fleeing in fear.
In 2011, two suicide bombings at Moscow Domodedovo International Airport killed 37 people and injured 170 others in an attack at the international arrival gate.
Also in 2011, officials raised the death toll from floods and mudslides in Brazil to at least 809 with thousands homeless.
In 2012, U.S. President Barack Obama said in his State of the Union address that his vision for America was a nation "built to last." In a wide-ranging talk, he spoke of many goals, including what he wants to do to help jump-start the economy, improve job numbers and create a sense of fairness for all Americans.
A thought for the day: Words from William Blake, "When I tell the truth, it is not for the sake of convincing those who do not know it, but for the sake of defending those that do."
Jack Brickhouse
Maria Tallchief Paschen
Michael Ontkean
Nastassja Kinski
Robert Baden-Powell
Terri Schiavo
Thomas A. Dorsey
Authorities seek baboon on the loose in South African city
Police called to boy's 'ice cold beer' stand find 'root beer' instead
7,046 packs of gum used as dominoes to set Guinness World Record
Postcard shows up at Illinois home exactly 26 years after postmark
Large snake caught crossing Minnesota road
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Aug. 8, 2013 / 5:43 PM
Iran political prisoners call for end of U.S. sanctions
TEHRAN, Aug. 8 (UPI) -- Political prisoners in Iran called on U.S. President Barack Obama to end sanctions and meet with Iranian leaders.
Fifty-five prominent former officials, activists, journalists and dissidents in Iran signed a letter to Obama that was published Thursday by Britain's The Guardian, the newspaper reported.
"We believe the time has come for our two countries to turn a page and start a new era of mutual understanding," read the letter.
In the letter, the political prisoners said they agree with Iranian president Hassan Rouhani that U.S. sanction have "devastating effects" on the lives of ordinary people.
RELATED Iran says it can prosecute U.S.
"All Iranian people, including the families of political prisoners and especially the low income groups, are suffering under the burden of rampant inflation and shortages of medical supplies and other basic necessities of life," the letter reads. "The sanctions have now turned into a collective punishment imposed on the Iranian people as a whole, not the government only. The national economy has shrunk over the past couple of years and the strength of Iran as a nation-state is being reduced."
The political prisoners said they believed that Obama could end tensions between the United States and Iran if he met with Rouhani.
"In our view, the tenure of this government may be the last chance to bring this conflict to a reasonable and mutually acceptable resolution," the letter said.
RELATED Iran says it posted video from U.S. drone
However, the letter warned that "continuing with the pressure track of these past years will strengthen the belief in a significant part of the Iranian public that the United States is not genuinely interested in resolving the conflict".
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Ray Wells
Research Geologist Emeritus
Geology, Minerals, Energy, and Geophysics Science Center
Email: rwells@usgs.gov
2130 SW 5th Ave
Neotectonics
Earthquake Hazards
Ray is a Research Geologist Emeritus at the Geology, Minerals, Energy, and Geophysics Science Center in Portland, OR. He received his BS degree from Penn State, an MS from the University of Oregon, and PhD, all in Geology, from the University of California. Presently, his research focuses on the relationship between forearc structure and the seismogenic behavior of the Cascadia megathrust.
Dr. Wells has been a research geologist with the USGS for 40 years, where he used field geology, paleomagnetism, and GPS to understand the tectonic evolution and seismic hazards of active continental margins. He has studied subduction zones around the world to better understand the controls on great megathrust earthquakes and has applied that understanding to the Cascadia convergent margin. Ray is particularly interested in how the oblique component of convergence is partitioned into permanent deformation of the forearc, producing faults, earthquakes, and tectonic rotation of the upper plate.
Dr. Wells is a recipient of the Distinguished Service Award of the Department of the Interior and the 2017 recipient of the Geological Society of America’s Geologic Mapping Award in honor of Florence Bascom. Recently retired, Ray is a Research Geologist Emeritus stationed at the USGS Oregon Water Science Center in Portland, Oregon and is a Research Associate with the Geology Department at Portland State University.
1971 Geological Field Assistant, Johns-Mannville Ltd, Stillwater Complex
1972-1974 Teaching Assistant, University of Oregon
1974 Geological Field Assistant, Mobil Oil Corp., Tyee Basin
1975-1976 Geologist, U.S. Geological Survey
1976-1977 Teaching Assistant, University of California, Santa Cruz
1978-1980 Research Assistant, University of California, Santa Cruz
1980 Geologist, Washington Division of Geology and Earth Resources
1981-2016 Research Geologist, U.S. Geological Survey
1991-1996 Cascadia Regional Coordinator - USGS Deep Continental Surveys
1995-2013 Project Chief, Pacific Northwest Urban Corridor Geologic Mapping, USGS, Menlo Park, California
2016- Research Geologist Emeritus, U.S. Geological Survey
2017 - Research Associate, Portland State University, Portland, OR
B.S., Geology, Art, Pennsylvania State University, 1972
M.S., Geology, University of Oregon, 1975
Ph.D., Geology, University of California, Santa Cruz, 1982
1977 - Current, American Geophysical Union
1974 - Current, Geological Society of America
1990 - Current, Seismological Society of America
Non-USGS Partners:
Oregon Department of Geology and Mineral Industries
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Preliminary Geologic Map of the Uncas 7.5' Quadrangle, Callam and Jefferson Counties, Washington
These are the digital files used to create the map in USGS OFR 99-421. The 1:24,000 scale map shows the bedrock and surficial deposts of the Uncas 7.5' quadrangle, Clallam and Jefferson counties, Washington. Digital files include ARC/Info coverages in export format of geology, and strike and dip information.
Haeussler, Peter J.; Yount, Jim C.; Wells, Ray E.
Preliminary Geologic Map of the Uncas 7.5' Quadrangle, Callam and Jefferson Counties, Washington; 1999; OFR; 99-421; Haeussler, Peter J.; Yount, Jim C.; Wells, Ray E.
Puget Sound aeromagnetic maps and data
Blakely, Richard J.; Wells, Ray E.; Weaver, Craig S.
Puget Sound aeromagnetic maps and data; 1999; OFR; 99-514; Blakely, Richard J.; Wells, Ray E.; Weaver, Craig S.
Geologic processes of accretion in the Cascadia subduction zone west of Washington State
The continental margin west of Oregon and Washington undergoes a northward transition in morphology, from a relatively narrow, steep slope west of Oregon to a broad, midslope terrace off Washington. Multichannel seismic (MCS) reflection data collected over the accretionary complex show that the morphologic transition is accompanied by significant...
Fisher, M.A.; Flueh, E.R.; Scholl, D. W.; Parsons, T.; Wells, R.E.; Tréhu, A.; ten Brink, Uri S.; Weaver, C.S.
Geologic processes of accretion in the Cascadia subduction zone west of Washington State; 1999; Article; Journal; Journal of Geodynamics; Fisher, M. A.; Flueh, E. R.; Scholl, D. W.; Parsons, T.; Wells, R. E.; Trehu, A.; Ten, Brink, U.; Weaver, C. S.
Three-dimensional velocity structure of Siletzia and other accreted terranes in the Cascadia forearc of Washington
Eocene mafic crust with high seismic velocities underlies much of the Oregon and Washington forearc and acts as a backstop for accretion of marine sedimentary rocks from the obliquely subducting Juan de Fuca slab. Arc-parallel migration of relatively strong blocks of this terrane, known as Siletzia, focuses upper crustal deformation along block...
Parsons, T.; Wells, R.E.; Fisher, M.A.; Flueh, E.; ten Brink, Uri S.
Attribution: Woods Hole Coastal and Marine Science Center
Three-dimensional velocity structure of Siletzia and other accreted terranes in the Cascadia forearc of Washington; 1999; Article; Journal; Journal of Geophysical Research B: Solid Earth; Parsons, T.; Wells, R. E.; Fisher, M. A.; Flueh, E.; Ten, Brink, U. S.
Scenic drive landslide of January-March 1998, La Honda, San Mateo County, California
The small rural town of La Honda, Calif., is an unincorporated region of San Mateo County situated in the Santa Cruz Mountains in the western part of the San Francisco peninsula. Much of the town is underlain by a previously recognized ancient landslide complex. The ancient slide complex covers about 1.0 to 1.25 km2, parts of which have been...
Jayko, Angela S.; Rymer, Michael J.; Prentice, Carol S.; Wilson, Ray C.; Wells, Ray E.
Attribution: Natural Hazards, Geologic Hazards Science Center, Natural Hazards, Landslide Hazards, United States of America
Scenic drive landslide of January-March 1998, La Honda, San Mateo County, California; 1998; OFR; 98-229; Jayko, Angela S.; Rymer, Michael J.; Prentice, Carol S.; Wilson, Ray C.; Wells, Ray E.
A new view into the Cascadia subduction zone and volcanic arc: Implications for earthquake hazards along the Washington margin
In light of suggestions that the Cascadia subduction margin may pose a significant seismic hazard for the highly populated Pacific Northwest region of the United States, the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS), the Research Center for Marine Geosciences (GEOMAR), and university collaborators collected and interpreted a 530-km-long wide-angle onshore-...
Parsons, T.; Trehu, A.M.; Luetgert, J.H.; Miller, K.; Kilbride, F.; Wells, R.E.; Fisher, M.A.; Flueh, E.; ten Brink, Uri S.; Christensen, N.I.
A new view into the Cascadia subduction zone and volcanic arc: Implications for earthquake hazards along the Washington margin; 1998; Article; Journal; Geology; Parsons, T.; Trehu, A. M.; Luetgert, J. H.; Miller, K.; Kilbride, F.; Wells, R. E.; Fisher, M. A.; Flueh, E.; Ten, Brink, U. S.; Christensen, N. I.
Fore-arc migration in Cascadia and its neotectonic significance
Neogene deformation, paleomagnetic rotations, and sparse geodetic data suggest the Cascadia fore arc is migrating northward along the coast and breaking up into large rotating blocks. Deformation occurs mostly around the margins of a large, relatively aseismic Oregon coastal block composed of thick, accreted seamount crust. This 400 km long block...
Wells, R.E.
Fore-arc migration in Cascadia and its neotectonic significance; 1998; Article; Journal; Geology; Wells, R. E.
Gravity anomalies, Quaternary vents, and Quaternary faults in the southern Cascade Range, Oregon and California: Implications for arc and backarc evolution
Isostatic residual gravity anomalies in the southern Cascade Range of northern California and southern Oregon are spatially correlated with broad zones of Quaternary magmatism as reflected by the total volume of Quaternary volcanic products, the distribution of Quaternary vents, and the anomalously low teleseismic P wave velocities in the upper 30...
Blakely, R.J.; Christiansen, R.L.; Guffanti, M.; Wells, R.E.; Donnelly-Nolan, J. M.; Muffler, L.J. Patrick; Clynne, M.A.; Smith, James G.
Gravity anomalies, Quaternary vents, and Quaternary faults in the southern Cascade Range, Oregon and California: Implications for arc and backarc evolution; 1997; Article; Journal; Journal of Geophysical Research B: Solid Earth; Blakely, R. J.; Christiansen, R. L.; Guffanti, M.; Wells, R. E.; Donnelly-Nolan, J. M.; Patrick, Muffler, L. J.; Clynne, M. A.; Smith, J. G.
Assessing earthquake hazards and reducing risk in the Pacific Northwest; Volume I
Rogers, Albert M.; Walsh, Timothy J.; Kockleman, William J.; Priest, George R.
Assessing earthquake hazards and reducing risk in the Pacific Northwest; Volume I; 1996; PP; 1560; edited by Rogers, Albert M.; Walsh, Timothy J.; Kockleman, William J.; Priest, George R.
Airborne hunt for faults in the Portland-Vancouver area
Geologic hazards in the Portland-Vancouver area include faults entirely hidden by river sediments, vegetation, and urban development. A recent aerial geophysical survey revealed patterns in the Earth's magnetic field that confirm the existence of a previously suspected fault running through Portland. It also indicated that this fault may pose a...
Blakely, Richard J.; Wells, Ray E.; Yelin, Thomas S.; Stauffer, Peter H.; Hendley, James W.
Attribution: , Earthquake Science Center, Natural Hazards, Earthquake Hazards
Blakely, R.J., Wells, R.E., Yelin, T.S., Stauffer, P.H., and Hendley, J.W., II, Airborne hunt for faults in the Portland-Vancouver area: U.S. Geological Survey Fact Sheet 105–96, 2 p. (Available at https://pubs.usgs.gov/fs/1996/0105/.)
Geologic map of the Tillamook Highlands, northwest Oregon Coast Range; a digital database
Wells, Ray E.; Snavely, Parke D.; MacLeod, Norman S.; Kelley, Michael M.; Parker, Michael J.; Fenton, Johanna S.; Felger, Tracey J.
Geologic map of the Tillamook Highlands, northwest Oregon Coast Range; a digital database; 1995; OFR; 95-670; Wells, Ray E.; Snavely, Parke D., Jr.; Macleod, Norman S.; Kelley, Michael M.; Parker, Michael J.; Fenton, Johanna S.; Felger, Tracey J.
Tectonic setting of the Portland-Vancouver area, Oregon and Washington: constraints from low-altitude aeromagnetic data
Seismic activity in the Portland-Vancouver metropolitan area may be associated with various mapped faults that locally offset volcanic basement of Eocene age and younger. This volcanic basement is concealed in most places by young deposits, vegetation, and urban development. The US Geological Survey conducted an aeromagnetic survey in September...
Blakely, R.J.; Wells, R.E.; Yelin, T.S.; Madin, I.P.; Beeson, M.H.
Tectonic setting of the Portland-Vancouver area, Oregon and Washington: constraints from low-altitude aeromagnetic data; 1995; Article; Journal; Geological Society of America Bulletin; Blakely, R. J.; Wells, R. E.; Yelin, T. S.; Madin, I. P.; Beeson, M. H.
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Women’s Financial Struggles Go Beyond Just Pay Gap
Survey: Day-to-day living, long-term saving more challenging for women than men
Tamara E. Holmes - May 10, 2019
Much attention has been given to the fact that, on average, women make less money than men. However, a new survey shows women’s financial challenges go way beyond pay equality, as they trail behind men in several key indicators.
Employee financial platform Salary Finance worked with a Yale researcher to survey more than 10,000 U.S. employees about their money concerns. Though survey respondents represented 26 different industries, women, overall, reported average annual earnings of $58,027—significantly less than the $79,517 in average yearly earnings reported by men.
With less money to work with, women are more likely than men to have trouble managing their daily living expenses. For example, 34% of women are likely to run out of cash before payday, compared to 25% of men. If household emergencies crop up, women are less able to handle them since 41% of women said they have less than $500 in the bank, compared to 18% of men.
Saving for the future is also more difficult for women, the survey found. In fact, 63% of women said they don’t make enough money to save regularly compared to 51% of men. With so many women believing they can’t afford to save, it’s not surprising that nearly 70% of women think they don’t have enough for retirement. Among men, only 50% feel unprepared for retirement.
Making matters worse, women tend to have higher rates of student and medical debt than men, so in many cases, women are trying to dig themselves out of a larger hole, the survey found. Yet when it comes to new loan prospects, women are a third more likely than men to have their applications rejected.
Many women also face financial implications due to motherhood. Of the 63% of female workers surveyed who had taken maternity leave at some point, 59% said it affected their ability to pay their bills, and 53% said they incurred additional debt while caring for their newborn.
Financial knowledge is another area in which women seem to lag behind men, with 66% of women respondents saying they understood how a 401(k) plan works, compared to 76% of men. Women were also less likely to have a 401(k) plan in the first place, with 56% having an account against 62% of the men surveyed.
As women struggle to get ahead financially, more than half (56%) reported being stressed about money, while only 41% of men felt that way. Yet women are taking whatever measures they can to improve their plight. In fact, 37% of women said they would choose to save their money rather than spend it, compared to 32% of men.
When it comes to finances, knowledge is power. While women often have a steeper financial mountain to climb, there are steps women can take to improve their odds of succeeding.
One proactive step is researching where the gender pay gap is shrinking the fastest. Although moving house isn’t always a realistic option, women who can do so easily might earn more money by relocating. Likewise, women should educate themselves about savings and investment vehicles such as 401(k) plans so they can make the most of the money they do earn.
Tamara E. Holmes
Tamara E. Holmes is a Washington, DC-based writer who covers personal finance, entrepreneurship and careers.
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US wins 4th World Cup title, 2nd in a row, beats Dutch 2-0
US fans cheer on Women's World Cup team in victory over Netherlands
By ANNE M. PETERSON | July 7, 2019 at 11:47 AM CDT - Updated July 8 at 10:29 AM
LYON, France (AP) — The United States won its record fourth Women’s World Cup title and second in a row, beating the Netherlands 2-0 Sunday night when Megan Rapinoe converted a penalty kick in the second half and Rose Lavelle added a goal.
Rapinoe, the pink-haired U.S. captain who grabbed world-wide attention on and off the field, scored in the 61st minute after a video review determined Stefanie van der Gragt had fouled Alex Morgan with a kick to the shoulder in the penalty area.
W ⭐️ O ⭐️ R ⭐️L ⭐️ D
C H A M P I O N S
#OneNationOneTeam pic.twitter.com/6JMJRTJ69b
— U.S. Soccer WNT (@USWNT) July 7, 2019
Two days past her 34th birthday, Rapinoe slotted the ball past goalkeeper Sari van Veenendaal for her 50th international goal, her sixth of the tournament to win the Golden Ball as scoring leader. The oldest player to score in a Women's World Cup final, she struck a familiar victorious pose with arms outstretched.
Lavelle, at 24 the team's up-and-coming star, added a goal on an 18-foot left-footed shot in the 69th after a solo run up the center of the field.
Fans, many dressed in red, white and blue, chanted "Equal Pay!" at the final whistle, a reminder players sued the U.S. Soccer Federation in March claiming gender discrimination.
Rapinoe drew the ire of U.S. President Donald Trump during the tournament by saying she and teammates would refuse to visit the White House, part of the team's wider push for gender equity. New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio needed just a few seconds after the final whistle to invite the team to a ticker-tape parade up the Canyon on Heroes in Manhattan on Wednesday.
The Americans never trailed in the tournament and set records with 26 goals and a 12-game World Cup winning streak dating to 2015. U.S. coach Jill Ellis became the first coach to lead a team to two Women's World Cup titles, and the U.S. joined Germany in 2003 and 2007 as the only repeat champions.
With confidence and brashness that some called even arrogant — triggering a backlash that the angry response was sexist — this American team established a standard of excellence that will be a goal for other U.S. teams and the rest of the world to match. Former American players joined the current generation on the field for the postgame celebration.
More AP soccer: https://apnews.com/apf-Soccer and https://twitter.com/AP_Sports
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Nineteenth Century Costume and Fashion
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MUSTAPHA KEMAL AND THE MODERNIZATION OF TURKEY
Reformist elements in Istanbul, to be sure, had tried to resist the decline. The first efforts had taken place in the eighteenth century, when Westernizing forces, concerned at the shrinkage of the empire, had tried to modernize the army. One energetic sultan, Selim III (r. 1789–1807), tried to establish a “new order” that would streamline both the civilian and military bureaucracies, but janissary forces (the emperor’s private guard originally recruited from among Christian subjects in the Balkans), alarmed at the potential loss of their power, revolted and brought the experiment to an end. Further efforts during the first half of the nineteenth century were somewhat more successful and resulted in the removal of the janissaries from power and the institution of a series of bureaucratic, military, and educational reforms. New roads were built, the power of local landlords was reduced, and an Imperial Rescript issued in 1856 granted equal rights to all subjects of the empire, whatever their religious preference. In the 1870s, a new generation of reformers seized power in Istanbul and pushed through a constitution aimed at forming a legislative assembly that would represent all the peoples in the state. But the sultan they placed on the throne, Abdulhamid (r. 1876 –1909), suspended the new charter and attempted to rule by traditional authoritarian means. By the end of the nineteenth century, the defunct 1876 constitution had become a symbol of change for reformist elements, now grouped together under the common name Young Turks. In 1908, Young Turk elements forced the sultan to restore the constitution, and he was removed from power the following year. But the Young Turks had appeared at a moment of extreme fragility for the empire. Internal rebellions, com- bined with Austrian annexations of Ottoman territories in the Balkans, undermined support for the new government and provoked the army to step in. With most minorities from the old empire now removed from Istanbul’s authority, many ethnic Turks began to embrace a new concept of a Turkish state based on all residents of Turkish nationality. The final blow to the old empire came inWorldWar I, when the Ottoman government chose the wrong side during the war and lost much of its territory in the peace settlement (see Chapter 4). As the tottering empire began to fall apart, the Greeks won Allied approval to seize the western parts of the Anatolian peninsula for their dream of re-creating the substance of the old Byzantine Empire. The impending collapse energized key elements in Turkey under the leadership of war hero Colonel Mustapha Kemal (1881–1938), who had commanded Turkish forces in their heroic defense of the Dardanelles against a British invasion during World War I. Now he resigned from the army and convoked a national congress that called for the creation of an elected government and the preservation of the remaining territories of the old empire in the new republic of Turkey. Establishing his new capital at Ankara, Kemal’s forces drove the Greeks from the Anatolian peninsula and persuaded the British to agree to a new treaty. In 1923, the last of the Ottoman sultans fled the country, which was now declared a Turkish republic. The Ottoman Empire had finally come to an end. During the next few years, President Mustapha Kemal (now popularly known as Atatürk, or “Father Turk”) attempted to transform Turkey into a modern secular republic. The trappings of a democratic system were put in place, centered on the elected Grand National Assembly, but the president was relatively intolerant of opposition and harshly suppressed critics of his rule. Turkish nationalism was emphasized, and the Turkish language, now written in the Roman alphabet, was shorn of many of its Arabic elements. Popular education was emphasized, old aristocratic titles like pasha and bey were abolished, and all Turkish citizens were given family names in the European style. Atatürk also took steps to modernize the economy, overseeing the establishment of a light industrial sector producing textiles, glass, paper, and cement and instituting a fiveyear plan on the Soviet model to provide for state direction over the economy. Atatürk was no admirer of Soviet communism, however, and the Turkish economy can be better described as a form of state capitalism. He also encouraged the modernization of the agricultural sector through the establishment of training institutions and model farms, but such reforms had relatively little effect on the nation’s predominantly conservative peasantry. Perhaps the most significant aspect of Atatürk’s reform program was his attempt to limit the power of the Islamic religion and transform Turkey into a secular state. The caliphate (according to which the Ottoman sultan was recognized as the temporal leader of the global Islamic community) was formally abolished in 1924, and the Shari’a (Islamic law) was replaced by a revised version of the Swiss law code. The fez (the brimless cap worn by Turkish Muslims) was abolished as a form of headdress, and women were discouraged from wearing the veil in the traditional Islamic custom. Women received the right to vote in 1934 and were legally guaranteed equal rights with men in all aspects of marriage and inheritance. Education and the professions were now open to citizens of both sexes, and some women even began to take part in politics. All citizens were given the right to convert to another religion at will. The legacy of Mustapha Kemal Atatürk was enormous. Although not all of his reforms were widely accepted in practice, especially by devout Muslims, most of the changes that he introduced were retained after his death in 1938. In virtually every respect, the Turkish republic was the product of his determined efforts to create a modern nation, a Turkish version of the “revolution from above” in Meiji Japan.
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James Polchin
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Writings & Interviews
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Patricia Hampl on F. Scott Fitzgerald's Essays from the Edge
March 09, 2012 by James Polchin in author, Crack-Up, Creative Practices, creativity, Essay, essayist, Essays from the Edge, F- Scott Fitzgerald, Intellect, literary criticism, literary journal, Patricia Hampl, The American Scholar, writer
Hampl explores the lesser known autobiographical essays of the novelist @ The American Scholar. The first readers to comment on F. Scott Fitzgerald’s “Crack-Up” essays made no pretense to literary criticism. They just wanted to dish—and diss. The dismay of old or former or soon-to-be-former friends came at Fitzgerald fast and furious, along with smack-downs from those critics who bothered to remark on the essays as they appeared in three successive issues of Esquire, in February, March, and April 1936.
John Dos Passos was particularly exercised. “Christ, man,” he wrote to Fitzgerald in October 1936. “How do you find time in the middle of the general conflagration to worry about all that stuff?” The “general conflagration,” presumably, was the Great Depression, but also National Socialism and fascism in Germany and Italy, and the Spanish Civil War, which had ignited in July. “We’re living in one of the damnedest tragic moments in history,” Dos Passos steams on. “If you want to go to pieces I think it’s absolutely OK but I think you ought to write a first-rate novel about it (and you probably will) instead of spilling it in little pieces for Arnold Gingrich,” the editor of Esquire, who had commissioned the essays.
By the standards of our own über-autobiographical age, with its appetite for revelation, its faith in the “redemptive” payoff of telling all, Fitzgerald’s essays seem decorously vague, cloaked in metaphor rather than disclosure. Though he describes his psychological and spiritual breakdown, his utter collapse, often in a wry, self-deprecating style, he doesn’t spill many autobiographical beans. We don’t learn of his despair over his wife’s mental illness. He doesn’t divulge his bouts with drinking, his imprudent affair with a married woman, his money worries, his literary woes. Mother, father, those stock figures of personal narrative—never mentioned. The master storyteller isn’t even very narrative, employing drifts of figurative language rather than episodes and scenes, feinting and lunging (mostly feinting) his way through his portrait of a breakdown that left him “cracked like an old plate.”
That Fitzgerald had published these personal essays in a glossy magazine seemed to vex his friends (Dos Passos, Ernest Hemingway, Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings, Sara Murphy, the unsigned New Yorker “Talk of the Town” writer—the list goes on) as much as the sentiments themselves. Maxwell Perkins and Harold Ober, Fitzgerald’s loyal editor and literary agent, were still backing away from the essays as late as 1941, a year after the writer’s death, when Edmund Wilson was shopping around a posthumous collection of his old friend’s incidental nonfiction that included the “Crack-Up” pieces. Wilson admitted to Perkins that he, too, had “hated” the essays when he first read them in Esquire. But “if you read The Crack-Up through,” he argued, “you realize that it is not a discreditable confession but an account of a kind of crisis that many men of Scott’s generation have gone through, and that in the end he sees a way to live by application to his work.”
Perkins was unpersuaded. He declined Wilson’s proposal to Scribners, the publisher until then of all Fitzgerald’s books. In a sense, it was the third time Perkins had rejected the book. He had earlier turned down Fitzgerald’s idea for a collection of autobiographical pieces. Fitzgerald came back to him in March 1936. “I thought you might reconsider the subject,” he writes, pointing out that “the interest in this Esquire series has been so big” that such autobiographical pieces might well fetch a large readership. The suggestion was reasonable, even canny; despite the scoldings and derision from the literary sector, Fitzgerald had received an astonishing number of letters from readers captivated by his willingness to reveal his wounds—which were also their wounds, the same boom-to-bust deflation of the individual spirit that the Depression had brought to the national economy and psyche. Though his literary friends tended to butter their censure of the essays with reverence for the great gift of his talent (which he was wasting—their point), the “Crack-Up” pieces were welcomed by ordinary readers.
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March 09, 2012 /James Polchin
autobiography, literature, therapy
author, Crack-Up, Creative Practices, creativity, Essay, essayist, Essays from the Edge, F- Scott Fitzgerald, Intellect, literary criticism, literary journal, Patricia Hampl, The American Scholar, writer
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Mwani Qatar receives ISM Code certification
January 28 2019 07:31 PM
Mwani Qatar receives certification ISM Code
Mwani Qatar said it is among the few companies in the country to have the 'ISM Code certification' from Bureau Veritas
Mwani Qatar has received the 'ISM Code certification' from the French classification authority Bureau Veritas in a step the company said “emphasises the quality” of its marine services.
Mwani Qatar said it is among the few companies in the country that has this international certificate. The certification was presented to Mwani Qatar’s chief officer (Ports Management) Nabil al-Khaldi on Monday.
Al-khaldi said, “We are pleased to have passed the rigorous audit stage and received the certification for the International Management Code for the Safe Operation of Ships and for Pollution Prevention (ISM Code).”
He pointed out that the certificate was a “new addition to the company’s recent accomplishments”, by receiving ISO 9001:2008 for Quality Management System, ISO 14001:2004 for Environmental Management System and OHSAS 18001:2007 for Occupational Health and Safety Management System from Lloyd’s Register Quality Assurance (LRQA).
Al-Khalidi said the “latest achievement represents a qualitative leap not only in terms of enhancing operations and the efficiency of the marine services unit, but also in terms of upgrading the company's competitive capabilities in marine services.”
It also reflects Mwani Qatar's relentless pursuit to secure world-class maritime services for its customers in accordance with the Ministry of Transport and Communications’ Strategic Plan and the objectives of strengthening Qatar’s maritime sector.
He noted that the important achievement was a result of the hard work and efforts of the “highly professional and experienced” team at the Marine Services unit in the company.
The certification confirms Mwani Qatar’s compliance with all mandatory regulations and that codes, guidelines and standards recommended by IMO and others are taken into account.
The Marine Services unit of Mwani Qatar “delivers quality marine services and ancillary quayside services” for vessels calling on Qatar’s ports. It has an advanced fleet comprising some 18 units. These include seven tug boats, seven pilot boats, three mooring boats, a crane barge and a speed boat.
The department offers a wide range of marine services including Aids to Navigation (AtoN), vessel traffic services (VTS), pilotage, harbour towage and mooring as well as diving services.
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Chinese Woman in Mar-a-Lago Mystery Is Indicted for Lying
Jonathan Levin and Michael Smith
Bloomberg• April 12, 2019
(Bloomberg) -- A Chinese woman detained at President Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida was indicted by a federal grand jury in Palm Beach County for unlawful entry and making false statements to a Secret Service agent.
Yujing Zhang was caught at the resort with four mobile phones, a laptop computer, external hard drive and a thumb drive containing suspected malware. Trump was golfing nearby when Zhang was taken into custody.
Nothing in the indictment refers to possible espionage, which is in line with remarks made by prosecutor Rolando Garcia at Zhang’s April 8 detention hearing in West Palm Beach. But Garcia told the judge that the U.S. continued to look into that possibility.
The case has attracted scrutiny of security procedures at Mar-a-Lago, President Trump’s so-called winter White House. The president regularly visits the property and conducts official business there, but it also operates as a private business dependent on traffic from members and special events.
Investigators continue to look into Zhang as part of a broader FBI-led investigation into whether Chinese operatives are targeting Trump and Mar-a-Lago to get information about the administration’s policies regarding China, according to a person familiar with the probe, who asked not to be identified because the inquiry is ongoing. The counterintelligence investigation, which began in December, has expanded since Zhang’s arrest, the person said.
Forensic FBI investigators have been analyzing the malware inside the thumb drive and Zhang’s other electronic devices for any connection to China’s intelligence operations, the person said. Information from some of Zhang’s electronics devices was used to draw up the grand jury indictment, the person said.
Security at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago Club Scrutinized Following Arrest
U.S. prosecutors in Miami opened the counterintelligence investigation after information led investigators to focus on Li Yang, a Florida businesswoman who goes by Cindy, one of the people said. Yang is the former owner of a South Florida massage parlor that was caught up in a prostitution scandal, in which Robert Kraft, owner of the New England Patriots, was charged with solicitation.
Zhang’s lawyer, public defender Robert Adler, said at the April 8 hearing that she had a legitimate reason to be at the property, planning to attend an event that had apparently been scheduled but later canceled.
Zhang “well knew no such event was scheduled at Mar-a-Lago and its grounds," prosecutors said in the indictment.
Adler also denied that Zhang explicitly misrepresented herself. She was apparently allowed into the club in part because her name was the same as that of a club member. But Adler said any inference that she was related to the other Zhang could have arisen from a misunderstanding. Zhang is a native Mandarin speaker, and hers is a very common name in China, the lawyer said.
The balance of Zhang’s detention hearing and her arraignment are scheduled for Monday in federal court in West Palm Beach.
Separately, the White House announced April 8 that Secret Service director Randolph Alles would leave the administration as part of a shakeup at the Department of Homeland Security.
At a hearing Friday, prosecutor Greg Kridos said the investigation of the massage parlor started as a probe of suspected human trafficking but there is no evidence to support that claim now. No one in the case will be charged with human trafficking, he said.
Kridos made the comment at a hearing in which media organizations sought the release of video showing Kraft at the massage parlor. A judge didn’t immediately rule on that request.
The case is U.S. v. Zhang, 19-cr-80056, U.S. District Court, Southern District of Florida (Palm Beach).
(Updates with Secret Service director leaving. Earlier version of this story corrected to remove reference to arrest in seventh paragraph.)
--With assistance from Chris Strohm.
To contact the reporters on this story: Jonathan Levin in Miami at jlevin20@bloomberg.net;Michael Smith in Miami at mssmith@bloomberg.net
To contact the editors responsible for this story: Michael J. Moore at mmoore55@bloomberg.net, Joe Schneider, Heather Smith
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Chamber welcomes new executive director
By WHITNEY WHITE-ASHLEYStaff Writer
The Glen Rose/Somervell Chamber of Commerce named Don Lanham as the new executive director. Lanham will take the helm July 6.
Lanham has worked with business, government and community projects since 1977. His background is in consultant roles with human service organizations, government and corporations in Australia, United States and Germany.
For more than 30 years, he has provided business development solutions, marketing and conceptual planning and has a successful history of grant writing and providing project management support.
Lanham�s vocational pursuits are founded in the sport of baseball. He was a baseball coach and player for more than 30 years. He coached numerous representative teams from Australia and was the director of the Australian Baseball Federation and the Sydney Olympic Ambassador for baseball in 2000.
Lanham returned to Texas in 2001 and has worked as a membership coordinator for Lifestar in Glen Rose. He continues to serve as a little league, high school and college umpire.
Lanham said he is looking forward to facilitating an inclusive environment were everyone has input in the future direction of the community.
�I�m looking forward to getting more involved with the community,� Lanham said. �I�ve been doing this a long time and enjoy working with people. Glen Rose is such a special place and I�m just excited to be a part of it.�
Lanham�s �better half� Lynda Mckinnon has lived and worked in Glen Rose for more than 25 years and recently retired from GRISD.
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The Mayor of London has appointed a world-class team of experts to develop the plans that will address the nation’s aviation crisis. He has made it very clear that he wishes to see the speediest possible resolution to the debate on where to build a multi runway hub airport, so that the British economy is given the best chance to prosper in the face of huge competition from its global rivals
The Mayor of London, Boris Johnson, said: “It is absolutely imperative that work to progress a new hub airport in the southeast is completed as soon as possible. The Government has set a timetable that dawdles when dash should be the order of the day. That is why I have assembled a mighty team of experts who I have tasked with delivering a fulsome examination of the most realistic solutions to our aviation crisis in the shortest time possible, which I look forward to sharing with the Government.”
Zaha Hadid said: “This work is essential to deliver the most integrated transport solutions for London and the UK. It will enable London to maintain its position as one of the world’s most important economic, commercial and cultural centres; outlining the city’s future growth and development which has always been founded on global connectivity. ”
Mike Pearson, UK director of airports, Atkins said: “This project is not purely about the creation of a new hub airport, it’s about forming the foundations for London’s future development and reaffirming the UK’s position as a key international centre. It will fundamentally shift the debate on UK aviation once and for all, providing both a convincing and compelling case for how international air connectivity is critical to underpinning the UK economy, as well as driving wider regeneration.”
http://www.thesundaytimes.co.uk/sto/news/uk_news/National/article1211287.ece
http://www.london.gov.uk/media/press_releases_mayoral/mayor-announces-world-class-team-develop-hub-airport-plans-0
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Home VIRAL Dumped Girlfriend Dumps Her Boyfriend’s Car In Swimming Pool (Photos)
Dumped Girlfriend Dumps Her Boyfriend’s Car In Swimming Pool (Photos)
For breaking up with her rather than fund her marketing business venture, a jilted girlfriend and model identified as Kristina Kuchma, reportedly drove her ex-boyfriend’s car into a garden pool to get revenge.
Her boyfriend, Guy Gentile, who came home to see his Mercedes S400 hybrid in the pool, told New York Post:
“My heart dropped because of [fears she was inside]. “I didn’t care about the car at that moment. “But after I realised she wasn’t in it, then I start to get pissed off that she would pull something like this after everything I’ve done for her.
“I dumped her. She dumped my car.”
Gentile, said their last dinner together was supposed to be a casual one with a friend — until she dropped a bomb on him. He said: “She looks at me and says, ‘I have something to tell you. I’m pregnant’.”
However after Gentile agreed to support the child, she said: “I’m not pregnant with a kid – I’m pregnant with an idea”, as she then tells him about a marketing business she hoped he would help fund with $50,000 gift.
Gentile had already bought her a Gucci bag, a new iPhone, and new Beats headphones as a birthday gift — but this request “blurred the lines” between business and romance, he said. He decided then to end their year-and-a-half-long relationship.
She reportedly then stormed off, taking the keys to his £41,000 ride so she could deliver some payback, he said.
It took more than four hours to get the car out of the pool, Gentile said.
READ Nigerian Man Buys Girlfriend Brand New Car After She Got Involved In An Accident And Damaged Her Old One
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HFF named to market for sale Riverside Plaza in Riverside, CA
LOS ANGELES, CA – HFF announced that it has been named to market for sale Riverside Plaza (top left photo), a 475,211-square-foot dual-grocery/drug and entertainment-anchored center in Riverside, California.
HFF is marketing the property on behalf of the seller, The Westminster Funds. The property is a core-plus opportunity and is listed for sale without an asking price and will be sold free and clear of debt.
Riverside Plaza is situated on nearly 33 acres at 3545 Central Avenue adjacent to State Highway 91 in Riverside.
The property is a landmark in the region and was renovated in 2004 and is approximately 93 percent leased to tenants including Von’s (not included in the collateral), Trader Joes, CVS Pharmacy, Regal Cinemas, Stadium 16, Forever 21, El Torito California Pizza Kitchen, Panera Bread and many more national tenants.
The shopping center offers investors a large upside opportunity in below market leases and future development opportunity, which compliments the already existing strong center.
The HFF investment sales team representing the seller is led by managing director Bryan Ley, senior managing director Ryan Gallagher (middle right photo) and director John Crump (lower left photo).
The Westminster Funds are diversified real estate investment partnerships for private investors and their foundations.
BRYAN LEY RYAN GALLAGHER
CA Lic. #01458927 Ca Lic. #01269918
HFF Managing Director HFF Senior Managing Director
bley@hfflp.com rgallagher@hfflp.com
KRISTEN MURPHY
HFF Associate Director, Marketing
Labels: CA 2-18-12, Holliday Fenoglio Fowler - Riverside, Riverside Plaza
Banner Apartments LLC Names John Nikolich Executive Vice President – Capital Markets and Investor Relations
NORTHBROOK, IL – Banner Apartments, LLC announced today that it has named John Nikolich as Executive Vice President - Capital Markets & Investor Relations.
Prior to joining Banner Apartments, Mr. Nikolich was the Managing Director & Founder of Flint Creek Partners, LLC, a boutique real estate investment bank where he provided investment banking and financial advisory services to real estate companies.
Mr. Nikolich has over 20 years of experience in the real estate industry and has raised more than $6,000,000,000 for private and public real estate companies. He began his institutional real estate career in the Investment Management Division of Jones Lang LaSalle in 1992.
Following Jones Lang LaSalle, Mr. Nikolich joined the Real Estate Investment Banking group at Wells Fargo Securities (formerly known as EVEREN Securities, Inc.), where he raised capital for publicly traded real estate investment trusts (REITs) as well as for leading private real estate operating companies. He spent the first five years of his career at Accenture, evaluating, recommending and implementing financial solutions for an international clientele.
“We are very pleased to have John join Banner.” said Milton Pinsky (top right photo), Chief Executive Office of Banner Apartments. “The depth of his experience in raising capital, coupled with the strength of his reputation will be a great compliment to our company.”
“Banner’s impressive track record and approach to creating value for their investors, combined with strong fundamentals in the multi-family industry, made this a unique opportunity. I’m looking forward to joining Banner’s team and helping the Company execute its growth strategy.” said Mr. Nikolich.
Mr. Nikolich holds an M.B.A. in Finance & Marketing from the Booth School of Business at The University of Chicago and a B.A. in Economics from Northwestern University.
Banner Apartments, LLC is a real estate investment management business specializing in the ownership, development and management of multi-family properties. Banner was founded in 1989 and currently has ownership interests in and manages over 5,890 apartment units. In addition, the principals of Banner formed a 501(c)(3) corporation for philanthropic reasons which has acquired to date an additional 439 affordable apartments in Illinois and Florida. Banner currently employs 208 team members.
More information is available at the company’s website: www.BannerApartments.com.
Contact: Douglas S. Imber, 773.305.4902
Labels: Banner Apartments LLC 2-18-12
HFF named to market for sale Riverside Plaza in Ri...
Banner Apartments LLC Names John Nikolich Executiv...
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Keith Bauer Joins Marcus & Millichap Capital Corp. as Director in Washington, DC
Keith Bauer
WASHINGTON, DC– Marcus & Millichap Capital Corporation (MMCC) has hired Keith Bauer as a director in the firm’s Washington, D.C. office, according to William E. Hughes, senior vice president and managing director of MMCC.
In his new position, Bauer will work with the firm’s industry-leading National Hospitality Group (NHG) in arranging debt and equity financing for hotels and golf resorts. He has extensive experience in all aspects of loan origination including income analysis, credit analysis, debt structuring, pricing strategy, transaction negotiation and closing and due diligence review.
“Keith brings more than 15 years of experience to MMCC,” says Hughes. “His proven ability to develop new business will be a valued asset, and his deep familiarity with mortgage banking, particularly in the hospitality industry where he has originated more than $450 million in loans, will raise MMCC’s D.C. and Maryland client service to an even higher level.”
Bauer joins MMCC with a broad background of executive experience in commercial real estate finance. Notably, he spent more than nine years in the hospitality industry division of Capmark Finance—formerly GMAC Commercial Mortgage—where he participated in more than $1.5 billion in closed loans.
Gregory LaBerge
During his tenure at Capmark, Bauer analyzed in excess of $4 billion in hospitality transactions throughout the United States, ranging from acquisition and/or light renovation funding to ground-up development loans.
“Our goal is to provide our clients with the most robust and comprehensive service offering in the industry,” adds Greg LaBerge, National Director of Marcus & Millichap’s National Hospitality Group. “Adding Keith to the team underscores that commitment.”
Bauer graduated from the University of Baltimore with a Bachelor of Science in business administration with concentrations in finance and management and a Master of Business Administration with a specialization in innovation, technology and operations.
Marcus & Millichap Capital Corp.
FedEx Distribution Facility Sale in South Windsor, CT Brings $32.2 Million
FedEx Distribution Facility, South Windsor, CT
SOUTH WINDSOR, CT – Marcus & Millichap Real Estate Investment Services, the nation’s largest real estate investment services firm, has arranged the sale of a 224,061-square foot FedEx distribution facility in South Windsor, Conn. The $32,200,000 sales price equates to $144 per square foot.
Laurie Ann Drinkwater
Laurie Ann “L.A.” Drinkwater, CCIM, an associate vice president investments in Marcus & Millichap’s New Haven office, and Seth Richard, a director of the firm’s National Retail Group in Manhattan, represented the buyer, a regional private investor.
Seth Richard
“The property is located 10 miles from downtown Hartford near interstates 91 and 84,” says Drinkwater. “This location is ideal for FedEx operations and bodes well for long-term tenancy.”
“FedEx made a capital investment in the material handling systems in the facility in excess of $20 million,” adds Richard. “The improvements, coupled with attractive increases in the rental stream, contributed to making this an excellent investment for our client.”
The facility was built in 2012 on 60.8 acres at 456 Sullivan Ave. in South Windsor. The double-net lease expires in 2027.
J.D. Parker,
Richard Kovalcheck Joins Marcus & Millichap Capital Corp. as an Associate Director in San Diego, CA
Richard Kovalcheck
SAN DIEGO, CA – Marcus & Millichap Capital Corporation (MMCC) has named Richard Kovalcheck as an associate director in the firm’s San Diego office, according to William E. Hughes, senior vice president and managing director of MMCC.
In his new position, Kovalcheck will be responsible for sourcing, underwriting, and obtaining financing for all asset classes of commercial real estate nationwide.
“Richard has a solid background in commercial real estate finance and strategy,” says Hughes. “His experience, particularly with SBA programs, will be of great value to our clients in San Diego, throughout California and beyond.”
Prior to joining MMCC, Kovalcheck worked with Plaza Bank in San Diego, where he focused on sourcing and financing owner-user commercial real estate.
He was also an acquisition analyst with Sovereign Capital Management in San Diego, focusing on properties to be placed in single-tenant asset 1031 exchanges, and value-add investor funds. He also served as a loan originator with The Mortgage Group Inc. in Nashville, Tenn.
Kovalcheck earned a Bachelor of Science degree in business administration from the University of Arizona. He received his MBA in finance and strategy from Vanderbilt University’s Owen Graduate School of Business.
HFF secures $50 million in refinancing for three Central Florida office properties
Michael Weinberg
ORLANDO, FL –HFF announced it has secured $50 million in refinancing for three office properties totaling more than 780,000 square feet in Central Florida. These properties include Quorum Center and Oakridge Office Park in Orlando and 850 Trafalgar in Maitland.
HFF worked exclusively on behalf of the borrower, a joint venture between The Praedium Group and Tower Realty Partners, Inc., to secure the loans in two separate transactions.
Elliott Throne
The10-year, fixed-rate loans for Quorum Center and 850 Trafalgar were placed with UBS Real Estate Finance Group. The 10-year, fixed-rate loan for Oakridge Office Park was placed with Morgan Stanley. All three non-recourse, securitized loans were priced in the mid four percent range.
The HFF team representing the borrower was led by Michael Weinberg, a director in HFF’s Orlando office, along with directors Elliott Throne and Chris Drew and senior real estate analyst Jorge Portela from HFF’s Miami office.
Chris Drew
The Praedium Group is a privately-held real estate investment firm focusing on under-performing and under-valued assets throughout the United States.
The Praedium Group was formed in 1991 and since inception has completed more than 350 transactions representing $9.1 billion of capital, including 72,000 multifamily units and 42 million square feet of commercial space.
During the past 21 years, The Praedium Group has sponsored a series of seven private equity funds as well as several separate investment vehicles.
Cliff Stein
The commingled funds and separate accounts sponsored by The Praedium Group have attracted investors that include public and corporate pension funds, financial institutions, insurance companies, foundations and endowments. For more information, please visit www.praediumgroup.com.
Tower Realty Partners is an Orlando-based commercial real estate owner focusing on value-added opportunities throughout Florida. Tower was formed in 1987 by Cliff Stein and Reid Berman.
Reid Berman
Since its inception, Tower has acquired more than $1 billion of office properties. Currently, Tower’s assets consist of more than 3.5 million square feet of office property throughout Florida. www.towerrealtypartners.com.
Kristen M. Murphy
tel 713.852.3500 | cel 617.543.4873 | fax 713.527.8725 | www.hfflp.com
HFF West Coast Leadership Announcements
Daniel M. Cashdan
LOS ANGELES, CA – HFF experienced significant growth on the West Coast in 2012 and in response to this growth the firm has made changes to its West Coast leadership team.
Dan Cashdan, a senior managing director in HFF’s Los Angeles office, has assumed the role of co-head of HFF’s Global Capital Initiative with a specific focus on Asian capital markets. He will continue to co-lead the firm’s equity placement and HFF Securities business lines with senior managing director Doug Bond.
Kevin MacKenzie
Senior managing director Kevin MacKenzie assumed the role of co-office head alongside senior managing director Paul Brindley in HFF’s Los Angeles office. Together they will oversee the debt, equity placement and investment sales platforms in the Los Angeles office. MacKenzie will continue his role as office head of the debt and equity placement team in Orange County.
Michael Leggett will act as co-office head of HFF’s Portland office, focused on the investment sales platform. Leggett will continue his role as office head of investment sales in San Francisco. MacKenzie will also step into a leadership position in the Portland and Seattle markets, as co-head of the Portland office, managing its debt placement team.
Michael Leggett
“The changes in our leadership on the West Coast is in keeping with our corporate mission, which is to identify leaders of our business, and to put them in positions which appropriately match their skills, aligning interests to significantly grow our presence in a given market and/or business line,” said Mark Gibson, executive managing director and member of HFF’s four-person leadership team.
In 2012, HFF’s West Coast offices closed approximately $6.5 billion in transactions across all platforms and property types, a more than 45 percent increase over 2011.
Mark Gibson
HFF’s West Coast offices debt and equity placement volume grew approximately 30 percent over 2011 to $4.35 billion, and investment sales volume grew nearly 115 percent to $2.1 billion.
Gibson added, “The year over year performance is a significant accomplishment for the teams involved and a testament to the success of HFF in growing its West Coast practice.”
HFF Chicago hires John (Jack) A. Dudick as director in its healthcare practice group
John A. Dudick
CHICAGO, IL – HFF announced that John (Jack) A. Dudick has joined the firm as a director in its Chicago office. Mr. Dudick will be a member of HFF’s national healthcare practice and will focus on healthcare capital markets and investment sale transactions throughout the United States.
Mr. Dudick has more than 15 years of industry experience and joins HFF from Lillibridge Healthcare Services, Inc. where he most recently served as senior vice president of acquisitions and investments.
Matthew Lawton
He began working with Lillibridge in 1999 and since that time has facilitated more than $1 billion of healthcare real estate acquisitions, developments, joint ventures and M&A transactions.
Prior to Lillibridge, Mr. Dudick was a senior consultant at Arthur Anderson. He is a member of the Urban Land Institute’s Healthcare and Life Science Council and holds a bachelor’s degree from the University of Notre Dame.
“Jack will be an instrumental member of HFF’s national healthcare practice as he has more than 15 years of experience working for a national healthcare REIT. He has deep relationships with clients in the healthcare industry and will be an invaluable resource for HFF’s growing national health care practice group,” said Matthew Lawton, executive managing director and co-head of HFF’s Chicago office.
Keith Bauer Joins Marcus & Millichap Capital Corp....
FedEx Distribution Facility Sale in South Windsor,...
Richard Kovalcheck Joins Marcus & Millichap Capita...
HFF secures $50 million in refinancing for three C...
HFF Chicago hires John (Jack) A. Dudick as directo...
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Barry McCabe
Gig Photos
Latest Archive RSS
When to play "Rock Around The Clock"
As some of you may be aware, I'm still writing (just not songs these days). A while back, I had the following story published in "Ireland's Own" magazine. It was a thrill to have it accepted.
One, two, three o’clock, four o’clock rock...Five, six, seven o’clock, eight o’clock rock...
By the time we got to nine, ten, eleven o’clock, twelve o’clock rock, we usually had them on the dance floor. That ol’ Bill Haley & The Comets’ chestnut “Rock Around The Clock” may have been from my parents’ time but it still worked a charm with my generation.
As far back as I can remember I’ve always loved music. At first I just listened to the radio but later I learned to play myself and joined a band. It was so much fun - a dream come true.
We played all around our area and we were lucky enough to become popular. We were a dance band, pure and simple. Every band was back then. Oh, you may have had some groups in Dublin, Cork or Galway that you could sit down and listen to, but not in the country. In the country, people went out to dance.
I learned early on that the test was to get them on the dance floor... a skill that had to be learned. Try too hard, too fast and it backfired on you. Wait too long and you’d lose them. The end result of either of those two mistakes was that they’d sit and look at you for most of the night. So the secret was to play the right song at just the right moment. You’d play several songs as a warm-up; good enough to get their attention, get their feet tapping and build up that need in them to hit the dance floor. Those songs were good but they were throwaways in the bigger game. That’s how I learned to play “Rock Around The Clock” at just the right moment. Ninety-nine times out of a hundred it worked. You knew you had a hard crowd if it didn’t.
As disco became popular and took work away from live bands, that ability to read a crowd stood by me. I’d built up a collection of LP’s and cassettes at the time and one day one of my friends asked me if I’d do the music for his sister’s 21st birthday party. He said: “you can just play records or cassettes. It doesn’t really matter. They’re not a dancing crowd. It’s just to have some music in the background.” I agreed to help him out.
I had all the band equipment, so that part was sorted – speakers, amplifiers, a microphone, etc. I had no intention of wiring up two turntables and bringing all my good records so I transferred what I thought were suitable songs to a bunch of cassettes. I made up a ‘slow dance’ tape, a ‘rock ‘n’ roll’ tape and a couple with new and old chart hits.
I felt they might not take me serious if they could see that I only had a cassette player with me, so I made up a big sign to place in front of it. I painted it in all the colours of the rainbow and wrote UFO in big letters. When asked what it meant, I answered – Ultimate Freak Out! Yeah, I was on my way as a DJ!
The evening was a big success... and I got them dancing. It was that ability to read a crowd and know how to pace them by choosing the right records at the right time. By the end of the night they were shouting for more... and I gave it to them. One comment I received repeatedly after it was over was: “Most of the DJ’s just stand there and play record after record but you spoke to us and made it personal.” I thanked them for their comments but little did they know – I had to talk all the time because I needed to cover myself as I took out one cassette and put in another. I’d have lost them if I left them standing on the dance floor in silence. While one song was playing, I’d use my walkman and line up the next song... and that was the UFO disco in all its splendour and glory!
Word of mouth ensured that I was kept busy doing parties everywhere. I could play AC/DC at a 50th wedding anniversary or Frank Sinatra at a 21st and it was all the same – I’d have them sweating it out on the dance floor for most of the night.
One time I was invited to a private party in Dublin; I had mentioned that I had a bit of equipment and brought it on the night. Of course I ended up doing my full disco show and it was such a success that I did it for several years.
When live music came back in vogue, I moved abroad to play music fulltime with my band. Later I heard that the party where I had DJ’d had decided to hire a professional but it didn’t work out at all. Seemingly, he just stood there and played record after record. I guess he didn’t know how to read a crowd... or when to play “Rock Around The Clock” by Bill Haley & The Comets!!
10 Albums - 2018
America - Original Album Series (a 5-CD package): you probably all remember songs such as 'Horse With No Name" and "Ventura Highway" but the group America was more than just those two songs.Some of their latter albums were produced by George Martin. Here is a track off their "Holiday" album (produced by George) called Lonely People.
Kris & Rita - Full Moon: the Kris & Rita in this case being Kris Kristofferson and Rita Coolidge. I've always liked the sound of their voices together. I think they worked real well as a duo. Here's a track off it called Loving Arms.
Everly Brothers - Sing Great Country Hits & Gone, Gone, Gone: this is two albums on one CD. The first one is self-explanatory. It's the boys singing old country songs such as "Oh Lonesome Me" and "Send Me The Pillow". "Gone, Gone, Gone" is an album that was released in 1965 and here's the title track.
Chase - Chase (on vinyl): was an American jazz-rock band. Their sound compared somewhat to Blood, Sweat & Tears and early Chicago. They had a hit single Get It On in 1971.
Top Of The Pops - 1970-1974: I have great memories of a lot of music from that era (early seventies), so getting a whole bunch of tracks together in a 3-CD package seemed like a good idea/deal. Here's Sweet playing Ballroom Blitz.
Françoise Hardy- The Vogue Years: a French artist who enjoyed a lot of success on the Vogue label between 1962 and 1967. It's what you would expect from the swinging sixties and with a French accent to top it all off. Here's a track off it called Dans Le Monde Entier.
Gregory Alan Isakov - This Empty Northern Hemisphere: a singer-songwriter who was born in South Africa but grew up in the US. Beautiful atmospheric music for when you're in that mood. Worth checking out. Here's a track off it called Dandelion Wine.
Andy Williams - The Real Andy Williams (a 3-CD package): I grew up listening to Andy via his TV show, which was broadcast by the BBC for years and years. A wonderful voice and this is a nice collection of his work (including some Christmas songs). Here's the classic Moon River.
Gordon Lightfoot - Sundown (on vinyl): Gordon has written some wonderful songs over the years and this is a very strong album. I loved the title track Sundown and in fact I used to play on my acoustic guitar when I first starting playing in public.
Chris Norman & Band - Live: this is a recent live recording (in Hamburg, Germany). It's a 2-CD and 1 DVD set... and very reasonably priced. It's a mixture of Smokie hits, solo hits and well-known covers. I've loved Chris' voice since I first heard it via Smokie in 1975. Here's Wild Angels from the DVD.
So there you have it, a selection of the various sounds I've listened to throughout 2018. If you have the time to click on the links and check the artists out then I hope you'll like what you hear. Over the years I've always enjoyed looking through people's record collections. You can tell a lot about a person from their record collection! :-)
Just Plain Folks Awards
Awards and winning often go hand-in-hand... and winning (or losing) often goes hand-in-hand with competition... and I'm just not that into competing. Hence you'll seldom see my name in competitions or up for an award.
They say - whoever 'they' are - that as an artist you will run into two "C's" throughout your career and that you should be busier with the "C" of creativity rather than the "C" of competition... and I agree wholeheartedly with that sentiment.
From time to time my music has shown up in various places and I've picked up some awards and that's alright with me. If someone else thinks it's worthy in some way and would like to honour it then I can live with that.
The Just Plain Folks organisation is a wonderful organisation. They work closely with CD Baby (the online record distributor founded by Derek Sivers) and both of these companies feel like family. They are very devoted to helping independent musicians, so an award ceremony by Just Plain Folks is more like a night out than a competition as far as I'm concerned.
I'm extremely grateful that they've gone to the bother of listening to all those songs (and watching the videos) and that they deem "The Peace Within" as a song, and "Troubadour" as a video, worthy of a nomination.
So thank you JPF for all the great work you do on our behalf. We're all winners by having the spotlight put on what we do.
Composed the soundtrack for a documentary
Recently I had the opportunity to do something new musically. Together with Ralph - you know him from the "Troubadour" CD/DVD - we composed and recorded the complete soundtrack for a documentary.
It was fun to do... and like I said a new experience. It was something that had been in the back of my mind for a while, so it was satisfying to finally get it done.
Writing music for a film, or a documentary, is something quite different than writing songs for an album. For starters, you're aiming for a different end result. It's something to be used as a support - to support the film or documentary - as opposed to being the main event itself - like a song is.
We recorded it in Ralph's home studio and the atmosphere was very relaxed. I must say I found it very easy to work with him. We're usually on the same page as regards what needs to be done, so no mucking about or endless conversations to complicate things or slow things down. In fact, it went so well that we recorded most of it in one day!
We had some ideas beforehand about what we wanted and the rest was done, or came to us, as we watched the images unfold. I think the end result is a nice mixture of sounds that complement the images.
I'm not sure when the documentary will be finished and available for public viewing but I'm sure we'll post something on the website as soon as we find out.
So, one more thing marked off the "to do" list. Right, what's next! :-)
Having my music used in a film (Dead Load)
I remember receiving an e-mail one day, out of the blue, asking if it was possible to use my music in a film. I thought about it for a really long time (about five seconds) and decided that would be cool.
The e-mail came from a guy called Greg Corcoran. It seems he was busy directing a short film he'd co-written with Colin Corrigan. He already knew what he wanted, so obviously he'd done his homework before contacting me. That was reassuring. Obviously we were dealing with someone who knew his stuff. Always a plus!
At one stage he asked if they could get access to the 'master tapes', which these days are actually digital files. What did that mean, I wondered. He replied that it was quite normal and the reason was that they might want to 'tweak' things here and there. Now, I wasn't too keen on the idea of someone 'tweaking' my songs but he explained it was for the better and I could listen to the results before they did anything official with it. That sealed the deal.
I have to say - I was very pleasantly surprised by the end results. His music supervisor, Steve Lynch, did a great job of highlighting various pieces within the song - pulling up a bass line here and there, etc. - and even sprinkling a little gold dust of his own over the songs (adding some keyboard parts). The end result being music that you'd think was written specifically for the film.
I won't say which songs were used, just watch the film yourselves.
I had the pleasure of being at the premiere during the Galway Film Festival. The audience laughed at all the right spots and seemed to really like it, so well done Greg (and everyone involved in making the film of course). You can view it on YouTube here or Vimeo here.
Happy New Year - Tolerance [guide word]
I'd like to take this opportunity to wish everyone a very Happy New Year. It's that time of the year when people attempt to write new habits into their lifestyle. Some of those habits hold and some of them slip away. It's not the end of the world if they do. The best thing to do if you fall off the horse is to get back on again. Be easy on yourself!
... which leads me to this year's guide word - tolerance. Let see what the dictionary has to say about it.
ˈtɒl(ə)r(ə)ns/
noun: tolerance; plural noun: tolerances
1. the ability or willingness to tolerate the existence of opinions or behaviour that one dislikes or disagrees with.
Let's see if we can find something else.
noun. 1. a fair, objective, and permissive attitude toward those whose opinions, beliefs, practices, racial or ethnic origins, etc., differ from one's own; freedom from bigotry. 2. a fair, objective, and permissive attitude toward opinions, beliefs, and practices that differ from one's own.
Imagine what could happen if people decided to put thoughts like those at the forefront of their minds. That's the wonderful thing about the mind - we can decide what thoughts to place there.
What if we were to put tolerant ones in there for 2017 and see how that works out.
10 albums I've listened to a lot this year
• Sweet Bells - Kate Rusby: Kate is a Yorkshire lass and sings lots of old mining songs from that area. "Sweet Bells" is a Christmas album, hence my playing it a lot these days.
• Elton John (the black album) - Elton John: I finally got it for my collection. I've loved it since it came out. I've been picking up all those early Elton albums lately. Gems, all of them.
• Songbook - David Gates: What a great songwriter he was... and what a sweet voice. This collection is a nice mix of his Bread hits, solo hits and a couple of new songs thrown in for good measure.
• Watertown - Frank Sinatra: I've become a big fan of Frank's over the last while... especially his Capitol recordings. This album however was released on his own Reprise label and it didn't do well at all when it was released. It gained some traction in the years that followed and slowly but surely people warmed to it. Now it's considered a masterpiece. Sorry about that, Frank!
• Best of... Smokie: I've always loved Chris Norman's voice. Still do. In fact, I'm going to see him live in Budapest, Hungary next April. He's doing a special show with an orchestra. Sounds interesting. I wonder which songs he'll do. He's had lots of hits in Europe as a solo artist as well.
• Already Free - The Derek Trucks Band: What a wonderful greasy, funky sound they make. Soul-blues based. Derek is an amazing slide player but the whole band is excellent. Check ‘em out, you won't be disappointed.
• Can I Have My Money Back - Gerry Rafferty: Released in 1971 it may not be as well known as some of his latter releases, which is a real shame because it's a really, really strong album. There are shades of The Beatles/Paul McCartney in the sound but it's also all Gerry. What a wonderful voice he had.
• Xmas! The Beatmas - Rubber Band: What a Beatles Christmas album might have sounded like. It's really clever how they put this together. They're from Denmark. They've taken classic Christmas songs and put them in a Beatles jacket. Hard to describe. Check it out if you can. Delightful stuff.
• "A" - Agnetha Fältskog: This album was recorded in 2013, so long after her ABBA days. It's not what I'd usually listen to. I came across it on YouTube and found it instantly likeable/listenable. Several repeat plays prompted me to buy it. I'm happy I did as it's give me many hours of listening pleasure since. She's still in fine voice... and what a beautiful voice she has.
• Late For The Sky - Jackson Browne: If there is one album I play over and over and never tire of, it's this one. It's so good, so strong. I have it on vinyl and also on CD. The CD is usually in the car and the CD player is set on repeat. Sometimes it starts to play again and before I can get to it to eject it, I hear those first few notes and I'm sold all over again and just let it play. The cover is a tip of the hat to René Magritte, a Belgian surrealist painter. It's based on René's L'Empire des Lumières series of paintings.
So there you have it, some sounds that have been keeping me company throughout 2016. I'm hoping Christmas will bring some additions to my collection. You can never have enough good music, right?
Of course I also hope that Christmas will bring you all lots of what you wish for and that you get some peace time with your friends and family.
Article in Ireland's Own magazine
"Ireland's Own" - as they say themselves "the week wouldn't be the same without it". I'm sure that rings true for many a household. I know I've seen it around for as long as I can remember.
Imagine the changes that have taken place in the world since it was first published in 1902... and yet, by sticking to their guns they have managed to outlast many a fad. You've got to hand it to them for consistency and knowing what their readers want. I have no idea if they're waiting on a story from me but the good folks who run "Ireland's Own" obviously thought my little story was suitable enough to run it in their summer special and I'm very grateful to them for that.
It's difficult to explain exactly what my wee story is about. It's from the early days of my music career and I suppose it's about a lesson I learned quite early on. It's a funny story, so if you do feel so inclined to check it out you can pick up a copy at your local newsagent or via their website and see what you think. It's issue no. 5554. Happy reading and have a great summer.
Great writing
I love to write. I also love to read. To read something well-written is a joy. So is finding something so well-written - and short - that it needs no fluffing up or anything else. In my opinion, the following certainly qualifies - short and to the point.
Prejudice is a great time saver. You can form opinions without having to get the facts - E.B. White
PJ Curtis - he's back on radio
Back in February 2013, I wrote a blog about a radio programme called the "House of R&B". It was a radio show on RTE (Irish national radio) and hosted by PJ Curtis.
In my opinion, and that of many others, that show didn't run half long enough and it was a sad day the day it came to an end.
Well, today I have some great news to report. PJ is back on the air, courtesy of coastfmgold. It advertises itself as - the Eastern Costa del Sol's ONLY English speaking Radio Station. Giving you the chance to enjoy THE very best music from the 50's, 60's, 70's, 80's, 90's & the 00's!
It's located in Nerja, Spain. PJ's programme is called "Roots, Blues & Beyond" and it goes out live every Monday between 6-8pm (CET) or 5-7pm (GMT). It's co-presented with a guy called Danny East. It's everything you'd expect (tons of great blues, rock 'n' roll, gospel music) and a natural follow-on to the "House of R&B". It's like he's never been away... and it's such a thrill to hear PJ's voice on the airwaves again.
So, do yourself a favour and tune in this coming Monday. I'm confident you won't be disappointed.
Join the Mailing List - and get access to rare 'bonus' material
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The Day They Lowered You Down
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June 13, 2012 by admin | 0 comments
The regular film screenings by the Bimal Roy Memorial & Film Society during the period of 2011-12, were accompanied by other programs. We had a special evening, “Towards Holistic Health for Women”, about their physical and mental wellness, organised at Kumar Clinic, Khar on 23 rd April, 2011. Speakers for the evening were eminent gynaecologist, Dr. Janki Ramakrishna and senior yoga instructor, Vijaya Magar, veterans in their respective fields. The session was followed by a Q & A about the many vital health issues that women, especially older women, face and are reluctant to ask. Before the talk, there was a free bone density test done by lab technicians who gave out the readings immediately. An optional Pap Smear test at actual lab cost was also on offer.
A houseful screening of “The Other Song”, a documentary on renowned Thumri singer, Rasoolan Bai, was held in collaboration with, the VACHA Trust, on June 6, 2011 at National College. VACHA is a women’s group that was formed in 1987. They organize gender training for teachers, social activists, youth groups and others. [www.vacha.org] The documentary, by Saba Dewan, narrates the story of a lost song recorded in the 30’s of the last century, exploring in the process the tradition of the Tawaifs, the only professional women musicians of India, some of whom were highly educated and adept at the arts, literature and poetry, yet considered unfit for respectable households by the purists of Indian classical music. In this difficult environment, Rasoolan Bai emerged as a celebrated singer and a great favourite in the courts of the princely states. Rasoolan Bai was honoured by the prestigious Sangeet Natak Academy Award. Introducing the documentary-film, well known Gujarati light music singer, Kaumudiniben Munshi, herself a disciple of Siddheshwari Devi, a contemporary of Rasoolan Bai shared her eloquent insights on that era.
On Bimal Roy’s birth centenary on 12th July, 2011, a seminar titled “Enduring Image 2011” was held at the Hall of Harmony, Nehru Centre, Worli on 7 th July, 2011. The programme hosted by acclaimed documentary film maker, Brahmanand Singh, focussed on the use of music in the Indian cinema of the 50s and 60s, with special reference to Bimal Roy films. Noted theatre personality, dramatist and musician, Shekhar Sen graced the occasion as the Chief Guest. He enchanted the audience with his erudition. Renowned music director, Anu Malik shared his nostalgic memories of the film music of that era.
The 15th Bimal Roy Annual Awards were held on the 5th November, 2011 at the Veer Sawarkar Hall, Shivaji Park, during which veterans and promising artistes and technicians were honoured. The 2011 recipients were yesteryears arch villain Pran Saheb, PK Nair, the pioneering archivist, Vikramaditya Motwane, the gifted young director of the film UDAAN and AM Padmanabhan, the well known sound engineer. The winners were selected by an eminent Jury headed by Ramesh Talwar. The awards were presented by Ashutosh Gowarikar and Naseeruddin Shah.
The Awards Function was followed by BRMC’s flagship concert, Smriti Sandhya 2011 entitled, Dharti Kahe Pukar Ke, celebrating shades of Indian folk music in film compositions. The concert was conceived and presented by renowned composer and musicologist, Tushar Bhatia. Singers included Shrikant Narayan, Bina Desai, Vrushali, Surojit, Nandi, Amit and Swati and the music was conducted by Chirag Panchal. This event was made possible by the help and support of our Sponsors- ONGC, Bank of India and other advertiser. BRMC is especially grateful to Mr. Apurba Saha of ONGC for his generous support and Mr. Arvind Kumar Sahu of Bank of India
A Director’s Special screening of “Stanley Ka Dabba” was held in association with the Mumbai Cricket Association-Recreation Centre, Bandra-Kurla Complex on 18th November, 2011. The screening was followed by a Q & session with Amole Gupte, the director of the film.
On the 26th January, 2012, a day-long picnic was organised to the farmhouse of Bimal Roy Memorial Committee Chairperson, Rinki Roy Bhattacharya at Navghar Farms near Khopoli. Lunch, tea and snacks were served. More than forty members, along with family and friends, enjoyed the excursion with great enthusiasm. This will be an ongoing annual event for BRMC.
On the 5th February, 2012, a Nature Walk was organised at the Maharashtra Nature Park, Sion which has magnificent plant/trees of medicinal value, which attract many varieties of birds. Renee Vyas, with her sound knowledge of plants and their medicinal value, gave an illuminating chat that was entertaining as well as educative.
The Memorial started a new initiative for reading programmes with Bhisham Sahani’s renowned short story, Chief Ki Dawat, on 17th March, 2012. The mono act by Nivedita Baumthiyal, noted theatre personality and IPTA General Secretary, was followed by a discussion on the helpless vulnerability of the aged amongst issues such as gender and class. The lively discussion was moderated by senior critic, Maithili Rao. Book reading will be another frequent feature of BRMC’s future programs.
Supriya NaikSatam
Bimal Roy Memorial Committee
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CamWorld
UX Design Portfolio
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About Cam Barrett
I design and build online communities and engagement-heavy web sites.
I have designed private online properties for the U.S. Army, jetsetters, snowboarders, Presidential campaigns and political wonks. I managed UX design at Teach for America.
I currently manage 70+ web sites for Newark Public Schools, the largest district in NJ.
My Conference Calendar
18 Years of Brain Mush
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CamWorld Daily
[sp-form formid=1488]
Anal Leakage
This week’s Rapidly Changing Face of Computing also talks about this concept of digital paper.
The latest issue of Wired has a great article on the Furby. Man, if you see these toys on the toystore shelves, buy as many as you can. They are going to be *the* hot Christmas item this year. Trust me on this one, folks.
I ate a can of Olestra-fried Pringles a few weeks back. “Anal Leakage” ensued. It appears I’m not alone.
Salon tells us how to blow your wad.
Posted by Cameron Barrett at August 26, 1998 09:03 PM
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Gabriel Presence - Awaken CD
Contemporary Worship Music
Parish Rosters
St Michaels Church
St Marys Church
Bishop of Hamilton
St Michael's Catholic School
St Mary's Catholic School
John Paul College
EASTER TIMETABLE
Chrism Mass at the Cathedral Tuesday 22nd March at 6.00 pm
Holy Thursday- the Last Supper 7.00 pm St Mary’s
Good Friday 3:00 pm at St Mary’s and St Michael’s
Easter Vigil 7.30 pm at St Mary’s
8:00 am at St Michael's
10.00 am and 5.00 pm at St Mary’s
Gabriel’s Presence
Spreading the Word through music.
CD now available at the reduced cost of $10.00.
Gabriel’s Presence has been together around 10 years. They are a group of musicians and singers from St Mary’s church in Rotorua and normally play for the 10.00am Mass on the 2nd, 4th and 5th Sundays each month. The group produced a CD called ‘Awaken’ in 2013 and to date have released over 600 copies. The CD is still available through information on this site and can be listened to on ‘amplifier’ - http://www.amplifier.co.nz/default,104987.sm
Involvement with St Mary’s School and the production of original music has become part of their ministry within the church.
Gabriel’s Presence also takes their Ministry on occasion into other congregations and denominations and has played for the Full Gospel Men’s Fellowship conferences for 3 years, the Baptist and Presbyterian Churches in Rotorua, combined church’ Prayer Meetings and various public performances and fund-raisers.
Contact for Gabriel’s Presence:
Bruce Norman
Phone - 07 350 3120
Parish Newsletters
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Another inconvenient truth ... .
Over the past few weeks I've been struggling to find an answer to a question that continues to plague those good souls who are wanting to learn just why it is that so few people of color visit the national parks that are urban, pastoral, relatively affordable, astoundingly beautiful, and all places of wonder. The percentage of those of us who are missing from the Grand Canyon, Yellowstone, Yosemite, the national forests, the hallowed battlefields of the Civil War, etc., in comparison to our white friends and neighbors is thought-provoking and -- until yesterday -- defied reason.
It was a week or so ago when a co-worker came to my cubicle to announce that the city manager's secretary sent word that she wouldn't be able to participate in next week's bus tour after all. The mayor was with us on the last outing and this time our city manager and two of the mayor's aides were to be among the 28 "tourists."
The manager and his staff were scheduled to be with us last month -- plus a member of the staff of the city clerk -- and all had to cancel at the last minute due to an extra-heavy work load associated with the following Tuesday being the day of the last council meeting before a month-long hiatus.
Elizabeth stood at my elbow with Sue's message and followed it with, "...I told Sue that if they have a group in their office who'd like to take the tour at a later time, I'd be happy to take them." I felt my face fall and my blood pressure rise-- and I hoped she hadn't noticed. "No!" These were my tours. I planned, choreographed, and cast them with great care. I spent weeks pulling each one together after carefully going over names and profiles on each from a list of guests who had mostly self-referred into my process. Long before each tour the bus has been overbooked and no recruitment needed. I couldn't tell her just why that was. I couldn't explain to her why I felt so adamant, so territorial. I realized that she couldn't possibly understand because I'd never stopped to articulate what I was doing; what were the elements that made them so powerful; and why simply piling people into a van and driving past places they're driven past their whole lives would have any meaning to anyone? And do I really know the answers to any of those questions?
I've intuitively resisted the urge to do special tours made up of any one part of the community. I'd cast each with a few city officials, artists, one or two news reporters, heads of departments and/or commissions, community activists, a few elders who'd lived this history, a couple of teens (in one instance), a few civic "agitators" with no portfolio but a great love for the city, a balance of races and cultures, commercial developers and entrepreneurs, historians, UC Berkeley interns, educators, etc. When someone once suggested that I create a tour for only the members of the city council, I refused. I'd quickly learned that the casting of the characters on these tours was the critical component in creating the magic that each tour delivered. That magic was embedded in the people on the bus. Their enthusiasm literally takes over early in the process as those with the memories would see some structure, street corner, road sign, etc., and stand up in their seats and aggressively take over the narration from Naomi with her bullhorn standing at the front of the bus -- our ranger and tour guide. Their enthusiasm is irrepressible!
When one considers that these community people in this reasonably small city (about 91,000 -- the size of a Super Bowl crowd) have been driving and walking past these same deteriorating structures for the past half-century, at least, it is small wonder that this kind of excitement can be re-awakened at all.
We purposely use a small bus (28 passenger) so that we can engage in one-on-one conversations but that can be easily turned into a single group at any point along the way. Those conversations are lively and -- in some cases -- marked by a quality of sharing of the history of the times that can be reached no other way. Each tour has been different, but similarly successful, with each generating the roster of folks from which to create the next tour.
Those animated conversations carry all of the "lost conversations and untold stories" that the history books have left out. They allow the human interest bits to rise in importance as people recall the way it all looked "back in the day," when Macdonald Avenue was a bustling main street with 9 movie houses, major department stores, a bowling alley, with "...the shipyard hiring hall over on Tenth Street, and "... where the USO stood but, "where black servicemen couldn't go," and "...the dance hall in the Winters Building that was only open for whites; and "...the Park Florist that used to belong to the Japanese families but they got taken away to internment camps;" and, "... Atchison Village was built by the Maritime Agency for whites but it sits on the agricultural fields across from the Mexican Baptist Church -- gardens created by and for the Latino community;" and "...and there's that place at the railyards where Native American workers were allowed to live in boxcars by the Santa Fe Railroad through a special arrangement because of what they'd contributed to the building of the railroad across the nation." The history rolls out as if yesterday from those who lived it and from those who carry the legacy in their genes from that heroic generation of Rosies and homefront workers that this new national park was created to honor.
There are still problems in this city, but one of them is not the fact that they haven't overcome the racist legacy of being a tiny insular company town owned by Standard Oil (now Chevron-Texaco), born in 1905 and re-created in 1941 for the purpose of defending the nation through its herculean ship-building feats. This is an American city to be proud of, if the criteria for judging is its well-distributed political power across the racial divide despite a legacy of segregation left by the war years.
These bus tours have drawn an even number of blacks and whites and is beginning to reflect others of color and ethnicity. Richmond has shown a proven ability to absorb and assimilate its newcomers as Sikhs and a large community of refugees from Southeast Asia have arrived (now 30 years ago) and as a Latino population escaping lives of poverty below the border grow in number -- much as African Americans escaped the hostile South in 1941.
Richmond is characterized by being a city of newcomers; strangers who've found their way here for a variety of reasons. The great legacy is in the fact that a city of 28,000 became a city of 101,000 almost overnight only 62 years ago. A city of strangers brought together charged with the mission to find ways to work together by whatever means necessary in order to save the world from tyranny. The sharing of the stories of how those who came before are of great value to those whose entry is more recent. The Laotians (in the person of Torm Nompraseaurt) may learn on Friday from African American (Simms Thompson) that 62 years later, against all odds, he has survived and maintained a place for himself in this city -- and from a casual conversation that might not ever have happened until now.
That's what's beginning to occur in these limited 4-hour bus tours. Doors are being opened between races and classes and long-suppressed conversations are being facilitated, finally.
This week will bring our sixth tour since they were initiated last December. Over 100 hundred local "tourists" have participated. I made an informal audit a few days ago and learned that exactly half of these city folks have been from the white community and half from black, people of all economic levels and fields of interest -- with a smattering of Latino and Asian in the mix. I'd say that was a bit of magic when we consider that they each came into the process, individually and voluntarily.
Articulating what is happening may be difficult, but there is no denial that something magical is in process and that it's coming - not from those deteriorating structures that we're driving past; not from the guides or from the little guidebooks we're providing -- but from the hearts and souls of those in the seats who are sharing in the rediscovery of our national history. I long for the day when we can slip four or five outsider tourists to quietly witness this sharing of history between Richmond's people. Now that's civic engagement. Do you suppose that anyone ever used eavesdropping as an acceptable feature? May be something to think about... .
The best we can do is to provide the environment in which the magic can happen. I've often stated that -- if the bus is too full -- I am willing to step away and rejoin the group at the end of the tour. I firmly believe that my work has been done when the list is finished and the casting complete. I trust the magic to unfold as folks retrace their steps back through time and share the journeys with one another.
Why are people of color not visiting national parks? That's easy. Forget about color. Our parks are visited largely by the middleclass. The truly wealthy own their own getaways. The truly poor have neither the means nor the education to appreciate what these great national parks could mean to their quality of life. We'll never convince the homeless of the virtue of sleeping under the stars. If this (as I suppose) is a question of economics, then our job is to move more people of color into the middleclass, right? A no brainer. Looking closely at the hiring policies of the National Park Service might be a good place to start. I'd want to work toward the day when the percentage of non-whites visiting our parks is equalled by their numbers in the work force. Ironically, that may be the truth of the percentages seen today, but in the wrong direction. The NPS's hiring procedures is what determines those numbers. This is where the middleclass has its beginnings.
... the other "inconvenient truth."
What a strange mindset ...
There are periods in these declining years when I have flashes of insight that are so blinding that I'm not sure whether I'm truly seeing behind the obvious or simply fooling myself. It's not as though I feel that I'm simply smarter than those around me; or that age plus experience has brushed away the doubts that shadowed my youth because of a lack of a formal education; but instead I find myself wondering why others can't see what it is that is so obvious to me? Is this something that comes with aging; a given? A gift? Foolishness born of advancing senility?
It comes in different forms and probably is a function of that growing sense of urgency that's creeping into prominence a bit more with each day. Sometime I find myself grinning to no one in particular on the drive home from work -- recalling some crazy incident that happened during the day -- and wondering why humor now has moved to the forefront in my arsenal of defenses. Maybe that's true for us all, and why Keith Olbermann's style of delivering the awfulness of each day's news works so well for me. I must be home by five o'clock each day to watch that critical first half-hour; the items that precede "Now let's play oddball!", and rarely if ever any longer watch the local news. The local body count no longer interests me. It's only then that I'm able to turn to CSPAN to get the raw material that forms the basis for Olbermann's pieces. Olbermann creates a protective layer that enables me to allow the daily ugly truths into my awareness with a feeling that I can handle it now. His commentaries are worthy of Edward R. Murrow's best efforts -- and his ability to probe the minds of his well-chosen guests invariably meet my own points of curiosity and deepen my understanding of the issues. But it is his sense of irony -- his light touch -- that allows me to absorb his meaning and messages and find ways to act on new information that in the hands of someone less deft would leave me paralyzed with numbing fear.
But I'm rambling ... and not expanding on that first paragraph ... but it's where my mind went and I can think of no way to connect these thoughts at the moment.
More later.
Posted by Betty Reid Soskin at 11:53 AM No comments: Links to this post
A busy week with little time for writing or even reflection ...
First for some corrections: My colleague, Lucy, is married to a biologist who (after hearing about our tree) took himself to the center of town for a look. He was able to determine that the tree was an exotic; a Cedar of Lebanon. It stands high above all other trees in the plaza and he judges it to be perhaps a century old.
Another colleague, Michele, who is the city's Arts Manager, upon hearing about our find drove to the mall to see for herself what the excitement was about and in so doing, met two older African American men with whom she spent some time chatting. She learned that, indeed, they had been visiting this tree since boyhood (they're now quite aged), and were decrying the fact that the benches had been removed only last October by the police department. "We have to stand up now, so we can't spend much time here anymore... ." How sad!
She also noted that they referred to the Cedar as "The Tree of Knowledge." I'd somehow transformed it to "The Wisdom Tree" in my memory and we need to now change back to the name these men used. I ran into Jerrold at the Point Richmond Street Festival yesterday and he confirmed this. This continues to speak to a long and honored tradition and surely for the need to restore this giant to its former status as one of the important anchors and protectors of the old downtown.
As the city staffer in charge of Arts and Culture (which includes the Arts Commission, the Advisory Committee for Public Art, and all things related), Michele immediately saw the need for removal of the signs of prohibition, the possibility of restoring seating, large story photographs of the area before "progress" intervened; a mural on one of the walls, and the need to talk with the police department right away to see how much of this is feasible. It was her feeling that the police chief who is newly-appointed, will see the light.
Meanwhile, I visited with the executive director of the Main Street Initiative (the nonprofit working with others to rehabilitate the city's central core), to tell her about what we've found, and to let her know how grateful we are for the fact that her organization and the Richmond Police Department had cleaned up this alleged "hot spot" and that -- now that several months had passed since their actions took place -- the city and the park can now reclaim the site and redirect its use. I'm hopeful that no one will feel uncomfortable or criticized for trying to make this troubled area safe for the patrons of the shopping mall. She showed no signs of annoyance and promises to share our wondrous find with her board at their next meeting.
There is talk about the possibility of trying to interest some local writer of children's books to create one about our Tree of Knowledge. Someone has suggested that it might be wonderful to have each of the many schools in the school district plant a Tree of Knowledge on their own sites -- perhaps on Arbor Day.
Our Cedar embodies so much that is relevant to the reclaiming of history. There are surely environmental issues; its name carries biblical references (important to the black community); and, "Lebanon" hints at today's headlines. There's something very timely in all this, wouldn't you say?
Wish I had another ten years to spend at this. The City of Richmond and the National Park Service will be co-creating this park over time. There are many such discoveries waiting to be revealed -- "The Untold Stories and Lost Conversations" -- if only we continue to sharpen our listening skills and carefully monitor these old/new paths that have been ignored for the past century.
The next phase will be that of engaging the community, industries, corporations, neighborhood councils, etc., in discussions about what it means to be a Gateway City for a National Park. Can you imagine how exciting this can be?
Another inconvenient truth ... . Over the past f...
What a strange mindset ... There are periods in t...
A busy week with little time for writing or even r...
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Posted on January 8, 2019 by Carl Fellstrom
British crime lord Robert Dawes, recently jailed in Paris over a 1.3 tonnes shipment of cocaine, will be quizzed by Dutch detectives over the brutal murder of school teacher Gerard Meesters.
French and Dutch authorities have confirmed that a European Arrest Warrant has been granted for 46-year-old Dawes after new evidence linking the crime boss to the murder has emerged.
Dawes under surveillance in Spain in 2013
The arrest warrant was granted on November 26 just weeks before Dawes was convicted for a 1.3 tonnes shipment of cocaine seized at Charles de Gaulle airport in September 2013. The move was seen as backstop position should Dawes be cleared of the Paris charges. Just before Christmas, after a two-week trial, he was convicted and sentenced to 22 years for organising the load on board a passenger flight from Caracas, Venezuela.
Under the terms of the arrest warrant, Dawes could be extradited to the Netherlands and face a trial over the murder of Mr Meesters in the very near future. A murder charge would take precedence over the recent sentence for the drug conviction. However, it is highly likely that any extradition to the Netherlands will have to be ratified by a judge in France.
It is understood Dutch prosecutors, after submitting a legal assistance request several months ago, are still awaiting authority from the British government to interview several witnesses in the case in the UK.
During the trial in Paris, evidence emerged of Dawes’ links to organised crime groups across the world and South America drug cartels over a 17 year period as well as his links another murder in Nottinghamshire in 2002 and the disappearance of a man whose body has never been found.
After the conviction National Crime Agency deputy director Matt Horne said: “Dawes was one of the most significant organised criminals in Europe with a network that literally spanned the globe.
“He had connections in South America, the Middle East, Asia and across Europe, which enabled him to orchestrate the movements of huge amounts of class A drugs and money.
“This was often facilitated by the utilisation of corrupt law enforcement, port workers and government officials.Despite the fact Dawes has been based overseas for many years, his offending has continued to have an impact on communities in the UK, particularly in Nottingham and the East Midlands.
“Dawes was prepared to use extreme levels of violence in order to further his reputation and take retribution against those who crossed him. Members or associates of his criminal group are known to have been involved in intimidation, shootings and murders.”
This entry was posted in Uncategorized and tagged cocaine, Gerard Meesters, National Crime Agency, Netherlands, organised crime, Robert dawes by Carl Fellstrom. Bookmark the permalink.
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You are currently in > Just a blog about Indonesia > Indonesia no longer hit by economic crisis : Kalla says
Indonesia no longer hit by economic crisis : Kalla says
JAKARTA - Vice President Jusuf Kalla has said here on Sunday that Indonesia is no longer hit by economic crisis because per capita income has reached US$1,500. "The economic crisis has actually ended," Kalla said to respond a speech deliverd by chairman of the Nation Awakening Party (PKB) Muhaimin Iskandar in the party`s national meeting.
The vice president further said Indonesia`s per capita income had reached US$1,000 before the crisis hit the country in 1998 and dropped drastically to US$700 during the crisis. "The country`s per capita income has reached 1,525 dollar. If its per capita income still stands at 700 dollar, it`s correct the crisis still exists but in fact it is not," he said.
After President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono took office on October 20, 2004, he moved quickly to implement a "pro-growth, pro-poor, pro-employment" economic program. He also announced an ambitious anti-corruption plan December 2004. The State Ministry of National Development Planning (BAPPENAS) released in early 2005 a Medium Term Plan focusing on four broad objectives: creating a safe and peaceful Indonesia, creating a just and democratic Indonesia, creating a prosperous Indonesia, and establishing a stable macroeconomic framework for development.
President Yudhoyono and his team have targeted average growth of 6.6% from 2004-2009 to reduce unemployment and poverty significantly. Indonesia`s overall macroeconomic picture is stable and improving, although GDP growth rates have not yet returned to pre-crisis levels. Indonesia?s 4th quarter 2004 GDP growth was 6.1%, its highest level since the 1997-98 financial crisis, and full year growth in 2004 was 5.1%.
Kalla, however, admitted that there are some problems facing Indonesian people. According to him, the previous governments had also problems related to human actions like communal conflicts in Poso and Ambon and now the government had problems related with natural disasters. He said the government tried hard to lessen impacts and victims of the calamities. One of the government`s efforts is to install early warning systems.
"The government will install sirens in coastal areas across the country prone to earthquake and tsunami," he said.
Posted in Economy @ 30 July 2006 13:49 CET by Jeroen · · permalink
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