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A special ceremony was conducted behind closed doors in Bukit Aman earlier today, which saw Abdul Hamid passing on the baton as deputy director of the police intelligence agency to an assistant, Datuk Mohd Haniff Hanudin. — Picture by Yap Tzu Ging
KUALA LUMPUR, Aug 19 — In another abrupt change within government agencies, Datuk Abdul Hamid Bador was today transferred out of the Special Branch (SB) and into the Prime Minister’s Department where he will head a new security division reporting directly to Datuk Seri Najib Razak.
A special ceremony was conducted behind closed doors in Bukit Aman earlier today, which saw Abdul Hamid passing on the baton as deputy director of the police intelligence agency to an assistant, Datuk Mohd Haniff Hanudin who was heading a unit called E4 that deals with the political extremist threat.
Abdul Hamid confirmed the transfer when contacted, but said he was in the dark on the reasons for his abrupt work shift.
“No… they just told me to go to JPM, so I go to JPM lah,” he told Malay Mail Online when contacted, using the Malay abbreviation for the Prime Minister’s Department.
“No reason given and I just received the letter yesterday… earlier today, there was a ceremony to hand over my duty.”
He added that he would take up his new duties at the Prime Minister’s Department on September 2, as he was currently on leave from work.
Malay Mail Online understands Abdul Hamid was ordered to go on “long leave” before assuming new duties as the head of a new security and transnational crime division under Prime Minister Datuk Seri Najib Abdul Razak.
Contacted today, Bukit Aman confirmed Abdul Hamid’s transfer and that the latter is on leave but denied knowledge on his next posting.
Abdul Hamid’s promotion is the latest change to take place within the SB following last month’s shock Cabinet reshuffle, which saw Datuk Seri Mohamad Fuzi Harun replacing Datuk Seri Akhil Bulat as SB director. |
PORTLAND, Ore. -- Some big changes are in store for Washington Park.
The city is putting together a new master plan for the park. One of its goals is to get many of the cars out, and put in a lot more park space.
Washington Park has been a popular Portland attraction ever since it was built back the 1890s. The last time it underwent a big remodel was in 1981.
Since then, Portland's population has nearly doubled. The park now draws more than three million visitors from all over the world every year.
The city's master plan would redesign the park and help eliminate traffic congestion.
"I think one of the biggest changes is that we're going to try and move all the cars to the edges," said Emily Roth, senior planner with Portland Parks & Recreation.
The plan also proposes installing a 900-space parking garage near the Oregon Zoo, and turning the existing 1,000-space lot into a park.
It would also look at adding cafes or food carts both near the zoo and down near the International Rose Test Garden.
"Maybe bring in a few food carts there in the summer time to have some diversity in food," said Roth.
The tennis courts near the garden would be moved and that area would also become a garden. Also proposed in the plan: a single track bike trail, an upgraded amphitheater and a new visitors center. We may also one day see electric people movers in the park.
"You leave your car, you can either walk, ride your bike, or take an electric, driverless people mover through the whole entire park where you can jump on and jump off," explained Roth.
The city is asking for public input on the plan. Those interested in giving it will have until April 30 to submit their ideas online.
The city will finalize the master plan by the end of the year. |
NATIONAL PRESS CLUB: Congress doesn’t trust the Navy to keep its aging cruisers in service, Sec. Ray Mabus acknowledged this afternoon. But they don’t have to trust anybody: They make the law.
Let Congress pass whatever law it likes compelling the Navy to keep and modernize the ships, Mabus told reporters here. “I’m willing to accept any sort of mandatory language that says we’ve got to do this,” he said. “Mandate us to buy all the modernization stuff — with the exception of electronics because that’s going to change so much — up front. Mandate that we sign contracts with the shipyard that would cost us money if we backed out of ’em. There are ways you can do this.”
But — and this is a big but — whatever you do, just don’t make us modernize the cruisers at the accelerated pace that the House Armed Services Committee voted for yesterday. The Navy can’t afford it: “If it’s done under the congressional plan, the one that’s being put forward now, we’re not going to have enough money,” Mabus said.
Taking a cruiser out of service for four years, as in current law, lets the shipyards schedule the work efficiently and lets the Navy dissolve the crew, thus saving personnel costs. Taking a cruiser out for only two years, as the HASC bill would require, means the shipyard work costs more and the crew has to stay on the payroll. As a result, the special fund set aside for cruiser modernization will run out sooner, in 2018, and “we’ll just have to come back” and ask for more money for the rest of the ships, Mabus said.
How much more, a reporter asked after his speech? Hundreds of millions? “More,” said Mabus.
Mabus doesn’t have a problem with most of the provisions in the HASC mark-up of the National Defense Authorization Act for 2016. “Overall,” he said, “[in] the Navy and Marine Corps, we’re relatively, relatively happy about the mark. In terms of the cruisers, I really do think it’s a matter of just not quite trusting us.”
“Not quite” is quite an understatement, at least when it comes to some House members. “The question is whether we just let the Navy run the clock out and leave these cruisers up on the dock where we never use them again,” fumed the HASC seapower subcommittee chairman, Rep. Randy Forbes, at yesterday’s markup. “If you pass this language, two years from now, we’ll have a couple of modernized cruisers,” he said, arguing for the accelerated modernization plan. If the Navy’s allowed to take longer, Forbes said, it’ll slow-roll Congress and do nothing: “Several years from now,” Forbes said, “the Navy’s going to tell you, ‘we’re sorry, we can’t do the modernization.'”
“If you’re going to do any kind of program the Navy is serious about, they’re would have had put money in their Future Years Defense Program [FYDP],” Forbes said. For cruiser modernization, he said, “they not only haven’t put a dime in, they’re not going to do it.”
“None of those things is correct,” Mabus said mildly. He and the Chief of Naval Operations, Adm. Jonathan Greenert, are “100 percent” committed to modernizing the cruisers, he said. “Now, three or four years ago, [that was] not the case,” Mabus acknowledged. “We did put in a budget that had some cruisers decommissioned,” he said, adding with a chuckle, “That was not my idea.”
The Navy’s current plan does not decommission any cruisers, Mabus hammered home. “They will still be under the command of the CNO, they will never go out of commission, and if we needed to put ’em back to sea — except for the ones in deep modernization — we could. We would just get a crew on ’em and take ’em out.”
(Mabus seems awfully optimistic here about the Navy’s ability to put a crew together on short notice. Imagine how hard it is to get a pick-up basketball team together. Then imagine that team has 330 members who must operate everything from 2,500-horsepower turbines to Tomahawk cruise missiles).
What about the FYDP? Why hasn’t the Navy allocated funding for cruiser modernization in the outyears? “It’s because of the — what’s the name of that fund?” Forbes said. “SMOSF, whatever that means.” (It means “Ship Modernization, Operations and Sustainment Fund,” and SMOSF is pronounced to rhyme with “Joseph”). As a special fund, SMOSF doesn’t show up in the FYDP the way a normal program would. It’s also going to run out ahead of schedule if Congress accelerates the modernization.
“We thought we came up with the best way to keep the most cruisers in for the longest time in the most affordable way, but obviously they get the last word,” said Mabus. |
A former employee says that he quit his job at Chick-fil-A after almost a decade of working at its restaurants and corporate headquarters because the company allowed a mindset “that Chick-fil-A doesn’t like homosexuals.”
“It’s become a safe place for people to hate and expect to be patted on the back for it. I don’t want to work in that kind of environment,” 60-year-old Steve Cammett recently told CBS Atlanta.
Cammett said that he spent nine years working for the restaurant chain because “I was a Chick-fil-A enthusiast. … We don’t have enough time to go over all the things I liked about Chick-fil-A.”
But things changed earlier this year after Chick-fil-A founder Dan Cathy told the Baptist Press that his company was “guilty as charged” of working to prevent marriage equality, sparking a series of protests and counter-protests.
“I felt hurt by those statements,” Cammett, whose late sister was a lesbian, said.
The former employee recalled instances where customers and other employees made bigoted commends about LGBT people. In one case, a customer put his arm around an employee and thanked him for taking a stand against “those perverts.”
“And that [employee] was gay and [the customer] didn’t know it,” Cammett explained. “And I just thought, ‘Wow. What has happened here?'”
“Chick-fil-A allowed a mindset to continue, especially amongst their customers, that Chick-fil-A doesn’t like homosexuals,” he added.
Earlier this month, Chick-fil-A reportedly agreed to stop funding groups opposing rights for LGBT people, some of which had been labeled as hate groups. But just two days later, the company changed its tune.
“Chick-fil-A and its charitable-giving arm, the WinShape Foundation, did not agree to stop making donations to groups that support the biblical definition of marriage in exchange for being allowed to open a franchise in Chicago,” a statement from the company said.
Watch this video from CBS Atlanta, broadcast Sept. 26, 2012.
CBS Atlanta 46 |
President Donald Trump has tapped Ajit Pai, the Federal Communications Commission's senior Republican member, to head the regulatory agency. The appointment, announced by the FCC today, does not require congressional approval since Pai is already an FCC commissioner.
Pai replaces Tom Wheeler, who announced last month that Inaugeration Day would be his last with the FCC. His departure gave Republicans a two-to-one majority in the FCC.
Pai, who has served as an FCC commissioner since 2012, will likely set a very different agenda than his predecessor. The former Verizon lawyer and Justice Department employee favors a more hands-off role for the FCC. He opposed most of the agency's major reforms during his tenure, including the sweeping net neutrality regulations passed in 2015, as well as the agency's more recent broadband privacy protections and the now delayed and likely dead cable box reforms. Now the new Republican-led FCC will likely work to roll back much of the previous administration's accomplishments.
"We need to fire up the weed whacker and remove those rules that are holding back investment, innovation, and job creation," Pai said at an event sponsored by the free market think tank Free State Foundation in Washington, DC, last month.
Net Neutrality No More
The agency's net neutrality rules, which re-classified internet service providers as "Title II" common carriers similar to utility providers, are amongs the rules Pai hopes to whack. "On the day that the Title II Order was adopted, I said that 'I don’t know whether this plan will be vacated by a court, reversed by Congress, or overturned by a future Commission. But I do believe that its days are numbered,'" Pai said at the Free State Foundation event. "Today, I am more confident than ever that this prediction will come true."
But even with a majority, FCC Republicans might not be able to easily turn back the clock, Wheeler argued in a farewell speech earlier this month. "The effort to undo an open Internet will face the high hurdle, imposed by the Administrative Procedure Act, of a fact-based showing that so much has changed in just two short years that a reversal is justified," he said.
In that regard, the Republican-dominated congress will likely be a bigger threat to net neutrality regulations and other existing FCC powers. The GOP has been working to kill the FCC's net neutrality rules since before they were even passed by the agency.
Major Mergers
Meanwhile, It's not yet clear what Pai's chairmanship will mean for AT&T's proposed acquisition of Time-Warner. Trump opposed the merger on the campaign trail, but Pai is generally more friendly to industry consolidation. He voted against the agency's approval of Charter's acquisition of Time-Warner Cable (a separate company from Time-Warner Inc), but only because he believed the merger agreement placed too many restrictions on Charter. "It's about imposing conditions that have nothing to do with the merits of this transaction," Pai told The Hill last year. "It's about the government micromanaging the internet economy."
At first blush, Pai's more hands-off approach to the FCC fits nicely with the new administration's broader agenda. Multichannel News reported earlier this month that the Trump administration favors a plan to massively restructure the FCC and remove many of its functions. Mark Jamison, a former Sprint regulatory policy manager who was part of Trump's FCC transition team, argued in an essay last year that the FCC had largely outlived its usefulness. "Most of the original motivations for having an FCC have gone away," Jamison wrote. "Telecommunications network providers and ISPs are rarely, if ever, monopolies. If there are instances where there are monopolies, it would seem overkill to have an entire federal agency dedicated to ex ante regulation of their services." Downsizing the FCC would dovetail with a plan reported last week by The Hill to cut federal spending by $10.5 trillion over 10 years.
But Pai's agenda includes more than just slashing existing regulations. In a report published in September of last year, Pai outlined an agenda that includes tax breaks for startups and rural broadband providers; using money from wireless spectrum auctions to expand wireless access in rural areas; "dig once" policies that would ensure that broadband conduits are installed as part of all road and highway construction projects; and regulations to make it easier for new internet service providers to access existing utility poles. It's not clear how this agenda would square with the more radical ideas apparently floated by the transition team.
Still, Pai's appointment signals that major changes are coming to the FCC—and possibly to the way the internet itself works in the US. |
NEW YORK — Google Maps is getting disconnected.
With an update for Android phones Tuesday, you’ll be able to search nearby businesses and get driving directions, including turn-by-turn voice prompts, even if your Internet connection is spotty or non-existent. Google says a version for iPhones will come soon.
The feature is ideal if you’re trying to leave an underground parking garage or a remote national park. It’s also great if you’re travelling abroad and want to conserve on expensive data plans. Google is also targeting users in emerging markets, where cellular speeds are slower and prices are higher relative to typical incomes.
Mapping apps included with Windows phones have long had this feature, but Windows has a tiny market share compared with iPhones and Android. Offline mapping is also available with some third-party apps, including Nokia’s Here.
Google Maps has had a limited offline feature. It lets you save a small region ahead of time, but it’s the equivalent of displaying a paper map in a phone app. You can’t use it for navigation and other tasks we’ve come to expect in digital maps.
With the new version, you’ll be able to do most of what you can do now.
You’ll need to download databases ahead of time, preferably when you have a Wi-Fi connection. To do so, start by searching for a location, such as a city. Then pinch in or out to select what area you want to download. Larger areas will give you more flexibility for navigation, but they also take up more storage. As you change your selection, you’re told how large the file is and how much storage on the phone you have left.
Once you download an area, Google will periodically refresh the data with new businesses and road changes. By default, that’s done only when you’re on Wi-Fi.
What you won’t get with offline mapping is traffic information. Once you’re back online, Google Maps might suggest a detour if there’s unusual backup ahead. You also won’t get photos and user reviews for businesses. But you do get contact information, hours and an overall user rating.
For directions, the feature initially works only with driving. It’s not yet available for walking, biking or public transit — so you might still be stuck in subway stations. |
Galit Zapata, a converted Jew, lights candles in her home in Bello, Colombia, to mark the Sabbath.
Nov. 2, 2012 Galit Zapata, a converted Jew, lights candles in her home in Bello, Colombia, to mark the Sabbath. Paul Smith/For The Washington Post
Dozens of families in working-class Bello have converted to Judaism, joining a worldwide movement that is seeing the descendants of Jews who were forced from Spain more than 500 years ago discover their heritage.
Dozens of families in working-class Bello have converted to Judaism, joining a worldwide movement that is seeing the descendants of Jews who were forced from Spain more than 500 years ago discover their heritage.
Dozens of families in working-class Bello have converted to Judaism, joining a worldwide movement that is seeing the descendants of Jews who were forced from Spain more than 500 years ago discover their heritage.
They were committed evangelicals, devoted to Jesus Christ.
But what some here called a spark, an inescapable pull of their ancestors, led them in a different direction, to Judaism. There were the grandparents who wouldn’t eat pork, the fragments of a Jewish tongue from medieval Spain that spiced up the language, and puzzling family rituals such as the lighting of candles on Friday nights.
So, after a spiritual journey that began a decade ago, dozens of families that had once belonged to a fire-and-brimstone church became Jews, converting with the help of rabbis from Miami and Jerusalem. Though unusual in one of the most Catholic of nations, the small community in Bello joined a worldwide movement in which the descendants of Jews forced from Spain more than 500 years ago are discovering and embracing their Jewish heritage.
They have emerged in places as divergent as the American Southwest, Brazil and even India. In these mostly remote outposts, the so-called Anusim or Marranos, Jews from Spain who fled the Inquisition and converted to Christianity, had found refuge.
“There’s a real awakening that’s taking place,” said Michael Freund, who directs Shavei Israel, a Jerusalem-based group that helps new Jewish communities such as Bello’s. “The Jewish spark was never quenched, and these Anusim are really fulfilling the dreams of their ancestors in that they are taking back the Jewish identity that was so brutally stolen from their forefathers.”
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This northwest state of Antioquia, with its high purple mountains, picturesque pueblos and fervent, almost mystical Catholicism, is surely one of the most unusual corners of the world for such Jewish stirrings.
For the families of Bello, the journey to Judaism began after the minister of a 3,000-member evangelical church, the Center for Integral Family Therapy, visited Israel in 1998 and 2003 and began to feel the pull of Judaism.
Juan Carlos Villegas, who has taken on the Hebrew name Elad, then told his flock that he planned to convert. Dozens joined him.
“These people had the capacity to say, yes, I’m open to finding the roots of my family,” said Villegas, 36, speaking in the community’s synagogue, a white-washed, two-story building on a street of rowhouses.
Villegas and the others said they felt history coursing through their veins as they explored the past and put together pieces of a puzzle that pointed to a Jewish ancestry.
“It was like our souls had memory,” he said. “It awakened in us a desire to learn more — who were we? Where were we from? Where are the roots of our families?”
Historical record
With a void in the historical record, it’s hard to say for sure how the past unfolded for the converted Jews who arrived here centuries ago, establishing themselves as merchants and traders. But there is evidence that they played an important role in the founding of towns here and that their numbers were significant, which is largely unknown to most Colombians.
At the University of Antioquia, geneticist Gabriel Bedoya and his team of scientists found in a 2000 study that 14 percent of the men in Antioquia are genetically related to the Kohanim, a priestly Jewish cast that is traced back three millennia to Moses’s brother, Aaron.
But Bedoya wants to conduct a more extensive study, he said, explaining that there is likely to be more genetic evidence to show that an even larger percentage of residents have Jewish ancestry.
There is other evidence of a Jewish past here, including documentation compiled by historians and the homespun stories passed down from generation to generation.
Seeking discretion in forbidding mountains, the converted Jewish families here adopted surnames, many of them from the heavily Catholic Basque country of Spain, said Enrique Serrano, a professor at Bogota’s Rosario University who has studied colonial-era Spanish records. Names such as Uribe and Echeverry, Botero and Restrepo, were “bought,” Serrano said, along with certificates that instantly gave the converts a Catholic family history.
They also took on a form of Catholicism that was greatly ostentatious, he said, with each family in each town ensuring that at least one son became a priest.
Clues in customs
Still, families couldn’t fully let go of the past, said Memo Anjel, a professor at the Pontifical Bolivarian University in Medellin. He said Antioquia, more than other regions, is filled with towns with biblical names or those that come from the Holy Land, such as Belen and Jerico. Anjel said there is also a proliferation of given names that are unusual in other parts of Colombia.
“They are people who call themselves Catholic but have names like Isaac, Ruben, Moises, Israel, Gabriel,” Anjel said. “And then there are also the women’s names — Ruth, Lia, Clara, Martha, Rebecca.”
There are also tantalizing clues in the customs found in the countryside.
The light ponchos worn by farmers, which feature four untied corners that appear like tassels, are nearly indistinguishable from the prayer shawls worn by observant Jewish men. Some of the haciendas feature conspicuous baths in patios, which scholars say may have first been designed as mikvahs for ritual cleansings.
The residents of old homes have also discovered mezuzas. These are tiny scrolls inscribed with verses, which are put in cases that are attached to doorways, as is common in the homes of Jews the world over.
The converts here in Bello also speak of the unassuming rituals of older family members that they now believe demonstrate a Jewish heritage.
“Before I converted, when I began to study Judaism and Jewish traditions, I began to notice those things in my family,” said Ezra Rodriguez, 33, as his son, Yoetzel, 4, scampered about an apartment decorated with pictures of Orthodox Jews praying at the Western Wall in Jerusalem.
His grandfather always covered his head, even in church, saying that not doing so showed disrespect. Rodriguez also said his grandparents wore their finest clothing on Saturday, not Sunday.
And he recalled how as a boy he’d laugh at his grandfather’s given name — Luis Maria, which honors the Virgin Mary.
“He would come in close and say in a whisper, ‘We had to give ourselves such names,’ ” Rodriguez recounted.
Despite the belief that they have Jewish roots, the Bello community had to formally convert, with a rabbi from Miami, Moshe Ohana, arriving to officiate. The men underwent ritual circumcision, and the whole community began a long process of intense instruction.
The group now has a 120-year-old Torah, which Villegas said was written in Amsterdam. A kosher bakery opened, and kosher meat arrives from a butcher in the capital, Bogota. There is a Hebrew preschool, which operates every afternoon.
And the synagogue, which segregates men from women as is common for Orthodox Jews, is filled daily with the sounds of Hebrew songs and prayers.
“It’s about showing dedication, lots of dedication, to study the prayers, learn to read Hebrew,¨said Meyer Sanchez, 37. “You have to sacrifice other things, like time with your wife, time with your family, and other things you may like, video games and music.”
Among the most fervent leaders in the community is Shlomo Cano, 34, a supervisor in a motorcycle assembly plant.
Cano, whose name had been Rene, said his metamorphosis began little by little. A musician, he began to play Jewish music when his band had been invited to play for Medellin’s established Jewish community. He also went to Israel.
He has since delved into the Talmud and is fast expanding his Hebrew vocabulary to recite Hebrew prayers and sing Hebrew songs.
Cano keeps kosher — he and his wife, Galit, run the community’s kosher bakery — and his family prays daily at the synagogue.
“You’re Jewish because you want to be Jewish, because you feel it, because you love it,” he said. “Now I can’t live without it.” |
These treats are made from two of my favorite dessert ingredients, chocolate and meringue. Each tart is consisted of a chocolate crust, creamy chocolate filling and fluffy meringue topping, all made from scratch. They may look intimidating but they are quite easy to make. Here is an easy dessert recipe for Chocolate Meringue Tarts.
Ingredients:
Crust
300g (2 cups) plain flour
200g chilled butter, chopped
45g (1/4 cup) icing sugar mixture
35g (1/3 cup) cocoa powder
4-5 tbs milk
Filling
1 x 200g pkt good-quality dark chocolate, coarsely chopped
250ml (1 cup) thickened cream
2 eggs, lightly whisked
Meringue
4 egg whites
215g (1 cup) caster sugar
Procedures:
To make the crust, combine flour, butter, icing sugar and cocoa powder in the bowl of a food processor and pulse until mixture resembles fine breadcrumbs. Add the milk and process until dough just comes together. Place dough onto a lightly floured surface and knead until smooth.
Divide pastry dough into 8 equal portions. Roll out each portion into a 4mm-thick disc using a lightly floured rolling pin. Carefully line the rolled pastry into a 3cm-deep, round 8cm tart tin and trim any excess. Repeat with the remaining pastry. Place in the fridge for 30 minutes to rest.
Preheat oven to 200°C. Cover each prepared pastry tin with baking paper and fill with pastry weights, rice or dried beans. Place all tins in a baking tray and bake for 15 minutes. Remove the paper and weights and bake for another 10 minutes or until crisp.
Reduce oven temperature to 180°C and start preparing the filling. Combine the chopped chocolate and cream in a medium saucepan over low heat. Cook, stirring with a metal spoon, for 5 minutes or until chocolate melts and mixture is smooth. Set aside for 5 minutes to cool slightly. Add the egg and stir until well combined. Spoon chocolate mixture among pastry cases. Bake in oven for 15-20 minutes or until just set.
To make the meringue, beat the egg whites using an electric beater until firm peaks form. Gradually add the sugar and whisk until sugar dissolves and mixture is thick and glossy.
Spoon or pipe meringue mixture among chocolate tarts. Bake in oven for 5-6 minutes or until light brown. Set aside for 30 minutes to cool before serving.
Get These Other Easy Dessert Recipes:
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Another blow to fatherhood: IVF mothers can name ANYONE as 'father' on birth certificate
Family values were under attack again last night with the news that single women having IVF will be able to name anyone they like as their baby's father on the birth certificate.
New regulations mean that a mother could nominate another woman to be her child's 'father'.
The 'father' does not need to be genetically related to the baby, nor be in any sort of romantic relationship with the mother.
Critics have sounded a warning about the ability of single women who have successful IVF treatment to nominate a person as the 'father'
Critics said a woman could list her best friend on the birth certificate. The word 'father' may even be replaced with the phrase 'second parent'.
The second parent, who will have to consent to being named, will take on the legal and moral responsibilities of parenthood.
This raises the spectre of a legal minefield in which female 'fathers' will fight for visitation rights and be chased for child support payments if their fragile relationship with the mother breaks down.
The changes, due to come in on April 6, will apply to many of the 2,000 women a year who have IVF using sperm from anonymous donors.
The regulations are part of the controversial Embryology Bill passed by Parliament last year. The Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority said they will give lesbian couples in civil partnerships who undergo IVF the same rights as married heterosexual couples.
An unmarried man whose girlfriend has fertility treatment will also find it easier to claim full parental rights.
The new rules state: 'The women receiving treatment with donor sperm (or embryos created with donor sperm) can consent to any man or woman being the father or second parent.' The only exemption is close blood relatives.
Critics said the change would lead to the role of father being downgraded to the one of godfather and warned that the child would be the one to lose out.
Baroness Deech, a former chairman of the HFEA, said the practice would lead to the ' falsification of the birth certificate'.
She said: 'This is putting the rights of the parents way above those of the child. It is absurd that anyone can be named as the father or the second parent.'
Dr Trevor Stammers, a GP and lecturer in healthcare ethics, questioned the strength of the relationships or friendships between the mother and 'father'.
He said: 'There is no doubt from sociological evidence accumulated over the past few years that children do best in a two-parent married family with heterosexual couples being the married parents.
'It probably will be the child that is the loser but by the time we find that out, in 15 or 16 years, a huge amount of damage will have been done.'
Geraldine Smith, Labour MP for Morecambe, said a birth certificate should be a true record of a child's genetic heritage. She added: 'I don't think the state should collude with parents to conceal the true genetic identity.'
David Jones, a professor of bioethics, likened the role of second parent to that of godparent. He added: 'This sounds like social engineering on the hoof.'
Philippa Taylor, of Christian charity CARE, said: 'We are going to get to the point where a birth certificate is not going to be a true statement of anyone's biological heritage.'
Former Tory leader Iain Duncan Smith said a father played an essential role in the development of a child. He added: 'The present Government seems not to care a damn about families.
'Teenage pregnancy is on the increase, abortion is on the increase, family breakdown is at record levels and we have got a growing number of dysfunctional children that are the product of broken homes.
'The lesson seems to be loud and clear to me that fathers are required.'
Tory MP Ann Widdecombe said the change would destroy the 'basic nature' of a man and a woman bringing up a child together as parents.
Other critics said that Labour's family and benefit policies support and reward single parents at the expense of couples and have sidelined marriage as a lifestyle choice with no value for children.
The HFEA said it was unlikely for the actual sperm donor to be named on the birth certificate because the sample is normally obtained from a sperm bank.
It added that the welfare of the child would always come first and any person nominated as a second parent would have counselling to ensure they understood the implications. |
Terrorist groups such as the Islamic State and Boko Haram have been dominating the headlines since 2013. Both groups have gained international notoriety for their ruthless brutality and their rise is posing new challenges for national, regional, and international security. Such non-state armed groups (NSAG) are not a new phenomenon. Today, however, we can observe an increasingly complex landscape of violent actors with a range of hybrid organizational structures and different agendas that set them apart from “traditional” non-state actors and result in new patterns of violence.
At the same time, there has been increasing acknowledgement within the academic literature and among the policy community of the relationship between climate change and security. However, most research on climate change and security only touches on the topic of non-state armed actors and does not specifically and comprehensively spell out the links between climate change, fragility and non-state armed groups.
The report Insurgency, Terrorism, and Organized Crime in a Warming Climate: Analyzing the Links Between Climate Change and Non-State Armed Groups tries to address this gap. Four case studies on Boko Haram in the Lake Chad region, ISIS in Syria, the Taliban in Afghanistan, and urban violence and organized crime in Guatemala span the whole spectrum of NSAGs and explore in depth the specific role NSAGs play in the complex dynamics of climate change and fragility.
These case studies show that as the climate is changing, so too are the conditions within which NSAGs operate. The complex risks arising from climate change, fragility, and conflict can contribute to the emergence and growth of non-state armed groups. This does not imply that there is a direct link between climate change and NSAG-related violence and conflict. However, large-scale environmental and climatic change contributes to creating an environment in which non-state armed groups can thrive and opens spaces that facilitate the pursuit of their strategies.
Continue reading on A New Climate for Peace. |
David Vaughan, glaciologist with the British Antarctic Survey
David Vaughan was sitting in his office in Cambridge when he first saw the grainy black-and-white picture of something he had never thought possible. It was a satellite image of a huge ice shelf on the edge of the South Pole in an area he had been studying with his colleagues at the British Antarctic Survey research centre. At least, it was supposed to be.
This was 1995 and Vaughan, a glaciologist with the careful manner of the solicitor he once thought of becoming, looked at the spot where the shelf had been and thought, “The damned thing’s not where it’s supposed to be.”
“It was like looking at a map of Britain and seeing half of Cornwall had disappeared,” he told me recently.
This was baffling, and disconcerting, because ice shelves act like giant doorstops that block the world’s last two ice sheets, in Antarctica and Greenland, from oozing faster towards the ocean. Those sheets are a frozen menace to civilisation – they would push up global sea levels by more than 60m if they ever slid into the sea. So a plane was dispatched to check on what Vaughan’s picture really showed. Its crew returned with startling news: the ice shelf had gone.
“They came back with these fantastic photographs of a whole area of football pitch-sized icebergs that were just floating off,” said Vaughan. “That was the first time we’d ever seen anything like that virtually collapse overnight.”
It was not the last. Today, seven of the 12 ice shelves that once fringed that part of the Antarctic have either collapsed or shrunk, along with 81 per cent of its 300 glaciers. And while temperatures have not risen across the entire Antarctic continent, the area that Vaughan was studying has warmed by about 3C in the past 50 years, much faster than global temperatures have risen.
Vaughan never thought about the natural world in the same way again. Today, he is a prominent author of a mammoth international report that will start to be published next month on one of the most fraught public policy issues of our age: climate change. This will be the first assessment report in six years from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the UN body created in 1988 to give governments an expert technical appraisal of how the climate is changing and why. There have only been four such reports before – in 1990, 1995, 2001 and 2007. Many of the scientists writing them have had experiences like David Vaughan’s that have convinced them the climate is changing profoundly, a conclusion each of their reports has confirmed with growing confidence.
A 1995 satellite photograph which revealed the disappearance of a huge ice shelf on the edge of the South Pole
But this report will be unlike any other. For one thing, it is the first since the IPCC was plunged into two controversies four years ago, one over claims that hacked scientists’ emails showed some IPCC authors had tried to hide data undermining their findings on global warming; another about an error in the 2007 report suggesting Himalayan glaciers could melt by 2035. It is also the first since it became so clear that, despite a relentless rise in carbon dioxide emissions, global temperatures have not risen nearly as fast over the past 15 years as they did in previous decades. And it will be the last before world leaders meet in Paris in 2015 to finalise a legally binding agreement to tackle climate change, which will be guided by the IPCC’s latest findings.
This means the report will be one of the most carefully analysed documents on climate change this decade, probed and picked apart by the thousands of people around the world for whom the subject has become a driving passion. Yet interviews with some of the scientists who have drafted the new assessment reveal the IPCC is still a curiously misunderstood body, made up of people with widely differing views about how the climate is changing and even about the value of the IPCC itself.
…
There is nothing else quite like the IPCC. No other branch of science appraises everything of note published in its field for several years on end and puts it together into one enormous study. Each assessment report is so big it is published in stages over the course of a year. The last one weighed in at 20lbs on my bathroom scales and ran to more than 3,000 pages. The one that will start to be published next month is set to be even bigger, in line with an explosive growth of climate science research. The first IPCC assessment in 1990 had 97 main authors. This one has 840.
Glenn Beck, broadcaster and sceptic, who has suggested that IPCC scientists should commit 'hara-kiri'
In the wake of the “Climategate” and “Glaciergate” controversies four years ago, a raft of inquiries eventually found no evidence of serious wrongdoing, let alone anything to raise doubts about the IPCC’s conclusions. But the scientists remain the target of a vigorous group of critics sceptical about their work. They have been branded “criminals” (Britain’s Lord Monckton) guilty of “massive international scientific fraud” (US congressman James Sensenbrenner) who should commit “hara-kiri” (US pundit Glenn Beck) for duping the world with “snake oil” (former Alaskan governor Sarah Palin).
This has had an impact on the people doing this latest IPCC assessment, according to several of the scientists interviewed for this article. “I see it in the tension in the author team,” as they check, recheck, then check again all their work, said David Vaughan. “I think there is a point at which that kind of stress can become difficult to manage,” he added, explaining it has made IPCC work “a very cumbersome, slow process”.
These furores have also added confusion to what is still a widely misunderstood scientific endeavour. For one thing, the IPCC does not actually exist, at least not in the way many imagine it does, with a staff of comfortably remunerated researchers beavering away to produce its reports. Instead, it relies on hundreds of mostly government-nominated scientists working for free for large parts of the several years it takes to produce the assessments for the IPCC’s 195 member countries, all of which are ultimately supposed to approve the report summaries.
The report authors are divided into three working groups: one on the physical science; one on how to adapt to climate change; and one on how to curb it. The most closely watched is Working Group I, on the physical science of climate change, whose report is coming out next month.
The largest share of authors comes from the US and then the UK, which has long been disproportionately represented in the IPCC. For more than half the panel’s life there has been a British scientist either chairing it or leading Working Group I, thanks to a drive to fund climate research dating back to former prime minister Margaret Thatcher.
Perhaps the least understood aspect of the IPCC, however, is how it is run. Its work is supported by a secretariat based in the home of international secretariats, Geneva. But unlike the nearby World Trade Organization, which has 629 regular staff, or the World Health Organization up the road, which has more than 1,800 in its headquarters, the IPCC has just 12 full-time staff in a strip of offices on the eighth floor of the World Meteorological Organization.
The day I visited in late June, I met Renate Christ, the Austrian scientist who has headed the IPCC secretariat since 2004, and asked what her annual budget was this year. “It goes between $7m and $10m,” she said, peering at her computer to check exactly what it was for 2013. It turns out that the amount of money the world has come up with to fund the headquarters of the body producing the last word on what Barack Obama recently called “the global threat of our time” is $9.3m this year, about the same as Cumbria spent fixing potholes last year.
If you sat down and read all the IPCC’s reports together, which few ordinary mortals ever do, you would read a story of growing scientific conviction that the Earth is warming and that it is probably because of the greenhouse gases humans have produced since they took to burning fossil fuels such as coal and gas in ever more prodigious quantities from the industrial revolution onwards.
The last assessment, in 2007, said average global surface temperatures had gone up 0.76C since 1850, had accelerated in recent decades, and were rising nearly twice as fast in the Arctic. The oceans were warming; glaciers were suffering “widespread mass loss”; and sea levels were rising. Global warming was therefore “unequivocal”, the report said, and most of the temperature rises seen since the mid-20th century were “very likely” due to the increase in human-made greenhouse gases, the most important of which is carbon dioxide.
The Fenris glacier in the Sermilik fjord on the southeast coast of Greenland, photographed in 1932-1933 (left) and in 2012. The glacier has retreated by 5,000m, with the rate of retreat increasing rapidly in the past decade. Photos copyrighted by Klaus Thymann for Project-Pressure.org; The Natural History Museum of Denmark
A leaked draft of the new fifth assessment done in October last year said this conclusion had only been strengthened by newer data and that heatwaves were also more likely in many parts of the world, as well as heavy rains.
But there is one thing the final version must include when it is published next month, according to Sir Bob Watson, the British scientist and climate action advocate who chaired the IPCC for nearly six years up to 2002. “I think the current Working Group I report must address in detail the slowing down in the last 10 years,” he said, adding that although the past three decades were probably the warmest in 1,000 years, “there is also no question that it would appear that the rate of change in the last decade or so is definitely slower than the previous two decades.”
“The IPCC must address this because the climate deniers are linking on to this as a reason to say we’ve got all the science wrong. So I think one of the very most important issues is indeed for them to address this issue absolutely head on.”
The extent of this slowdown depends on how one measures it. Each of the past three decades has been warmer than the previous one and the long-term trend since the 1850s clearly shows a steady temperature rise. However, the average rate of warming was 0.17C per decade between 1970 and 1998 and just 0.04C per decade from 1998 to 2012, according to one of the main global temperature data sets.
Slowing temperature rises have happened before, notably between the 1940s and 1970s. But the recent slowdown has come even though the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere reached 400 parts per million earlier this year, the highest level in millions of years.
This issue is so new that it was barely considered when the IPCC first met in 2009 to decide what would be in its next assessment and there is still no agreed name for it. Many scientists have started to call it the “hiatus” or “pause” and though it will be addressed in the final report, there is still no consensus on what has caused it. Some think it is happening because the oceans are absorbing more heat than once thought, especially at very great depths. Others think aerosols, tiny airborne particles from volcanic eruptions or industrial pollution that reflect sunlight away from the Earth could be having more of a cooling impact.
The most contentious theory – and the one global warming sceptics are most interested in – is that the climate is not as sensitive to carbon dioxide emissions as previously thought. Even if this proves correct, all the climate models used by the IPCC for its latest assessment show that if greenhouse gas emissions continue at current rates, the world will still exceed this century the 2C warming from pre-industrial levels that some scientists believe could prompt dangerous forms of climate change.
But in a sign of what a potent issue the slowdown is becoming, politicians in the US and the UK are already asking if it means they can ease back on contentious measures to curb global warming such as offshore wind farms or carbon pricing.
…
Thomas Stocker co-chair, IPCC Working Group I report
The man at the centre of the IPCC’s new assessment is a gruff Swiss environmental physicist named Thomas Stocker, co-chair of the Working Group I report. After a lifetime spent in the trenches of climate science he is a man of firm opinions. He likes the cerebral American jazz pianist, Keith Jarrett, and spotting orchids. He dislikes a lot of things, including people addicted to smartphones (his own ancient device does almost nothing but take calls), the falling rate of scientific literacy in western society, and poorly run meetings, which he says are “just terrible” and even “irresponsible”. When I saw him in the airy office he has occupied at the University of Bern for the past 20 years, the walls were plastered with reproductions of some of his team’s best-known scientific publications, including a chart showing that concentrations of carbon dioxide in the past 200 years rose to levels more than 30 per cent higher than at any time in the past 800,000 years.
“That’s the most impressive hockey stick,” he said proudly, a reference to the famously contentious graph first published in the late 1990s by the US scientist, Michael Mann, and colleagues. This showed temperatures stayed roughly flat for nearly 1,000 years, like the handle on a horizontal hockey stick, before rising sharply in the 20th century, like the blade, after fossil-fuel emissions began to soar. Climate sceptics have spent years attacking it and Mann because it was such a simple picture of the link between global warming and rising carbon dioxide emissions.
Stocker says, however, that it was his team’s research that was used in the Al Gore film, An Inconvenient Truth, for the part where Gore uses a forklift to illustrate the relative level of today’s emissions compared with those of the past.
He is characteristically brusque about the idea that the recent slowdown in warming suggests politicians can ease up on measures to curb global warming because scientists were mistaken about climate sensitivity. Such questioning is based on “complete disinformation”, he said, pointing out that even the IPCC’s best estimates are always given together with a range of upper and lower projected temperatures. In any case, he said, 15 years of slower warming is simply too short a timeframe on which to base a judgment. “If we found that indeed for 30 years the temperature didn’t go up and CO2 went up with the rate that we observe today, then of course that would pose serious questions. It’s absolutely clear,” he said.
But is it possible that temperatures are not responding to carbon emissions as vigorously as scientists once thought or do we know if the oceans are absorbing more heat? “If we knew one, we could actually make a statement about the other,” Stocker said. “It’s really coupled. We’re not in a position to say either/or.”
It is a similar picture for aerosols. “I think generally there is a large uncertainty,” he said, adding that the current rate at which fossil fuels are being burnt means a considerable amount of warming is nonetheless certain.
Dr Judith Curry of Georgia Institute of Technology
Stocker remains resolutely confident about the robustness of the IPCC’s projections overall. “There is no other science and there’s no other activity of humans that looks into the future that has done so well as the IPCC,” he said. “Ask how well do the GDP projections fare for the next month. Ask how well do the projections of crop yields for the next year. Ask how well projections of DAX [the blue-chip German stock index] and all these other indices fare.”
Stocker’s view is shared by many of the thousands of scientists who have contributed to the IPCC reports over the past 25 years but not all. Dr Judith Curry, chair of the School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences at the Georgia Institute of Technology, is one of several prominent US contrarians who have taken part in past reports but says she would not do so again. The process focuses too narrowly on human impact on the climate, she says, and requires a consensus about its conclusions that can lead to a tribal, group-thinking about the science. “This focus has essentially neglected natural climate variability, and has also neglected to assess potential benefits from a warmer climate,” she told the FT.
“Defending the consensus creates temptations to make illegitimate attacks on scientists whose views do not align with the consensus and to dismiss any disagreement as politically motivated ‘denialism’.”
Peter Wadhams, review editor, IPCC Working Group I report
One doesn’t need to look far to find IPCC scientists who are – for different reasons – even less flattering about some of its work, including one helping to shape the latest assessment. Peter Wadhams, a leading expert on Arctic sea ice at Cambridge university, is a review editor on the new Working Group I report. He was pleased to be involved with this one because he was so upset about certain aspects of the last IPCC assessment in 2007.
“They made a couple of real clangers there,” he said gloomily, staring around his cluttered lair in the university’s Department of Applied Mathematics and Theoretical Physics. One was a contentious decision not to include a best estimate for future sea level rises because it was thought the potential impact of ice sheets was still too poorly understood. Wadhams, along with other critics, believes this led to a serious underestimate of how high sea levels will rise. “They just chickened out,” he fumes. “I mean, in a really systematically cowardly way. And it shows how naive these scientists are or how terrified of sticking their neck out.”
Thomas Stocker, who had a hand in drafting that earlier report, said uncertainties about how the ice sheets were changing made it impossible to include them in the way Wadhams thought they should have been. “Our purpose in AR4 [the earlier assessment] was not to report the highest numbers which would make headlines, but it was to report the numbers that we can defend,” he said.
But Wadhams is even angrier about another line in that last IPCC report suggesting it could take until the latter part of this century before Arctic summer sea ice disappears almost entirely. The sea ice that covers much of the North Pole always melts a little in summer and then refreezes as winter sets in. Last summer, however, it shrank to its lowest point in more than 30 years, a much more dramatic decline than predicted. Wadhams thinks it more likely that its summer sea ice will vanish as soon as 2015.
“It could even be this year or next year but not later than 2015 there won’t be any ice in the Arctic in the summer,” he said, pulling out a battered laptop to show a diagram explaining his calculations, which he calls “the Arctic death spiral”.
This prediction is frequently described as too extreme by other climate scientists writing for the IPCC. But Wadhams says this only underlines the “very conservative” views of the body, which has far too many government scientists who are “in the business of really generating complacency”. He even has doubts about how much value there is in today’s IPCC assessment reports, which he thinks have become too big to be widely useful. “I mean, those thick ones are kind of monuments to man’s arrogance or man’s beavering away. It’s to say, ‘Hey, look, aren’t we wonderful, there’s more of us doing climate research than ever before in the world, we’re all doing more and this is what we’ve done and aren’t we great.’
“But the trouble is a reader who’s not a scientist is going to say, ‘Well, so what?’, there’s 50lbs of book, what does it tell me?”
…
Perhaps the greatest danger to the IPCC, however, is how cumbersome it has become to produce its assessments. The length of time between reports has always made some of its findings slightly outdated, but the process is also increasingly taxing for the volunteer scientists involved. Professor Jonathan Gregory, a leading expert on sea levels and an IPCC report veteran, had been working nonstop the day I saw him at Reading University. “It’s pretty near, I think, the limit of what one can do without it being a job,” he said. “It’s taken a colossal amount of my time this time.”
“I’ve been working on the IPCC Report in the last two months about 35 hours a week,” Gregory added, “but then I have to work another 25 hours to get all the other stuff done, or at least keeping it ticking over. So it is pretty difficult, really.”
Thomas Stocker, co-chair IPCC Working Group 1, in Jungfraujoch, Switzerland
Across the corridor, another IPCC author, Professor Rowan Sutton, was even blunter. “This has been a phenomenally protracted process,” he said. “I’m not sure I would do it again. I mean I don’t think I’ve got the time to do it again really. I do also think that the process needs to change to make it more manageable.”
This change could happen. Earlier this year, Renate Christ from the IPCC secretariat sent a letter to all the governments that commission the panel’s reports asking them to consider “the future of the IPCC” in time for a meeting to be held in October in the Georgian city of Batumi. Similar reviews have been done in the past but one question up for debate this time, according to an accompanying background document that was sent out, is “should the IPCC continue to give priority to comprehensive assessment reports”, with smaller special reports. Another was whether it should do more “focused thematic reports that would jointly constitute an assessment report”.
This would be quite a change for a body that has played such a profound role in shaping the way we think about climate change. And it would make the latest IPCC assessment report even more distinct from its predecessors because, depending on what governments end up deciding, there is a chance that this one could be the last of its kind.
——————————————-
Pilita Clark is the FT’s environment correspondent. To comment on this article, please email magazineletters@ft.com |
Share. Check out an exclusive scene from the Season 3 premiere. Check out an exclusive scene from the Season 3 premiere.
With The 100 back tomorrow night, IGN has an exclusive clip, giving you an early look at what's to come in Season 3.
The end of Season 2 found Octavia (Marie Avgeropoulos) having to deal with some huge emotional upheaval, as she went from the joy of being fully accepted by Indra (Adina Porter) and being told she was a Grounder, to being cast out, after she refused to follow orders and abandon their plan and leave her brother, Bellamy (Bob Morley), behind.
Season 3 finds Octavia and Lincoln (Ricky Whittle) once more living amongst those from the Ark, in the settlement now called Arkadia. But as this clip shows, the girl who was forced to live in hiding underneath the floor for most of her life is not feeling comfortable at all, even as Lincoln, despite being a Grounder himself, is becoming more accepted.
Check out the clip:
Exit Theatre Mode
The 100 fans will note the name "Luna" in Octavia and Lincoln's conversation, a Grounder leader first mentioned by Lincoln in Season 2.
For plenty more on The 100, watch the video playlist below, featuring our new on-set interviews with Marie Avgeropoulos, Eliza Taylor, Devon Bostick and Bob Morley.
The 100: Eliza Taylor on Clarke's "Messy" Reunion With Lexa in Season 3 > <
... Exit Theatre Mode
The 100: Season 3 premieres Thursday, January 21st at 9:00pm ET/PT on the CW.
Eric Goldman is Executive Editor of IGN TV. You can follow him on Twitter at @TheEricGoldman, IGN at ericgoldman-ign and Facebook at Facebook.com/TheEricGoldman. |
Network Rail moves more than 50 tonnes of ballast to shore up track but warns travel problems could last until end of Monday
A four-metre-deep sinkhole opened up underneath railway lines in south London on Monday, causing travel chaos for commuters, who were advised to avoid one of the capital’s busiest stations just as the evening rush hour was getting under way.
Network Rail said it was moving more than 50 tonnes of ballast to the scene in Forest Hill to try and shore up the track, but said travel problems could last until the end of the day.
Southern (@SouthernRailUK) ⚠️ Services continue to be disrupted by a large hole under the tracks. Latest info https://t.co/3ffJZSC6TM pic.twitter.com/YmbjccTng7
The hole shut down two lines into London Bridge station and severely disrupted, diverted or cancelled many Southern train services into and out of the station. The problems hit within days of Southern having to release a reduced timetable because it was struggling to deliver services as expected.
Tom Berry (@CdreSchmidlapp) For the record @SouthernRailUK a hole in the track is your best excuse yet. #southernrail
Emma Cate (@CathayStakes) The sinkhole at Forest Hill must be what all the trains have been disappearing into in the last few months 😂 #ForestHill #southernfail
Passengers were told to use either nearby Victoria or Blackfriars stations. A Network Rail spokesman said: “Our aim is to have the railway fixed for tomorrow morning, but holes like this can be unpredictable. Until the ballast is packed into the hole, we won’t know for certain if the hole is stable or not – so passengers are advised to check before they travel.” |
The Lament
On 12 March 2012 David Remnick, editor of The New Yorker, wrote a brief lament for Israeli democracy. It appeared under the title “Threatened” and can be found in the magazine’s Talk Of The Town comment section. Here are some of the points that Remnick made:
1. “Democracy is never fully achieved. At best, its an ambition, a state of becoming.” Remnick points to the U.S. and tells us that it has taken “generations” for many minority groups to attain “the rights of citizenship.” And, even now it is an on-going struggle for there are always those (including a number of contenders for the Republican nomination) who wish to “scale back such rights.”
Remnick is correct. However, it should be emphasized that the general historical trend in the U.S., particularly since the Second World War, has been toward greater inclusiveness. Sometimes its two steps forward and one step backward, but the presence of the nation’s first black president should be taken as a sign of the direction in which the U.S. is moving.
2. Israel is “embroiled in a crisis of democratic becoming.” Politically, Israel was built on a social democratic model and the resulting institutions should be seen as “points of pride.” And yet “an intensifying conflict of values has put its democratic nature under tremendous stress.” Remnick refers here to “an existential threat that looms within.” What is this potentially fatal threat? “Reactionary elements” who would lead Israel to the political brink, so to speak–a “decent into apartheid, xenophobia, and isolation.”
Remnick believes that the “political corrosion begins…with the occupation of the Palestinian territories…that has lasted for forty five years.” He points out that the result has been “a profoundly anti-democratic, even racist, political culture [that] has become endemic among much of the Jewish population in the West Bank, and jeopardizes Israel proper.” He notes that recent Israeli polls show the youth of the country “losing touch with the liberal democratic principles of the state.”
3. Remnick sees this as a horrible step backward from Theodor Herzl’s vision of “a pluralist Zionism” and he puts a lot of the blame on “emboldened [Jewish] fundamentalists [who] flaunt an increasingly aggressive medievalism,” the kind that has made heroes of Jewish terrorists such as the mass murder Baruch Goldstein. Such people now thrive in a political environment in which “the tenets of liberal democracy [are] negotiable in a game of coalition politics.”
4. Remnick’s conclusion is that “such short-term expedience cannot but exact a long-term price: this dream–and process of democratic becoming–may be painfully, even fatally, deferred.”
Historical Corrections
Certainly many of David Remnick’s observations of anti-democratic Israeli behavior are accurate but his assumption that these are relatively recent phenomena, located mainly among the settlers on the West Bank, is just historically wrong. Israel’s anti-democratic trends flow from structural problems that were built into the Zionist experiment that ultimately resulted in the Israeli state. Built in by the Zionist ideology itself.
The truth is that you cannot design a state, and its supporting political ideology, for one in-group only, then try to implement it in a land filled with out-groups, and not come forth with a discriminatory product. Having an exclusionary goal from the beginning, as the Zionists did, makes Israeli prejudices structural and not an accident of this or that government’s policies.
Thus, an accurate reading of Theodor Herzl reveals that his “pluralistic Zionism” was a concept that assumed, indeed demanded, that the population of the state be overwhelmingly Jewish. The non-Jewish population had to be enticed or pushed out of the Jewish state. That makes Israel’s anti-democratic Zionist attitude one hundred seventeen years old (dating from the publication of Herzl’s Der Jundenstaat – The Jewish State) and not, as Remnick suggests, forty five. Once Herzl’s desired purge was accomplished, there could them be “pluralism” among the solely Jewish population remaining. Today, we call such ethnocentrism, racism.
An accurate and open-minded look at Israel’s history, as can be had from the works of Ilan Pappe and Benny Morris, among others, shows beyond a doubt that, from the beginning, Israeli political leaders, be they of the right or the left, secular or religious, all had the same goal of purging the country of non-Jews. If differences existed relevant to this goal, they were tactical and not strategic. And this, by the way, is why all the talk heard across the American political spectrum of how Israel is “just like us” is again, historically incorrect. While the democratic majority in the U.S. has chosen to interpret its laws and political philosophy in an inclusive manner, Israel’s Jewish majority has chosen to pursue the opposite goal–an exclusive, ethnocentric, and ultimately racist state.
Conclusion
Nonetheless, David Remnick’s brief essay is both interesting and important. It shows that there is a growing split among Zionists here in the United States. The so-called “soft Zionists” are increasingly troubled by the fact that Israel’s behavior contradicts their long cherished myths.
All nations have cherished myths and they are important in sustaining support for and faith in the nation itself. When the myths start to fall away you know that support must fall away as well. And so it is with Israel. You can see it in the increasing numbers of Israelis deciding to emigrate out of their country, and you can see it in David Remnick’s essay which, in its own way, is an act of emigration. Seeing his imagined liberal Israel overtaken by “an increasingly aggressive medievalism,” David Remnick has apparently come to the conclusion that this is not the sort of Israel he can support. |
A white-hot inferno of a comics flame war is blazing on social media right now and everyone has to take a side to preserve life as we know it.
In one corner: Gail Simone, currently of Red Sonja but previously of every comic you ever read.
In the other: Fabian Nicieza, famed co-creator of Deadpool and long time Marvel editor and writer.
What sparked the blaze is a shocker: Simone’s claim that Cyclop’s eyebeams are heat vision.
Cyclops is one of the most problematic of X-men. To some a whiny, privileged brat, to others a tormented, disabled survivor. While the conversation over whether to just kick him to the curb while Wolverine and (adult) Jean Grey make out or just bury him in a tomb of adamantium has long been seen on social media, the new controversy has ignited a new war the likes of which the comics world has never seen.
The stunning claim started out on Facebook, and many immediately raised arms against this fake news:
Some observers suggested that Simone was really testing to see whether it would be easier for male comics readers to think
a) Simone–a near 20 year industry veteran who has written every major character there is to write–didn’t know what she was talking about
or
b) Simone was just trolling them
…but such conspiracy theories were quickly dismissed as farcical.
Nicieza, summoning the vast powers of former X-men writer soon emerged to counter Simone’s earth shattering pronouncement.
And then it got cray. Simone defended her views while revealing dark secrets about Nicieza.
And Fabian shot back!
The feud has only escalated as the hours pass. Many have friended Nicieza to show support.
But in perhaps the biggest reveal of all, Simone, who fights to win, has enlisted Porgs to her side.
OR as good ol JR might put it, “THE PORGS! THE PORGS! THE PORGS!”
Porgs, if you don’t know, are the cutesy wootsy new aliens from Star Wars The Last Jedi that are expected to either be the new Ewoks or a sharp repudiation of all that is cute– while still selling a billion toys.
That’s how things stand at this moment. Cyclop’s eye beams have long been a source of controversy, but never has the fundamental debate over their nature ripped the comics industry asunder like this. Sides are being taken, Words are being exchanged. Blog posts are being written.
And nothing will ever be the same again.
Courage. We’ll survive this. We have to.
Writer C. W. Cooke summed it all up in this meme.
Heidi MacDonald is the founder and editor in chief of The Beat. In the past, she worked for Disney, DC Comics, Fox and Publishers Weekly. She can be heard regularly on the More To Come Podcast. She likes coffee, cats and noble struggle.
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Social media marketing is tricky, and a lot of people don’t fully understand the positives and negatives of integrating it into their businesses. I’m going to explain how your website will benefit from embracing social media.
The primary reason we work in social media is to get links. Clean, Google friendly backlinks. It’s possible to generate thousands of them with a single article, just three hundred words could bring in more than ten thousand links. Obviously, links bring good rankings on Google and will help your site become an authority site if marketed correctly.
Successfully marketing an article on the social networks also brings traffic, more than you could ever desire. We’ve launched articles that have had almost a million visitors. Unfortunately, the traffic is commercially worthless, you’re going to make almost no sales, get any sign-ups or achieve any direct return. I’ve only ever heard once of a person making “proper” money from a success on the social networks, and that was just $11,000.
Social Media success on your blog could also help you gain a few RSS subscribers, but I wouldn’t think it would add them in the hundreds.
Brand exposure is also a factor, however, most social network users don’t like commercial sites and the pages have to be “dressed down” in order for them to work. Hence, negating the “brand exposure” that having millions of visitors might bring.
Social media marketing is a great way to start your viral marketing campaign which again would bring indirect brand awareness. Viral videos have always worked well, and are working particularly well at the moment.
In summary, social media can be of huge benefit, if you realise how to use it to it’s full potential. As a webmaster or business owner, the benefit is indirect, mostly though increased link equity, which will bring the rankings and then the traffic. Using social media to create links is by far the most economical way of increasing your rankings on the search engines, and it is still within Google’s guidelines as an added bonus. |
The Central Remedial Clinic’s chief executive who resigned yesterday has repaid the HSE extra funding he received in excess of official guidelines.
Brian Conlan, who took over as the clinic’s chief last July, was in receipt of a €125,000 salary until October of this year, though the salary level approved by the HSE was significantly less.
According to internal HSE documents, the approved salary for the CRC’s chief executive post that applied in July was €64,812, though this was later revised upwards to €83,252 in October.
A spokesman for Mr Conlan confirmed today that he reimbursed the HSE for additional payments he received by cheque this morning.
In a statement to The Irish Times, Mr Conlan said he had personally taken steps to ensure his salary met HSE guidelines.
“The position of CRC chief executive came with an annual salary financed entirely from the CRC’s annual funding allocation from the HSE,” he said.
“After I joined I became aware that the HSE had taken issue with the CRC on the value of the salary as it exceeded the recommended payscale for a chief executive of an institution of the CRC’s size.”
Mr Conlan said he made representations to the clinic’s board, requesting its agreement to formally reduce the salary scale for chief executive of the CRC in keeping with the HSE guidelines.
He added: “The board agreed and the revised payscale came into effect from 1st October last. I have taken steps to reimburse the HSE for the value of the net salary I received in excess of their guidelines between July and September.”
A spokesman last night said Mr Conlan did not plan to attend tomorrow’s sitting of the Dáil Public Accounts Committee, which is investigating the issue of top-up fees.
“He has resigned from his post and doesn’t have additional information to bring to the proceedings beyond what is available to the remaining directors . . . There is no onus on him to appear,” Mr Conlan’s spokesman said.
The clinic has been mired in controversy since it emerged that charitable funds were used to top-up the salaries of senior executives.
The Irish Times reported last week that the HSE expressed alarm during the summer over the “highly irregular” manner in which Mr Conlan was appointed, without interviewing external candidates.
In a statement yesterday, Mr Conlan said he had been offered the position of chief executive last July following a selection process conducted by the clinic’s board, with assistance from recruitment consultants.
Mr Conlan has since confirmed that he was a member of the CRC’s board while the selection process took place.
His spokesman today said Mr Conlan was qualified as a member of the board to apply for the position of Chief Executive.
Mr Conlan’s spokesman also claimed he had not received any top-up payments while serving in the position.
However, documents show Mr Conlan’s salary was significantly in excess of official guidelines authorised by the HSE. |
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Image copyright AFP Image caption Saudi police have stepped up their operations around the country since the emergence of Islamic State
Saudi Arabia has arrested 88 people accused of plotting attacks inside and outside the country, officials say.
The interior ministry said the men had been monitored for several months before their arrest and "were on the verge of carrying out operations".
Police say three of the men are from Yemen, one is still being identified and the rest are Saudis.
Correspondents say Saudi Arabia has stepped up its security amid Islamic State's offensive in Iraq and Syria.
Interior ministry spokesman Mansour al-Turki did not give any details about the plots but said 59 of the men had previously served prison sentences for similar offences.
He told reporters the arrests were made over the past few days, and said it showed that Saudi forces were "serious in tracking down" anyone who joined extremist groups.
"It is unfortunate that some of those who had completed their sentences and were released by court orders returned to their previous ways," he added.
Those arrested support "misguided ideology and glorify terrorist acts," the spokesman added, saying several of them were in contact with "members of terrorist organisations" outside the country.
Earlier this year, Saudi Arabia made it illegal for its citizens to fight for groups overseas amid growing concerns that those citizens would eventually threaten the kingdom's stability.
'Europe and US at threat'
The six-nation Gulf Co-operation Council, of which Saudi Arabia is a member, said on Saturday that it was ready to act "against terrorist threats that face the region and the world".
Saudi King Abdullah said groups like Islamic State posed a danger that could "affect several countries outside the Middle East".
"If we ignore them, I am sure they will reach Europe in a month and America in another month," he warned.
Saudi Arabia has faced a growing threat from extremist fighters across its southern border with Yemen and has voiced concern about Islamic State's rise to its north, in Iraq and Syria.
Security in the Saudi kingdom will come under the spotlight over the next few weeks as millions of Muslim pilgrims make their way to the country to take part in the Hajj in October. |
This is part of a series about improving mental health research, diagnosis and treatment. Join the conversation on Twitter with the hashtag #OpenMinds
The ground-floor apartment isn't fancy. There's a beige couch against a beige wall; the drawn curtains hold the shadows in. But Renee Blais chose the mismatched furniture herself and the new curtain rod was hung by a father she'd hardly seen for years. Now she has clean dishes piled by the sink, cookbooks on a table in the living room, a foot-high rubber plant growing in a clay pot. "I'm allowed to have a pet," she says with a grin that reveals two missing teeth. "But I think I will start with a plant."
These small things matter: opening the fridge and seeing food she bought for herself. Making coffee in the morning. A front door with a lock. Before Blais, 28, moved in this winter, she was homeless, prostituting herself for drugs, her every possession stuffed in a bag. She fell asleep knowing her shoes might be stolen by morning – or worse.
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"At the end, I didn't want to live any more," she says. On the street, "you are surrounded by people, but it's the loneliest feeling ever."
Now, she says brightly, "I am not using, I am not lost and all over the place. Since I moved in, only good things have been happening."
Renee didn't find a home; this home found her. Or more precisely, Jason Platts found her, casually showing up on the streets of the low-income Ottawa neighbourhood of Vanier, inviting her for coffee, visiting her in hospital when she was diagnosed with a bacterial infection. It's Platts's job, as an outreach worker for the Canadian Mental Health Association, to wait for her to say she'd had enough of life on the street, and then help her leave it – in this case, by finding an apartment in the city's east end and giving her the support she needs to stay there.
Mental illness and poverty
In many cases, mental illness can't be simplified down to a medical problem that even a perfect health-care system would solve. It's also a social issue, tangled up in poverty, unemployment and family circumstance. People who are poor are about four times as likely to have a mental-health problem, and people who are mentally ill are more likely to become poor. Among the 200,000 people in Canada homeless every year, two-thirds have a history of mental illness or substance abuse. The country spends $7.7-billion for health care, social-service use and the justice system in connection with homelessness; the human cost of being trapped on the street in one of the wealthiest nations in the world is without measure.
This reality is more evidence for early intervention, for publicly funded comprehensive treatments – to tackle illness before it derails a patient's life, and to invest in preventing relapse. But it also means that psychotherapy and well-managed drugs are only a partial remedy for many of the sickest patients who also need support finding jobs and affordable housing.
The support part is proving, in research, to be an essential ingredient – to keep people in their new apartments by bringing the social system to them and not requiring complete sobriety to enter or stay in the program. Housing first, as advocates like to say, but not housing only. This approach, credited to a Canadian psychologist, is now considered to be the best practice mental-health program to end homelessness. And it is being adopted all over the world, thanks, in part, to an unprecendented five-year study in Canadian cities that showed how well it worked.
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Using the Housing First model, which has been endorsed by the Obama administration, cities such as New Orleans and the entire state of Utah are on the verge of declaring an end to chronic homelessness (in the United States, the first focus of the program is often on veterans). Medicine Hat claims it will have achieved this goal by the end of the year. Projects are launching in Europe's largest cities. In 2013, Ottawa committed nearly $600-million over five years to Housing First projects (slightly less than the previous half-decade commitment), with provinces also contributing. The selling point was the five-city pilot project conducted by the Mental Health Commission of Canada, which found that spending $1 on Housing First saved $2 in costs for homeless people with the highest needs and the most severe mental illness. What's more, they were no longer trapped in a hospital bed until they had somewhere to go, or sleeping in a parking garage or locked up in a jail cell, drifting between social supports and treatment plans. They were home.
Genesis of a new approach
Dr. Sam Tsemberis understands the transforming power of place, how the story of a life can be changed with a new country, a different set of walls. He was 7 when his family arrived in Canada, escaping the civil war in Greece for Montreal, where his family ran a deli. As a young substitute teacher tossed into a special-education class, he watched his students hide with shame in their classroom, always wanting the door closed and yet shine on stage in drama club. He went back to school to become a better teacher and became a psychologist instead, which led him to New York and an internship at Bellevue psychiatric hospital. He would counsel people during the day and walk by them the next morning on the sidewalk, still wearing their Bellevue pyjamas.
"The way I learned to help people is to listen to their stories," says Tsemberis, sitting in an Ottawa restaurant in April, having just finished a two-day meeting with social-services groups in the capital. (Tsemberis, who heads the non-profit Pathways to Housing , is based in New York but travels the world giving workshops on the housing first model.)
He recalls how, at Bellevue, he became closer to the patients than the staff, who carried their ward keys like shields of distinction. "I don't think I would have gotten to the idea of putting people into their apartments if I hadn't listened to what people really wanted."
What they wanted was their own place. "You can visit me," they told Tsemberis, "but I don't want to have to hide my beer under the couch when you come over."
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It's so obvious in its simplicity: To help people who are homeless, find them housing. But historically, the philosophy had been very different: People living on the street, struggling with mental illness and drug addiction, had to be helped before they could live independently. They needed to take their meds and give up their alcohol; they needed to learn, once again, to follow society's rules as set by transition houses and shelters. Those programs worked to a certain extent – people were given access to health services, they worked at their addictions, they moved on. But the hardest cases, the sickest people, rarely made it off the street – at least, not for long. "They were programmed into helplessness," Tsemberis says. "When they are invited to go live on their own, there is fear of leaving."
Renee Blais, smart, articulate and now motivated to change her life, is an example of why that approach doesn't work. She'd been homeless for four years when she met Jason Platts. Before that, after five years on the street, she was admitted to a seven-month rehab program in Montreal, but, returning to Ottawa and her old environment, she couldn't avoid drugs. Even the best shelters are rough, filled with other addicts. "For me to stay clean in that place, it would be impossible. For me it wasn't safe." And she didn't always agree with the rules. At a transition house, after leaving a hospital, she argued with the staff and was kicked out one morning for getting too close with a male resident, with whom she is still in a relationship.
Other groups, including a program called Houselink in Toronto, had been moving the homeless into independent housing for decades. But Tsemberis envisioned a more structured plan: Move people into subsidized apartments scattered around the city so they could live like regular tenants, with no restrictions linked to sobriety or treatment compliance, visit them regularly and provide the level of assistance they wanted and needed. It's a social-behavioural approach, rather than a medical-biological one. The housing came first, the help came to them.
In 1992, Tsemberis started out with a team that included a formerly homeless poet and a recovering addict, and enough funding for 50 units. On one of the first nights, one man dragged the furniture out of another apartment and sold it on the street to make money for crack for the addicted tenant living there. The man had been a plumber, so this included the sink and toilet. "That was the beginning of realizing that this is going to be very complicated," Tsemberis recalls. "People will give you many, many opportunities to get rid of them." The plumber was given another apartment, and another; he went to jail and when he got out, he was given yet another. Four apartments later, he was going with Tsemberis to presentations to sell the program to policy-makers.
"If we'd had a 50-per-cent retention rate, we would have been thrilled," Tsemberis recalls. "That first year, we had 84 per cent. We were on to something."
In studies, Housing First has managed to maintain those stats, although it frays a bit over time. In Canadian research, the cost benefits are highest for people with the most severe mental illness, who have the most room to improve. Unlike in the U.S., Canadian research has found that treatment in the community leads to similar health gains for more average clients – a finding experts attribute to universal health care. But in the Mental Health Commission's pilot project, Housing First participants reported better quality of life and 73 per cent were in stable housing after a year, versus 32 per cent of those receiving regular services. Housing First has clashed with groups that provide transitional housing, who have seen their budgets cut, and poverty advocates who point out that a collection of options needs to exist. But as Vicky Stergiopoulos, a psychiatrist at the Centre for Research on Inner City Health at St. Michael's Hospital in Toronto observes, the Housing First model rescues even her most ill patients, the ones with schizophrenia who could never function in shared living space. For her, turf wars are a distraction; this is about what works.
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'Things are getting better every day'
In Medicine Hat, Mayor Ted Clugston was a skeptic when first approached about Housing First. "I was raised that you work hard, you get a job, or two jobs if that's what it takes, and you shouldn't be looking for a handout," he said. People living on the street were lazy, he believed, and needed to get off drugs. The Alberta city's social-service workers, he admits, "had a hard time with me." But eventually, they sold him on the savings it would mean for more expensive city services – and he came to recognize the more complex link between homelessness, stigma and mental illness. In the past five years, the Medicine Hat Community Housing Society has received about $12-million in provincial and federal funds, used to house and support nearly 900 people, including 250 children, in a combination of existing subsidized apartments and newly constructed affordable housing. In a city with a population 61,000, Clugston likes to say that's about the same as Calgary getting 20,000 people off the street. It has not been officially announced but he says Medicine Hat has already achieved its goal of finding housing for every newly homeless person within 10 days.
Not every Housing First strategy looks the same. Tsemberis believes what works best is scattering clients throughout cities in safe neighbourhoods and moving mental-health services out of offices and into their homes directly with personal visits. But some cities have purchased entire buildings, or provide different levels of service – in those cases retention rates are not as high. Some people eventually become self-sufficient, but others stay in the program indefinitely, which means funding needs to be stable. Housing First has focused on single people who are chronically homeless and need mental-health services.
Blais, meanwhile, is making plans. She would like to go back to high school, and do some volunteering. For the first time in years, she spent Easter with her family. She has gone from seeing Platts four times a week to only once. She goes daily for a dose of methadone. "I am sure the time will come when I will be okay on my own," she says. "Things are getting better every day. Now it is time to turn the page."
After lunch, Sam Tsemberis heads back to his Ottawa hotel, walking along Sussex Drive, a street of high-end stores and restaurants. The turrets of the Château Laurier soar into the sky. A few blocks away, the city's shelters are preparing for their nightly guests. Tsemberis catches the eye of an older man sitting on the sidewalk, his wiry, grey beard resting on his chest, his cap out for coins. Tsemberis greets him and gives him change from his pocket. Turning away, he sighs. "That's how we got homelessness. We got used to walking by people on the streets."
And by not listening when they told us what they needed.
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By the numbers
200,000: The number of people in Canada who are homeless annually.
$7-billion: The annual cost of homelessness in Canada in health care, justice costs and social-service use.
67: The percentage of people who are homeless with a history of mental illness.
$600-million: Ottawa's five-year investment in Housing First projects starting in 2014.
55: The percentage of homeless people who had visited an emergency room or been hospitalized in the past year (2010 Health and Housing in Transition Study).
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43: The percentage of long-term psychiatric patients in hospital for 90 days or more, receiving alternative levels of care, who were readmitted within 30 days.
$2,500: The additional cost of a hospital stay for a homeless person compared with an average patient (2011 study at St. Michael's Hospital).
4.8: The average number of years, in their lifetime, that a participant in the Housing First trial had been homeless.
40: The percentage of participants in the trial who reported having their first episode of homelessness before age 25.
73: The percentage of time Housing First participants spent in stable housing over two years.
32: The percentage of time spent in stable housing by a control group.
$19,582: The annual cost of the Housing First initiative for the most severely mentally ill clients with the highest needs.
$42,536: The annual costs saved in services that otherwise would have been used.
225,000: The annual cost to the system, per person, for homeless people who are the highest users of social, justice and health-care services.
$2: The amount saved through Housing First for every $1 spent on these clients.
Sources: Cross-Site at Home/Chez Soi study, Mental Health Commission of Canada; St Michael's Hospital, and 2010 Canadian Health and Housing in Transition Study
The Centre for Addiction and Mental Health has purchased advertisements to accompany this series. The organization had no involvement in the creation or production of this or any other story in the series. |
Story highlights Trump repeated calls over the weekend to fire players who kneel during the national anthem
His remarks struck many as stoking racial resentments
(CNN) President Donald Trump is not putting to rest this weekend's uproar over professional football players' protests during the national anthem, declaring early Monday that a rival sports franchise was more suitably patriotic.
"So proud of NASCAR and its supporters and fans," Trump wrote on Twitter at 7:25 a.m. ET. "They won't put up with disrespecting our Country or our Flag - they said it loud and clear!"
He went on to write eight minutes later: "Many people booed the players who kneeled yesterday (which was a small percentage of total). These are fans who demand respect for our Flag!" He later tweeted "#StandForOurAnthem" and retweeted a user who cited for NFL player Pat Tillman, who was killed in Afghanistan in 2004 while serving with the Army Rangers.
In a statement released Monday afternoon, NASCAR said sports are a "unifying influence in our society."
"Our respect for the national anthem has always been a hallmark of our pre-race events. Thanks to the sacrifices of many, we live in a country of unparalleled freedoms and countless liberties, including the right to peacefully express one's opinion," the statement said.
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EVGA this week unveiled their NVIDIA GeForce GTX 950-based video cards with reduced power consumption. As a result, these new cards do not require auxiliary power connectors and can be powered entirely by a PCIe x16 slots Similar variants have already been announced from companies like ASUS and MSI, but EVGA decided to release a range of such graphics cards as well, including factory-overclocked models.
EVGA’s family of low-power GeForce GTX 950 graphics cards that do not need external power consists of four models, which is a lot by contrast to other manufacturers. The GPUs are based on NVIDIA’s cut-down GM206 graphics die (768 stream processors, 48 texture units, 32 ROPs, 128-bit GDDR5 memory interface) but use EVGA’s custom PCB with 3+1 phase VRM. The GPUs are equipped with 2 GB of GDDR5 memory, one or two DVI connectors depending on model, one HDMI 2.0 port and one DisplayPort output.
From the four cards, two of them run at NVIDIA’s reference GPU clock rates of 1025/1190 MHz, while the other two a little bit faster and run the graphics chip at 1076/1253 MHz. In each pair, one has a single DVI-I while the other has DVI-I and DVI-D connectors. All the boards feature 6.6 Gbps GDDR5 memory. As for cooling, they use dual-slot single-fan EVGA ACX 2.0 coolers.
Unfortunately, EVGA does not mark its GeForce GTX 950 boards with reduced power consumption with any easy to recognize label, hence, the only way to distinguish the adapters without PCIe connectors is by referencing the product numbers:
NVIDIA GeForce GTX 950 Graphics Cards Specification Comparison EVGA GTX 950 EVGA GTX 950 EVGA GTX 950 EVGA GTX 950 MSI
GTX 950 ASUS
GTX 950 Ref Product Name 02G-P4-0952 02G-P4-0956 02G-P4-0954 02G-P5-258 2GD5 OCV2 GTX950-2G - CUDA Cores 768 Texture Units 48 ROPs 32 Core Clock 1025
MHz 1076
MHz 1025
MHz 1076
MHz 1076
MHz 1026
MHz 1024
MHz Boost Clock 1190
MHz 1253
MHz 1190
MHz 1253
MHz 1253
MHz 1190
MHz 1188
MHz Memory Clock 6.6 Gbps
GDDR5 Memory Bus Width 128-bit VRAM 2 GB TDP 75 W 90 W Outputs DVI-I
DP 1.2
HDMI 2.0 DVI-I
DP 1.2
HDMI 2.0 DVI-D
DVI-I
DP 1.2
HDMI 2.0 DVI-D
DVI-I
DP 1.2
HDMI 2.0 DVI-I
DisplayPort 1.2
HDMI 2.0 Architecture Maxwell 2 GPU GM206 Transistor Count 2.94 B Manufacturing Process TSMC 28nm Launch Date Apr '16 Mar '16 Mar '16 Aug '15 Launch Price unknown $159
While graphics cards like the GeForce GTX 950 are not used to build high-end gaming PCs, these new PCIe-less models can be purchased to upgrade inexpensive or older PCs which sometimes come without an auxiliary PCIe power connector on the power supply. In addition, a GM206-based adapter is a reasonable choice for an HTPC as the GPU supports hardware-accelerated decoding and encoding of H.265 (HEVC) video, as well as HDCP 2.2 content protection over HDMI 2.0 (which is required for Ultra HD Blu-ray playback).
Since at least three manufacturers of NVIDIA graphics cards already offer GeForce GTX 950 boards without auxiliary PCIe power connectors, it is could be assumed that the GM206-251 GPU (revealed by MSI) has been selected due to reduced power requirements. It is unclear whether NVIDIA picks such GPUs itself and then marks them accordingly, or if there is a new revision of the chip and makers of add-in-cards have to test power requirements themselves through binning.
Right now EVGA does not sell its GeForce GTX 950 low power graphics cards on its website. It is unknown at what price these units will be launched at this time. |
“Unfortunately, no deaf actors showed up to the auditions.”
The statement above was made yesterday in a public statement to the Deaf and hard of hearing community by Leslie Charipar, artistic director of Theatre Cedar Rapids in Iowa. It was issued in response to complaints that Charipar has received from the Deaf community at large about the theatre’s upcoming production of Nina Raine’s Tribes, which TCR has cast with hearing actors in the roles of Billy, who is deaf, and Sylvia, a young woman raised by Deaf parents who is now going deaf. The statement is in response to what Charipar calls “questions, complaints, rants, and vitriol against our production.”
The statement about “showing up” is not a unique one, as it has been used by various theatres in a variety of circumstances, when they say they are unable to cast roles authentically for race, ethnicity and disability, but forge ahead with a show regardless. It places the onus on people whose lived experience mirrors or approximates that of the role in question, blaming them for not “showing up” and, ostensibly, then absolves the producer for proceeding with casting solely from the pool of those who did, regardless of the specific requirements of the role.
Now it’s worth noting, as Charipar points out in her statement, that TCR is a community theatre. It casts locally and no actors are compensated. Indeed, many positions at TCR are volunteer, but based on online evidence, they’ve built a thriving company dating back 90 years. They offer ten productions a year ranging from Sister Act to The Flick, as well as programs for children and teens. The company is sufficiently sophisticated to operate on a budget that totals over $3 million annually in expenses; even if one removes the in-kind contribution of $750,000 for its venue, it’s still over a $2 million operation.
Having been entirely unaware of the company or issues surrounding its production of Tribes until Charipar’s statement began to be shared widely on social media, it’s difficult to assess all of the communication that has taken place to date. There are certainly many comments about the issue on the company’s Facebook page, though none there that I saw rose to the level of rants or vitriol, only passionate statements on behalf of the Deaf community and authenticity in casting. Certainly with a statement like Charipar’s being issued, surely a great deal of communication of all kinds led up to it. It’s important to acknowledge that some of the commenters I did see appeared to be making the assumption that TCR was a company that is hiring actors, rather than casting local amateurs, and which could have gone beyond their immediate community, engaging an actor from outside their metropolitan area.
But coming back to the statement about Deaf actors not showing up, Charipar writes, “It is our policy at TCR to cast from the pool of actors who auditioned. That is the only fair way to cast…that is the purpose of auditions.” She also writes, “I know that at least one organization that advocates on behalf of the deaf community was contacted to let them know that we were holding auditions for a show with a role for a deaf actor.”
Regardless of whether the theatre is amateur or professional, TCR is a major creative and entertainment resource for the Cedar Rapids community. Having produced Dreamgirls with a black cast, having cast an actress of Korean heritage as Christmas Eve in Avenue Q, it would seem to be incumbent upon them to make all necessary efforts to at least find a deaf actor for the role of Billy in Tribes. That means going beyond their usual policy of just casting who shows up, but really making a concerted effort to reach out to the Deaf community in their region.
TCR did put out a casting notice for late August auditions indicating that they were seeking, in their words, “two hearing impaired actors in their 20s, one male who can speak and sign, and one female who can speak and sign, or be able to perform with a hearing impaired accent.” But with performances beginning in October, presumably with rehearsals in September, they didn’t allow any extra time in the event that Deaf or hard of hearing actors didn’t materialize. If they had been committed to authentic casting, they might have worked further ahead of their usual schedule, and made their call for Deaf actors more vigorously.
The results of their casting call obviously led Charipar to the following questions in her statement:
“My question to you is: with no deaf actor in the role of Billy, should we just not do the play, thereby ending any conversation that this play or the controversy of our casting might bring? Or is it more valuable to do the play with the actors available so that we can talk about the issues confronting the deaf community?”
But earlier in the statement, Charipar made clear her priorities:
“It was a decision made in service to the show we have committed to do, to the audience who has already purchased tickets to this particular show, and to the actors who showed up to audition.”
Despite the artistic director’s intention to begin a conversation about the issues of the play, TCR neglected the real concerns of the very community they sought to explore through the theatre’s work. This is contrary to a central tenet held by many Deaf and disabled activists, “Nothing about us without us,” which is to say that they should be included whenever and wherever their lives are being explored or affected.
Since Charipar posed rhetorical questions, let me pose my own:
Did TCR have ASL interpreters available at auditions and did it announce that interpreters would be present?
If an insufficient number of black actors had auditioned for Dreamgirls, or no Asian actors had auditioned for Avenue Q, would TCR have proceeded with those productions using only the people who showed up? Does TCR differentiate between respect for communities of color and the Deaf and disability communities?
Did TCR find hearing actors who sign, or will they need to engage an ASL consultant to train the actors who were cast (or, if being strictly accurate to the British setting, BSL)? If it’s the latter, does TCR understand that they will be asking the actors required to sign to perform in another language without actually speaking or comprehending that language, since ASL is not English?
If there is an ASL or BSL consultant, who presumably works closely with individuals who are deaf or a broader Deaf community, what does that person think about training people to pretend to deafness?
Has TCR made arrangements for open-captioned or sign interpreted performances, to ensure that no Deaf members of their community are excluded from experiencing the show, if they are willing to accept the casting?
The Theater Cedar Rapids production of Tribes is clearly going forward after weighing opinions for and against producing the play without authentically casting the role of Billy or Sylvia. That’s their right. But returning to the theme of having a conversation about the issues raised in the play, it’s fair to say that Theatre Cedar Rapids is already engaged in that conversation, though perhaps not in the way that they intended and not as soon as they intended. That’s the right of the Deaf community and those who support them.
Let’s hope that the result of this conversation is some real learning not simply at TCR, but in Cedar Rapids at large, about the Deaf and disabled community, and the many barriers that exist to their participation in the arts both as professionals and amateurs. This shouldn’t simply be a fleeting speed bump for TCR on the road to doing things the way they’ve always been done.
Update, September 14, 2016: Theatre Cedar Rapids has postponed their production of Tribes. In a statement, artistic director Leslie Charipar wrote, “In light of conversation among and feedback from the Deaf community and after a great deal of conversation and soul-searching with TCR staff, Tribes director David Schneider, and the cast of Tribes, TCR has decided to postpone our production of Tribes until we can gain the support of the Deaf community and collaborate with them in finding d/Deaf actors to play the deaf roles as well as ensure that we are portraying the deaf experience in an authentic and respectful way.”
Howard Sherman is the interim director of the Alliance for Inclusion in the Arts.
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Trail Blazers guard CJ McCollum isn’t the kind of player who makes excuses. In fact, the 6-4 guard out of Lehigh is perhaps his most vicious critic, often times pointing out his own mistakes first when discussing team performances, particularly in losses. He holds himself to a high standard, and when he fails to meet that standard, he’s not afraid to admit it.
So it wasn’t surprising to hear McCollum take responsibility for the one-game suspension levied by the NBA for leaving the bench during at altercation between Trail Blazers rookie Caleb Swanigan and Suns center Alex Len during the fourth quarter of Portland’s 113-104 preseason victory in Phoenix on October 11. But he certainly wasn’t satisfied with the ruling either, which will keep the starting two guard out of Portland’s season opener versus the Suns on October 18 and cost him roughly $164,000 in lost salary.
“I was disappointed,” said McCollum of the decision. “You never want to miss games, especially like that to start the season. You work so hard to prepare for the season, you go through a lot of preseason games that don’t mean anything and then you miss a regular season game because of an incident that you weren’t even involved in. There’s nothing I can do about it now but more forward and learn from it.”
While McCollum did violate the most literal interpretation of the rule, which states players can be fined and/or suspended for leaving the bench and entering the court during an altercation, one could argue McCollum didn’t violate the spirit, as he made no contact with another player and looked as though he was more interested in alleviating the situation than exacerbating it.
“Obviously I wasn’t trying to escalate the situation, I was trying to look out for a teammate, but they decided to suspend me,” said McCollum. “I should have known that they were going to suspend me but with it being preseason and me not being involved in the actual event and me just trying to help my teammate — he might clear a million before taxes but not after taxes, so I was thinking about looking out for him. It cost me a lot of money and the first game of the season. I should have known better with my history of violence on the court that I would be suspended.”
McCollum’s teammates echoed the sentiment that while they realize a rule was broken, perhaps there were other ways to deal with what was ultimately a benign action committed in the fourth quarter of a preseason contest by a player with no “history of violence” during his four season in the NBA.
“I comprehend a rule is a rule, but I feel like everything is different somewhat,” said Evan Turner, who is one of the favorites to start in McCollum’s place. “I guess they’re being fair with the rule with everybody, but CJ didn’t go on the court in a negative manner. It was a preseason game, he had a towel in his hand, he wasn’t aggressive, you know what I’m saying? He wasn’t volatile, he wasn’t keeping the situation going. It’s tough. Obviously rules are rules so I comprehend you’re not allowed to do that. When you break it down, obviously we make a decent amount of money but for that type of situation, to lose any type of thing and most importantly lose one of our go-to guys to start on the road, that’s pretty crazy.”
Multiple players noted that making up for McCollum’s absence, specifically on the offensive end, wouldn’t be easy. But while not having a player of McCollum’s quality is never a good thing, at least in this case, they’ve got a couple of days to figure out how they’ll make due.
“Obviously our level of focus has to be up,” said Damian Lillard. “I’m sure that’s going to give Phoenix some energy knowing that we a man down and one of our main guys who has an impact on every game that we play. We’ve got to come together, the effort has to be collective. We’ve just got to go get it done. It’s one game and we’ve got to go out and get it done for him.”
While it is just one game, it’s very possible the suspension will have a lasting effect in terms of the way McCollum views his relationship with the NBA. In the past, McCollum has taken pride in serving as an ambassador for the league, whether it was taking time out of his offseason to participate in the NBA Africa game in Johannesburg this summer, cutting his All-Star Break short to participate in the 2017 Three-Point Shooting contest or joining various NBA TV and ESPN shows as a guest analyst. But after being suspended for a minor mistake in preseason play, McCollum just might rethink his willingness to participate in that capacity going forward.
“They could have suspended me for the preseason game, they could have fined me more money and allowed me to play in a regular season game,” said McCollum. “It’s the intent and it’s usually up to them, it’s to their discretion, so they had a choice. They didn’t have to suspend me… I’m like an elephant, I don’t forget things.” |
Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker came to Washington this weekend with a clear message to deliver to the national press: He’s not New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie.
In the swanky J.W. Marriott hotel just blocks from the White House, which both governor’s have hopes to soon occupy, the two embattled Republicans presented radically different strategies for handling swirling questions about the actions of former political aides.
Walker, who is facing questions over a newly released trove of documents from an investigation into his first campaign, has nonchalantly stopped for repeated questions from reporters, conveying a ‘nothing to see here’ message. He’s glad-handed lobbyists and activists for hours on end, unfazed by attention of the press. Christie, meanwhile, has been almost entirely out of view at the National Governors Association meeting, continuing a weeks-long effort to avoid the limelight. In a closed-door meeting of governors Saturday, several governors described Christie as uncharacteristically quiet and reserved. The New Jersey Governor appeared at just a pair of official NGA events, breaching past the assembled press and confining most of his activities to quietly fundraising for the Republican Governors Association.
Six former Walker aides and allies have been convicted of wrongdoing following an investigation into improper campaign activities by official staff when Walker was Milwaukee County executive mounting a campaign for the governor’s mansion. The release last week of tens of thousands of pages of documents from that first investigation was branded as “old news” by Walker, who noted repeatedly that a Democratic prosecutor had closed the investigation last year without any accusation that he had done anything improper. “People want to go through 27,000 pages plus of details, and our approach is ‘case is closed,’” Walker said. “A Democrat district attorney looked at it, and he’s done. It’s done.”
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Walker did, however, note that the investigation into Christie aides’ involvement in closing lanes to the George Washington Bridge is “just beginning.”
“He addressed it early on, but obviously he’s not out of the woods yet,” Walker said, comparing their situations while exiting a NGA reception for state adjutants general that Christie skipped. “He’s got the legislature which is not on his side politically, and they’ll probably drag it out for some time.”
The twin controversies have vastly different stakes for the lawmakers. Christie, seen for the better part of a year as the GOP’s 2016 front-runner, has faced seemingly unending interest from the media in his scandals, not least because of its placement in the New York City media market. Copious unanswered questions and unreviewed documents make calculating the ultimate fallout difficult, while the source of his troubles, relatable traffic problems, will be a hard image to shake.
But for Walker, safely away from the Acela corridor and dealing with a four-year-old probe, there has been little more than a week of bad press and isolated embarrassing stories about aides’ old emails. The investigation was a prominent story line through his 2012 recall election, from which he emerged stronger than ever. A second probe, meanwhile, is continuing into Walker’s recall election.
The Democratic National Committee has tried hard to equate the two scandals this week, noting the common story lines of improper activity by senior aides and questions about how much the lawmakers knew about it. Democrats are hoping the scandals will help bring down Walker this fall and plan to use Christie’s troubles to defeat the Republican candidates he stumps for in his role as chairman of the RGA. “I’m just grateful that I don’t have Democratic governors who have those challenges,” said Vermont Gov. Peter Shumlin, the chair of the Democratic Governors Association. “We don’t get indicted, we don’t get criminal investigations—we create jobs.”
Contact us at editors@time.com. |
Sichuan ‘Dry-Fried’ Green Beans (Vegetarian) – Gan Bian Si Ji (Su)
The fun run I mentioned in my stir-fry runner bean post may be over, but we still have stacks of beans left over, meaning Fen has the choice of either eating healthy, or not at all. Alright, so the usual method of cooking Sichuan dry-fried green beans isn’t all that healthy (most restaurant deep-fry the beans), but this lighter vegetarian recipe is a healthier and fantastically tasty variation.
As with most recipes on this blog, Sichuan dry-fried green beans is a traditional Sichuanese recipe, although the dish is now popular throughout the whole of China, and indeed throughout Chinese restaurants and takeouts all over the world. The deep-fried version is an oily, delicious beast in its own right, but this healthy broiled option has gained plenty of momentum as an alternative, and is featured everywhere from Every Grain of Rice to Serious Eats.
Sichuan Dry-Fried Green Beans Cooking Tips
Instead of deep frying the beans, the trick is to blanch them for a couple of minutes until their skin is blistered and tender, yet they still have snappy insides. This is then combined with the chilli and peppercorn-infused oil (careful not to stir-fry the spices too long as they easily burn) and drizzled with sesame oil for a light, breezy dish that packs a tongue-tingling kick. Adding the ya cai or tian jin (preserved vegetables) is entirely optional, but I find the tian jin in particular adds a third competent to the dish and makes it even more utterly delicious.
I’ve used green beans in this recipe, but feel free to go wield with broad beans, runner beans, French beans, or whatever you like. Feel free to mix in some minced beef too if you’re feeling particularly carnivorous – I certainly will next time as I’m more than pushing my luck with feeding Fen so much veg! |
DAM! This movie is so packed full of kaiju that we had to get the whole team back together! Join us as we venture deep into the moon's crust to unearth the terrible truth of Destroy All Monsters!
SHOWNOTES
Tokyo Corrections! (2:30):
Kyle was wrong about a kaiju movie!? Who CAN we trust?
Shin Godzilla Release date confirmed! (4:24):
We had this in the show notes from last episode, but wanted it recorded for perpetuity.
Kong! The...musical? (6:00):
Looks like the king of the apes is hitting Broadway...weird right?
A Whole Shmorgasboard of Godzilla King of the Monsters news(8:34):
Cast news, an Expo, and hints that there will be practical effects!
Destroy All Monsters discussion (17:15)
I wanted to write something about how great Varan was in this movie, but I'm not allowed to lie anymore.
Credits
Our music comes from the extremely talented Eclectic Method. We thank him for the permission to use the song "Monsters" throughout the show.
If you’d like advertise with us or sponsor us, please e-mail tokyolivescast@gmail.com. |
Working For Notebookcheck Are you a techie who knows how to write? Then join our Team! Currently wanted:
German-English-Translator - Details here
The California-based gaming company has sent out invitations for a keynote to be held in Berlin, Germany this upcoming October 20th and Notebookcheck will be live at the event to check out any new product announcements and hardware. Razer CEO Min-Liang Tan will be spearheading the event and may be announcing products for the German market including the yet-to-be-released Razer Core GPU docking station and the Razer Blade Stealth. In contrast, both devices are already available for North American users. Razer is becoming a well-known gaming brand around the world with its ultra-sleek product designs and frequent sponsorship of gaming tournaments.
Beyond the aforementioned hardware, Razer also sells smaller gaming-centric accessories such as the DeathAdder Elite gaming mouse and the Kraken Pro V2 7.1 headset. It's quite likely that the focus of the keynote will be on a refreshed notebook with Pascal GPU options. The manufacturer recently announced a Kaby Lake refresh of its Blade Stealth, but the Blade Pro 17 and Blade 14 are both at least two years old each and becoming quickly out-of-date.
Come back on October 20th as we'll be reporting with hands-on previews for what Razer will have in store. |
Author: Muneeb Mannan
A study by Ipsos MediaCT reveals that more than one out of four Americans with Internet access streamed at least one full length video program during April this year, and 14% streamed at least one full-length movie. I find these to be remarkable statistics, especially when you consider that these represent more than double the usage just eight months earlier. And if you look at the 18 to 24 age segment, more than half watched a full episode and nearly one third watched a movie.
“The digital video revolution is no longer centered on short clips via YouTube; it is becoming an important distribution channel where any type of full-length video can be instantly accessed for immediate consumption without a fee,” explains Brian Pickens, Senior Research Manager at Ipsos MediaCT.
That’s the key point here; the early adopters are out in force on this, and the growing success of services such as Hulu demonstrates that people will watch “television” content delivered over the Internet. As it becomes easier (and less intrusive) to watch programs and movies on the Web, expect these numbers to grow even faster. |
Epidemiologists are already seeing the same things in Fukushima, where radiation exposures were far lower than at Chernobyl. Radiation biologists say the increased cancer risk from Fukushima will be so low it won’t change general cancer rates for that area, or Japan generally. (The World Health Organization predicts minor increases in rates of some cancers, for some ages and genders, in small pockets of more highly contaminated areas near the plant.)
Nonetheless, thousands of people are refusing to return to their homes and businesses in evacuated areas, even where dose levels have fallen low enough to declare those areas safe. Levels of stress, anxiety and depression are significantly elevated. One survey found that stress among children in the Fukushima area is double the level of other children in Japan.
And the Japanese Education Ministry reports that the children in Fukushima Prefecture have become the most obese in Japan since the nuclear accident prompted schools to curtail outside exercise, in most cases in areas where the risk from radiation was infinitesimal.
Similar responses are likely in the United States should a radiological emergency occur. More than the risk of radiation, those excessively fearful responses and their ramifications for society are what keep emergency planners and counterterrorism officials up at night.
Some are taking steps in the right direction. The Environmental Protection Agency has proposed new guidelines for communities about what types of protection would be necessary for a range of nuclear incidents: a power plant accident, dispersal of radiation from a “dirty bomb” or even from the detonation of an “improvised nuclear device” — i.e., a terrorist-made nuclear bomb.
The guidelines describe, based on the doses people would be exposed to, the various levels of protection that would called for, from merely staying indoors (most radiation can’t penetrate skin much less walls or windows), to evacuation. They are an effort to help communities understand the real risks of radiation so they can base their emergency planning on the actual threat, and thereby reduce the dangers we face because our fear of radiation so far exceeds the true hazard.
But the proposals by the Environmental Protection Agency are just one, insufficient step. Without a much broader and persistent effort by various branches and levels of government to help the public understand the actual biological effects of radiation, we will continue to face the threat of deep historic nuclear fears that simply don’t match the facts. |
Here I am, lying in bed. If you walk in now, you’ll think I’m sleeping. But I see you. Although my eyelids look shut, they are fluttering slightly. They are the only parts of me that I can move. I am fully conscious but I cannot shout out to you: my body is completely frozen.
Everybody is paralysed during rapid eye movement (REM) sleep, the stage of sleep where dreaming occurs. If we weren’t paralysed, we would act out our dreams, endangering ourselves and our sleeping partners. But sometimes, especially when sleep patterns are disrupted or we get exhausted, things go awry: REM extends into waking consciousness, our bodies become immobile and our alert brains fuse with the imagery of dreams. The phenomenon of waking up during REM, completely unable to move, is called sleep paralysis.
The experience can be terrifying. Trapped in your paralysed body, you might sense the presence of a malevolent intruder in the room or a pressure on your chest, squeezing the breath out of your lungs. Hallucinations can jangle the senses: there are ominous voices, supernatural entities, strange lights. You feel as if you are being touched or dragged, bed covers seem to be snatched from you, and you are helpless to grab them back.
I have experienced the frightening imagery of sleep paralysis since childhood, but only later did I understand that my dark journey was not unique – I share it with at least 6 per cent of people worldwide, and it has been reported for thousands of years as encounters with sexual demons, beasts, and ghosts. These reports differ by culture – but the texture and the biology is the same. From Newfoundland come tales of the Old Hag, a hideous witch who pins down sleepers by sitting on their chests. Japanese folklore gives us kanashibari, the fate of the unfortunate or cursed who have been magically tied up in their sleep by evil spirits. In Old Norse, the Mara is a malevolent spirit who straddles the body of the sleeper as if riding a horse, then tries to strangle them; mara is the origin of the English word ‘nightmare’. UFO abduction stories and alien encounters likely emerge from sleep paralysis, too.
Ever since I was a teen, I have seen shadow figures in the corner of my bedroom, and awoken to find strange entities – grinning vampires or silent watchers – by my bed. I’ve felt my hand grasped, my chest crushed by the weight of a strange beast; my body twisting and spinning in space. I’ve heard buzzing, ringing, whooshing and nasty names whispered in my ear. If the radio or TV were on, I could hear the programmes clearly and, after paralysis released me, I could report them back. If someone walked into the room, or the doorbell rang, or a dog barked, or (as happened on one occasion) there was a power outage, I was fully aware. I tried to shout out, to pull at my eyelids, desperate to snap out of it, but I could not budge.
With this ghoulish treasure trove to draw upon, sleep paralysis has naturally spawned some very scary stories and films. But as a writer and filmmaker as well as a long-time percipient, I have another story to tell. Beyond the sheer terror, sleep paralysis can open a doorway to thrilling, extraordinary, and quite enjoyable altered states. One is the lucid dream state, in which you can consciously manipulate your dreams, traversing incredible landscapes and interacting with creatures conjured in your mind. Another is the out-of-body experience – the waking sensation of separating from your physical body and floating, spinning and flying through your surroundings; often, you’d look down to see yourself lying below.
The biological underpinnings of sleep paralysis have become less mysterious in recent years. The psychologist Kazuhiko Fukuda at Edogawa University in Japan explains the likely involvement of the amygdala, a brain region that signals fear from threats in the environment and triggers our primal ‘fight or flight’ reactions. Waking up paralysed constitutes an environmental threat, yet we cannot react. The amygdala is in hyperdrive, and REM physiology has invaded our consciousness. We are left stuck in a state of overwhelming terror, leaving us dreaming awake and set upon by our deepest fears.
In 2012, University of Toronto neuroscientists Patricia Brooks and John Peever reported the physiological process behind the altered state: GABA A and GABA B , the receptors that regulate the body’s muscle tone, combine with glycine, an amino acid, to switch off motor-neurone activity in our voluntary muscles during REM sleep. Normally, they switch our motor-neurone activity back on before we wake up. But, sometimes, we wake up during REM, and the GABA and glycine keep hold of us – the scary result is dreaming awake.
I could float up to my bedroom ceiling or into the living room or out through the solid front door
One of the most probing explorations of this state, and the one that helped free me from the terror, comes from Jorge Conesa-Sevilla, a neurocognitive psychologist and shamanic artist based in Oregon who regularly experiences sleep paralysis himself. In his book Wrestling with Ghosts (2004), he takes a refreshing approach to the subject, couching sleep paralysis in scientific terms, without denying his personal, exploratory approach.
Conesa-Sevilla taught me that people who experience sleep paralysis have a unique advantage in dreaming lucidly – they can use their altered state as a launch pad for full-blown dream control. It makes sense: both lucid dreams and sleep paralysis are ‘blended states’, according to the psychologist James Cheyne of the University of Waterloo in Canada – but these states are distinct. ‘Lucid dreaming seems to consist of waking awareness intruding into dreams and sleep paralysis of dream imagery intruding into waking consciousness.’
Conesa-Sevilla has developed specific, highly honed techniques to help us move from one blended state to the other. Like many others who regularly experience sleep paralysis, I had naturally slipped into lucid dreams on occasion, but I did not understand what they were, or that I could initiate this switch. Wrestling with Ghosts explained how to do this, but most importantly, it made me understand that sleep paralysis was not a curse; it could be a gift.
Conesa-Sevilla’s system, called Sleep Paralysis Signalling (SPS), is used to acknowledge and exploit your self-awareness in order to transition from one altered state to the other: from terror to bliss. It includes focusing on particular parts of your body, imagining that you are spinning, and using meditation, controlled breathing and relaxation for managing the fear of the paralysed state. Tapping SPS, I can wilfully go from waking to the dream state, retaining just enough consciousness to influence the action within.
To switch from sleep paralysis into lucid dreaming is no mean feat; it is hard to keep a cool head with a ghost sitting on top of you. I can rarely pinpoint the moment that terror becomes lucidity but, when it does, I am launched into the vast landscapes and vivid colours of my lucid dreams.
I often return to the same places, worlds that I have created. There is a city with a complex network of streets, elaborate houses, an underground system, a harbour and swimming pools. The whites, blues, yellows and greens are far more intense than any I have seen in waking life. And there are great natural landscapes: a coastline with high cliffs and forests. I know my way around. I could draw a map of these worlds. I can choose where to go and I can walk or fly. I populate these landscapes with people; be they familiar or fantastical, living or departed, I talk to them. I am fully conscious during these dreams.
My lucid dreams are often accompanied by sensations of flying, floating or leaping across the landscape. But sometimes I have another experience, similar in that it is characterised by flying and floating sensations, yet distinct. During a lucid dream I am ‘intact’ and moving around a dreamscape, whereas during these other experiences, I seem to physically twist or stand up and ‘out of myself’ and into my immediate surroundings. This sensation feels as real to me as it would if I were to stand up now – and it is experienced as fully alert consciousness. I now understand this to be a form of out-of-body experience, or OBE.
With hindsight, I realise I’ve been having OBEs for some time. In one childhood memory, I’m lying both ‘on’ and ‘under’ my bed at the same time. Later, I willed the experience out of terror during the sleep paralysis itself. If I yell, but make no sound, I thought, if I feel, but nothing is touching me, if I move my arms, but they are still, then my paralysed body is, somehow, receiving sensations of movement from my brain. What would happen if I consciously willed this phenomenal body to twist out of my paralysed body? And I found that, in my mind at least, I could.
At first there were loud noises, buzzing and whooshing. At times it felt as if my brain was being sucked out of the top of my head, or that my whole body was being pulled backwards at high speed. I would panic and fight it, but each time I became a little braver. I would ride out the scary sounds and sensations, and find that they gave way to a pleasant feeling of being completely separate from my body.
I could see my bedroom, but in altered form. The plain wooden door had beautiful paintings on it; the trees in the garden were a different species or larger than normal. At times I seemed to be dragging myself around; at others I was light and moved with ease.
During these OBEs, I wondered what would happen if I tried to push my body through my closed bedroom door, and I found that I could. I started to play with these sensations, to float up to my bedroom ceiling or into the living room or out through the solid front door. I enjoyed the feeling of spinning around my house and garden.
My lucid dreams and OBEs are delightful because I can consciously heighten my experience, and a little terror can be exhilarating
I understand the mind and body to be a complex biological and chemical entity, intertwined, yet my hallucinogenic nights suggested otherwise. What was this ‘self’ that appeared to get free? I was unnerved by a friend who suggested I stop leaving my body lest a ‘lost soul’ inhabit it while I was gone, blocking my return. But my fears were eased by talks with the experts. The neuroscience fascinated me, and set me free.
Our sense of ‘self’ as embodied, moving around space relative to gravity, comes from sensual input: spatial position and balance, touch and movement, and visual cues. These ‘vestibular’ sensations, coming from diverse neural networks in different parts of the brain, are brought together and processed at the junction of the temporal and parietal lobes (or our temporal-parietal junction), a region just above and behind the ears. When we are awake, our temporal-parietal junction is highly active, and it processes information efficiently and coherently. During dream sleep, however, vestibular sensations come not from the external environment but from within the brain itself.
During REM, vestibular sensations might be the source of those lovely flying dreams. But they can also be felt during sleep paralysis – and can be used to propel us to OBE. The jet fuel here is dissonance: from REM, we get vestibular sensations produced by the brain and from waking we get vestibular input from the outside world; both land in the temporal parietal junction. During sleep paralysis, Cheyne explains, the brain tries to reconcile the conflict ‘between movement and non-movement, between simultaneously floating above, and lying on, one’s bed’. He thinks we resolve the conflict by ‘a splitting of the phenomenal self and the physical body, sometimes referred to as an out-of-body experience’.
The notion is supported by Olaf Blanke, professor of neurology at the University Hospital of Geneva, whose studies over the past decade have helped to transform the field. Blanke has shown when he stimulates the brain with electrical current, it generates its own vestibular sensation and transports it to the temporal-parietal junction, recreating the pattern that occurs during REM. As a result, the sense of self as embodied is lost and the individual reports feeling separate and detached. Of special note is the position of the temporal-parietal junction just above and behind the ears, perhaps an explanation for the sense of a presence that seems to lurk behind or just out of sight – the very entities so many of us describe as part of the sleep-paralysis experience.
Some might think that these neurological explanations for sleep paralysis, lucid dreams and OBEs are impediments to the experience but, to me, they enrich it. My lucid dreams and OBEs are even more delightful because I can consciously heighten my experience, and a little terror can be exhilarating. To this day, I’m frightened when I wake up paralysed. After all, my amygdala is screaming FEAR! FEAR! FEAR! But, with my new-found understanding, I can overcome the terror and take advantage of being awake to explore these altered states. The transition from state to state can be slippery but, the more I understand what is happening in my brain, the more control I have and the more enjoyable the experience becomes.
Here I am again, lying in bed. If you walk in now, you’ll think I’m sleeping. But I am not: I am conscious and I am flying, bounding across landscapes coloured by dreams.
If you ever wake up unable to move, try not to panic. Remind yourself that you stand at the threshold of a fantastical world, a strange hinterland, an exhilarating space in which you are awake, but have a REM toy box at your disposal. |
NSA whistleblower J. Kirk Wiebe claims that the NSA provided spy software to Germany that is likely being used by both governments to monitor and control entire domestic populations.
WASHINGTON (Sputnik) — The US National Security Agency (NSA) provided spy software to Germany that is likely being used by both governments to monitor and control entire domestic populations, NSA whistleblower J. Kirk Wiebe told Sputnik.
The software has the functionality, Wiebe explained, to allow end users in Washington and Berlin to filter out data to avoid intruding on the privacy of innocent citizens, but they have failed to do that.
“Perhaps our governments want to know what we are doing independent of any criminal or terrorist activities,” Wiebe suggested. “Perhaps they want to do what every tyrannical government in history has done – control the population.”
In the absence of good oversight, Wiebe warned, all that is needed for governments to control populations using these technologies is “the intent and will to carry it through.”
In April 2013, according to leaked documents, Germany's domestic security agency, the BND, agreed to provide the NSA with intelligence in exchange for a highly effective spy software program called XKeyscore, media reported on Wednesday.
Germany’s domestic security agency has argued that information obtained with the help of XKeyscore could be transferred to the NSA without violating German law.
In 2013, NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden made available documents detailing long-term US intelligence data collection in Europe and many other targets around the world.
The German Parliamentary Committee investigating the NSA spying scandal was set up in March 2014 to examine the extent of the US intelligence agency's surveillance activities revealed in documents published by Snowden. |
Team Liquid's Nick "nitr0" Cannella is considered to be one of the best young talents in the North American scene and dropping 35 frags against Fnatic at the ESL ESEA Pro League Season 2 Finals was a testament to his strengths.
Although he had a couple of great games, his team ultimately fell to Fnatic in the Group A decider. After his team's heartbreaking loss however, he set aside some time to talk to theScore eSports about how he developed his game, his experience playing with mOE and what he learned from this tournament.
Looking back on 2015 as a whole, what was your favorite moment from this year?
My favorite moment from 2015 must have been our qualification into the major, DreamHack Cluj-Napoca, by knocking out Renegades on the big stage. It was my first big stage experience and it was definitely a memorable one.
You are often heralded as one of the brightest young talents in the NA scene. How have you developed your game to where it is now?
I have honestly come a very long way to where I stand today as an individual player. I was playing ESEA-Main with my old team and eventually got into the higher tier ten mans where you saw players like swag, dazed… etc. After that, I got a tryout for Area-51 with Steno. Steno taught me so much about the fundamentals of CS that it still affects my playstyle today in terms of teamwork and basic CS. Next, I had a magnificent coach and ex-teammate who definitely had a tremendous impact on who I am today, not only as a player, but as an individual – Dmode. Moreover, my aim came from death matching, but losing teaches me a lot as a person, and how I can build upon it. Obviously my team and I have lost a lot in 2015, but I promise 2016 will be different.
The NA scene has had a historically tough time of trying to contend with the European teams. What do you personally think needs to be done to try and close the gap?
Communication and practice/work ethic is the main issue that needs to be addressed inside of North America. I do not think it is skill, as I think most North American players can easily hang with the Europeans. Once North American teams find the correct work ethic and implement it into daily practice, I think we will be able to contend; however, we are not at that level quite yet.
Coming into the ESL ESEA Pro League Season 2 Finals, your team has not had the kind of results that I believe you were expecting, falling short at DreamHack Winter in the group stages. What have you guys worked on to try and remedy this coming into the ESL ESEA Pro League Season 2 finals and going into the new year?
The main thing to take out of all of these back-to-back LAN events for us has been to widen our map pool and use our practice time more efficiently as a whole. European map pools have always succumbed ours and it is a recurring problem for every event, especially in best-of-threes.
You did not have EliGE in your first match of the tournament. What was it like playing with mOE in the lineup? What were your expectations coming into the match?
People always say that EliGE is a huge impact to my success, and they are not wrong. Our team has very passive players, not counting EliGE and I as we are always there for each other. Our goal on the team is to open up sites for the team to finish the round and it works most of the time. As for mOE, I really enjoyed having him for that one day. I think he got his frags he was supposed to get but unfortunately we couldn’t close the matches. Thanks mOE for standing in for us, massive respect!
In the third match of the tournament you faced Fnatic. Historically, you seem to always have great games against them. What do you think is the reason that you have these insane games against one of the best teams in the world?
Counter-Strike is a very momentum based game, if not the most. I can honestly say I just felt very comfortable today. I was warming up earlier on Saturday and I saw some of the Fnatic members not warming up, so I really felt the urge to put in my full effort and I came out firing. I am personally probably one of the momentum based players in this game: once I get a good start, I will finish strong, and vice versa.
Even though you had some good games, your team fell short in the group stages. What did you guys learn from this tournament?
From ESEA/ESL LAN alone, once again I think our map pool was dominated by Fnatic. We were not 100% ready for their Mirage, and we failed to win our map in a very close fashion. We tried changing some positions recently due to poor performances and have lacked the time to practice new setups. I am not one for making excuses and I wanted to say that they flat out out-played us and out-shot us today.
At this tournament, you are playing on the previous patch of the game. Have you had a chance to play on the new patch and what is your personal opinion of the new patch?
Fortunately for me, I have not played on the recent patch so it did not affect me at all; however, I wanted to try out the Revolver because it is always funny playing with broken patches! I don’t have a personal opinion on the update because I haven’t tried it out yet, but I can honestly say it is fun getting used to new patches.
Overall, what is your team’s plans for 2016?
Without saying what has not been publicly released yet, we are definitely going to be preparing harder for everything as a team, and I personally am going to try to help out adreN more with in-game leading.
What are your personal plans for the holidays?
My personal plans for the holidays are to take a small break, hang out with family, celebrate Christmas, set aside some personal plans for my girlfriend, and then begin the grind for 2016.
Do you have any final words for your fans?
Obviously, I love you all and I hope you love me too! No, but I cannot thank you guys enough for all the support; it really makes my life a lot easier with support. I am a very passionate player and I hope you keep supporting my team and I in 2016!
This article has been edited and condensed for clarity.
Paul Park is a writer for theScore eSports. Follow him on Twitter. |
Chapman University’s semi-annual economic forecast hit some sour notes with its projection for 2017 looking like the overall slowest year since the Great Recession.
With the economic rebound in its eighth year, the business climate — especially in Orange County — is losing much of its oomph, said Chapman’s report released Wednesday, June 21.
“Prospects dim. Even more than California’s” reads the chapter title on the local economy.
Here are six Orange County themes in the forecast:
(1) Modest job growth
The post-recession hiring spree will cool with a projected Orange County employment growth of 1.5 percent this year. That’s down from 2.3 percent in 2016 and would be the slowest pace since the recovery began. Key culprits? A lack of workers to hire and a possible end to the building boom.
(2) Decent income boost
Countywide income is projected to grow by 4.5 percent this year vs. 4.3 percent in 2016. That added cash allows local spending, as measured by taxable sales, to grow by 4.5 percent this year vs. 4.3 percent in 2016. That extra shopping won’t help local retailers, though, as their employment will fall 0.1 percent in 2017.
(3) Pricier homes
Chapman has been concerned since late last year that Orange County pricing has exceeded underlying fundamentals. Yet, a very limited supply of homes to buy is projected to push up prices 6.2 percent this year — the highest since 2013.
(4) Construction cools
The post-recession building boom won’t be much of an economic driver. Building permits in dollars will grow by 4.5 percent this year vs. 10.1 percent in 2016. As a result, Orange County construction bosses will increase staffing only by 2.9 percent vs. 5.7 percent in 2016 and 10.3 percent in 2015.
(5) Meager population growth
Chapman notes that a quickly aging Orange County population won’t grow by much in the coming years. A key reason? Foreign immigration, a major population boost, will slow as local departures rise. By 2020, Orange County will add a net 92,000 residents — all older than 65.
(6) State, nation outpace
Orange County will be a laggard in 2017 compared with U.S job growth, forecast to rise 1.7 percent for 2017, and 2.1 percent growth in California. The national challenge will be what, if any, fiscal stimulus comes out of Washington. Statewide, the big question: How slow will the high-paying tech sector get? |
CNN messed up this week and Stephen Colbert was not about to give them a pass. “This is CNN’s worst mistake since their short-lived spinoff, Wolf Blitzer’s Rockin’ Situation Garage,” the Late Show host joked Tuesday night.
“Now CNN says that ‘the retraction does not mean the facts of the story were necessarily wrong,’ but they pulled the story because ‘standard editorial processes were not followed,’” Colbert explained. “Yes, it’s a fine story. They just forgot to call it ‘breaking news’ and have a countdown clock.”
As Colbert noted, the target of CNN’s recently retracted story, Trump transition official Anthony Scaramucci, accepted the network’s apology. “Guess who’s not moving on?” he asked. “The Tweetster in Chief,” who “unloaded” on CNN earlier Tuesday morning, writing, “Fake News CNN is looking at big management changes now that they got caught falsely pushing their phony Russian stories. Ratings way down!”
“And it is true, CNN does have some phony stories,” Colbert admitted. “I watched Anthony Bourdain Parts Unknown and I didn’t see any parts of his body I didn’t already know.”
But if there is one person who is “guilty of fake news” out there, Colbert said it is President Donald Trump, who was caught on Tuesday displaying a fake Time magazine with himself on the cover at his golf resorts.
“Trump made his own Time magazine cover?” Colbert asked. “My God, that can only mean he’s acquired mall kiosk technology! But if that one’s fake, please, tell me there’s a chance this one is fake, too,” he added, showing the one that read “How Trump Won” on the screen. |
The Bill Masterton Memorial Trophy is awarded to a player who best exemplifies the qualities of perseverance, sportsmanship, and dedication to ice hockey. The award is named after formal NHL player, Bill Masterton, who is the only player to have died from injuries sustained on ice. Usually the player who is awarded the trophy has overcome a serious illness or injury or has turned their career around. Jaromir Jagr, the 45 year old Florida Panther is the current holder of the trophy. This season Craig Anderson, Andrew Cogliano, and Derek Ryan have been nominated for the Bill Masterton Trophy. Here is a preview into each player’s season and why they were nominated:
Craig Anderson: Goalie, Ottawa Senators
Anderson had one of the best seasons of his career while his wife Nicholle had been diagnosed with throat cancer. Anderson missed time during the season to be with his wife but that did not affect his play. During the season, Anderson appeared in 40 games with a record of 25-11-4, 5 shutouts, a goals against average of 2.28, and a save percentage of .926. He played a pivotal role in the Ottawa Senators playoff run to the Eastern Conference Final and he was just as good in the playoffs with a record of 11-8,tallying 1 shutout with a goals against average of 2.34 and a save percentage of .922. In late May, Nicholle beat her cancer and the Ottawa Senators announced they would protect Anderson in the upcoming expansion draft.
Andrew Cogliano: Left Winger, Anaheim Ducks
Andrew Cogliano is no stranger to the Masterton Trophy having been nominated four times before without ever winning it. The Ontario native has earned the title of being the NHL’s “Ironman” appearing in 786 consecutive games and 60 playoff games. This season, Cogliano passed Craig Ramsay who was fourth on the most consecutive games played list with 776. Currently, Doug Jarvis holds the record for most consecutive games played with 964.In the 2016-2017 season, Cogliano scored 16 goals with 19 assists in 82 games.
Derek Ryan: Center, Carolina Hurricanes
Derek Ryan went on a wild ride before he was able to reach the NHL. He played for the University of Alberta, the Spokane Chiefs in the WHL, the Kalamazoo Wings in the UHL, Alba Volan Szekesfehervar and EC VSV in the EBEL, and Orebro HK in the SHL before finally signing with the Carolina Hurricanes in June of 2015. During the 2015-2016season, Ryan waited patiently for his opportunity, splitting time between the Charlotte Checkers and the Hurricanes before finally earning a full-time spot in the 2016-2017 NHL Season. He recorded 11 goals and 18 assists in 67 games this season.
Although all three candidates deserve strong consideration for this award, the edge should go to Craig Anderson. Goaltenders are different breed altogether requiring a certain type of mind set to play in front of a puck traveling upwards of 100 miles per hour. When that mind set is thrown off due to personal circumstances, it is difficult to get back to a high level of play. Anderson did come back and in the first game back shutout the New York Islanders 3-0. Anderson wound up having a great season playing with a heavy heart and kudos to him for helping his team every step of the way, especially throughout the playoffs. Since his situation is unique and involves serious illness to his family, he most likely will be the recipient of the 2017 Bill Masterson Trophy.
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Connecticut to Cut Funding for 21 Gun Salutes at Veteran Funerals – Too Costly
Veterans are furious over a proposed state budget cut that will eliminate the firing detail at veteran funerals.
The Connecticut state military said funding for the gun salutes will run out around April.
Meanwhile Connecticut state university and colleges, along with Hartford and New Haven, have declared themselves sanctuary cities. And state employees were given fat raises at the end of December.
Reader Mark had this to say:
“Since our budget is so bad, they are considering not giving soldiers who are having funerals the 21 gun salute anymore. Keep in mind that Connecticut has stated they will fight Trump on immigration issues. They have declared the city of New Haven a sanctuary city. I find it funny they have money to give to illegals but not to give to soldiers to have a proper and decent burial and celebration of their service.”
Kevin Rennie at The Courant reported:
Connecticut veterans up in arms over cut in funeral honors The mask on the Malloy administration has slipped again. What an ugly face it revealed. How could it be otherwise when Gov. Dannel P. Malloy whacked $469,533 out of the state budget for Connecticut Honor Guard members to attend military funerals. The nasty cut would reduce the honor guard unit to three members from the current five. The reduction was made from a $40 billion, two-year state budget. Everett Shepard, an official with the Connecticut chapter of the American Legion, told FoxCT that the budget cuts “would make it impossible for the remaining honor guard to perform a rifle salute” at military funerals. Malloy has more than $33 million in state benefits for retailer Bass Pro Shops to sell guns in Bridgeport, but not enough to honor dead veterans with a traditional military salute at their funerals. The second-term Democrat managed to find tens of millions of dollars in public funds in corporate welfare in the run-up to last November’s election. Less than half a million for the men and women who defended freedom around the world? Send a card. At a press conference earlier this month, Malloy said of the cuts he has made, “We have been surgical in the decisions we have had to make. Some of those are tough decisions.” That’s odd. Only three months ago, at 4:32 p.m. on the day before Christmas Eve, Malloy’s administration announced pay raises of as much as 12 percent for state commissioners and his top aides. The governor’s budget chief, Ben Barnes, who struggled to defend the Christmas raises when they were announced, saw his salary increase from $187,000 to $210,000 a year. He’s the official who declared after November’s election that Connecticut is in a “permanent fiscal crisis.” The Malloy-Barnes budget would rather see the burden of that continuing crisis be borne by fallen veterans than the selfish circle around the governor. |
UPDATE — June 26: Victoria police responded to a report of found stolen property in downtown Victoria on the evening of Friday, June 24, according to Saanich police.
An unknown person believed to be a man, dressed all in black, tossed a large object wrapped in blankets at the door of a storefront on the 1300 block of Government Street. A store employee retrieved the item and discovered that it was the stolen carving from UVic.
The art piece appears in good condition and is in the process of being returned to UVic.
ORIGINAL STORY — June 23: The Oak Bay and Saanich police departments are conducting a joint investigation after reports of a breaking and entering at the Fraser Building taking place on Monday, June 13. A valued piece of First Nations artwork was stolen during the break-in.
Sul-Sultan, pictured above, was created by Tsartlip Coast Salish artist Charles W. Elliott in 1995-96, and was commissioned and owned by the Faculty of Law. Its value is estimated at $10 000.
“This is a joint investigation between the Oak Bay Police and Saanich Police as the University of Victoria campus is situated within both Municipalities,” A/Sgt. Jereme Leslie said. “The University of Victoria has owned this piece for 20 years and they hope for the quick recovery of this culturally significant piece of art.”
The full media release from Saanich PD is included below.
Police are asking anyone in the area between June 12–13, between the hours of 5:30 p.m. – 5:30 a.m., that may have seen anything suspicious to call Saanich Police at 250-475-4321 or Oak Bay Police at 250-592-2424 or Crimestoppers at 1-800-222-TIPS (8477).
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Eyes have been on Palmer Luckey, the founder of Facebook-owned Oculus, following an article linking him to ‘Nimble America’, a polarizing political group that’s been described as part of the fringe ‘alt-right’. Following developer and community backlash, Luckey has issued an apology and a denial of some of the claims made against him.
While Brendan Iribe is the CEO of Oculus, Luckey is the company’s founder and in many ways an important public face of Oculus thanks to his role in bringing about the VR renaissance we’re currently enjoying.
Luckey was the subject of a recent article by The Daily Beast which claims that he has admitted to being a financial backer of Nimble America, a group dedicated to supporting Republican Presidential candidate Donald Trump by circulating negative memes of Hillary Clinton, Trump’s Democratic opponent in the race for the White House.
While Road to VR doesn’t cover politics, backlash among Oculus’ developers and community has brought the issue into the VR realm.
According to the original article, Luckey confirmed to The Daily Beast that he had used the pseudonym ‘NimbleRichMan’ to write a (now deleted) post in the pro-Trump subreddit /r/The_Donald, on behalf of the organisation which says it’s dedicated to proving “shitposting is powerful and meme magic is real.” Founders of that subreddit have helped circulate and popularise white supremacist memes depicting Trump, according to the same Daily Beast report. Nimble America had apparently taken credit for a billboard spotted in Pittsburgh, depicting a caricature of Clinton bearing the slogan “Too Big to Jail,” referring to the Democratic candidate’s recent email server troubles.
Luckey has issued a statement in response to the article via his personal Facebook page. The part-apology, part-denial confirms that Luckey made a large donation to Nimble America, but refutes claims that he made specific posts under the Reddit username NimbleRichMan.
I am deeply sorry that my actions are negatively impacting the perception of Oculus and its partners.The recent news stories about me do not accurately represent my views. Here’s more background: I contributed $10,000 to Nimble America because I thought the organization had fresh ideas on how to communicate with young voters through the use of several billboards. I am a libertarian who has publicly supported Ron Paul and Gary Johnson in the past, and I plan on voting for Gary in this election as well. I am committed to the principles of fair play and equal treatment. I did not write the “NimbleRichMan” posts, nor did I delete the account. Reports that I am a founder or employee of Nimble America are false. I don’t have any plans to donate beyond what I have already given to Nimble America. Still, my actions were my own and do not represent Oculus. I’m sorry for the impact my actions are having on the community.
Following Luckey statement, Daily Beast Senior News Editor Ben Collins, one of the authors of the initial article, says that the refutations are false, citing emails from Luckey himself, which Collins posted to Twitter.
.@PalmerLuckey Palmer, what you just wrote about NimbleRichMan isn't true. Or you didn't tell the truth in an email earlier this week. pic.twitter.com/cRSDFosrEM — Ben Collins (@oneunderscore__) September 24, 2016
VR Developer and Community Backlash
In the aftermath of the story breaking, Motherboard has reported that several developers producing titles for Oculus’ Rift VR platform have spoken out in response, many stating they’re withdrawing their support for the Oculus platform as long as Luckey is still with the company.
SUPERHYPERCUBE will not be supporting Oculus. https://t.co/sqtAzZ8hJZ — Polytron (@Polytron) September 23, 2016
I'm dropping Oculus support from Tower Underworld Online V due to Palmer Luckey's politics. If you're not familiar with TUOV, ask me. — Merisa (@cambrian_era) September 23, 2016
With Fez and Superhypercube publisher Polytron stating, “In a political climate as fragile and horrifying as this one, we cannot tacitly endorse these actions by supporting Luckey or his platform.”
Insomniac Games, who have developed and released two games exclusively for Oculus’ platform (with one more on the way), took a more measured and diplomatic approach; speaking to Motherboard, the company said, “Insomniac Games condemns all forms of hate speech. While everyone has a right to express his or her political opinion, the behavior and sentiments reported do not reflect the values of our company. We are also confident that this behavior and sentiment does not reflect the values of the many Oculus employees we work with on a daily basis.”
As for the VR community which has grown alongside the fledgling VR industry, many have expressed anger at Luckey’s stance. A thread about the Daily Beast article on the Oculus section of Reddit has seen a whopping 3,900 comments, with some users disavowing Oculus and its Rift headset while others expressed shock, disbelief, and disappointment at the news.
Whether this will have a tangible impact on Oculus as a company remains to be seen. For now the company hasn’t made any public statements regarding the incident except to point to Luckey’s personal statement. |
Supporters of presidential candidate Bernie Sanders Bernard (Bernie) SandersPush to end U.S. support for Saudi war hits Senate setback Sanders: 'I fully expect' fair treatment by DNC in 2020 after 'not quite even handed' 2016 primary Sanders: 'Damn right' I'll make the large corporations pay 'fair share of taxes' MORE are lashing out at Sen. Elizabeth Warren Elizabeth Ann WarrenSanders: 'Damn right' I'll make the large corporations pay 'fair share of taxes' House to push back at Trump on border GOP Sen. Tillis to vote for resolution blocking Trump's emergency declaration MORE (D-Mass.) for staying neutral in the Democratic primary.
Some Sanders fans are particularly upset that Warren didn’t tilt the scales in the Vermont senator’s favor in her home state of Massachusetts, where Hillary Clinton Hillary Diane Rodham ClintonSanders: 'I fully expect' fair treatment by DNC in 2020 after 'not quite even handed' 2016 primary Sanders: 'Damn right' I'll make the large corporations pay 'fair share of taxes' Former Sanders campaign spokesman: Clinton staff are 'biggest a--holes in American politics' MORE pulled out an important win on Tuesday.
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“Senator Warren, you’re all talk, no walk. Used to respect you but now I’ll take that respect and give it to Tulsi Gabbard Tulsi GabbardWarren vows to forgo 'fancy receptions or big money fundraisers' Bernie is back with a bang — but can he hold on to his supporters? Gabbard hits back at Meghan McCain after fight over Assad MORE, who actually deserves it,” said one commenter on Warren’s Facebook page, referring to the Hawaii lawmaker who recently stepped down from a position at the Democratic National Committee to back Sanders.
A glance at Warren’s social media shows that she is inundated by Sanders backers, who are offering a combination of pleas and recriminations over her choice not to endorse so far.
One recent post on her Facebook page about paid family leave had more than 1,000 comments, and nearly all were about her not endorsing Sanders.
“Coward,” said one critic with a Sanders logo for an avatar.
The online fervor over a potential Warren endorsement is so high that The New York Times had to publicly disavow a fake news article announcing Warren was backing Sanders.
Warren, who did not comment for this story, has been feeling pressure from all sides in the fractious Democratic battle.
She’s the only woman in the Senate who hasn’t endorsed Clinton, and her colleagues have pressed her to do so.
“I’m hopeful she’ll join us. I’m hopeful she’ll join the revolution that will allow us to come together to elect” the first female president, Sen. Debbie Stabenow Deborah (Debbie) Ann StabenowLand conservation tax incentives should inspire charitable giving, not loopholes Four names emerge for UN position: report Democrats brush off GOP 'trolling' over Green New Deal MORE (D-Mich.) told The Hill last month.
There’s no real doubt that Warren will eventually endorse the Democratic nominee for the White House.
Warren’s outsize presence in the Democratic Party virtually ensures her a plum speaking spot at the national convention, where she could play a role in uniting the party.
Leaders of liberal groups backing Sanders for president say they’re not bothered by her neutrality and credit her with helping to move Clinton to the left.
“I don’t think she’s been on the sidelines,” said Charles Chamberlain, executive director of Democracy for America, which has endorsed Sanders. “What she does is hugely helpful for Bernie. She continues to keep the campaign focused on the issues.”
Chamberlain also said Warren’s decision not to endorse Clinton yet is actually an implicit endorsement of Sanders.
“She’s the only female senator who has not made an endorsement of Hillary Clinton. That’s almost an endorsement right there,” he said. “It is saying, flat out, that I won’t just go along to get along.”
The anger Warren sees from the most vociferous Sanders supporters does not mean she’s in bad graces with most people on the left, either.
Videos she posts to her Facebook page pull in millions of views, underlining the fact that she remains one of her party’s most popular figures and a progressive hero.
Given that standing, many believe Warren could be a central player in rallying the party around its nominee after a tough primary.
“There’s a growing belief that Elizabeth Warren will play a large role during the unification moment,” said Adam Green, co-founder of the Progressive Change Campaign Committee, which has not endorsed in the primary. “Her influence is right in the middle of the race, and it’s because her hands are clean and she hasn’t endorsed one candidate.”
Warren could also be maximizing her leverage by not endorsing a candidate.
“If you endorse Bernie now, then you’ve marginalized yourself,” said one financial lobbyist who has watched Warren closely for years. “Why would you do it now, when you already have somebody who’s bringing Hillary over to the left?
“I don’t want to overstate it, but she is the most important person in the party in many ways,” the lobbyist added. “She is the person that everybody needs.”
Throughout the primary, Warren has offered praise for both Clinton and Sanders, often when they have taken a tougher stance on overseeing Wall Street.
She praised Sanders’s financial reform plan, which includes breaking up the nation’s biggest banks, and also offered kudos to Clinton for vowing to fight against GOP efforts to roll back the Dodd-Frank financial reform law.
“She’s been very good about rewarding them,” said Green. “Once someone has endorsed, there’s not much reason for the other candidate to listen to them.”
One area where Warren would like to exert some influence is on the staffing of the next Democratic administration.
She has picked fights with the Obama administration over high-ranking officials she deems unsatisfactory. She has repeatedly challenged watchdogs like the Securities and Exchange Commission and the Justice Department for what she sees as a lax approach to financial wrongdoers. And she upended the White House’s efforts to place Antonio Weiss, a former investment banker, in a top Treasury Department position. Weiss ultimately ended up in an advisory role at Treasury.
And Warren made clear in a January op-ed in the Times that she will be expecting the eventual Democratic nominee to promise tough-minded regulators.
“Personnel is policy,” she wrote. “The next president can rebuild faith in our institutions by honoring the simple notion that nobody is above the law, but it will happen only if voters demand it.” |
The word “trade” implies a mutually beneficial exchange of goods and services. I buy stuff from you and, in return, you buy stuff from me. A good trading partner is a nation that buys (imports) as much as it sells (exports). A bad trade relationship is one in which a nation sells (or exports) while buying little in return. Such a relationship isn’t mutually beneficial. In such a relationship, one nation creates jobs at the other’s expense and drains funds away from the other’s economy.
America’s free trade policy has resulted in both good and bad trade relationships. On balance, its many beneficial trade relationships have been more than offset by a minority of really bad ones. But what’s the best way to judge? Some differences in trade imbalances are due to a huge disparity in the size of nations. Is a big nation that maintains a large trade surplus with the U.S. any better than a tiny nation with a proportionately large imbalance? The only way to judge such imbalances fairly is to express them in per capita terms. That is, how much does each person in that nation buy from the U.S. vs. how much they manufacture and sell to us?
When expressed in per capita terms, the results are surprising. Here’s the list: Top 20 Deficits, 2012. The key take-aways from this list are as follows:
Note the population density of the nations on this list. By comparison, the population density of the U.S. is approximately 86 people per square mile. Eighteen of these twenty nations are more densely populated than the U.S. Eight are more than five times as densely populated. In fact, the average population density of the nations on this list is 493 people per square mile – more than five times the density of the U.S. Only two are less densely populated – Sweden and Finland. When I first published this list in 2006 in Five Short Blasts , Sweden ranked number two. By 2012, they have fallen to number eleven. And their surplus with the U.S. has been reduced by half.
, Sweden ranked number two. By 2012, they have fallen to number eleven. And their surplus with the U.S. has been reduced by half. Note the “per capita purchasing power parity (PPP)” of the nations on this list. By comparison, U.S. PPP is approximately $48,500. Most of the nations on this list are relatively wealthy nations, debunking the myth that trade deficits are caused by low wages. If low wages are to blame, how do you explain the presence of Ireland, Switzerland, Taiwan, Denmark, Germany, Japan and Austria (among others) in the top ten of this list? Also, the PPP of this list has risen dramatically in the past six years. (More on this topic in a later post.)
Though China gets all of the attention for its massive trade deficit with the U.S., it barely makes the top 20 list, coming in at number 18. It has risen only one place on this list since 2006. In per capita terms, its trade imbalance with the U.S. is rather unremarkable relative to the other nations on this list. In fact, when you understand the role that population density plays in driving trade imbalances, the huge trade deficit with China, given its sheer size and enormous population, is exactly what should have been expected.
People who live in overcrowded conditions buy fewer products because they have no room to utilize them. They buy or rent smaller homes because there is no room for larger homes. They own fewer cars because their roads are choked with traffic and they choose mass transit instead. Because their homes are smaller, they buy less furniture, far less lawn and gardening equipment and smaller appliances. They buy less sporting equipment like boats, golf equipment, tennis equipment – you name it – simply because of the scarcity of resources for using such.
When two nations grossly disparate in population density atttempt to trade freely with each other, the work of manufacturing is spread evenly across the combined labor force, but the disparity in per capita consumption remains. They buy less from us than we buy from them. The result is inescapable – a trade deficit and loss of jobs for the less densely populated nation. In effect, a host-parasite relationship is established in which the more densely populated nation feeds on the market of the other nation. The less densely populated nation pays the price for the other nation’s overpopulation. It hardly seems fair, does it?
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Chase Dance, Perth’s specialist in teaching wedding dance lessons, providing a safe and comfortable learning environment so you can enjoy your first dance with confidence.
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Every episode of South Park is animated digitally in only a few days. Well, all except for the first one, which took three and a half months, cost $300,000, and used cut out pieces of paper and stop motion.
Today, making a South Park episode just involves throwing things together on a computer program, but when Parker and Stone first got started with their pilot, the process involved cutting out literally hundreds of pieces of construction paper and capturing thousands of images shot from above. They labored for months on end in a small office in Denver, Colorado throughout the summer, and thankfully it paid off for them. For shots of the night sky, they took black poster board, cut holes into it, and lit it from behind. For a shot of Kenny bleeding, they drew on him with a red marker and added more and more for every frame.
Watching the first episode now, it definitely looks amateurish compared to the polished, HD look of the recent episodes, but it still has a charm to it, and it blows the mind to think of all the work that went into this dumb cartoon of kids swearing. |
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When Pope Francis met with Sheikh Ahmed al-Tayeb on Monday, he told him that “our meeting is the message“. So precisely what kind of “message” was Pope Francis attempting to convey? Sheikh Ahmed al-Tayeb is the Grand Imam of Cairo’s Al-Azhar Mosque, and some have described him as “the highest figure in Sunni Islam“. The Daily Mail said that the meeting between these two men was a “historic bid to reopen dialogue between the two churches”, and as you will see below this is yet another in a long series of attempts by Pope Francis to build bridges between Catholicism and various other faiths. In the end, what are we to make of all of this? Could it be possible that Pope Francis is laying the groundwork for the “super world church” and the coming one world religion that David Wilkerson and so many others have warned about?
Pope Francis made sure that when he embraced Sheikh Ahmed al-Tayeb there would be plenty of reporters there to document the moment. The following is an excerpt from a Daily Mail article entitled “Pope embraces grand imam at historic Vatican meeting in a bid to bring the Catholic and Muslim churches together“…
Pope Francis today embraced the grand imam of Al-Azhar, the prestigious Sunni Muslim center of learning, in an historic bid to reopen dialogue between the two churches. At a time of increased Islamic extremist attacks on Christians, Sheik Ahmed el-Tayyib was photographed hugging Francis during a visit to the Apostolic Palace at the Vatican.
This meeting comes in the context of some very curious statements that the Pope have been making about Islam and Christianity lately. If you don’t know what I am talking about, here is one example…
“Today, I don’t think that there is a fear of Islam as such but of ISIS and its war of conquest, which is partly drawn from Islam,” he told French newspaper La Croix. “It is true that the idea of conquest is inherent in the soul of Islam, however, it is also possible to interpret the objective in Matthew’s Gospel, where Jesus sends his disciples to all nations, in terms of the same idea of conquest.” The Pope also said he “dreaded” hearing about the “Christian roots of Europe” because, to him, they take on “colonialist overtones” and he called on European nations to “integrate” Muslim migrants into the continent. “This integration is all the more necessary today since, as a result of a selfish search for well-being, Europe is experiencing the grave problem of a declining birth rate,” he stated. “A demographic emptiness is developing.”
On another occasion, the Pope declared that “Christians and Muslims are brothers and sisters“. Pope Francis seems to have a strong desire to paint Christianity and Islam as two sides of the same coin, and he has taken steps to reach out to Muslims that no other Pope in history has done. To illustrate this point, I want to share an extended excerpt from one of my previous articles…
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Very early in his papacy, he authorized “Islamic prayers and readings from the Quran” at the Vatican for the first time ever. And as I documented in a previous article entitled “In New York, Pope Francis Embraced Chrislam And Laid A Foundation For A One World Religion“, during his visit to St. Patrick’s Cathedral in Manhattan he made it very clear that he believes that Christians and Muslims worship the same God. The following is how he began his address…
I would like to express two sentiments for my Muslim brothers and sisters: Firstly, my greetings as they celebrate the feast of sacrifice. I would have wished my greeting to be warmer. My sentiments of closeness, my sentiments of closeness in the face of tragedy. The tragedy that they suffered in Mecca. In this moment, I give assurances of my prayers. I unite myself with you all. A prayer to almighty god, all merciful.
In Islam, one of Allah’s primary titles is “the all-merciful one”. If you doubt this, just do a Google search. And this certainly was not the first time that Pope Francis has used such language. For example, check out the following excerpt from remarks that he made during his very first ecumenical meeting as Pope…
I then greet and cordially thank you all, dear friends belonging to other religious traditions; first of all the Muslims, who worship the one God, living and merciful, and call upon Him in prayer, and all of you. I really appreciate your presence: in it I see a tangible sign of the will to grow in mutual esteem and cooperation for the common good of humanity. The Catholic Church is aware of the importance of promoting friendship and respect between men and women of different religious traditions – I wish to repeat this: promoting friendship and respect between men and women of different religious traditions – it also attests the valuable work that the Pontifical Council for interreligious dialogue performs.
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Are you starting to see what I am talking about?
There is a very clear pattern developing here. Pope Francis believes that Christians and Muslims worship the same God, and he wants us to know that he considers Islam to be a perfectly acceptable way to seek God.
If you doubt this in any way, I want you to watch this video which was released by the Vatican in January 2016…
In this video, Pope Francis explains that people all over the world are “seeking God or meeting God in different ways” and that “there is only one certainty that we have for all: we are all children of God”. At about the 20 second mark, leaders from various major religions are shown declaring what they believe. First, a female Buddhist announces “I have confidence in the Buddha“. Secondly, a Jewish rabbi declares “I believe in God“. Thirdly, a Catholic priest tells us that “I believe in Jesus Christ“, and lastly an Islamic leader is shown saying “I believe in God, Allah“.
If you have not see this video, it is one of the creepiest things that I have ever seen on YouTube. It has become exceedingly clear that Pope Francis believes that all major religions are completely valid paths to the same God, and there is virtually no uproar over this.
This just shows how late in the game we really are. The one world religion that was prophesied nearly 2000 years ago in the Book of Revelation is starting to come to life, and we are witnessing the events of the last days begin to unfold right in front of our eyes.
*About the author: Michael Snyder is the founder and publisher of End Of The American Dream. Michael’s controversial new book about Bible prophecy entitled “The Rapture Verdict” is available in paperback and for the Kindle on Amazon.com.* |
Carl Froch, the super-middleweight champion from Nottingham, is set to earn around £8 million for his two-belt world-title defence against George Groves, who is likely to make in the region of £2 million, at Wembley on Saturday night.
The largest boxing event in British history, with 80,000 tickets sold, may well be life-changing financially for the protagonists, yet the real prize for the two men will be to have their hand raised at the end of it.
Pride will trump earning power. There will be serious bragging rights for the victor after a long and attritional campaign from both champion and challenger, punctuated by a legal appeal to the International Boxing Federation, which forced this rematch after a controversial conclusion to the first instalment. The IBF ruled that Groves had been stopped prematurely in the ninth round of their encounter last November.
Yesterday, with Wembley Stadium empty and echoing, both men appeared subdued in the face of a blizzard of camera flashes and interviews, and for once, they barely sparred verbally.
Gone were the pushing, prodding and mental probing of months past. It is business now. And both fighters said they were ready. The solitary nod towards mind games came from Groves, who suggested that he would win by a left-hook stoppage. Froch took it lightly, saying he would “keep the right hand up”.
Groves, like Froch, admitted that there was little left to say. Poised after the public stare-down and promotion of the event live on Sky Box Office, the pair then spoke in separate rooms at Wembley.
Groves went first. “Nothing needs to be forced with Carl, so there’s no need for me to try and force a reaction. His destiny is to lose and Saturday night is fast approaching. I would much rather leave him to digest all of that on his own.
“We went head-to-head and never said a word and he will have to deal with his fate and his fate is going to come on Saturday night. Nothing needs to be said between us. It’s fight week and he’s in a fight he cannot win because my performance won’t allow him to be in the fight. That’s got to be a terrible feeling for Carl and it’s only going to get worse.
“Whether he does or doesn’t know what’s coming, I’ve got all bases covered. I’m a better fighter than Carl Froch and I beat him in every aspect. I expect a much better and more focused Carl Froch, but at the same time he knows what’s coming and that adds pressure, so let’s see if he can cope with that.
“I always think about what I say, how I’m going to act and how I am portrayed every time I open my mouth. In the first fight, I was portrayed as the bad guy, but I’ve come across a lot more casual now.
“Today, I don’t need to antagonise Carl Froch. I want him to be at peace because it is dawning on him that his day of reckoning is fast approaching. He is going to have to face the inevitable. He is like a man on death row and I can’t imagine that would be very nice.
“I know I can deal with the pressure. I’ve always been able to stay calm in high-pressure situations. I never get nervous and I’m always very confident, to the point where some people think I’m cocky.
“I’ll be in the zone on fight night, it doesn’t matter how many people are there. It could be 200,000. Carl has boxed at a high level for a long time, but time catches up with everyone.”
In an adjoining room, the unshakeable self-belief was mirrored by the champion, a man who has campaigned at elite level for 12 fights consecutively over six years.
“He looked a little bit subdued. I was expecting him to maybe to bring a bit more to the table and try to get under my skin,” said Froch, who at 36 is nine years Groves’s senior.
“I thought he would have one last-ditch effort, but I suppose that would have been too predictable. I think he’s thought he’s lost all the way along on the mind games, so whatever he said would have been irrelevant. His mind games, me being mandated, it will be a third-round knockout.
“I’ve lost count of everything he’s said. And now he’s going to beat me with a left hook. I’ve lost track of all the rubbish. He’s put himself in a position where he’s told everyone that the first fight was a stonewall robbery, but he knows when he looked in the mirror the following morning: his face was all swollen, he had two black eyes and a swollen lip, and lumps all over his head.
“The referee stopped the fight for that reason. He knows his legs were gone and he knows that he was in trouble when the ref stopped the fight. He can say what he wants and now I have been in this situation before where I know that this is going to be a tough fight.”
The champion exuded an icy calm at every turn, the internal strength honed from being in the same situation many times before. “When you prepare really, really well you get that confidence. The fight is won or lost in the preparation. And I’ve won the preparation.”
The weigh-in on Friday, when the two men face off, chests bared, nostrils flared, could be a telling moment. The fight cannot come soon enough for both of them.
• Follow Carl Froch v George Groves: live! |
I had taken my case to the European court of human rights in the ’80s because trans people couldn’t get their birth certificates amended or replaced after gender confirmation surgery. We couldn’t legally marry. If I had been sent to prison, it would have been a male prison and on and on the list went.
Consequently, as a result of the lack of protection in those days, I had fallen prey to the press who had outed me. It destroyed my career as a successful international model. My agent at the time suggested reaching out to Playboy to see if they would be interested in doing a spread with me as I was out to prove that trans people can be sexy and attractive. I had previously been featured in Playboy as a Bond girl without anyone knowing my past. The second time could be part of my activism and visibility that I was heavily involved with.
They were very eager so we shot the spread and cover and did the full interview. It was just about to go to print when they called to say the whole lot had been shelved. A major US company threatened to pull millions of dollars in advertising if Playboy featured me. I was extremely disappointed. I was told Hugh had argued hard for me but at the end of the day no one could afford to lose that sort of endorsement fee so I sadly understood why it didn’t go ahead.
Mr. Hefner, however, had continued to follow my activism which included doing chat shows and interviews around the world. Months passed and then he invited me to the mansion to discuss things face to face. I obliged and after telling him my story, he was visibly moved and had great empathy for the challenges that I had endured and was still facing. He then did an incredible thing for those times. Despite the enormous pressure he was under he decided to go ahead and run the spread as a feature in the US and worldwide and essentially became an ally for trans visibility and awareness.
Playboy, a magazine showcasing nude, beautiful, sexy women was an incredible platform to show trans people are no different. Understand this was all prior to the internet. There is so much ignorance in the world today regarding trans people. It was one thousand times worse back then. There’s just no comparison. The worldwide reach of the photos and feature had significant impact in changing erroneous preconceived ideas that a lot of people had about the trans community. I featured on Playboy magazine covers worldwide and the impact was huge on our acceptance ― I thank Hugh for that. ― Caroline Cossey |
With the cold, wintery weather upon us, the City of Toronto has opened its outdoor ice rinks. However, if you're looking to up your skating game, you should probably head down to the water on Saturday nights.
Yes, the Harbourfront Centre's weekly DJ Skate Nights will return on December 19. This means you can glide around under the stars while grooving to tunes provided by both local and international DJs.
For this year, Harbourfront Centre is pairing up with a variety of groups and organizations including Wavelength, Soul Kitchen, Do Right Music and Small World Music to bring a myriad of genres on to the ice.
Harbourfront Centre's DJ Skate Nights are completely free. They run from December 19 until February 20 (though don't expect one on December 26) from 8 p.m. to 11 p.m.
Photo by Brian Medina / Harbourfront Centre on Facebook. |
A Tennessee woman was so dissatisfied with her Hardee's hamburger that she called police twice to complain, resulting in her arrest on the charge of abusing the 9-1-1 system.
Donna Marie Nichols, 50, called police in Rockwood, Tenn., March 28. Audio of one of the 9-1-1 calls was posted on the Smoking Gun website. In the recording, Nichols tells the dispatcher, "I had ordered some food from Hardee's over here and the food is no good, and the girl told me when I called her back that I could bring it back and get my money on it. Now she's telling me she can't do anything until tomorrow.
"I had to work for seven hours today to get that money just to eat a sandwich and I just got out of the hospital yesterday and they can give me my money back. I only took a small bite out of the burger and it's nasty," she said.
An officer went to Nichols' location to talk to her. In his sworn complaint, he said she told him the burger "tasted funny."
The officer arrested her and took her to Roane County Jail. She was held on $1,500 bail and released Monday, according to The Smoking Gun.
Nichols is hardly the first person accused of abusing the 9-1-1 system for a fast-food meal.
A Florida middle-school teacher was arrested in December after she allegedly got into a dispute with a McDonald's employee about her order and pelted the employee with hash browns.
Simone Paolercio, 39, was arrested at her Lakeland, Fla., home on misdemeanor battery charges. She denied any wrongdoing.
Also, police in Florida arrested a man in 2009 who called 9-1-1 to complain that a Burger King in Boynton Beach did not have lemonade. When employees offered him Coke for his combo meal, rather than the desired lemonade, Jean Fortune, 66, got upset.
Fortune's call to 9-1-1 lasted for five minutes, and as he persisted with his complaint about the food and the server's perceived rudeness, the dispatcher grew noticeably frustrated. "Customer service is not a reason to call 9-1-1," she told Fortune. "9-1-1 is if you're dying."
He was charged with misusing the 9-1-1 system. |
An activist at a "gay blood drive" in Los Angeles in 2013. Photo by Jamie Lee Curtis Taete
Today is World Blood Donor Day, and that fact couldn't be more cruelly ironic for America's LGBTQ community. The campaign, started by the World Health organization in 2004, is a reminder to donate blood to those who need it, yet queer men across the country remain barred from doing just that days after a mass shooting at a gay nightclub in Orlando, Florida, left 49 people dead and 53 injured.
Currently, any man who has had sex with another man in the past year is prohibited from donating blood, per FDA guidelines. Those policies were updated in December 2015. Prior to that tweak, the organization banned gay and bisexual men from donating outright. David Stacy, who serves as the government affairs director for the Human Rights Campaign, stated in a press release at the time that it "falls far short of a fully acceptable solution." Anthony Hayes of Gay Men's Health Crisis told Newsweek that it was a "de facto lifetime ban."
In the wake of the Pulse shooting, public health advocates and activists are calling on the FDA to strike down a ban they view as discriminatory, stigmatizing, and based on outdated science.
Where does the FDA blood ban come from? According to Diane Anderson-Minshall of HIV Plus Magazine, these policies are a remnant of the AIDS panic of the Reagan Era, when men were dying in the streets with little idea about how to stop the spread of the disease. "Those policies were all set up in the 1980s," Anderson-Minshall said. "They were a response to this vast fear that was out there, a lack of scientific knowledge, and a lack of treatment." The initial ban, announced in 1983, stated that men were barred from donation if they had sexual intercourse with another man after 1977, the year the virus first began to circulate.
The current policies also affect transgender men, transgender women, sex workers, intravenous drug users, or anyone who has sexual contact with a man who has sex with men (MSM). EJ Dickson, who is the connections editor for Mic, told VICE that she was once banned from giving blood because she stated on the donation form that she'd been intimate with a bisexual man. The FDA policies also apply to organs and bone marrow. Erik Sudduth, a schoolteacher who works in New York City, wanted to give marrow last year to the eight-year-old daughter of a friend, who had recently been diagnosed with acute leukemia. Because Sudduth is in a long-term same-sex relationship, he was not allowed to do so.
"In this day and age, it's a bit ridiculous," Anderson-Minshall said. "One of the things they say is that the reason they don't let them donate is so that they don't miss anybody when [they do] HIV screenings, but HIV screenings are so good." Testing for HIV has improved dramatically since the 1980s. Today, medical professionals can detect the presence of the virus within 2 to 3 weeks of infection, which Anderson-Minshall explained has greatly reduced the risk of transmission. In 2016, just 1 out of 2 million blood transfusions will result in the transfer of the HIV virus. "We can test HIV incredibly fast and incredibly well," she said.
That's why many countries, including France, Argentina, and Italy, have struck down their blood bans in recent years. In 2001, Italy changed its policy to determine donation eligibility based on "individual risk assessments," which also apply to heterosexuals. This has not led to an increase in HIV transmission over the past 15 years. The current FDA policy is similar to regulations in Australia, the United Kingdom, and New Zealand, which also mandate a one-year period of abstinence for MSMs who donate blood. The waiting period in Canada is five years.
Magda Holberg, the chief clinical officer at Howard Brown Health Center, told VICE that the updated policy "isn't based in medical fact." She said, "If we have the technology to test and reduce the window in terms of testing for HIV, this doesn't make sense." Holberg stated that this is because the policy remains rooted in societal homophobia, as well as the perception that gay and bisexual men are more promiscuous. "Many people don't want to receive transfusions from gay people," Holberg stated. "It's not about what's transmitted from that. It's about the fact that this is a population of people that isn't respected."
Holberg explained that these policies have a way of stigmatizing a community that's already subjected to widespread societal shame, which may encourage MSMs to be dishonest about their status or not get tested. Donte Oxun, a New Orleans DJ and longtime public health advocate, told VICE that he lied about his sexual orientation in order to donate blood as a teenager. "It was important for me to be a part of something," he said. Holberg said this is common, especially in the wake of tragedy. "Many people don't want to be dishonest, but this is a very concerning situation when people feel that their emotional response is to try to donate," she said.
Following the Pulse shooting, reports circulated that OneBlood and other donation centers in Florida would temporarily ignore the FDA policy in order to allow MSMs to donate. That rumor, however, turned out to be false. Daniel Ibrahim Abdalla, a PhD student living in Orlando, Florida, told VICE that he was one of the many people who found that they couldn't donate over the weekend, as gay and bisexual men were turned away.
Pat Michaels, the spokesperson for OneBlood, told the Washington Post that its system hasn't even been updated to reflect the FDA's one-year window, although the organization will be making the switch this year.
Anderson-Minshall said, though, that the Orlando shooting could be a tipping point in encouraging the FDA to repeal its policies once and for all. The organization reportedly met on Sunday to discuss the blood ban and "didn't put out a statement all weekend" on enforcing its guidelines. "They're testing the waters with this," she predicted. If that's the case, striking down the ban could have a huge impact on the amount of blood donated in the United States: UCLA's Williams Institute reports that it could "increase the total annual blood supply by 2 to 4 percent." That would mean up to 615,300 additional pints available each year.
For gay and bisexual men, finally being allowed to donate would mean getting to aid their community during a time of incredible need. "It was a tragic reminder on an already tragic day," John-Paul Brammer, a columnist for the Guardian, told VICE. "It really compounded the sadness for me—recognizing that we have all these structural barriers in place that prevent us from being truly equal." Oxun said it was just another reminder of the way society looks not only looks at queer men but people living with HIV. "You're impure, you're unclean—that's the message we're sending to people," he said.
Thirty-three years after the original FDA policy was put in place, it's time to allow queer people to give the victims in Orlando the most sacred gift of all—life.
Follow Nico Lang on Twitter. |
7. How is time represented in the brain?
Hundred-yard dashes begin with a gunshot rather than a strobe light because your brain can react more quickly to a bang than to a flash. Yet as soon as we get outside the realm of motor reactions and into the realm of perception (what you report that you saw and heard), the story changes. When it comes to awareness, the brain goes through a good deal of trouble to synchronize incoming signals that are processed at very different speeds.
For example, snap your fingers in front of you. Although your auditory system processes information about the snap about 30 milliseconds faster than your visual system, the sight of your fingers and the sound of the snap seem simultaneous. Your brain is employing fancy editing tricks to make simultaneous events in the world feel simultaneous to you, even when the different senses processing the information would individually swear otherwise.
For a simple example of how your brain plays tricks with time, look in the mirror at your left eye. Now shift your gaze to your right eye. Your eye movements take time, of course, but you do not see your eyes move. It is as if the world instantly made the transition from one view to the next. What happened to that little gap in time? For that matter, what happens to the 80 milliseconds of darkness you should see every time you blink your eyes? Bottom line: Your notion of the smooth passage of time is a construction of the brain. Clarifying the picture of how the brain normally solves timing problems should give insight into what happens when temporal calibration goes wrong, as may happen in the brains of people with dyslexia. Sensory inputs that are out of sync also contribute to the risk of falls in elderly patients.
8. Why do brains sleep and dream?
One of the most astonishing aspects of our lives is that we spend a third of our time in the strange world of sleep. Newborn babies spend about twice that. It is inordinately difficult to remain awake for more than a full day-night cycle. In humans, continuous wakefulness of the nervous system results in mental derangement; rats deprived of sleep for 10 days die. All mammals sleep, reptiles and birds sleep, and voluntary breathers like dolphins sleep with one brain hemisphere dormant at a time. The evolutionary trend is clear, but the function of sleep is not.
The universality of sleep, even though it comes at the cost of time and leaves the sleeper relatively defenseless, suggests a deep importance. There is no universally agreed-upon answer, but there are at least three popular (and nonexclusive) guesses. The first is that sleep is restorative, saving and replenishing the body’s energy stores. However, the high neural activity during sleep suggests there is more to the story. A second theory proposes that sleep allows the brain to run simulations of fighting, problem solving, and other key actions before testing them out in the real world. A third theory—the one that enjoys the most evidence—is that sleep plays a critical role in learning and consolidating memories and in forgetting inconsequential details. In other words, sleep allows the brain to store away the important stuff and take out the neural trash.
Recently, the spotlight has focused on REM sleep as the most important phase for locking memories into long-term encoding. In one study, rats were trained to scurry around a track for a food reward. The researchers recorded activity in the neurons known as place cells, which showed distinct patterns of activity depending upon the rats’ location on the track. Later, while the rats dropped off into REM sleep, the recordings continued. During this sleep, the rats’ place cells often repeated the exact same pattern of activity that was seen when the animals ran. The correlation was so close, the researchers claimed, that as the animal “dreamed,” they could reconstruct where it would be on the track if it had been awake—and whether the animal was dreaming of running or standing still. The emerging idea is that information replayed during sleep might determine which events we remember later. Sleep, in this view, is akin to an off-line practice session. In several recent experiments, human subjects performing difficult tasks improved their scores between sessions on consecutive days, but not between sessions on the same day, implicating sleep in the learning process.
Understanding how sleeping and dreaming are changed by trauma, drugs, and disease—and how we might modulate our need for sleep—is a rich field to harvest for future clues.
9. How do the specialized systems of the brain integrate with one another?
To the naked eye, no part of the brain’s surface looks terribly different from any other part. But when we measure activity, we find that different types of information lurk in each region of the neural territory. Within vision, for example, separate areas process motion, edges, faces, and colors. The territory of the adult brain is as fractured as a map of the countries of the world.
Now that neuroscientists have a reasonable idea of how that territory is divided, we find ourselves looking at a strange assortment of brain networks involved with smell, hunger, pain, goal setting, temperature, prediction, and hundreds of other tasks. Despite their disparate functions, these systems seem to work together seamlessly. There are almost no good ideas about how this occurs.
Nor is it understood how the brain coordinates its systems so rapidly. The slow speed of spikes (they travel about one foot per second in axons that lack the insulating sheathing called myelin) is one hundred-millionth the speed of signal transmission in digital computers. Yet a human can recognize a friend almost instantaneously, while digital computers are slow—and usually unsuccessful—at face recognition. How can an organ with such slow parts operate so quickly? The usual answer is that the brain is a parallel processor, running many operations at the same time. This is almost certainly true, but what slows down parallel-processing digital computers is the next stage of operations, where results need to be compared and decided upon. Brains are amazingly fast at this. So while the brain’s ability to do parallel processing is impressive, its ability to rapidly synthesize those parallel processes into a single, behavior-guiding output is at least as significant. An animal running must go left or right around a tree; it cannot do both.
There is no special anatomical location in the brain where information from all the different systems converges; rather, the specialized areas all interconnect with one another, forming a network of parallel and recurring links. Somehow, our integrated image of the world emerges from this complex labyrinthine network of brain structures. Surprisingly little study has been done on large, loopy networks like the ones in the brain—probably in part because it is easier to think about brains as tidy assembly lines than as dynamic networks.
10. What is consciousness?
Think back to your first kiss. The experience of it may pop into your head instantly. Where was that memory before you became conscious of it? How was it stored in your brain before and after it came into consciousness? What is the difference between those states
An explanation of consciousness is one of the major unsolved problems of modern science. It may not turn out to be a single phenomenon; nonetheless, by way of a preliminary target, let’s think of it as the thing that flickers on when you wake up in the morning that was not there, in the exact same brain hardware, moments before.
Neuroscientists believe that consciousness emerges from the material stuff of the brain primarily because even very small changes to your brain (say, by drugs or disease) can powerfully alter your subjective experiences. The heart of the problem is that we do not yet know how to engineer pieces and parts such that the resulting machine has the kind of private subjective experience that you and I take for granted. If I give you all the Tinkertoys in the world and tell you to hook them up so that they form a conscious machine, good luck. We don’t have a theory yet of how to do this; we don’t even know what the theory will look like.
One of the traditional challenges to consciousness research is studying it experimentally. It is probable that at any moment some active neuronal processes correlate with consciousness, while others do not. The first challenge is to determine the difference between them. Some clever experiments are making at least a little headway. In one of these, subjects see an image of a house in one eye and, simultaneously, an image of a cow in the other. Instead of perceiving a house-cow mixture, people perceive only one of them. Then, after some random amount of time, they will believe they’re seeing the other, and they will continue to switch slowly back and forth. Yet nothing about the visual stimulus changes; only the conscious experience changes. This test allows investigators to probe which properties of neuronal activity correlate with the changes in subjective experience.
The mechanisms underlying consciousness could reside at any of a variety of physical levels: molecular, cellular, circuit, pathway, or some organizational level not yet described. The mechanisms might also be a product of interactions between these levels. One compelling but still speculative notion is that the massive feedback circuitry of the brain is essential to the production of consciousness.
In the near term, scientists are working to identify the areas of the brain that correlate with consciousness. Then comes the next step: understanding why they correlate. This is the so-called hard problem of neuroscience, and it lies at the outer limit of what material explanations will say about the experience of being human. |
Five people have been sentenced to death in Pakistan today for killing a Christian couple who were lynched and burned in a kiln by a Muslim mob after being falsely accused of blasphemy.
The illiterate couple had been falsely accused of tossing out pages of the Koran along with the rubbish, desecrating the Muslim holy book.
The deaths of Shahzad Masih and his pregnant wife Shama Bibi caused outrage in Pakistan and saw other Christian families living near their home in Punjab to flee the area in fear.
Shahzad's father, a faith healer who used pages with inscriptions in many languages for his work, had died shortly before the incident. The couple burning some of his documents, which led to the misunderstanding.
Shama Bibi (left) and her husband Shehzad Masih, who were both Christians, were murdered in Pakistan after a mob accused them of desecrating a copy of the Koran
The Christian community in nearby Faisalabad demanded justice for the couple after they were killed in November 2014
Witnesses described how an angry mob of hundreds of people set upon the couple in a hamlet called Chak 59 near the town of Kot Radha Kishan in Punjab in 2014, attacking them and throwing their bodies into a brick kiln.
It is unclear whether they were still alive when tossed into the kiln.
Their three children were orphaned and all that remained of them was charred bones and their discarded shoes.
The Christian couple were attacked by a mob in a hamlet called Chak 59 near Kot Radha Kishan in Punjab, 50 miles from Lahore
Riaz Anjum, a lawyer representing the couple's family, said a total of 103 people had been charged in the case.
But the court in the eastern city of Lahore had acquitted 90 people.
Mr Masih worked as a labourer at the brick kiln and among those acquitted was his employer.
A man surveys the site of the brick kiln where the Christian couple were murdered. Only their discarded shoes, and some charred bones, remained of them
He had been accused of locking the couple up as they tried to flee for fear they would default on their debt to him.
Five men were sentenced to hang and eight others were jailed for two years each.
'The five people awarded the death sentence were involved in dragging, beating and burning the couple while the other eight played a supportive role according to the judgement,' Mr Anjum said.
Senior prosecutor Khurram Khan confirmed the death sentences.
Their relatives are seen grieving for the couple in Kot Radha Kishan, Pakistan in 2014
Blasphemy is legally punishable by death in the deeply conservative Muslim country, where even unproven accusations can stir violence.
Critics say the laws are abused to wage personal vendettas, often against Christians.
By the time the attack was over, only charred bones and the couple's discarded shoes remained.
Police and locals pictured at the site of their death. The couple's relatives have claimed the two were detained by the owner of the brick kiln, where Mr Masih worked
Pakistani Christians lay floral wreaths at the brick kiln where a Christian couple was burnt alive
Members of Pakistan's Christian community protested the couple's murders in Islamabad
After the deaths Christian campaigners called on politicians to ensure justice was done |
Today, Bill and Melinda Gates released their latest annual letter, which takes stock of some of the progress they’ve made so far with their philanthropy—but leaves key questions unanswered about where Gates giving might go from here.
I’ll get to those questions in a moment. Let’s first look at the new update, which is titled “Dear Warren,” and takes the form of a letter to Warren Buffett. In December, Buffett—who famously pledged the bulk of his fortune to the Gates Foundation in 2006—asked Bill and Melinda to reflect on how they’re measuring their progress and how they “would like the final scorecard to read.”
Their response is a sweeping and uplifting look at gains the world has made in improving global health in the past 25 years, especially when it comes to reducing child mortality. The letter notes that childhood deaths have been cut in half since 1990, with 122 million lives saved as a result.
The Gateses write further that vaccines have been the biggest reason for this drop. Bill and Melinda say, “Coverage for the basic package of childhood vaccines is now the highest it’s ever been, at 86 percent. And the gap between the richest and the poorest countries is the lowest it’s ever been.”
That’s a remarkable statistic, and expanding access to vaccinations, of course, has been a central focus of the Gates Foundation’s work since its inception. To the extent that their philanthropy has played a key role, here—along with that of other donors—it’s a stunning testament to the power of private giving to shape the arc of human history.
(I don’t know of any authoritative study measuring the exact role of the Gates Foundation in expanding vaccination coverage and how many lives have been saved as a result. One analysis estimated that between 2007 and 2012, investments by the foundation saved around 6 million lives.)
Looking ahead, the Gateses see even bigger gains to come. They write, “In our lifetimes, malaria will end. No one will die from AIDS. Few people will get TB. Children everywhere will be well nourished. And the death of a child in the developing world will be just as rare as the death of a child in the rich world.”
Those seem like remarkably optimistic predictions, but the Gateses don’t say much about their game plan going forward to conquer top dread diseases and greatly reduce the extreme poverty that underlies the suffering of children worldwide.
More broadly, this annual letter—like previous ones—doesn’t offer much insight into the couple’s thinking about how they will handle the monumental task of deploying vast piles of wealth going forward.
Consider three figures: First, the Gates Foundation, which will spend down and close its doors two decades after Bill and Melinda die, has an endowment of some $40 billion. Second, according to Forbes, Bill Gates’s net worth is now $85 billion, a fortune that he and Melinda have said they will give away. Third, Warren Buffett is currently worth $74 billion, with maybe $60 billion of that destined for the Gates Foundation.
All these numbers will likely change, perhaps declining sharply if there is a stock market correction. On the other hand, both Gates and Buffett could potentially grow much richer in the next decade or so, since both have added tens of billions to their fortunes since 2006.
But to keep things simple, let’s work with today’s numbers: Over the next half-century or so, Bill and Melinda, along with whoever handles their giving once they’re gone and their foundation is spending down, may dedicate as much as $185 billion in total to their philanthropic mission. By comparison, since its inception, the Gates Foundation has spent around $40 billion. So we’re looking at four times as much money harnessed to Gates giving over future decades.
Here are four questions about what lies ahead.
Will the Gates Foundation Increase Its Grantmaking, and If So, When?
Over the past few years, Gates Foundation giving has held pretty steady. In 2015, it made $4.2 billion in grants; the year before, it was $3.9 billion. Yet, with so much money waiting in the wings, the Gateses could easily raise their level of annual giving—and at some point, will need to do so in order to achieve their long-term spend-down ambitions.
I’ve wondered before why the Gateses aren’t giving away more money, faster—even as they’ve exhorted other wealthy people to give and even as they’ve trumpeted the immense value of making preventive investments today, starting with vaccinating children. I suspect they have very good reasons for holding back, such as wanting to be sure greater giving has the desired impact or because their grantmaking pipeline can only handle so much money. Regardless, it’d be nice to know what the schedule is, here—assuming they themselves know. (Maybe they don’t.)
Will Bill and Melinda Embrace New Causes?
One way to give away lots of money faster is to embrace a broader agenda. You can see that most vividly in Mike Bloomberg’s giving, which now ranges far more widely than it did a few years ago, with this billionaire tackling such new areas as protecting the world’s fisheries. Will Bill and Melinda also move into new areas?
There are some signs of things moving in this direction. Gender equity has emerged as a growing focus on the Gates Foundation’s international work in recent years, with Melinda taking the lead. Domestically, the foundation has started to expand into early childhood learning, as we’ve reported. Even more intriguing, the Gates Foundation launched a wide-ranging effort last year to explore U.S. poverty issues, tapping a who’s who of leading thinkers. It’s hard to say where that initiative might lead, but it would obviously be huge news to the nonprofit world if the Gates Foundation’s U.S. work departed from its narrow education focus and tackled inequities writ large. Such an expanded agenda could also absorb many billions of dollars.
One other thing: Last year, Bill Gates launched a big investing effort on clean energy, which shows that he’s thinking about the challenge of climate change. Might the foundation one day take this on through its grantmaking? It would make sense, given that so many of humanity’s recent gains will be at risk in the coming century and beyond as the climate changes.
Will the Gateses Upend How They Approach Existing Areas of Work?
Bill and Melinda’s latest annual letter focuses strictly on their global work, and mainly on the health parts of that work. You can see why, too: This has been where they’ve had their greatest success as philanthropists. Meanwhile, other areas haven’t gone nearly as well, starting with their massive push to improve K-12 education in the United States—an effort that, by Bill’s own account, has not produced dramatic change. Others, of course, have offered far harsher accounts of the foundation’s performance.
Will we see a very different Gates approach to K-12 going forward? We’ve speculated quite a bit on this lately at IP, looking at the recent appointment of Bob Hughes to lead the K-12 work. Hughes is known as a stronger collaborator, so perhaps the era of the Gates Foundation charging forward with grand and risky experiments (with hugely disruptive effects) is coming to an end. Regardless, it would be nice to hear Bill and Melinda offer both a frank retrospective of their K-12 work to date and thoughts on their plans going forward.
Will Impact Investing Move Front and Center?
As I mentioned, Bill Gates has an $85 billion private fortune that has not yet been harnessed to philanthropy. And just maybe it never will be. Maybe that money will be mainly directed to impact investing, like the clean energy effort that Gates has put together. As we’ve reported, the Gates Foundation already leads the foundation world in terms of the sheer dollars that it has put into private investments and, presumably, it’s learned a lot along the way. Meanwhile, more and more donors are realizing that traditional grantmaking is a very limited tool for tackling some of humanity’s biggest challenges. If Bill and Melinda really drink the Kool Aid here, it could have big implications for what comes.
Maybe the endgame of Gates philanthropy involves less and less straight giving. Maybe a few decades from now, the bulk of that huge remaining Gates fortune will be in a social investment fund with the potential to exist for a very long time to come.
I guess we’ll see. |
This post is about this thing, read the agenda and stuff.
So I’m doing this writeup almost more out of obligation than actually wanting to. That’s all my blog is anymore, nothing gold can stay. If you want a super-serious writeup, check out Dan La Botz’s piece over at New Politics, and I think many more assessments will be forthcoming (from North Star editors Louis Proyect and Mark Lause for example), all of which I will reprint here or submit to North Star. The parts I’ve read are solid. But if you want something perhaps a bit juicier and more detailed, and more stupid, stay here.
So what the fuck was this thing and how did I become involved? These are excellent questions, and it’s still sort of unbelievable to me.
HOW IT HAPPENED
So you all know CUSP, a project which I love and I don’t see as unimportant but which is basically little more than me and some friends putting up a shingle on the Internet and say “hey socialists should be united derp derp” (more on that later). During some CUSP canvassing over the Internet, a leading member of Solidarity messages me that he and his org are generally very much down with the broad direction of CUSP – probably more looking for anything Left-Independent than explicitly Socialist, but hey, it’s something. He asks if I would want to be on a Soli conference call about putting forth the idea of an independent Left electoral conference. I say, def.
That was a huge con call, probably the most active/collective participation that has occurred in one place in Soli for a while. That’s not meant as an insult, because personally I think creating a collective beacon of visibility is one of the most important tasks the Left could be undertaking right now. I was really energized to be on it.
However from there it was less about anything mass participatory (for a time) and more about people on Soli’s committee reaching out to other groups and local campaigns/candidates/outfits. I followed this process as a fellow traveler on con calls of Soli’s committee, but not the collective inter-group planning committee. Keeping me hidden away in the basement was probably for the best given that I think some people might still be mad at me about the whole saying what I actually think thing. They asked me to help publicize the conference through CUSP, North Star, tankie facebook pages I bizarrely happen to be an admin of, and whatever the hell else I was involved in, plus to work on making the conference website.
CUSP => Soli con call => Soil IPA committee => logistics & attendance
My concern with the conference was NOT to launch some big intervention arguing that it should be socialist-only…there were enough weirdos mucking the thing up by advancing their own little bizarre formulations there (enough, but fortunately few!). Now if you can believe this, I was actually not going to attend. Still kind of unbelievable to me too in retrospect, but I figured I would try to make the conference a livestreamed interactive event over the Internet by setting up the application end, promote it among my affiliated audiences, maybe send a few minions to call for taking the whole thing to its next level of development (that ended up being me in practice), and that would be it.
So at some point a guy in Solidarity asks me, dude, this is all you have been about for like, years now? How the fuck can you not go? (He said it nicely, but pretty much that bluntly, which in truth was warranted.) And I say, I’m broke.
He says, I found flights out of Atlantic City for $80 round trip and we can put you up.
Damn. I have never felt so believed-in, except when my blog started getting an audience, Louis Proyect made me chancellor of North Star, or when my recruiter told me I should go to Officer Candidate School (Maximum Problemagic). For real though, people seem to keep thinking it’s worth it to take a chance on me despite my uncompromising hate of authority, tendency toward putting forward grand sweeping plans for what the Left should do, and occult insanity/general weirdness. If sometimes I seem a little wrapped up in what I’m doing and I don’t pay attention to you, don’t take it personally. I notice when people notice; I notice when people support me, every time. It all means a rather lot to me, thanks to everyone who gives me a hearing. We’re rebuilding and reinventing the Left together and you rock.
SHENNANIGANS
I have been badly wanting to go to a rave ever since receiving miraculous revelations telling me that I should, I hoped this trip would be my chance. Alas, too much fatigue, money limits, and not knowing my way around town concluded with this not happening and me getting only mildly drunk with small handfuls of leftists instead. Only later did I hear from a comrade in Philly Socialists who had been passing through that she had indeed attended such an affair the night before we spoke. Perhaps if I had only dedicated myself more, I could have gone apeshit in a bath of color and sound…truly the gods are cruel and regret is a bitter taste. Someday.
I subjected some poor Green Party electoral technicality maven named Phil Huckleberry to my insane ravings about Jesus and reincarnation (the idea is that God had no moral authority to judge humanity until living a human’s life with perfect principle, hence Christ, except that for it to really count Christ had to be born without the knowledge of being God, etc). A young woman asked for my phone number, but when I gave it to her, she quizzically asked if I was giving her an area code (I was), must have concluded I was an out-of-reach out-of-towner, and immediately abandoned the chase. I guess it was just summer love.
I brought both Greenman and Redman, by which I mean to the uninitiated the mono-color body suits as seen on Always Sunny in Philadelphia, and I asked Jill Stein to do a photo with me of me wearing the red one and her wearing the green one. She said she had to catch a plane. This was almost certainly a lie.
One thing I said (roughly) during my comments was “It might not be 100% clear how to connect to Black Lives Matter, we can connect with its organized national convention, but it’s also sometimes enough to give our rhetorical support to it. In the same way that Syriza has been Greece’s Party of the Riot, we can be that.” For some reason this got laughter; I think it’s because how wide-eyed and rapturous I must have looked and sounded during that last beautiful vision of bricks and ballots.
On the flight out I got a ridiculous ton of writing done, regarding where CUSP is going, where Emerge is going (into North Star probably), and an emerging theory in my head about the relationship between the fabric of personal relationships, the formation of cliques/friend groups, and the dynamics of power and democracy within organizations, and also how this relates to the issue of state-based ruling classes in state-based economies. It was a giant burst of suppressed creativity somehow, probably because I’d been working on conference stuff, but it finally got out. All of that is forthcoming.
THE CONFERENCE
The conference was predominated by the 60s generation, but they were simply the largest group instead of the majority. Ages were mixed, gender was mixed, and race was mixed, especially for what I assumed would be the most nerdy white petit bourgeois common interest imaginable. Attendance was over 175, up to 200, I never got the final count, which is pretty good regarding that some critics viewed this conference as trying to create something out of nothing. There was strong attention not just to electoral machinery (necessary!) but also how that stuff interconnects with issues like Black Lives Matter and $15.
The conference was somewhat nastily divided over Bernie Sanders and Jill Stein, leaning decisively toward Jill of course given that it was meant to be an independent, anti-Democrat conference in essence. However Bernie supporters were there, both in the audience and as speakers/candidates/officeholders.
One of my few complaints is that numerous people were a bit too brutal to the Sanders supporters, and I say this not least because I am leaning toward his campaign (believe me I understand the anxieties of all sides). A 16-year-old woman came to support Sanders and was subjected to endless berating of him, often with very little clear articulated reference to what precisely Sanders has done wrong (and honestly I could list things…). Later in the conference she said that this was the first time she had been exposed to socialist ideas, she agreed with a lot of what she was hearing, but she was badly dismayed by the venom with which people were trying to “communicate.” I agreed wholeheartedly on that front – whether you’re inside or outside the Bernie campaign, you should try to connect with these people and that means treating them like human beings. I think we need to reach people like her, since there are already 175,000.
And this was a unique issue because the rest of the conference got along famously. It was probably one of the best, least annoying inter-group Left gatherings I have ever been to! The typical sectarian shitshow was almost nowhere to be found. Sure, some groups were slightly self-promoting (and why not, really?), but they were also unmistakably contributing. Sure, there were one or two sectarians making speeches about their bizarre preferred exact formulations of a party or whatever the fuck (and deep down I could be considered one of those though I did not really torture people at this conference about that), but they were completely overwhelmed by people actually talking about how to run campaigns, eager to work together, and focused on learning from each other.
One of my favorite presentations was from Richmond Progressive Alliance, a formation in California. I hadn’t really paid much attention to them earlier because they were not Orthodox Pig Iron Campaigners for Socialism, but their methods were actually amazing.
Some of the key insights from their campaigning were two main points. One was that in non-partisan struggle, you almost have to make the race partisan. People need a collective bloc which they can clearly politically identify in order to vote; much of people’s voting habits are, in truth, party-based instead of individualistic, the constant self-dishonest griping of independents notwithstanding. The second thing was that, while you should strive to give your bloc a broad progressive identification by participation publicly in many social issues, they actually win races by picking one strategic critical wedge issue. This is comparable to Sawant’s campaigns, which revolved around $15 and now rent control. RPA’s approach was very similar.
A guy from Vermont Progessive Party claimed that they run successful state rep campaigns for only $5,000 and state senate campaigns for only $20,000. I am sure non-grassroots campaigns blow ten times that.
Jorgé Mújica of Chicago Socialist Campaign had one of my favorite quotes of the night. He said that people at the conference were involved in a scattered focus on issues, and insufficiently on electoral machine politics required to actually win. He said: “We win all the debates, we lose all the elections.” Amazing. Of course a more nuanced take would be that it all matters, but really he was counterbalancing other tendencies at the conference himself, so in context it made sense.
MY INVOLVEMENT
As for me, I was running the livestreaming. At first we were using Twitch. I thought this made sense; many people have heard of Twitch, and I heard of it through Jodi Dean posting something about how Twitch Plays Pokemon could be a visionary example of future online direct-democratic structures.
However, little did I know, Twitch is not simply a livestreaming platform popular among gamers, but is instead a livestreaming platform only for gaming. We had gotten almost entirely through Saturday’s first two pre-lunch sessions when Twitch informed us our account had been suspended for non-gaming content, LOL. Me and a comrade considered pressing the argument that this conference was itself a form of strategy game but concluded that time was critical and concessions had to be made.
I had to scramble to set up a conference YouTube account, learn their system, redirect my Open Broadcast Software client, and test it out all when I was supposed to be eating lunch, fun fun.
I ended up doing some of their other filming/recording stuff, and dealing with piping distance greetings from Denmark/Seattle onto a projector, and other projector stuff like power points and the notes from the final brainstorming session. I also just did whatever bullshit that was asked of me like carrying stuff around or whatever. I was a pretty good little boy, but they kind of paid for me to go so I had no problem with it. Lots of video will probably be forthcoming at LeftElect.org.
Sad thing? The livestreaming audience only ever reached single-digits at any given time. That’s not to say that’s all it was; I am thinking it could have been around 30 people shuffling in and out, and if the livestreaming helped 30 people who couldn’t afford to make the trip follow along, then I consider it a good deed performed.
However, what was really hilarious is how many times people during the conference said things like “Fuck the mainstream media, fuck the corporate media, let’s BE the media! We need to get this shit on YouTube!” and I was thinking “point of information ma’am, you are currently on YouTube…carry on.” My services were appreciated by the attendees, if not so much utilized by the wider masses this time. So I suppose that in its future development (future, larger, more participatory, and hopefully more widely-followed conferences coming out of this one) that the practice of getting the livestreaming and all the A/V & projector shit set up was good, and may help us be prepared for the future actual huge Podemos-magnitude flood of web participation. If anything, I learned a lot and I am putting it on my resumé.
We were in a basement with shitty reception so I had prepared myself by enlisting the services of Jump Wireless mobile broadband, so I would always have an Internet connection independent of the infrastructure provided by the union (to be honest theirs was pretty weak, sad to say). Mobile broadband really is excellent for sidestepping unresponsive institutions! (It is necessary at all times to maintain a renegade political infrastructure in case of expulsion/split/government crackdown!)
RESULTS
The final session is what I had been hoping would be a democratic session to forge a network right then and there. It’s not what it was.
Instead it was more of a consultative session where the planning committee who set the thing up affirmed that it would persist as a sort of unelected bureaucracy to keep pushing the process forward, but it now opened itself up to ideas/consultation/critique. The committee’s plan/recommendation:
Keep continuations committee
Let continuations committee forge network after the conference
Reach out to even more groups and more local independent campaign forces
Support Sawant! (This was a major point to celebrate in my opinion.)
(This was a major point to celebrate in my opinion.) Keep website for coordination, opinion, content/video
Weather the Sanderite storm of 2016
Continue process at US Social Forum?
Another interesting possibility was that the Democratic National Convention is at Philly in 2016, and various voices came out in support of the idea of crashing it/hosting a large nearby event for the inevitable disaffected Bernie supporters.
What frightened me about the whole “let the committee handle it” approach was that I’ve seen this thing happen before over the last few years…many groups have been responding to electoral Left stuff out of more public pressure to do so than necessarily real commitment, as far as I could tell. Several Left Unity talks have occurred only to be followed up by inaction, as well. This conference assuaged my fears however – it seemed the people who set it up are dead serious about at least having another conference. Whatever beef I may have with the structure, the continuations committee did state a sincere intention to keep pushing the thing forward in a way I found believable.
Indeed, someone raised a motion to accept the committee’s recommendations. I objected that this session was not even really set up to be a democracy – there was insufficient time scheduled for competing motions, real discussion or planning, and the moderator was definitely not prepared to carry out anything approximating Robert’s Rules or even a basic fair democratic process. I said a good deal of this. I was one of four abstentions from voting for the motion, having no votes against and almost unanimous.
Yeah, that was a dickish thing of me to do given that I agreed with all the content of the motion in itself. But you know what? Democracy is something I insist on, and yes even formal democracy. Virtually everything on the Left is done by “trusted cadres” as they said in the USSR (see intro), and if we are ever going to break out of our little corner into mass relevance, we have to do it by empowering the people in the room to debate, vote, and run shit themselves. That is the only way our organizations will create a world worth living in, and indeed the only way people will feel ownership over them enough to put their time and participation in. We need to be more flexible and prepared to turn discussion sessions into proper debate & voting sessions. This means we have to surrender our own plans, our own pre-decided processes, and the undespoiled sanctity of our own positions to the will of the mob. Really we should have only one position – all power to the mob, and none for ourselves, except through it.
I still thought putting the network formation off to another conference was a bad idea and we needed a network right here and now, and I said so. How much momentum can people keep up? We’ve all got other political stuff, and lives. Shouldn’t this have been the conference to declare a network? Why put it off after losing momentum? If it never happens on their part, I’m fairly prepared to put it into motion unilaterally, and if anything, this conference strengthened my network of contracts and my ability to do such a thing.
My proposals were in this spirit of being pointed toward setting the damned thing up now:
walk away with a structure decided, less amorphous
mutual educational support re: electoral skills
Podemos-style launch-petition circulation for a targeted election
a wave of local candidates under a common umbrella name
a few keys issues defining this umbrella, ex. $15, BLM, Green New Deal
eventually a participatory decision-making structure
The response I got from the crowd was decent, and I have a feeling this and other brainstorm quality comments from the crowd (all viewable here) will help steer and influence the continuations committee in its planning of next steps. (I don’t think I’m being oversharing by linking to this; it was, after all, up on a giant projector screen.)
So, in conclusion. Will me and collaborators still probably launch a Socialist Electoral Alliance, based more on participatory membership, online organizing, and Socialist specificity? Yes, but I don’t see it as competing with this conference or the alliance of people around it; it would be more like a component or ally of it, really.
Did I get everything I wanted? No.
But the overwhelming feeling I got from the entire conference, seeing the mix of groups, the mix of ages, the mix of genders, the mix of races, the era of good feelings and willingness to come together, the common recognition of this common need, all to build some kind of collaborative electoral intervention & common electoral front in the USA, is “holy fuck this has needed to happen for years, I am so ecstatic it is actually happening.”
And it finally happened. |
Highway Safety: National Academies Committee Recommends Implementation Improvements
June 28, 2017
By Shilo Rea
An estimated 550,000 commercial motor carriers—trucks and buses, employing over 4 million drivers—move freight and passengers across U.S. highways each year, resulting in about 100,000 fatality- or injury-causing crashes.
Congress asked the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine to investigate whether the methods used to evaluate the safety of long-distance trucks and buses were adequate. A committee, co-chaired by Carnegie Mellon University’s Joel Greenhouse, found that while the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration’s (FMCSA) Safety Measurement System (SMS) used to identify vehicles at high risk for future crashes is conceptually sound, several features involving its implementation need to be improved.
Specifically, the committee proposed that FMCSA develop a more statistically principled approach based on item response theory (IRT) to measure the "safety fitness" of each carrier. IRT models have been applied successfully in informing policy decisions in other areas such as hospital rankings. If the new model is then demonstrated to perform well in identifying motor carriers that need interventions, FMCSA should use it to replace SMS.
"Using the IRT approach, the evaluations made by the FMCSA will be transparent and reproducible," said Greenhouse, professor of statistics in the Dietrich College of Humanities and Social Sciences. "Formalizing the approach using IRT models will address many of the criticisms of the current SMS, such as, 'How can a safety violation, e.g., a broken tail light, be related to crashes?' or 'Why can a carrier’s relative safety ranking change significantly from year to year?' As the long distance carriers have more faith in how they are being evaluated for safety, they will invest more effort in improving the safety of their fleets, which will help them attract more business."
Approximately 3.5 million commercial motor vehicle (CMV) roadside inspections are conducted yearly by specially trained inspectors on approximately 900 potential violations of safety regulations that fall under six categories: unsafe driving, hours of service compliance, vehicle maintenance, controlled substances/alcohol use, hazardous materials compliance and driver fitness.
FMCSA uses information that is collected mainly during these inspections to identify motor carriers that are operating unsafely and therefore are likely to be at higher risk for future crashes. Carriers found to have frequent violations are subject to interventions from FMCSA, which can include warning letters and investigations.
The report identified a number of data quality issues and recommended that FMCSA should continue to collaborate with states and other agencies to improve the collection of data on vehicle miles traveled and on crashes, data which are often missing and of unsatisfactory quality. Including vehicle miles traveled data by state and month will enable SMS to account for varied environments where carriers travel -- for example, in icy winter weather in the North. In addition, there is information available in police narratives not represented in the data used that could be helpful in understanding the contributing factors in a crash.
The committee also believes the FMCSA should research ways of collecting data on carrier characteristics -- including driver turnover rates, type of cargo, and method and level of compensation. For example, compensation levels are relevant because it is known that drivers who are better-compensated, and those not compensated based on miles traveled, have fewer crashes. This additional data collection would require greater collaboration between FMCSA and the states to standardize the effort and to protect carrier-specific information.
In addition to Greenhouse, Harvard Medical School’s Sharon-Lise T. Normand co-chaired the committee. The committee operated under the National Academies’ Division of Behavioral and Social Sciences and Education’s Committee on National Statistics.
Read more
Download the report |
A second man accused in the shooting death of Anthony Smith — a case that has come under intense scrutiny after several people involved were linked to Mayor Rob Ford — had his charges stayed Tuesday. Hanad Mohamed, 23, was one of two men originally charged with first-degree murder in Smith’s slaying outside the Loki Lounge nightclub on King St. in March. Muhammad Khattak was also wounded in the shooting.
All charges have been dropped against Hanad Mohamed, shown in July 2013, in relation to the shooting death of Anthony Smith. ( Andrew Francis Wallace / Toronto Star file photo )
Nisar Hashimi, also 23, pleaded guilty to lesser charges of manslaughter and aggravated assault in June, after he surrendered to police. He is currently serving a nine-year sentence. That was just a month after the Star and the Gawker website broke a story about a video showing Ford smoking what appears to be crack cocaine, alongside a picture of the mayor posing with 21-year-old Smith, Khattak and a third man, Monir Kassim. The plea came just weeks after police executed dozens of search warrants across the city in a guns and gang sweep called Project Traveller, which netted more than 50 arrests — including that of Khattak and Kassim, alleged members of the Dixon City Bloods.
Article Continued Below
Crown attorney Mary Misener said Tuesday there was no reasonable prospect of conviction in Mohamed’s case, and there was “no evidence” to proceed. Mohamed’s charges were earlier downgraded to accessory after the fact to manslaughter, accessory to discharging a firearm, and accessory to aggravated assault. Mohamed has maintained his innocence and has been out on bail since July. He is currently in Edmonton and did not immediately hear that his charges had been dropped, said lawyer Fariborz Davoudi said. “I’m sure he’ll be delighted to hear the news.” Davoudi told the Star that his client had no connection to Smith and “got caught up in an investigation that had nothing to do with him.” Mohamed is a friend, “in a loose sense,” of Hashimi, he said.
An agreed statement of facts read at Hashimi’s sentencing said Hashimi had opened fire on Smith and Khattak (who is Hashimi’s cousin) and that the group had an ongoing dispute. Hashimi was said to be under the influence of alcohol and drugs and was acting in self-defence.
Article Continued Below
Davoudi defended his client and distanced the young man from Ford and the Project Traveller investigation. “Hanad Mohamed is not a gang member. He was a young, respectable fellow,” Davoudi said, adding he was employed as a security guard in Fort McMurray at the time of the incident and had come to visit family in Toronto when the shooting happened. Davoudi said Mohamed is not connected to the police investigation that has probed Ford’s inner circle following the Traveller sweep and which recovered the deleted crack video. “Mr. Ford was totally alien to him,” Davoudi said, adding Mohamed also had no connection to the house at 15 Windsor Rd. where the picture with Ford was taken, alleged by police to be a “crack house.” Police documents released last year show at least one staff member believed Smith’s murder might be connected to the crack video. David Price told former chief of staff Mark Towhey about a call he received that a cellphone that had the video on it belonged to Smith and that it was “motive for his murder.” That information was relayed to police. Those allegations have not been tested in court. But investigators quickly determined that the video was not the motive, based on information already gathered about the murder. |
The ultimate list of the most notable free agents when starting FM13, featuring unparalleled depth and most usable presentation.
Welcome to the ultimate list of the best free players in Football Manager 2013 by FMScout.com. Like all my other lists, I have dedicated many hours composing this to make sure it is really the greatest list of free players in FM13 around the web.
This is the successor of our popular
FM 2012 best free players and
FM 2011 best free players.
These lists have received a combined total of almost 1 million views.
This is the first edition, including roughly 250 players! Updates will be applied from to time to ensure I'm not missing any players worthy of appearing here.
Released: 21 Oct 2012
Frequently Asked Questions
► Looking for Football Manager 2015 Best Free Players
I can't find all players of this list on my save game. Why is that?
I loaded what I consider the top 14 leagues (roughly 65,000 players) to produce my lists of players. Your save game probably has less leagues and players loaded, which explains why you can't find all of them.
Can you please share a shortlist for this list to import in-game?
Sorry I can't do that. I used to share shortlists but people would steal them and post on other sites without providing credit and passing as their own, which is very annoying. This also explains why you won't be able to copy/paste names off this list.
That is a lot of players to go through. Is there some kind of recommendation?
Yes. The list is sorted by position and my personal recommendation, meaning that the players at the top of each position table are recommended more than the ones at the bottom. I will eventually add recommendation stars to make it even easier for you.
You can quickly see which players are EU national or not. For non EU players you can check their international caps number to figure out if it's likely to get a work permit.
Click on the table headers (name, age, etc) for easy sorting.
You can also sort by multiple columns if you press and hold Shift while clicking the headers.
Goalkeepers Name Age Position Nation EU Caps Gordon, Craig 29 GK SCO 40 Manninger, Alexander 35 GK AUT 32 Moreira 30 GK POR 0 Marcos Leandro 30 GK BRA 0 Macho, Jurgen 34 GK AUT 25 Mateus 29 GK BRA 0 Stolz, Alexander 28 GK GER 0 Eilhoff, Dennis 29 GK GER 0 Padovani, Jean-Daniel 32 GK FRA 0 Lejsal, Martin 29 GK CZE 0 Galinovic, Mario 35 GK CRO 2 Ratajczak, Michael 30 GK GER 0 Kingson, Richard 34 GK GHA / TUR 83 Santilli, Mario 28 GK ARG 0 Eduardo 33 GK ESP 0 Defenders Central Name Age Position Nation EU Caps Mensah, John 29 D C GHA 82 Gustavo Bastos 30 D C, DM BRA 0 Asatiani, Malkhaz 30 D C GEO 42 Fuentes, Ismael 30 SW, D C CHI 30 Buljat, Jurica 25 D C CRO 2 Biscan, Igor 34 D C, DM CRO 15 Silvestre, Mikael 34 D LC FRA / GLP 40 Pamarot, Noe 33 D RC FRA / GLP 0 Gnanou, Ibrahim 25 D RC BUR 10 Bates, Matthew 25 D RLC ENG 0 Fuentes, Fabricio 35 SW, D C ARG / ITA 1 Afolabi, Rabiu 32 D LC NGR / BEL 20 Rocha, Ricardo 33 D LC POR 6 Meira, Fernando 34 SW, D C, DM POR 54 Sarriegi, Josu 33 D C ESP / BSQ 0 Paz, Jose Maria 34 SW, D C ARG 0 Howard, Mark 26 D C ENG 0 Loran, Tyrone 31 D RC CUW / NED 5 Traore, Lamine 29 D C BUR 29 Sorondo, Gonzalo 32 SW, D C URU / BRA 27 Kroldrup, Per 32 D C DEN 33 Meite, Abdoulaye 31 D C CIV / FRA 48 Ben-Haim, Tal 30 D RLC ISR 61 Vinicius 31 D C BRA / ITA 0 Monsoreau, Sylvain 31 D LC FRA / MTQ 0 Geder 34 D C BRA 0 Moreyra, Julio Cesar 30 SW, D C ARG 0 Kostal, Pavel 31 D C CZE 0 Teco 29 D C BRA 0 Cris 32 D C BRA 0 Plinio 27 D C BRA 0 Nen 34 SW, D C BRA 0 Juliano 31 D C, DM BRA 0 Vitor 27 D RC BRA 0 Plestan, Nicolas 31 D C FRA 0 Olfers, Steve 30 D C, DM NED 0 Kotysch, Sascha 23 D RC, DM GER 0 Anderson Luis 25 D C, DM BRA 0 Andre Bahia 28 SW, D C BRA 0 Thiago Mathias 29 D C BRA 0 Ustaritz 29 D C ESP / BSQ 0 Luciano Castan 22 D C BRA / ITA 0 Gomes 32 D C, DM BRA 0 Stewart, Damion 31 D C JAM 55 Vasoski, Aleksandar 32 D C MKD 33 Piccoli, Alcides 33 D C ARG 0 Omokoh, Harrison 30 SW, D C, DM NGR 0 Erivelton 34 D C BRA 0 Sicilia, Pablo 30 D C ESP 0 Drpic, Dino 31 D C CRO 1 Prieto, Luis 33 D C ESP / BSQ 0 Marcelao 31 D C BRA 0 Diallo, Mamadou 27 D C GUI 28 Ficagna, Daniele 31 D C ITA 0 Defenders Right Name Age Position Nation EU Caps Miguel 32 D/WB R POR / GBS 59 Rnic, Nemanja 27 D RC SRB 3 Cortes, David 32 D/WB R ESP 0 Ebondo, Albin 28 D/WB R FRA / CGO / CMR 0 Grygera, Zdenek 32 D RL CZE 65 Stalteri, Paul 34 D R CAN / ITA 84 Gaspar, Manolo 31 D/WB R ESP 0 Vanden Borre, Anthony 24 D/WB R, DM, M RC BEL / COD 23 Babic, Valentin 31 D RC, M R CRO 0 Sidny 30 D/WB/M R BRA 0 Odiah, Chidi 28 D/WB/M R NGR 28 Andrezinho 30 D/WB R BRA 0 Calvo, Jose Maria 31 D/WB RL ARG 0 Jerez, Pablo 28 D/WB R ARG 0 Perrier-Doumbe, Jean-Joel 33 D/WB R CMR / FRA 20 Zambrotta, Gianluca 35 D/WB RL ITA 98 Gustavo 30 D/WB/M R BRA / ITA 0 Osmar 30 D/WB R BRA 0 Michel 34 D/WB R BRA 0 Laurenti, Fabien 29 D RC FRA 0 Griffin, Andy 33 D RL ENG 0 Defenders Left Name Age Position Nation EU Caps Ibertsberger, Andreas 29 D RL AUT 14 Boenisch, Sebastian 25 D/WB RL POL / GER 9 Berthod, Jeremy 28 D/WB L FRA 0 Del Horno, Asier 31 D LC ESP / BSQ 10 Bonig, Philipp 32 D/WB L GER 0 Vandooren, Gonzague 32 D/WB/AM L BEL 0 Benitez, Nelson 28 D L ARG 0 Ezequias 31 D/WB L BRA 0 Traore, Djimi 32 D LC MLI / FRA 10 Lemaitre, Reynald 29 D/WB/AM L FRA 0 Schwarz, Benjamin 26 D/WB L GER 0 Krupoviesa, Juan 33 D/WB/M L ARG 0 Jorge Ribeiro 30 D/WB/M L POR 9 Pieri, Mirko 33 D/WB L ITA 0 Rossato 34 D/WB/AM L BRA / ITA 0 Marcinho 33 D/WB L BRA 0 Defensive Midfielders Name Age Position Nation EU Caps Grella, Vincenzo 32 DM AUS / ITA 46 Reo-Coker, Nigel 28 DM ENG / SLE 0 Katsouranis, Kostas 33 DM GRE 95 Carboni, Ezequiel 33 DM ARG / ITA 0 Diop, Papa Bouba 34 DM SEN 63 Hargreaves, Owen 31 DM ENG / CAN / WAL 42 Diao, Salif 35 DM SEN 39 Farinos, Javier 34 DM, AM C ESP 2 Zamogilny, Damian 32 DM ARG 0 Zanetti, Cristiano 35 DM ITA 17 Cisse, Edouard 34 DM FRA / SEN / BSQ 0 Sinkala, Andrew 33 D C, DM ZAM 22 Narry, Moussa 26 DM GHA / NIG 4 Petre, Ovidiu 30 DM ROU 23 Obodo, Christian 28 DM NGR 14 Fernando 26 DM BRA 0 Saidou, Alioum 34 DM CMR 21 Pezzoni, Kevin 23 D C, DM GER / ITA 0 Fabiano 34 DM BRA 0 Ricardo Oliveira 35 DM BRA 0 Sable, Julien 31 DM FRA 0 Bruno Octavio 26 DM BRA 0 Simao 28 D/WB R, DM, M RC BRA 0 Fink, Michael 30 DM GER 0 Bovio 30 DM BRA 0 Bodde, Ferrie 30 DM NED 0 Perez Castro, Facundo 30 DM ARG 0 Dias 34 DM BRA 0 Roberto 24 DM BRA 0 Luciano Santos 32 DM BRA 0 Faye, Amdy 35 DM SEN / FRA 18 Matabuena, Sergio 33 DM ESP 0 Tomas, Antonio 27 DM ESP 0 Diaz, Andres 29 DM, M RC ARG 0 Jonilson 33 DM BRA 0 Obodai, Anthony 30 DM, M RC GHA 4 Cesar Santiago 27 D/WB R, DM, M RC BRA 0 Alexandre 33 DM BRA 0 Dirceu 34 DM BRA 0 Walker 30 D C, DM BRA / ITA 0 Midfielders Center Name Age Position Nation EU Caps Jonatas 29 M C BRA 0 Batista 33 DM, M LC BRA 0 Marcos Paulo 35 DM, M RC BRA 12 Bowyer, Lee 35 M RC ENG 1 Barone, Simone 34 M C ITA 16 Hitzlsperger, Thomas 30 M C GER 52 Sandrinho 32 DM, AM C BRA / BUL 0 Rafael 28 DM, AM C BRA 0 Mozart 32 DM, AM C BRA / ITA 0 Kabous, Abderrahman 29 M C MAR / FRA 21 Fusani, Massimiliano 33 M C ITA 0 Wingers Right Name Age Position Nation EU Caps Marques, Jose Fernando 27 AM RC ESP 0 De Mul, Tom 26 AM R BEL 2 Abdessadki, Yacine 31 AM R MAR / FRA 8 Pino, Juan Pablo 25 AM RLC COL 2 Castelen, Romeo 29 AM R NED / SUR 10 Juanma 31 AM R ESP 0 Pereyra, Gabriel 34 AM RC ARG 0 Castroman, Lucas 31 AM R, ST ARG / ITA 5 Douglas, Darl 32 AM RC NED / SUR 0 Jorge Lopez 33 AM RLC ESP 0 Varela, Fernando 32 D/WB/AM R ESP 0 Ortiz, Jose 34 AM RC, F C ESP 0 Wingers Left Name Age Position Nation EU Caps Drenthe, Royston 25 WB/AM L NED / SUR 1 Kewell, Harry 33 AM RLC AUS / ENG 58 Solari, Santiago 35 AM L ARG / ESP 11 Akale, Kanga 31 AM RL CIV / FRA 35 Ailton 34 AM LC, F C BRA 0 Del Nero, Simone 30 D/WB L, AM LC ITA 0 McFadden, James 29 AM LC, F C SCO 48 Delev, Spas 22 AM RL, ST BUL 5 Mansare, Fode 30 AM L GUI / FRA 44 Diogo Gomes 26 M LC BRA 0 Calleja, Javier 34 D/WB/AM L ESP 0 Dum, Sascha 26 D/WB/AM L GER 0 Zenden, Boudewijn 35 AM L NED 54 Castillo, German 34 AM LC ARG 0 Tulasne, Geoffrey 24 AM RL FRA 0 Attacking Midfielders Center Name Age Position Nation EU Caps Alex 34 AM/F C BRA 49 Tote 33 AM RC, F C ESP 0 Morais 28 AM RLC BRA 0 Magnum 30 AM LC BRA 0 Ergic, Ivan 31 AM C SRB / AUS 11 Bofo Bautista 33 AM C MEX 38 Takyi, Charles 27 AM RC GHA / GER 3 Mascara, Giuseppe 32 AM/F C ITA 1 Akin, Ibrahim 28 AM RLC, F C TUR 4 Robson Ponte 35 AM RC BRA / ITA 0 De Zerbi, Roberto 33 AM RLC ITA 0 Skacel, Rudi 33 AM C CZE 6 Gaitan, Walter 35 AM LC ARG / MEX 0 Juninho 29 AM C BRA 0 Diogo Rincon 32 AM/F C BRA 0 Cortes, Martin 29 AM LC ARG 0 Ciro 32 AM/F C BRA 0 Tchoyi, Somen 29 AM RLC, F C CMR 14 van Dijk, Dominique 32 AM LC NED 0 Bruins, Luigi 25 AM LC NED 0 Strikers Name Age Position Nation EU Caps Martsvaladze, Otar 28 AM L, ST GEO 13 Adailton 35 AM RLC, F C BRA / ITA 0 Fernando Baiano 33 ST BRA / ESP 0 Buengo, Titi 32 ST ANG / FRA 5 Adamov, Roman 30 ST RUS 3 Gil 31 AM LC, F C BRA 4 Pavlovich, Nicolas 34 ST ARG / ITA 0 Charisteas, Angelos 32 ST GRE 88 Bolado, Ivan 23 ST GEQ / ESP 5 Bosnjak, Ivan 32 AM R, ST CRO 14 Reis 24 ST BRA 0 Auer, Benjamin 31 ST GER 0 Geilson 28 ST BRA 0 Bardaro, Cristian 34 ST ARG 0 Carew, John 32 ST NOR / GAM 88 Ishiaku, Manasseh 29 ST NGR / BEL 4 Amanatidis, Ioannis 30 ST GRE 35 Ferreira 33 ST BRA 0 Clodoaldo 33 ST BRA 0 Robson 29 AM/F C BRA 0 Ruiz, Carlos 32 ST GUA 83 Estevez, Raul 34 AM RL, ST ARG 0 Suazo, David 32 ST HON / ITA 43 Eduardo 32 AM L, ST BRA 0 Talles Cunha 23 ST BRA 0 Figueira, Edmar 28 ST BRA 0 Guayre 32 AM RL, ST ESP 1 Galvao 30 ST BRA 0 Marcelinho 33 AM RC, F C BRA 0 Wendell 23 ST BRA 0 Bagayoko, Mamadou 33 ST MLI / FRA 21 Neto Potiguar 26 ST BRA 0 Jean 30 ST BRA 0 Bruno Cazarine 29 ST BRA / ITA 0 Mpenza, Emile 34 ST BEL / COD 57 Leandro Tatu 30 AM R, ST BRA 0 Koke 29 AM RC, F C ESP 0 Anderson Gomes 27 ST BRA 0 Ricardinho 28 AM/F C BRA 0 Jandson 25 ST BRA 0 Iglesias, Leonardo 32 ST ARG / ITA 0 Fagundes dos Santos, Elison 24 ST BRA 0
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A double-decker tourist bus became stuck under a central Paris bridge on Friday, injuring at least four passengers, firefighters said. (Geoffroy van der Hasselt, AFP)
Paris - An open-top double-decker tourist bus crashed into a central Paris bridge during an Olympic fun day on Friday, injuring at least four passengers, firefighters said.
The bus, with seating on the upper deck for sightseeing, was too high to pass under the Alexandre III bridge and scraped the roof of the tunnel before stopping after a few metres.
The Paris fire service said a woman who was among those hurt had serious injuries.
The crash came during a large-scale event on the Seine to promote the French capital's bid to host the 2024 Olympics, with a floating running track installed across the river just next to the bridge.
A police source said the bus was not travelling along its usual route, having been diverted because of the Olympic event.
The Big Bus Tours company, which offers sightseeing trips around Paris on open-top buses, confirmed to AFP that one of its vehicles had been involved in an accident, without giving further details.
Traffic was cut off in both directions to allow the injured to be treated and the bus to be towed away.
The ornate Alexandre III bridge over the River Seine is a magnet for tourists, especially honeymooners keen to take selfies with the Eiffel Tower in the background.
In 2008, a six-year-old boy and a 45-year-old man died after a tourist pleasure boat carrying 12 people sank in the Seine after hitting a bridge. |
She called out the haters, the bigots and the racists as a “basket of deplorables.”
And then some Democrats told Hillary Clinton Hillary Diane Rodham ClintonSanders: 'I fully expect' fair treatment by DNC in 2020 after 'not quite even handed' 2016 primary Sanders: 'Damn right' I'll make the large corporations pay 'fair share of taxes' Former Sanders campaign spokesman: Clinton staff are 'biggest a--holes in American politics' MORE to walk it back.
David Axelrod, President Obama’s former top political guru, called Clinton’s words a “mistake” that might allow Republican nominee Donald Trump Donald John TrumpHouse committee believes it has evidence Trump requested putting ally in charge of Cohen probe: report Vietnamese airline takes steps to open flights to US on sidelines of Trump-Kim summit Manafort's attorneys say he should get less than 10 years in prison MORE to “seize the high ground.”
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The New York Times’ liberal editorial page similarly concluded “real damage had been done” because Clinton had written off a group of voters by saying they were “irredeemable.”
Sally Kohn, the left-leaning CNN commentator, wrote in The Washington Post that “what is, in fact, deplorable is not only that Clinton said this but that she apparently believes it.”
Kohn explained that while Trump is clearly “running a xenophobic campaign that’s pandering to white nationalism,” most of his supporters are filled with “resentment that is partly about identity but also about economic suffering.” Clinton, Kohn argued, “should be reaching out to these voters, not offending them.”
This line of thinking from influential white Democrats reminded me of a line in President Reagan’s 1989 farewell address: “Don’t be afraid to see what you see.”
And here is what I see:
Mike Pence Michael (Mike) Richard PencePence meeting with Senate GOP ahead of vote to block emergency declaration 'And the award for best political commentary by an Oscar nominee goes to...' UN nuclear watchdog: Iran maintains compliance with 2015 pact MORE, Trump’s vice presidential running mate, was asked a few days after Clinton’s speech if he would call former Ku Klux Klan leader and white supremacist David Duke a "deplorable."
"No, I'm not in the name-calling business,” Pence responded, refusing to condemn an indisputable racist and Trump supporter.
Instead, Pence complained: "What Hillary Clinton did Friday night was shocking. I mean, the millions of people who support Donald Trump around this country are not a basket of anything."
And then I saw Trump’s son, Donald Jr., post an image of his dad, Pence and Alex Jones.
Jones is best known for advancing the conspiracy theory that the U.S. government was behind the 9/11 terrorist attacks that killed almost 3,000 people. Jones has also suggested the government is putting chemical additives into juice boxes, intending to make children homosexual to control population growth. And Jones claims the massacre of school children at Sandy Hook Elementary in 2012 was staged as part of a government plot to enact gun control and that no children were actually killed there.
Trump has praised Jones for “his amazing reputation” and appeared as a guest on his show during the GOP primaries.
Earlier this month, Trump Jr. tweeted an article from Jones’ website which stated that Hillary Clinton was wearing an earpiece during a forum with Matt Lauer on NBC News. Clinton was not wearing an earpiece, of course.
At a Trump rally last week in Asheville, N.C., a 69-year-old woman protesting against the GOP nominee at one of the candidate’s rallies was punched in the face by a Trump supporter. She later called a North Carolina television station to ask if people found a Trump supporter punching her in the face ‘deplorable’?
So, I see a lot of deplorable behavior. But some political thought-leaders — including some Clinton supporters — prefer to excuse it as the actions of a few misguided people and not representative of most Trump supporters.
Can we determine if close to half of Trump supporters hold deplorable beliefs? Let’s go to the polls.
An April poll taken by Reuters found that a large percentage of self-described Trump supporters describe black people as more “lazy” than whites (40 percent), “less intelligent” than whites (32 percent), more “rude” than whites (44 percent), more “violent” than whites (48 percent) and more “criminal” than whites (46 percent).
Another Reuters poll taken in July found that 58 percent of Trump supporters have either a “very unfavorable” or “somewhat unfavorable” view of the entire religion of Islam.
These are racist views. If they do not count as “deplorable,” then the word “deplorable” no longer has any meaning. By the way, a Washington Post/ABC News poll has 60 percent of Americans agreeing that Trump is personally “biased against women and minorities.”
Another shocking poll from NBC News/Survey Monkey taken in August found that just 27 percent of Republicans agreed with the statement “Barack Obama Barack Hussein ObamaWith low birth rate, America needs future migrants 4 ways Hillary looms over the 2020 race Obama goes viral after sporting black bomber jacket with '44' on sleeve at basketball game MORE was born in the U.S.”
Trump burst on to the national political stage five years ago as the “birther-in-chief,” perpetuating this overtly racist conspiracy theory about the first black President of the United States. Only last week did he finally — and briefly — acknowledge that Obama was born in the United States.
As she prepares for her first debate with Trump next week, Clinton needs to unapologetically remind voters — especially traditional Republicans who are uncomfortable with seeing their party overrun by extremists — of the racist, paranoid fringes that Trump has invited into the nation’s politics under the banner of the Republican Party.
Clinton laid the groundwork in a speech in Nevada last month when she declared that "a fringe element has effectively taken over the Republican Party."
She accused Trump of “disregard for the values that make our country."
After being scolded for her ‘deplorables’ comment, Clinton backtracked. She explained that she was being “grossly generalistic…I regret saying ‘half’ – that was wrong.”
Clinton should not have apologized. Calling out the bullies and the bigots in a national presidential election is brave. Listen to her running mate, Sen. Tim Kaine Timothy (Tim) Michael KaineTrump claims Democrats ‘don’t mind executing babies after birth’ after blocked abortion bill Democrats block abortion bill in Senate Trump unleashing digital juggernaut ahead of 2020 MORE (D-Va.).
“She advanced the notion that if you’re chumming around with the head of the KKK … that’s deplorable,” Kaine said. “You’ve got to call that out. If you’re attacking immigrants, that’s deplorable. If you’re attacking LGBT Americans, that’s deplorable. If you’re attacking people because they’re Muslims, that’s deplorable.”
To quote President Reagan once again: “Don’t be afraid to see what you see.”
Juan Williams is an author and political analyst for Fox News Channel. His latest book, "We The People: The Modern-Day Figures Who Have Reshaped and Affirmed the Founding Fathers' Vision of America" published by Crown, is out now. |
EMERYVILLE — In a falling-out between two e-commerce companies, a Bay Area art retailer was sued on Tuesday for allegedly hacking into the computer servers of another Internet retailer and stealing swathes of consumer information.
Gotham City Online, a website that sells discount brand-name shoes, sued Art.com, an Emeryville-based company that sells fine art online, in the U.S. District Court in San Francisco, claiming trade secret violations and computer fraud.
According to the lawsuit, Art.com illegally accessed Gotham City’s servers, and changed the security passwords and ownership credentials to prevent Gotham City employees from accessing email or company files. The lawsuit alleges that Art.com copied and altered Gotham City files, including files containing information about consumers who shop at Gotham City, and stole computer code and other intellectual property. Gotham City said the computer tampering brought business to a standstill and at one point caused the website to crash.
“For a significant period of time, Gotham City’s employees were unable to access their emails or to perform work for the company and its consumers,” according to the lawsuit. “Gotham City was forced to send home employees because they were unable to perform their jobs.”
A spokeswoman for Art.com said late Tuesday afternoon that the company had not reviewed the lawsuit and its general policy is not to comment on ongoing litigation.
The Gotham City servers host, among other things, the programming code for pricing items and ordering from the website; vendor information; employee names and addresses; and customer names, addresses, email addresses, purchase histories and passwords to their Gotham City accounts. There is no evidence that any consumer payment information was stolen.
The lawsuit is the latest falling out between the two e-commerce companies, which had a business deal a couple of years ago that quickly went south. Kentucky-based Gotham City in 2012 sold some of its assets to Art.com, and Gotham City staff became Art.com employees, although the two retail sites continued to operate separately. But in January, Art.com executives fired three Gotham City’s high-level employees and rescinded a promise of a multimillion dollar bonus, according to the lawsuit.
According to Gotham City, the computer tampering began shortly after those employees were fired, and it regained control of the computer servers again on Feb. 13.
“We have been asking Art.com to desist from these practices for quite some time,” Gotham City CEO, Jonathan Garriss said in a prepared statement. “Hopefully the lawsuit will help spur that change and get the company to clean up its act.”
Gotham City is claiming Art.com has violated the California Uniform Trade Secrets Act and the federal Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, and is asking for relief for at least $5,000 in damage done to its servers and for lost business.
Contact Heather Somerville at 510-208-6413. Follow her at Twitter.com/heathersomervil. |
Early Father’s Day morning both directions of Interstate 5 in south Everett were shut down as a young man climbed onto the outside of the pedestrian bridge over I-5 north of 128th. The incident happened shortly before 6:00am. Southbound I-5 traffic was diverted at Everett Mall Way and Northbound I-5 was diverted off 128th. Several dozen cars were stopped on southbound I-5 itself, unable to turn around as the incident played out. For more than an hour, a Snohomish County Sheriff’s deputy listened to the young man who at times hung over the freeway with just 3 fingers. I was nearby and able to hear as the deputy calmly talked with the young man. Alternately distraught, angry and sad the man several times made threats to jump. The deputy calmly listened, speaking with the man and following him back and forth across the bridge. After more than an hour the man agreed to come off the bridge and as he did the deputy gently helped him back over the fence to the cheers of motorists who had been stopped on I-5 and were watching from below. No one was hurt, the young man was taken to get the proper help and motorists who were delayed were able to get back on their way. I was honored to shake the deputy’s hand who spent that time talking with the young man. Thanks and a Happy Father’s Day to that deputy and all of the other deputies, police, troopers and firefighters who made this story have a positive outcome. |
An over-emphasis on tackling new and emerging security threats may be causing companies to overlook older but far more frequently exploited vulnerabilities, says a recent report.
The report, from TrustWave, is based on an analysis of data gathered from over 1,900 penetration tests and over 200 data breach investigations conducted on behalf of clients such as American Express, MasterCard, Discover, Visa, and several large retailers.
[ Also in InfoWorld: "Companies patch OS holes, but biggest priority should be apps." | Learn how to secure your systems with Roger Grimes' Security Adviser blog and Security Central newsletter, both from InfoWorld. ]
The analysis showed is that major global companies are employing "vulnerability chasers" and searching out the latest vulnerabilities and zero-day threats while overlooking the most common ones, the report said.
As a result, companies continue to be felled by old and supposedly well-understood vulnerabilities rather than by newfangled attack tools and methods.
For instance, the top three ways hackers gained initial access to corporate networks in 2009 were via remote access applications, trusted internal network connections and SQL injection attacks, TrustWave found.
All three attacks points have been well researched and known about for several years. SQL injection vulnerabilities, for instance, have been known about for at least 10 years, but still continue to be widely prevalent in Web-based, database-driven applications, TrustWave said.
The most common vulnerability that TrustWave discovered during its external network penetration tests had to do with the management interfaces for Web application engines such as Websphere, and Cold Fusion. In many cases, the management interfaces were accessible directly from the Internet and had little or no password protection, potentially allowing attackers to deploy their own malicious applications on the Web server.
Similarly unprotected network infrastructure components such as routers, switches and VPN concentrators represented the second most common vulnerability unearthed by TrustWave. The tendency by many companies to host internal applications on the same server that also hosts external content was another common vulnerability, as were misconfigured firewall rules, default or easy-to-guess passwords and DNS cache poisoning.
Meanwhile TrustWave's wireless penetration tests unearthed common weaknesses such as the continued use of WEP encryption, legacy 802.11 networks with minimal to no security controls and wireless clients using public "guest" networks instead of secured private networks.
In almost all of the cases, the most common vulnerabilities unearthed by TrustWave were common well-understood issues that should have been addressed a long time ago said Nicholas Percoco, senior vice president at TrustWave's SpiderLabs research unit.
"There are basically two themes," Percoco said. "Through our study in 2009 we found some very old vulnerabilities present within enterprises, some as old as 20 to 30 years." The second theme is that attackers are targeting these old flaws to break into enterprises, then using increasingly sophisticated tools to harvest data from companies, he said.
In addition to older keystroke logging and packet sniffing tools, malicious attackers are increasingly employing tools such as memory parsers and credentialed malware to steal data, Percoco said. Memory parsers are used to monitor the random access memory associated with a certain process and to extract specific data from it. Credentialed malware programs are a new class of multi-user programs that have typically been used to steal money and payment card numbers from ATMs.
There are several measures companies can take to mitigate the risks posed by older and often overlooked vulnerabilities, TrustWave said. One step is to maintain a complete asset inventory. Many companies are often unaware of all the IT assets they own or of the risks they pose to data, so maintaining an up to date list of assets is vital to protecting them, TrustWave said.
Decommissioning older legacy systems as much as possible can also help mitigate the risk. Also, in 80% of the cases that TrustWave looked at, third-parties were responsible for introducing vulnerabilities. So monitoring third-party relationships is key according to the company. Other recommended measures included internal network segmentation, data encryption and stronger Wi-Fi security policies.
Jaikumar Vijayan covers data security and privacy issues, financial services security and e-voting for Computerworld . Follow Jaikumar on Twitter at @jaivijayan , send e-mail to jvijayan@computerworld.com or subscribe to Jaikumar's RSS feed .
Read more about spam, malware and vulnerabilities in Computerworld's Spam, Malware and Vulnerabilities Knowledge Center.
This story, "Old security flaws still a major cause of data breaches, says report" was originally published by Computerworld . |
Every so often, the headline of a New York Times article reveals in an uncomplimentary way the underlying ideological blinders that guide the newspaper’s implicit editorial line. The classic example is “Prison Population Growing Although Crime Rates Drops,” which caused great mirth among conservatives, because it suggested that it never occurred to the headline writer that perhaps crimes rates were dropping because more criminals were in jail.
Today’s Times has another good example, “Campus Debates on Israel Drive a Wedge Between Jews and Minorities.” One assumption implicit in the headline is that the minority of far-left activists who run “minority” organizations on campus represent “minorities” in general. (Since the article suggests that the conflict in question is making even non-activist Jews feel uncomfortable on some campuses, I’ll give the Times a pass on whether it’s conflating pro-Israel activists with Jews.)
But even more telling is that the Times headline writer implicitly decided that Jews are not a minority group. Now you might argue that the writer is simply following American affirmative action convention, in which “people of color” are considered minorities, and no one else is. But in fact, the article also references gay student organizations, and quotes on the “minority” side an “Egyptian-American” student. Why are gays a “minority,” but not Jews? Why would a person of Egyptian descent, who is considered as “white” in American racial parlance as Jews, be a member of a minority group, but not Jews? [UPDATE: Not to mention “feminists," another group identified in the article as being in conflict with pro-Israel Jewish students.]
There is no rhyme or reason to this sort of thing; who is deemed to be a minority is a social construction often dependent on the political needs of whomever is doing a construction. And in the political environment of elite American campuses, gays, persons of Middle Eastern descent (unless they are Jews, like my Iraqi wife), Muslims, and others (people whose ancestors spoke Spanish, even if they are directly descended from Spanish conquistadors and are of pure European ancestry) are deemed to be minorities, while Jews are mere “privileged whites”–again, even if they happen to be Hispanic or Middle Eastern, or even if their ancestors recently survived the Holocaust.
As I said, I think there is no rhyme or reason to this beyond politics, but that’s not my point, nor is my point that I want Jews to be considered a “minority” group; I’m not a fan of victimology, comparative or otherwise, and it’s likely just as well for American Jews that Jewish college students haven’t wholesale adopted victim status and the socio-politics that seems to accompany it on campus.
Rather, my point that the Times’ headline implicitly sides with campus leftist politics that deems lots of other dubious contenders, but not Jews, to be minorities. Surely the headline could instead have said, “Campus Debates on Israel Drive a Wedge Between Jews and OTHER Minorities,” and would have been at least as accurate.
UPDATE: On further reflection, the headline reflects the left-wing view that Jews cannot be deemed a minority in the context of any controversy that relates to Jews supporting Israel, because “minorities” only qualify when they are on the “progressive” side. Thus, if a Neo-Nazi group started handing out racist and anti-Semitic flyers on campus, there would no problem deeming Jews to be members of a “minority” coalition protesting the flyers. If the same anti-Semitic flyers were handed out by Students for Justice in Palestine to favor their cause, though, then to many on the far left Jews become part of the white elite who need to “check their privilege.”
Similarly, if an Asian-American student group were to oppose affirmative action preferences as damaging to their constituency, I could easily envision a Times headline,”Campus Debates on Affirmative Action Drive a Wedge Between Asians and Minorities.”
Speaking of SJP, Prof. Jacobson has a nice piece on the hatred their chapters often embody at NRO. |
MANCHESTER -- Jose Mourinho insists Manchester United's title challenge this season will be built on attacking football, unlike Chelsea's success under Antonio Conte.
United top the table after three games, taking nine points, scoring 10 goals and conceding none. They face their toughest challenge of the season so far this weekend when they visit Stoke on Saturday evening --- a place United have not won a league game since 2013.
But Mourinho has promised his team will attack Stoke, and every other team in the Premier League this season, while having a thinly-veiled dig at Conte's champions.
He told a news conference on Friday: "We try to play the best we can.
"We know that if you look in a pragmatic way, you see the last winners of the Premier League, the last winners of the Premier League, they did not play attacking football. They played defensive football and counter-attack football.
"So according to the results, that is the way to win the Premier League.
"We try to play according to the qualities of our players. We try to play positive, we try to play good, but we try to win.
"If one day to win we have to play defensive football, we have to do it. And if we go to Stoke and Stoke in some moments of the match, they put us under pressure and they are dominant, we have to be humble and we have to be pragmatic and we have to face the reality.
Manchester United have scored 10 times without conceding in the league this season. Richard Sellers/PA Images via Getty Images
"If you ask me, are we going to go there and play with seven at the back, like some teams do, five plus two? No, we're not going to do that. We're going to try and play well and score goals.
"But if our opponent is better than us and dominant, we are humble enough to transform our way of playing to play for a result."
United head to the bet365 Stadium looking to extend a perfect record in the league so far this season.
Two comfortable 4-0 wins over West Ham and Swansea were followed with a 2-0 victory over Leicester before the international break.
And Mourinho says he learned a lot about his players for how they went on beat Leicester despite Romelu Lukaku's missed penalty at 0-0 with half an hour to play.
He added: "I was saying a few weeks ago let's see what we do in a difficult moment. I think a difficult moment was 0-0, miss a penalty with 30 minutes to play. It was difficult moment.
"Our reaction was good. A difficult moment will be losing, will be playing with 10 men, we are going to have difficult moments. Let's see how we cope.
"My feeling is the squad is strong, the players are strong, united, the atmosphere is very good, very positive.
"We don't fear any challenge but we know Premier League, Champions League, let's forget a bit the League Cup, the next two matches is where the quality, is where the difficulties are."
Sir Alex Ferguson was the last United manager to win a league game at Stoke just weeks before he announced his retirement.
There have been two draws and two defeats in the last four visits under David Moyes, Louis van Gaal and Mourinho, while Mark Hughes' side have already beaten Arsenal at home this season.
Mourinho said: "I would say it's always difficult there, of course sometimes they lose matches but normally it's not easy for anyone to play against Stoke, probably because in the last years United was not strong enough and in my personal case last season we didn't win because we were not good enough, didn't play well enough.
"They are difficult, they are aggressive, they defend with a lot of people, they are dangerous on counter attack, set pieces, it's a stadium that has a lot of pressure, too.
"I think it's going to be difficult again. Hopefully we can be better than in previous seasons so hopefully we can be better." |
The U.S. State Department on Wednesday said it rejected any outright suggestion that Turkey is working with ISIS to smuggle oil after Russia accused the Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan and his family of involvement in illegal oil trade with the militant radicals.
Instead, the U.S. said if Russians were concerned about ISIS’s illicit finance they should take it up with the Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, who is Moscow’s close ally.
State Department spokesman Mark Toner told a news briefing that U.S. information was that ISIS was selling oil at the wellheads to middlemen who in turn were involved in smuggling the oil across the frontier into Turkey.
“We reject outright the premise that the Turkish government is in league with ISIL to smuggle oil across its borders,”" Toner
said, using an acronym for the militant group. “We frankly see no evidence, none, to support such an accusation.”
Meanwhile, Turkish Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoğlu said it is not possible to explain Russia’s claim of Turkey buying ISIS oil with reason after Turkey’s president dubbed Moscow’s sanctions against Ankara as “emotional.”
“It is not possible to explain Russia’s allegations by reason,” Davutoglu told a meeting of prominent businessmen in Ankara, adding that Moscow’s punishing of Turkish businesses through economic sanctions was not in line with international law.
Earlier, Russia’s defence ministry on Wednesday accused Erdogan and his family of buying illegal oil trade with ISIS, as a dispute rages over Ankara’s downing of one of Moscow's warplanes.
“The main consumer of this oil stolen from its legitimate owners Syria and Iraq is Turkey. According to available information, the highest level of the political leadership of the country, President Erdogan and his family, are involved in this criminal business,” deputy defence minister Anatoly Antonov told journalists.
On Wednesday, Turkey emphasized it won’t retaliate against Russia’s “emotional” sanctions.
Russian Defence Ministry officials also said that they had proof of their claim.
The officials, speaking at an event in Moscow, cited satellite imagery which they said showed oil tanker trucks heading from ISIS territory to Turkey and said they knew of three routes by which the oil passed into Turkey.
The Defence Ministry added it would continue to launch air strikes on ISIS oil infrastructure in Syria as part of its bombing campaign.
Erdogan’s response
In response, Erdogan also said that Russia had no right to “slander” Turkey with allegations and he does not want any further harm to relations with Russia.
“No one has a right to engage in slander against Turkey by saying that Turkey is buying oil from Daesh (ISIS),” Erdogan said in comments broadcast by Turkish television on a visit to Qatar, after the Russian defence ministry claimed he and his family were involved in the illegal oil trade.
(With Reuters, AFP)
Last Update: Thursday, 3 December 2015 KSA 12:22 - GMT 09:22 |
The Internet Crackdown Begins: U.S. Senator Al Franken Wants Google, Facebook And Twitter To Censor Political Speech
Are the days of the free and open Internet numbered? The Internet is certainly used for all sorts of horrible things, but it has also allowed ordinary people to communicate on a mass scale that would have been unimaginable decades ago. In the old days, if you wanted to reach large audiences of people with your information you always had to go through corporate gatekeepers. But today, anyone with an Internet connection can literally broadcast whatever they want to say to the whole world. Personally, my wife and I have always been amazed at how many people we are able to touch all over the planet from our little home in the mountains. Over the past seven years our websites have been viewed more than 100 million times, and we receive emails about our work from people all over the globe.
Unfortunately, major changes may soon be coming to the Internet. The election of Donald Trump really angered the elite, and they are blaming the power of the Internet for his victory. They insist that something must be done “for the good of democracy”.
For example, in an opinion piece for the Guardian, U.S. Senator Al Franken proposed that it is time for the U.S. government to step in because Google, Facebook and Twitter have failed to prevent the spread of propaganda, misinformation, and hate speech…
As lawmakers grapple with the revelations regarding Russia’s manipulation of social media during the 2016 election, many are shocked to learn the outsized role that the major tech companies play in so many aspects of our lives. Not only do they guide what we see, read, and buy on a regular basis, but their dominance – specifically in the market of information – now requires that we consider their role in the integrity of our democracy. Last week’s hearings demonstrated that these companies may not be up to the challenge that they’ve created for themselves. In some instances, it seems that they’ve failed to take commonsense precautions to prevent the spread of propaganda, misinformation, and hate speech.
Those are very ominous words.
So precisely what would constitute “propaganda”, “misinformation” or “hate speech”?
When you start regulating speech, you cross a very dangerous line. There is a reason why our founders guaranteed us freedom of speech in the Bill of Rights, because if we don’t have the freedom to say what we want then what do we really have left?
During the presidential election, there was a lot of talk about Hillary Clinton’s health. The mainstream media insisted that she was just fine, and they accused those of us in the alternative media that were questioning her health of engaging in “propaganda” and “misinformation”. Well, it turns out that we now know that Clinton’s health was so bad that Donna Brazile was actually considering replacing her as the nominee, and so it was actually the mainstream media that was putting out “propaganda” and “misinformation”.
Any effort to institute some sort of “truth police” would take us significantly down the road to totalitarianism, but apparently that is what Franken wants. In fact, he is openly suggesting that it is time for government regulators to step in…
Instead of simply trusting the big tech companies to police how their services are being used and abused, Franken suggested that regulators need to step in. Lawmakers should take a closer look at the influence technology plays in the everyday lives of Americans by conducting “vigorous oversight in the form of investigations and hearings to fully understand current practices and the potential for harm,” the Minnesota senator said. “I’m hopeful that recent events will encourage regulators, as well as a broader contingent of my colleagues — on both sides of the aisle — to give this issue the attention it deserves,” he said.
So once government regulators begin regulating speech on the Internet, where will it end?
Will everything that we do on the Internet have to be evaluated for “truthiness” before it is allowed to be posted?
And who decides what the “truth” actually is?
I am a big believer in the marketplace of ideas. I have always been convinced that if everyone is allowed to openly share what they believe that the truth will win in the end.
Of course the elite are scared of the free exchange of ideas, because that gives the people way too much control over their own destiny. Prior to the Internet age, they were always in control of the flow of information in our society, but now things have changed dramatically.
They desperately want to get control of the Internet, because they want things to go back to the way that they used to be. But we can’t allow that to happen, and so we must greatly resist any attempts to regulate speech on the Internet.
*********
Original article
TLB published this article from Michael Snyder’s blog The American Dream.
Michael Snyder is a Republican candidate for Congress in Idaho’s First Congressional District, and you can learn how you can get involved in the campaign on his official website. His new book entitled “Living A Life That Really Matters” is available in paperback and for the Kindle on Amazon.com. |
How far does Tony Abbott want to take us back? Ten years? Twenty years? Some people say 50 years. Warwick O’Neill suggests it might be even further.
By now we’ve all heard the arguments against Tony and Joe’s budget; claims that it favours the rich, creates a two class society and it’s taking Australia back fifty years. Although I agree with most of these claims, I can’t support the theory that Australian society will regress 50 years with the impact of this budget. That is way too short sighted. Any student of military history will see that this budget is indeed taking us back nearly 200 years to a politically endorsed situation designed to ensure the status quo so only the wealthy (ie upper class) can prosper.
For those who don’t understand military hierarchy, a commissioned officer is a soldier who essentially starts their career half way up the rank structure. In this day and age in Australia, young men and women apply to Duntroon or ADFA, and on successful completion of their training, enter the army with the rank of Lieutenant. They then progress through the ranks and after 25-30 years they become Generals and run the whole show. The rest of the soldiery join up, complete their training, and enter the army with the less than impressive collective name of OR’s (Other Ranks). An OR can rise through the ranks and become an NCO (Non Commissioned Officer), and after 25-30 achieve the dizzy heights of Warrant Officer . . . and still be out ranked by the freshly hatched Lieutenant. Sounds strange, I know, but it does work.
Now, back in the late 1700’s and through to the mid-late 1800s in England, Commissioned and Non Commissioned ranks existed but unlike today when anyone, regardless of background can become a Commissioned Officer, in those days only the wealthy upper class , regardless of their ability, could obtain a Commission. The lower classes could only join the army as ORs.
Why? Surely even people of humble birth can be talented leaders?
To put it simply, this was put in place to ensure that only the rich could maintain control of the British Army. “You see Old Bean, those chaps across the channel, the Froggies, they promoted people based on merit. On how well they did their job, of all things! So some of those dashed peasants rose in rank to a point where they actually controlled the army. That’s when their damnable common blood compelled them to use the army to over throw the French aristocracy, and found a society based on liberty and freedom for all, regardless of their birth. Can you imagine such a ghastly thing, Curruthers?”
So, to ensure no such state of affairs could occur in England a system of purchasing rank was introduced. Essentially, a young chap uses part of his family’s fortune to purchase a Commission in the best unit that he can afford. So maybe he starts as a Cornet in the 12th Hussars. He bides his time until and Lieutenancy becomes available, and he purchases that, recouping some of the money by selling his former rank. If, inconveniently, the Hussars are sent overseas to do some actual soldiering, you simply take leave on half pay and stay home. This way a man could rise through the ranks, but because each higher rank was more expensive than the last, only the disgustingly wealthy could rise to the top, usually without seeing any real warfare.
This situation is what led to the disastrous Charge of the Light Brigade during the Crimean War. The three men who were mostly responsible for the Charge had all risen through the ranks through the purchasing system, and at the time of the Crimean War were in positions of Command. None of these men had any experience in leading a campaign and the end result was the heavy losses of experienced, but less wealthy officers, and men.
So how is this relevant to the 2014 Budget in Australia? Let’s examine the parallels.
What would happen to the increasingly wealthy rich classes of Australia if too many of us “common people” received the best possible education, regardless of our limited means. Why, we might flood parliament with representatives from the lower socio-economic backgrounds. If that were to happen, we might even take control and introduce policies which might spread the wealth on a slightly fairer basis. Oh the horror.
They then put their wealthy, educated minds together to figure out how to stop this. “Let’s make it difficult for the peasants to obtain a full education. Let’s make them pay for a visit to a GP, even though they’ve already paid their Medicare Levy. Let’s jack up the fuel excise a couple of times a year. Let’s make the pension age higher, so that young people will have to spend money on taking care of their elderly parents who can no longer work but can’t get Government assistance. Let’s deregulate University fees. Let’s cut funding to Government schools while protecting Government funding of Private schools. Let’s cut support from the unemployed, so they’ll have to resort to crime to support themselves and we can then lock them away. We’ll add a couple of token measures which only us wealthy types have to pay, but will hardly notice, to make it all seem fair (they’ll never catch on – they’re peasants). Surely all this will keep them in such a poor financial position, that they will be unable to afford an education, then can’t make it into parliament thereby maintaining the status-quo for the wealthy ruling class.”
“Well done chaps, pass the Chardonnay. Now, how do we get the women back into the kitchen, and force all non-Christians back to the one true faith?”
I don’t know about you, but I can see some dangerous parallels here. The British Aristocracy actively prevented talented working class people from threatening their rule by imposing financial obstacles. Obstacles that only the rich could overcome. Is the Abbot Government not doing the same thing here, today? Is Australia heading for our own Charge of the Light Brigade, metaphorically speaking?
Isn’t he who forgets the past, condemned to repeat it?
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Amateur car racers tried to shut down a major freeway in South Los Angeles today, but ended up getting boxed in and arrested by a police show of force against the impromptu "Fast And Furious"-style rally.
The Glenn Anderson (105) Freeway was swarmed by officers from the California Highway Patrol, the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department and Los Angeles Police Department during the incident, which also resulted in several high-speed chases.
All traffic was stopped by officers on the eastbound 105 Freeway from Crenshaw Boulevard to Vermont Avenue. Video shot by freelance camera crews showed officers searching cars, frisking suspects and arresting people.
A CHP spokesman said charges would be pressed against racers for violating numerous vehicle code sections, as well as for narcotics violations and possessing stolen firearms and stolen vehicles.
Numerous drivers were given field sobriety tests and some were arrested. No arrest total was immediately available, but the videographer said "dozens" of people were placed in police cars.
The three large agencies were ready when the illegal drag racers tried to block the freeway to regular traffic, said CHP Officer Tony Polizzi.
"We investigated and determined who the involved parties were that initiated the closure attempt, conducted appropriate enforcement action, and then released traffic," said Polizzi.
Police cars were used to block the freeway, and that closure prompted a SigAlert to be issued from 3:30 a.m. to 4:48 a.m.
He said no injuries were reported to any law enforcement or suspects and that the CHP were in the process of compiling statistics from their area offices, as well as from other law enforcement agencies.
"This growing situation (illegal racing and cruising) draws in spectators who create a public safety hazard through their unsafe driving,, obstruction of public roadways, and increasingly violent behavior," Polizzi said. "These events have directly impacted public access to roadways, businesses and private property.
"Crimes and acts of violence have been committed against innocent motorists and vehicles attempting to pass through these illegal events, as well as random acts of vandalism by spectators aiding and abetting these illegal activities," he said.
City News Service
Photo Credit: Instagram User: sgxphoto |
Hatoful Boyfriend has been out a few years now so the concept should not be new to most gamers, but the remake for PS4 and Vita has been recently released alongside the PC versions last year and so it seemed a good time to take a look at the updated ports.
The first thing to note about Hatoful Boyfriend is just how clever it all is. Take the title for example. The pronunciation of Hatoful is both “heartful” and “hurtful” in Japanese and eludes to the game’s dark undertones. Hato is also the Japanese word for “pigeon” or “dove,” which is what makes Hatoful Boyfriend stand out in a sea of Japanese anime dating simulators.
As the protagonist you play the only human in a high school full of sentient birds. Throughout the game you meet around 10 different birds and make decisions that determine the types of friendships you forge with everybirdie. Your decisions matter a great deal, and one single incorrect one can see your storyline diverge onto a completely different path, so it’s important to pick up on clues that will lead to your desired ending.
Each playthrough of Hatoful Boyfriend only lasts around 30 minutes and is not particularly fulfilling, but it’s through multiple playthroughs, exhausting all of your options, that you really get a sense for the whole story. There are many stories that cross paths, so you will only truly understand something that happened down one path if you see another to completion. This is where Hatoful Boyfriend excels. While story-telling is obviously the key element to any dating simulator, there is a much deeper, darker story that Hatoful Boyfriend disguises on the surface and can only be discovered by following several paths. You could easily play Hatoful Boyfriend through to its conclusion several times and still not have discovered the bulk of the true story dependant on which birds you choose to flock with.
The various endings are of course what most players will strive for, and they are all completely unique. Some are your standard dating simulator love story endings, while others will have you laugh at their absurdity. Notably, Hatoful Boyfriend is one of the few dating simulators where your choices can result in death of both the protagonist and other characters, which is refreshing and adds another emotional layer to the novel. There are “bad” endings, ones where someone dies or you end up with no-one but to me this is only a good thing. The only truly bad endings are “boring” ones.
While the endings are good, and some of them are really, really good (Anghel I’m looking at you) the path to reach them once you’ve played it through a few times can be rather tedious, as the same dialogue trees are played out over and over where your choices are few and far between. This was made even more obvious to me when during one playthrough the game crashed, and I had to start all over again. Seemingly innocuous choices can also change the nature of your whole run and can become quite frustrating.
While all the birds are very different to date, there are several that your brain tells you to avoid—the Filipino bird who talks in fantasy style riddles, the dove obsessed with pudding or the doctor who appears to be some kind of drug pusher—yet these are the paths that lead to the best endings. It goes against the grain to push you in the direction of choosing lovers who wouldn’t even entertain in real or virtual life.
As for the remake, Hatoful Boyfriend has nice art, though nothing particularly spectacular. Then again it’s pretty hard to get too worked up over the aesthetics of a game that is mostly made up of static photographs of birds. The human character portraits are nice, though they only appear once. The music is atmospheric but doesn’t add a lot in particular, but the touchscreen capabilities are a nice … touch.
Hatoful Boyfriend is one of those games that you just should play even if just once for the high levels of absurdity and dark undertones, though it’s certainly not the kind of game that I will rave about endlessly over Twitter. For that accolade my heart only bleeds Huniepop.
I played Hatoful Boyfriend on the PS Vita and was given a review code as courtesy. You can buy yours from the PSN Store.
7.5 Very Good Summary A great dark story for a take on the classic dating sim, but could do with less repetition.
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On September 24, Pope Francis scolded Congress for guns and weapons which are manufactured in America and sold around the world.
He said he was determined “to minimize and, in the long term, to end the many armed conflicts throughout our world,” as he addressed the billion-dollar sales from American companies that he sees as a contributing factor to conflicts abroad.
According to The Intercept, Pope Francis said:
Here we have to ask ourselves: Why are deadly weapons being sold to those who plan to inflict untold suffering on individuals and society? Sadly, the answer, as we all know, is simply for money: money that is drenched in blood, often innocent blood. In the face of this shameful and culpable silence, it is our duty to confront the problem and to stop the arms trade.
U.S. manufacturers make tens of billions cumulatively—The Intercept cites a figure of $23.7 billion in 2014 alone—from guns and weapons that are sold “to nearly 100 different countries.” The sales “have surged to record levels” under Obama, due in part to taxpayer subsidized sales to Israel and Egypt and “huge shipments to Gulf States, particularly Saudi Arabia.” And Saudi Arabia has subsequently been criticized for using “cluster bombs and other munitions… to hit densely populated areas, schools, and even a camp for displaced people in Yemen.” These are some of the things that appear to be behind Pope Francis’s statements on this issue.
However, his words to Congress were immediately seized by media outlets like the Chicago Sun-Times and anti-Second Amendment groups as an impetus for gun control too. Breitbart News reported that Americans for Responsible Solutions—the gun control group founded by Gabby Giffords and Mark Kelly—sent out a donation request after Pope Francis spoke. In the request, they asked for $3 from every gun control supporter and quoted the first part of Pope Francis’s question—”Here we have to ask ourselves: Why are deadly weapons being sold to those who plan to inflict untold suffering on individuals and society?”
Giffords went even further than asking for money by sending a tweet that cast gun control in religious overtones. She tweeted: “Inspired by [Pope Francis], let all Americans engage in a politics that sees the passage of just legislation that may bring us closer to grace.”
Pope Francis’s words may play perfectly into the hands of those trying to push the UN Arms Trade Treaty in the U.S. as well. That treaty is ubiquitously structured to stop small arms from crossing borders illegally, but Breitbart News has shown that the actual result will be international gun control.
Follow AWR Hawkins on Twitter: @AWRHawkins. Reach him directly at awrhawkins@breitbart.com. |
Gruesome new details are surfacing after 16 Afghan villagers including nine children were shot in their houses by at least one US serviceman. Witnesses to the atrocity now say that several drunken American soldiers were involved.
Neighbors at the village where the killings took place said they were awoken past midnight by crackling gunfire:
"They were all drunk and shooting all over the place," Reuters cites Agha Lala, a villager in Kandahar's Panjwayi district.
Lala's neighbor Haji Samad lost all of his 11 relatives in the rampage, including children and grandchildren. He claims Marines “poured chemicals over their dead bodies and burned them.”
Twenty-year-old Jan Agha says the gunfire “shook him out of bed.” He was in the epicenter of the horrible shooting, witnessing his father shot as the latter peered out of a window to see what was going on.
"The Americans stayed in our house for a while. I was very scared," the young man told reporters.
Lying on a floor, Agha says, he pretended to be dead.
He added that his brother was shot in his head and chest. His sister was killed as well. “My mother was shot in her eye and her face. She was unrecognizable,” he said.
The Afghan parliament said the incident was barbaric and demanded justice. Both NATO and US officials condemned the violence, promising a swift investigation.
US ‘fundamental strategy’ in Afghanistan won’t change – Pentagon
The Pentagon’s chief spokesman, George Little, said on Monday that there was "every indication" that the perpetrator, whose name he refused to disclose, had not been accompanied by any other soldiers. He also said that the mass killing would not change the “basic war strategy” in Afghanistan.
"Despite what some are saying, we’re not changing our fundamental strategy," Little said.
Also on Monday NATO reacted to the massacre of Afghan villagers, with spokeswoman Oana Lungescu saying the shooting was an "isolated incident." She emphasized it would not affect the timeline of the previously discussed withdrawal of US troops from Afghanistan by the end of 2014.
Earlier a preliminary official report said the unnamed culprit, identified as a member of the US army staff, had acted alone and is now in custody after turning himself in at an American base.
US troops in Afghanistan have been put on high alert as the Taliban has issued a threat vowing “to take revenge from the invaders and the savage murderers for every single martyr.”
The statement published on the group’s website said that the US is “arming lunatics in Afghanistan who turn their weapons against the defenseless Afghans.”
Afghan officials, fearing possible violent demonstrations, have deployed extra police and troops in and around Kandahar.
The incident was one of the worst of its kind since the US-led invasion of Afghanistan in 2001. It comes just weeks after copies of the Koran were burned at a US military base, provoking mass riots in Afghanistan.
Slaying of 16 Afghan civilians 'absolutely tragic and heartbreaking' – Barack Obama
US President Barack Obama has said during an interview with Denver TV Station KCNC that the killing of 16 Afghan civilians by a US soldier was “absolutely tragic and heartbreaking” but also noted that he was “proud generally” of what US troops had accomplished in Afghanistan while working under strenuous conditions.
In another interview, this time with Orlando-based WFTV, the president reiterated his stance in favor of a pullout from Afghanistan by the end of 2014. He said the incident “does signal the importance of us transitioning in accordance with my plans that Afghans are taking more of the initiative in security.”
Asked whether the incident could be compared to the infamous 1968 My Lai Massacre, in which US troops murdered up to 500 civilians in South Vietnam, Obama responded by saying it was not comparable. “It appeared you had a lone gunman who acted on his own,” he noted.
US defense secretary Leon Panetta said that the death penalty was a possible punishment against the soldier who perpetrated the massacre. He noted that officials will use the military justice system to try the soldier and that the shootings must not derail the military mission in Afghanistan.
In the meantime, Reuters quoted an anonymous US official who said that the accused soldier had been treated for traumatic brain injury after being in a vehicle that rolled over in Iraq in 2010. |
For a celebrated writer who’s built a reputation on crafting ornate, world-spanning epics, Grant Morrison and his latest descent down the rabbit hole—The Multiversity—touch on a sense of scale and complexity unique in comics, let alone any entertainment medium. The saga escorts readers through the various realities of the DC Universe and the ghoulish, nihilistic beings—The Gentry—who threaten to corrupt their foundation. The intoxicating project offers a chain of interlinking debut issues to comic series that don’t exist outside this umbrella title (yet), with a different artist tackling each chapter, save the opening and closing bookends from penciller Ivan Reis. In the course of The Multiversity, we’ve witnessed a world where the Nazis flourish with their own Superman, a 48-page dissection of Watchmen that mirrors the iconic work’s ambition, and an unholy alliance of super villains who create a new day of the week. There’s a lot going on here.
But in The Multiversity: Ultra Comics #1, Morrison presents a new type of superhero that’s never been seen before: you.
Illustrated with dramatic bombast by Doug Mahnke, this penultimate chapter takes place in our world, where no superheroes exist save the ones united through the comic previewed here. Also: the book is haunted with a Trojan Horse of a very bad, viral idea. (More on that later). To say the least, The Multiversity: Ultra Comics #1 is a dense exploration into the nature of fiction that packs a metric ton of allegory, symbolism and meta-manuevers into one issue. With such heady topics at hand, Paste chatted with Morrison to discuss this innovative approach, wrapping up the series and where the post-modern icon can possibly go from a project this massive.
Paste: So in this issue we’ve finally come full circle in the The Multiversity project, with the cursed comic shown in the first chapter, Multiversity #1. This comic is referred to as being infected and haunted. What makes it so?
Grant Morrison: There’s a very bad idea hidden inside the comic book, and the bad idea will be revealed if you continue to read it, so you may not want to know this. The bad idea is ultimately not that you stop reading the story, but the story dies, which by implication means that you one day will also die. The new horror that’s revealed is the Oblivion Machine in Ultra Comics; consuming comics is devouring the hours and the minutes of your lives, and you’re actually being vampirized by your entertainment media. That’s the ghost in Ultra Comics, that you’re being devoured by the story that you’re consuming, because you could be out there meeting the girl of your dreams or flying out a microlight. It’s about the things that we consume, the pictures that we love to watch.
Paste: After reading it a few times, the comic operates on a perpetual loop—the beginning is the end is the beginning. Without being too ambiguous, is it meant to have a resolution or does it function more as a disquieting rhetorical question?
Morrison: I think the questions are kind of answered if you read it multiple times. It’s meant to be like a loop. It’s meant to be like you’re trapped inside with something malevolent. And how you figure out what you’ve been told by the malevolent entity, it’s kind of down to the individual reader. Quite literally, everyone who reads Ultra Comics will be connected across time and space by the fact that they’re reading Ultra Comics. The comic is a gigantic node of a network. Even when I’m dead, people might pick up a back issue of Ultra Comics and be part of the story again. Every mind that becomes part of Ultra Comics becomes part of this superhero network. The idea was how closely could we embed a fictional entity into the real world and connect it to real people, and enter real people into what we were doing.
Unlike all other earths in the multiverse, [Earth-Prime—our earth where this issue takes place] doesn’t have superheroes. What we have are representations. Without movies, without comics, what would a real superhero be like in our world? Maybe it would be a giant network of minds all connected by reading the same experience, ultimately in the same place, in the same room, at the same time, no matter how far apart they are geographically or historically.
Paste: This issue takes place on Earth-Prime, our own earth, and speaks directly to comic books and their pragmatic effect on readers. In your decades as a creator, do you think comic books have assumed a different relationship in how they effect their readers? One of the most interesting twists here is how online commentary plays into a battle with The Gentry.
Morrison: Yeah. Something very interesting has happened since the dawn of the internet in the sense that the audience can respond immediately, and everything becomes almost like a live performance. And no matter how much we say we don’t care about this stuff and we don’t read this stuff, of course we look at it. It’s influencing everything. I think the dialogue between the creators or the authors and the consumers is now so tight and so close, that it has to be acknowledged as a major part of the experience of creating pop culture in the 21st century. And again, I wanted this comic to go there because I think it’s a fertile field. Nobody’s really talked about it and how we all respond. We listen to what they’re saying, we adapt to stances, we change and they change. Everyone playing this strange game has to be acknowledged at least in a work like this one, particularly, which is about that relationship.
Paste: On that note on community, I’ve seen a lot the style you cemented for Vertigo in the ‘80s trickle down to this generation. When I saw the Neighborhood Guard, the first thing I thought was Farel Dalrymple’s The Wrenchies.
Morrison: I haven’t seen that one either because I live out in the country, and I never see any bloody comics except the ones that DC sends me. But I’ve read about it. I was thinking of it more like the Jack Kirby kid gangs. It’s almost 1940s or 1930s stuff to be honest. Because Ultra is about pop culture and kind of where we are now, with these representations of dystopia and apocalypse and the end of civilization. So I wanted the Neighborhood Guard to represent that. They’re still hopeful, they’re still plucky young teenagers of the actual new world to be confronted with constant, miserable news every day of their lives.
Paste: Multiversity is just so big and massive in scope, panning out to dissect how the realities between comic fiction and the world intersect. It’s also a theme playing out in Annihilator, albeit as a reflection on the film industry. This project feels so definitive and absolute; are there more meta comic events that you could write past this? Am I being unimaginative by asking where do you go from here?
Morrison: I realize it’s my master theme. A lot of times I’ll be working on a thing, and I’ll be thinking here’s another story where a person wakes up to the true nature of reality and I’ll think, ‘Grant, come on—why do you keep doing this?’ But it is the thing I’m most interested in and is most useful to the way we live now, in this hyper-accelerated, digital media sphere. The difference between who we are and what we try to be is so ridiculous. So I’m embracing it, in the way that Philip K. Dick always wrote stories about people taken into the world that exists underneath reality, I think that’s just my master theme and my master goal. Annihilator’s got a little bit of that; it’s not everyone living in the same simulation, but all of my characters are living in a world that isn’t quite the real world. And the stories are all about them discovering what the real world is. There are a couple more to come, and maybe I’ll break the cycle.
Paste: What might those stories be?
Morrison: I’ve got a few creator-owned projects coming out, like Sinatoro and the conclusion of Nameless, which go to similar places in a different way. But beyond that as I tell everyone, the big influence is the Wonder Woman: Earth One book I’ve been doing for the last couple of years with Yanick Paquette, and we’re almost finished. That changed the entire playing field for me. I wrote a book that wasn’t reliant on the structure of boys adventure fiction. It opened up a whole new way of looking at things. Beyond Wonder Woman, I think there may be some very different ways of thinking about things.
Paste: The Multiversity #2 comes out next month, concluding the story. I think The Gentry has been my favorite aspect of the book—I know each member is an extreme of various villain archetypes, but they also seem to represent something so much more primal. Are we going to discover more about these characters and what separates them from a character like Darkseid?
Morrison: Oh yeah, you definitely find out a lot more about them, but at the same time I think why they work is because everyone can read them in their own way, and make them represent what they want them to represent. I want to keep that little bit of mystery. The finale pretty much explains who they are, and even in Ultra it’s explained that these are really bad ideas. They’re demon ideas and we incubate them and they form. We can feel them, but we don’t quite know how to display them and what they’re doing. It’s been portrayed that our imaginative space has become degraded. Where once we had Star Trek now we have The Walking Dead. We see our civilization as something that’s basically, ultimately doomed. And maybe a generation ago we saw our civilization as something that would naturally be carried into the stars, and have this fantastic utopian future. So Multiverse is all about that, and Ultra is specifically about the idea that we have impoverished a neighborhood, and once you’ve impoverished a neighborhood then you come in to gentrify it. You’ve made it very comfortable for the monsters to cultivate.
Paste: Is there anything else you’d like to add at all?
Morrison: One more thing is that Ultra Comics was inspired by the 1970s head comics. I don’t know if you’ve ever read Jim Starlin’s Warlock or Captain Marvel. I grew up on that. Back in the day, people like Starlin would come back from Vietnam and did these fantastic allegorical kind of Pilgrim’s Progress-style superhero comics. So I think Ultra Comics was my and Doug Mahnke’s attempt to almost create one of those cosmic comics of the ‘70s. Everything is allegorical. Everything is a metaphor. Everything is some psychological state. I will mention that, because those guys were a big inspiration for this particular issue.
The Multiversity: Ultra Comics #1 comes out this Wednesday.
Cover by Doug Mahnke
Variant Cover by Doug Mahnke
Variant Cover by Duncan Rouleau
Variant Cover by Yanick Paquette
Variant Cover by Grant Morrison |
Muay Thai legend Kaensak Sor. Ploenjit was the first person to ever teach me the importance of “play” in Muay Thai. In our sessions he wasn’t so much interested in showing me techniques, or holding pads for me, so much as trying to get me to change my approach first. He would spar with me for an hour straight in the morning heat of the New Jersey summer or the cold of winter, and over and over again he would remind me that I needed to relax and have fun; he’d get me to laugh or after he’d land a strike on me he’d remind me, “I don’t care.” What he meant was that I shouldn’t care and, while it took me more than a couple years of training many hours each day, every day, in Thailand to actually figure out what he meant by that, to really embrace it… well, I get it now. It’s brilliant. It’s a game.
Learning how to play has been one of the most important pieces in my recent Muay Thai development. It’s also probably the most beneficial lesson to carry over into my general persona. I’m a better person because of this lesson and I only learned it through a lot of years of tension and struggle. So, the other day I was running and listening to one of my favorite podcasts, Ted Radio Hour, that happened to be on the importance of play. The main idea being driven home was that most mammals use play as a learning tool in youth, but very few continue to play into adulthood. It’s those animals which do have the capacity to keep playing which fare the best.
The podcast goes into all kinds of examples for how playing helps in adulthood, from reducing stress and anxiety to helping to heal injuries and mental illnesses. Two examples from the episode really stand out to me. The first is that everybody knows how to play. If you toss a ball at someone, whether they’re expecting a game of catch or not, they generally know how to catch it and throw it back. You can be pulled into a game quite easily, without it requiring a lot of “but I don’t know how,” business. The second is from a woman who is a videogame developer. She has a horrible concussion and suffered for over a year with recurring migraine, light sensitivity, and severe depression as part of the injury. So she turned her recovery into a game (role playing, in real life not a videogame): she was a superhero whose aim was to avoid things which caused her pain (bright lights, loud noises) and “power ups” by doing things which charged her (going for a walk, eating well, getting enough rest). She has since turned it into an a game you can download on the phone and thousands of people suffering from Depression, PTSD, head injury, etc. are benefiting from it. They’re healing by playing.
When I first moved to Thailand I was training and fighting out of Lanna Muay Thai in Chiang Mai. Andy Thomson, who had been co-owner and trainer at that camp for 22 years at that point, would tell me to smile in order to get me to relax. As an American woman with a pretty good resting bitch face, I do not like being told to smile (when I was a bartender I got this a lot, as you can imagine), so I had a pretty immediate resistance to that suggestion, which I justified at the time as being reasonable. “You’re trying to punch me in the face,” I’d argue, “it’s pretty hard to smile.” Now I smile and, indeed, laugh when the punch does land right in my face. It’s genuinely funny sometimes; other times it’s not funny at all but acting like it is funny or not a big deal is highly preferable to acting like I’m pissed. Poker Face is a big deal in Thailand Mauy Thai. But this is kind of like not identifying a ball when it’s tossed at you. Like, not knowing to catch it so it just hits you and drops to the ground. Figuring out how to pick it up and toss it back is the first step, then you can figure out how to catch it on the next time around. That’s how I learned to play in sparring. I was getting hit by the ball a lot, which wasn’t fun; but I figured out how to pick it up and toss it back. In Muay Thai, that’s knowing the game isn’t over just because you got hit, it’s knowing that you strike back to continue the game.
Video Game Power-ups and Muay Thai
Yesterday was more a lesson about the second example in the podcast, where the woman invented a real-life game that she has now titled “Super Better,” intended to increase resilience. I wasn’t feeling like going to my first gym of the afternoon sessions, where I do padwork and generally try to use the frustration and difficulty I feel there as a means to teach me to be tougher. If I can get through that, I can get through other tough situations. But I have a very hard time turning that space into a game, because it’s one of the most un-fun places I frequent. There are a lot of reasons for that and most of them are out of my control, but my attitude and response is almost 100% within my control. So I borrowed some things from her game and interpreted them for my reality: avoid things that make me miserable, like individuals at the gym who piss me off or letting myself be consumed by the frustration I feel at being kicked too hard by my trainer; and look for “power ups,” which are things that make me feel good: laughing, overly performing my confidence as if I’m “winning” even when I’ve gotten my ass handed to me, making fun of my trainer’s truly terrible taste in American music. These things make me happy. Unlike a ball being tossed at you, where you can figure out how to play really easily, it can be really hard to figure out how to “play” with being hit too hard, someone who makes you feel badly about yourself, headaches, fatigue, Depression… those games don’t reveal themselves easily. But we do know the general structure of games: obstacles and points. So figure out what’s an obstacle, make avoiding or overcoming that obstacle the aim, and then add ways to “power up” or get points. In the rules of Muay Thai, a landed kick is a point – it’s a point against me when I’m the recipient and it’s a point I don’t easily score against my much bigger, stronger, evasive trainer. So kicks aren’t my point. My point is instead acting like that point that just got me doesn’t matter. My point is getting my trainer to laugh. That’s my game.
I ended up having a really good session and then when I went to my second gym I was in a great mood. My “power ups” were in full effect and my life bar was really high. So when I was put into a “man in the middle” sparring situation, where I was in the middle and completely overwhelmed by my three bigger, stronger sparring partners, I already knew how to get my points: stay calm, disagree with all the points being landed on me, and laugh my ass off. It was fantastic. But my goal couldn’t be just “to laugh,” or to smile (thanks Andy). I get too nervous trying to accomplish even small things, like how I’ve wanted to ask Pi Nu’s brother to show me a clinch move for probably 8 months now but I’m too shy to ask. So if I turn that into a game I’m more likely actually do it. For example, I tell myself “just f***ing ask, Sylvie!” and then I feel badly for not doing it. But if I turn the task of getting the information from that lock into a Quest, I can turn acquiring that knowledge into a game and in games you have multiple lives rather than having just failed. This quest is actually going to happen today, which I’m super nervous about. So I have to design this quest, it has to have stages. So this is an example of what I’m going to try today, as he’s expected there. First stage: say something with actual words to Pi Nok (the brother). I’ve done this maybe twice ever in the 2 years I’ve been at the gym; he kind of intimidates me. So that’s like acquiring a key or object that will be needed later in the game. Then I’ll power up by showing dominance over my clinching partner, even if it’s a give and take I just need one slick move or throw, which I can then use to have a good life bar when I have to actually approach Pi Nok and ask him if he can show me the lock. That way, if he refuses (which is so unlikely; really guys, I’m ridiculous for not having asked him 10 times already) it won’t be too big a damage to my life bar.
That’s an example of how I can negotiate my shyness to improve my knowledge and training in the gym, but for instance in sparring I have to design my own game as well: if my aim is to not feel so deflated when getting overwhelmed by my sparring partners, then the methods to feeling something else have to be part of the game – see if I can take a step forward after every landed kick, just to eat up space. That’s a better game than “don’t get kicked.” I’m shit at that game. But I’m really good at the “every kick you land takes away a little of your comfort space,” game. I have the all-time high score in that one. I’m going to keep adding to this approach, will let you all know how it goes!
To listen to the TED talk on Play, and find our more about this click the photo:
Related Posts
All My Mental Training Posts
Why “Train Smarter” Has Always Bothered Me – The Rule of Longer
The Most Difficult Technique of All: Laughter
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Once again, Hillary Clinton has pledged that she will discover as much as possible about government involvement in UFO research and share the information with the American people. Clinton was on Jimmy Kimmel’s talk show Thursday night, and Kimmel brought up the fact that he’d asked former President Bill Clinton about his efforts on UFO disclosure during his administration. (Kimmel has also asked President Barack Obama about UFOs.)
“He said that he did do that and he didn’t find anything,” Kimmel said. Hillary Clinton replied, “Well, I’m going to do it again.”
This is the second time during the last few months that Clinton has said she wants to tackle this issue. In late December, Clinton told a New Hampshire reporter that she thought “we may have been visited already,” and that she would “get to the bottom” of the issue if elected president. Three weeks ago, Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta, an X-Files fan and longtime Clinton aide, told a Las Vegas television station that he’s pressed Clinton on the issue.
“I’ve talked to Hillary about that, this is a little bit of a cause of mine which is that people really want to know what the government knows, and there are still classified files that could be declassified,” Podesta said at the time.
And while many dismiss UFOs with eye-rolling skepticism, Clinton showed Kimmel that she’s familiar with the more scientific side of the issue, correcting his use of the term “UFO.”
“There’s a new name—it’s ‘unexplained aerial phenomenon,'” she said. “UAP, that’s the latest nomenclature.”
UAP is the term used by the scientific and evidence-based wing of the UFO research community, and is an attempt by those interested in the issue to get away from the derision and mockery that the term “UFO” typically provokes. When Podesta was interviewed in Las Vegas, he said, “I think I’ve convinced her that we need an effort to kind of go look at that and declassify as much as we can so that people have their legitimate questions answered and more attention and more discussion about unexplained aerial phenomena can happen without people who are in public life who are serious about this being ridiculed.”
As Mother Jones has reported, the Clintons’ interest in UFOs and information about US government involvement goes back at least until the mid-1990s. During that time, the late Laurance Rockefeller, who was a UFO enthusiast, approached the White House and pushed for the information to be released. Documents released about Rockefeller’s meetings under a Freedom of Information Act request show that Hillary Clinton was involved in those talks. She met with Rockefeller in August 1995 at his Wyoming ranch and probably discussed the issue, according to the FOIA documents. The effort, known by some as the “Rockefeller Initiative,” has been the subject of several big stories lately, including a recent Mother Jones profile of Stephen Bassett, the nation’s only registered extraterrestrial-issue lobbyist.
Last night, Clinton told Kimmel that anything that can be released should be released. “I would like us to go into those files and hopefully make as much of that public as possible,” she said. “If there’s nothing there, let’s tell people there’s nothing there.”
“What if there is something there?” asked Kimmel.
“Well, if there is something there,” she replied, “unless it’s a threat to national security, I think we ought to share it with the public.”
Watch the exchange: |
Paul Walker’s tragic death left the world heartbroken on Nov. 30. The 40-year-old ‘Fast & Furious’ actor died in a car crash in Santa Clarita after leaving a charity event. We had fallen in love with his character, Brian O’Conner, and now know that the cast and crew plan to pay a special tribute to Paul in the next film.
Fast & Furious 7 is currently in the process of filming, but after Paul Walker‘s shocking death, many were left wondering how the franchise would move forward. However, HollywoodLife.com can now tell you exclusively that the movie, slated to come out in July 2014, will honor the late star.
“Many people within the production haven’t even heard the tragic news because of the holidays, but its almost positive that the movie will still move forward in his honor,” a source close to the film’s cast told HollywoodLife.com exclusively. “Once people get back to work on Monday, many meetings will be happening.”
[hl_youtube src=”https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tM6sUuVhcN8″ link=”https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tM6sUuVhcN8″ text=”Paul Walker Car Crash Video Surfaces “]
Paul has starred in five of the six Fast & Furious films, plus was mid-way through filming the seventh when he tragically lost his life in a car crash.
Paul Walker’s Shocking Death
Paul was the passenger in a Porsche GT during a charity event for his organization, Reach Out Worldwide, which was raising money for those affected by the typhoon in the Philippines. The driver of the car lost control, crashing into a tree, causing the car to burst into flames. Santa Clarita’s Sheriff’s Station confirmed to HollywoodLife.com that both men were pronounced dead at the scene.
Paul’s family took to his official Facebook page to release the following statement:
It is with a truly heavy heart that we must confirm that Paul Walker passed away today in a tragic car accident while attending a charity event for his organization Reach Out Worldwide. He was a passenger in a friend’s car, in which both lost their lives. We appreciate your patience as we too are stunned and saddened beyond belief by this news. Thank you for keeping his family and friends in your prayers during this very difficult time. We will do our best to keep you apprised on where to send condolences. – #TeamPW
— Emily Longeretta, Reporting by Russ Weakland
More Paul Walker News: |
When Dogs, Cats And Rats Come To The Rescue
Heroic acts carried out by a wide variety of animals — elk and elephants, horses and goats, dogs and cats — are on offer in Jennifer Holland's just-published book, Unlikely Heroes: 37 Inspiring Stories of Courage and Heart from the Animal Kingdom.
A few years ago, Holland's Unlikely Friendships was a best-seller, and given my work in animal behavior, I was keen to check out her new focus.
Unlikely Heroes 37 Inspiring Stories of Courage and Heart from the Animal Kingdom by Jennifer S. Holland Paperback, 246 pages | purchase close overlay Buy Featured Book Your purchase helps support NPR programming. How?
Through spontaneous acts of bravery, living lives of service, or bringing about positive outcomes in other ways, animals may become rescuers of others. By design, Holland applies the "hero" label widely. In one story, a lactating mother hippo, with her own baby in view, rescues a wildebeest and a zebra baby, each trying to cross the Mara River during the annual Serengeti migration.
"Deep and fast moving when the animals arrive, the water is an obstacle in itself," Holland writes. "But it is made extra deadly by crocodiles."
On the day in question, the water was high, the crocs were hungry and the scene was chaos. As the last 10 wildebeest attempted to cross, one mother wildebeest climbed up on the riverbank only to see her infant drifting away and weakening. She became frantic, in the words of an observer. This is the moment when the mother hippo stepped in: She nudged the baby toward the riverbank and safety. Very soon, the same thing happened to a baby zebra, and the hippo's response was the same.
Just maternal instinct, you might say? Maybe so. But we don't withhold the term "hero" from human moms who save children in some impulsive act.
Some stories involve animals rescuing us. When I asked Holland by email earlier this week to select particularly moving stories from the book, she chose two of this nature. One involves a U.S. veteran named Jesse Knott and his cat, Koshka. Having already served in Iraq and sustained injuries there, on duty in Afghanistan Knott lost two of his men to a suicide bomber. He fell into a serious depression. Mistreated earlier as a feral cat, Koshka stayed with Knott through that time, interacting with him so persistently and lovingly that he felt pulled back from a very dark place. Holland told me:
"One reason this story is so powerful, is because the man himself is a hero in the more traditional sense, a war veteran and leader, yet he really sees this little animal as having saved his life (and made the lives of his fellow soldiers better) during the worst of times. The cat was just doing cat things — being funny, sweet, and affectionate — but it also seemed to know just what the man needed and when to provide it."
The rescue turns out to be mutual: Koshka now lives with Knott's parents in the United States. The skill of cats in helping "their people" is something I know about. As I wrote here at 13.7 in June, this summer I mourned the loss of my cat, Pilar. We had been close for 15 years but when I went through prolonged chemotherapy and radiation recently, she heightened her expression of attention and love toward me in ways that stay even now close to my heart.
Holland's second choice stars an elephant seal named Gimpy, who lived at the Marine Mammal Care Center in San Pedro, Calif., owing to partial paralysis and blindness. She had bonded with a keeper named Hugh Ryono, who worked at the center. One day when Ryono slipped and fell in the seal pen, he was suddenly confronted with three angrily aroused younger seals, each capable of doing damage by way of sharp canine teeth. Into the fray lumbered the 300-pound Gimpy, who not only allowed Ryono to crawl over her body (thus putting herself between him and the incensed trio) but also displayed her own teeth fiercely at the youngsters, causing them to back off. Holland wrote me that:
"[The event is] sort of a superman version of an animal story, but with a very unexpected creature swooping in at just the right second. Elephant seals: I've spent some time with them in the wild and they are not animals you'd expect to come to a person's rescue. In this case, the man had a relationship with the animal already, and I love the fact that the animal was moved enough by their bond to act on his behalf in a dangerous situation."
"Dogs Who Sniff to Save Species" is one of my own favorite chapters. It describes the Montana-based Working Dogs for Conservation, an organization that trains dogs to use their sharp sense of smell to distinguish one animal species from another, often using scat scents. A Labrador retriever named Wicket is at the center of this tale. Wicket's nose, Holland writes in the book,
"inspired the relocation of a planned development away from a grizzly bear habitat in Montana's Centennial Mountains. In South Africa, she found the exceptionally rare geometric tortoise and located a long-lost female whose transmitter had fallen off. And the dog's efforts not only led to finding kit fox where they hadn't been seen in forty years, but they also pointed out the best kit fox habitat, which the Bureau of Land Management then bought for the animals' protection."
Recently Wicket has joined a new WDC initiative in Zambia, searching out poachers' snares, which carry their own distinctive scent. I find this idea promising, as so much wildlife (in Africa and elsewhere) is under threat from illegal hunting.
In another chapter, we meet African pouched rats that sniff out land mines in war-torn areas — a rodent highlight of the book. The rats, fortunately, are too small and light to set off the mines should they walk across them, so risk to them of this usually dangerous work is quite low.
Might these stories help people think about, and act, compassionately toward animals in new ways? Or are those of us drawn to the book already prone to compassion for animals? When I asked Holland these questions, she replied:
"For those of us who already love animals, and see them as being empathetic, thinking beings, these kinds of stories have us nodding knowingly, happy for more evidence! But I think for people who aren't already in the animal-hugger camp, some of these cases could have an impact on how they think and act. Certainly most people have great respect for therapy animals, bomb-sniffing animals, and the like — those are that trained to be heroes in service to people. But going beyond that, when an animal does something remarkable without that training, makes a choice to help or protect, that gives even the most science-minded among us pause. The old days of totally separating humans and other animals, emotionally, are gone."
Animal heroes deserve recognition. Holland would be the first to say that there are many more than 37 inspiring tales of animal heroes — or 38 by my personal counting system, because of Pilar. Do any of you have animal-hero tales to share here, or thoughts on their significance?
Barbara's most recent book on animals was released in paperback in April. You can keep up with what she is thinking on Twitter: @bjkingape |
Based in a block built in the early 1900s, I feel like this place just oozes the sort of confident relaxed look which we love. The wallpaper in the bedroom, for example, doesn’t feel formal or imposed – it just flows with everything else there.
The armchair in the living room works really well with the other furniture, and the space to its right makes that room feel a lot bigger. I’m glad they didn’t try and cram something in there. However, I do wish that they’d have made their bed properly before taking photos. Either way, enjoy, as of January 2017 this house is still on the market!
. . . This setup works really well, the room is inviting you to sit down from the hallway The armchair works really well with the other furniture, and the space to the right makes this room feel a lot bigger. I’m glad they didn’t try and cram something in there. Some really good art placement here . . . Perfectly understated . . I have a feeling this scene was posed, but it looks cool all the same! It feels like they’re trying to sell a lifestyle along with the apartment in this case . . . . Does anybody know what plant this is? I used to have one just like it. |
Rep. Matt Salmon (R-Ariz.) has introduced legislation that would increase interior enforcement and expedite the deportation of criminal aliens. The bill was introduced in the wake of one of his constituents being murdered by a criminal illegal alien awaiting deportation.
Grant Ronnebeck, 21, was gunned down in January while working at a QuikTrip store in Mesa. The man charged with killing him, Apolinar Altamirano, 29, was in the country illegally and had been released by Immigration and Customs Enforcement even though he'd been previously convicted of a felony burglary charge. Altamirano had been awaiting deportation for two years.
Mr. Ronnebeck's story, however, is one of many. According to the Department of Homeland Security in June, between 2010 and 2014, 121 undocumented immigrants who were released while awaiting deportation committed crimes and were later charged with homicide.
Rep. Salmon's proposed legislation would require federal immigration authorities to detain illegal aliens accused or convicted of serious crimes and deport them within 90 days.
In a statement, Rep. Salmon said his legislation is intended to end a "catch and release" policy under President Barack Obama's administration.
"Undocumented immigrants convicted of serious crimes at the local level are turned over to ICE only to be released later on their own recognizance or on bond."
For more on this story, read The Arizona Republic |
Palestinian human rights defenders are urging Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh to halt planned executions in the Gaza Strip. Ashraf Amra APA images
Palestinian and international human rights defenders are urging Hamas authorities not to proceed with planned executions in the Gaza Strip.
Earlier this month, Ismail Jaber, the attorney general in the coastal territory, announced that Gaza would soon witness the public executions of 13 persons convicted of murder, with the goal of deterring such crimes.
Ismail Haniyeh, the most senior Hamas leader in Gaza, also announced that the executions would go ahead. On Wednesday, Gaza-based members of the Hamas-affiliated Change and Reform bloc in the Palestinian Legislative Council also approved the plan.
Human rights defenders are mobilizing to stop the executions.
The Gaza-based Palestinian Centre for Human Rights (PCHR) warned on Thursday that the executions would be illegal under the Palestinian Basic Law, which requires that all death sentences be ratified by the Palestinian Authority president.
The group said that the executions would amount to extrajudicial killings.
PCHR said it had written to Haniyeh setting out its legal arguments against the executions. The group stated that leaders who order them could face prosecution in the International Criminal Court in which Palestine is now a member.
“Street justice”
Al-Mezan Center for Human Rights, also based in Gaza, said it too was in contact with Hamas leaders to try to prevent the killings.
“We are against it. There’s no logic in violating the right to life and when you implement the death penalty it doesn’t stop the crime,” Al-Mezan’s assistant director Samir Zakout said. “The street wants the death penalty, people who had relatives killed want it. But we are against this kind of street justice.”
Rupert Colville, spokesperson for the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, said his office was “deeply concerned” about the planned executions.
“We urge the authorities in Gaza to uphold their obligations to respect the rights to life and to a fair trial – which are guaranteed under the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, to which the State of Palestine is a party – and not carry out these executions,” Colville said.
“We also urge the Palestinian president to establish a moratorium on executions in line with the strong international trend towards ending the use of the death penalty,” Colville added.
Split authority
The West Bank-based PA leader Mahmoud Abbas has not ratified any death sentences in a decade.
Hamas has however continued the use of the death penalty in Gaza.
The surprise victor in legislative elections in 2006, Hamas took control of the internal governance of Gaza in 2007 after fierce battles with Abbas’ rival Fatah party, which refused to hand over power.
This has meant in practice that most areas of governance, including the judicial system, have been split.
As of January, according to PCHR, a total of 172 death sentences had been issued since the PA was established in 1994, of which 30 were in the West Bank and 142 in Gaza.
Eighty-four death sentences were issued since Hamas took over in Gaza in 2007.
Up to 2010, according to PCHR, approximately half the death sentences were for homicides and approximately half for collaboration with Israel.
No deterrent
The planned executions come in apparent response to several high-profile murders in Gaza and an increase in crime that is seen as linked to the dire economic situation in the territory as a result of the tight siege Israel has imposed since Hamas assumed power.
PCHR, which has long campaigned against the death penalty, challenged the claims of Hamas leaders that public killings would do anything to improve security.
PCHR noted that crime rates in Gaza, where the death penalty has been applied in recent years, are far higher than in the West Bank, where it has not been implemented since 2001.
“In addition, the experiences of other countries, which abolished the death penalty, reveal that no change was noticed regarding the serious crime rate,” PCHR added. “Even in countries applying thousands of death sentences annually, serious crime rates have not decreased.”
“According to scientific research, the crime rate is mainly based on social, economic and cultural circumstances and an efficient security system not on lenient or severe punishments,” PCHR stated.
The group urged Hamas leaders to take another factor into account: the potential gift to Israeli propaganda of public executions.
“Implementing the death sentences in this manner might contribute to displaying a negative image about the Gaza Strip that Israel attempts to market to justify their crimes against Palestinian civilians,” PCHR said.
While Israel and its supporters have certainly tried to exploit executions by Palestinians to portray them as barbaric, Israeli leaders are enthusiastic about executing Palestinians, whether judicially or extrajudicially, just as long as it is done by Israelis. |
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Milwaukee, WI — YouTuber, superrick568 was practicing his First Amendment right earlier this month when he came across Officer Lentz with the Milwaukee police department.
Rick noted on his YouTube channel that he’d been out for less than an hour and had filmed this officer and his partner three times during that time. He said, “there were so many stops within a 2-mile radius that I couldn’t keep up. The third time got to him, and he demanded my I.D.”
When officer Lentz gets out of the vehicle, it looked like he was about to assault the man filming.
“Give me your ID!” demands Lentz, to which Rick respectfully declined.
“Unless I’m doing something wrong, I’m not giving you my ID,” replies Rick.
“Right now, you are doing something wrong,” says Lentz, lying through his teeth. “I just asked you for your identification. I need to know who you are, because you are sitting out here filming us.”
It has been clearly established that all Americans have the right to record the police. For an officer of the law to remain willingly ignorant of this precedent is at best, dereliction of duty, and at worst, unlawful deprivation of rights. Either way, Lentz was in the wrong.
In Hiibel v. Sixth Judicial District Court of Nevada, the Supreme Court upheld state laws requiring citizens to reveal their identity when officers have reasonable suspicion to believe criminal activity may be taking place. Commonly known as “stop-and-identify” statutes, these laws permit police to arrest criminal suspects who refuse to identify themselves.
As of 2014, 24 states have stop-and-identify laws, and Wisconsin is one of those states. However, according to the state law, Lentz had no reason to stop Rick as filming the police is not reasonable suspicion.
968.24 Temporary questioning without arrest. After having identified himself or herself as a law enforcement officer, a law enforcement officer may stop a person in a public place for a reasonable period of time when the officer reasonably suspects that such person is committing, is about to commit or has committed a crime, and may demand the name and address of the person and an explanation of the person’s conduct. Such detention and temporary questioning shall be conducted in the vicinity where the person was stopped.
After verbal lashing from Lentz, Rick asks for the officer’s supervisor. After a long, somewhat hilarious, and unnecessary interaction, Lentz’ supervisor shows up and sets the record straight. Rick had done nothing wrong and there was no need for this entire stop.
While many may say that Rick should’ve simply shown his ID and gone on his way — they are missing the point entirely. Some will assert that if you are doing nothing wrong, then you have nothing to hide. However, those people couldn’t be more wrong.
At night, do you close your blinds or curtains in your home because you are doing something wrong?
It is important that people like Rick assert these rights, or one day, all of our philosophical ‘curtains’ will be forced open 24 hours a day. |
Tech companies criticize each other publicly all the time, with varying levels of subtlety and snark. Asus attacked Apple today by going after prospective Apple Watch customers interested in the $10,000-$17,000 Edition model.
Asus didn’t exactly go for the subtle approach, though the company did avoid directly referring to Apple, Apple Watch, and Apple Watch Edition. Instead, the company put together a flow chart for “Should I buy the Golden Apple” and then posted it on its main Twitter account:
The “shopping guide,” as Asus calls it, concludes in two options: “That’s fine, be logical. Buy Asus ZenWatch instead.” and “You are really out of your mind.” for those that keep answering positively to questions that would deter any sane person from spending five figures on a smartwatch.
Of course, the cheapest Apple Watch can be purchased for $349, which does not require being filthy rich nor a little insane. Still, the Asus ZenWatch costs even less, at $199.
Apple events sometimes lead to huge reactions from competitors, while other times they result in general quietness. Yet the Apple Watch Edition is controversial not just because it’s so ridiculously expensive, but also since it is likely to become obsolete rather quickly. We’re thus frankly not surprised that a tech company responded so directly.
Meanwhile, Pebble chose to announce the Pebble Time, and Motorola expanded its customization tool Moto Maker to the Moto 360. Asus was more eager to make fun of Apple fans.
Time will tell which strategy works best, though we don’t think calling potential customers crazy is the best approach. It is certainly hilarious, though. |
The 2013 draft class, with some slight exceptions, was absolutely awful. The top three picks were a mediocre right tackle, a schlub who got kicked inside to guard, and an edge rusher who smoked himself out of the limelight with failed drug tests and bad circumstances. And yet, even at that time, many believed in Barkevious Mingo, the edge rusher from LSU who was a little bit light but had athleticism to spare.
No matter if you place him at DE or LB, Mingo is pretty physically freaky pic.twitter.com/61tQ8YPg7A — Ethan Hammerman (@Ethanhamm) August 25, 2016
Coming out of LSU, Barkevious Mingo was know as having the name of a Pokemon and the moves of a bengal tiger, utilizing his twitchiness and explosion to react at the snap and makes plays in the backfield of his opponents. As a senior, Mingo faced constant double teams and was forced to play more of an edge-setting role in LSU's defense, racking up 4.5 sacks and 8.5 TFL. The 6 foot 4 Mingo's stock stayed fairly consistent as a senior, although some began to hype a certain Oregon Duck over him due to his perceived projectability.
Mingo's Scouting Combine, as previously noted, was phenomenal. He showcased his physical gifts and was able to maintain his stock as well as he could, eventually getting picked by the Cleveland Browns at 6 overall. At the start of his tenure in the City on Fire, Mingo impressed in a variety of facets, catching the eye of many observers with both his defensive and special teams presences.
Barkevious Mingo (playing 2nd team ROLB) gave backup LT Rashad Butler all he could handle a few times off the edge. Very explosive/fluid. — Brendan Leister (@BrendanLeister) July 28, 2013
Barkevious Mingo was playing Josh Cribbs’ old position on the punt unit - right upback. Chris Ogbonnaya was the PP (personal protector). — Brendan Leister (@BrendanLeister) July 28, 2013
Counted four QB hits or hurries by Barkevious Mingo in the preseason opener. Good base to build on, but HAS to get stronger. #Browns — Matt Miller (@nfldraftscout) August 11, 2013
Mingo faced a slight setback in August of his rookie year, as he suffered a bruised lung and had to be admitted to the hospital. However, once the regular season started, Mingo starred in Ray Horton's defense. The rookie compiled five sacks on the year, including one on his very first regular season play.
Barkevious Mingo... retire. 1 play, 1 sack. — Pete Smith (@_PeteSmith_) September 15, 2013
Devastating spin move by Barkevious Mingo. https://t.co/HTjSYLhqMl — Brendan Leister (@BrendanLeister) December 4, 2013
Mingo was poised to burst onto the scene in 2014, but some circumstances in Cleveland limited his ability to grow. First of all, Mike Lombardi and Joe Banner with both given the boot, resulting in many of their additions becoming personas non-gratas in the Cleveland locker room. Secondly, the addition of Mike Pettine stunted Mingo's growth as a pass rusher. Pettine decided to utilize Mingo as a "space linebacker," similar to Calvin Pace in New York. This forced Mingo to play more coverage snaps rather than rush the passer. These factors, plus a shoulder injury he suffered against the Steelers in Week 1, seemed to spell doom for Barkevious.
Yet...somehow, he persevered and thrived, against all odds. PFF gave him a +14.0 grade at the end of the season, a high mark for such a young player. Although he only had two sacks, Mingo contributed in other ways, unselfishly helping the team however he could. Plus, when he got opportunities to rush the passer, he was able to make his presence felt routinely.
Through 3 games Browns have 8 defenders with over 100 snaps played and negative PFF grades. Barkevious Mingo is NOT one of them — Justin Higdon (@afc2nfc) September 22, 2014
Both HC, DC say they are happy with what he's doing, but struggling? MT @WFNYScott: Mike Pettine talks about the struggling Barkevious Mingo — Pete Smith (@_PeteSmith_) October 2, 2014
Barkevious Mingo had 3 QB hurries in only 12 pass rushes yesterday vs PIT. Hopefully he continues to get more chances to rush QB. #Browns — Brendan Leister (@BrendanLeister) October 13, 2014
While there was optimism heading into 2014, Mingo broke camp in 2015 a bit underappreciated and underrated for his contributions. He also was recovering from shoulder surgery and, for some reason, did not vibe with new defensive coordinator Jim O'Neil, who said that Mingo would "have to earn playing time" against the likes of Scott Solomon, Nate Orchard, and Armonty Bryant.
Browns' Barkevious Mingo will 'have to earn' playing time in 2015 http://t.co/FacXsK4JIs pic.twitter.com/xgVyZ2YQRq — theScore NFL (@theScoreNFL) June 19, 2015
Next on the docket of pain for Barkevious was a knee scope, that caused him to miss the entire preseason. This setback did not help Mingo's rift with O'Neil and the rest of the defense left the third year pro languishing for the remainder of the season. He played in every game but only started twice, and did not collect a sack. He and his agent were both unhappy, and per Dustin Fox, the Patriots were sniffing around Barkevious even then, offering a third round pick for him.
Heard they offered as high as a 3rd last season for him. Still a good get in return this year. https://t.co/rAX8FdgtIO — Dustin Fox (@DustinFox37) August 25, 2016
To me, Barkevious Mingo is still a potential star, a 25 year old with a ton of upside who was screwed over by bad coaching and awful usage. If Bill Belichick can harness the eye of the tiger that lives in Mingo, he has the potential to become the best pass rusher on the 2016 New England Patriots. |
Are postal volumes on the verge of a sharp plunge?
The volume of mail making it way through An Post’s trays, cages and vans has been declining about 5 per cent per annum in recent years and is now down 35 per cent since 2007.
And with private post accounting for only 10 per cent of mail in Ireland, the threat is clearly a move to online communications. An Post is now very reliant on its biggest customers – the banks and utility companies – continuing to use the service “and they are driving everybody online”, An Post chairman designate Dermot Divilly said this week.
“For every 1 per cent decline, that’s about €4-€5 million in turnover off our bottom line,” Divilly told the Oireachtas communications committee. “We have to adapt the company to that new lower level, because that is really outside our control.”
The veteran businessman outlined how An Post would have to sell more products and services through the post office network, charge more for postal services (ie more expensive stamps) and reduce its costs. The organisation is, he noted, “a very large employer”.
Its vulnerable position was laid bare in an exchange between Divilly and Green Party leader Eamon Ryan, a member of the communications committee. Ryan, a former minister for communications, said he “could think of no other business where the core business is guaranteed to decline 5 per cent per annum”; but even then, he contended, An Post should be preparing for “real cliff drops” in mail volumes in the year ahead.
An Post only needs “one or two” of the banks to decide to stop communicating with customers in writing for the annual decline in volumes to start looking more like 20 per cent than 5 per cent, he suggested.
Divilly agreed. “As you say, it will come in big drops. Once one bank does it, the other banks will follow immediately.”
But when Ryan offered a timescale of five to 10 years before this potential nosedive, Divilly said it would likely be “even shorter than that”.
“Well, God help us, then,” said Ryan. “It is going to be very difficult to manage the company.”
Very, very difficult. |
Obama’s “Legacy” Should Be Defined By The U.S. War Currently Raging In Iraq
Michael Tracey Blocked Unblock Follow Following Jan 3, 2017
Oddly omitted from the ongoing evaluations of Barack Obama’s “legacy” is the fact that the U.S. is currently waging a ground war in Iraq, the country Obama was elected with a specific mandate to withdraw U.S. troops from. He launched his campaign in 2007 firmly on the premise that the Iraq War was a mistake, not just that it had been managed incorrectly (as his opponent Hillary would claim, much to her detriment) — but that the fundamental philosophy which undergirded George W. Bush’s misadventure was inherently wrongheaded.
Campaigning in such a fashion very obviously didn’t make Obama a “dove” — his (fulfilled) pledge to escalate the war in Afghanistan and his (fulfilled) pledged to attack “terrorists” in Pakistan demonstrated that — but still, he had as conspicuous a mandate as any to dramatically reconfigure the U.S. strategic mission in Iraq.
Fast-forward to January 2017 — Obama has but a few weeks left in office. And what’s going on? Sure enough, yet another Iraq War with the U.S. at the helm. Call it Iraq War 3.0 — since August 2014, the U.S. has been engaged in an active combat mission in the very country Obama was supposed to have extricated us from. The initial impetus behind the war was purportedly to save Yazidis stranded on a mountain — so, it was going to be strictly benign and “humanitarian,” and of a highly “limited” nature. That’s always how these things begin, with the noblest of alleged goals. Only a monster could object to rescuing besieged Yazidis.
Notice the NYT’s bizarrely passive headline from August 7, 2014 — as if Obama was not the Commander-in-Chief with near-absolute power to order the U.S. military to do as he pleases. You’d almost think that this intervention just sort of naturally materialized somewhere out there in the universe, and Obama, as a mere bystander lacking agency, stepped aside and simply “allowed” it to go forward.
The war was presented to the American people under false pretenses. The main aim, it was later shown, was not strictly “humanitarian.” If the aim was strictly humanitarian, then achievement of the limited goal of preventing the allegedly imminent slaughter of the Yazidis on Mount Sinjar would have been sufficient to complete the mission. But yet here we are, 2.5 years later, waging offensive war to root out ISIS “insurgents” in Mosul and elsewhere. The war has expanded beyond the scope initially conveyed to the public — that’s indisputable. And it has expanded in increments, with staggered deployments of additional “advisors” here and there, as if the commanders are consciously trying to evoke echoes of Vietnam.
And it’s not a campaign restricted to “airstrikes” either, as U.S. ground forces are currently engaged in active combat and sustaining casualties. To repeat, the initial way in which the war was sold to the country was unequivocally false. There’s no way around it.
The scope and intensity of the current U.S. ground war in Mosul was never contemplated when Obama issued that August 2014 proclamation.
It also must be emphasized that the war as currently waged is illegal per U.S. domestic law. It is being waged without Congressional authorization. The only legal grounds on which the administration justifies its war-making is the 2002 Congressional resolution authorizing Bush to attack Iraq, which is utterly preposterous for a whole variety of reasons. (The legal basis for the ongoing war in Syria is even more preposterous.) So Obama, whose central 2008 campaign theme was condemning Bush for how horribly he handled the Iraq situation, is now relying on the Bush Administration’s legal rationale for waging war in Iraq, with no end in sight.
Obama’s “war on ISIS” in Iraq and Syria has directly led to the death of thousands of civilians:
And on, and on, and on. Do most Americans even know that the country is once again engaged in active combat in Iraq (and Syria)? Probably not. Do they know what Trump blurted out on Twitter last night? More likely. This ought to be viewed as a profound blemish on the outgoing president’s record, and yet we hear very little about it in the popular media narrative. Instead it’s 24/7 Trump hyperventilation. What a mess.
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Reuters Women walk past a billboard that carries a verse from Koran urging women to wear a hijab in Raqqa.
TEL ABYAD, Syria — The woman took her sons and paid a smuggler's exorbitant fee to escape her impossible trap in Raqqa: stuck between the ISIS militants she hates and the pounding of international airstrikes.
On Thursday night, the family arrived in the safest city outside Raqqa, Tel Abyad, where she believed the ethnic Kurdish forces who run it would help her. She had agonized over leaving for months. For Raqqa residents like her, it's far from easy to leave — despite the "misery" of living in the city, as the woman described it, fear of the militants and economic desperation often keep them there. "People in Raqqa are against their ideology," she said, wearing a black shawl and heavy coat, and too afraid of reprisals to give her name. "But where will they go? It's a miserable life, but people feel they don't have another choice." Following the Paris attacks, a spike in international airstrikes had compounded the suffering in Raqqa — and finally convinced her to flee. "They hide among civilians so civilians will die. It's not important to them if we're killed," she said.
Leaving meant paying a smuggler 9,000 Syrian pounds (approximately $47.50), a huge sum for the family. Her husband stayed behind in hopes of keeping the jihadis from taking their possessions and home — a common fate for those who escape. The woman said her family was poor, like many who remain. "They don't have the ability to leave," she said.
Mike Giglio / BuzzFeed This woman paid a smuggler to flee Raqqa with her sons.
ISIS also demonizes those fleeing the city, and the woman feared reprisals if they were caught. Sitting next to her at a community center in Tel Abyad on Friday was her 11-year-old son, who described his fears that the militants would take him if they caught the family leaving. He believed this has happened to one of his friends. "People are mainly afraid of the road from Raqqa," he said. "ISIS takes their kids."
Amid a renewed international focus on stopping ISIS in the wake of the Paris attacks, the first step has been a ramping up of French and U.S. airstrikes on Raqqa, the Syrian capital of the jihadis. Some in the West have said less care should be taken to avoid civilian casualties in hopes of making the strikes more effective — and some have even suggested that anyone still living in the city must support the extremists. One sign of the increasing acceptance of civilian casualties in Washington comes in its coordination with Russia, which has far less qualms about collateral damage, as a partner in the anti-ISIS strikes. "I choose to fight them in their backyard. I choose to fight them in Raqqa, not on the streets of the Western capitals of the word or American cities,” Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham said on CNN's State of the Union on Sunday.
Reuters Residents walk along the market in central Raqqa. |
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By Tamlin H. Bason
Sens. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.), Jerry Moran (R-Kan.), and Maria Cantwell (D-Wash.) formally introduced the Online Protection and Enforcement of Digital Trade Act Dec. 17, the same day that Sen. Harry Reid (D-Nev.) maneuvered to bring about a vote on the Protect IP Act when the Senate resumes its next legislative session in late January.
Both bills concern rogue foreign websites that profit by infringing the intellectual property rights of U.S. businesses.
The Protect IP Act (S.968) was approved by the Senate Judiciary Committee May 26.
Unlike S.968 and the House's Stop Online Piracy Act (H.R. 3261), Wyden's OPEN Act (S.2029) would not allow U.S. rights holders to file private actions against foreign rogue websites in U.S. federal courts. Instead, the bill would amend the Tariff Act of 1930 in order to grant jurisdiction over these websites to the International Trade Committee, which already has the authority to prevent the importation of goods that infringe on a U.S. company's patents.
The OPEN Act also lacks provisions from the other two bills authorizing the Office of the U.S. Attorney General to order that a rogue website be blocked at the domain name system level, a remedy that has been subject to a great deal of criticism by opponents that claim such a remedy could make the domain name system less secure.
“The OPEN Act expands the ability of the ITC to investigate IP infringement— providing a forum for due process without messing with the inner workings of the Internet,” Wyden said in a press statement. “The same goals are met, without the collateral damage SOPA and Protect IP will leave in their wake.”
Senate Will Begin Debate on S. 968 Jan. 24
Wyden moved to introduce his bill just hours after Reid filed a cloture motion Dec. 17 to force a vote on whether to proceed on the Protect IP Act. Reid called that bill, which was introduced May 12 by Sens. Patrick J. Leahy (D-Vt.), Orrin G. Hatch (R-Utah), and Chuck E. Grassley (R-Iowa), “a bipartisan piece of legislation which is extremely important.”
Immediately after the Senate Judiciary Committee approved the Protect IP Act, Wyden issued a statement announcing that he would place a hold on the bill's move to the Senate floor.
After Reid filed the cloture motion, Wyden took the floor to reiterate his intent to filibuster the bill once it reaches the Senate floor.
“Over the past few weeks more than a million Americans have weighed in strongly in opposition to this legislation,” Wyden said, referring to the public's outcry of opposition both to the Senate's bill and to the House's Stop Online Piracy Act. “Therefore, I will be working with colleagues on both sides of the aisle over the next month to explain the basis for this wide-spread concern and I intend to follow through on a commitment that I made more than a year ago, to filibuster this bill when the Senate returns in January.”
OPEN Act First Circulated Dec. 9
Rep. Darrell Issa (R-Calif.), who is a staunch critic of both SOPA and the Protect IP Act, first hinted at the possibility of an alternative bill in the days leading up to a Nov. 16 House Judiciary Committee hearing on H.R.3261.
Issa and Wyden on Dec. 8 began circulating a document that they hoped would serve as a starting point for the legislation, and on Dec. 9 the lawmakers released the draft text of the bill. At that time, the public was invited to go to the website keepthewebopen.com in order to review and make comments on the draft bill and to share their concerns on SOPA and the Protect IP Act.
Bill Would Amend Tariff Act of 1930
S.2029 is a 44-page bill that contains six separate sections.
The second section is by far the most substantive component of the legislation. It would amend Title III the Tariff Act of 1930, 19 U.S.C. §1304 et seq., to create a new Section 337A, “unfair trade practices relating to infringement of copyrights and trademarks by certain internet sites.”
Under this section, “nondomestic” websites engaging in copyright or trademark infringement would be subject to investigations by the ITC, either under its own initiative or pursuant to a complaint. However, the ITC would lose power to take action against websites whose operators consent to the jurisdiction of U.S. federal courts for copyright and trademark actions.
For websites that do not submit to federal court jurisdiction, the ITC may issue a cease-and-desist order that can be served on the website. However, such an order cannot be issued until after the operator of the website has been given an opportunity to be heard.
The ITC would also be empowered to direct financial transaction providers to take “reasonable measures, as expeditiously as reasonable” to prevent transactions between rogue websites and U.S. customers. Online advertisers could similarly be ordered to take commercially reasonable as well as “technically feasible” measures to stop serving ads to a rogue website.
Such service providers would be immune from legal action arising from their compliance with such an order. Furthermore, service providers would be immune from action if they voluntarily cut off service to websites that credible evidence shows are dedicated to infringing activity.
In a press release, Wyden said, “The OPEN Act embraces remedies against true foreign, ‘rogue' sites that are the most effective: shutting off the money.”
ITC Would Appoint ‘Hearing Officers.'
The bill also creates authority for taking action against an “internet site that endangers the public health,” specifically by selling prescription medication in the absence of a valid prescription.
Section 3 of the bill would allow the ITC to appoint “Section 337B judges,” defined as hearing officers “other than administrative law judges” to handle such proceedings.
Section 4 would authorize the U.S. Department of Homeland Security to notify the owner of a trademark or copyright of suspicions that infringing goods are being imported.
The ITC would also be directed to promulgate regulations regarding “procedures for receiving information from the public about Internet sites dedicated to infringing activity” and other matters relating to the implementation of Section 337A.
The president would also be directed to issue a report two years after enactment of the bill on enforcement and effectiveness.
Opinion at http://pub.bna.com/ptcj/OpenAct.pdf |
By The Metric Maven
Bulldog Edition
My friend Kat once told me this joke:
Einstein, Newton and Pascal decided to play hide and seek. Einstein put his head against a nearby tree and began counting. Newton only traverses a couple of paces, then reaches into his coat and produces a piece of chalk. He draws a perfect one meter square on the pavement, and then steps into it.
Einstein finishes counting, looks up, and immediately sees Newton standing near him. Einstein says with surprise, “Newton, you really suck at hide and seek, I immediately found you.”
Newton replies “No, no, no you haven’t, you found one Newton per square meter!—-you found Pascal!”
Longtime readers may recall that I’m very much against the adoption of unit identifiers which are the names of persons. If memory serves, Isaac Asimov argued that the names of units should provide a clue as to what they might be. I’m very much of the same mind. As you might imagine I have a first order aversion to the “nesting” of units named after famous scientific persons. When I was taking some long forgotten class in engineering mechanics, I recall a number of problems which defined pressure in pascals. I didn’t question the pascal, but it always seemed a bit remote as far as gaining an intuitive understanding of the amount of pressure present.
I had not really thought much about those ancient exercises in engineering until recently. I was visiting my father in my small hometown, and he was working with another person installing a new Japanese printing press. A technician was installing air for the pneumatics, but was familiar with using pounds per square inch (PSI). He asked me “what is the conversion between pascals and PSI?” to which I could only reply that I could not recall it off the top of my head. The conversion is 1 PSI = 6894.757 pascal. The PSI is so removed in magnitude from a pascal, that one would need to deal in Kilopascals to obtain 1 PSI = 6.895 Kilopascals. But at that moment I was at a loss and could only blurt out what I thought was a useless statement: “well, a pascal is a newton per square meter.” The countenance of the technician brightened. It was clear that my statement actually helped him to understand that the metric system was not somehow creating a mysterious and esoteric alternative to force over area, but that a pascal could actually be related to a pound per square inch in terms of a newton per square meter.
What struck me was that SI, in its quixotic rush to further fete scientists who will never be forgotten as long as the scientific endeavor and humanity continues, have obscured meaning. When I was a boy and first heard pounds per square inch, I understood the concept immediately. The Ye Olde English unit expressed itself within its name. If I had a small one inch square of wood, and I stood on it and weighted 100 pounds, it would be 100 pounds per square inch. If the cross-section of the wood became smaller and smaller the pressure in pounds per square inch would increase. When the area is reduced to a small point it can puncture objects with little applied force. The spear, and arrow rely on an understanding of this principle, and they are some of the first technological tools used by humans. Understanding force over an area, allows one to comprehend why women in high heels attempt to avoid walking on grass, and when they do, they ramble across it on their toes. The pounds per square inch of their heels will easily puncture the sod and form a vacuum that might capture their shoes in place. When neighborhood boys taught me how to patch the inner tubes of my bicycle tires, there was no confusion when they told me how many pounds per square inch were needed for proper inflation. The concept was very intuitive.
The use of the word newton to describe a kilogram-meter per second squared makes as much sense as the pound, and has a name which cannot claim to be a superior nomenclature. The cgs unit of force, the dyne, at least used a word which was not that of a person, and also attempted to use a word which is similar to dynamic. It attempted to describe in words what the unit describes mathematically. In my view SI then doubles down on anthropomorphism at the expense of explanation by calling a newton per square meter a pascal. If a newton per square meter was abbreviated as NSM for newton per square meter, and dual scale gauges found in the US had PSI and KNSM a person who was transitioning to metric could understand that metric was at least on the same planet as the Ye Olde English units. A pascal is an abstract notion by comparison and only serves to conceal information, and not express it.
When I did EMI testing in a GTEM years ago, the amount of noise generated by electrical equipment (often horrible tones) were measured with a device which required the computation of dBspl (decibels Sound Pressure Level) and I recall immediately converting to newtons per square meter for the math used to process the data. The pascal was never really expressive in a way that attracted its direct use. In my view for SI to become more intuitive and useful, questions like this need to be examined, and possible simplifications should be considered, and if they make sense, instituted. If Einstein could not see an obvious relationship between a Newton per square meter and Pascal—why should we?
If you liked this essay and wish to support the work of The Metric Maven, please visit his Patreon Page |
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Sep. 26, 2017, 10:19 PM GMT / Updated Sep. 26, 2017, 10:23 PM GMT By Kristin Donnelly and Alex Johnson
WASHINGTON — The acting head of the Drug Enforcement Administration is resigning, he said in an email Tuesday, a few weeks after he complained that President Donald Trump appeared to have "condoned police misconduct."
In the email to DEA staffers, Chuck Rosenberg, who became acting administrator in 2015, gave no reason for his departure, which takes effect on Sunday.
Chuck Rosenberg in Washington, D.C., on April 18. Alex Brandon / AP file
A spokesperson for the DEA confirmed Rosenberg's resignation but wouldn't comment on a report in The New York Times, which quoted law enforcement officials as saying Rosenberg had become convinced that Trump "had little respect for the law."
Rosenberg, 57, was kept on by Trump, but his future with the administration came into doubt after Trump fired FBI Director James Comey — a close associate whom Rosenberg had served as chief of staff.
But Rosenberg has already publicly criticized the president, saying in a memo to the agency's employees on July 29 that Trump's remarks in a speech to law enforcement officers "condoned police misconduct."
Rosenberg sent the memo a day after Trump appeared to encourage law enforcement officers not to take care to protect suspects in custody.
"When you see these thugs being thrown into the back of a paddy wagon — you just see them thrown in, rough," Trump said July 28 in an address in Selden, New York. "I said, 'Please don't be too nice.'"
Rosenberg said in the memo: "We have an obligation to speak out when something is wrong." He listed "core values" that he said were fundamental to the agency: "Rule of Law, Respect and Compassion, Service, Devotion, Integrity, [and] Accountability."
"This is how we conduct ourselves. This is how we treat those whom we encounter in our work: victims, witnesses, subjects, and defendants. This is who we are."
Attorney General Jeff Sessions sent a similar message to police on Aug. 1, saying in a speech before the National Organization of Black Law Enforcement Executives that officers should conduct themselves "in a lawful way" and promising to prosecute officers who violate use-of-force laws.
White House Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders said at the time that Trump's remarks had been blown out of proportion, telling reporters, "It was a joke."
Kristin Donnelly reported from Washington. Alex Johnson reported from Los Angeles. |
Russia’s energy minister downplayed any risk to the country’s oil sector following the disputed delivery of gas turbines built by Siemens to the Crimea peninsula.
The German industrial giant said last week it would stop delivering power plant equipment to Russia after the four turbines were shipped Crimea against the company’s policy and in violation of a contract with a Russian partner.
Asked by reporters in St. Petersburg July 24 whether the Siemens decision could affect Russia’s oil industry, Aleksandr Novak said no.
"We have a competitive market in the country. So what Siemens supplies can be delivered by other companies,” he was quoted as saying.
"As for electricity generation, we...have now learnt to produce the necessary equipment," he said.
Germany has urged the European Union to add four more Russian individuals and companies to the EU sanctions list over the dispute.
Russia annexed Crimea from Ukraine in 2014, prompting the EU and the United States to impose a series of economic sanctions.
Based on reporting by Reuters, Interfax |
SACRAMENTO (CBS13) – An arrest has been made months after a woman in her 60s was attacked and raped. The suspect is only 15 years old.
The assault happened in early February and Sacramento sheriff’s detectives finally linked evidence at the scene to the teenager.
“My mom and our family is very lucky that he didn’t kill her,” the victim’s son, who wished to remain anonymous, said.
His 64-year-old mother thought she was safe in her own home until she was brutally attacked, raped and robbed inside her south Sacramento apartment.
“She don’t enjoy life no more, and she has flashbacks all the time, and she just don’t feel safe anymore,” the son said.
The victim reported being choked, thrown by her hair and beaten.
Deputies arrested the suspected attacker on Wednesday — stunned the attacker was so young.
“When I learned he was 15, I couldn’t believe it,” the man said.
“I think it shocks the conscious somewhat to think of somebody so young committing such a violent crime,” Sacramento County sheriff’s Sgt. Jason Ramos said.
Deputies say the unnamed teenager doesn’t have much of a criminal record, but they will compare his DNA with other assaults in the area.
“There’s always the potential that he could be connected to unsolved sexual assault cases,” said Ramos.
“He’s a kid. And to commit a horrible crime, a heinous crime like this, it’s unbelievable,” the victim’s son said.
The victim’s son is still coming to terms with what a kid could be capable of doing.
“He’s a menace to society,” he said.
The teen faces felony charges. |
While we appreciate candor among executives, it is generally unwise for the CEO of any company to slight their own brand – even if they really dislike their product. Mutsuhiro Oshikiri may not have gotten the memo.According to a report in the Sydney Morning Herald, the new CEO of Mitsubishi Australia isn't mincing words, saying "the product is too old...the prices are too high." Oshikiri took over the Australian branch of the Japanese automaker just ten weeks ago, and says the brand needs to be updating its product portfolio more quickly."I don't know why people buy a Mitsubishi ...What is the benefit?...I have to find out."The comments are more introspective to the brand than outright defamation, but that doesn't mean that Oshikiri's comments aren't making waves.Struggling Mitsubishi is set to roll out three new models in the Australian market shortly, including a new Outlander and a revival of its low-cost Mirage subcompact (above). The next question Oshikiri may be asking is, "Will it be enough to make the brand relevant?" Only time will tell. |
Russian President Vladimir Putin apparently cut out a blistering critique of Ukrainian authorities in a speech to human-rights advocates last week, as he seeks to carve out a peace deal with his country’s neighbor.
In a draft prepared by Putin’s speechwriters and obtained by TIME, the President was set to accuse Ukrainian authorities of the “mass destruction of their own citizens” during their ongoing conflict with Moscow-backed separatist rebels. But at the last moment, Putin appears to have dropped that line. The speech, as he delivered it on Dec. 5, made no mention of Ukraine whatsoever.
Reached by TIME on Monday, Putin’s spokesman Dmitri Peskov declined to comment on why the President had omitted this entire section when he delivered the speech in the Kremlin throne room that afternoon. Asked whether the change signaled a shift in Putin’s position on Ukraine, Peskov said, “No, absolutely not.”
But Russia’s position on the Ukraine conflict had already softened ahead of the next round of peace talks to be held later this week. Those talks, which will involve representatives of Russia, Ukraine and the separatists who control large portions of eastern Ukraine, as well as European mediators, will provide all sides with the best chance they’ve had in months to reach a lasting cease-fire in the eight-month-old conflict, which has already claimed more than 4,000 lives. (The date for the talks, initially set for Dec. 9, could be delayed by several days at the requests of the separatist leaders, who have asked for more time to prepare.)
Ahead of those negotiations, Putin has appeared to take a more conciliatory approach, as Russia faces immense political and economic pressure from the West to call off its support for the Ukrainian separatists. Three days before the talks were due to commence in Minsk, French President François Hollande made a surprise visit to Moscow, and Putin took the unusual step of meeting Hollande at the airport rather than having the French leader come to him, as diplomatic protocol would normally require.
When the two Presidents sat down on Saturday at Vnukovo airport for two hours of discussions on Ukraine, Putin said, “We need to resolve” the conflict and the rift it has caused between Russia and the West. Following the closed-door meeting, Putin told reporters that Russia respects Ukraine’s territorial integrity and wants to see it restored. Hollande then spoke with his German counterpart, Angela Merkel, about the “prospects for progress that have emerged” in relations with Russia.
But Putin’s last-minute redaction of the speech on Friday is perhaps the clearest sign yet of a change in rhetoric. He has tended throughout the conflict in Ukraine not to miss an opportunity to denounce the Ukrainian authorities for violating the rights of ethnic Russians, and Friday’s meeting with rights advocates in the Kremlin seemed like an ideal venue to trot out those claims once more.
According to the copy of the draft speech distributed at the Kremlin press center on Friday, Putin was meant to tell his audience that, “Neither international acts nor the structures meant to defend human rights have been able to stop the Ukrainian authorities’ mass destruction of their own citizens. Despite the fact that international observers are present in Ukraine, people are unable to stop the violation of their most basic right, the right to life.”
Gleb Pavlovsky, a former Kremlin adviser and political consultant, says the redaction appears to be part of a broader shift in Russia’s messaging. “The turn on the Ukraine issue is clear, even obvious,” he says. “Putin now wants to strengthen the message of friendliness, and the Kremlin is trying in various ways to turn down the heat on the Ukrainian issue.”
Russian state television networks, for instance, have gradually stopped labeling the Ukrainian government “fascist” in their reports, and on Saturday, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov referred to the separatist-controlled regions of eastern Ukraine as an “open boil” on the body of the country, that needed to heal. Even a month ago it would have been hard to imagine such language coming from senior Kremlin officials, who have doggedly supported the separatists ever since their war against Ukraine began in April. “But now Moscow is trying to distance itself from them,” says Pavlovsky.
One of Putin’s imagemakers from the start of his presidency until 2011, Pavlovsky says it is not rare for the President to make last-minute changes to the texts that his speechwriters prepare. And he would almost certainly have approved the original version denouncing rights violations in Ukraine, Pavlovsky says. “Otherwise it would not have been there. But at the last minute he apparently decided that it’s not appropriate.”
The reason seems to be the troubling state of Russia’s economy. Over the past nine months, the U.S. and its allies have imposed several rounds of sanctions against Russia to force a change in the Kremlin’s interventionist policies in Ukraine, and those sanctions have managed to inflict substantial pain on Russian elites and state-connected firms. At the same time, a sharp drop in the price of oil, Russia’s most important export, has decimated federal coffers and the national currency, which has lost about 40% of its value against the dollar since the start of the year.
But a sudden change of course on Ukraine could damage the Russian President, Pavlovsky warns. The Kremlin’s propaganda channels have spent months stirring up public support for the separatist cause, and the President could see a drop in his sky-high approval if he is seen as submitting to Western pressure at this stage in the conflict, he says. “They don’t want the public to notice this shift.”
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The Arizona Daily Star recently posted a photo gallery of pictures taken in relation to a story by the Tucson Citizen about a UFO sighting in October, 1968 near the town of Gleeson. The UFO allegedly left scorch marks in the side of a local mountain.
The mining town of Gleeson, Arizona is nothing but a ghost town now, and it wasn’t much more than that in 1968 when Pearl Christiansen reported seeing several UFOs hovering over nearby Browns Peak. At the time, Christiansen was a 71 year-old retired school teacher who had lived in Gleeson since 1920.
She says that while she was on Browns Peak she saw several UFOs hover over the peak for four hours one night. She told the Tucson Citizen that eventually, “they seemed to back off into the Valley behind the peak.”
She said, “It looked as though there were a train of lights trailing from one side.” She described one of the UFOs: “There was a red band which turned wine in color, then turned purple, several minutes later it was gold.”
She says the UFOs did not frighten her, “I was happily excited about the beauty of the thing. I never was afraid. I had no fear – just excited.”
Witnesses said the UFO left burns on the side of the mountain. William Mayfield, the operator of the Gleeson Museum, examined the burned rocks and cacti in the area. He said the scorched rock was too hot to touch 48 hours after the incident. He also reported a “queer, acid-like smell” that was “nothing like our fuels smell.”
Some suggested that the burned areas could have been caused by strange rituals performed by a nearby “hippie camp.”
Inquiries were made to the nearest military base, which was the U.S. Army installation at Ft. Huachuca, but the reporter was told, “The Air Force has that responsibility.”
According the Arizona Daily Star, the town of Gleeson was home to the miners at the Copper Belle mine, which provided copper during WWI. The mine closed in 1930 and the Gleeson post office closed in 1939, leaving Gleeson another deserted ghost town in the dry deserts of Arizona.
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Zack Bowman brought the Bears’ big secret to the Giants and, after some prodding, spread it like religion.
In 2014, members of his new team noticed that Bowman, a little-used cornerback toward the end of his six-year Bears career, kept forcing fumbles during preseason practice.
“It was crazy,” cornerback Prince Amukamara said. “Bowman came there and was getting about two turnovers a day just by punching the ball. Just because it was new. (Receivers) didn’t know how to lock it in. Guys hadn’t seen it or experienced that type of pressure.”
Finally, his fellow Giants cornerbacks — including Amukamara, who the Bears signed to a one-year, $7 million deal in March — asked him about the secret.
It was, of course, the Peanut Punch, popularized by former Bears cornerback Charles Tillman.
“Guys started inquiring, and asking, ‘Man, how are you doing it?’” Amukamara said. “And then after that, me and the other guys, we started doing it. …
“We were all thankful that Bowman taught us that.”
When Amukamara spoke Tuesday of returning the Bears cornerback room to its previous greatness, then, he knows of what he speaks — and the challenges ahead.
The Bears forced only 11 turnovers last season, tying the NFL record for futility, before signing former Cardinal Marcus Cooper and Amukamara to start at cornerback.
“Just to bring back that tradition of Chicago Bears defense, where there’s a lot of takeaways and plays on the ball,” Amukamara said. “Just restoring that order.”
GM Ryan Pace believes Amukamara, who turned 28 on Tuesday, can be a steadying force on a team that cut veteran cornerback Tracy Porter and is still not sure what, if anything, to expect from former first-round pick Kyle Fuller.
While practicing takeaways won’t get serious until the Bears put on pads, the team has stressed them during their offseason program, which ends with a three-day mandatory minicamp next week at Halas Hall.
Pace suspects Amukamara has posted “hidden production” during his career, positing that quarterbacks didn’t throw in his direction because he was covering his man.
Amukamara is coming off his first-ever season without an interception. The 19th pick of the 2011 draft has only surpassed one interception in a season only once — 2014, when he logged three with the Giants.
Amukamara’s not sure if his interception drought last year with the Jaguars was because of luck, skill or scheme — “I think all of it works together,” the cornerback said —but he thinks Vic Fangio’s system will put him in a better position to get takeaways.
Former coaches told him how much he’d like playing for the Bears’ defensive coordinator. Like that of former Giants coordinator Steve Spagnuolo, Fangio’s scheme allows Amukamara to watch the quarterback’s eyes and more aggressively pursue a pass.
“You get to have vision, you get to see the ball and you get to make plays on the ball,” he said. “You get to challenge the receivers. I would say Vic is similar to Spagnuolo … just because they don’t like to wait for the offense to attack them.
“They like to attack the offense. They’re sending blitzes from all sorts of directions and are not making the pocket comfortable for the quarterback.”
Last month, Fangio was quick to point out that Amukamara was on his third team in three years — hardly a symbol of consistency.
Still, he’s optimistic that this season will be the best of the three.
“Thought he played better last year than he had earlier in his career,” Fangio said. “And hopefully he’ll be able to continue that here and maybe play his best. He should be in his prime.” |
1. Abstract¶ This document compiles the release notes for the Danube release of OPNFV when using JOID as a deployment tool with LXD container hypervisor.
2. Introduction¶ These notes provides release information for the use of joid as deployment tool for the Danube release of OPNFV with LXD hypervisor for containers scenario. The goal of the Danube release and this JOID based deployment process is to establish a lab ready platform accelerating further development of the OPNFV infrastructure. Carefully follow the installation-instructions which guides a user to deploy OPNFV using JOID which is based on MAAS and Juju.
3. Summary¶ LXD is a lightweight container hypervisor for full system containers, unlike Docker and Rocket which is for application containers. This means that the container will look and feel like a regular VM – but will act like a container. LXD uses the same container technology found in the Linux kernel (cgroups, namespaces, LSM, etc). Danube release with the JOID deployment with LXD hypervisor will establish an OPNFV target system on a Pharos compliant lab infrastructure. The current definition of an OPNFV target system is and OpenStack Newton combined with LXD Hypervisor. The system is deployed with OpenStack High Availability (HA) for most OpenStack services. User has following choices to make to do the deployment. Openstack – Newton
Type – HA, nonHA, tip (stable git branch of respective openstack)
Feature – LXD (container hypervisor) NOTE: Detailed information on how to install in your lab can be find in installation guide command to deploy lxd feature is: #LXD deployment with HA Openstack ./deploy.sh -o newton -f lxd -t ha -l custom -s nosdn #LXD deployment with no HA Openstack ./deploy.sh -o newton -f lxd -t nonha -l custom -s nosdn
4. Using LXD with Openstack¶ Once you have finished installinf the JOID with LXD container hypervisor you can use the following to uplod your lxd image to the glance server that LXD can use. In order to do that you simply have to do the following: wget -O xenial-server-cloudimg-amd64-root.tar.gz https://cloud-images.ubuntu.com/xenial/current/xenial-server-cloudimg-amd64-root.tar.gz glance image-create –name=”Xenial LXC x86_64” –visibility=public –container-format=bare –disk-format=root-tar –property architecture=”x86_64” xenial-server-cloudimg-amd64-root.tar.gz After you upload the image to glance then you will be ready to go. If you have any questions please don’t hesitate to ask on the LXC mailing, #lxcontainers IRC channel on freenode
5. Release Data¶ Project JOID Repo/tag gerrit.opnfv.org/gerrit/joid.git stable/danube Release designation Danube release Release date April 01 2017 Purpose of the delivery Danube release 5.1. Deliverables¶ 5.1.1. Software deliverables¶ JOID based installer script files
6. Known Limitations, Issues and Workarounds¶ 6.1. Known issues¶ JIRA TICKETS: JIRA REFERENCE SLOGAN JIRA: YARDSTICK-325 Provide raw format yardstick vm image for nova-lxd scenario(OPNFV) JIRA: |
Khairy called the anti-hysteria kit the personification of a backward-thinking society. ― File pic
KUALA LUMPUR, May 18 ― Federal minister Khairy Jamaluddin took a swipe today at the group that produced the "anti-hysteria" kit, saying Malaysians should be more scientific and modern instead of remaining a society entrenched in superstitious beliefs.
Speaking at the launch of a computer coding programme for rural youths organised by Umno Youth, the youth and sports minister called the anti-hysteria kit the personification of a backward-thinking society.
"We want our society to become scientific, innovative. We want our youth to produce something new, not something like the anti-hysteria kit.
"The anti-hysteria kit is nonsense, absurd superstition and we don't want our society to be nonsensical," Khairy, who is also the wing's chief, said at the programme.
Khairy added the coding programme organised by Umno youth is an example of the kind of initiatives that should be encouraged in order to create a Malay society that was science-savvy.
"We don't want something like the anti-hysteria kit. That is the mark of a backward society," he said.
The kit produced by Universiti Malaysia Pahang (UMP) is sold for RM8,750 each to “ward off evil spirits”.
It was touted as being based on the Quran and hadith, though its makers did not elaborate how.
Some of the items used in the kit include chopsticks, salt, lime, vinegar, pepper spray, and formic acid.
The idea was ridiculed domestically and internationally.
The Institute of Islamic Understanding Malaysia’s (IKIM) Centre said the kit showed Malaysian Muslims were still unable to tell the difference between the supernatural and science.
Despite the criticism, UMP defended the kit, claiming that it was based on scientific research and has a proven track record in over 50 test cases.
It was also quick to offer its services and said the introduction of the kit was timely after a school in Kelantan had a mass hysteria attack.
The hysteria incident was reported worldwide. |
November 26, 2018
The FDA has issued a safety alert, cautioning that when the MS medicine Gilenya (Fingolimod®) is stopped, the disease can become much worse than before the medicine was started or while it was being taken. This MS worsening is rare but can result in permanent disability.
There have been 35 such cases reported to the FDA and in published medical literature in the eight years since fingolimod was approved in September 2010. These reports describe severely increased disability accompanied by the presence of multiple new lesions on magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) that occurred 2 to 24 weeks after fingolimod was stopped. Most patients experienced this worsening in the first 12 weeks after stopping. The severe increase in disability in these patients was more severe than typical MS relapses, and in cases where baseline disability was known, appeared unrelated to the patients’ prior disease state.
Providers should discuss with patients the potential risk of severe increase in disability reported in this alert. When fingolimod is stopped, patients should be monitored for evidence of an exacerbation of their MS and treated appropriately. Patients should be advised to seek immediate medical attention if they experience new or worsened symptoms of MS.
Gilenya (Fingolimod®) Prescribing Information
November 26, 2018
The package labeling for ocrelizumab has been updated with results from a Phase 3b randomized, open-label study which examined the concomitant use of ocrelizumab and several non-live vaccines in adults 18-55 years of age with relapsing forms of MS. Patients on ocrelizumab demonstrated an attenuated antibody response to tetanus toxoid-containing vaccine, pneumococcal polysaccharide, pneumococcal conjugate vaccines, and seasonal inactivated influenza vaccines. The impact of the observed attenuation on vaccine effectiveness in this patient population is unknown. It is recommended that all immunizations according to immunization guidelines at given at least 4 weeks prior to initiation of ocrelizumab for live or live-attenuated vaccines and, whenever possible, at least 2 weeks prior to initiation of ocrelizumab for non-live vaccines. Vaccination with live-attenuated or live vaccines is not recommended during treatment with ocrelizumab and until B cell repletion has occurred.
An additional warning regarding infants born to mothers receiving ocrelizumab treatment is included in the updated labeling. In these infants, live or live-attenuated vaccines should not be administered before confirming the recovery of B-cell counts as measured by CD19+ B-cells; depletion of B-cells may increase the risks from live or live-attenuated vaccines. Non-live vaccines may be administered prior to recovery from B-cell depletion, however vaccine immune response assessment should be considered to see if a protective immune response has been mounted.
Ocrevus (Ocrelizumab®) Prescribing Information
November 19, 2018
Recently, a generic equivalent for Ampyra has been approved by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA). This medication is used to help with walking and balance problems which can be associated with MS. The generic medication is called Dalfampridine. As an FDA approved generic, the FDA ensures the generic medication provides the same clinical benefit and is as safe and effective as the brand-name medicine that it duplicates. A generic medication must have the same active ingredients, safety, effectiveness, strength, quality and benefits as the brand-name medication it copies.
Here are the important things you need to know; (1) Please do not start taking Dalfampridine until you have finished all of your Ampyra. (2) The Dalfampridine tablet may look different than the Ampyra tablet. (3) You should not feel any different with this change in product. (4) Please continue to take your Dalfampridine as instructed by your healthcare provider. (5) Call your VA pharmacy or healthcare provider if you have any questions or problems with this change in your medication.
September 26, 2018
The National MS Society has a quarterly magazine for people affected by MS. The fall 2018 issue has a great article, "At the Front", highlighting Veterans with MS and the VA healthcare system.
September 7, 2018
Dimethyl fumarate (DMF) has been associated with lymphopenia in clinical trials. To date, there have been five cases of PML in MS patients treated with DMF with an additional 14 cases reported in Europe where psoriasis patients were treated with a mixture of fumaric acid esters. Notably, 13 out of these 19 patients had grade 3 lymphopenia (ALC < 500-200/mm3). An integrated analysis of phase 2b/3/long-term extension studies of DMF in MS (N = 2,470) was conducted to characterize ALC profiles (Fox RJ, et al. Neurol Clin Pract. 2016 Jun;6(3):220-229). Mean absolute lymphocyte counts (ALC) decreased by 30% during the first year and then plateaued, remaining above the lower limit of normal (LLN). The majority of patients will develop low ALC in the first 9-10 months of DMF therapy (Baharnoori M, et al. Mult Scler Relat Disord. 2018 Feb;20:51-57., Khatri BO, et al. Mult Scler Rel Disord. 2015 Jul;4(4):377-379., and Gold R, et al. Mult Scler. 2017 Feb;23(2):253-265.). Current product labeling for DMF in the US recommends laboratory monitoring at baseline and every 6-12 months, European labeling recommends monitoring be conducted quarterly. Given the current evidence regarding the development of ALC within the first year of therapy and potential PML development, the DMF Criteria for Use (CFU) has been updated with the following monitoring statement; “Patients should have a CBC with differential at baseline and monitored quarterly for the first year of therapy and then every 6-12 months as clinically indicated by wbc or lymphocyte count.”
September 4, 2018
Team Northwest 2018, comprised of 11 Veteran athletes representing the VA Puget Sound Health Care System in Washington state, brought home 21 medals from the 2018 National Veterans Wheelchair Games, July 30 – August 4, 2018 in Orlando, Florida. To learn more, visit the VA Puget Sound website.
Disclaimer: Links are provided as a convenience and for informational purposes only. They do not constitute an endorsement or an approval by MSCoE of any of the products, services, or opinions of the organization. MSCoE bears no responsibility for the accuracy, legality, or content of the external site or for that of subsequent links. Contact the external site for answers to questions regarding its content. |
From the party that's constantly hollering about Freedumz!, this is hypocrisy at its worst. Nationwide,of Republicans say that Islam should be illegal in the United States, according to a new PPP poll provided exclusively to Daily Kos Elections. Nearly half——say Christianity should be our official religion.
So what about that pesky freedom of religion guaranteed by the Constitution? You know, that whole "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof?" Well, PPP asked about that too. And guess what? Just one in 20 Republicans admit to wanting to actually eliminate freedom of religion, even though so many of them had just espoused positions that would do exactly that!
Since we already know they don't want freedom of religion for all people, we must interpret this to mean they only want freedom of religion for some people—presumably themselves, at least. This dangerous attitude—freedom for me, but not for thee—is exactly what the Constitution should be used to guard against. It is, in a nutshell, un-American, and yet, as history sadly shows, all too American, indeed.
Lest you think this is solely confined to Republicans, smaller numbers of both Democrats and independents also admitted to wanting to outlaw Islam (15 percent of Democrats, 20 percent of independents) and make Christianity our official religion (28 and 24 percent, respectively).
Overall, for all respondents, the share that supports freedom of religion in deed, not just in word, barely clears the halfway mark: Just 53 percent of voters oppose making Christianity the official religion of the United States, and only 56 percent think Islam should be legal. We're lucky the First Amendment was enshrined into our founding principles so long ago, because quite a lot of people—but especially Republicans—are eager to chuck it. |
I have tried (and failed!) to learn to play jazz more times than I can count.
It’s a dense and intimidating art form, and most of the instructional materials available read like a novel with the first 80 pages torn out.
So while I am far from well-versed in the ways of jazz music, in the past year I’ve made some solid inroads.
I’m amazed that what follows wasn’t driven into my thick skull from all angles when I first started trying to make sense of jazz.
1. Jazz is all about the timing.
If your time isn’t 100% on, you’re not going to sound jazzy. Developing a swinging groove & playing behind the beat is HARD. Learn to play with a metronome click on 2 & 4.
2. Jazz is about playing the changes.
You hear this phrase thrown around a lot, but pause for a moment to think about what it really means: you have to be hyper-aware of the chord being played (and the ones about to be played) and make appropriate note choices.
3. This means the biggest part of learning jazz is increasing your speed of musical thought.
You can train yourself to do this. iRealb is a fantastic app that’ll let you loop some tiny section of a song nice & slow.
4. Build up, don’t whittle down.
Ignore those asshats that insist that knowing all the modes is the way to go. Instead, focus on knowing what the notes are in each chord (the “chord tones”), particularly the 3rd & the 7th.
The root, the 5th, & the 9th all sound great too, but jazzers rarely resolve a line to the root–that’s more of a rock & blues thing to do. It’s possible that your ear is used to this sound and you’re playing it often, hampering your overall jazziness.
5. If you can make a chord tone of one chord move a half step to a chord tone of the next chord, you will sound jazzy.
For example, when you play F over G7 (that’s the 7 of G7), then play E as the chords change to C (now you’re playing the 3 of C), that’s playing the changes, and it sounds jazzy.
Get good enough at that and your solo will imply the chords so strongly that you’ll lead the listener’s ear along the changes, even if you’re playing unaccompanied.
6. Jazz is a modular music–you’re remixing the same chunks all the damned time.
The most common modular chunk of jazz harmony is the ii-V-I, but as you learn a few tunes, you’re going to see some others too.
7. Spend LOTS of time stealing from others.
Transcribe lines from players you like (and make sure you understand how the notes relate to the chords). Learn licks from the Charlie Parker Omnibook and the Aebersold ii-V-I book. Make them your own.
There’s so much more to be learned from this than you might guess…
8. Create a licktionary of all the lines you steal and/or create.
Write it in standard notation and it’ll improve your reading too. Practice finding them all over the neck, in all the keys…
9. Learn it in all 12 keys.
Once you have a line you like, learn it in all 12 keys. Being able to throw it down in all keys is massively helpful. And it goes a long way towards increasing your speed of musical thought.
10. Studying jazz will teach you almost everything you need to know to play in most styles.
Even if you don’t get to be very good at jazz, it still teaches you how to play successfully in just about every style––essentially everything but metal and classical.
But ain’t nobody going to pay you to play those styles anyway.
[note: I expanded this post from an answer I wrote over on Quora.] |
Previously by Chris Sullivan: Rome Didn’t Fall in a Day
In 1972 a wonderful little book was published. It arrived with little fanfare yet somehow it has managed to survive for 25 years. Most people have never read it. These are the same people who today are asking questions about what went wrong with America. These are the same people who today find that their plans for the future, no matter how hard they have worked to make those plans a reality, have vanished into thin air. These are the same people who are working 3 jobs to keep what one job secured for them 20 years ago…….These people are you and I, the working middle class, the "We the People."
The book is titled None Dare Call It Conspiracy, and was authored by Gary Allen with Larry Abraham. It was considered very controversial 23 years ago. In retrospect it appears to have been a blueprint for the future of America. That America is perhaps where we are all living today.
If you doubt the possibility of a conspiracy to bring America to it’s knees and perhaps install a totalitarian dictatorship through the conversion of our republic into a democracy you need only look to the changes in our laws. Gary Allen provided his readers with fourteen signposts on the road to totalitarianism. They were compiled by Dr. Warren Carroll, and Mike Djordjevich, a refugee from Yugoslavian communism. The list is in no particular order. However, nothing on the list existed in American law at the time the list was compiled.
Read it now, experience it for yourself. Any one of the listed items would be a clear warning that the totalitarian state is very near, and a significant number of perhaps five or more could possibly suggest that the freedom we have once enjoyed and the preservation of our Great Republic has been lost.
14 SIGNPOSTS TO SLAVERY
1. Restrictions on taking money out of the country and on the establishment or retention of a foreign bank account by an American citizen.
2. Abolition of private ownership of hand guns.
3. Detention of individuals without judicial process.
4. Requirements that private financial transactions be keyed to social security numbers or other government identification so that government records of these transactions can be fed into a computer.
5. Use of compulsory education laws to forbid attendance at presently existing private schools.
6. Compulsory non-military service.
7. Compulsory psychological treatment for non-government workers or public school children.
8. An official declaration that anti-communist (Patriot) organizations are subversive and subsequent legal action taken to suppress them.
9. Laws limiting the number of people allowed to meet in a private home.
10. Any significant change in passport regulations to make passports more difficult to obtain.
11. Wage and price controls, especially in a non-wartime situation.
12. Any kind of compulsory registration with the government of where individuals work.
13. Any attempt to restrict freedom of movement within the United States.
14. Any attempt to make a new major law by executive decree (that is, actually put into effect, not merely authorized as by existing executive orders.)
President Nixon invoked numbers 1, 11 and 14. As of January 1,1972, banks must report to the government any deposit or withdrawal over $5,000. That number has since been reduced to $3,000. Any purchase over $10,000 made in cash must also be reported to the federal government. Clinton has done the same via Executive Orders.
Courts have in some instances ordered individuals without bank accounts to open one under threat of incarceration through charges of Civil contempt…..
Reprinted with permission from Different Bugle.
The Best of Chris Sullivan |
Heroic have managed to secure a spot in the DreamHack Valencia playoffs after beating both Misfits and KPI by 16-8 scorelines.
MODDII's Heroic are through to DH Valencia playoffs
We caught up with Andreas "MODDII" Fridh to get to know his impressions on matters concerning Heroic's matches, their map pool and the preparation for Valencia.
I'd like to start to talk about your first match, in which you lost just two rounds in the second half after taking a three-round lead on the CT side. What are your thoughts on the match?
We felt pretty confident on Overpass. We talked about the potential maps before the game, and I said to my team that it would be a huge surprise if they put Nuke or Overpass in the pool. So when they picked Overpass I was so surprised, and even though we struggled a bit on the CT side, I was pretty confident. We just got six rounds as CT and then we managed to close it out as Terrorists. I knew our T side was pretty good.
Do you feel confident on all maps, or are there any you would prefer to avoid?
We have one permanent ban, I don't really feel confident on that one. But then we have six maps we are pretty OK on. Of course I prefer our stronger maps, such as Nuke and Overpass, but I feel pretty confident in the maps we have.
In your second match, you met KPI for first place in the group. You easily won the match, but the Spanish team put up a fight. What do you think of them as a team?
I was surprised. We practiced against them quite a few times, and they didn't seem that good, I'm sorry to say it. But here, on LAN, they gave us a fight, of course, we needed to focus and play seriously. They got some good headshots, so I'm surprised.
I know you guys did not have that much time to prepare, but how was your preparation for Valencia?
We actually lost pretty early in Cologne, so we used those days there to do a quick bootcamp, that was basically our preparation. Then we had the Malmö qualifier before coming here, and we took that as a practice as well, even though we lost. It sucked, but we have had enough preparation.
What are your goals for this tournament?
Right now, after qualifying for the playoffs, my goal to reach the final, of course. In a final anything can happen and only good teams can make it, but I want to win. That's my goal.
Snappi said in Cologne that he was feeling pretty confident about the team and the way it worked, despite some mistakes. How do you feel about it?
I could not agree more with him. Our players have good work ethic, so we're doing fine, and even though we can lose a game, we are able to sit down and discuss our mistakes, so I'm super happy.
Who else do you see as favourites for this tournament?
I think CLG are going to do well. They were good at their last event and had that super overtime versus fnatic, for example. They have had some pretty decent results lately. I hope NiP beat CLG so we do not have to face them in the semi-finals. In my eyes, the dark horse will be CLG. |
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