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UPDATE July 26, 2017
Vancouver Police are requesting the public;s assistance to find a missing man who has not been seen in over a week.
Twenty-nine-year-old Joel Arkinson has not been heard from since June 1st, 2017, and his lack of contact with friends and family is out of character and cause for concern.
Mr. Arkinson is white, 6’5″ tall, and weighs approximately 225 pounds. He usually wears glasses and often has a heavy beard. He is believed to be carrying a large backpack.
He told his family that he intended to go camping in a tent. However, these plans were not confirmed and his destination is not known.
Anyone with information on Joel Arkinson’s whereabouts, or who can confirm that he is safe, is asked to contact the Vancouver Police. |
For anyone who discovered Jim Gaffigan through his immortal “Hot Pockets’’ routine, it will come as absolutely no surprise that the comedian really, really likes food. In fact, he loves eating so much it’s the subject of his new book, “Food: A Love Story.’’
Gaffigan is bringing his book tour to the Wilbur Theatre on Wednesday night and, surprisingly, the comedian turned author has a lot to say about the New England food scene in his latest offering.
For example, the self-proclaimed “eatie’’ (he doesn’t like the term “foodie’’) pokes fun at Boston’s obsession with Dunkin’ Donuts. The chain gets its own section within the chapter “Doughnuts: The Circle of Life.’’
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Gaffigan calls Dunkin’ the “favorite son’’ of New England.
“It seems like New Englanders view that doughnut shop like a relative or a childhood friend. ‘Dunkie’s is awesome. It’s wicked awesome!’ They are so passionate and vocal at times, it makes me question whether Dunkin’ Donuts is making doughnuts or playing for the Red Sox.’’
Jim Gaffigan, the Nostradamus of food? The comedian writes in “Food: A Love Story’’ that he predicted the coming of Dunkin’s “glazed donut breakfast sandwich’’ during his 2006 comedy special. —James Scherer/Dunkin' Brands, Inc./Associated Press
“Dunkie’s’’ may actually owe Gaffigan a bit of credit. The comedian writes how, in a way, he came up with the idea for one of the company’s more questionable offerings: the glazed doughnut breakfast sandwich.
Gaffigan claims in “Food’’ that he predicted the eventual creation of the item, which for some reason combines a bacon, egg, and cheese sandwich with a glazed doughnut.
“I came up with this silly concept for my 2006 comedy special ‘Beyond the Pale,’ and then in 2012 Dunkin’ Donuts made me a sort of food prophet by introducing the very food item that I had hyperbolically predicted. I wasn’t surprised really. Dunkin’ Donuts is only responding to the ongoing public desire for innovation and variety in our food. It’s the new American Manifest Destiny.’’
Gaffigan knows New Englanders love their “seabugs,’’ also known as shellfish —Michele McDonald for The Boston Globe
Aside from Dunkin’, other aspects of the Boston food scene also make their way into Gaffigan’s book.
The comedian lists the city—as well as most of the eastern seaboard—under the “Seabugland’’ section of his “Food Map’’ of America.
Gaffigan writes how, for local residents, loving shellfish is virtually synonymous with being a New Englander.
“Shellfish are an integral part of the northeastern identity. Whenever someone does a bad Boston accent, it’s either to say ‘wicked’ or ‘lobstah.’ Lobster is as much a part of the New England personality as is the hating on all things New York City.’’
If you want to hear Gaffigan berate Boston’s food scene even more, or just want a few laughs, the comedian has a pair of performances at the Wilbur on Wednesday night,which will be followed by a book signing.
Hot Pockets aren’t included, though. |
The city’s infamous rubber rooms have rebounded.
In one of the “reassignment centers,” 16 exiled educators sit in a city Department of Education building in Long Island City, Queens, including a dozen packed into one room — where they do virtually no work.
They listen to music, do crossword puzzles, chat — and as this exclusive Post photo reveals, doze on the taxpayer’s dime.
The rules forbid beach chairs and air mattresses, but not nap time. The teacher sprawled on the floor, pulled a wool hat over his eyes to shut out the fluorescent lights and slept.
Others prop up two chairs to recline or just lay their heads on the table. “It’s gone right back to the way it was in the old days, an old-fashioned rubber room,” one banished teacher said.
Despite the photographic evidence and teacher testimony to the contrary, the city denies the existence of the derided holding pens. “There are no more rubber rooms,” DOE officials told The Post last week, saying reassigned staffers are given “administrative duties.”
In 2010, the DOE and the teachers union trumpeted a major agreement to close the centers holding more than 700 idled educators accused of misconduct or incompetence.
Many teachers settled charges by paying fines and finally returned to classrooms, while those still expelled were scattered across the five boroughs. But the rubber room deal is routinely violated. “No one pays any attention to the agreement,” said Betsy Combier, a veteran paralegal who helps defend teachers.
The DOE refused to say how many removed teachers and other tenured staffers remain in limbo, but sources estimate 200 to 400 get paid while awaiting disciplinary hearings. Their salaries total $15 million to $20 million a year.
The Long Island City castoffs begin their day by reading newspapers, then turn on the radio. They get 45 minutes to leave for lunch. They chat and sometimes exercise to “relieve the stress.”
While the city promised to keep removed educators busy, the Queens exiles say they only occasionally oblige requests to do menial tasks like stuffing folders or making copies. Others refuse to do such work, calling it “demeaning.”
They mainly just kill time to get through a six-hour, 20-minute day.
“I’m so exhausted from being in this place doing nothing,” one said.
Several teachers on the payroll have been benched for up to five years due to a stunning bureaucratic breakdown. The 2010 deal required the independent arbitrators who conduct termination trials to issue a decision 30 days after a hearing, so that vindicated teachers could return to work and bad ones could be axed.
But decisions still come months — or even years — late. The DOE says it can’t enforce the rule.
“They’re just letting me sit here,” said a teacher removed from the classroom nearly five years ago on charges of physically abusing children, which he denies. His trial ended four years ago. He makes about $70,000 a year.
Social Studies teacher David Suker has sat in the rubber room since September 2015, even though a state Supreme Court judge overturned his termination. Suker, an Army vet who taught at-risk kids in The Bronx, was found guilty of failing to immediately report his arrest in the Occupy Wall Street protests but was finally fined just $7,000.
After The Post asked why the DOE had not put Suker back to work, officials on Friday assigned him to a school as a substitute. |
Newborns cry, but not like this.
Thirteen months ago, Courtney Castonguay held her daughter Emma in her arms as the baby cried incessantly.
A "high-pitched" cry, Castonguay said, different from the other babies around her at a Hamilton hospital.
Castonguay tried everything in her power to comfort her little girl, but she knew only one thing could.
"I felt like the worst mother in the world," Castonguay said in an interview. "She was suffering because of my choice."
Courtney Castonguay, Emma's mother, was once addicted to opioids. Her daughter, born with NAS, is now doing well after treatment. (CBC)
Castonguay, 21 at the time, suffered too — tormented with guilt and fear.
She was addicted to opioids at the time, having used them regularly since high school.
During her pregnancy, she was taking hydromorphone and fentanyl, but was too afraid and ashamed to tell her doctor.
"I hid it the whole time. The entire nine months," Castonguay said. "I was scared she was going to get taken away from me."
Once she saw how sick Emma was, she told doctors, who quickly confirmed the baby was born with an addiction. But Emma has since been treated and is doing well.
Hundreds of NAS babies
Emma is among hundreds of Canadian infants hospitalized last year with neonatal abstinence syndrome (NAS).
They are the small, innocent victims of an opioid crisis, which policymakers and health-care officials are struggling to contain.
Between April 2016 and March 31, 2017, the Canadian Institute for Health Information (CIHI) identified 1,846 babies admitted to hospital after their mothers used opioids during pregnancy.
The tally does not include Quebec, which keeps its own statistics.
More than half the cases — 988 — were in Ontario, where CIHI has tracked a steady increase in NAS since 2012.
The numbers back up what health-care providers have been witnessing first-hand.
Taking a toll on health care
At St. Joseph's Healthcare in Hamilton, social worker Sarah Simpson says the neonatal unit, where she has worked for 20 years, used to treat approximately one baby for NAS every six months.
Now the unit is treating between two and five babies for NAS at all times.
Social worker Sarah Simpson says the neonatal unit at St. Joseph's Healthcare in Hamilton used to treat approximately one baby for NAS every six months. (CBC)
Emma, like other babies with NAS, receive morphine therapy to slowly wean them off the opioids that created the addiction. Treatment in hospital takes anywhere from four to five days, to six to eight weeks.
Hospital staff continue to monitor babies with NAS and their parents for 18 months after birth.
"It's really difficult for the staff," Simpson said in an interview, adding that the babies require "constant care," at a time when parents aren't always available to stay with the newborns in the hospital.
The parents also need support.
"There's a lot of shame. There's a lot of guilt," Simpson said. "We're not here to judge."
The rising numbers of NAS babies are stretching hospital resources thin, and Simpson would like to see the establishment of a centre similar to Fir Square Combined Care Unit at Vancouver's B.C. Women's Hospital.
The centre is the first in Canada to care for women who use substances and their newborns exposed to substances, in a single unit.
Dr. Maya Nader, who specializes in addictions at St. Michael's Hospital in Toronto, says the increase in NAS is a burden on the health-care system, requiring more hospital beds, pediatricians and nurses.
"I'm worried because, in general, there is too much opioid use in the population," Nader said in an interview.
Dr. Maya Nader, who specializes in addictions at St. Michael's Hospital in Toronto, says the increase in NAS is a burden on the health-care system. (CBC)
She attributes the higher rate of NAS in Ontario to its larger population and higher rates of opioid use.
Looking for solutions
Ontario Health Minister Eric Hoskins says the government is addressing the opioid crisis, but "there's always more work to be done."
Ontario Health Minister Eric Hoskins says government staff are studying possible reasons behind an increase in NAS cases. (Darryl Dyck/The Canadian Press)
In an interview, he said ministry staff will be investigating why far more babies are born with NAS in Ontario than other provinces.
"We've got tremendous expertise on this issue. I'm confident we can not only have a clearer determination of what the reasons might be, but what specific support and interventions would prove helpful," Hoskins said.
Emma's recovery
Support is what got Castonguay and Emma through.
Now 13 months old, Emma is happy and healthy. After early struggles, she's at a healthy weight and her recovery is ahead of schedule.
"She's come so far, I can't even believe it," Castonguay said.
But it wasn't easy.
"You've got to have the right support. Some people can't handle it. It's just too hard to watch a baby go through that. Especially your own baby."
Castonguay is grateful to have received the support she needed and hopes others will get it as well, as the opioid crisis worsens and more babies are born with NAS.
"I got lucky and she's an amazing little girl." |
Introduction
Recently, NASA published their press release which mentions the unique possibility to drive around on Mars. I couldn't help myself and right away clicked on the link that lead to an amusing interactive experience where I was able to drive the rover around, watch video streaming from its cameras in real-time and even find out the specs of the vehicle. However, what shocked me the most was that this has all been done using the Blend4Web engine - and not Unity.
Why was I so surprised? Even two yeas ago (or more) there were publications about NASA creating a similar demo using Unity. However, it didn't get passed the beta stage, and it looks like the space agency had moved on from Unity. It is interesting that the programmers of such a large organization chose to discontinue the time-invested project and begin from scratch. It took a little time but I was able to find the above-mentioned Mars rover app made in Unity . Honestly, it looks like an unfinished game. The scene loads slowly (especially the terrain), functionality is primitive - you can only drive, the overall picture is of horrible quality.
What's the Deal
WebGL Roadmap
They're Waiting
Background
We all know wonderful games can be made with Unity and its portfolio is full of hundreds of quality projects. So, what's the deal?The reason is that Unity is seriously lagging behind when it comes to their WebGL exporter. The first alarm rang when Google Chrome developers declared NPAPI deprecated . This browser's global market share is too significant for any web developer to just ignore. You can find a lot of "advice" on using a magic option, chrome://flags/#enable-npapi, online. However, in September 2015 this loophole will disappear. Creating games and web visualizations is an enterprise and nobody likes losing customers. Earlier, downloading the Unity plug-in was not as big of deal as it was with Flash - but now the situation has become completely different. The web plug-in can not be used anymore, while Unity's WebGL exporter is still in its infancy. Developers of all kinds caused uproar, requiring the Unity team to proactively respond. Finally, Unity 5 has been released with WebGL support but only as a preview. Half a year has passed and the situation is not any better. They even came up with an "ingenious" method to check the user's browser and then recommend using Unity in another browser. Unfortunately, and for obvious reasons, it is not always reasonable. And still, what's happening with Unity WebGL? Why is there still no stable version available? What are the prospects? These questions are of much interest to many developers. I'm not a techie, so it's difficult for me to understand Unity's issues in this area, but what I've found online is making me sad.The official Unity forum has a thread called " WebGL Roadmap ". A team representative explains the future of WebGL in Unity. I have looked through this text thoroughly and it convinced me that the bright future Unity keeps promising is still in the far removed distance. WebGL should work in all browsers on all platforms including mobile ones by default. It's not there. If you happen to successfully compile your game for WebGL, strike out mobile devices from the list. The reasons are clear: Unity's WebGL has catastrophically large memory consumption and bad performance. Yes, a top-of-the-line device can still manage to run the game at decent speed, but a cheaper one will run it as slow as a turtle. And forget about hoping your project will work on desktops with ease. Browsers are the programs which eat all of a computer's free memory, and the half-finished Unity WebGL build often causes crashes and closes browser tabs (especially in Chrome). There are some problems with audio. I personally tried to export a simple game for WebGL, and got croaking noise as the main character moved. The sound literally jammed and I could not fix it. The reason is poor performance, but other engines still work somehow... Forget about in-game video. MovieTexture class is simply not supported for WebGL. As an alternative, the devs are suggesting to use HTML5 capabilities directly. Network problems. System.IO.Sockets and UnityEngine.Network classes do not work for WebGL and will never work due to security issues. I haven't enumerated all issues, but this doesn't answer the question - when will it start working? Alas, Unity devs' comments are unclear, obscure and don't include a specific timeline. Although I did find something: "We are not committing to specific release dates for any of these features, and we may decide not to go ahead with some of these at all."They are waiting for WebGL 2.0, which will be based on OpenGL ES 3.0. The future version, Unity 5.2, is planned to have an export option for the new API. However, I'm not sure that browsers will work with it - now WebGL 2.0 is available only as an experimental option. They are waiting for WebAssembly , which is very promising but has just started being discussed. Nobody can even guess the date when it will be implemented. I'm sorry, but if the problem can only be fixed, as they say, by upcoming third-party technologies, then maybe the problem lies in Unity WebGL itself? Unity is a convenient, popular and cross-platform engine, an awesome tool for making games and I love it a lot. Still, this is a tool which can no longer be used for the web. The most annoying fact is that the future holds too much uncertainty. You may say, "you are a pessimist!". No, I'm just a realist, just like the NASA guys. This is the answer to the title of this article: "Why NASA Switched from Unity to Blend4Web". It's simple: Unity's WebGL is not ready... and will it ever be? "We are not committing to specific release dates..." So what about Blend4Web? I can only congratulate the developers with such a conclusive win in the field of WebGL - NASA's app has been showcased at the opening of the WebGL section on SIGGRAPH 2015 - which means competitors have no intention of waiting.This post is a translation of the original article (in Russian) by Andrei Prakhov aka Prand, who is the author of three books about Blender and a Unity developer with several indie games released. |
Weiss was creeping through a construction zone at midnight, with a makeshift bomb in her hand. She was going to have to plant the device close enough to the garrison to completely level the place. If any guards saw her, she was dead. All in all, she'd had worse days.
"How's it going Weiss?" Ruby came in over the comms, since she and the other two commandos were back in the forest, watching to make sure no one in the garrison came out and saw her.
"Fine." Weiss whispered back, feeling the need to be quiet, despite her knowledge that no one outside her helmet could hear her unless she wanted them to.
"You sound nervous." Blake pointed out, clearly having a good time with Weiss's nervousness.
"I'm just walking through a construction yard with a bomb filled with high explosives, and if I get seen, I'll be shot. So yeah, I'm pretty fucking nervous."" Weiss shot back, not in the mood to be messed with.
"Ah don't worry Weiss, if they shoot you just try and shield yourself with the bomb. You'll complete the objective, and you won't even feel it!" Yang entered the conversation a little too cheerfully, a hint of laughter in her voice.
"Yang I will come back there and shove this bomb so far up your-." Was as far as Weiss got before Ruby interjected, as Yang roared with laughter.
"Okay guys, let's calm down. You got this Weiss." Ruby said, before the comms went silent.
Weiss looked around as silence fell once again around her, suddenly becoming more nervous. Fuck, I kind of miss them now.
Weiss approached the edge of the construction site, where it was closest to the garrison. Gently setting the bomb down, she began to dig a hole to place the bomb in. She was worried at first that the dirt would suppress most of the blast, but Yang had assured them that she "had filled that with enough of the good stuff to put a large crater in this dirt planet." Weiss hoped that she didn't fill it with that much explosives, since the team would have to be relatively close by to detonate it.
Satisfied with the depth of the hole she had dug, she gingerly lowered the bomb into it, before covering it with a tarp.
Weiss began to sneak away from the bomb, ready to get back to her team.
The sun had risen, and Junior had begun to inspect his troops. A smile spread across Blake's face, as her crosshair settled on the back of his head, ready to take the shot. Despite Weiss placing the bomb, Team RWBY had elected to snipe Junior, and then blow the place to kingdom come. As it had worked out, Junior didn't sleep in the garrison, so they would have had to wait anyway.
"I have the shot." She reported matter-of-factly, waiting for the command she so desperately wanted to hear.
"Take." Was all Ruby said, as Blake's smile widened and her finger squeezed down on the trigger.
A red puff of vapor escaped from the back of his head as he lurched forward, his blood leaving a nice mark on the front of the garrison.
"And goodbye garrison." Ruby remarked happily as her thumb pressed down on the detonator.
Nothing happened.
"Oh fuck, nonono." Ruby said, pressing the trigger repeatedly.
"Wish we had brought the E-Web." Weiss said, referring to the standard issue heavy repeating blaster that most commando squads carried. RWBY had decided against bringing it, but were now unequipped to deal with the high amount of enemy troopers coming towards them.
"Yeah, definitely should have brought the E-Web." She remarked as blaster fire began to fly into the trees, RWBY taking cover.
"This is RWBY actual, we require immediate evac, I repeat, immediate evac!" Ruby began barking into her comlink as Blake began to fire more rounds into the approaching onslaught of enemies. She decided to take out one of Junior's lieutenants, the one dressed in white. Her head snapped back as a plasma bolt entered her skull cavity, exiting with a spray of blood. Blake quickly took the sniper attachment off her gun, realizing that she needed to be using her default rifle to deal with the swarm of enemies.
"What the fuck happened here Yang?!" Ruby yelled, shooting at the horde of droids and mercenaries before ducking behind a tree, dodging several blaster bolts.
"This was not my fault, that charge was packed perfectly!" Yang complained as she slapped on her anti-armor attachment, firing grenades into her enemies.
Ruby began rapidly pressing the detonator again, her frustration growing. "Stupid. Piece. Of. Fucking. SHIT!" At her last obscenity, Ruby slammed the detonator into the tree trunk.
KABOOM!
The girls were immediately knocked down, as what had once been a garrison was instantly disintegrated by Yang's bomb.
Miltia Malachite found herself face down in the dirt, her previous place of occupation having just been sent 50 meters in the sky. The droids were dead, as were all the mercs. The only reason she was alive was because she had sprinted towards the forest immediately, but at an angle, so she could flank whoever had assassinated her boss. Poor Junior. And Melanie too. She had seen her twin go down, probably sniped by the same asshole who had killed Junior. Tears began to well in her eyes, but she shoved the emotions aside. I can grieve later, now is the time for vengeance.
Gripping her custom rifle, she rose unsteadily to her feet. All she could hear was a piercing ringing, and if the sharp pain in her left ear was any indicator, she had blown an eardrum. Feeling a wet sensation on the right side of her face, she brushed it with her fingers, coming back with blood on her fingertips. Guess I blew them both.
She began to walk towards the treeline, limping. She looked at her left leg, and saw a piece of metal stuck into the outside of her thigh. Shrapnel from a droid. Perfect.
Grimacing from the pain, she began to approach the forest, feeling not pain, nor sadness, but only a hunger for vengeance. After it was all done, then she would feel pain.
Yang groaned as she lay on her back, silence falling on the battlefield in the aftermath of the deafening explosion. She sat up, shaking her head.
Weiss was the first one to stand, albeit shakily. She looked at Yang, and then Ruby, before just shaking her head disapprovingly.
"I don't know whose fault that was, and I don't really care, but just know that whoever it was, you suck." Weiss said, her remark met by laughter from her friends.
"Well I guess we're done here." Ruby said, beginning to rise from behind the tree where she had been knocked on her ass.
It was then that Yang heard the most disgusting sound she had ever had the misfortune of hearing. It was the sound of a Verpine Shatter Rifle slug penetrating armor, and entering flesh.
It was the sound that accompanied Weiss falling to the ground, completely silent.
"Enemy contact!" Ruby barked, as Yang rushed to Weiss. She had fallen on her back and Yang struggled to get her helmet off.
Yang was barely aware of plasma fire streaming from Blake's location, and it seemed like more than necessary, but that wasn't important. What was important was saving the life of her teammate.
"The medpack. Get the fucking medpack!" Yang yelled as she tried to stop the bleeding. The round had entered through Weiss's side, where the armor was much thinner, to allow for range of motion.
"Talk to me here Weiss. Where are you right now?" Yang said, trying to keep her teammate focused, trying to keep her mind off the blood because fuck that was a lot of blood.
"I'm on some shithole planet." Weiss wheezed, her breathing clearly impaired.
"Round entered her side, may have broken some ribs, possibly punctured a lung." Yang stated as Ruby joined her, medpack in hand. Blake was standing, keeping watch for any other surprises the team wasn't ready for.
Yang put pressure on the wound, feeling for any breaks, as Weiss yelped in pain.
"Yeah, definitely broken ribs. This punctured lungs gonna screw us if we aren't careful though." Yang said, holding her hand out, palm up. "Bio-foam."
Ruby handed her the bio-foam spray can, which was designed to fill holes in the body. Yang angled it into the wound, hoping to spray enough to stop the bleeding, but not enough that she filled the lung with the foam. If she did that, Weiss could suffocate.
"Sorry princess, but this one's gonna hurt." She said apologetically, spraying the foam, as Ruby got back on the comms.
"This is RWBY actual, I need that evac now! We have wounded, repeat, we have wounded." She went silent, before nodding.
"Evac's in the clearing with the farmhouse, we need to move." She relayed to her team, standing up.
"Come on Weiss, we need to move." Yang said, lifting Weiss up, and draping Weiss's left arm around her shoulders. They began to move towards the clearing, Blake walking behind them, rifle ready to take anyone on.
In the clearing was the greatest sight of Yang's life. A LAAT/i gunship, ready to extract them. They got over there as fast as they could, Weiss's armor stained with even more blood. There was a medic on board, and as soon as they were on he began to take a look at Weiss, while Yang recounted what happened. Blake and Ruby sat down as the gunship took off, happy to be off this planet.
"You're gonna be alright Weiss. You're gonna be just fine." Yang reassured her, as Weiss did something very strange.
She smiled.
"You know, this is what pirates do, right?" Pyrrha said, and Jaune began to laugh.
"No, we maintain a sense of style and personal hygiene that pirates could only help to match." Their pilot, Redwing, replied, causing Jaune to howl with laughter. Nora was laughing as well, and Ren was completely still, as if he was asleep.
Pyrrha was right though, they were partaking in pirate strategy. Team JNPR was sitting in a disguised commercial freighter, waiting for another disguised commercial freighter to jump into the system, so that they could open fire on them. The freighter had been associated with a large criminal organization that was plundering Republic trade routes, among other illegal activities. JNPR had been sent to take them out of the equation and obtain as much information on the organization as possible. Using pirate strategy on pirates.
And so they sat, waiting for their mark to enter the system, as they had been for the past two hours.
"Are we even sure that they'll come into this system?" Nora asked, having starting to grow impatient roughly one minute into the operation.
"Well intel said they would be, so take that as you will." Redwing stated, causing Nora to groan. They were only a week or so into the war, and Intel had already gained a reputation of being spotty at best.
JNPR had been drifting for a while now, cracking jokes while Nora continued to play heavy metal music. It was all very much against regulations, but Redwing seemed like a relaxed enough pilot, and Jaune didn't really care.
Jaune was seated next to Pyrrha, helmet off, also against regulations, with a smile plastered across his face. His armor was still covered with scorch marks from the battle on Geonosis, which was annoying Pyrrha for some reason. All through their training they had maintained clean armor, and since his was white, Jaune had always worked exceptionally hard to make sure it was spotless. But now it was as if he didn't care.
Nora was across from Jaune and Pyrrha, her fingers drumming to the beat of the music she had chosen. Ren sat next to her, his helmet off just like the rest of them, sitting completely still, eyes closed. If Pyrrha didn't know any better, she would assume he had fallen asleep. But that wasn't the case, since for as long as they had been a squad Pyrrha had known Ren to be like this. Always quiet before a mission, but when he needed to, he would switch on into the ruthless killing machine he was born to be.
"So Red, you do this type of thing often?" Jaune asked, trying to get to know the pilot more.
"Are you asking if I've flown a disguised freighter so I can attack other disguised freighters and send in a commando squad to board them?" Redwing said, pausing for a moment as if thinking about the missions he had flown in the past week. "No, can't say I have."
"Well no time like the present huh?" Jaune said, still smiling. This was a side of him that Pyrrha had never seen before. Back in training Jaune was quiet, and unsure of his abilities. But during Geonosis he had truly emerged as a leader, and shown confidence. It would seem this new Jaune was here to stay, and Pyrrha had no problem with that. He is rather cute when he's being confident. Pyrrha quickly snapped out of those thoughts, choosing to focus on the mission. There would be time after the mission for her to reflect on these feelings of hers.
"Contact about to jump into the system. Specs match the freighter we're looking for." Redwing stated, and the mood became serious.
"Sure would be embarrassing, hijacking a civilian freighter." Jaune said, his helmet in his hands.
"Yeah, but I would bet money that this is our ship. It's approaching in thirty seconds." Redwing said, cutting his comm feed as he got ready.
Immediately Nora stopped playing her music, Ren opened his eyes, and all four commandos put on their helmets, snapping them into place.
"Ten seconds. Going dark." Redwing said, cutting the lights inside and outside the ship.
Inside the holding area the only light was coming from the blue glow of the commando's visors, a sight Pyrrha felt was oddly reassuring, and deep inside her she felt a feeling she had identified during the battle of Geonosis. She was excited.
It was time to hunt.
A/N: Hey guys and gals, Heil96 here! I had a lot of fun writing this chapter, and I'm really looking forward to the next few as well! We broke one thousand total views of RC RWBY, which is absolutely amazing! Thanks to every single one of you, I hadn't expected this much interest in the story! I know I kinda left the whole Weiss situation at a cliffhanger, but I felt like that was a good time to switch it up to JNPR. I finished my moncon, which means I can put my full attention back to this and my new OC fic, AtS. I want to give a shoutout to some of my friends from the r/RWBY discord server, namely /u/RavenBranwen, Bran, ImmolateDynamo, and Dragon. They are writing an awesome fic called The Misadventures of Team TWLT, and while I recommend that you go read it, I feel the need to warn you. It's satirical smut, and is written so poorly (on purpose), and with so many overpowered OC's (also intentional), that it's beautiful. It really earns the M rating, so don't give me a review that says "Holy shit my eyes are bleeding Heil96 why would you do this." So yeah, go check it out if you want, and if not, new chapter of RC RWBY will be posted Friday at around noon CST. That's all I've got, thanks for reading!
Team RWBY
RC-1183 Ruby
RC-1104 Weiss
RC-1170 Blake
RC-1126 Yang
Team JNPR
RC-1390 Jaune
RC-1163 Nora
RC-8051 Pyrrha
RC-2223 Ren
Vode An
Heil96, out. |
LOS ANGELES — The California National Guard declassified a top secret cryptologic program today that played a significant role in the wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Syria.
The Bro-Code Talkers schoolhouse was established in 2008 on UCLA’s fraternity row after the Army expressed a need to develop greater cryptologic defenses in the face of rising great power competition from Russia and China. Bro-Code Talkers embedded as radiomen with combat units to transmit messages through common phrases and concepts from the West Coast fraternity lifestyle, which is undecipherable to outsiders. The Middle Eastern conflicts served as a proof of concept to test the program’s viability.
“Me and my sergeants just wanted baller pledges we could kickback with,” explained the unit’s founder, Col. Kiefer Brodie, ripping a fat cloud from his juul. “None of those weak boners, like the Fall ’09 class, who narced when we hazed them. Or that kid who died from alcohol poisoning during last year’s rush. That kid sucked.”
The now declassified report translates several examples of the “brocabulary,” which played a key role in the successful execution of thousands of counter-terrorism missions. An expression like “cracking a cold one with the boys,” implies a directive for friendlies to pop smoke during close air support engagements. “Tapping the keg,” is code for a convoy replenishment of food and supplies. “Do you know who my father is?” constitutes a request to speak to higher-ups at battalion headquarters.
School cadre handpicked recruits from high schools around the SoCal area through a rigorous selection process. Candidates were chosen based on a variety of factors including how much they liked the Dave Matthews Band, the number of women with whom they had had relations, but mostly their father’s annual income.
Recruits with the following names were granted automatic membership to the prestigious organization: Kyle, Skylar, Kyler, Chad, Brad, Bret, Chet, Chip, Jake, Bryce, Cory, and Todd.
The highest offense a soldier could commit in training or battle was breaking Bro-Code, which Brodie called the most sacred of commandments and the very core of what the unit stood for. Soldiers who failed to live up to the community’s hallowed standards of being chill were reportedly drummed out of the HAUS (house) in an elaborate ritual involving a paddling gauntlet and a keg of skunked Natty.
“This one time, my pledge brother Tanner hooked up with my boy Randy’s sister, Jessica,” shared decorated Bro-Code Talker, Staff Sgt. Topher Zayne, suppressing tears. “Me and Brayden and them told him how not tight that was and that if he did it again, we’d have to report him. He said we were chill, but a week later, we caught him with Hunter’s ex, Ashleigh. Bro …”
Many have speculated the motives for the program’s recent termination and subsequent declassification, especially after successful fielding in the Middle East. Some blame PC culture, which found fault with the unit’s systematic perpetuation and cover-up of sexual assault at their raucous house parties as well as the community’s stunning lack of racial diversity, inciting some critics to brand them, “whiter than people who say ‘whoopsie-daisy.’”
Despite these claims, many within the organization believe that the program is being retired due to a loss of combat effectiveness in the evolving future of warfare.
“That Vladimir Putin dude … That dude is straight gangster,” commented Troy Vanderbilt chowing down on a plate of “hella good” Indian food. “He’s got a rock band of chicks who follow him around. Bro-code prevents using our powers against somebody who pulls that hard.”
Regardless of the motivation behind it, the special project has come to an end after a storied decade of dominance. As the bros return home to their normal lives and the investment banking jobs offered by their buddy’s dad Rick, they take a moment to reflect on what their service meant.
“Running around in my combat sperrys, the newest iPhone nestled firmly in the cargo frocket of my Reagan Bush ’84 tactical romper, ready to call another bro at a moment’s notice and coordinate fire for our boys on the ground — that’s why I served,” shared Sgt. Kev Jorgenson, staring wistfully into the distance, his OEF visor turned backwards. “Someday, one of my illegitimate children will ask me, ‘Daddy, were you a hero in the war?’ And I’ll say, ‘You can’t prove I’m your daddy. I’ve never met your mother. Here’s ten thousand dollars to shut the hell up.’ But deep down I’ll know … No, I wasn’t a hero. But I raged face in the company of heroes.” |
Aerobic exercise has been well established to promote enhanced learning and memory in both human and non-human animals. Exercise regimens enhance blood perfusion, neo-vascularization, and neurogenesis in nervous system structures associated with learning and memory. The impact of specific plastic changes to learning and memory performance in exercising animals are not well understood. The current experiment was designed to investigate the contributions of angiogenesis and neurogenesis to learning and memory performance by pharmacologically blocking each process in separate groups of exercising animals prior to visual spatial memory assessment. Results from our experiment indicate that angiogenesis is an important component of learning as animals receiving an angiogenesis inhibitor exhibit retarded Morris water maze (MWM) acquisition. Interestingly, our results also revealed that neurogenesis inhibition improves learning and memory performance in the MWM. Animals that received the neurogenesis inhibitor displayed the best overall MWM performance. These results point to the importance of vascular plasticity in learning and memory function and provide empirical evidence to support the use of manipulations that enhance vascular plasticity to improve cognitive function and protect against natural cognitive decline.
Copyright © 2010 IBRO. Published by Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. |
Michel Kelly-Gagnon and Youri Chassin are president and research director, respectively, of the Montreal Economic Institute.
Another round of discussions involving negotiators from each of the 12 countries looking to sign the Trans-Pacific Partnership ended Monday in Guam. A TPP deal could prove very positive for Canadian prosperity. Not least among its benefits could be the end of Canada's obsolete supply-management policies for the dairy, poultry and egg industries.
The price setting, tariff protection and supply control that make up these policies ostensibly benefit about 15,000 farmers, if one takes a narrow view, but they do so to the detriment of the other 35 million Canadians. It's a mark of shame for what is otherwise a trading country, and it should be abolished – even if doing so doesn't end up being a prerequisite to signing on to the TPP trade deal.
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Supply management hurts all Canadians as consumers by forcing us to pay more for milk, chicken, eggs and other products that use these foodstuffs as ingredients. Importantly, according to a study by researchers from the University of Manitoba published in the latest issue of Canadian Public Policy, it disproportionately hurts poor Canadians and Canadians with children.
These researchers found that supply management imposes a burden of $554 a year for the richest 20 per cent of households, representing 0.47 per cent of their incomes. The burden for the poorest quintile of households is $339 a year, which is lower in absolute terms but represents 2.29 per cent of their incomes. In relative terms, these policies therefore hurt poor households almost five times as much as rich households, making them heavily regressive. As for families with children, they are hurt 55 per cent more than childless households in absolute terms and 21 per cent more in relative terms.
Supply management is also regressive in who it helps. The same researchers point out that the average income for dairy-producing Canadian households was around $110,000 in 2009 and $119,000 for poultry- and egg-producing households. Since mean Canadian household income was just $68,000 in comparison, the average effect of these policies is to transfer income from the less well-off to the better-off.
These policies are harmful in other ways, too. Processors that make products such as butter, cheese, yogurt and ice cream are hurt by the higher prices they must pay for the milk they use. Although Canadian consumers are in turn forced to buy their high-priced products – due to protective tariffs of up to 299 per cent – our processors lose out on potential markets beyond our borders because their products are simply not competitive.
All other Canadian businesses that rely on international trade are also harmed, including the majority of Canadian farmers who are not protected by supply-management policies. These policies have made it more difficult to negotiate trade deals and ask other countries to lower their trade barriers on Canadian goods and services.
Even dairy and poultry farmers themselves, the direct beneficiaries of supply management, are harmed by the system, which provides them with little incentive to innovate and become more productive. As former Liberal parliamentarian Martha Hall Findlay pointed out in a 2012 University of Calgary School of Public Policy research paper on the issue, this is unfair to efficient farmers, whose opportunities to expand and compete internationally are constrained by the current regime.
The only reason supply management remains in place is the perceived power of the dairy and poultry lobbies, and the strong risk aversion that permeates the world of electoral politics. Yet even if it meant making enemies of dairy and poultry farmers (which needn't be the case), abolishing supply management should not frighten politicians, since the number of such farmers has plummeted by more than 90 per cent in the past 50 years. According to Ms. Hall Findlay, the remaining farms are heavily concentrated in electoral districts that predominantly support one particular party or another, and so very few of them would actually be won or lost over this issue.
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It should be possible to avoid confrontation if we follow the example of Australia, one of the other 11 countries involved in the TPP negotiations. Its government successfully dismantled dairy-industry supply management 15 years ago. In order to help dairy producers adjust to the new reality, the government bought back their production quotas, financed with a temporary 11-cent-a-litre tax on milk. Such a program respects the fact that most farmers have been required by government policies to spend considerable sums buying those production quotas in the first place.
Equally important, the Australian dairy industry did not collapse once the government stopped supporting it through regulation. Instead, less-efficient farmers cashed out, while the more efficient increased their productivity. Notably, total dairy product exports grew by about 200 per cent from 1990 to 2002 as government support was withdrawn.
Most Canadian farmers are able to get along without supply management. With TPP negotiations perhaps coming to a head in the coming weeks and months, it's high time for the government to let dairy and poultry farmers succeed through a more natural process based on voluntary exchange. |
After that was a CBLDF panel on the fight to defend manga. The short version of the issues is that since a lot of manga characters are in high school and are often depicted in “sexual fashion” that some agencies are treating it as child pornography. Despite that there are no real people depicted and there are no actual sexual situations or nudity in these manga. And yet no one has issues with Twilight which has a 17 y/o being mentally and emotionally abused by someone more than 80 years older.
I had to cut out a little early to catch the JMS (Joe Michael Straczynski) panel with his big announcement. He is starting his own studio! He also talked about a number of upcoming projects, but I don’t really care about previews. I am excited that he is starting his own studio as I hope this means he will doing more of his own projects. Ok, I’m really hoping for more Babylon 5 but I don’t really expect it to happen. I’d be happy with more series like Rising Stars or Midnight Nation. The other thing I took from the panel was advice he gave to someone who was just getting into writing and was worried that is was all bad. He told them that everyone’s early writing is awful and you just need to keep at it to get better. Inspirational?
Later we caught the year’s best and worst manga. This was interesting just to see what the different panelists value in a manga and what they consider bad. We took notes and wrote down a few names for later reference.
Then we tried to go to the Gays In Comics mixer hosted by Prism comics. We had a good conversation with Tara Madison Avery earlier in the day at the Prism booth about the complete lack of bisexuality in comics so we were looking forward to talking to more people. I say tried because it wasn’t much of a mixer. The previous Gays In Comics 25th Anniversary Celebration ran long and the events kind of blended. So we ended up managing to catch some of that panel, which was cool.
We had to skip out of the mixer/panel shortly after the raffle to head off to the racebending.com after party at The Stage: Rock Bar & Grill. It turned out that the band which was supposed to play had van trouble, but the replacements were pretty good anyway. It seemed a little disorganized. We weren’t sure who was there for the after party and who was just there anyway. We got to talk to one of the co-founders of the blog on the way out. The most interesting part was the bartender who decided we were very interesting and seemed even more impressed that we had met at Burning Man.
Sunday there weren’t really any panels we wanted to see and we were very drained, so we just spent some time in the dealer room, took some pictures, and then spent the afternoon at the beach with a friend and her puppies.
So this is where I talk about the dealer room.
This is where the crush of people was at its worst. Several times we had to leave the room for a bit just to breathe. The major vendors has large displays. Lots of places were giving stuff away to crowds of people. We hit up a select few areas (Doctor Who lunchbox) but I mostly stuck near the Independents area. I didn’t get to all of them. I walked the aisles to see what grabbed my attention.
Keith Knight was there. He writes “The K Chronicles”, “The Knight Chronicles”, and “(Th)ink”. I think all 3 of them are syndicated in different papers around the country. I had only gotten to read a bit of “The Knight Chronicles” in our local paper. It is amusing, no punches pulled commentary on politics and American society. “The Knight Chronicles” is apparently the more family friendly, character driven version of “The K Chronicles”. So I picked up a copy of the “The K Chronicles” of course. Go check out his page. And I can vouch for this strip actually happening. I was on the next aisle over talking to the makers of Princeless when the commotion started.
Princeless is my next highlight. This is an awesome book. It is the classic story of a hero rescuing princesses trapped in towers and seeking to overthrow the oppressive king. Except the hero used to be one of those princesses and she’s only 14. Annoyed at her father locking her away to wait for a prince and the way women are treated in the kingdom in general, she befriends the dragon which was guarding her (a dragon that was none too pleased to kind out it had been hired just to get ultimately offed) and sets off to rescue her sisters. All of the characters have depth and personality. Even the dragon. The whole thing is cute, funny, and awareness raising at the same time. Only 4 issues / 1 collected volume is out so far. Check out the tumblr page and get your comic shop to keep the new issues on hand.
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A team of researchers has restarted the world’s largest fusion experiment—the Joint European Torus (JET) reactor, near Oxford, U.K. The move is a step forward in the quest for practical nuclear fusion.
The project was put on hold while a new lining was installed. This lining mimics the planned configuration of the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor (ITER), a full-scale experimental fusion reactor now under construction in southern France. As a consequence, the new undertaking at JET is being called the ITER-Like Wall Project.
The JET team says the lining, made of tiles of the light metal beryllium, should be better able to withstand the extreme conditions needed for a self-sustaining fusion reaction than the carbon-fiber composite tiles used before. The lining will also allow for laser-driven fusion experiments, similar to those underway at the National Ignition Facility in California.
JET is a tokamak—a device for carrying out magnetic confinement fusion. Its doughnut-shaped reactor contains plasma made from hydrogen that’s squeezed by powerful magnetic fields. Eventually, magnetic pressure and heat force the hydrogen nuclei to fuse into helium, releasing a burst of energy and freeing high-energy neutrons.
JET is the only tokamak in the world equipped to use tritium, the radioactive form of hydrogen containing two neutrons in its nucleus, as well as the single-neutron form, deuterium. Forcing these two forms of hydrogen to fuse produces large yields of energy. The ITER tokamak will also use this form of fusion once it’s complete.
Guy Matthews, director of the ITER-Like Wall Project, explains that ITER would not be able to operate with a carbon lining. “Electrons in the material tend to dilute the plasma—each one will displace a hydrogen nucleus,” he says. “This is why carbon was chosen; it has a low atomic number, and carbon fiber can withstand high temperatures.”
The problem comes with introducing tritium to the plasma. “If you have it in the wall, it will tend to form hydrocarbon compounds with the hydrogen in the reactor, and when the form of hydrogen is tritium, the hydrocarbons will be radioactive,” says Matthews. “That’s a radiological issue, a safety issue, and an economic issue, because there isn’t much tritium available, and you don’t want it trapped.”
For JET, this isn’t an overwhelming problem; the doughnut-shaped “torus” is relatively small—about two meters across—and only runs fusion pulses for a few tens of seconds. But ITER’s torus will be almost 10 times that size and run 10-minute pulses; and a commercial fusion reactor would have to run continuously.
The beryllium tiles used to refit JET are machined into precise shapes with a deep grid of cuts designed to prevent stresses developing as the tiles heat and cool during the reactor’s operation.
The reactor is lined with 5,000 of these tiles, which cover every part of the interior apart from a trench running around the base of the torus. Known as the diverter, this is where plasma particles are slowed down to expend their energy. At this stage the plasma is in direct contact with the lining, which is made of tungsten tiles, as the heavier metal is less likely to be displaced from the surface by light helium and hydrogen nuclei, Matthews says.
The refit of JET took around 15 months. All of the tiles from the former lining had to be stripped out and replaced with beryllium or tungsten. Because the reactor shell itself has been rendered radioactive by neutron bombardment, the bulk of the work had to be carried out by remote operation.
The work is also likely to have implications for laser-driven fusion research, according to Chris Matthews, director of the High Power Laser Energy Research (HiPER) project, a European attempt to devise a power station-like fusion reactor running on the same principle as the National Ignition Facility.
“The first wall is an area where we and magnetic fusion have a crossover of interest,” he says. “The environment is rather different, because ITER has a constant plasma loading, whereas we have to deal with a pulsed load, but we’re hoping to benefit from the research that’s going into the ITER-like wall.” |
A North Carolina photographer dove headfirst, literally, into his assignment when he came face-to-face with an elk.
James York was photographing elk at sunrise in the Cataloochee Valley of the Great Smoky Mountains National Park in Gatlinburg, Tenn., when one of the elk on which he had his lens focused approached him.
"He came up peacefully enough," York said. "I was hoping he might just take a little sniff and move away but he didn't."
Instead, the elk began nuzzling York, sniffing at his leg and forcefully nudging his antlers into York's head, which York did his best to keep down.
"I'm thinking, 'Don't show him fear,'" York said. "He was prancing and digging his hoofs in the ground and then bouncing back and forth and lowering his horns down and coming at me fairly aggressive."
A fellow photographer, Vince Camiolo, captured York's nearly seven-minute encounter with the elk on his own video camera and posted it to YouTube.
"He has his head cocked to the side and his horns are down and his eye is locked right on me," York said of the encounter.
After about five minutes, York stands up and the elk backs away, only to continue staring down York in a sort of standoff. As the elk continues to approach and then back away from York, a white SUV slowly approaches and York eventually hops in, leaving his camera bag behind.
As the elk starts to bite into the camera bag, the SUV drives forward close enough to scare the elk away and York comes out of the car to retrieve his bag.
"Everyone says I have a hard head," York said. "Well, I am glad I do because it came in handy that day." |
The Los Angeles Unified School District has suspended a science teacher after two of his students made science projects that school officials thought looked like weapons.
The L.A. Times is reporting that science teacher Greg Schiller, a popular teacher at Ramon C. Cortines High School and a representative to the L.A. teacher’s union, has been suspended over two controversial science projects his students made in February.
Photo via Change.org
When one student brought in the parts for a compressed air propeller, much like the one President Obama had fun with at last year’s White House science fair, a school employeee grew alarmed by its resemblance to a weapon. The compressor was not hooked up to a source of compressed air, so it could not have been fired.
Another student attempted to create an electromagnetic coilgun using batteries and a projectile tube—a common contraption for science fairs. Both projects were confiscated, however, and Schiller was suspended for “supervising the building, research, and development of imitation weapons.”
While Schiller is out of the classroom, his students have complained they’re being taught by substitute teachers who aren’t prepared to teach his curriculum, which includes preparing college-bound students for upcoming Advanced Placement tests. Although Schiller had prepared lesson plans for the substitute teachers, school officials made him stop.
“The class is now essentially a free period,” 17-year-old psychology student Liana Kleinman told the Times.
In response to Schiller’s suspension, students and supporters have protested, both at the school and online, via a Change.org petition and the hashtag #reinstateschiller.
Photo via Facebook
He’s simply one of the best science teachers out there and we miss him!! >.< #reinstateschiller #lausdfail pic.twitter.com/YLNX2ZfNmH — May Rawrlingtonz (@RandomMayRage) April 12, 2014
Although Schiller has gotten support from the United Teachers of Los Angeles, numerous students, and the L.A. Times‘ editorial board, the investigation into his hands-on teaching methods is still ongoing.
H/T BoingBoing | Photo via mightyohm/Flickr (CC BY-SA 2.0) |
Earlier this year, Nest recalled the Protect smoke detector after it realized the product's standout feature (the ability to silence it with a hand gesture) made it potentially unsafe to use. In response, Nest halted sales, and disabled "Wave" control on existing devices using the product's built-in WiFi connection. Now Protect is back: The company resumed sales tonight, with the Wave feature still disabled. And hey, the price is lower too -- $99, down from $129. For now, you'll have to silence the device the old-fashioned way -- by pushing a button. That said, a Nest spokesperson told us the company is working on an easier way to silence the alarm, even if hand gestures aren't the way to go (people might silence the device when they didn't mean to). If you wanna buy it now, be our guest; just remember that you're no longer paying for gesture control, but other features, like a built-in nightlight, sleek design, spoken warnings and the ability to control the device remotely using an app. Still a good feature set if you ask us, though it was probably wise of Nest to cut the price.
Update: For those of you who already own a Nest Protect, you might be eligible for a $33 refund -- if you purchased it before June 15th, have it paired to your Nest account and had the device connected to the internet after April 3rd. You can find more information about that here. |
Federal judge halts candidate Jill Stein's Michigan recount, sealing Donald Trump's win
Posted
A federal judge who ordered Michigan to begin its recount has effectively ended it, tying his decision to a state court ruling that found Green Party candidate Jill Stein had no legal standing to request another look at ballots.
Key points: Ruling seals Donald Trump's narrow victory over Hillary Clinton for Michigan
Ms Stein did not have a chance of winning even after a recount, the Court says
Ms Stein got about 1 per cent of the vote in three states where she has pushed for recounts
The ruling seals Republican Donald Trump's narrow victory over Democrat Hillary Clinton for Michigan's 16 electoral votes.
US District Judge Mark Goldsmith agreed with Republicans who argued that the three-day recount must end, a day after the state appeals court dealt a blow to the effort.
The court said Ms Stein, who finished fourth in Michigan on November 8, did not have a chance of winning even after a recount and therefore is not an "aggrieved" candidate.
"Because there is no basis for this court to ignore the Michigan court's ruling and make an independent judgment regarding what the Michigan Legislature intended by the term 'aggrieved', plaintiffs have not shown an entitlement to a recount," Mr Goldsmith said.
It was the judge's midnight ruling on Monday (local time) that started the recount in Michigan, but Goldsmith's order dealt with timing not whether a recount was appropriate.
More than 20 of 83 counties already were counting ballots again. They reported minor changes in vote totals, although many precincts could not be examined for a second time for a variety of reasons.
The Michigan elections board voted, 3-1, earlier on Wednesday to end the recount if Mr Goldsmith extinguished his earlier order.
Stein not legally entitled to hijack 'will of voters'
State Republican Party Chairman Ronna Romney McDaniel and Attorney General Bill Schuette said it is a victory for voters and taxpayers.
Ms Stein now is left with asking the Michigan Supreme Court to intervene, which is a long shot.
"Jill Stein, who received only 1.07 per cent of the vote in Michigan, is not legally entitled to hijack the will of voters and drag them into an arduous and expensive publicity stunt," Mr McDaniel said.
Ms Stein got about 1 per cent of the vote in three states — Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania — where she has pushed for recounts after crowdfunding $US3.5 million for the filing fees. Mr Trump narrowly won all three.
She insists she is more concerned about the accuracy of the election, but Mr Goldsmith said Ms Stein's legal team presented only "speculative claims" about vulnerable machines, "not actual injury".
The judge said a recount to test the integrity of the voting system "has never been endorsed by any court".
A court hearing will be held on Friday (local time) on a possible recount in Pennsylvania.
Wisconsin's recount, which started last week, has increased Mr Trump's margin of victory over Mrs Clinton thus far.
Mrs Clinton needed all three states to flip in order to take enough electoral votes to win the election.
Mr Trump has 306 electoral votes to Mrs Clinton's 232, with 270 votes needed to win.
Michigan has 16 electoral votes, Pennsylvania has 20 and Wisconsin has 10.
AP/ABC
Topics: us-elections, government-and-politics, world-politics, united-states |
At 22 years old, Jessy Nelson has found himself with the toughest battle of his life ahead of him. The Troy Lee Designs/GoPro/Red Bull/KTM racer sustained paralyzing injuries at the August 13 Unadilla round of the Lucas Oil Pro Motocross Nationals when he clipped a track marker and crashed. Nelson’s bike hit him in the back, breaking his T4 and T5 vertebrae. His spinal cord was stretched in the incident – not severed or cut – and he underwent surgery to stabilize the broken vertebrae in a hospital in Cooperstown, NY. Shortly after surgery, Nelson was transferred to a rehabilitation center in New York, where therapists have worked with him to help get him as mobile as possible. Nelson hopes to return home to California soon, so that he can pursue a more aggressive therapy developed for spinal cord injury patients at Project Walk in Carlsbad, California. Nelson has no movement below mid-chest for now, but he was excited to tell us that he has regained some feeling in his toes recently. We’re all big Jessy Nelson fans at TransWorld Motocross, and we are pulling for our buddy to beat the odds and regain his ability to walk, but in the meantime, please support his recovery efforts by donating to his Road to Recovery Fund by CLICKING HERE
Jessy, we’re about seven weeks out from the accident and we are really happy to speak with you. Do you remember everything that happened at Unadilla?
Yeah, I remember the day a little bit and I remember having a lot of things on my mind with the track that I think should have been addressed. I hit one of those yellow track markers that are all over the course and have been all year long. For whatever reason, though, they were staked into the ground at Unadilla so if you were to hit one it wasn’t going to bounce out of the way. I actually hit one in practice and it just about smashed my hand. During the race, I somehow made a mistake and tagged one of those markers going into a corner. I’ve seen the crash, and I can’t believe that I’m now unable to move my legs because of it. It’s a scary thought to me because I’ve obviously thought about having kids and a family one day. I want to be able to play with my kids and run around with them. I want to teach my kid how to ride a bicycle. Being in this chair isn’t me, and I’m willing to do anything I can to get out of it.
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So you were able to see the crash on video?
Yeah, it wasn’t the greatest quality, but you can see what happened. It was just a shitty day that I will never forget! I just hope something good comes of this. I don’t understand how there is nothing to be done in a situation like this. There’s no fix and there’s no cure for what I have. Instead, you’re handed a wheelchair and told to use your core.
By definition, rehab should aid in getting a person back to or near the point before their injury. Instead, a hospital’s version of rehab for a spinal cord injury is to help the individual learn how to get in and out of their chair along with how to go to the bathroom…
Yeah, you’re pretty much right. I learned all of that and you’d think getting in and out of bed is easy, but when you have no use of the muscles in the lower portion of your body all you have left are your arms, it’s tough. That kind of stuff is a lot harder than most people think; it’s a struggle. The outpatient therapy is extremely expensive, and if I want to get better the funds need to be there. I’m going to look into the stem cell thing, and I’m going to take every road possible. I’m not taking no for an answer. I’ll sell my house and use that money for my rehabilitation if I have to. I’m not giving up!
How has it been since you started rehab? Has there been any progress?
Well, I’m able to get in and out of bed now, and I don’t have a whole lot of pain anymore, which is good. Everything is starting to feel better, but everything is still really tough. As far as feeling or anything like that in my legs nothing has changed really. I get a little tingling feeling here and there, but it always goes away.
In our conversations you’ve said that you have good days and bad days, and I absolutely think you should focus on the positive because this could have turned out much worse. What do you do to keep your spirits up?
Frankly, the only person that keeps my spirits up is my girlfriend. She has helped me with everything in that aspect with trying to keep me in a positive frame of mind. I really don’t understand how she deals with this. It’s tough, though, to stay positive. Everyone says to stay out of my head with those, “Why me?” thoughts, but I’m sitting here in a hospital bed in New York seven weeks after the accident thinking those exact thoughts. I don’t want to be here, this isn’t my life. I mean I’m 22 years old. I just bought a house and I wanted to start a family one day, but now I have all of this is weighing on me.
There’s much more to it than meets the eye with a major injury like this when it comes to bills and insurance. Insurance obviously helps with a portion of the bills, but a lot of it falls on the individual. Even things like the expenses of having your family there for you add up quickly. Have your parents been there the whole time or have they been flying back and forth?
Yeah, my parents are here. Insurance has been spotty and they’ve been all over the place when it comes to covering certain things. They only want to cover so much of the therapy. My parents were out here for quite a while, but they went back home to try to make my home wheelchair accessible. I have to put a lift in my house so that I will be able to go up and down the stairs, along with wheelchair ramps all over the place. Just the essentials right now. Someone was nice enough to let my parents stay in his house for a week, but other than that my parents have been living out of a hotel. It’s extremely expensive, but they didn’t have anywhere else to go. My dad would stay with me quite a bit in my room and my mom did the same thing, but they both went back to my house in California to get everything ready. For the last three weeks my girlfriend has stayed in my room in the hospital with me. She’s been sleeping on a little pullout couch and she’s been helping me eat right. Anyway she can, she’s always helping.
How has it been for you to see the support from all of your fans and friends in the industry? The Road 2 Recovery foundation has been doing a great job…
Yeah, it’s unbelievable to see all of the help and encouragement I’ve received from everyone. The outreach and love is incredible, but it’s nearly impossible for me to thank them all. If I could I would call everyone personally to thank them, but I’ve got so much going on right now. But there’s so much more to it than not being able to use your legs; it’s a different kind of evil. In the beginning, everything was awful because nothing works. Everything from my chest down I’m unable to move and that kind of thing can have an adverse affect on a person’s mind. I truly find it hard to believe that there is no cure for this. Ultimately the government makes more money off of people that are injured or sick than the people that are healthy; it’s bullshit. The stem cell thing is all over the place, as well. I mean, is there really no hope? And to the doctor that did my surgery… I don’t think he was very good. In fact, I hope he reads this because I truly believe he’s not a good doctor, whatsoever. He was one of the most negative people I’ve ever had to deal with when it came to my injury. He gave me no hope and nothing to strive for. Instead, I was handed a wheelchair. If I’m ever able to walk again, I’m buying a plane ticket to Cooperstown, New York, just so that I can tell him to F off! That guy really put me in the dumps for a while. I’m just trying to do the best that I can because I’m tired of being in New York. I want to be home. I’m tired of not walking, I’m tired of sitting in a chair and I’m tired of the process involved in simple, everyday activities now. Everything about this situation is awful; it’s hard to explain just what it’s like.
What’s next when you come home? As you mentioned, your house in Lake Elsinore is being converted to accommodate you, but are you going to pursue a more aggressive therapy?
Yeah, I’m going to do anything I can. I’m no stranger to hard work, and this is going to be a lot harder than training for an outdoor race. It already has been! Looking back, I’m going to miss that stuff a lot. Training was easy compared to what I’m going to have to face. Training in riding every day, though, that was something that I really loved and I’m going to miss it a lot. Even if I’m able to walk again, it’ll still be a scary thought to ride a motorcycle again, but I’m obviously saying that now because I’m a little bitter about the situation. I wish more than anything I could wake up tomorrow and stand up out of bed. I would use all of the donated money to help other people. I’m tired of being like this already, but when I get home I’m going to head to Project Walk to see how that goes along with figuring out my house. Getting a house prepared for someone in a wheelchair is expensive, and I think I’m around the $12,000 mark. I’ll have to do the same thing when it comes to my body; catheters, wheelchairs, etc.
I spoke with your team manager Tyler Keefe, and he said that when you were ready there was always going to be a job waiting for you at the team. During your recovery, is being at the races something that you want to do or would it be too painful?
As of right now, it wouldn’t really bother me. I’m not bitter towards racing at all because it was my entire life. I would love to go to an Anaheim Supercross or something, but I wouldn’t want to be overwhelmed with people. I would like to go there just to watch my friends race. When I go to the races I want to walk around. I want to be able to walk from pit to pit to say hi to my friends without having to roll up and down ramps the whole time. I’m young, so it’s even harder to wrap my head around the situation. People have said to me, “You need to accept this as a challenge!” It’s not like that, though. It’s a lot more obscure than that.
Other than the obvious injury from the accident, is everything else with your body okay?
As far as I know everything is fine. I don’t really have anything else going on save for a couple of broken ribs. I couldn’t really feel it before, but I could sense that something was wrong in my chest. Hopefully soon I will see something positive. Show me something! I just want to get home to see my friends and family and I want to sleep in my own bed. I’ve spent about six or seven weeks in this hospital bed, and I’m over it.
Do you have anything in closing that you would like to say to your friends, fans and team?
I want to thank everyone at Road 2 Recovery, Bob Walker, Jimmy Button and his mom along with everyone that has shown support. Troy Lee and everybody on the team has been extremely supportive along with KTM. There’s been a lot of people with spinal cord injuries that have reached out to me and they’ve shined some light on the situation with information. Before this I had no knowledge of this type of thing. I wish more than anything I was one of those stories you hear where the individual is miraculously healed from a severe spinal cord injury overnight, but that’s not how it is. It hasn’t been very long since the accident, but it’s not looking good. I’m just going to continue doing the best that I can. |
DMITRY KISELEV, anchor of Vesti Nedeli, a weekly television show, and Russia’s chief propagandist, has had much to say about victory in recent weeks. The Syrian ceasefire that began on February 27th, he told his viewers, was “definitely a Russian victory”, made possible by Russia and America, two great powers, taking joint responsibility for the world’s biggest crisis. The Americans had been convinced “to work with us and forget about their exceptionalism” both by Russia’s diplomacy and by its display of military might: the precision of its bombs, the efficiency of its pilots and the range of its missiles—“which, by the way, can carry nuclear explosives.”
His words were music to the ears of Larisa Kirillova, a pensioner from Kursk. Yes, her pension is no longer rising while food prices are soaring; yes, her daughter has lost her job: but Russia is once again a great power. “Of course things are tough, but we are encircled by enemies and will bear this crisis,” she says resolutely.
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On March 13th, walking along the flightline at Khmeimim, the base in Latakia from which the Russian air force has been launching its Syrian operations, Mr Kiselev rejoiced in “the victory of good over evil” and the mix of Russian firepower and acumen that had brought it about. “Russian planes are beautiful and splendid...Our strikes are more precise and efficient than [America’s]. We are making deals with the moderate opposition faster and deliver humanitarian aid more quickly. While the Americans are only coming to, we are already making friends, feeding and [medically] treating them.” The only thing that could have made the message plainer would have been a banner in the background saying “Mission Accomplished”.
The next day, as peace talks were set to get under way in Geneva (see article), Vladimir Putin went on television to announce the withdrawal of Russian troops from Syria: “The task set for the Ministry of Defence and the military forces has been accomplished.” Bashar al-Assad has been bolstered (though not to the extent that he might have wished), America has been exposed as ineffective and dithering, troublesome Turkey has been sidelined. But though those are all welcome achievements for Mr Putin, there is another overarching one.
When Russia started its bombing campaign in September, Barack Obama warned that Syria was “not some superpower chessboard contest, and anybody who frames it in that way isn’t paying very close attention to what’s been happening on the chessboard.” But if Mr Obama did not see it that way, Mr Putin did; and though what would come about on the chessboard mattered to him, the simple fact of playing mattered more.
The purpose of Russia’s action in Syria was not just to shore up the regime of Mr Assad, nor to resolve the largest humanitarian crisis of the century so far. Indeed, to the extent that that crisis is a problem for the European Union (EU), Russia is all for it. Mr Putin wanted to force the West to recognise that, for all that it may deplore Russia’s actions in Ukraine and seek to isolate it with sanctions, Russia is a global power—the player on the other side of the board. “The process of asserting itself as a great power is more important than the result it achieves,” says Maria Lipman, the editor of Counterpoint, a journal.
Mr Obama believes that Mr Putin’s adventures in Ukraine and Syria betray a fundamental misunderstanding of how power works in foreign policy. “Real power means you can get what you want without having to exert violence,” Jeffrey Goldberg recently quoted him as saying in the Atlantic magazine. But for foreign policy to bolster Mr Putin’s domestic agenda by satisfying people like Ms Kirillova, exerting violence is crucial. It is not just a means for getting what Mr Putin wants, but a goal in itself. Just so long as it is seen on a screen.
Yadda Yalta yadda
Mr Putin’s first two presidential terms, which ran from 2000 to 2008, were sold under the banner of political stabilisation and economic growth. The third, begun in 2012, has brought neither of these things (see chart 1). Russia is not becoming any more stable and it is getting distinctly worse off. The economy contracted by 4% last year. Disposable incomes have been falling since 2013. Thus the need for this current term to be reconfigured as a wartime presidency, its successes presented with polish by men and women like Mr Kisilev.
The underpinning of this policy requires the world to be read in a number of seemingly contradictory ways. America must be seen as both a model for modernisation and a source of evil to be resisted. Russia must be seen as both unconstrained and beleaguered—a duality that harks back to the years of Stalinism, which saw the Soviet Union both as a beacon leading the world into an inevitable communist future and as a fortress besieged by enemies and shot through with spies.
The Soviet Communist Party once ruled that no international issue could be resolved without Soviet participation or against its will. Mr Putin lacks the firepower or economic resources of the Soviet era, but lays great stock in the geostrategic position it aspired to, and which it surrendered with its collapse. He wants to return to the times of the Yalta and Potsdam agreements when America, the Soviet Union and Britain divided Europe into Soviet and Western spheres of influence.
And the Russian people want that, too. One of the greatest hopes the public had for Mr Putin when he first became president in 2000 was that he would restore Russia to the position the Soviet Union had once held. According to polls carried out at the time, people cared about this considerably more than they cared about the recovery of savings lost in the early 1990s, social justice or the fight against corruption. Only the rule of law and stopping the war in Chechnya came close.
It is not, after all, just America which believes itself a special nation. Soviet citizens were assured that they had a special place in the world and its history. But by 1991 half the Russian population felt that their country had reached a dead end. Journalists spoke slightingly of a homeland that had suffered one of the deepest traumas in its troubled history. The almost masochistic pleasure many took in national self-deprecation was the obverse of earlier and future exceptionalism.
Small wonder that by 2000 many craved a restoration, and that they remain grateful to Mr Putin for providing it (see chart 2). In 1996 36% of Russians were proud of their country’s political influence in the world; at the end of last year the figure was 68%. Pride in the military surged from 40% to 85% over the same period.
Lev Gudkov of Levada Centre, a pollster, says the growth in pride and self-worth is inseparable from anti-Americanism: “Russia’s collective identity is a negative one: people are consolidated only in the face of a perceived threat from the outside enemy.” Unwilling and unable to influence Russian domestic politics, people are easily induced to focus their anger on America and the West. In doing so, Mr Gudkov argues, they project on to America the qualities of their own country’s ruling class: cynicism, disrespect for human rights, greed and corruption.
This attitude towards the West allows Russians to absolve themselves of responsibility for any wrongdoing and assume the role of a victim. Some 80% of Russians, while saying that they feel no personal animosity towards the West, blame its hostility for the confrontations that pit it against their country. The Kremlin portrays the annexation of Crimea and the bombing of Syria as defensive; according to Russian propaganda it was America that staged the coup in Ukraine in order to claw it away from Russia. The best way to stop the advances of the EU and NATO towards Russian borders is to try to undermine and rupture both alliances.
You furnish the pictures...
It was in the aftermath of the economic crisis of 2008-09 that this anti-Americanism became the main staple of the regime. The popularity of Mr Putin fell in the wake of the crisis—and though GDP growth soon returned, his previously sky-high ratings did not. In late 2011 and early 2012 tens of thousands of middle-class citizens took to the streets demanding a modern, European-style state.
The annexation of Crimea in early 2014 turned things around. It distracted people’s attention from their daily lives, in which the state was a menace, to a historic narrative where the state is a source of Russia’s greatness. Television news ratings, which had been falling for almost a decade, perked up; Mr Putin’s popularity soared to new heights. “His mandate today is far bigger than the job of the president; he is the embodiment of Russian statehood,” says Ms Lipman.
It is thanks to this role as the avatar of a resurgent nation that Mr Putin is staying popular during one of the worst economic crises in modern Russian history. As recently as the first air strikes in Syria, many believed that the current recession would be short-lived and bearable, like its predecessor. Not so. Though recession hit only in the third quarter of 2014, the economy had begun to slow at the end of 2012, when oil prices were still high and Crimea was still part of Ukraine. Natalia Zubarevich, an expert on Russian regions, argues that bad institutions and poor governance have brought about a slow, grinding downturn that risks turning into a long-term degradation. The model of economic growth fuelled by the redistribution of growing oil rents has run its course.
The latest oil-price shock, coupled with Western sanctions which have cut Russia off from Western capital markets, made matters worse. Foreign direct investment fell by a staggering 92% last year. “A country in which investment has fallen for three years in a row is a country that is squeezing its future,” says Ms Zubarevich. “There is a feeling, among the elite, that while the train of history runs ahead, Russia is left behind,” says Ekaterina Schulmann, a political scientist.
The brunt of the crisis of 2008-09 was borne by business; the public was sheltered by spending increases. This time the population has suffered. Large firms are under strict instructions not to lay people off, but they have cut hours and salaries. The high share of imports in Russian consumption means that the devaluation of the rouble hurts everybody. In dollar terms the average monthly salary in the year to January 2015 fell from $850 to $450.
Yet this does not mean that Russians are about to take to the streets. The urban middle class has not been moved to public protest in the style of 2011-12. “When everything is being squeezed, a Soviet instinct kicks in: people survive in small groups, bonding with friends and relatives,” says Ms Zubarevich. The fact that it is relatively easy for the successful to leave the country provides the system with a safety valve.
There have been some sector-specific protests by lorry drivers and doctors. But so far the protesters are appealing to Mr Putin more than they are attacking him. Recent polls show that most Russians are happy to give up Western goods and travel to America and Europe for the sake of Russia’s standing in the world. But they are not prepared to lose their jobs, or to see their salaries and pensions frozen. And that is the way the economy is heading.
The Kremlin is making contingency plans. The riot police have been exempted from pay cuts and last December Mr Putin signed a law allowing the FSB, the state security agency, to open fire on crowds. Yet, for all his authoritarianism, Mr Putin is not a bloodthirsty dictator, but a cautious former KGB officer. He prefers mass manipulation to brutal repression.
...I’ll furnish the war
The country’s state television channels have been his favoured tool to that end. As part of the process the president has made himself, in the words of Fiona Hill of the Brookings Institution, a think-tank, a “TV personality”. Mr Putin has dressed up (or stripped down) to compete in judo matches, fly a microlight with migrating storks and recover sunken treasure on prime time. War leader is a weightier role—but not one of an entirely different sort.
Kirill Rogov, an independent political analyst, argues that support for Mr Putin’s regime depends on television’s ability to draw the public away from their everyday experiences and into its news agenda. When people switch off the news, look around them and see the economy in a bad way, by and large Mr Putin’s ratings fall, too. The annexation of Crimea and the war in Ukraine saw the news and the president bounce back again (see chart 3). People who had previously distanced themselves from politics were mesmerised by dramatic imagery, martial music, well staged and edited action.
Russian television does not simply cover wars that are driven by foreign policy. It takes foreign adventures as raw material from which to generate events that stoke domestic passions and reinforce the government narrative. For example, fake stories such as the one about “fascists” crucifying a Russian boy in eastern Ukraine helped to mobilise the population there against the Ukrainian government in 2014. A recent bogus story about a Russian girl being raped by migrants in Germany led to anti-migrant rallies by ethnic Russians in Berlin; it became a contentious issue between Russia and Germany, generating yet more footage for Russian television.
Domestic news is given short shrift, since people’s personal experiences would allow them to see through official lies. What there is is dominated by orderly meetings of Kremlin officials. Death and destruction for the most part only occur abroad. The 31 miners and five rescue workers who perished in Vorkuta in February were barely covered on the nightly Russian news; the macabre story of an Uzbek nanny brandishing the severed head of a four-year-old girl outside a Moscow metro station received almost no mention on the state channels. Had the coal miners died in Ukraine or the girl been decapitated in Germany, Russian television would have spent days bombarding the audience with special reports, talk shows and investigations.
For now they have the spectacle of warriors returning from Syria; jubilant crowds waving flags; women in traditional dress offering pilots bread and salt. This pageantry does not necessarily mean that Russia has disengaged completely: some Russian forces will stay at their base in Latakia and may continue to offer support to Mr Assad. But it does mean that there will now be slots to fill on the nightly news, and that makes Russia’s neighbours nervous. Soon after reporting the exit from Syria, Russia’s main news channels aired footage of renewed fighting in the Donbas, leading some in Ukraine to wonder whether the withdrawal may prove a redeployment.
In truth, though, any of the former Soviet republics with a sizeable ethnic Russian population could be at risk. As a secret-service operative, Mr Putin excels in concealing his intentions. This tactical nous, Ms Hill argues, has allowed him to stay one step ahead of his opponents at home and abroad. From the war against Georgia in August 2008—the original template for Russia’s strategy of spectacle—to the operation in Syria, Russia’s adventures have repeatedly caught the West by surprise.
In February Mr Obama announced plans to quadruple military spending in central and eastern Europe—including the Baltic states—to $3.4 billion. That makes deterrent sense. But Mr Putin’s ultimate goal is not to have a full-scale war with NATO. The sort of conflicts he needs to stay in power do not require him to fight over territory; just to keep the ratings up and feed the public’s appetite for a story in which they deservingly come out on top.
Such conflicts, though, do have a limitation: Mr Putin cannot afford to sustain big losses. The Syrian footage focused on aircraft soaring high above any risks; when a few Russian soldiers were killed in Ukraine, the Kremlin did everything it could to cover it up. It is these concerns, rather than fear of further sanctions, that have kept Russia from moving deeper into Ukraine or risking a serious confrontation with Turkey. They have doubtless been a factor in not hanging around in Syria, either. However proud and grateful television may make the Russian people feel to Mr Putin, they are not prepared to sacrifice the lives of their children and loved ones for him. As Ms Kirillova from Kursk says, “We can tolerate anything, as long as there is no war.” |
well water box is in, its so well made its crazy to put it in there but it must.gave Donny the inch and boom he makes it up fast quick and pressure tested.well Franz has come and gone and it was a busy time while he was here. i had a couple problems that i need to fix to make it work right. so i could not get my dyno timeMy grocery list !1... i need to cut vents in the hood because this subaru intake temps are way to hot ! :firedevil:2... i need to make a safety strap on the drive shaft, also add a little better support on the rear diff so it does not end up on the tarmac !3.... move my water coolers in a better placewhat we have now is a 17psi road tune that to be honest is just crazy to even go to 25psi how fast this car is right now. i am kind of glad i didn't get all the power at once its a tricky car to drive that's for sure.once i fix the problems then 25psi dyno tune will be done, ill push for the end of the season but no promise its getting late and the car needs to be put away soon.Franz picturesso in order to lower my intake temps with out cutting my hood i sacrificed my a/c systemby getting rid of the a/c system i gained just about 20 degrees off the 60 degree iat temp, out side temp is 20 degree.i just could not cut the hood with out trying the last step, a massive awic cooler (26x7x2). if this does not cool my intake then i am busting the saw out and going to town on the stock hood or the brand new OEM one i have laying around that i picked up for this problem.so as of now car runs good at 17psi i am a drifter out of control with awd lol. my gas tank sprung a leak do to the vent line sensor not working should have un plugged it like i did for my legacy ! instead it split it self down the side of the tank like a pop can.a new OEM subaru one is on its way so i can put more then 10bucks in the car and make my way to see Franz and get it tuned on the dyno by the end of this fall weather.so i went to Washington D.C to visit Franz and he did a little work on the car and he took me to see the crazy city which is just amazing to see and i cant wait to go back for part 2 of the city !!Abraham Lincoln says helloFranz's one of a billion cool tool's he owns !my leone getting all its numbers crunched to perfection !little vidfranz made me a new shorter pipe from scratch in a matter of minutes, and he gave me the fancy clamps to hold it right. we also put in oil temp, oil pressure, fuel pressure sensors to watch whats going and everything is good !so much went down this week here is some extra pics from the dyno session, the guys at IMA Motorsports know there Porsche's it was Porsche heaven, i was sourounded buy flat six's with huge turbos making stupid power every where i looked such nice people at IMA Motorsports !all these porsche made me think why am i messing with this four bangger when subaru made the best six which is a ej22 with a extra 2 lol.franz babyLOL my mamma's car hahahhale mansi need to make this stand or buy one like this, need like 10 of them lol |
The blogosphere has been all a buzz this week after an article in the Financial Times suggested that America’s prized “AAA†credit rating could be in jeopardy. I first mused about this last fall even before the extent of the financial crisis was fully known and long before the government-sponsored stimulus packages added trillions to the US national debt. In the ensuing eight months since then, conditions have only worsened and, if anything, the case to downgrade the US credit rating is even greater.
Most of the pundits addressing this topic all agree that losing triple A status would be catastrophic to the US and would torpedo efforts to emerge from the recession. However, most writers seem to believe that the US economy is too big, and the US dollar too widely-held, to entertain the possibility that the US could be anything but the safest of bets. Too big? Too important? Isn’t that what they said about General Motors?
America’s annual deficit is now approaching $2 trillion a year with an accumulated debt of $11 trillion which is set to double in less than six years if the US remains on its present course. This alone must give ratings agents reason for concern but more telling perhaps is the recent actions of America’s number one lender. *
In September 2008, China surpassed Japan as the largest holder of US debt which as of March 2009, was nearly $768 billion dollars. In fact, in just over a year China has nearly doubled its US holdings – including more than $50 billion in the last four months alone. Meanwhile, many of America’s other traditional investors – countries including the United Kingdom, Brazil, Switzerland, and Germany – actually reduced their US dollar exposures.
But if China is increasing its investment in the US, isn’t this a vote of confidence in the long-term prospects for America? Actually, no – lending the US more money in this manner has more to do with China protecting its own investments as any drop in the US dollar also hits China’s bottom line.
Further to this point and as noted in yesterday’s New York Times, China may be buying US debt, but it is being much more selective, eschewing long-term Treasuries and government-sponsored enterprises (such as Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac) in favor of short-term notes. In other words, China is increasingly less willing to accept the greater risk of long-dated bonds and is actually exchanging long-term bonds for short-term notes, which even though they have lower yields, provide greater flexibility should China wish to divest itself of some of its US holdings.
The implications of this should not be ignored as it represents a major shift in China’s policy from even as little as a year ago. Not only is China reducing its exposure to long-term US securities, China is also – as we learned recently – increasing its supply of gold in a bid to alter the composition of its $2 trillion foreign currency portfolio. This is a strategy clearly aimed at minimizing the risk of future inflation eroding the value of long-term US-denominated holdings, while at the same time reducing exposure to what it feels are riskier investments.
* Source: US Treasury Department Website
About the Author Scott Boyd has been working in and writing about the financial industry since the early 1990s. As a technical writer and project manager with several of Canada’s leading financial institutions, Scott has produced educational materials for investment system end-users including portfolio managers and traders. Scott now administers and contributes to OANDA FXPedia and regularly provides commentaries for the OANDA FXTrade website.
This article is for general information purposes only. It is not investment advice or a solution to buy or sell securities. Opinions are the authors; not necessarily that of OANDA Corporation or any of its affiliates, subsidiaries, officers or directors. Leveraged trading is high risk and not suitable for all. You could lose all of your deposited funds. |
This article is also available in: Shqip Македонски Bos/Hrv/Srp
War veterans smashing bilingual signs in Vukovar in September. Photo: Beta
The campaign group pushing for a referendum, the Committee for the Defence of Croatian Vukovar, announced on Friday that it had already gathered over 650,000 signatures – 200,000 more than needed to trigger a vote on the minority rights issue.
The Committee, led by war veterans angered by the installation of new bilingual signs in Croatian Latin and Serbian Cyrillic in the symbolic wartime flashpoint town of Vukovar, launched its petition for a referendum two weeks ago and still has another three weeks to gather signatures.
Croatian law states that if 10 per cent of registered voters sign such a petition, they have the right to a referendum.
The Committee is proposing that minority language rights should be granted only in places where at least half of population is from an ethnic minority, instead of a third, as under the current minority rights legislation.
More than a third of Vukovar residents are Serbs, which led the authorities to start installing the controversial bilingual signs in September – although many of them were immediately torn down by angry veterans who fought to defend the town that was besieged by Serb forces in 1991.
The centre-left government has condemned the anti-Cyrillic initiative.
Croatian foreign minister Vesna Pusic warned this week that by signing its accession contract with the EU, “Croatia obliged itself to implement the existing laws on ethnic minority rights”.
But Vlado Illjkic, a member of the Committee, demanded that Pusic show exactly how the accession contract forbids the referendum, and threatened to take the issue to the constitutional court.
“If the Croatian parliament accepts the changes in the constitution that will forbid the realisation of this referendum, perhaps the constitutional court will have a different opinion, which could lead to a constitutional crisis,” said Iljkic.
The Committee said that a few thousand signatures still remain uncounted, so the final petition tally could be higher than 650,000.
Meanwhile Serbia’s foreign ministry said on Thursday that it had warned foreign governments that Croatia’s Serb minority was under threat over the proposed referendum and other allegedly anti-Serb incidents over the past month.
It said it sent a document to all the countries in which Serbia has an embassy listing incidents which it said were “endangering the rights of Serbs”, including the removal of the bilingual signs in Vukovar and other Croatian towns, an attack on the Serbian consulate in the town of Rijeka and a Croatian football player leading a chant associated with the wartime fascist Ustashe movement. |
Iranian President Hassan Rouhani says security is currently the most important issue in the region, stressing that the Islamic Republic regards Pakistan’s security as extension of its own.
In a meeting with Pakistan’s Senate Chairman Mian Raza Rabbani in Tehran on Monday, the Iranian president added that terrorism poses the main threat to the countries in the region.
“All regional countries must cooperate with each other to fight and eliminate terrorism,” he said.
He added that Tehran and Islamabad had the potential to cooperate and hold consultation on the fight against terrorism and the development of regional security.
Rouhani emphasized that Iran and Pakistan were strategically important to one another and expressed the Islamic Republic’s determination to expand relations with Islamabad in various sectors such as science and technology, culture and energy.
Iran, Pakistan share close stance on regional, global issues: Rabbani
The Pakistani Senate chairman, for his part, said relations between the two countries were based on religious, historical and cultural commonalities.
Rabbani, who had traveled to Iran to attend Rouhani’s inauguration for a second term, added that Tehran and Islamabad enjoyed a common stance on regional and international issues.
He stressed the importance of bolstering cooperation in economic, security, parliamentary and energy fields as well as in the campaign against terrorism based on common interests.
Pakistan would spare no effort to promote relations with Tehran, the top senator pointed out.
Iran, Zimbabwe must use potentialities to serve nations: Rouhani
Meanwhile, in a meeting with his Zimbabwean counterpart, Robert Mugabe, the Iranian president said Tehran and Harare must use their extensive potentialities to serve the interests of their respective nations.
Iranian President Hassan Rouhani (R) shakes hands with his Zimbabwean counterpart, Robert Mugabe, in Tehran on August 7, 2017. (Photo by president.ir)
“Like the Iranian people, the Zimbabwean people have fought and are fighting for their dependence,” Rouhani said.
Mugabe, for his part, said that his country sought enhanced relations with Iran, adding that Zimbabwe’s great potentialities could pave the way for the development of cooperation between the two countries. |
Fourteen consecutive seasons of 10 wins or more.
Fourteen consecutive top-five finishes in the Associated Press Top 25 poll.
Two national championships.
Nine consecutive conference titles.
Two Heisman Trophy winners.
If Florida State's unprecedented performance in the 1990s isn't considered a modern-day college football dynasty, then what program can possibly be remembered as one?
The Seminoles didn't win back-to-back national championships like Nebraska did in 1994-95, a feat No. 2 Alabama has a chance to duplicate when it plays No. 1 Notre Dame in the Jan. 7 Discover BCS National Championship in Miami.
Warrick Dunn was one of the most popular Seminoles of the 1990s. US Presswire
Florida State didn't win as many national championships (two) in the 1990s as Miami did in the 1980s (three), but no program played as well for as long as the Seminoles did in the '90s.
Over the course of 14 seasons from 1987 to 2000, the Seminoles had a 152-19-1 record, winning 88 percent of their games. FSU won national championships in 1993 and 1999 and finished No. 2 twice and No. 3 five times.
During the 1990s alone, FSU had a 109-13-1 record, the most victories by any team during a decade. Only Oklahoma during the 1950s won a higher percentage of its games (89.5 percent) during one decade than Florida State did during the '90s (88.6 percent).
A season with two losses was considered a hiccup during FSU's stretch of dominance.
"You have to do it year after year after year," said former FSU coach Bobby Bowden, who is major college football's all-time winningest coach with 377 victories. "That's what makes a dynasty. You can't do it in two years. You can't do it in three years. It has to be for a long time."
The 1987 FSU team finished 11-1, which started 14 consecutive seasons with 10 or more victories, the longest such streak in college football history. The Seminoles finished in the top five of the final Associated Press Top 25 poll every season from 1987 to 2000. After joining the ACC in 1992, FSU won its first 29 conference games and didn't lose to a league foe until a 33-28 defeat at Virginia on Nov. 2, 1995. FSU won ACC titles in each of its first nine seasons in the league.
"The thing that makes you a dynasty is accomplishing something that sets you apart from every other program, doing something that puts you a step above everyone else," Bowden said. "We won more games in the 1990s than anyone has ever won in a decade."
If the Seminoles had won only a couple of more games, there certainly would be no debate about their designation as a modern-day dynasty. While Bowden led FSU to two national championships, becoming the first team to go wire-to-wire as the No. 1 team in the country in 1999, the Seminoles endured a handful of other near misses.
In-state rival Miami was largely the reason FSU didn't win more crystal trophies. In 1987, FSU's only loss was a 26-25 defeat to the Hurricanes. The next season, the Seminoles were ranked No. 1 in the preseason but lost to Miami 31-0 in their opener. Miami beat FSU seven times in eight seasons from 1985 to 1992, with many of those losses costing the Seminoles a chance to play for the national championship. |
Scalproller™
Titanium Microneedle Roller
Enhances any topical treatment regime by stimulating natural repair pathways to support scar healing and maintain healthy hair growth.
Benefits:
The Scalproller by Nanogen has 4 innovative modes of action to enhance any hair treatment regimen:
1. Increases Topical Treatment Absorption
Scalproller pre-treatment has been shown to increase absorption of topical treatments by 5 times or more. With Scalproller pre-treatment, lower 2% concentrations of a topical treatment solution will give concentrations in the scalp higher than when using 5% solutions on untreated skin. Similarly, 5% solutions will produce higher concentrations in the scalp than 12.5% solutions or suspensions used on untreated skin. Frontal scalp areas are notoriously difficult to treat topically, most probably due to lack of absorption. Therefore topical treatments are only really effective in treating vertex hair loss. Using Nanogen's Scalproller can dramatically increase absorption of topical treatments in these regions, opening up new potential areas for topical treatments to act on.
2. Heals Donor Scars
Hair transplant surgery commonly leaves scars in the donor region; Nanogen's Scalproller has been proven to fade and reduce the appearance of these scars by breaking up scar tissue structures and formations. Plus there is evidence in animal models to show that new hair may grow to conceal the donor area after Scalproller treatment.
3. Activates PRP Treatment
Platelet Rich Plasma or PRP therapy is a cutting edge development in hair loss treatment. PRP has been shown to produce thicker transplanted hair growth, and possibly even thicken non-transplanted hair.
In PRP therapy, the platelet and growth factor rich fraction of the patient's blood is re-injected into them, and then growth is activated by repeated needle insertion. Single needle insertion is irregular, time consuming and often painful. Scalproller treatment produces much more reliable, regular needle insertions in less time, and with less pain.
4. Encourages New Hair Growth
The latest research by Intercytex, performed with Dr. Bessam Farjo as principal investigator, has shown that patients receiving superficial injections and controlled wounding grow new hair, which may solely be a result of the controlled skin wounding itself.
This surprising result is correlated by the pioneering work published by Dr. George Cotsarelis of Pennsylvania University, who found that stimulation of the Wnt protein by wounding leads to hair regeneration. Wounding by microneedles would potentially start this Wnt protein mediated growth stimulation, and prevent synthesis of TGF-β2, a protein known to induce hair loss.
Scalproller treatment increases topical treatment penetration and may independently promote new hair growth.
Increasing Topical Treatment Penetration
Scalp skin is comprised of several layers. The outside layer is called the stratum corneum, and is made from dead skin cells with a high concentration of oils an keratin protein. This layer protects the outside of the body, and is very effective at preventing microbes and chemicals from passing through, entering the body.
Applying topical treatments is only useful if the actives can penetrate through this layer. Actives that are small molecules can penetrate around the hair shaft and sebaceous glands, and some of the active will go through the stratum corneum. However a significant amount of actives will be blocked, especially larger molecules. This often means that only a fraction of the total active in the product reaches the target area and has an effect.
Using the Scalproller creates thousands of quickly healing channels through the stratum corneum, bypassing the major barrier to treatment absorption. The stratum corneum on the scalp is not very thick, and can be penetrated by a 0.3 or a 0.5mm microneedle. These channels allow more than 5 times more actives to penetrate the scalp. They also allow larger molecules like growth factors to penetrate easily, where before absorption would have been low.
Directions:
For best results, first cleanse the scalp using Hair Prepare. Clean the Scalproller with the sanitising solution spray and allow to dry for a few seconds before use. At first, use a constant, gentle rolling motion once in one direction only over each area, from the crown toward the front or the sides.
After time, individual users may prefer to roll in multiple directions. Apply a topical solution like Serum VEGF as per the product instructions.
Use the roller once a day at night before applying topical treatment. Ensure the roller is cleansed thoroughly after each use, run under hot water and allow to dry
before sterilising and returning it to the case. Always allow the roller to cool before using.
Overview
Clean the Scalproller quickly and conveniently
before and after every use.
Easy to use sanitising spray ensures the
Scalproller is clean and ready to use.
Titanium microneedle roller
Enhances penetration of any topical treatment.
Unique titanium microneedles stay sharp
for painless use for 3-6 months.
[productalsobuy] |
Hours after releasing the video of the police-involved shooting of Lavall Hall, his family confronts Miami Gardens Mayor Oliver Gilbert at a city council meeting. (Published Wednesday, April 8, 2015)
The family of a mentally ill man fatally shot by police in Miami Gardens confronted local officials Wednesday in a dramatic exchange that unfolded just hours after their attorney released video of the shooting that includes audio of the victim's mother begging "please, don't hurt my child, please."
Catherine Daniels, the mother of Lavall Hall, attended the Miami Gardens city council meeting Wednesday night to demand answers, but she never got a turn to speak.
The council zipped through the public hearing option, and that's when things took an angry turn, as Daniels confronted Mayor Oliver Gilbert.
"I wanna ask you something, do you hold accountable for what your officers did?" she asked, as Gilbert appeared to walk away.
“Why are you running? I asked you do you justify your officer was in the right?” Daniels called after Gilbert.
Hall was shot and killed by officers in February after his mother called 911 for help with her son, who was schizophrenic. Former police chief Stephen Johnson said the officer opened fire after Hall attacked two officers with a broomstick.
Earlier Wednesday, the family's attorney, Glen Golberg, released chilling dash camera video of part of the deadly confrontation. Goldberg said the police dash camera video of the shooting, which was obtained by his family, contradicts the police narrative.
Lawyers Release "Bombshell" Video Fatal Police-Involved Shooting in Miami Gardens
The attorney for the family of a man killed in a police-involved shooting in Miami Gardens released dash camera video of part of the confrontation Wednesday. (Published Wednesday, April 8, 2015)
"It is a bombshell, it does not corroborate what the City of Miami Gardens police chief had said," Goldberg said.
In the video, Hall's mother can be heard off-camera pleading with officers for her son's safety. An officer is heard saying "he's walking with a broom and he's walking around in his underwear. Every time I go near him, he walks away" before the fatal encounter.
"I was devastated to see that it happened like that," Daniels said.
NAACP representatives pointed out that the incident was not the first time Hall's mother called police to the home, noting that Hall had been safely committed to a forced psychiatric evaluation under the Baker Act a week prior to the incident.
"This is why this mother called. She did the right thing," representatives said, as Daniels began to weep audibly. "What she called for was assistance from police never knowing that this would be the last time that she would see her son."
Miami Gardens Police said they were required to release the video to Hall's family but said they wouldn't comment further because the case remains an open investigation.
New Video To Be Released in Miami Gardens Police Shooting
Lawyer for the family of Lavall Hall, who was shot by Miami Gardens Police, says new video disputes officers' account of the incident. (Published Tuesday, April 7, 2015)
On Tuesday afternoon, Miami-Dade State Attorney Katherine Fernandez Rundle said in a letter to Goldberg that releasing the video could harm the criminal case involving the officers.
"Obviously our concern is that this potential contamination may compromise our common goal to seek the truth," her letter said, in part.
"It is our position that the practices and procedures employed by the City of Miami Gardens were far below the standards in our community," Goldberg said.
The family of Hall has already filed a wrongful death lawsuit against the city and police department. |
David Yankovich announces he will challenge Ryan next year
House Speaker Paul Ryan takes questions from reporters at the Republican National Committee Headquarters in Washington. (Photo: Associated Press)
MADISON - A Democratic political activist from Ohio has moved to Wisconsin to run against House Speaker Paul Ryan.
David Yankovich announced Tuesday that he would challenge the Republican Ryan next year. Ryan was born and raised in Janesville, which is in the southeast Wisconsin congressional district he’s represented since 1998.
Yankovich calls himself “one of the original voices of the resistance against Paul Ryan and Donald Trump.” His campaign website touts the fact that he recently moved to Kenosha, and is not rich, famous or a politician.
Yankovich says he plans to spend the next year and a half meeting and learning from people in Wisconsin.
National Republican Congressional Committee spokesman Chris Martin calls Yankovich a “liberal carpetbagger who flaunts his own lack of qualifications to run for office.”
Ryan won re-election in 2016 with 65% of the vote.
Read or Share this story: http://jsonl.in/2rlqPUv |
FOREIGNERS pledging their allegiance to Queen Elizabeth in Fife, near Edinburgh, are rewarded, along with British citizenship, by a mug emblazoned with a puffin and the words “Fife the kingdom of life”. Those doing so in Gateshead receive a medal while in Cornwall new Britons are handed a lapel pin in the shape of a Celtic knot, fashioned from local tin. Such trinkets, however, come with a hefty price tag. Securing citizenship is expensive, both in comparison with the past and with the tariffs elsewhere. Its costliness is one indication of Britain’s ungenerous attitude towards those who want to settle in the country for good.
Becoming a citizen is a lengthy process, as it is in many places, with myriad hurdles and fees along the way. Someone applying for residency on the basis of being married to a Briton, for example, must pay £649 on two separate occasions for two two-and-a-half year visas (plus the same for any dependants) to begin their residency. In addition, as of this month migrants from outside the European Economic Area must pay a £200 annual “health-care charge”. They must then fork out £1,500 for “indefinite leave to remain” (which was free before 2003 when a fee of £155 was introduced) before being allowed to apply for citizenship.
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The charges thus mount up to several thousand pounds before foreigners reach the final stage, naturalisation, which in itself has become ever more pricey. Between 2005 and 2015 the fees for naturalisation rose from £200 for one adult to £1,005. The price for a family of four has risen to £3,508, almost two-and-a-half-times higher than in 2010. And not forgetting £50 for a citizenship test.
The government concedes that the fees for processes such as naturalisation far outweigh the costs. In 2014 the Home Office estimated its expenditure for dealing with an application for naturalisation to be £144; at that time would-be Britons paid £906. The government argues that the high price helps to cover the costs of immigration and border control more generally. Such fees offset, for example, tourist visas to Britain which cost visitors less than they do the government. When it came to power the coalition government scrapped a fund designed to offset the impact of immigration on areas most burdened. The cash had come from a £50 levy imposed on various immigration applications. The levy has remained in place though it is unclear exactly what the money is now spent on. The Tory election manifesto promises, with few details, the creation of a similar fund.
Go back a couple of decades, however, and naturalisation cost virtually nothing, says Thom Brooks, a professor of law and government at Durham University and an expert on citizenship. The rocketing costs since then reflect the fact that the process has become more onerous since the terrorist attacks of September 11th 2001, argues Mr Brooks, and the fact that the government realised that British nationality could be a useful money-spinner.
But soaring fees do little to discourage foreigners from applying, he suggests. Changes to the law or the application process are a greater deterrent. Around 126,000 foreigners were granted British citizenship in 2014, down from almost 208,000 in 2013, the highest number since 1962, when records began. The peak was probably prompted by a swell of applications ahead of the introduction of tougher language requirements towards the end of 2013. The fall in 2014 also reflects a large decrease in the number of grants of settlement (permanent residence) which created a smaller pool of newly eligible applicants for citizenship.
The disparity in the cost of naturalisation between countries is stark (see chart), reflecting in part differing views of the costs and benefits of citizenship. It can be seen primarily as a benefit to the migrant, suggests Madeleine Sumption of the Migration Observatory at the University of Oxford. After all, citizens are allowed to vote, they cannot be deported and certain jobs are limited to nationals. A British passport gets holders into many countries visa-free. By that account, charging a premium for these personal gains makes sense.
But citizenship can also be seen as a public good from which the host country profits. Desiring citizenship can indicate immigrants’ integration into society and can further facilitate it, says Ms Sumption. Becoming a citizen may cultivate loyalty to a country and its values. On that view, levying a lower rate is wise to avoid discouraging new nationals. If foreigners can get a job which (legally) gets them in the door and they then behave well, America—which puts a lower price on naturalisation than Britain—welcomes them as citizens. America wants migrants to see themselves as part of the national story rather than a separate isolated class, says Mr Brooks. Britain, by contrast, prefers to squeeze its would-be citizens for all they are worth. |
N’Golo Kante has earned a huge number of plaudits for his performances in the Blues engine room this season, while Conte is aware of the threat posed by Manchester United’s Paul Pogba, having managed him for two campaigns at Juventus.
Starting with the importance of Kante to this Chelsea side, Conte was full of praise for a man he believes shares the same work ethic he demonstrated during his own playing days. However, as with all players, the Italian insists there is room for improvement.
‘My job is to try and improve my players and I want to improve my players through working very hard,’ said Conte. ‘We are talking about a great player – he played very well in the past, last season with Leicester, and he is playing very well also this season with us.
‘We are working in some aspects to try and improve him, to make him a more complete player, but we are talking about a great player. N’Golo is also a fantastic person, with great commitment and he is a great example.
‘He’s a really good guy – he always has a smile on his face and this is fantastic. During training sessions, he works a lot, but with a smile. To see this is great for the other players, for the staff, for me and all the people who work at Chelsea. He’s a great player and, I repeat, he always puts 100 per cent in the game but also in the training.
‘In my career I like a lot this type of player, also because I was this type of player! I always appreciate this player, with great generosity, with great ability to work for the team. I think it’s important to have this type of player if you want to win. Not only great talent, but also players that run a lot during the game.’
Going into more detail on the similarities between Kante and Conte the player, our head coach said: ‘He’s stronger than me! I think I was perhaps stronger than him to score the goal, but in the other aspects, there isn’t a competition with him – he is stronger than me.’
As Conte seeks to lead us to silverware in his first season at Chelsea, one of United’s key players knows all about lifting trophies under the Italian’s stewardship, with Pogba and Conte winning back-to-back Serie A trophies and an Italian Super Cup at Juventus between 2013 and 2014.
‘I don’t like to talk about the players of the other teams, but in this case, with Paul, I have had the opportunity in the past to train him and, yeah, we are talking about a top player in all the situations,’ he said.
‘Also, in his commitment during training sessions to try to improve himself, with great technique, physically strong and great stamina – I can tell you that Paul Pogba is a top player.
‘We are working to try to find the right solution for the whole team, not only for Pogba or for one individual player. We are studying Manchester United to try to find the right solution. Paul is a really good player, we must pay great attention to him, but it’s right to think about the whole Manchester United team because this team is very strong.’
As for which player he thinks is the best, Conte said: ‘They are two different players with different characteristics. It’s very difficult to try to compare Paul and N’Golo – two top players but with different characteristics.’ |
LUCKNOW: The Akhil Bharatiya Hindu Mahasabha on Monday said it would build a temple to Mahatma Gandhi’s assassin, Nathuram Godse , in Sitapur district. For this, it has bought land in Siddhauli’s Para village, where it purports to begin construction on January 30, the day Gandhi was shot dead.Hindu Mahasabha spokesman Sharad Gupta said Godse’s urn, kept in Pune, would be brought to Sitapur through a “kalash yatra”. The urn is with Godse’s niece Himani Savarkar.The land identified for the temple belongs to one Kamlesh Tiwari, who claims to be the working president of Hindu Mahasabha. Interestingly, the Mahasabha is mired in internal bickering, with many members claiming to be real office-bearers.It’s the same plot of land on which the Bharat Mata Temple was to be built, Gupta told TOI, adding that the Mahasabha had originally thought of approaching Prime Minister Narendra Modi to lay the foundation stone to the Bharat Mata temple.“However, since the BJP is not showing much interest in the Hindu agenda like the Congress , the Hindu Mahasabha has decided to come up with a temple on Godse,” Gupta said.BJP MLA from Gorakhpur, Radha Mohan Das Agrawal, who’s said to have contested his first assembly election on a Hindu Mahasabha ticket, told TOI that the organization could perform useful duties if its members kept aside their differences.Along with Godse, the Mahasabha also plans to install statues of another “national” hero, Vinayak Damodar Savarkar. Savarkar was once president of Hindu Mahasabha and had advocated reconversion (or ghar wapsi) of converted Hindus. |
Natural Wonders
Cod vs starfish in pāua showdown
Starfish pry pāua carefully from the rocks, only to have them snatched away by marauding gangs of cod
Our Big Blue Backyard is one of New Zealand's most celebrated and discussed TV series, produced by the world-renowned NHNZ - formerly Natural History New Zealand - based in Dunedin.
Newsroom is featuring some of the top moments from this incredible show, including behind-the-scenes interviews with underwater cinematographer Kina Scollay, and NHNZ executive producer Judith Curran.
“Blue cod are hilarious fish that appear to really like being filmed and they and the massive starfish are constantly battling over who gets the pāua. The starfish are better at prying them off the rocks but then a gang of cod will move in and take the prize. It’s exceptionally entertaining”.
Kina Scollay Underwater cinematographer
NHNZ series Our Big Blue Backyard was made for TV One with the help of NZ on Air |
In an unmarked territory, hidden beyond the upper reaches of Oakville’s southwestern borderlands, Promontory looms remote, raw, and replete with uncharted potential. Steeped in history yet largely overlooked in the twentieth century, the scale of this undiscovered territory evokes the impression of a small national park. These lands encompass an entire watershed, and embody all the hallmarks of an unparalleled winegrowing estate - diversity of soil, elevation, exposition, and climate – all within a single and dramatic expanse.
Building a dream of this scale requires a commitment much greater than that of one individual or even one lifetime. It is a pursuit that requires the experience and wisdom of the founding generation, the preparedness and conviction of the current generation, with consideration for the promise of the next.
Promontory extends our pioneering spirit of discovering something that can reveal, just possibly, a glimpse of the sublime.
We invite you to join us,
Will Harlan
Director |
Excited fans for the upcoming Grateful Dead 50th Anniversary shows at Chicago’s Soldier Field have submitted a new Change.org petition to propose camping be allowed on a “floating campsite” atop the calm, nearby waters of Lake Michigan from July 3-5.
In a strategic move that is sure to catch the attention of both city officials and local sailors, connected deadheads got creative after their initial petition to allow for camping in the parking lots of Soldier Field after the shows was denied.
“If they don’t let us camp in the lot, we’ll just have to make our own,” Nebraska deadhead Jeff Watson said, who started the online petition.
The petition has gathered almost 11,000 signatures despite the fact that the event is still more than three months away. Many hotels near the venue are already reporting significant rate increases and limited room availabilities for the July 4th holiday weekend, leaving fans on a budget wondering where they can setup a tent for cheap.
“The city ordinances do not explicitly restrict camping on the lake,” local maritime law expert Bob Loblaw said.
#EmbraceTheFace #Dead50 |
The following are release dates and changes for September 2015 products.
For a complete list of upcoming release dates, please see the Product Release Schedule.
Please note these are the release dates for Japan. The overseas shipping dates may differ from the dates listed below.
The following release dates have been confirmed:
Arrival at wholesale stores on the 28th September 2015:
Good Smile Company - Hatsune Miku: Animal Charm Straps
Max Factory - Battleship Re-Class
Shipping out from GSC on the 28th September 2015:
Good Smile Company - Nendoroid Yamato
Good Smile Company - Nendoroid Kashu Kiyomitsu
Good Smile Company - Nendoroid KAITO: Senbonzakura Ver.
Good Smile Company - Nendoroid Co-de: Shion Todo - Eternal Punk Co-de
Good Smile Company - Nendoroid Co-de: Shion Todo - Baby Monster Cyalume Co-de
Good Smile Company - Nendoroid Honoka Kosaka (Rerelease)
Good Smile Company - Nendoroid Nico Yazawa (Rerelease)
HOBBYSTOCK - Nendoroid Pouch: Sleeping Bag (Kashu Kiyomitsu Ver.)
Max Factory - figFIX Amatsukaze: Half-Damage ver.
Max Factory - figma Rin Tohsaka 2.0
FREEing - Perceval
Shipping out from GSC on the 29th September 2015:
Max Factory - Plamya-sama
The following products have had their release dates changed:
Delayed from September 2015 to October 2015:
Good Smile Company - Nendoroid Darth Vader
Good Smile Company - Nendoroid Stormtrooper
Good Smile Company - Musashi: Light Armament Ver.
Good Smile Company - Musashi Kai: Light Armament Ver.
Good Smile Company - Musashi: Heavy Armament Ver.
Good Smile Company - Musashi Kai: Heavy Armament Ver.
Max Factory - figFIX Nagato: Half-Damage ver.
Max Factory - figma Vehicles: Panzer IV Ausf. D "Finals"
Max Factory - figma Vehicles: Panzer IV Ausf. D Tank Equipment Set
Max Factory - Yui Yuigahama
Max Factory - Aoi Sakurai
Phat! Company - Medicchu KanColle: Airfield Princess
Phat! Company - Medicchu KanColle: Kongo
WING - Muramasa Sansei: Bunny Ver.
WING - Super Sonico: Office Lady Ver.
WING - POP-DELIC GIRLS series Devil's Cheerleaders BLACK CHEER Ver.
AQUAMARINE - Battle Maiden Navi
PLATEADO - Sinon
ThreeA - TOMORROW QUEENS CALL ECHO SAISHO
ThreeA - TOMORROW QUEENS CALL ECHO SAIGO
ThreeA - TOMORROW QUEENS CALL ECHO ITSUMO
ThreeA - TOMORROW KINGS UNDERVERSE RANGER DAI NI SUTORAIKI
ThreeA - TOMORROW KINGS UNDERVERSE RANGER SENSAI KoGEKI
ThreeA - HALO UNSC SPARTAN GABRIEL THORNE
threezero - Mass Effect 3 Commander Shepard
threezero - WWR ROTHCHILD FIELD MECHANIC - NIGHT FIXER JENKINS
Beast Kingdom - Egg Attack Iron Man 3: Mark I
Beast Kingdom - Kids Nations Series 005 Avengers: Age of Ultron Earphone Jack Accessories
Delayed from September 2015 to November 2015:
Good Smile Company - Shigure Kai Ni
Max Factory - Racing Miku 2014: EV MIRAI Ver.
ThreeA - Bumblebee
Delayed from September 2015 to December 2015:
Good Smile Company - Lamborghini Countach LP400 (Red)
Good Smile Company - Lamborghini Countach LP400 (Yellow)
=============================
Apology for the Extended Delay of Lamborghini Countach LP400 Models
We wish to apologise for the delay of the Lamborghini Countach LP400 Models which have been further delayed due to further need to stabilize the production line. We apologise once again to all those who ordered this item and are waiting patiently for its release. Please trust that these delays are to ensure a high quality product that fans will be proud to own. The current estimated release date is December 2015.
=============================
Other products not mentioned yet are still in the final stages of quality control and as soon as we have a set date we will inform you. Please note that the actual date of products releasing in stores will differ depending on your location. Weather conditions and other unforeseen circumstances may also delay products, however we will inform you as soon as possible if this is the case. |
Curves ahead! The plus-size models that prove fashion is finally ready to embrace larger women
First there was Dove's 'real women' campaign, then there was Beth Ditto, but to date it seems that larger women have failed to become anything more than a novelty in fashion.
After all, Sophie Dahl, the original plus-size model, eventually lost the weight that made her so famous, Kate Moss continues to live by the mantra: 'Nothing tastes as good as skinny feels', and only last year Ralph Lauren famously airbrushed a model to look so thin, her head was wider than her waist.
But could 2010 be the year that curves finally come of age?
Size matters: Model Tara Lynn wears nothing but a slick of red lipstick while posing for V Magazine's size issue
V Magazine certainly believes that is the case, so much so that it has dedicated an entire issue to women of different shapes and sizes.
'The Size Issue', which hits news stands on January 14, features a high-fashion photo shoot starring no less than five curvaceous bombshells.
The images, by Norwegian fashion photographer Solve Sundsbo, see the models wearing everything from figure-hugging Agent Provocateur bodysuits to cut-out Gucci swimsuits.
One wears Dolce & Gabbana lingerie, while another dramatically poses in nothing but a slick of red lipstick.
The girls unashamedly flaunt full thighs, stomach rolls and love handles - things that would normally be airbrushed out on a high fashion magazine.
Figured out: Candice Huffine and Tara Lynn unashamedly flaunt their curves for photographer Solve Sundsbo
On form: Kasia P models Agent Provocateur's leopard-print bodysuit, while Candice Huffine proves Gucci's embellished cut-out swimsuit is not just for the super-slim
Sundsbo said : ' I loved the opportunity to show that you can be beautiful and sexy outside the narrow interpretations that normally define us.'
The same issue sees famed plus-size model Crystal Renn take on the slender Jacquelyn Jablonski, who at 17, has already modelled for Calvin Klein Jeans and Proenza Schouler.
And the U.S. glossy could well be on the money with its theme. Over the past few months, gap-toothed supermodel Lara Stone - who is currently dating David Walliams - has become famous in her own right thanks to her 'va-va voom' size 8 figure (most models are a UK size 4-6).
Bombshells: Plus-size models Candice Huffine (left) and Michelle Olson (right) work the body-con look
Larger than life: Marquita Pring almost covers up in Pringle of Scotland knitwear, while Michelle Olson dares to bare in a Dolce & Gabbana corset
Gossip singer Beth Ditto's collection for Evans was a runaway success, with some items selling out in days.
And who could forget the media storm surrounding British designer Mark Fast's London Fashion Week show in September, after his stylist allegedly walked out over a decision to use plus-size models.
The models in question proved how sexy Fast's clingy knitted dresses could look on a curvaceous body, making them a sellout at Brown's, the London boutique in which they were sold.
Shaping up, from left: Tara Lynn, Candice Huffine, Michelle Olson, Marquita Pring
So could skinny finally be on its way out? Realistically, no.
Even Stone, who is, by normal standards, very slim, admitted: ‘A lot of people say it’s nice to see someone who won’t break in half when you touch them. But I am still a woman and a person, and if you’re compared and confronted with your colleagues, and they’re all half your size, you think, “F***, I’m really fat!”’
But it seems that the fashion world is slowly making progress by beginning to accept more varied body shapes, and that there remains plenty of opportunity to embrace women that really look like women.
Photography: Solve Sundsbo
Styling: Nicola Formichetti
Models: Candice Huffine, Marquita Pring, Michelle Olson, Tara Lynn, Kasia P. |
Unit 731 was specifically created by the Japanese military in Harbin , China (then part of Japanese-occupied Manchukuo ) for researching biological and chemical warfare , by carrying out human experimentation on people of all ages. During the Second Sino-Japanese War and later World War II, the Japanese had encased bubonic plague , cholera , smallpox , botulism , anthrax , and other diseases into bombs where they were routinely dropped on Chinese combatants and non-combatants . According to the 2002 International Symposium on the Crimes of Bacteriological Warfare , the number of people killed by the Imperial Japanese Army germ warfare and human experiments was around 580,000. [1] According to other sources, "tens of thousands, and perhaps as many as 400,000 Chinese died of bubonic plague, cholera, anthrax and other diseases" from the use of biological warfare. [2]
During the last months of the war, Ishii was preparing for a long-distance attack on the United States. This operation, codenamed "Cherry Blossoms at Night", called for the use of airplanes to spread plague in the Americans' naval base in San Diego at night. The plan was finalized on March 26, 1945. Five of the new I-400-class long-range submarines were to be sent across the Pacific Ocean, each carrying three Aichi M6A Seiran aircraft loaded with plague-infected fleas. The submarines were to surface and launch the aircraft towards the target, either to drop the plague via balloon bombs, or to crash in enemy territory. Either way, the plague would then infect people in the area. The mission was extremely risky for the pilots and submariners, likely a one-way kamikaze mission. A pilot under the command of Ishii, Ishio Kobata, recalled the plan in 1998:
I was told directly by Shiro Ishii of the kamikaze mission "Cherry Blossoms at Night", which was named by Ishii himself. I was a leader of a squad of seventeen. I understood that the mission was to spread contaminated fleas in the enemy's base and contaminate them with plague.
The plan was scheduled to begin on September 22, 1945, but was not realized because it was vetoed by Yoshijiro Umezu, Chief of the Army General Staff,[5][6] and because of the surrender of Japan on August 15, 1945. Arata Mizoguchi, who was a Unit 731 commander in the Imperial Japanese Navy, said that only three I-400 had been built by August 15, but estimated that, by September 2, two or three more would have been built ahead of schedule had the war gone on.[7][8][9][10] |
Meet your new teacher (Flickr user Carl MiKoy)
Are you bored with your job, but enthralled by the mysteries of nature? Wish your days were filled with a few more dinosaur bones and giant squids? Well, step right up, because the Museum of Natural History has a golden opportunity for you!
The Museum is seeking applicants for their Master of Arts in Teaching (MAT) program, a 15-month curriculum that trains people to become science teachers, with the Museum itself as its classroom. Students will learn all about totally awesome stuff like planets, water, weather, and geology, plus possibly the ancient curse that causes the animals to come alive at night.
Tuition is free and students get a $30,000 stipend and health benefits, though graduates must commit to spending four years teaching in a high-needs public school and will face assignment anywhere in New York state. The program is part of a push to get more science teachers into New York schools, who are facing a serious shortage of math and science experts. "We’re looking for people who want to make a career of teaching and stay in the business,” said Ellen Futter, president of the museum, “whether they be just out of college or former participants in a volunteer corps or career changers or veterans.” If this sounds like the coolest job on the planet, get cracking on this here application, which is due January 31. |
Indian Foreign Minister Sushma Swaraj was in Beijing this week to participate in a trilateral meeting with her Russian and Chinese counterparts. While there, she also held separate meetings with both President Xi Jinping and Foreign Minister Wang Yi. Swaraj told reporters that, in addition to the trilateral meeting, one of the main purposes for the visit was laying the groundwork for Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s trip to China in May 2015. Apparently, part of that groundwork will be a concerted effort to see concrete progress in discussions over China and India’s disputed border.
The Telegraph, citing an Indian government official, said that New Delhi in particular hopes to hammer out the Framework for a Resolution of the Boundary Question. “That’s the next big diplomatic target for the government,” one official told The Telegraph of India. “The breakthrough has to be ready to be announced when the PM visits in May.” India’s national security adviser, Ajit Doval, is expected to travel to Beijing soon to continue the negotiations.
India and China dispute two large swaths of territory: Arunachal Pradesh to the east of Bhutan and Aksai Chin on the western edge of the India-China border. Arunachal Pradesh is administered by India as a state while Aksai Chin is administered by China as part of Xinjiang. In the 1990s, China and India effectively agreed to hold to the status quo, with both countries agreeing to abide by the Line of Actual Control until their governments could agree on a true border. However, the LAC remains ill-defined and incursions by both sides are frequent.
Since 2003, China and India have held a total of 17 rounds of border talks, with little to show for it. But new leadership in both Beijing and New Delhi has raised hopes that the two sides can reach the Holy Grail of their bilateral relationship: a demarcated border.
Since Modi came to power last year, China and India have taken to emphasizing the newness of their relationship. “I have been told that the Lunar Year of Sheep is known as the year of creativity and innovation… I feel that your India visit was about creativity and innovations,” Swaraj told Xi during their meeting this week. Xi also affirmed that “China-India relations entered a new development stage” with his fall 2014 trip to India. He added, “I have full confidence on the future of China and India relations and I believe that good progress will be achieved in the growth of bilateral relations this year.”
The question, then, is whether this new “creativity and innovation” can actually lead to a diplomatic breakthrough on the border issue. China and India both were hoping to have such a breakthrough to showcase during Xi’s September visit to India. That didn’t pan out – instead, the presence of Chinese troops in a disputed region highlighted how the border issue continues to strain China-India ties. That led to Modi raising India’s “serious concern over repeated incidents along the border” in talks with Xi.
Last year, in the wake of Xi’s visit, both he and Modi said their governments were committed to an “early” settlement of the border question. This time around, Indian diplomats have taking the daring step of putting a time-frame on the negotiations, raising expectations for a major announcement in May. That will be a difficult goal to reach – neither Modi nor Xi appears to be particularly flexible when it comes to territorial issues. But a border agreement will be a major coup for both Modi and Xi if they can pull it off. |
LOTRO Mordor Livestream Notes a guest Jun 22nd, 2017 851 Never a guest851Never
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rawdownloadcloneembedreportprint text 2.44 KB LOTRO MORDOR STREAM NOTES ------------------------------------------------------- *Allegiance system - something with crafting -Can view it on bullroarer (not fully without progression) -As you progress through mordor can pledge to certain factions (elves, dwarves, men, hobbits) -A few things specific to each alliance -Cosmetic Rewards, gear(best gear when expansion initially releases), cool stories -Can do all allegiances on one character but it gets a lot harder going through the second, third, and fourth time(Mainly for alts) *115 level cap *Crafting Increase -NEW MINSTREL INSTRUMENTS (new stats) -Level 115 gear (no 105 or 110 gear) -No new Crafting Guild tier *Mordor gets harder when you veer from the path (slightly challenging zones) -debuff that gets stronger the deeper you go -better landscape treasure the deeper you go *gear makes you stronger -helps fight against the shadows of mordor *Epic quest will not end on bullroarer -can start like first two quests I think -New story will start after mordor *LOTS OF FIRE AND LAVA *NO FLOWERS HYYYYYYYYYYYYPE *Legendary Item stuff -New relics (better tiers) -New legacy tiers *Gear -Returning to vitality -Slots go down at start *Flame of Ancalamir -Allows you to take items that are found throughout mordor and convert them to Ashes of Gorgoroth (Barter Item) -Ashes allow you to buy gear that hasn't dropped yet -Gear is no longer RNG, eventually can get most gear through Ashes *Elf-Smith NPC for Ashes of Gorgoroth -Offense/Defense sets *New pvp gear later down the line -Creeps become 115 on bullroarer (some form of magic voodoo) *NEW VIRTUE TIER - 19 to 20 *No fishing in Mordor (feelsbadman) *COST INFORMATION -Potential different Editions -Pricing Un-finalized *Avatar Revamp (not on bullroarer immediately) -Starting with Men and Elves *Barber Revamp -Barber shop has been revamped -Can recreate character looks through barber now -Won't be on bullroarer immediately -Can not change race *High Elf (potentially not on bullroarer immeditely) -No new class -New traits -New race skills -Classes -EVERYTHING BUT BURGLAR AND BEORNING -New starting area -Not open world *Bullroarer Info -New stuff every weekend *64-bit client -Work In Progress *Group Content -Potentially on bullroarer before summer ends *No Epic Battles (whew) ***EVERYTHING IS NOT FINAL ON BULLROARER
RAW Paste Data
LOTRO MORDOR STREAM NOTES ------------------------------------------------------- *Allegiance system - something with crafting -Can view it on bullroarer (not fully without progression) -As you progress through mordor can pledge to certain factions (elves, dwarves, men, hobbits) -A few things specific to each alliance -Cosmetic Rewards, gear(best gear when expansion initially releases), cool stories -Can do all allegiances on one character but it gets a lot harder going through the second, third, and fourth time(Mainly for alts) *115 level cap *Crafting Increase -NEW MINSTREL INSTRUMENTS (new stats) -Level 115 gear (no 105 or 110 gear) -No new Crafting Guild tier *Mordor gets harder when you veer from the path (slightly challenging zones) -debuff that gets stronger the deeper you go -better landscape treasure the deeper you go *gear makes you stronger -helps fight against the shadows of mordor *Epic quest will not end on bullroarer -can start like first two quests I think -New story will start after mordor *LOTS OF FIRE AND LAVA *NO FLOWERS HYYYYYYYYYYYYPE *Legendary Item stuff -New relics (better tiers) -New legacy tiers *Gear -Returning to vitality -Slots go down at start *Flame of Ancalamir -Allows you to take items that are found throughout mordor and convert them to Ashes of Gorgoroth (Barter Item) -Ashes allow you to buy gear that hasn't dropped yet -Gear is no longer RNG, eventually can get most gear through Ashes *Elf-Smith NPC for Ashes of Gorgoroth -Offense/Defense sets *New pvp gear later down the line -Creeps become 115 on bullroarer (some form of magic voodoo) *NEW VIRTUE TIER - 19 to 20 *No fishing in Mordor (feelsbadman) *COST INFORMATION -Potential different Editions -Pricing Un-finalized *Avatar Revamp (not on bullroarer immediately) -Starting with Men and Elves *Barber Revamp -Barber shop has been revamped -Can recreate character looks through barber now -Won't be on bullroarer immediately -Can not change race *High Elf (potentially not on bullroarer immeditely) -No new class -New traits -New race skills -Classes -EVERYTHING BUT BURGLAR AND BEORNING -New starting area -Not open world *Bullroarer Info -New stuff every weekend *64-bit client -Work In Progress *Group Content -Potentially on bullroarer before summer ends *No Epic Battles (whew) ***EVERYTHING IS NOT FINAL ON BULLROARER |
Breaking News Emails Get breaking news alerts and special reports. The news and stories that matter, delivered weekday mornings.
May 31, 2015, 6:36 AM GMT By Alan Boyle
After eight days of uneasy silence, the LightSail solar sail experiment rebooted itself to recover from a software glitch in orbit, the Planetary Society said Saturday.
"Our LightSail called home!" Bill Nye the Science Guy, who's the nonprofit society's CEO, reported in a news release emailed to reporters. "It’s alive!"
The LightSail nanosatellite is about the size of a loaf of bread, but there's a 344-square-foot sail of ultra-thin reflective plastic folded inside. It was launched on May 20 as one of the secondary payloads accompanying the U.S. Air Force's X-37B space plane into orbit. Just a couple of days after launch, the spacecraft stopped transmitting data. Mission managers figured out that a software glitch had filled its onboard memory with needless information, causing a computer crash.
Engineers had to wait for the automatic reboot, which may have been triggered by a stray cosmic ray.
"We were ready for three more weeks of anxiety," Nye said. "In this meantime, the team has coded a software patch ready to upload. After we are confident in the data packets regarding our orbit, we will make decisions about uploading the patch and deploying our sails — and we'll make that decision very soon."
Nye said the mission "has been a roller coaster for us down here on Earth, all the while our capable little spacecraft has been on orbit going about its business." |
Smokeless tobacco products, as used in Europe and North America, do not appear to increase cancer risk. A large meta-analysis, published in the open access journal BMC Medicine, has shown that snuff as used in Scandinavia has no discernible effect on the risk of various cancers. Products used in the past in the USA may have increased the risk, but any effect that exists now seems likely to be quite small.
Peter Lee and Jan Hamling, from P.N. Lee Statistics and Computing Ltd, carried out the analysis of 89 studies from the United States and Scandinavia. They found that, after adjustment for concurrent smoking, any effect of current US products or Scandinavian snuff seems very limited. According to Lee, "It is clear that any effect of smokeless tobacco on risk of cancer, if it exists at all, is quantitatively very much smaller than the known effects of smoking".
In 2005 in US men aged 35 or over, there were a total of 142,205 deaths from seven cancers considered to be caused by smoking. If these people had never smoked, Lee and Hamling estimated that the numbers would have reduced by 104,737, with the reduction in lung cancer deaths, 79,195, being the major contributor. If smokeless tobacco was introduced to a similar population of never smokers, this meta-analysis shows that any increase in risk would be negligible compared to the lives saved by reducing cigarette use.
Lee said, "Our paper shows very clearly that, in marked contrast to smoking, smokeless tobacco use carries little or no risk of cancer. Concerns about possible effects of smokeless tobacco on oral cancer are answered by our analyses showing a lack of relationship based on the combined evidence from those 14 studies published since 1990 which allow adequate control for effects of smoking." |
UUA Breakthrough Congregation: Unitarian Universalist Church of Boulder, Colorado
Ready for change
UU World Magazine Fall 2014 , published by the Unitarian Universalist Association
Interim Ministry, Leadership Development, Membership Growth & Outreach, Breakthrough Congregations
Just five years ago, things were so bleak at the Unitarian Universalist Church of Boulder, Colorado, that there was a question as to how much longer it would survive.
The congregation went years without paying the mortgage on its building. It hadn’t paid its Fair Share denominational dues to the Unitarian Universalist Association since the 1990s. The building was dilapidated, the minister’s office was hard to find, and the religious education building was unavailable because the church, desperate for income, rented it out to local schools.
Worse, it had the cliquey atmosphere of a social club, so unwelcoming that the church flunked a “secret visitor” evaluation when a UUA Mountain Desert District representative attended a service unannounced. At one point, membership dwindled to eighty, with so much infighting that when longtime member Barbara Richards became congregation president in 1993, friends warned her she would need a sledgehammer to call meetings to order.
“If I had walked in five years ago instead of four, I would not have come back,” said Whitney Wheeless, who joined the church in 2009 and is now president of the five-member board of trustees.
Today when you walk up the sunny pathway to the church on a Sunday morning, you’re met with radical hospitality, as two smiling congregants—one is from the rapidly growing young adult group—greet everyone before they reach the front door. Inside the sanctuary, built in the 1960s in a shape reminiscent of a Pueblo kiva, scores of new members and newly invigorated long-timers occupy nearly every seat.
The service is joyful and energetic and emphasizes the church’s new focus on social justice. On a Sunday in May, nine members of the church’s new Social Change Immigration Ministry described their recent BorderLinks trip to the Arizona-Mexico border. They placed items they’d found in the desert, such as empty water bottles, on a makeshift altar at the front of the church.
At coffee hour, children run about, people discuss the church-wide social change events, and a crowd of twentysomethings laugh as they plan their weekly pub meeting, Spirituality on Tap.
“You step back and you think, ‘Not long ago, this was like the apocalypse,’” said Jennifer Skiendzielewski, who will be board president next year. “There is an amazement that things have changed so dramatically.”
Since 2008, when the Rev. Howell Lind arrived as part of a bold experiment that has evolved into the UUA’s new Developmental Ministry program (see “What Is Developmental Ministry?” page 36), the Unitarian Universalist Church of Boulder has more than doubled its certified membership, from 110 to 233, with an unofficial count of 270. It has swept away a $50,000 deficit and raised $170,000 for capital developments, including a beautiful new playground and solar panels. It has become a teaching congregation for student ministers; it has pioneered Mindful Meetings to give a spiritual base to all church business; and it has instituted a Small Group Social Change Ministry model for social justice, with church-wide events that build community.
In what may be the most exciting development, it now includes fifty-five young adult members between 18 and 35—an astonishing fifteen-fold increase in five years—who attend church services on Sundays, meet at least weekly outside church, and are deliberately incorporated into all levels of church leadership. “The environment is just so much more exciting and fun to be a part of,” said Susie Belmont, who was one of only three young adults when she joined the church in 2009.
The church is doing so well that it is mentoring Mission Peak UU Congregation in Fremont, California, as a Leap of Faith congregation.
Each year, the UUA’s Office of Growth Strategies recognizes a handful of congregations that have broken through barriers to achieve exemplary goals. For the Boulder church’s remarkable change of course in such a short time, it has been named a Breakthrough Congregation by the UUA. (See more photos and share a study guide about this story.)
While the members appreciate the outside recognition, they are more delighted that they have rescued their beloved community by choosing to stay at the table rather than giving up and by being open to significant change and experimentation.
“People who’ve come back to the church after having been away ten years or whatever, they find it’s a different place—there’s excitement, enthusiasm, and the noise level [at coffee hour] is unbelievable,” said Lind.
“We’re at a really good place that we weren’t at even a couple of years ago,” said Wheeless with a broad smile.
In the dark days, as members call the recent past, the church was falling apart, both literally and figuratively.
Founded by a young mother in 1947 as the American Unitarian Association’s first fellowship, the church had more recently developed a quitting culture, where disgruntled members would leave rather than staying and working through conflict. By the mid-2000s, with no money in the coffers and a couple of bad matches between ministers and congregation, the church was on life support. “Oh, we were in trouble,” says Skiendzielewski.
But a core group decided they needed to pull themselves together, as Skiendzielewski puts it, and they reached out to Mountain Desert District Executive Nancy Bowen. With the Boulder church about to enter a ministerial search, Bowen suggested an innovative lifeline: decide what they as a congregation needed to do to become functional, then hire a minister who would help them reach those specific goals over a five-year period.
They jumped on it.
“I think we wanted to find a direction that would be successful instead of this constantly rotating door of un-success, so we were willing to try something new,” said Jenny Fitt-Peaster, immediate past-president of the board. After much explanation and lobbying by the board, the congregation voted unanimously to switch to a new kind of search.
“They knew that they were in really bad shape and in some ways on a path to self destruction. It was time for someone to come in from outside,” said the Rev. Keith Kron, director of the UUA’s Transitions Office, which now oversees the Developmental Ministry program.
They began with an interim minister, the Rev. Becky Gunn, now minister at the UU Society of Bangor, Maine, who got them headed in the right direction. In 2007 the board devised a set of goals to get the church back on its feet. The board worked with Bowen and the Rev. John Weston, then-director of Transitions at the UUA, to find a minister whose expertise was on point. They chose Lind, an expert in organizational systems and finances who, in addition to ministering to churches in three states, served fourteen years as district executive of the UUA’s Metropolitan New York District.
“My experience as a field staffer for the UUA helped, in that I’d seen a variety of congregations—those with bad practices and those with good—so I had learned what works,” said Lind, who is married to Bowen. “Ministry to spiritual needs is more than just pastoral; it also means knowing how to build a community. It’s having a sense of how to motivate a congregation to move the way it wants to. I think the Developmental Ministry program is an excellent way to do that.”
It’s important to note that the goals were set by the board, not by Lind, creating shared leadership. And because the minister contracts with the board for five years, it gives them incentive to make the relationship work. “That’s significant, because it means the board is in the game no matter what,” said Wheeless. “It allows some buy-in and commitment [from the board] even if the congregation starts being concerned about changes.”
As soon as Lind arrived, his every step was strategic, to help the congregation reach its goals, including the shedding of its image as a social club.
“The first Sunday Howell stepped into the pulpit, he wore his robe,” recalled Richards. “He wears it every Sunday he’s preaching. It sets the stage—it says that this is a place of worship and that we belong to a larger association than ourselves.”
Lind moved the minister’s office from a secluded area in the back of the building to the front, signaling access, visibility, and transparency. He then persuaded the congregation to fix its run-down building: first, a new front door, then carpet and paint.
“We had let the place get run down because we had no money,” said Fitt-Peaster. “He said our physical structure needed to look good in order for us to feel good about ourselves. He wasn’t afraid of asking for money and he was able to get it, when we hadn’t before. He opened our eyes to the fact we weren’t a poor congregation, and I think that opened doors for other things to happen.”
The board made governance changes and amended bylaws and policies so it could move toward its goals, and most of its members have attended the UUA’s regional Russell Lockwood Leadership School. The changes began to build on themselves. In a controversial move, the board stopped renting out its religious education building so the church could use its own space. As the congregation got healthier, it took on a series of intern ministers, who proved essential to attracting and retaining young adults, and Lind gave them room to be creative.
“There was never any ego in it, in terms of what [Lind] offered to us,” said Richards, a decades-long member and hospitality ministry coordinator.
At the same time, added Skiendzielewski, Lind’s persistence proved invaluable: “His stubbornness allows him not to care that people don’t like everything from the beginning. He doesn’t bend to appeasement.” When Lind encountered criticism to changes, rather than backing down he’d urge the congregation to ride it out with the idea of tweaking things down the road.
A capital campaign raised $65,000 for a new playground, and at least 100 members of the rapidly growing congregation came together over four days to build it, with teens and seniors sawing and hammering next to each other. It was an important community-building event. The church raised $105,000 more for other projects, and it donates $2,000 a month from the weekly offerings to local social justice organizations.
Stung by failing the mystery visitor’s evaluation, the congregation now emphasizes welcoming newcomers. “The big thing that makes us a Breakthrough Congregation is that it’s a very welcoming place now,” said Lind.
The young adult group is especially organized, tight knit, and enthusiastic. The group immediately adds visitors to its email list and invites them to get-togethers at local pubs, where five to twenty people gather each week. Lind seeks the group’s input for Sunday services, and as a result the music is more contemporary, said Belmont. Young adults serve on the board of trustees and on every other committee.
“We worked really hard to incorporate young adults immediately into the leadership,” said Lind. “They want to be taken seriously and they want their vision and values to be heard.” The success of the young adult group in creating community has inspired an over-35 group, Wine and Spirit, and now the church is focusing on attracting and retaining more young families.
The congregation has reached its goals so quickly that it’s now working on a five-year strategic plan that seeks to extend improvements in worship, family development, buildings and grounds, and more. Lind, who has enjoyed the challenge, has agreed to stay on until a settled minister is called; the congregation’s search will begin soon.
“It takes about seven years to change a church culture,” said Lind, who may take on another developmental congregation. “If they choose someone next year, that’ll be seven years, and enough culture change has already happened to get it out of the social club. It doesn’t mean the work is all done, but I think they’re more than stable now, to the point where congregational polity can be returned and they can call a minister.”
He’s leaving them in excellent shape, they say. “When you look at where we were, and where we are,” said Richards, “there’s no comparison.”
“There is something better, and it can be done—that’s the message we can carry forward,” says Fred Cole, a member for forty-seven years. “Change takes work, dedication, commitment—and it takes the whole village.”
See additional photos at UU World's Flickr page. |
I saw that my gift was being sent from Amazon and had been patiently waiting, checking the post office daily. Today, I had a slip in the box saying I had a package. I had also ordered a new mp3 player recently and was expecting that as well. I picked up a few different packages and now I was really curious. The drive home was the longest ten minute drive! I was so excited! I ran in the house, packages in hand. I tore through the box like a rabid rodent I saw the 2 most perfect gifts. I have been wanting an mp3 speaker for months to use with my phone and in the box was the coolest one I had ever seen! That would have been enough to make me the happiest vaporrama ever but then there was also a cookbook with all sorts of awesome yummies to make! Deciding where to start is going to be the hardest part. Thank you so very much to my Secret Santa! You made me little kid on christmas happy!
Edit: I just discovered that there is a second box still in transit! What!! This is too much! I love you, Miss Secret Santa!! Will update asap XD
UPDATE: I went body boarding this morning before the post office opened so after I finished I went to check my mail box. The second package was there! Again the long 10 minute drive home and then tearing open the plastic. I screamed so loud when I saw what my match had gotten me that I scared all 3 cats! She got me the best t-shirt anyone has ever given me...my dear match, I LOVE YOU!!! Thank you so very much, you fucking ROCK!!! |
Being more successful with women isn’t that complex.
I used to spend so much energy analyzing every possible detail and outcome of social interactions. I read all the books and articles that taught me the theory behind “pickup”. I’ve tried every routine in the book only to realize: I just needed to stop over-complicating shit.
When in doubt, KEEP IT SIMPLE.
Have you heard of Occam’s Razor? It’s the theory that usually the simplest solution is the right one.
You’ve already read tons of advice on overcoming approach anxiety and holding conversation. You’ve also probably gotten trapped in the excess mental masturbation that pervades much of the pickup industry.
What you should be doing is taking that knowledge and repeatedly testing it out, thus developing your social abilities naturally. The guys who become confident and connect with lots of girls are the ones who put the most time in. Implementation is the obvious and best answer.
Let’s use Occam’s Razor to slash through your other sticking points:
“I don’t know any women.”
Get off your ass and approach a ton of girls. This alone will determine the bulk of your results. Women aren’t magically going to appear in your bedroom. (Note: this involves getting off the computer.)
“I’m scared to approach women.”
We all are, you just get to the point where you’ve had enough experience under your belt to stop letting your fears hold you back. I didn’t approach for almost three months of going out socializing, but now I can say hi to anyone. Did I learn some special technique? No, I grabbed my balls and decided I wanted to stop being frustrated.
Start with simple “safe” questions like asking for directions or what time the venue closes, and walk away. Then, next time try to continue the conversation. After that, try using a direct statement to begin conversation. My approach eBook contains straightforward examples and anxiety exercises to try right now.
“I don’t know how to talk to women.”
That’s because you don’t talk to women regularly! You wouldn’t expect to know how to play a piano by thinking about playing. You would sit down, place your hands on the keys, and practice your ass off. You can’t learn how to talk to women without actually talking to women.
You can shoot the shit with close friends and family because you’ve interacted with them many times. Do that with women and you’ll hit that same comfortable rhythm.
“I’m afraid of being rejected.”
Get over it, you’re going to get rejected by girls. There’s no guy in history that hits it off with every woman he meets, or even the majority of them. The sooner you embrace that, the better. Go talk to women: get rejected by some and warmly welcomed by others. You’ll realize how little rejection matters in the long run.
“I don’t want to come off as creepy.”
No one wants to purposely freak out a woman (well, most don’t). But guess what, even if you say all the right things, there’s still a chance you could be deemed “creepy”. Additionally, you have already unavoidably creeped out someone in your life before and survived. There’s no point in worrying about it.
“There’s a girl I’ve never talked to, what do I do?”
Umm, go talk to her? Walk up to her and say, “Hey, I wanted to come introduce myself, I’m Nick.” Try to enjoy yourself and have a genuine conversation, maybe get a laugh or two from her. Then ask for her number. If she’s interested, she’ll say yes and want to hang out.
“I always end up in the friend zone.”
Think about the words “friend zone”. It means you are seen as just a friend. The main differences between a friend and a lover are sexual attraction and physical intimacy. So therefore you need to start turning her on and touching her.
Flirt like crazy, create lots of physical contact, and escalate the situation. Tell her she looks cute or sexy and hit on her already. She’ll let you know if she’s not interested, but if she is, you’ll be the one hooking up with a beautiful girl. If you have crippling sexual anxiety, apply the exercises to overcome it.
“I like this girl I know, how do I find out if she’s interested?”
Again, show your intentions and you’ll get your answer. Once you make it clear that you’re interested in being more than a friend (through flirting and physical contact), she’s either going to accept your advances or not.
“She gave me her number, what should I do?”
Text her. Don’t wait for three days to make contact. Within a few message exchanges, ask her on a date. If you made a good impression on her, then she wants to see you again.
“We’re on a date and I want to kiss her, should I go for it?”
You want to kiss her so the answer is a resounding yes! As long as you’re both not having a miserable time, take the shot and see what happens. Even if you went for it before she was ready, you can try again later when she feels more comfortable.
What makes me sad is that many of you reading this will not follow Occam’s Razor. You’ll get hyped up for a little and then go back to the same excuse of why you can’t or don’t want to go out this week. You’ll just need to read the next pickup guide searching for that hidden gem to push you over the hump.
And while you’re still frustrated and searching, there will be others who are finally obtaining the romantic life they desire. They’ve discovered the simple solution that always works — action.
—
Want a no bullshit plan of action to get you started? Have a free strategy session with me. |
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CARROLL, Iowa- Normally in the state of Iowa, you don’t see many Snowy Owls coming down from the cold arctic.
This year there have been many more sightings reported across Iowa in the past few weeks.
“Actually it since late October and currently, there are somewhere between 50 and 70 snowy owls in Iowa ,” said Mattt Wetrich, Carroll County Naturalist, for the Carroll County Conservation Board. “Right now that’s up considerably from the average winter, where all the way through March we might see a small handful, maybe 10 or less birds.”
Wetrich has been posting reports of Snowy Owls found in Iowa on the Iowa Ornithologists website.
Some Snowy Owls have been injured after being hit by a vehicle, while hunting for prey along Iowa’s roadways.
One such Snowy Owl was injured in 2011, the last great influx of the birds. Borealis is now a mature Snowy Owl, and visits classrooms for outreach about the bird.
“He is cold adapted even though we have a nice cool day he still panting he’s warm,” said Kay Neumann of the Soar Raptor Center. “There is a huge insulated layer, the middle of July we have our 95° days under 4% humidity he gets to stay in air-conditioning.”
If you’d like to know more about Snowy Owls, you can contact the SOAR Center here. |
NPR, I should note, says the above RT video and the Ames-Levine story are inaccurate. "NPR receives support from a vast portfolio of corporate sponsors, philanthropists and foundations. There is a very strict and effective firewall between those who support us and NPR's journalism. All parties understand this principle. Sponsor relations are managed and handled independently of NPR's journalists," NPR says.
(This post seems like one that calls out for my own personal extensive disclosure statement:
-I was a huge fan of the eXile, the paper founded by Mark Ames and [current Rolling Stone writer] Matt Taibbi when they lived in Russia.
-I met Ames for drinks at The Scratcher in Manhattan's East Village once; we got along well. I think I lost his contact info. Call me, maybe, Mark?
-I've been a critic of the CFPB but I like Elizabeth Warren.
-I've known Kamer for years and years and consider him a close friend.
-I've never appeared on Russia Today.
-I'm a regular guest on Marketplace Radio, which is produced by American Public Radio — which is not the same thing as NPR at all.
-When I was a corporate attorney, I frequently represented banks.
-I keep my savings in a bank account, although not Ally Bank.
-My grandfather fought for the Allies in World War II but that is unrelated to Ally bank.
-My niece is named Ally, but that is short for Alethea and we pronounce it differently.)
______________________ |
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This petition arises from an ongoing situation regarding one of the best Super Smash Bros. Melee players in the world, William "Leffen" Hjelte. In 2015, Mr. Hjelte was deported from the United States because he was sponsored by an American company while using a tourist visa, when he needed a work visa. After applying for a P1 Visa, which is what professional athletes use to come to the US, he was denied due to Super Smash Bros.
Melee not being recognized as a "legitimate" sport. Competitors in other eSports, such as League of Legends, have been approved for P1 Visas in order to travel to the US and compete. Given the precedent set with League of Legends, other eSports should be considered "legitimate" sports in order to let players come and compete in the United States. This petition arises from an ongoing situation regarding one of the best Super Smash Bros. Melee players in the world, William "Leffen" Hjelte. In 2015, Mr. Hjelte was deported from the United States because he was sponsored by an American company while using a tourist visa, when he needed a work visa. After applying for a P1 Visa, which is what professional athletes use to come to the US, he was denied due to Super Smash Bros.Melee not being recognized as a "legitimate" sport. Competitors in other eSports, such as League of Legends, have been approved for P1 Visas in order to travel to the US and compete. Given the precedent set with League of Legends, other eSports should be considered "legitimate" sports in order to let players come and compete in the United States.
UCSIS' definition of being "internationally recognised"
Having a high level of achievement in a field evidenced by a degree of skill and recognition substantially above that ordinarily encountered. The reputation of the group, not the individual achievements of its members or the acclaim of a particular production, is essential. UCSIS' definition of being "internationally recognised"Having a high level of achievement in a field evidenced by a degree of skill and recognition substantially above that ordinarily encountered. The reputation of the group, not the individual achievements of its members or the acclaim of a particular production, is essential.
Major Dota 2 nations Russia, China and Ukraine are all not among the Visa Waiver Program countries Major Dota 2 nations Russia, China and Ukraine are all not among the Visa Waiver Program countries
The petition entitled The USCIS Should Recognize All Esports As "Legitimate" Sports So International Players Can Come to the US on P1 Visas was started on April 29th, and has gathered the necessary 100,000 votes to trigger a response from the White House on the matter.The petition will help raise awareness, but is only a small part of a much larger problem in relation to foreign players coming to compete and live in the United States in eSports. I've attempted to explain in a bit more detail below. Special thanks toKyle "Beef" Bautista and compLexity Gaming for their insights on the subject.So what is the P1 Visa?The P1 Visa is a type of United States visa which grants a person the right to enter the country in order to compete in an athlete for an organisation. It can last between 1 to 3 years.In order to qualify for a P1 Visa an athlete or his organisation must prove he/she is "internationally recognised". A player on his own would be unable to apply for this visa without a team behind them. UCSIS defines international recognised as:This obviously poses a problem, how does one prove in Dota 2 or any other eSport they are recognised "substantially above that normally encountered"? Teams are left to gather evidence of just how "big a deal" they are.Obstacles between the P1 Visa and eSports - Proving you're a BIG DEALIn order to get a P1 Visa for anyone wishing to live and play in the USA as a paid job, proving you're a big deal in your field is crucial.As long as you can prove you're internationally recognised and you are going to do this for a living, you could be granted a P1 Visa.For League of Legends the hands-on approach of Riot Games reduces the issues encountered for players of their title as they have a large organising body to support their application, but for players of other games it is not so simple.They need to prove they are taking part in a "Major Sports League" - and obtain sufficient evidence from the organiser of it - they also need to provide evidence they are recognised in more than one country.This is obviously a very grey area, and with eSports still only part of the way towards worldwide recognition, teams are left hunting for data to prove their players' stature.So how can a team prove their player is recognised? Match viewership, Twitter followers, written statements from a recognised expert or sports media, international rankings, awards or honours and proof of participation in what the USCIS would deem a "major" competition are all possibilities. Whether they accept them as legitimate or not is another question entirely.P1 Visa is NOT for players coming to compete at TIIn a Dota 2 context, the P1 visa is not relevant to players simply coming to the country to play in the Summit or The International. For these kind of competitions players can apply for a B1-B2 visa, which allows them to compete for material gain but they are NOT allowed to be paid for being there by a US company.In other words if you wish to live in the United States as a non-US citizen and make a living from gaming you would need a P1 visa and an organisation behind you to support your application. If you wish to come to compete in the Summit you would need a B1-B2 visa, but you would not be allowed to receive a salary of any kind for your time spent in the United States aside from prize money winnings.VWP makes it easy for citizens of some countries but not all to come to the USIf you are fortunate enough to be a citizen of one of the 38 countries on the Visa Waiver Program then you can enter the U.S. without even a need for a B1-B2 or a P1. These countries include big eSports nations such as Sweden, South Korea and Germany.However, it does not extend to Russia, China or even the Ukraine. In the world of Dota 2 this is a major issue, and is the reason we often see CIS and Chinese teams struggle to get visas for The International and other events held in the United States. Players from these countries and any other country not listed in the VWP usually apply for a B1-B2 visa, which is for business and tourism.B1-B2 visa is not always fairIn order to successfully apply for a B1-B2 visa, organisations need to prove their players are really travelling to the United States and are not being paid for being there. They also need to give evidence of funds to cover their expenses while in the United States, and prove that they are not planning to try to sneak into the US and not return to their home country.The B1-B2 visa also requires the custom and border protection to understand what the players are going to the US for in the first place. This also can cause issues if the personal dealing with the application or the entrance into the country is unfamiliar with eSports, or does not believe in the validity of eSports. Overall the visa process for players coming to play in tournaments from non-VWP countries is a very hit or miss affair.Will the petition make a difference?The petition will of course raise awareness of the issues surrounding the P1 and eSports visas in general, but it's important to realise the P1 only affects players looking to live in the United States and earn a salary while being there. It will not reduce the visa issues we have seen at past Internationals and other U.S. based events where players are normally using a B1-B2 visa. Signing the petition is still a good way to raise awareness of the problem and help pledge your support to professional gamers. |
Perhaps the most important part of the survey process is the creation of questions that accurately measure the opinions, experiences and behaviors of the public. Accurate random sampling and high response rates will be wasted if the information gathered is built on a shaky foundation of ambiguous or biased questions. Creating good measures involves both writing good questions and organizing them to form the questionnaire.
Questionnaire design is a multistage process that requires attention to many details at once. Designing the questionnaire is complicated because surveys can ask about topics in varying degrees of detail, questions can be asked in different ways, and questions asked earlier in a survey may influence how people respond to later questions. Researchers also are often interested in measuring change over time and therefore must be attentive to how opinions or behaviors have been measured in prior surveys.
Surveyors may conduct pilot tests or focus groups in the early stages of questionnaire development in order to better understand how people think about an issue or comprehend a question. Pretesting a survey is an essential step in the questionnaire design process to evaluate how people respond to the overall questionnaire and specific questions.
For many years, surveyors approached questionnaire design as an art, but substantial research over the past thirty years has demonstrated that there is a lot of science involved in crafting a good survey questionnaire. Here, we discuss the pitfalls and best practices of designing questionnaires.
Question development
There are several steps involved in developing a survey questionnaire. The first is identifying what topics will be covered in the survey. For Pew Research Center surveys, this involves thinking about what is happening in our nation and the world and what will be relevant to the public, policymakers and the media. We also track opinion on a variety of issues over time so we often ensure that we update these trends on a regular basis so we can understand whether people’s opinions are changing.
At Pew Research Center, questionnaire development is a collaborative and iterative process where staff meet to discuss drafts of the questionnaire several times over the course of its development. After the questionnaire is drafted and reviewed, we pretest every questionnaire and make final changes before fielding the survey.
Measuring change over time
Many surveyors want to track changes over time in people’s attitudes, opinions and behaviors. To measure change, questions are asked at two or more points in time. A cross-sectional design, the most common one used in public opinion research, surveys different people in the same population at multiple points in time. A panel or longitudinal design, frequently used in other types of social research, surveys the same people over time. Pew Research Center launched its own random sample panel survey in 2014; for more, see the section on the American Trends Panel.
Many of the questions in Pew Research surveys have been asked in prior polls. Asking the same questions at different points in time allows us to report on changes in the overall views of the general public (or a subset of the public, such as registered voters, men or African Americans).
When measuring change over time, it is important to use the same question wording and to be sensitive to where the question is asked in the questionnaire to maintain a similar context as when the question was asked previously (see question wording and question order for further information). All of our survey reports include a topline questionnaire that provides the exact question wording and sequencing, along with results from the current poll and previous polls in which the question was asked.
Open- and closed-ended questions
One of the most significant decisions that can affect how people answer questions is whether the question is posed as an open-ended question, where respondents provide a response in their own words, or a closed-ended question, where they are asked to choose from a list of answer choices.
For example, in a poll conducted after the presidential election in 2008, people responded very differently to two versions of this question: “What one issue mattered most to you in deciding how you voted for president?” One was closed-ended and the other open-ended. In the closed-ended version, respondents were provided five options (and could volunteer an option not on the list).
When explicitly offered the economy as a response, more than half of respondents (58%) chose this answer; only 35% of those who responded to the open-ended version volunteered the economy. Moreover, among those asked the closed-ended version, fewer than one-in-ten (8%) provided a response other than the five they were read; by contrast fully 43% of those asked the open-ended version provided a response not listed in the closed-ended version of the question. All of the other issues were chosen at least slightly more often when explicitly offered in the closed-ended version than in the open-ended version. (Also see “High Marks for the Campaign, a High Bar for Obama” for more information.)
Researchers will sometimes conduct a pilot study using open-ended questions to discover which answers are most common. They will then develop closed-ended questions that include the most common responses as answer choices. In this way, the questions may better reflect what the public is thinking or how they view a particular issue.
When asking closed-ended questions, the choice of options provided, how each option is described, the number of response options offered and the order in which options are read can all influence how people respond. One example of the impact of how categories are defined can be found in a Pew Research poll conducted in January 2002: When half of the sample was asked whether it was “more important for President Bush to focus on domestic policy or foreign policy,” 52% chose domestic policy while only 34% said foreign policy. When the category “foreign policy” was narrowed to a specific aspect – “the war on terrorism” – far more people chose it; only 33% chose domestic policy while 52% chose the war on terrorism.
In most circumstances, the number of answer choices should be kept to a relatively small number – just four or perhaps five at most – especially in telephone surveys. Psychological research indicates that people have a hard time keeping more than this number of choices in mind at one time. When the question is asking about an objective fact, such as the religious affiliation of the respondent, more categories can be used. For example, Pew Research Center’s standard religion question includes 12 different categories, beginning with the most common affiliations (Protestant and Catholic). Most respondents have no trouble with this question because they can just wait until they hear their religious tradition read to respond.
What is your present religion, if any? Are you Protestant, Roman Catholic, Mormon, Orthodox such as Greek or Russian Orthodox, Jewish, Muslim, Buddhist, Hindu, atheist, agnostic, something else, or nothing in particular?
In addition to the number and choice of response options offered, the order of answer categories can influence how people respond to closed-ended questions. Research suggests that in telephone surveys respondents more frequently choose items heard later in a list (a “recency effect”).
Because of concerns about the effects of category order on responses to closed-ended questions, many sets of response options in Pew Research Center’s surveys are programmed to be randomized (when questions have two or more response options) to ensure that the options are not asked in the same order for each respondent. For instance, in the example discussed above about what issue mattered most in people’s vote, the order of the five issues in the closed-ended version of the question was randomized so that no one issue appeared early or late in the list for all respondents. Randomization of response items does not eliminate order effects, but it does ensure that this type of bias is spread randomly.
Questions with ordinal response categories – those with an underlying order (e.g., excellent, good, only fair, poor OR very favorable, mostly favorable, mostly unfavorable, very unfavorable) – are generally not randomized because the order of the categories conveys important information to help respondents answer the question. Generally, these types of scales should be presented in order so respondents can easily place their responses along the continuum, but the order can be reversed for some respondents. For example, in one of the Pew Research Center’s questions about abortion, half of the sample is asked whether abortion should be “legal in all cases, legal in most cases, illegal in most cases, illegal in all cases” while the other half of the sample is asked the same question with the response categories read in reverse order, starting with “illegal in all cases.” Again, reversing the order does not eliminate the recency effect but distributes it randomly across the population.
Question wording
The choice of words and phrases in a question is critical in expressing the meaning and intent of the question to the respondent and ensuring that all respondents interpret the question the same way. Even small wording differences can substantially affect the answers people provide.
An example of a wording difference that had a significant impact on responses comes from a January 2003 Pew Research Center survey. When people were asked whether they would “favor or oppose taking military action in Iraq to end Saddam Hussein’s rule,” 68% said they favored military action while 25% said they opposed military action. However, when asked whether they would “favor or oppose taking military action in Iraq to end Saddam Hussein’s rule even if it meant that U.S. forces might suffer thousands of casualties,” responses were dramatically different; only 43% said they favored military action, while 48% said they opposed it. The introduction of U.S. casualties altered the context of the question and influenced whether people favored or opposed military action in Iraq.
There has been a substantial amount of research to gauge the impact of different ways of asking questions and how to minimize differences in the way respondents interpret what is being asked. The issues related to question wording are more numerous than can be treated adequately in this short space. Here are a few of the important things to consider in crafting survey questions:
First, it is important to ask questions that are clear and specific and that each respondent will be able to answer. If a question is open-ended, it should be evident to respondents that they can answer in their own words and what type of response they should provide (an issue or problem, a month, number of days, etc.). Closed-ended questions should include all reasonable responses (i.e., the list of options is exhaustive) and the response categories should not overlap (i.e., response options should be mutually exclusive).
It is also important to ask only one question at a time. Questions that ask respondents to evaluate more than one concept (known as double-barreled questions) – such as “How much confidence do you have in President Obama to handle domestic and foreign policy?” – are difficult for respondents to answer and often lead to responses that are difficult to interpret. In this example, it would be more effective to ask two separate questions, one about domestic policy and another about foreign policy.
In general, questions that use simple and concrete language are more easily understood by respondents. It is especially important to consider the education level of the survey population when thinking about how easy it will be for respondents to interpret and answer a question. Double negatives (e.g., do you favor or oppose not allowing gays and lesbians to legally marry) or unfamiliar abbreviations or jargon (e.g., ANWR instead of Arctic National Wildlife Refuge) can result in respondent confusion and should be avoided.
Similarly, it is important to consider whether certain words may be viewed as biased or potentially offensive to some respondents, as well as the emotional reaction that some words may provoke. For example, in a 2005 Pew Research survey, 51% of respondents said they favored “making it legal for doctors to give terminally ill patients the means to end their lives,” but only 44% said they favored “making it legal for doctors to assist terminally ill patients in committing suicide.” Although both versions of the question are asking about the same thing, the reaction of respondents was different. In another example, respondents have reacted differently to questions using the word “welfare” as opposed to the more generic “assistance to the poor.” Several experiments have shown that there is much greater public support for expanding “assistance to the poor” than for expanding “welfare.”
One of the most common formats used in survey questions is the “agree-disagree” format. In this type of question, respondents are asked whether they agree or disagree with a particular statement. Research has shown that, compared with the better educated and better informed, less educated and less informed respondents have a greater tendency to agree with such statements. This is sometimes called an “acquiescence bias” (since some kinds of respondents are more likely to acquiesce to the assertion than are others). A better practice is to offer respondents a choice between alternative statements. A Pew Research Center experiment with one of its routinely asked values questions illustrates the difference that question format can make. Not only does the forced choice format yield a very different result overall from the agree-disagree format, but the pattern of answers among better- and lesser-educated respondents also tends to be very different.
One other challenge in developing questionnaires is what is called “social desirability bias.” People have a natural tendency to want to be accepted and liked, and this may lead people to provide inaccurate answers to questions that deal with sensitive subjects. Research has shown that respondents understate alcohol and drug use, tax evasion and racial bias; they also may overstate church attendance, charitable contributions and the likelihood that they will vote in an election. Researchers attempt to account for this potential bias in crafting questions about these topics. For instance, when Pew Research Center surveys ask about past voting behavior, it is important to note that circumstances may have prevented the respondent from voting: “In the 2012 presidential election between Barack Obama and Mitt Romney, did things come up that kept you from voting, or did you happen to vote?” The choice of response options can also make it easier for people to be honest; for example, a question about church attendance might include three of six response options that indicate infrequent attendance. Research has also shown that social desirability bias can be greater when an interviewer is present (e.g., telephone and face-to-face surveys) than when respondents complete the survey themselves (e.g., paper and web surveys).
Lastly, because slight modifications in question wording can affect responses, identical question wording should be used when the intention is to compare results to those from earlier surveys (see measuring change over time for more information). Similarly, because question wording and responses can vary based on the mode used to survey respondents, researchers should carefully evaluate the likely effects on trend measurements if a different survey mode will be used to assess change in opinion over time (see collecting survey data for more information).
Question order
Once the survey questions are developed, particular attention should be paid to how they are ordered in the questionnaire. The placement of a question can have a greater impact on the result than the particular choice of words used in the question.
When determining the order of questions within the questionnaire, surveyors must be attentive to how questions early in a questionnaire may have unintended effects on how respondents answer subsequent questions. Researchers have demonstrated that the order in which questions are asked can influence how people respond; earlier questions – in particular those directly preceding other questions – can provide context for the questions that follow (these effects are called “order effects”).
One kind of order effect can be seen in responses to open-ended questions. Pew Research surveys generally ask open-ended questions about national problems, opinions about leaders and similar topics near the beginning of the questionnaire. If closed-ended questions that relate to the topic are placed before the open-ended question, respondents are much more likely to mention concepts or considerations raised in those earlier questions when responding to the open-ended question.
For closed-ended opinion questions, there are two main types of order effects: contrast effects, where the order results in greater differences in responses, and assimilation effects, where responses are more similar as a result of their order.
An example of a contrast effect can be seen in a Pew Research Center poll conducted in October 2003 that found that people were more likely to favor allowing gays and lesbians to enter into legal agreements that give them the same rights as married couples when this question was asked after one about whether they favored or opposed allowing gays and lesbians to marry (45% favored legal agreements when asked after the marriage question, but 37% favored legal agreements without the immediate preceding context of a question about gay marriage). Responses to the question about gay marriage, meanwhile, were not significantly affected by its placement before or after the legal agreements question.
Another experiment embedded in a December 2008 Pew Research poll also resulted in a contrast effect. When people were asked “All in all, are you satisfied or dissatisfied with the way things are going in this country today?” immediately after having been asked “Do you approve or disapprove of the way George W. Bush is handling his job as president?”; 88% said they were dissatisfied, compared with only 78% without the context of the prior question. Responses to presidential approval remained relatively unchanged whether national satisfaction was asked before or after it. A similar finding occurred in December 2004 when both satisfaction and presidential approval were much higher (57% were dissatisfied when Bush approval was asked first vs. 51% when general satisfaction was asked first).
Several studies also have shown that asking a more specific question before a more general question (e.g., asking about happiness with one’s marriage before asking about one’s overall happiness) can result in a contrast effect. Although some exceptions have been found, people tend to avoid redundancy by excluding the more specific question from the general rating.
Assimilation effects occur when responses to two questions are more consistent or closer together because of their placement in the questionnaire. We found an example of an assimilation effect in a Pew Research poll conducted in November 2008 when we asked whether Republican leaders should work with Obama or stand up to him on important issues and whether Democratic leaders should work with Republican leaders or stand up to them on important issues. People are more likely to say that Republican leaders should work with Obama when the question was preceded by the one asking what Democratic leaders should do in working with Republican leaders (81% vs. 66%). However, when people were first asked about Republican leaders working with Obama, fewer said that Democratic leaders should work with Republican leaders (71% vs. 82%).
The order questions are asked is of particular importance when tracking trends over time. As a result, care should be taken to ensure that the context is similar each time a question is asked. Modifying the context of the question could call into question any observed changes over time (see measuring change over time for more information).
A questionnaire, like a conversation, should be grouped by topic and unfold in a logical order. It is often helpful to begin the survey with simple questions that respondents will find interesting and engaging to help establish rapport and motivate them to continue to participate in the survey. Throughout the survey, an effort should be made to keep the survey interesting and not overburden respondents with several difficult questions right after one another. Demographic questions such as income, education or age should not be asked near the beginning of a survey unless they are needed to determine eligibility for the survey or for routing respondents through particular sections of the questionnaire. Even then, it is best to precede such items with more interesting and engaging questions.
Pilot tests and focus groups
Similar to pretests, pilot tests are used to evaluate how a sample of people from the survey population respond to the questionnaire. For a pilot test, surveyors typically contact a large number of people so that potential differences within and across groups in the population can be analyzed. In addition, pilot tests for many surveys test the full implementation procedures (e.g., contact letters, incentives, callbacks, etc.). Pilot tests are usually conducted well in advance of when the survey will be fielded so that more substantial changes to the questionnaire or procedures can be made. Pilot tests are particularly helpful when surveyors are testing new questions or making substantial changes to a questionnaire, testing new procedures or different ways of implementing the survey, and for large-scale surveys, such as the U.S. Census.
Focus groups are very different from pilot tests because people discuss the survey topic or respond to specific questions in a group setting, often face to face (though online focus groups are sometimes used). When conducting focus groups, the surveyor typically gathers a group of people and asks them questions, both as a group and individually. Focus group moderators may ask specific survey questions, but often focus group questions are less specific and allow participants to provide longer answers and discuss a topic with others. Focus groups can be particularly helpful in gathering information before developing a survey questionnaire to see what topics are salient to members of the population, how people understand a topic area and how people interpret questions (in particular, how framing a topic or question in different ways might affect responses). For these types of focus groups, the moderator typically asks broad questions to help elicit unedited reactions from the group members, and then may ask more specific follow-up questions.
For some projects, focus groups may be used in combination with a survey questionnaire to provide an opportunity for people to discuss topics in more detail or depth than is possible in the interview. An important aspect of focus groups is the interaction among participants. While focus groups can be a valuable component of the research process, providing a qualitative understanding of the topics that are quantified in survey research, the results of focus groups must be interpreted with caution. Because people respond in a group setting their answers can be influenced by the opinions expressed by others in the group, and because the total number of participants is often small (and not a randomly selected subset of the population), the results from focus groups should not be used to generalize to a broader population.
Pretests
One of the most important ways to determine whether respondents are interpreting questions as intended and whether the order of questions may influence responses is to conduct a pretest using a small sample of people from the survey population. The pretest is conducted using the same protocol and setting as the survey and is typically conducted once the questionnaire and procedures have been finalized.
For telephone surveys, interviewers call respondents as they would in the actual survey. Surveyors often listen to respondents as they complete the questionnaire to understand if there are problems with particular questions or with the order questions are asked. In addition, surveyors get feedback from interviewers about the questions and an estimate of how much time it will take people to respond to the questionnaire.
Pew Research Center pretests all of its questionnaires, typically on the evening before a survey is scheduled to begin. The staff then meet the following day to discuss the pretest and make any changes to the questionnaire before the survey goes into the field. Information from pretesting is invaluable when making final decisions about the survey questionnaire. |
The Pew Research Center's excellent FactTank blog reported Tuesday that the Census Bureau is considering dropping a number of questions from its American Community Survey. The ACS has been a perennial target of Republican lawmakers, who say that its questions on everything from household income to commute times constitute an invasion of privacy.
Perhaps hoping to stave off some of these concerns, the bureau is reviewing a number of questions, including the one that has been subject to the most ridicule from the right: Housing questions 8a-8c, which cover the plumbing facilities in a household, including the presence (or lack thereof) of a "flush toilet." Setting aside privacy issues for the moment, can such a question possibly have relevancy in the year 2014? Or to put it more bluntly: Who doesn't have a flushing toilet?
As it turns out, a lot of people. According to the latest American Community Survey, nearly 630,000 occupied households lack complete plumbing facilities, which means that they are without one or more of the following: a toilet, a tub or shower, or running water. The Census Bureau says that the average household contains 2.6 individuals, which means that today, in 2014, in the wealthiest nation on Earth, upwards of 1.6 million people are living without full indoor plumbing.
As the map below shows, there is considerable geographic variation. Counties containing Indian reservations have astonishingly high percentages of households without plumbing -- 14 percent of households in Shannon County, S.D., don't have full plumbing. In Apache County, Ariz., the rate is more than 17 percent. Sparsely-populated census areas in Alaska also have very high percentages.
Counties along the Rio Grande in Texas have high rates of unplumbed households, as do a smattering of counties in Appalachia, particularly in eastern Kentucky and western Virginia. The southwestern portion of Alabama is another hot spot.
Looking beyond the present day, it's worth remembering that indoor plumbing is a fairly new development for many communities. In 1950 fully one quarter of U.S. households did not have a flush toilet -- this means that the era of outhouses is well within living memory for many Americans. The town I live in, Oella, Md., was reliant on outhouses until 1984. And it's smack in the middle of the Acela corridor, between Baltimore and Washington.
So the American Community Survey's questions on the issue aren't simply a laughing matter or an abstract exercise in privacy invasion -- it's about a real problem that still affects millions of people. Among other things, the government uses this data to allocate Section 8 and other federal housing subsidies; to assess the quality of housing stock in a given area; to determine the number of older Americans living in sub-standard housing who may be eligible for assistance; and to identify the Indian reservations that need the most housing assistance.
All told, a Brookings Institution study estimated that American Community Survey data is used to guide over $416 billion in annual federal spending. Without that data, the government would be forced to spend that money blindly. |
The Waukegan Public Library's Early Learning Center opened a new space-themed exhibit Sunday.
More than 200 children under the age of 8 attended the opening of the "Blast Off!" exhibit, which included cupcakes and freeze-dried ice cream.
Park City sisters Ariana and Layla Teran played on a model lunar rover. Ariana, 7, who dressed in one of the provided astronaut costumes, said she enjoyed pretending to trek the moon with her sister.
"I feel like it's gonna be awesome going to space," Ariana said.
Waukegan mother Darnisha Ivy-Biggs said the Early Learning Center is a great place for her children to play while learning.
"We come to the library almost every single day because they love it here," Ivy-Biggs said.
Yadira Sanchez Olson / Lake County News-Sun The new Blast Off! exhibit at Waukegan Public Library opened on Sunday. The new Blast Off! exhibit at Waukegan Public Library opened on Sunday. (Yadira Sanchez Olson / Lake County News-Sun)
The exhibit features space-themed exhibits — such as a space capsule or black light room with constellations — that were designed to promote learning the alphabet and shape and color recognition, library spokeswoman Amanda Civitello said.
Through sponsorship from the North Shore Gas Company, the Waukegan Public Library presents a new exhibit each year that is built mostly by in-house engineers.
This year, a NASA display on the main floor of the library features artifacts from NASA's Lower Earth Orbit shuttle program.
"We're very fortunate to have that from NASA in Huntsville, Alabama," Civitello said.
The NASA exhibit features a 13-foot replica space shuttle, a seat from the shuttle Endeavour and a tire from the shuttle Columbia, Civitello said.
Blast Off! replaces the previous Fairy Tales exhibit and display.
Sunday's celebration included "Star Wars" characters, who were on hand to pose for photos. Rockford's Discovery Center Museum provided older children with hands-on activities.
Yadira Sanchez Olson is a freelance reporter for the News-Sun. |
Sony is dropping the price of its two PlayStation VR bundles. The company announced today that it will start selling the $399 “core” PSVR set — which previously included only the headset — with a PlayStation Camera, which has a $59 list price. The more expensive $499 bundle, which includes a camera, two PlayStation Move controllers, and the Sony-produced minigame collection PlayStation Worlds, has been dropped to $449. Both bundles will go on sale September 1st.
PlayStation VR has often been advertised as a $399 VR headset, but since you needed the external camera to use it, the true price for most people was higher at launch. Some retailers launched promotional bundles with a free camera earlier this year, but Sony is now making the drop official and permanent. The more expensive bundle’s discount also keeps PlayStation VR cheaper than the Oculus Rift, which got a permanent price drop to $499 last month.
All three major high-end VR headsets have seen price cuts this year; HTC brought the Vive down to $599 just last week. Compared to Oculus and HTC, Sony is making a modest reduction, but it’s also eliminating one of the PlayStation VR’s annoying hidden costs — and making the whole platform a little more attractive. |
In what Reuters has said was "an apparent sign of support just three days before the first round of an uncertain presidential election", French presidential candidate Emmanuel Macron - and the market-friendly candidate preferred by Europe's establishment - spoke with former U.S. president Barack Obama on the phone on Thursday.
Quick to avoid the perception of yet another foreign interference (who can forget Obama's strong condemnation of the Brexit campaign last summer), in a statement from Kevin Lewis, spokesperson to President Barack Obama, he said that "an endorsement was not the purpose of the call, as President Obama is not making any formal endorsement in advance of the run-off election on Sunday." And yet, the optics certainly imply just that.
The full statement below:
"President Obama spoke on the phone to Emmanuel Macron this morning. President Obama appreciated the opportunity to hear from Mr. Macron about his campaign and the important upcoming presidential election in France, a country that President Obama remains deeply committed to as a close ally of the United States, and as a leader on behalf of liberal values in Europe and around the world. An endorsement was not the purpose of the call, as President Obama is not making any formal endorsement in advance of the run-off election on Sunday."
Macron said Obama wanted to exchange views about the French presidential campaign and that the ex-president had stressed how important the relationship between the two countries was.
Macron's party "En Marche!" said in a statement that "Emmanuel Macron warmly thanked Barack Obama for his friendly call."
In a separate statement, Obama's spokesman added: "an endorsement was not the purpose of the call, as President Obama is not making any formal endorsement in advance of the run-off." Macron is the only candidate so far to have said he has talked with Obama, a popular figure in France. |
A fourth-grade teacher at Bennett Elementary School in Frenship ISD, which serves Lubbock, TX, has written, deleted, and faced widespread public shame for a Facebook post in which she details her anger at Eric Casebolt’s resignation and her support for a return to a bygone era in which blacks were formally segregated on one side of the town.
To reiterate, this Texas elementary school teacher saw the video screenshotted in the post she shared—saw a white agent of the state pull his gun on a bunch of teenagers while brutalizing a black girl’s bare body—and wrote:
This makes me ANGRY! This officer should not have had to resign. I’m going to just go ahead and say it... the blacks are the ones causing the problems and this “racial tension.” I guess that’s what happens when you flunk out of school and have no education. I’m sure their parents are just as guilty for not knowing what their kids were doing, or knew it and didn’t care. I’m almost to the point of wanting them all segregated on one side of town so they can hurt each other and leave the innocent people alone. Maybe the 50s and 60s were really on to something. now, let the bashing of my true and honest opinion begin... GO! #imnotracist #imsickofthemcausingtrouble #itwasagatedcommunity
It is essentially safe to say in 2015 that any time you hear someone saying “I’m not racist,” they’re hella racist. It’s the historically cancerous cousin of “I don’t mean to be rude.” It’s also phenomenal that the intellectual escapism around race in America is such that a white woman can see that video, write a post longing for the good old days when blacks didn’t have civil rights, and then honestly think she can claim not to be racist.
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Anyway, Karen Fitzgibbons is responsible to her workplace for her public communication: a statement from Frenship ISD reads, “If an employee’s use of electronic media interferes with the employee’s ability to effectively perform his or her job duties, the employee is subject to disciplinary action, up to and including termination of employment.” Well, I think overt and unapologetic racism interferes with an elementary school teacher’s abilities to effectively perform her duties as well—but as of Wednesday, Fitzgibbons is still teaching.
Regardless of what happens to her now, Fitzgibbons will now forever be associated with this Facebook post and the resultant (and to her—and maybe you! I don’t know—unwarranted) public shaming. Does this seem good to you? Does it seem bad? There’s been much written about public shaming in the last year, thanks to Jon Ronson, whose So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed book came largely down on the idea that shaming ordinary people isn’t worth it, and is a way of the masses spinning our collective outrage wheel to produce straw (fleeting satisfaction at the “ruination” of someone’s life) rather than gold (political change).
And it’s true that Twitter can get people fired but rarely hired, that public attention tends to push in one direction, by which I mean straight to hell. But one of the things I hated about Ronson’s book was its soft political logic—the flattening of public shaming generally into a fairly monolithic impulse that “creat[es] a world where the smartest way to survive is to be bland.” On this point, Ron Jonson was wrong, and backing down from the real fight. Public shaming, though as useless as anything else we do online, does not change the underlying power dynamic that people are trying to protest in their outrage. White men outlast their public shame; white people, in general if not always, tend to—buffered as they are by whatever real or imagined invincibility made them say the dumb-ass thing in the first place. In Fitzgibbons’ case, I’d venture that it’s the black children who ever have the misfortune of coming in contact with her that will suffer more than she ever—clearly—could, or could even try for a moment to understand.
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Update: The original version of this post conflated two Bennett Elementary Schools. One is in McKinney; it’s not the school where Fitzgibbons teaches, she teaches at Frenship ISD. Jezebel is very regretful for the error.
Update 2: Fitzgibbons has apologized, but it wasn’t enough to satisfy her embarrassed employers. She’s been fired.
Contact the author at jia@jezebel.com. |
Welcome back to Luminaries, an UPROXX original series spotlighting young inventors using technology to change the world. This episode was made possible by The 100% Electric Nissan LEAF®.
A fair majority of what comes out of your car’s tailpipe is carbon dioxide, a gas we don’t need more of. But carbon dioxide is inevitable when you burn something; it’s part of the combustion process. However, it doesn’t have to go into the atmosphere, and Param Jaggi has figured out a way to turn it into oxygen.
You’ve likely heard of Jaggi before; he’s been working on green technologies since he was in high school. At 14, he built a bio-reactor using algae, and he’s gotten attention from the auto industry for his work in capturing and reusing the waste heat cars generate. At 21, most of his life and his career has been focused on cleaning up the Earth and changing the course of where we’re headed.
However, nothing is quite as ambitious as the Ecotube. Jaggi uses layers of algae on plates arranged in a tube; when you start your car, emissions flow over it… including the CO2 we need out of the atmosphere. The algae turn the CO2 into oxygen, and even the least fuel efficient vehicle has become far more green.
Being green is not a trend, it’s a necessity for both our Earth and our wallets. There are many innovations on the way for how we drive to get more out of the gas tank, and in some cases, like the 100% Electric Nissan LEAF®, ending the burning of gas altogether. But we can’t put everyone in a green vehicle right away, and with the Ecotube, we can ensure everyone can get behind the wheel of a car that contributes oxygen, not CO2.
Brought to you by Nissan Electric. |
Over the weekend, Donald Trump did what he always does when things go south for him. He walked away. He announced he is not the man at 70 he had been at 59 when he had boasted of sexual assault, and he pledged “to be a better man tomorrow.” With that, he effectively declared moral bankruptcy, paying about a dime on the dollar of sincerity.
It was, of course, what Trump had done six times in business, only this time the crisis was not about his finances, but his character. He had been caught talking trash about women. He has been caught boasting about committing the sort of sex crimes transit cops are always on the lookout for. He said he had hit on a married woman soon after he himself had been married. For all of that, he had “regret.”
Then, like the angel he thinks he is, he took flight. He left his own body and, looking down, pronounced in his videotaped apology that the Donald Trump who said all those repugnant things, the Donald Trump who managed to break centuries of newspaper tradition against using certain words, the Donald Trump who issued a casting call for the alleged victims of Bill Clinton, the Donald Trump who often talked about women in the most despicable terms, the Donald Trump who listened to Howard Stern take apart his daughter’s physique like she was a Lego creation, the Donald Trump who went vile on Megyn Kelly and who has called women “dogs” and “pigs” and who berated a former Miss Universe for gaining weight and who made a tabloid spectacle of his extramarital affair with Marla Maples, that that Donald Trump doesn’t exist anymore. The man erased his own past.
Anderson Cooper, one of the two moderators at Sunday night’s debate in St. Louis, begged to differ. “You bragged that you have sexually assaulted women. Do you understand that?”
“No, I didn’t say that at all,” Trump replied. “I don’t think you understood what was — this was locker-room talk. I’m not proud of it. I apologize to my family. I apologize to the American people. Certainly I’m not proud of it. But this is locker-room talk.” And then, forsaking segues and showing contempt for his audience, he veered into the blood-soaked Middle East. “You know, when we have a world where you have ISIS chopping off heads, where you have — and, frankly, drowning people in steel cages, where you have wars and horrible, horrible sights all over, where you have so many bad things happening, this is like medieval times. We haven’t seen anything like this, the carnage all over the world.”
Here are key moments from the fiery town-hall style presidential debate between Republican Donald Trump and Democrat Hillary Clinton at Washington University in St. Louis on Oct. 9. (Sarah Parnass/The Washington Post)
Bill Clinton was in the audience. He smiled from time to time, but God only knows what he was thinking. It has been almost two decades since his affair with Monica Lewinsky was revealed and yet the scandal stalks him like a vagrant cat looking for a handout of milk. We have become inured to all this — the sex, the lying, the slippery definitions of sex, the bouncing tenses — is, is, was, was — the tawdriness of it all, the erasure of the line between private and public. Two men in that debate room had much to account for.
Hillary Clinton had the chance to put away Trump. She failed. He was able to pivot, to move on to other subjects, some of which, like her emails, were awkward for her. She did not dwell on the odious tape, 11 years old and stinking with rancid sexism, a dialogue between morons, two men frozen in their adolescence, and she may not have done so because of those Bill Clinton accusers sitting in the audience and who had been all over TV just an hour or so earlier. They seemed so pleasant, middle-aged like Hillary. She could not possibly attack them. The whole subject must bring her pain. Best to talk about something else.
And so Trump’s diversion worked. He lives to fight another day, to continue to bring embarrassment and shame to the Republican Party and the political careerists who would risk a debacle of a presidency rather than take a stand on principle. Lies spill from Trump’s mouth and he exudes bigotry, yet he learned long ago that only suckers pay their debts and take responsibility for what they’ve done. He simply moves on. If he succeeds this time, then we are not his creditors, but as morally bankrupt as he is.
Read more from Richard Cohen’s archive. |
This list is in response to all the suggestions in the comments on the Top 10 Sci Fi Inventions that Shouldn’t be Invented. While there are tons of inventions that have various dangerous aspects there are many that would benefit the human race with hardly any dangers.
10 Interstellar Travel
Interstellar space travel is unmanned or manned travel between stars. The concept of interstellar travel in starships is a staple in science fiction. Interstellar travel is tremendously more difficult than interplanetary travel due to the vastly larger distances involved. Imagine being able to travel to distant worlds, discover new horizons and colonize space, all in the blink of an eye.
Can it be done? The NASA Breakthrough Propulsion Physics Project identified two breakthroughs which are needed for interstellar travel to be possible:
A method of propulsion able to reach the maximum speed which it is possible to attain
A new method of on-board energy production which would power those devices. [Wikipedia]
9 Terraforming
Terraforming (literally, “Earth-shaping) is the hypothetical process of deliberately modifying its atmosphere, temperature, surface topography or ecology to be similar to those of Earth in order to make it habitable by humans. This must become a reality if there is to ever be interstellar colonization. But isn’t the ultimate dream for humans to propagate and colonize the entire galaxy?
Can it be done? Well, in theory, yes. Here’s how:
Ecosynthesis. This is a term used to describe the use of introduced species to fill niches in a disrupted environment, with the aim of increasing the speed of ecological restoration.
Paraterraforming: This is the construction of a habitable enclosure on a planet which eventually grows to encompass most of the planet’s usable area. [Wikipedia]
8 Space Elevator
A space elevator is a proposed structure designed to transport material from a celestial body’s surface into space. The term most often refers to a structure that reaches from the surface of the Earth to geosynchronous orbit (GSO) and a counter-mass beyond. This device would facilitate construction in space, launching of satellites and space travel (via the “slingshot effect”).
Can it be done? Absolutely. The most common theory is a tether, usually in the form of a cable or ribbon, spanning from the surface near the equator to a point beyond geosynchronous orbit. As the planet rotates, the inertia at the end of the tether counteracts gravity, and also keeps the cable taut. Vehicles can then climb the tether and reach orbit without the use of rocket propulsion. [Wikipedia]
7 Energy Shield
Typically, energy shields are some form of force field designed to protect against weapons or elements by deflecting or absorbing their impact. The field is projected along the surface of, or into the space around an object. They usually work by absorbing or dissipating the energy of the incoming attack; prolonged exposure to such attacks weakens the shield and eventually results in the shield’s collapse, making the protected area vulnerable to attack.
Can it be done? This one is a toughie. Scientists are toying with the possibility, but a number of obstacles must be overcome before it could ever be conceived.
Energy. The cost of the projection of such a shield would be phenomenal, to say the least.
Technology. It all comes down to projecting energy into a solid form. Once we can do that, the rest is history. [Wikipedia]
6 Panacea
The panacea is a remedy that would cure all diseases, and prolong life. It is the ultimate cure for cancer, aids, viruses, everything. For millennia it has been thought of as simply a pipe dream, but as medical science advances the idea of a panacea is coming far closer to reality.
Can it be done? In theory, yes. The advances of medical science in genetics (specifically the interplay of inherited genes and the environment), and the immune system are lending more credibility to this idea every year. It is certainly imaginable within the lifetime of the current generation. [Wikipedia]
5 Antigravity
Antigravity is the idea of creating a place or object that is free from the force of gravity. It does not refer to countering the gravitational force by an opposing force of a different nature, as a helium balloon does; instead, anti-gravity requires that the fundamental causes of the force of gravity be made either not present or not applicable to the place or object through some kind of technological intervention. The practical applications of antigravity range from reduced transportation costs, to gravity manipulation in space.
Can it be done? The short answer to this one is no. However, there are theories that seem to indicate the existence, or at least possibility of antigravity. One of the most common is the Biefeld-Brown effect. This effect is not technically antigravity, however it duplicates the effects. Basically, a cloud of positively charged ions are attracted to a negative smooth electrode, where they are neutralized again. In the process, thousands of impacts occur between these charged ions and the neutral air molecules in the air gap, causing a transfer in momentum between the two, which creates a net directional force on the electrode setup. [Wikipedia]
4 Bionics
Bionics is a term which refers to flow of ideas from biology to engineering and vice versa. Hence, there are two slightly different points of view regarding the meaning of the word.
In medicine, Bionics means the replacement or enhancement of organs or other body parts by mechanical versions. Bionic implants differ from mere prostheses by mimicking the original function very closely, or even surpassing it.
In technology, Bionics refers to the development of specific technologies which mimic biological adaptation to the environment. Examples include a ships hull that mimics the thick skin of a dolphin, or sonar, radar, and medical ultrasound imaging imitating the echolocation of bats.
Can it be done? Yes. This technology has been in development for a number of years and, while still in the early stages, has already produced many devices. Examples of technological bionics include Velcro and Cat’s eye reflectors. Examples of medical bionics include artificial hearts and the cochlear implant. [Wikipedia]
3 Global Municipal Wi-Fi
Municipal Wi-Fi is the concept of turning an entire city into a Wireless Access Zone, with the ultimate goal of making wireless access to the Internet a universal service. This is usually done by providing municipal broadband via Wi-Fi to large parts or all of a municipal area by deploying a wireless mesh network. The typical deployment design uses hundreds of routers deployed outdoors, often on utility poles. The operator of the network acts as a wireless internet service provider.
Can it be done? Actually, this technology already exists in many cities throughout the world. However, it is not common enough to be considered mainstream. Usually, a private firm works closely with local government to construct such a network and operate it. Financing is usually shared by both the private firm and the municipal government. Once operational, the service may be free, supported by advertising, provided for a monthly charge per user or some combination. [Wikipedia]
2 Transatlantic tunnel
A transatlantic tunnel is a theoretical tunnel which would span the Atlantic Ocean between North America and Europe and would carry mass transit of some type—trains are envisioned in most proposals. Using advanced technologies, speeds of 300 to 5,000 mph (500 to 8,000 km/h) are envisioned. The implications of such a tunnel are massive. Imagine being able to go from New York to London in less than an hour. Or shipping goods overseas at a fraction of the cost and time.
Can it be done? Plans for such a tunnel have not progressed beyond the conceptual stage, and no one is actively pursuing such a project. The main barriers to constructing such a tunnel are cost—as much as $12 trillion—and the limits of current materials science. A Transatlantic Tunnel would be 215 times longer than the longest current tunnel and would cost perhaps 3000 times as much. [Wikipedia]
1 Ocean Colonization
Ocean colonization is the theory and practice of permanent human settlement of oceans. Such settlements may float on the surface of the water, or be secured to the ocean floor, or exist in an intermediate position. Advantages of ocean colonization include the expansion of livable area and expanded resource access. Many lessons learned from ocean colonization will likely prove applicable to space colonization. The ocean may prove simpler to colonize than space and thus occur first, providing a proving ground for the latter.
Can it be done? Yes, but the economic realities must be considered. To become self-sustaining, the colony must aim to produce output of a kind which holds a comparative advantage by occurring on the ocean. While it can save the cost of acquiring land, building a floating structure that survives in the open ocean has its own costs. One of the most realistic possibilities is the export of electricity from tidal energy. [Wikipedia]
This article is licensed under the GFDL because it contains quotations from the Wikipedia articles cited above.
Contributor: Mystern |
Mark Rosenberg calls Jay Dickey every so often just to see how he’s doing. Both men are in their 70s now. They trade health updates. They share news about their families. Mark once opened some doors for Jay’s daughter to land a job. Jay offered advice when Mark’s son was having problems. These phone calls, connecting one man in Atlanta with another in Pine Bluff, Ark., have become anticipated moments in their lives.
“He’s just an extraordinary guy,” Jay says.
“He’s such a kind and caring person,” says Mark.
Their relationship is also an unlikely one. Twenty years ago, these two men were enemies on opposite sides of the nation’s gun debate. Their distrust was so deep and well known, they were warned to avoid each other.
Mark Rosenberg (Bill O'Leary/The Washington Post)
Back then, Jay was Rep. Jay Dickey (R-Ark.), the National Rifle Association’s self-described point man on the Hill. And Mark was Dr. Mark Rosenberg, a champion of gun-violence research at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
When they clashed in person for the first time in April 1996, it was a meeting that would ripple across the years and into the present. It quickly led to the CDC’s controversial decision to halt its gun-violence research. Dickey declared victory. Rosenberg lost his job. And for two decades, the CDC has refused to investigate shootings as a public health problem, a position that even presidential pleas and strings of mass shootings have proved powerless to reverse.
Today, the gun debate is still shaped by what happened between these two men. They now say what happened was a mistake, one that has spurred on gun violence’s tragic toll.
As the 2016 presidential hopefuls offer competing visions of how to deal with shootings — with everything on the table from stricter gun laws to expanding gun rights — these two men are trying to get their message out. They believe they have a solution. But they are not sure that anyone, on either side, wants to hear it.
‘Can you stop violence?’
The official topic of the House Appropriations subcommittee hearing on April 30, 1996, was the CDC’s budget. But everyone knew the real focus was the agency’s study of gun violence.
The CDC had just started to think about violence as a disease: If you studied it, you might learn how to prevent it. Little was known about a problem that causes roughly 70,000 injuries and 30,000 deaths a year, many of them suicides and accidents.
In 1993, a rigorous CDC-funded study in the New England Journal of Science found that firearms kept at home greatly increased the risk of homicide by a family member or close acquaintance, rather than offering self-protection.
Jay Dickey, in 1999, when he was in the House. (Rep. Jay Dickey's Office via KRT)
That finding fired up the opposition. Gun violence is a criminal justice problem, not a public health one, they argued. The NRA in particular accused the CDC of being overtly anti-gun.
The NRA urged its congressional allies to target the CDC’s funding: the $2.6 million spent annually on gun-violence research. And Dickey proudly led the charge.
That’s how Rosenberg, director of the CDC’s National Center for Injury Control and Prevention, ended up sitting at the subcommittee witness table on that day in April.
He and Dickey had been sparring in the press for months.
Now, they sat in the same room for the first time.
Dickey dug right in, asking why the CDC seemed to align itself with gun-control groups.
Rosenberg said it was just trying to spread the word about the gun-violence problem.
“The problem you’re talking about is gun-related activities?” Dickey said, according to transcripts. “Is that what you’re saying the problem is?”
“No,” Rosenberg countered. The center focuses on violence. “I think it is so important for us to remember that the problem is the problem. It is the problem of premature deaths of our young people that we’re trying to focus on.”
“Can you stop violence? You can’t stop violence unless you stop people from committing it, can you? How can you stop violence by attacking the gun?”
“We’re not trying to attack the gun, sir,” Rosenberg said. “We’re trying to understand the problem. . . . And absolutely yes, we can prevent violence.”
A clear message
Rosenberg left the hearing room in disbelief.
“He truly felt the CDC was trying to take people’s guns away,” Rosenberg recalled.
The Republican-led Congress soon stripped $2.6 million from the CDC’s budget. More importantly, tucked inside the next federal spending bill was a provision that would change the trajectory of the nation’s gun debate — what became known as the Jay Dickey Amendment.
Rosenberg can still recall the words by heart: No funds for the CDC injury center “may be used to advocate or promote gun control.”
In one sense, he found it ridiculous. Scientists follow data. They don’t push policies. But he also recognized the implied threat.
“It was really a shot fired across the bow: If any of you researchers do this research or bureaucrats even think about doing it, we are going to harass you,” Rosenberg said.
At first, Rosenberg tried to spot a loophole in the Dickey Amendment.
He had the support of his boss, David Satcher. But Satcher left in 1998, on his way to becoming U.S. surgeon general. Rosenberg’s new boss seemed less interested. A year later, Rosenberg said, he was fired.
“The message was: This is too hot to handle.”
The CDC has never returned to funding firearm studies. The agency held firm even when President Obama ordered it to get back to researching “the causes of gun violence” in early 2013, shortly after a gunman killed 20 children at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn.
Private funding has not absorbed the slack, either, scientists say. No one, it seems, wants to pick a fight over guns.
“It’s evident this has had a chilling effect,” said Arthur Kellermann, who as a researcher at Emory University co-authored the 1993 study of firearms kept at home.
Kellermann moved on from the gun debate. Today, he is dean of the medical school at the Uniformed Services University of the Health Sciences. But he said he recognizes what’s been lost.
“There’s been so little science on this topic in the last 20 years that there’s no new information to keep the public engaged,” he said.
People seem to have forgotten why the research is important.
“This isn’t about guns,” he said. “This is about preventing tragedies.”
A window
Two weeks after the fateful hearing, Rosenberg was called back to Capitol Hill. A staffer in Dickey’s office wanted to go over some data. Rosenberg’s superiors didn’t like the idea. A match to gasoline, they called it. They told him to go but avoid the congressman.
Rosenberg intended to follow orders, but as he was preparing to leave, the staffer said the congressman was in his office and would like to say hello. Rosenberg gulped hard.
He walked in. The two men shook hands. Dickey offered him a seat. It was clear the congressman intended for him to visit awhile.
This was Dickey’s plan, a lesson from his days as a trial lawyer in Arkansas.
“I’d tried a lot of cases and knew the value of not letting divisions exist,” Dickey recalled.
The two men talked about their children. Dickey had four. Rosenberg had two. They hit it off.
Weeks later, Dickey invited Rosenberg’s teenage son and his class to visit him in Congress. The offer was accepted. Rosenberg’s son wrote a thank-you note. Later, Rosenberg spotted the handwritten letter on the congressman’s wall.
Neither man can explain why they started talking or even how they found something to talk about. But they kept doing it. The relationship evolved over years.
And slowly, cautiously, they started to talk about guns.
First, trust
There was no epiphany. No moment when the walls tumbled down. But by the time the two men started talking about the issue dividing them, they were friends.
“What friendship lets you do is trust the other person,” Rosenberg said. “If you’re going to learn from someone else, you have to trust them and trust what they are saying. And he taught me a lot.”
Dickey explained why he believed the CDC had an anti-gun bias. That suspicion appeared to be confirmed when the agency backed down in the face of his amendment. It looked to him as though the CDC lost interest once gun control was off the table.
Rosenberg countered that the CDC never wanted to ban guns — the agency was interested in injury prevention. And he thought it was possible to study the problem while protecting gun rights. But he acknowledged that the CDC missed its chance to make that clear.
Rosenberg taught Dickey about the value of scientific research, describing how deaths from auto accidents plummeted with federal research funding fueling the widespread use of seat belts, anti-lock brakes and air bags. Today, for the first time on record, U.S. death rates from automobiles and firearms are the same — driven primarily by a precipitous drop in fatal auto accidents.
“We did all that, saving 300,000 lives, without banning cars,” Rosenberg said. “We could do the same thing with gun-
violence research.”
Dickey was most intrigued by one simple innovation — cable barriers on highway medians to prevent crossover crashes.
Dickey saw a clear parallel with guns. The barriers did not interfere with traffic or ban cars. He envisioned similar limits on guns. He knew that would be controversial.
“But something needs to be done,” he said. “It’s more obvious now than before that we’re not making progress” in preventing gun violence.
Their private discussions turned public after a gunman killed 12 people inside a movie theater in Aurora, Colo., in July 2012.
A week later, they co-authored an opinion piece in The Washington Post titled “We won’t know the cause of gun violence until we look for it.”
They wrote that one undesirable consequence of their clash in 1996 was that “U.S. scientists cannot answer the most basic question: What works to prevent firearm injuries?”
In the years since, they have turned to their Rolodexes to gin up support. It’s been tough. Dickey said the NRA hasn’t returned his calls. Earlier this month, Rep. Mike Thompson (D-Calif.) issued a release trumpeting a letter from Dickey announcing his change of heart about gun studies. It was a start.
Otherwise, a handful of op-eds over the years, including another in The Post last week, haven’t changed the debate — just as nothing has happened after any of the high-profile mass shootings in recent years, despite renewed calls by lawmakers and public health officials for the CDC to resume its gun studies.
More than ‘common sense’
The result, Rosenberg said, is a debate distorted on both sides.
Pro-gun groups push for more firearms in more places, such as arming teachers to prevent school shootings. But no one knows whether that will make students safer. The research hasn’t been done.
The rallying cry on the other side is for “common-sense gun control.” Obama offered his support for this after the mass shooting in San Bernardino, Calif., early this month.
But Rosenberg dismisses these solutions, too.
“I don’t think common sense can answer these really tough issues,” he said.
Medical literature is littered with solutions that research later proved to be wrong or even harmful, such as gastric freezing to treat stomach ulcers.
“In the area of what works to prevent shootings,” Rosenberg said, “we know almost nothing.”
Today, they both live with their regrets. Rosenberg wishes the CDC had loudly proclaimed that it was not aiming to ban guns. That would have blunted the NRA’s criticism. He said future CDC research should have the twin goals of reducing gun violence and protecting the rights of law-abiding gun owners.
Dickey agreed.
“We need to turn this over to science and take it away from politics,” said the former congressman.
But the research needs to be clearly separated from its policy implications, Dickey said. Any hint of gun control would kill it. Rosenberg suggested funding CDC studies while leaving the Dickey Amendment in place as a reminder.
It also sounds a bit simple, even foolhardy. Today, neither man wields the power he once did.
But they are close friends. They figured out how to trust each other. They listen to each other. And they insist there is something to be learned from that, too.
Dickey just wonders if anyone is paying attention. The debate has become so polarized, the language so extreme, that their effort to be reasonable doesn’t seem to break through the noise.
“I think people don’t want to hear how Mark and I care for each other,” he said.
The other story is more familiar, the one where they are cast as enemies. That fits the polarized gun debate, each side backed into its corner. People know that one. They also know how it has turned out.
The truth is Dickey looks forward to his friend’s next call. |
Barça’s ideas have been spread across Europe by former players who switched to the dugout, including coaches of four Champions League quarter-finalists
Where are they now? In the dugout, that’s where, and not just any dugout. Take a look at the picture above. It is nearly 19 years old now: 28 August 1996, the side that won the Spanish Super Cup. You will recognise some of the faces, and among them are four of the eight coaches in the Champions League quarter-finals: this week Pep Guardiola’s Bayern Munich face Julen Lopetegui’s Porto and Laurent Blanc’s Paris Saint-Germain take on Luis Enrique’s Barcelona. Their Barcelona, where they all played together.
If it is extraordinary enough that one team provides half the managers left in the competition, go a little deeper. The starting XI that day ran: Lopetegui, Ferrer, Popescu, Abelardo, Blanc, Luis Enrique, Sergi, Amor, Guardiola, Stoichkov, Pizzi. Only two of them have not become first-team coaches: Guillermo Amor, who ran Barcelona’s academy and is now technical director at Adelaide United, and Gica Popescu, sent to jail for three years for fraud. Now there’s a “Where Are They Now?”.
There were 27 players in Barcelona’s squad in the 1996-97 season. Popescu apart, only five others have not worked as coaches or technical directors and among them are Giovanni, who scouts for Olympiakos, and Vítor Baía, an ambassador for Porto, plus the owner of the Fort Lauderdale Strikers, Ronaldo, and another Ballon d’Or winner, the Fifa presidential candidate Luís Figo.
La Liga’s manager cull continues with Deportivo’s coach the latest to go | Sid Lowe Read more
Sergi Barjuan has just taken over at Almería, Juan Antonio Pizzi manages León in Mexico having coached Valencia last season and Chapi Ferrer began this year at Córdoba, while Albert Celades is Spain’s Under-21 coach, Emmanuel Amunike coaches Nigeria’s Under-17s and Roberto Prosinecki manages Azerbaijan, to name but a few. Barça’s manager when they won the Super Cup, the Copa del Rey and the Cup Winners’ Cup was Sir Bobby Robson. Oh, and you might recognise his assistant, too: José Mourinho.
“Surprised? Not at all. The best club in the world, surrounded by the best players, learning from the best coaches. Why should I be surprised?” asks Hristo Stoichkov, who has coached Celta and Bulgaria.
Perhaps because others are. On Wednesday Luis Enrique faced his friend Sergi at the Camp Nou. Asked afterwards if the pair looked like being coaches back then, he laughed: “We looked like anything but coaches.” But, Luis Enrique added, “things change”. They change for everyone and fate isn’t entirely random. The length of the list invites the conclusion that Barcelona were conditioning them, forming managers even if they did not know it.
Luis Enrique, Sergi, Guardiola and Abelardo Fernández were especially close, the gang of four. Abelardo coaches Sporting Gijón. “I got my badge at 27, 28. I wasn’t thinking: ‘I’ll coach’, it was more a ‘just in case,’” he says. “Later you think about coaching and your experiences at Barcelona – and in my case Sporting – contribute but I wouldn’t necessarily have bet on those four, or any of us.”
Abelardo continues: “The only one out of the ordinary was Pep. He’d study videos carefully and showed an excessive interest in technical and tactical questions for a player.”
Others also noticed something about Guardiola. “Pep would participate, discuss, talk constantly, order,” Amor says of the midfielder whom Bobby Robson would recall as “always ready to speak his mind”. “You could tell with Pep, the reference point,” agrees Stoichkov. Óscar García, a member of that Barcelona squad who later coached Brighton and Watford, says: “Pep was the one.”
The one, but not the only one. The players had already identified Mourinho as different – “as a tandem he and Bobby were among the best”, Stoichkov says – while he in turn identified Guardiola, Luis Enrique and Blanc as the players most interested in the game’s mechanisms, spending time studying his technical reports. Blanc said he and Mourinho had “good discussions”: “Even then I was passionate about tactics.”
“They were all strong personalities, knowledgeable technically and tactically,” says Abelardo. He describes Lopetegui as preparado; diligent, qualified, intelligent. Amor describes Blanc as “a señor in every sense: well-mannered, intelligent, serious”. García describes Luis Enrique as “methodical, strict, with a real desire to win”.
Others were emerging too. There’s no catch-all explanation, no single reason for so many coaches emerging from that team, still less reaching such a high level, but players were being shaped by their environment, developing the personality, interest and knowledge to manage. The desire to manage, too. It wasn’t always positive, but bad times taught too: “You learned to live with pressure,” García says of a season that was a case study in the club’s self-destructive entorno, its political, social and media environment.
In some cases those shared experiences helped them become a certain type of manager, in style and methodology. “Barcelona’s game is based on attacking, possession, winning. If you look at [those coaches], many have the same idea,” Amor says.
When Zlatan Ibrahimovic dismissed Guardiola as a “philosopher”, it was an attack, but he does have a philosophy. Blanc may not always have practised what he preaches but during Euro 2012 he said: “Watching Spain is a pleasure. Their philosophy is one I love and know; it’s Barcelona’s philosophy.” Lopetegui arrived at Porto via the Spanish national team youth structure, bringing a technical, possession game in a 4-3-3 formation. “They wanted a specific way of playing,” he says.
Curiously, of the four some might argue the least “Barça” is the one at Barça. Results have been superb but the debate is often ideological, focused on the style under Luis Enrique. Yet his deviation has been exaggerated and he has been shaped by similar ideals, beginning at Barcelona B while Guardiola was first-team coach and Amor academy director.
Here, Johan Cruyff, in charge from 1988 to the spring of 1996, is an important figure. Stoichkov recalls: “I’d never tell a player: ‘Do what I did.’ That was one of Johan’s lessons that really stayed with me. It’s too much pressure. You can correct, help, guide, but don’t say that, never, ever.” But it was less about specific lessons, more about ideas – encapsulated by Txiki Begiristain, who played for Barcelona until 1995. “Every time Cruyff needed a solution, he attacked more.”
That influenced their managerial style and philosophy; it also influenced their career path. It was not just about making players coaches but about making players want to be coaches. Asked to explain the proliferation, Amor says: “Johan has a part to play, for sure.” He says: “There’s something basic, beyond results: the fact that we enjoyed it so much. The ideas carry you. When you enjoy something it’s lovely, so you want to keep going when your playing career ends.”
García, whose first coaching job was as Cruyff’s assistant with the Catalan national team, has a similar view: “You feel like teaching, passing on what you learned and enjoyed. You’re not conscious before, but maybe a process had started. Cruyff’s way was different, about the why? Not just doing things, understanding them. I’m proudest when my players say they’ve learnt something; that satisfies more than titles.”
Lopetegui insists: “I want players to really understand the game,” and Mourinho recalled a squad for whom it was not enough for the coach to be right, he had to demonstrate he was right.
There is a contradiction here which Abelardo quickly highlights: in 1996-97, Cruyff was not the coach, Robson was. And while Stoichkov notes that Luis Enrique and Blanc were signed by the Dutchman, they never played under him. Much of the culture remained, though, and Robson was a different lesson, variety. Popular, he won them over by his personality and his management of theirs. He did not just tell, he listened.
More than that, players admit that in 1996-97 there was a degree of auto-gestión, self-management, which may even have helped develop coaches. Mourinho stepped forward, Stoichkov describing him as “the typical guy who likes to be on top of everything: I learnt a lot from him, he was different.” And the players stepped forward too. “We took on a lot of responsibility,” Amor says.
Abelardo is not convinced while Stoichkov will not hear a word said against Robson, of whom he is fond, but Óscar says: “Maybe that autogestión is a factor. Without realising it, perhaps that forms leaders, people thinking about the game.”
Stoichkov says: “Pep, Luis Enrique, Laurent, Julen … I’m not surprised. They always had talent and personality plus good people around them. We were at the world’s best club and when you get used to winning you want to keep going.”
Amor adds: “It’s lovely to see four team-mates, people you’ve been fortunate to play with, in the quarter-finals. Hopefully we’ll see one of them win the final too.” |
The rear foot elevated split squat (aka the Bulgarian split squat) has become my primary lower body strength exercise. I don't back squat, rarely front squat, and when I do, it's usually with lighter weights.
(Please, hear me out before you slap the wuss tag on me and search for the next "do squats and drink milk" article.)
I still love squats, but I don't think they're right for me. I've had a long history of back problems (not lifting-related), which culminated in 2005 when I had a surgery to repair a disk at L5-S1. I was just 20 years old.
I started squatting after my surgery because I wanted to make my legs bigger and stronger and had always heard squats were the only way to do it. My legs did get bigger and stronger, but my back was constantly sore. I remember always having to ice my back just to make it to the next squat day, then repeating the process all over again. There had to be a better way.
It turns out heavy squats aren't the only way to get bigger, stronger legs.
Enter the Rear Foot Elevated Split Squat
I'd dabbled with rear foot elevated split squats (RFESS) off and on for a few years, but I never really thought of them as a strength exercise until I read Mike Boyle's article Build Bigger Legs, One at a Time . Shortly thereafter, I got an internship at Coach Boyle's facility (where I now work), and knowing that RFESS are his bread and butter lower body exercise, I figured it'd be a good idea to get better at them.
It didn't take long for me to start drinking the Kool Aid, and I haven't looked back. My experiences thus far have surpassed even my grandest expectations. I haven't experienced any back pain since my transition from heavy squats to heavy RFESS. My biggest "problem" now is that I've maxed out the dumbbells in the gym and have had to resort to loading with weighted vests, chains, and the occasional Volkswagen Beetle (kidding).
My adoration has been bolstered by what I've observed from my athletes. We've had well over 500 athletes come through the doors in the past year without a single case of low back pain due to the RFESS. There have been a few minor complaints of knee pain that have been quickly cleared up by adjusting the distance of the front leg to the bench (usually moving farther away). Similarly, I've heard several complaints of a pulling sensation in the groin and hip flexor of the rear leg (usually shorter and/or inflexible athletes), usually rectified by lowering the height of the bench.
Nevertheless, for someone with a preexisting groin issue, I'd choose some other movement.
Still, when taking into account the sheer volume of athletes that we've had perform the exercise on a regular basis, the injury rate is remarkably low, almost zero.
It's also a very "user-friendly" exercise, meaning most people can do it well. Many lifters struggle for years learning how to squat correctly, and lots never do. Go into any commercial gym and you'll see far more bad squats than you will good ones. Often, it's due to poor form and/or mobility restrictions, both of which are correctable with good coaching, hard work, and patience.
If you're one who's hell-bent on squatting and are willing to address your limitations to be able to do them well, I applaud you. In the meantime, it still makes sense to employ the RFESS as the risk of getting hurt is far less. If you can't squat well and continue to do it anyway, you're just asking for injury.
Finally, there are those who just aren't meant to squat. For some like me, it may be due to prior injury, while for others it may just be the way they're built. Many lifters with longer femurs and longer torsos will invariably turn their squats into good mornings, transferring much of the force from the legs to the lower back, which is both dangerous and ineffective. Practice and coaching may improve their technique slightly, but for the most part it will be an uphill battle.
I realize what I just said is akin to strength and conditioning heresy. Many just can't wrap their minds around the idea that squats may not be for everyone. I'd submit that these people are probably good squatters who haven't experienced significant back pain in their lives. For those blessed souls, squats are great. I'm jealous of them. But for those with back injuries or who just can't seem to pull off a decent squat, the RFESS is a better choice.
Limitless
In the back squat, the limiting factor is typically the lower back. In the front squat, it's the upper back. In the RFESS, you essentially eliminate those limiting factors and are able to hone in more directly on the legs. Moreover, because you're not loading the spine as heavily, it doesn't take as long to recover, so you're able to do them with greater frequency, potentially leading to greater strength and size gains.
It might seem that stability would be a severely limiting factor in getting strong, but this isn't the case with the RFESS, which is what makes it the best single-leg variation for building strength. In many ways, it bridges the gap between bilateral and single-leg exercises because you get the benefits of unilateral training while still getting assistance from the back leg to handle heavier loads. The back leg doesn't do much as far as lifting the weight, but helps tremendously with stabilization, allowing the front working leg to push harder. Technically, it could be argued that the RFESS isn't even a true single leg exercise at all since both legs are in contact with a fixed surface the entire time.
I don't care how it's classified. I just care if it works, and it clearly does.
Squat-less Hypertrophy?
Switching to the RFESS doesn't mean resigning yourself to a life with chicken legs. My legs have gotten bigger and stronger over the past year and a half, which doesn't seem logical until you consider that the vast majority of lifters can overload the legs much more in a RFESS than they can in a squat or front squat.
Exactly how much more isn't clear – it's hard to determine exactly how much load is being placed on the working leg during a RFESS since the back leg helps to some degree. If I had to venture a guess, I'd say the front leg bears about 85% of the load, although I'm sure it varies from person to person. It's also hard to compare the RFESS to full squats because the depth isn't equivalent since the front leg is slightly above parallel in the bottom position of the RFESS.
We could argue about the minutiae all day. In the end, just look at the numbers. We've found that on average, our athletes use about the same weight for the RFESS that they use for parallel front squats. Many athletes that struggle with squatting can actually RFESS more than they front squat!
The more experienced athletes with good squatting builds (short and stocky) usually front squat slightly more, but not much. Even the best squatters usually front squat no more than 10% of what they can do on the RFESS.
We're only starting to scratch the surface with the RFESS. Two years ago, when Mike wrote his controversial article, 225x5 was considered the benchmark. Now we have high school guys hitting those numbers and college guys doing it for close to 20 reps!
The "How To"
The key to learning the RFESS is first establishing a good setup position and then following a systematic loading progression.
Start by placing a small Airex pad or folded towel in front of a standard weight bench. Standing in front of the pad, reach one leg back behind you and rest the top of your foot on the bench. Descend under control until your back knee lightly touches the pad, making sure to keep the torso upright.
The most important thing is determining how far you need to stand from the bench, which is somewhat individual and will take some trial and error to figure out.
The closer you stand to the bench, the more it will emphasize the quads. However, standing too close may cause knee pain and make it harder to stay upright.
On the other hand, standing too far away can cause pain in the groin and hip flexor of the rear leg and lead to excessive arching of the lower back. You should feel a slight stretch in the rear hip flexor, but no pain. If you feel pain, try using a shorter bench so the stretch isn't as extreme.
When first starting out, it seems best to start from the bottom up to help ingrain good form. As far as loading, start with a light dumbbell held in the goblet position.
Stick with the goblet hold until you've maxed out the dumbbells in your gym or can no longer hold the weight. The goblet hold is great because it forces you into good posture while providing a great core workout.
Once you've run out of weight that way, start holding two dumbbells at your sides. You'll need to be extra vigilant to stay upright because the dumbbells will pull you forward. If using a 90-pound dumbbell with the goblet hold, start with two 50-pound dumbbells. Continue on until you've maxed out your dumbbells.
Using wrist straps is fine if grip strength becomes an issue, but only when absolutely necessary. Try to refrain and in time you'll have a killer grip to accompany your strong legs.
If you find yourself in a position where you've run out of weight again, there are several things you can do:
Use weight vests. This is my personal favorite, but I realize not everyone has access to them.
Use a barbell. For people with back issues, I prefer using a front squat grip because it requires less weight and helps ensure an upright torso, similar to the goblet hold. If you don't have back issues, feel free to put the bar on your back if it's more comfortable. If using a front squat grip, use the same weight as you would if you were holding dumbbells. If using the bar on your back method, you'll be able to handle slightly more weight, so plan accordingly. Any time you use a barbell, make sure to use a power rack so you can safely bail if need be.
Increase the range of motion by elevating the front leg on a small step. I love this method, but it's not for everyone. If you don't have the requisite mobility, it can wreak havoc on your hips and lower back. Start light and if you experience any pain whatsoever, try something else. I recommend no higher than a four-inch step, which will put most lifters of average height at parallel or slightly below.
Eccentrics. Slowing down the tempo on the eccentric portion of the rep will make lighter weights feel heavier, which is great for both hypertrophy and strength. I warn you though, they burn! This isn't a technique I'd recommend doing frequently. Rather, it should be employed sparingly and judiciously, no more than once every 3-4 months for three weeks at a time.
1.5 Reps. I picked this one up from Joe Defranco. Do one full rep, come halfway up, go back down again, and come all the way up. That's one rep. This significantly increases the time under tension and can be great for packing some muscle on your quads. Again, these burn. Consider yourself warned.
Jump. RFESS jumps are a fantastic way to develop single-leg power through a full range of motion.
Closing Thoughts
I'm certainly not anti-squatting. Fact is, if I could do them pain free, I'd probably take up powerlifting as I love moving heavy weights. And if squatting works for you, then do it.
If what you're doing isn't working, the RFESS might be the answer you're looking for. But you'll never know until you try it. What do you have to lose? |
Talk about a hell of a follow up to Wrestlemania.
Going into the night, it looked like we would have a solid card. And boy oh boy, did Extreme Rules deliver on basically every aspect.
First, I’ll get some relatively unimportant stuff out of the way. The Miz continued his god-knows-how-many-months long losing streak by falling to Santino in the pre-show match on YouTube. Layla came back after being gone for nearly a year and won the Divas Title after some failed twin magic. Orton beat Kane in a match that was really solid, but felt like it lasted too long. And thankfully, Cody Rhodes won his title back by beating Show in a tables match that required what some would say dumb luck. Brodus Clay beat Ziggler in his first non-squash match, and looked pretty solid doing it. He might actually be able to work decent matches given the rigth competition. And lastly Ryback destroyed a couple of local jobbers. One of these days, he’s going to need to have a real match.
And with all that said, I think I got rid of all the relatively unimportant stuff. Don’t get me wrong, some of these were solid to good matches, especially Orton vs. Kane. They just didn’t mean a whole lot in the scheme of things. Especially not with three awesome, main event worth matches on the card.
First, I’m just going to get this out of the way. Sheamus vs. Daniel Bryan was DAMN good. If it wasn’t for Punk vs. Jericho, it would have been the best match of the night.That’s how good it was, and it showed us what we missed out on at Wrestlemania each of the last two years.
Personally, I’m actually shocked at how good this match was. I thought it’d be good, but never thought it’d be as good as it was. Both Sheamus and Bryan showed they know how to build drama and work a good, long match. Because this was a lengthy match, officially clocking in at 22:55 in length. There was drama all over the place, especially with the first fall. Both guys, especially Bryan, had a bunch of near falls. It eventually ended with Bryan getting disqualified after he went well past the refs five count, repeatedly kicking the shoulder of Sheamus, which had been hurt earlier in the match. It eventually led up to him making Sheamus pass out to the Yes Lock for the second fall of the match.
The third fall was also really good. Both guys mounted offense, but in the end, it was Sheamus who came out as the victor, scoring the Brough Kick from out of nowhere to get the win.
I’m actually not so sure how I feel about this win yet, either. I expected Sheamus to win. He’s been pushed too hard all year for him to have such a short title reign. But damn, do I really like Bryan. He’s gotten completely over with the crowd, garnering constant “Yes!” chants throughout his matches. With his scorching popularity, I don’t think it’d be all that smart for WWE creative to keep the title off him for too long, though that might be what they’re doing, seeing as how Del Rio is next in line for a title shot. We’ll see how that goes, but I’ll be furious if they give the title back to him.
Next up, I’m skipping to the main event, because it was only the third best match tonight. But that doesn’t mean much, because it was a really good, and absolutely brutal match, and not how some might expect. There were very few weapons used in this – only Cena’s chains really, and they barely came into play.
This was all about Lesnar just pummelling Cena for most of the matches 17 plus minutes. Within moments of the opening bell, Lesnar immediately took down Cena and busted him open with a wicked elbow across the head, causing one of multiple stoppages during the match. And for the record, this didn’t look like a fake elbow either where the blood was from a capsule or anything (especially since WWE is very anti-blood nowadays). This looked very real, especially since it kept bleeding throughout the entirety of the match.
This might have been the biggest beating Cena has taken in a long time – maybe since last year at Extreme Rules when The Miz and Alex Riley double teamed who through much of their “I Quit” match, which Cena inevitably won. Lesnar was just flat out brutal though. He rained down the punches and elbows through much of the match, and had Cena chained up from the top rope at one point in time. He also locked on the kimura (which is a real life MMA submission that wrenches on the shoulder for all you non-MMA watchers out there) a couple times during the match, really working on Cena’s left arm. And to Cena’s credit, he actually sold this really well, as he barely used his left arm for much of the latter stages of the match.
But in the end, it was all to no avail for Lesnar. Despite physically dominating the entire match, Cena managed to muster a bit of offense late, and it was enough to secure the victory. He caught Lesnar with a fist full of chains to the face, and then drilled him with an AA onto the steel steps that were in the middle of the ring, landing the three count immediately thereafter.
Honestly, this match was the most shocking of all of them to me. I was thoroughly shocked that Cena got the win tonight, mainly because I didn’t think they’d bring Brock back to lose in his first match. It was a shock to say the least, but it didn’t really make Brock look bad. He physically dominated Cena all match, and accomplished what he wanted to accomplish – hurt Cena. It’s going to be interesting to see where they take this storyline from here, because I can’t imagine that it’s over.
Lastly, we cover what was really the biggest draw for me on this card – Punk vs. Jericho, part two. Only this time, in a Chicago Street Fight. And remember how I said yesterday that I thought this match, despite the stipulation, wouldn’t be too extreme and over the top? Well, guess what everyone…I was wrong. Dead wrong. Because this match was probably the one that most lived up to the billing of the pay per view, because it was all out chaos throughout much of the match.
And it didn’t long to get that way either. CM Punk almost immediately grabbed a kendo stick and used it multiple times on Jericho. Shortly after that, in spilled out the outside of the ring, where Jericho would send Punk flying into the retaining wall, chairs…really, just everywhere around ringside.
The highlight of this match though, came near the end. Jericho had Punk locked in the Walls, with really nowhere to go. Punk managed to get to the ropes…but it didn’t really do him any good, seeing as how there was no rope break in the match. Instead, the ever resourceful Punk managed to get himself a fire extinguisher off from underneath the ring and sprayed Jericho in the face. The match then quickly spilled outside, where the highlight of the night was hit.
With Jericho sprawled across the Spanish announce table, Punk scaled to the top rope (almost falling off in the process) and landed the flying elbow, putting both himself and Punk through the table. It looked pretty rough too, especially for Punk and how he landed on his hip. But it was one hell of an awesome spot to see.
The match wasn’t quite over yet though. After both men had gotten back in the ring, Punk locked in the Anaconda Vice. In what looked like a victory for Punk by now, Jericho managed to grab the kendo stick that was still sitting in the ring and pummel Punk with it, getting him to break the hold.
Jericho then tried to end it with the ultimate slap in the face for Punk, as he went for Punk’s patented GTS. Punk however, managed to slip out of it on the way down, slingshot Jericho into the exposed turnbuckle, and land the GTS and getting the three count.
This match really did have it all, and I was pleased of the outcome. I’m honestly shocked that Jericho hasn’t won the title from Punk yet, because it almost feels like his comeback has been somewhat of a waste because of it. But this was the second straight PPV where these two men showcased why they’re two of the best in the entire industry, as they put on an absolute show for over 25 minutes. It’s going to be interesting to see where both men go from here. I have a hard time believing that they’ll continue this feud, but who knows. If they don’t, I’m not entirely sure what Jericho is going to do, because the whole point of his comeback has been this incredible feud with Punk, and if it ends, then what’s left for him? Who knows.
I do know one thing though – this was a damn fine PPV. Props to WWE for managing two terrific PPVs in one month, because that has to be hard to do.
Until next time.
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This piece was updated after publication with more information.
Giannis Antetokounmpo is coming for LeBron’s title as King of the Chasedown Block, if he isn’t holding it already. Antetokounmpo’s endless length is enough to inject fear into opponents’ hearts. Just ask Blazers stars C.J. McCollum and Damian Lillard, who each felt Antetokounmpo’s wrath within a 30-second span on Thursday.
Those two blocks—on plays seemingly out of reach—are symbolic of Milwaukee’s late-blooming defensive renaissance in recent weeks. The Bucks own the NBA’s fifth-best defense (101.2) in their past 11 games since adding Eric Bledsoe. This follows a stretch of 10 games to open the season in which they ranked 29th, in line with their past two dismal defensive campaigns. Jason Kidd’s hyper-aggressive blitzing scheme is working again. Suddenly, Giannis looks the part of a Defensive Player of the Year candidate and Bledsoe has returned to an elite form last witnessed during his youth.
Giannis is the finisher. Bledsoe sets the tone. The Bucks’ new starting point guard is an agitator. With a thick frame and swift feet, Bledsoe’s terrific at pummeling through screens and switching onto larger wings. His near-6-foot-8 wingspan allows him to contest shots and invade passing lanes that he shouldn’t have access to standing only 6-foot-1. Bolstered by Bledsoe’s contributions, Milwaukee’s defense has improved significantly in various defensive statistics.
Milwaukee Bucks Defensive Statistics, 2017–18 Stat Type Rank Before Bledsoe Rank After Bledsoe Stat Type Rank Before Bledsoe Rank After Bledsoe Deflections 29th 3rd Loose Balls Recovered 27th 2nd Opponent TOV% 20th 1st DRTG 29th 5th
Kidd has preached deflections and steals to his defense in his time as head coach, and the Bucks have built a roster full of long limbs in hopes of maximizing their opportunities. But they weren't getting many of them earlier this season as offenses learned how to time their passes through the trees. Now, the Bucks are wreaking havoc.
Bledsoe’s communication has bolstered the team’s effort on defense while Khris Middleton has done a better job of talking and rotating from the weak side. Milwaukee’s big man defenders, John Henson and Thon Maker, are executing better on pick-and-rolls with Bledsoe busting through and Henson containing on the blitz. The more players talk, the more connected they’ll be, and the more connected they are, the better they’ll produce.
Precise rotations are integral to any defense’s success, but it’s especially critical for one that blitzes like the Bucks.
Bledsoe and Antetokounmpo trap Lillard, which forces the entire defense to rotate. There’s a lot that can go wrong. Henson is virtually out of the play once Al-Farouq Aminu drives, but the entire Milwaukee defense rotates in lockstep to cover. McCollum made the shot at the end of the possession, but that’s an acceptable result considering how heavily contested it was late in the shot clock.
Kidd hasn’t altered his hyper-aggressive scheme during the Bucks’ recent defensive hot streak. They are just executing better as a whole when gambling with traps, blitzes, and presses. The Bucks still have issues, though. They have a 95.3 defensive rating with Bledsoe on the floor, compared to 111.6 when he’s watching from the bench. If Bledsoe is basketball Botox, the Bucks are receiving enough treatments for their defense to hold form. But face lifts aren’t permanent.
Milwaukee’s schedule has been fairly soft. They’ve won eight of the 11 games played with Bledsoe in the lineup, but have only three notable wins against the Spurs, Pistons, and Blazers. Recent wins over the Kings and Blazers have helped to bolster their defensive numbers largely because those two teams played into the strengths of the Bucks’ defensive schemes. The Kings shoot more midrange jumpers and have a lower combined number of 3s and at-rim attempts than any other NBA team, while ball movement from one side of the court to the other can be a rarity in Portland. Teams that pass the ball and move off the ball are toughest on Milwaukee. The Jazz pounded the Bucks last week using ball and body movement to disorient their defense, and the two teams will match up again on Saturday. That contest—as well as games this week against Boston and Detroit—will be strong indicators regarding the Bucks’ progress. Even in their decisive wins, they suffered major slippages.
Henson doesn’t blitz overly aggressively here, but the rest of the defense fails to rotate. Look at Tony Snell on the weak side: He’s in a defensive stance, but he’s on an island. Jusuf Nurkic missed an easy kickout pass to McCollum for an open 3. More experienced playmaking centers (like Al Horford, who gets another crack at the Bucks on Monday) won’t miss that pass often.
A few minutes later, McCollum ended up with a wide-open 3:
This is a Spain pick-and-roll by Portland, which involves McCollum setting a pick on the screen defender (Henson). The team fails to communicate, as Henson recovers to Nurkic rather than switching. In this case, McCollum misses, but teams will make them pay down the road.
Kidd said it’s “impossible” for a young team to switch effectively and “know everyone on the floor.” Kidd isn’t wrong, but he’s also laid out the exact reason no other team in the NBA runs the extreme style of defense the Bucks employ. Teams generally aim to take away attempts at the rim and from behind the 3-point line to invite midrange jumpers. The Bucks do the opposite. Opponents attempt the fourth-fewest midrange jumpers against the Bucks and have the most at-rim opportunities, per Cleaning the Glass. There won’t be as many complaints about Milwaukee’s scheme as long as the team continues winning, but it’s still an issue that merits discussion. They struggle to communicate routinely, and the system as a whole leaves so much room for error that one slipup can lead to an open layup or 3. The fact their defense falls off a cliff when Bledsoe is off the floor is worrisome enough. One recent defensive hot streak doesn’t change three seasons of defensive struggles, and even with Giannis becoming a superstar and Bledsoe shining, it doesn’t appear sustainable.
There’s pressure to win now in Milwaukee, as there should be; Giannis is ready to lead a team to the NBA Finals. They need to add another star, but need the cap space to do it. The Bucks are seeking a big man, according to multiple NBA executives, and are also trying to open up cap space by aborting some of their larger contracts, such as Matthew Dellavedova, John Henson (both signed through 2019–20), or Mirza Teletovic (signed through 2018–19).
Marc Gasol would make sense for Milwaukee. Too bad he’s not available. Three NBA executives I spoke with don’t expect the Grizzlies to deal him, though the case can be made that they should. One said that even if Gasol requested a trade, nothing would likely happen until the offseason. Lower-cost options like Nerlens Noel will be available, but he doesn’t move the needle in a way that the Bucks would need out of an in-season deal.
The name that keeps popping up is DeAndre Jordan. The Clippers are a disaster, losers of 12 of their past 15 games. Their season is lost. League executives expect them to listen to offers for their star center. But Jordan has a player option worth $24.1 million for the 2018–19 season, and as ESPN’s Bobby Marks pointed out on Twitter, teams won’t be able to gauge his interest in committing long-term since the center doesn’t have an agent.
Jordan hasn’t made his decision on an agency yet, but multiple executives and agents I spoke with believe there’s momentum toward an agreement with Rich Paul, founder of Klutch Sports Group. The two teams typically associated with Jordan in the rumor mill coincidently have Klutch clients: the Bucks (Bledsoe) and the Cavs (LeBron James, J.R. Smith, and Tristan Thompson). It’s unclear when Jordan will make his choice, but the timing matters. Any agent that represents Jordan could leverage him toward a team that would sign him to a max contract. That mere threat could dissuade some teams from even pursuing him, increasing the odds he lands on a team willing to pony up. (Update: Jordan has signed with Excel Sports Management's Jeff Schwartz, who also represents Jason Kidd.)
Milwaukee has a tough decision to make if acquiring Jordan is indeed a possibility. A Giannis-Jordan pick-and-roll gives me goosebumps; Kidd could take the basics of what the Clippers did with DJ and Blake Griffin and build on it. That said, the spacing issues that plagued the Clippers would apply to the Bucks—they’d need more shooting. Still, it’s undeniable that Jordan would help their defense. The Bucks haven't had a traditional rim protector on their roster since Larry Sanders played 27 games in 2014–15. The aggressive scheme they run today could simply be a choice based on their personnel. Having a big like Jordan could force them to alter the scheme, turning the blitz into a situational weapon instead of the basis for their attack.
Imagine Jordan in this spot instead of Henson, retreating then corralling the ball handler, while the rest of the defense swarms, cutting off driving angles and passing lanes. Tweaking their style wouldn’t change their identity entirely. Even if they “drop” the screen defender by having him sag into the paint, the Bucks still have more than enough length to disrupt offenses from every angle.
The downsides of handing Jordan a max contract this summer—at his age, with his game so reliant on athleticism—must be nightmare-inducing for Bucks general manager Jon Horst. But Giannis and Bledsoe have accelerated the timeline in Milwaukee. Taking another step forward this season will take some calculated gambles. The Bucks have spent the past few seasons taking risks defensively. A potential swing for DeAndre Jordan would be the biggest yet, one that could make or break their defense and determine just how special these Bucks can be. |
A top official at the US Drug Enforcement Administration has said that legalizing marijuana, a drug that a majority of Americans are now in favor of decriminalizing, is “reckless and irresponsible.”
James L. Capra, the chief of operations at the DEA, was responding to a question from a senator Wednesday when he admitted authorities are nervous about the prospect of legalization measures, which are becoming more popular throughout the US after decriminalization initiatives passed in Colorado and Washington.
“I have to say this…going down the path to legalization in this country is reckless and irresponsible,” he said. “I’m talking about the long term impact of legalization in the United States. It scares us.”
Cannabis remains illegal under federal law, which trumps conflicting state law. Yet US President Obama has said his administration will not enforce federal marijuana restrictions in states where it has been decriminalized.
Were that not the case, the DEA would be responsible for cracking down on pot shops. The agency, in fact, has sustained heavy criticism because it continues to harass grow operations in California, Montana, and elsewhere where the drug is now legal for medicinal purposes.
Sales in Colorado began on January 1 and will begin in Washington within the coming months.
“There are more dispensaries in Denver than there are Starbucks,” Capra said, as quoted by the Washington Post. “The idea somehow people in our country have that this is somehow good for us as a nation is wrong. It’s a bad thing.”
An October Gallup poll found that more Americans than ever admitted they are in favor of legalizing marijuana. The number, which stands at 58 percent, has slowly increased in the decades since Gallup first asked the question in 1969, when a mere 12 percent were in favor of legalization.
Along with Colorado and Washington, 21 states have laws protecting medical marijuana for citizens with serious illnesses. Yet even more are poised to join the fray, with lawmakers in California, New York, and elsewhere suggesting in recent weeks that pot will become more accessible in their state in some form within the next 12 months. A Washington Post poll compiled this week found that Washington DC residents favor decriminalization by a 2:1 ratio.
Yet Capra made it clear on Wednesday that he remains unconvinced.
“This is a bad experiment,” he said. “It’s going to cost us in terms of social costs.”
He went on to describe an international drug conference in Moscow, where officials from around the world wondered if the US is easing its hardline stance in the War on Drugs.
“Almost everyone looked at us and said: Why are you doing this, you’re pointing a finger at us as a sources state,” he said. “I have no answer for them. I don’t have an answer for them.”
Lawmakers and cannabis advocates alike expect legalization measures to help boost struggling government budgets by attracting tourism dollars and tax revenue. Yet dozens of current and former law enforcement officials from around the nation have spoken out against the changes as the conversation has gone on. One reason, critics say, is because marijuana arrests and seizures indirectly provide resources for the DEA.
Last year, for instance, marijuana lobbyists attacked Bensinger, DuPont & Associates – a company founded by anti-pot crusaders under US President Nixon that now specializes in corporate drug testing – penned an open letter to a Senate committee criticizing the Obama administration’s stance on marijuana.
The letter, as quoted by US News & World Report, advised that cannabis is “a dangerous and addictive drug” which “significantly impacts” society as a whole – and worker productivity in particular.
Robert DuPont was the White House drug czar under Nixon and then President Ford, and Peter Bensinger was a high-ranked DEA official through the 1970s. Ethan Nadelmann, executive director of the Drug Policy Alliance in New York, said that the issue is both professional and personal for people like DuPont, Bensinger, and others who currently serve in the DEA.
“They realize they are going to suffer the fate of the people who ran the bureau of prohibition [of alcohol] in the ‘20s and ‘30s, and that must be a little demoralizing,” Nadelman said. “So they are trying to justify their life’s work.” |
Share. Research firm offers new way to sell sequels. Research firm offers new way to sell sequels.
Electronic Entertainment Design and Research, an independent firm, has compiled data in a new report that suggests Sony's PlayStation Network "Welcome Back" program was successful in not only increasing consumer awareness and the sale of digital titles but also presented a new sequel strategy.
Using data from three sources, IGN GamerMetrics, GameTrailers, and Google Insights, EEDAR determined the program, which included free downloads for Infamous, LittleBigPlanet, Dead Nation and WipEout, "caused an increase in awareness and acquisition of titles where a newer iteration was available (i.e. LittleBigPlanet 2). In one case, it increased the awareness and possible purchase intent of sequels even though a sequel was non-existent (i.e. Dead Nation 2)."
EEDAR says that LittleBigPlanet 2 "experienced a 66% gain in IGN Page Views and a 23% increase in Unique Interest (an IGN viewer indicating interest or purchase in a title) in June compared to the month of May," suggesting consumers played LittleBigPlanet for free through PSN and looked for more information on the sequel and potentially bought it.
On GameTrailers.com video views for the LittleBigPlanet 2 trailer increased 69% over the comparable time period, the report states.
And through Google Insights, consumer searches for "Dead Nation 2" "skyrocketed" the week of June 11th. "Similar to LittleBigPlanet 2, EEDAR believes this data suggests consumers were actively seeking for more information (and possibly would have made a purchase, if a sequel had existed) for Dead Nation 2."
All in all, EEDAR offers two interesting recommendations for publishers:
1. Release a free version of an older iteration of a game before the launch of its next iteration for a limited time.
2. Release an older iteration two to four months after a new iteration has been launched for a limited time, suggesting the free offering "would likely boost sales of the new iteration while the new iteration still maintains its premium pricing structure ($59.99/$49.99) and has appropriate shelf space."
Disclaimer: EEDAR and IGN are partners |
America has a binge drinking problem, according to a new government report.
More than 38 million U.S. adults binge drink an average of four times each month, according to a new report from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The agency notes that the majority of people who binge drink are not alcoholics, but the trend is alarming because of the number of serious problems that can occur when people have too much alcohol, such as car accidents, violence and sexually transmitted diseases.
The CDC reports that too much drinking results in 80,000 deaths each year in the U.S., and cost the country more than $223.5 billion in 2006.
"The public is very much aware of the health risks of obesity, which are less than binge drinking," said Dr. Fulton Crews, director of the Center for Alcohol Studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. "But most people don't realize that binge drinking is unhealthy."
The agency defines binge drinking as women having four or more drinks in a sitting and men drinking five or more, but the definition of binge drinking can vary. According to the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism, the same amount of alcohol must be consumed in two hours or less to qualify as binge drinking, an amount that would put a person's blood alcohol level above the legal driving limit, Crews said.
According to the CDC's report, binge drinking is more common among young adults ages 18 to 34 and among wealthier Americans, those with an annual household income of $75,000 or more. But binge drinkers age 65 and older reported drinking more in one sitting, and people with an annual income of less than $25,000 per household drank the largest number of drinks per sitting - about eight or nine at a time.
Although the report discusses binge drinking in adults only, Crews noted that binge drinking is a major problem among children under 18.
Dr. Marc Galanter, director of the division of alcoholism and drug abuse at the New York University School of Medicine, said such a high rate of regular binge drinking, particularly among young people, could create future problems with alcohol dependence. He also said the report has interesting implications for the debate about the legalization of marijuana in the U.S.
"This gives you some idea of how substances can come to be overused," Galanter said. "It has implications for the wisdom of affording more easy access to marijuana, which could come to be abused in its own way."
The data in the CDC's report came from a 2010 report of an ongoing telephone health survey and analyzed responses of nearly 500,000 Americans to questions about their alcohol habits. |
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On desolate salt flats on the far outskirts of China’s sixth-largest city, dozens of enormous half-built skyscrapers stand as a monument to the excess and optimism of the Chinese real estate market.
As physical manifestations of China’s property bubble go, few examples can beat this effort to replicate Wall Street in a wasteland 40km outside Tianjin and 150km from the capital Beijing.
Blueprints for the Yujiapu Financial District are intentionally modelled on Manhattan’s skyline, complete with an ersatz Rockefeller Center and twin office towers that look uncannily similar to the ones destroyed on September 11 2001.
Officials in charge of the project boast that when Yujiapu is eventually finished in 2019 it will be one-third larger than the City of London and more than three times the size of New York’s financial district, at least in terms of surface area.
But after years of soaring prices and frantic construction across the entire country, China’s real estate bubble is showing serious signs of strain and this project’s fate is now in question.
The country’s property market is barely 15 years old and nobody has ever experienced a real crash because, before the late 1990s, most urban residents in post-Communist China were still provided housing by their “work unit”.
Chinese banks started issuing home loans in 1997 and as recently as 1994 a central bank official charged with translating an American financial document had to look to Taiwan for a translation since no dictionary in Beijing included a Chinese word for “mortgage”.
Even before the global financial crisis of 2008 many were already warning of a property bubble in China, prompting the government to introduce purchasing and downpayment restrictions to slow soaring prices.
But when the crisis hit and the economy went into freefall, Beijing decided it had no choice but to refill the property bubble with a tidal wave of credit.
The result was an immediate rebound and an increase of total debt in the economy from about 140 per cent of gross domestic product at the end of 2008, to more than 250 per cent at the end of June.
To understand the scale of the resulting building boom, consider this statistic: in just two years – 2011 and 2012 – China produced more cement than the US did in the entire 20th century.
In the past decade much of China’s construction frenzy has been driven by real demand, from people wanting to urbanise or upgrade their homes or from speculators who have almost no other options to invest their newfound wealth.
China’s stock market has been in the doldrums since a massive bubble burst in 2007, returns on bank deposits are negligible or negative and the country’s capital controls mean citizens cannot easily diversify their portfolios abroad.
The government itself has an enormous incentive to keep pumping the bubble up, since all land is technically owned by the state and land sales made up 60 per cent of local government’s budgetary revenues last year, according to estimates from JPMorgan.
Since 2008 land prices have increased fivefold, triggering corresponding asset price rises, but even as prices soared and supply mushroomed, demand for housing and office space pretty much kept up – until this year.
Prices in 55 of China’s 70 largest cities fell in June from a month earlier, compared with just 35 cities in May, accelerating a downward trend that began at the start of the year and marking the sharpest monthly price decline since December 2008.
“China’s real estate market seems to have reached a turning point,” said Zhu Haibin, a JPMorgan economist, in a recent report. “A housing market slowdown is the major near-term macro risk in China.”
The turning point seems to have come because China has simply built too much.
Until 2011, the market mostly saw supply shortages but today total floor space under construction is enough to satisfy well over four years of demand at a national level.
In some of the worst affected provinces, there is enough supply for more than seven years of demand.
More than 90 per cent of households already own at least one home and, for those urban households that own apartments, nearly 76 per cent of their assets are in real estate, according to Gan Li, director of the Survey and Research Center for China Household Finance.
Mr Gan estimates that China’s existing housing stock is already more than sufficient for every household to own their home but developers are still supplying well over 15m new units a year.
Back in Yujiapu, construction on the skyscrapers has slowed to a crawl as ambitious government planners ponder the possibility that China’s real estate bubble has finally burst and their dream of Wall Street on the Tianjin salt flats will never become reality. |
Sarfunkel is a new inhabitant on the Island of Rare Animals. She is described as a barrel woman.[1]
Contents show]
Appearance Edit
She has long, flowing blond hair and wears a pair of goggles. She is stuck within a barrel, similar to how Gaimon is stuck inside a chest. Her barrel has the word "Caution" written on it with a star below it.[1]
Gallery Edit
Sarfunkel in the digitally colored chapters.
Personality Edit
Sarfunkel cares deeply about Gaimon, since they have been friends for some time and she was seen feeding him.[1]
History Edit
From the Decks of the World Edit
During the two years after Gaimon met the Straw Hat Pirates, Sarfunkel came to the Island of Rare Animals and befriended him. While the two were having a meal, she fed stew to Gaimon.[1]
Trivia Edit
Her pairing with Gaimon is a possible spoonerism of the singing group Simon and Garfunkel.
References Edit |
Lt. Col. Jeffrey Krusinski, who led the Air Force's Sexual Assault Prevention and Response Unit, is seen leaving the Arlington County General District Court on July 18. (Pablo Martinez Monsivais/AP)
An Air Force colonel accused of assaulting a young woman outside a Crystal City bar this past spring has been acquitted by an Arlington jury.
Lt. Col. Jeffrey Krusinski, 42, was head of the Air Force’s sexual assault prevention branch when he was arrested after the May encounter outside a Crystal City bar. The incident was swept up in an ongoing debate over whether the military is equipped to handle sexual assaults among its ranks.
Prosecutors and defense attorneys finished their final pitches to jurors about 3:30 pm. Arlington County Assistant Commonwealth’s Attorney Cari Steele asked them to focus on Krusinski’s grabbing of the woman’s buttocks when she clearly “didn’t like it” and ignore what she termed “distractions” posed by his defense attorneys.
“She felt totally violated,” Steele said. “That’s what this case is about.”
Barry Coburn, Krusinski’s attorney, highlighted what he called inconsistencies in the woman’s account of a fracas after the alleged grab, and said those were enough to give jurors reasonable doubt. He hinted that Krusinski might have grazed the woman by accident on a narrow sidewalk.
This image released by the Arlington County Police Department shows Lt. Col. Jeffrey Krusinski. (AP)
On Tuesday, the woman, a 23-year-old American University graduate, testified emotionally about the encounter with Krusinski, saying she felt “totally violated.” She said she was on the phone with a friend outside Freddie’s Beach Bar when Krusinski came up behind her, gave her behind a “squeeze,” and “asked me if I liked it.”
The woman said she followed Krusinksi and confronted him, pushing and punching him in the face.
A server from the bar testified that she too was groped by Krusinski that night, along with one of her co-workers.
“He was just a drunken mess,” the server, Jordain Coleman, testified. She said Krusinski offered to take her home with him. Coleman told jurors that she was used to dealing with drunk customers and brushed him off, only to watch him approach and grope the 23-year-old woman.
“I don’t blame her, but she went crazy on him,” Coleman said.
On Wednesday morning, Krusinski’s lawyers asked unsuccessfully for a mistrial, saying that after Coleman’s testimony, Krusinski could not possibly get a fair verdict. In a previous hearing, they had attempted to exclude some of that testimony.
The defense focused Wednesday on the actions during and after the woman’s encounter with Krusinski. Two witnesses testified that they saw the woman hit Krusinski repeatedly with both hands, one of which held her cellphone. She had testified that she hit him only with her right hand, with the phone in her left.
A bartender from Freddie’s testified that Krusinski approached the back entrance of the bar from the parking lot after the encounter, his face “awash in blood.” Ray Martin, the bartender, gave Krusinski a wet rag and called an ambulance.
Krusinski was initially charged with sexual battery, but prosecutors ultimately moved forward with an assault charge. Arlington Commonwealth’s Attorney Theo Stamos said prosecutors decided that the way the sexual battery statute is written and has been interpreted by appellate courts made an assault charge more appropriate.
Assault is a Class 1 misdemeanor, with a maximum punishment of a $2,500 fine and a year in jail.
The alleged incident came amid a political fight over how the military should handle complaints of sexual harassment and assault. Some lawmakers are pushing for cases to be taken out of the chain of command. The Pentagon has resisted that and instead revamped sexual assault policies.
A recently released Pentagon report found that reports of sexual assault in the military increased 46 percent to 3,553 reports this fiscal year, a spike Defense Department officials portrayed as a sign that victims now feel more comfortable coming forward.
Krusinski was assigned to another position after his arrest, and Air Force officials had said that they would wait until the legal proceedings were over to take any action. |
There’s a tantalizing trade rumor making the rounds that
will pique Coyotes fans’ interest.
If Pittsburgh can’t get center Jordan Staal signed to a contract extension this
offseason, he might be on the blocks. The reasoning is this: Staal will be an
unrestricted free agent after next season, so the Penguins might want to get
something for a valuable asset.
The Coyotes are one of several teams said to be interested. General manager Don
Maloney did not return a message left Wednesday. One scenario has Phoenix
dealing defenseman Keith Yandle, a second-round pick this year and a
third-round pick next season for Staal.
That deal makes sense on a lot of fronts. Each team has a surplus at the
position they’d be dealing. The Coyotes have been stockpiling defenseman in
their system for several years, and Oliver Ekman-Larsson appears ready to take
a giant leap forward. Pittsburgh already has centers Sidney Crosby and Evgeni
Malkin to go along with Staal — a collection that Maloney recently called “an
embarrassment of riches.”
Both teams also have glaring needs that this deal would address. The Coyotes
have needed a top-flight center at least since Jeremy Roenick left — arguably
for their entire Valley existence. The Penguins already have forward depth, and
they shored up their backup goaltending spot by signing Tomas Vokoun, who
should push underachieving Marc-Andre Fleury.
There are problems with this rumor as well. What if Pittsburgh wants more than
the aforementioned assets? What if other Staal suitors like Buffalo and
Carolina drive the price higher? Does Yandle’s puck-moving and puck-possession
game adequately address the Penguins’ defensive shortcomings, or is his
defensive zone play a concern?
Equally important: Can the Coyotes finalize their sale by the time free agency
opens on July 1 so they have the freedom to make deals and can negotiate with
an air of stability? Will new owner Greg Jamison be willing to pony up a
long-term contract for a young (23) and talented center? Will Staal agree to
sign that contract or will he want to test the waters after one season,
creating the possibility of losing a defenseman who is signed for four more
years for a rent-a-center?
With Los Angeles set to sweep the New Jersey Devils and claim the Stanley Cup,
hockey’s silly season has begun. Get ready for a wave of intriguing rumors,
most of which will never achieve reality. |
Mr. Abe responded with equal warmth, congratulating Mr. Trump on his inauguration and welcoming his commitment to the defense treaty while sidestepping questions about Mr. Trump’s withdrawal from the Trans-Pacific Partnership. “With the birth of the Trump administration, a new genesis will be built between Japan and the U.S. in economic relations,” he said.
Acutely aware of Mr. Trump’s complaints about foreign competitors, Mr. Abe stressed that “Japanese businesses have built factories all over the United States” and invested $150 billion, creating many American jobs. “Japan, with our high level of technical capability, we will be able to contribute to President Trump’s growth strategy,” he said. “There will be even more new jobs being born in the United States.”
He specifically cited Japan’s bullet-train technology, noting that if it existed along America’s Eastern corridor, it would take “only one hour” for the president to travel from the White House in Washington to Trump Tower in New York.
While he stuck to positive themes during their public comments, Mr. Abe may have questions in private for Mr. Trump about his provocative statements related to Japan, including his warning to Toyota on Twitter that he would slap a “big border tax” on the carmaker if it built a new plant in Mexico and his charges that Japan devalues its currency to gain economic advantage.
Mr. Abe was the first foreign leader to visit Mr. Trump after his election in November, and they have spoken a number of times since then, according to the officials.
By contrast, the president has gotten off to a chilly start with Mr. Xi, who was angered by Mr. Trump’s decision in November to take a congratulatory call from the president of Taiwan — which China considers a breakaway province — and his subsequent questioning of the “One China” policy. Mr. Trump had a fence-mending call with Mr. Xi on Thursday night and agreed to honor the One China policy at the Chinese leader’s request.
“We had a very, very good talk last night and discussed a lot of subjects,” Mr. Trump said. He predicted that he would get along with China and forge a fairer playing field on trade and currency. “I believe that will all work out very well for everybody, China, Japan, the United States and everybody in the region,” he said.
Even so, Mr. Abe’s visit could fuel suspicions in Beijing that Mr. Trump intends to make Japan, rather than China, the focal point of his engagement with Asia. That would be a distinct shift from former President Barack Obama, who hosted Mr. Xi in 2013 for an informal summit meeting at the 200-acre Sunnylands estate in Rancho Mirage, Calif. |
This collection of documents, spanning three decades from the 1960s to the 1980s, focus on CIA's collection and analysis of the Soviet Navy. In addition, this collection is a continuation of previous releases on the Warsaw Pact forces [available at CIA Analysis of Warsaw Pact Forces and Soviet and Warsaw Pact Military Journals] and adds 82 newly released documents ranging from translation of the clandestinely-obtained articles from the Soviet military journal, Military Thought, to the high-level National Intelligence Estimates. Many of the documents in this collection reflect the tensions in the bipolar Cold War and specifically focused on the Soviet Navy's development of its naval forces during that timeframe. After World War II, the U.S. leaders faced a nuclear armed rival and in no time, Soviet tanks were in the streets of Budapest, and the first Sputnik satellite was launched. Understanding how the Soviet Union envisioned the next combat situation required in-depth knowledge of both their high-level theory of warfare and probable tactical behavior. The collection will provide new insight into the Agency's analysis of the evolving Soviet Navy and its military posture during the Cold War.
View the Collection Booklet |
The United States government wrote the wrong middle name on documents requesting Edward Snowden’s extradition from Hong Kong, the Wall Street Journal reported Wednesday.
Snowden’s passport lists his middle name as James, while documents provided by the Department of Justice listed it as Joseph. The DOJ also failed to specify Snowden’s passport number.
Hong Kong officials claim the confusion allowed Snowden to leave the country without issue.
“Until the minute of Snowden’s departure, the U.S. government hadn’t yet replied to our requests for clarification,” he said. “Hong Kong’s government had no legal basis to block his departure,” said Hong Kong’s justice secretary, Rimsky Yuen. “Any suggestion that we have been deliberately letting Mr. Snowden go away or to do any other things to obstruct the normal operation is totally untrue.”
While the U.S. government has been working to retrieve Snowden as quickly as possible, local Hong Kong lawyers stressed that dealing with the city’s bureaucracy takes precision and patience.
“If you want to restrict someone’s freedom to travel you need to get the paperwork,” said Giles Surman, a lawyer who is experienced Hong Kong extradition cases.
Snowden is currently thought to be living in Moscow, with plans to depart for Ecuador.
Follow William on Twitter |
CHARLOTTE, N.C. -- The Charlotte Bobcats have agreed to a two-year contract with former Los Angeles Lakers point guard Ramon Sessions.
Sessions' agent, Jared Karnes, confirmed to ESPNLosAngeles.com that Sessions and the Bobcats agreed to a two-year guaranteed contract on Thursday.
Financial terms of the deal have not been announced.
Sessions replaces D.J. Augustin, whose qualifying offer was rescinded earlier Thursday. The move made Augustin, last year's starting point guard, an unrestricted free agent.
Sessions is entering his sixth season and averaged 12.7 points, 6.2 assists and 3.8 rebounds per game last season for the Lakers with 19 starts. He's previously played for Milwaukee, Minnesota and Cleveland and has averaged 11.1 points and five assists per game during his career.
Sessions opted out of his contract with the Lakers to sign with the Bobcats.
It's unclear at this point who'll be the team's starting point guard. The Bobcats drafted Kemba Walker with the ninth pick in last year's draft and owner Michael Jordan likes the savvy of the former Connecticut star, although he's a little undersized at 6 feet 1. Jordan had a major role in the decision to draft Walker, who played in spurts last season and had one triple-double as a rookie.
Augustin leaves after four seasons with the Bobcats.
He was Charlotte's ninth overall pick in the 2008 draft.
By rescinding Augustin's qualifying offer, the Bobcats saved about $4.4 million under the salary cap -- money they turned around and used to sign Sessions.
Augustin initially was selected by the Bobcats with the ninth overall pick in the 2008 NBA Draft. In four NBA seasons, he played in 282 games for the Bobcats with averages of 10.9 points, 4.4 assists and 2.0 rebounds but struggled at times with shooting. Last year, he played in 48 games, averaging 11.1 points, 6.4 assists and 2.3 rebounds.
Information from The Associated Press was used in this report. |
Photo
A three-year parlor game has been taking place on Wall Street to identify the Goldman Sachs employee behind a Twitter account that purports to reveal the uncensored comments overheard in the firm’s elevators.
The Twitter account, @GSElevator, reports overheard remarks like, “I never give money to homeless people. I can’t reward failure in good conscience,” and “Groupon…Food stamps for the middle class.”
The Twitter account, which has an audience of more than 600,000 followers, has been the subject of an internal inquiry at Goldman to find the rogue employee. The tweets, often laced with insider references to deals in the news, appeal to both Wall Street bankers and outsiders who mock the industry. Late last month, the writer sold a book about Wall Street culture based on the tweets for a six-figure sum.
There is a good reason Goldman Sachs has been unable to uncover its Twitter-happy employee: He doesn’t work at the firm. And he never did.
The author is a 34-year-old former bond executive who lives in Texas. His name is John LeFevre.
He had tried to remain anonymous, scrubbing the Internet of mentions of his name and pictures of himself on all but a handful of sites. Some people had already speculated that @GSElevator was not hanging around the halls of Goldman.
The ability of people like Mr. LeFevre to create anonymous Twitter accounts underscores concerns about the veracity of what is published and the identity of authors. It also raises questions about whether publishers are blurring the line between real life and the made-up kind.
Upon being contacted late last week after several weeks of reporting uncovered his identity, he confirmed his alter ego. “Frankly, I’m surprised it has taken this long,” he said by phone. “I knew this day would come.”
Mr. LeFevre, who worked for Citigroup for seven years, said the Twitter account started as “a joke to entertain myself.”
He quickly interrupted the inevitable line of questioning about how he had never worked at Goldman and appeared to be an impostor. “To pre-empt what you’re about to say, legally speaking,” he said, “I was never explicitly an employee of the firm.”
Mr. LeFevre was offered a job as head of debt syndicate in Asia at Goldman’s Hong Kong office in August 2010, but the offer was later revoked, according to people at the firm who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss the matter. Mr. LeFevre said his previous employer contended that he was bound by a noncompete agreement and “things turned nasty with my old boss and he threatened a lawsuit against me and Goldman.”
By Mr. LeFevre’s own account of his experience with Goldman: “My contract was never rescinded. We cordially agreed to part ways to avoid a public mess. I don’t know how much I can talk about it. It wasn’t acrimonious.”
When pressed about whether he had implicitly misrepresented himself as a Goldman employee, he said he deliberately never said in any of his tweets that he worked for the firm. “This was never about me as a person,” he said. “It wasn’t about a firm. The stories aren’t Goldman Sachs in particular. It was about the culture in general.”
A Goldman spokesman, after being told that @GSElevator had been unmasked, said in a statement, “We are pleased to report that the official ban on talking in elevators will be lifted effective immediately.”
The fact that Mr. LeFevre was not a Goldman employee did not appear to dissuade his publisher, Touchstone, an imprint of Simon & Schuster, which said it had not been misled.
“He’s been pretty straight with us the entire time, so this is not a surprise,” said the book’s editor, Matthew Benjamin, who bought the book without ever meeting Mr. LeFevre. “That you’re writing about him speaks to the interest he’s generated. We always expected his identity to be revealed at some point.”
Mr. LeFevre’s agent, Byrd Leavell, said: “What matters is that every story in the book is true. John’s material he delivered is hilarious. The book isn’t going to live or die on whether he worked at Goldman Sachs for two months or not.”
Mr. LeFevre, who started at Citigroup in New York in 2001 after graduating from Babson College before moving with the firm to London and then Hong Kong, said that he was inspired to start the Twitter account in the fall of 2011. “I was sitting around with a friend at a bar,” he said.
At the time, an account called @CondeElevator had sprung up, supposedly chronicling the goings-on in the elevator of the media company Condé Nast. “I thought, ‘This is ridiculous that people are infatuated with Condé Nast. If they only saw the elitist, sexist and out-of-touch things bankers say.’ People had no idea what it is really like.”
He said he chose to name his account after Goldman Sachs because “it was commercial.” In an email, Mr. LeFevre added, Goldman “has more love/hate Main Street appeal.” At the time, the Occupy Wall Street movement was in full swing. He said he was also struck by some of the lines, comical to him, he heard from people at Goldman when he first received a job offer. “Even socializing with them — going to bars and having guys buy girls drinks and then throw out a line like, ‘Don’t worry ladies, these drinks are on Goldman Sachs.’ ”
Mr. LeFvre, who left Citigroup in 2008 and began to work at a start-up boutique firm in 2009 in Hong Kong, insisted that many of the exchanges he published on Twitter were true: “I’ve been collecting these stories for years.”
He said his intent was neither to mock nor glamorize Wall Street. “I do not have an agenda to paint the people or this culture one way or the other,” he said, adding that he was “always a cynical banker” when he worked on Wall Street but “I loved it. We did a lot of crazy stuff. It’s not like I had a great epiphany along the way.”
Still, he said that working on Wall Street was an eye-opener. “I went into investment banking and I saw a group of people that aren’t as impressive as I thought they were — or as impressive as they thought they were. They defined themselves as human beings by their jobs.”
His Twitter feed has become red meat for industry critics, something Mr. LeFevre said was initially unintentional but later something he tried to stoke. “A lot of times I pander, I’ll be honest with you. I pander for retweets,” he said, referring to users blasting copies of a tweet to their own followers, multiplying its reach.
He said his Twitter account had evolved over the last few years: “Early on, I tweeted more about specific people or deals, inside jokes/commentary, and even a few ad hominem attacks. That gave me a certain validation and credibility. But over time, the tweets have been increasingly styled to have a bit more commercial appeal.
“I don’t consider it selling out or pandering to a lower common denominator; I think of it more as adapting to what the widest possible audience of people responds favorably to.”
Mr. LeFevre, who refused to disclose his location in Texas, started worrying several months ago that his identity would be revealed. He received some emails from friends who had guessed it was him. He also noticed that some Goldman Sachs employees had viewed his LinkedIn profile page; he later removed it.
Now that he has been outed, he said, “it’s something that can be embraced. And I certainly don’t have anything to hide.”
A sampling of musings from GSElevator’s Twitter account:
#1: I just want to be rich enough to not be motivated by money.
— GS Elevator Gossip (@GSElevator) 14 Dec 13
#1: Only Neanderthals resort to violence. I prefer crushing one’s spirit, hope, or ego.
— GS Elevator Gossip (@GSElevator) 25 Dec 13
#1: Some chick asked me what I would do with 10 million bucks. I told her I’d wonder where the rest of my money went.
— GS Elevator Gossip (@GSElevator) 12 Nov 13 |
Electronic privacy is all the rage in these post-Petraeus days. Can the government really go pawing through our email at will? Well, pretty much so, it turns out, at least, until the Supreme Court gets around to focusing a little bit of its attention on this newfangled, electronic world of ours. But email isn't the only data we pass around in electronic form, and with all of our attention focused on our in-boxes, we may be missing a larger world of privacy perils—and the unlikely guardians who have been fighting a rearguard action against official snoops.
As it turns out, the feds are very interested in tracking all of our electronic communications, very concerned that private industry isn't assisting snooping efforts as much as officials would like—and maybe not so eager to share that bit of discord between the federal government and the telecommunications industry with the world at large.
In a letter addressed to the Electronic Frontier Foundation, dated September 7, 2012, Immigration and Customs Enforcement FOIA Officer Catrina M. Pavlik-Keenan explained that a number of documents sent to the online civil liberties organization a year earlier were actually exempt from freedom of information disclosure:
Please return any original copies of these documents to the ICE FOIA Office at the address below. If these records were provided to you on a disc, please return the original disc. You should also destroy any electronic or paper copies of these documents.
What could have inspired such regrets in a federal agency that it attempted the likely impossible task of retrieving inconvenient documents from an organization generally dedicated to discomfiting obstinate government agencies?
As EFF staff attorney Jennifer Lynch wrote:
EFF had requested documents from the government in response to reports that the feds wanted to expand the reach of the notorious Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act, which mandates that telecommunications companies and equipment manufacturers build-in wiretapping capabilities for ease of government snooping. In this fast-moving world of ours, the FBI and other other law-enforcers want to see CALEA applied to Skype, Google, and other new forms of online communication. What EFF received in return for its queries was evidence that telecommunications companies that have long fallen under the umbrella of the wiretapping law, and which have even been given immunity to liability for their cooperation with legally questionable snooping in alleged terrorism cases, are actually often dragging their feet on complying with eavesdropping requests, and sometimes even telling the feds to get lost—at least, until they come back with better paperwork. The documents secured by EFF were actually part of a report compiling such incidents of “non compliance with a lawful electronic surveillance order.”
That report was compiled to bolster the FBI's “Going Dark” initiative to enhance its powers to wiretap without being stymied by intransigent private-sector types. As FBI General Counsel Valerie Caproni told a House subcommittee last year:
Any solution to the Going Dark problem should ensure that when the government has satisfied a court that it has met the legal requirements to obtain an order to intercept the communications of a criminal, terrorist, or spy, the government is technologically able to execute that court order in a timely fashion that is isolated to the individual subject to the order.
That is, the FBI wants to expand not just its legal reach, but its ability to satisfy its nosiness on its own, without waiting on the assistance of third parties.
That the federal government is growing impatient with the way individuals, organizations, and corporations deal with matters-digital is no secret. Even as Sen. Joe Lieberman's (I-Conn.) far-reaching Cybersecurity Act, described by the EFF as a potential conduit for private information to the National Security Agency, was going down to defeat in the Senate, President Obama was preparing, and then issuing, Presidential Policy Directive 20, assigning the military broad cybersecurity authority by fiat. Exacty how much authority isn't clear, since the White House has refused to reveal the details—a move the Electronic Privacy Information Center is appealing on freedom of information grounds.
More troubling, the president has apparently prepared another directive that would implement Lieberman's failed bill by executive order, establishing "voluntary" standards for cybersecurity and data-sharing between private industry and government officials that few observers believe would remain a matter of simple preference. As the Heritage Foundation's David Inserra cautions, the bill uses the word "voluntary," but "then requires that sector-specific agencies explain to Congress why they haven’t made these standards mandatory." A presidential directive would take this controversial, twice-defeated legislation, and impose it from on-high.
Ultimately, though, in an Internet-connected world, federal agencies may find that they've acquired long-sought powers, only to see their targets slip through their fingers. The EFF cautions that expanding government snooping power and forcing companies to incorporate easy wiretapping into their products "will impair innovation and drive Internet development offshore."
That horse may already be out of the barn. This fall saw the launch of Silent Circle, a secure-communications company that includes on its team Phil Zimmerman, the inventor of PGP encryption. The company, helmed by a former Navy SEAL, deliberately based itself outside the United States, and beyond the reach of American laws and agencies.
Determined to corral or bypass communications services that don't cooperate as fully as they'd like, U.S. officials may simply have inspired a new breed that don't even have to pay them lip-service. |
President Obama said Republican opposition to ObamaCare should disqualify them from running either chamber of Congress and argued during a Silicon Valley fundraiser Thursday night that the GOP was on the wrong side of history.
“I can’t explain it, why they’re so obsessed that those folks don’t have health insurance,” Obama said. “But we’re on the right side of history on that issue. But if that’s all they got, then they shouldn’t be running either chamber. They shouldn’t be running the House and they sure should not be running the Senate.”
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The president was speaking at his fifth fundraiser in 24 hours, the last leg of a furious fundraising blitz up and down the California coast.
As in previous stops, the president fretted that the Democratic Party would not turn out for the upcoming 2014 midterm elections.
“Democrats have a congenital defect when it comes to our politics, and that is, we like voting during presidential years and during the midterms, we don’t vote,” Obama said.
“We’re going to have to make sure that we are coming out with the same urgency and the same enthusiasm that we typically show during presidential years,” he added.
Roughly 250 supporters attended the event, where tickets ranged between $1,000 and $32,400, according to an invitation obtained by the Sunlight Foundation. According to CBS News’s Mark Knoller, it was the president’s 19th fundraiser of 2014 and his 57th benefitting Democratic candidates this cycle.
Obama has rarely strayed from his core message during the fundraising appeals, although on Thursday night, he was driven off-script at least twice. As he was introduced to a Dionne Warwick song, the audience cheered for Obama to sing along.
“No, no, no, I’m good,” Obama said. “Maybe after the midterms.”
Toward the end of his remarks, the president was briefly interrupted by a protester who shouted at him about freedom for Ethiopia.
“You kind of screwed up my ending,” Obama replied. “That’s ok. And we’ve got free speech in this country.”
The man was allowed to remain in the room after his outburst.
The president will remain overnight in California, with an energy speech at a Silicon Valley Wal-mart slated for Friday morning before returning to Washington. |
news What Could Canada Have Been if the Treaty Process Was Fair?
The Toronto Purchase was supposed to be a rental, but the Mississaugas were still forced off the land.
I’ll start by saying that I am Anishnabe. Or First Nations, or Indigenous, or native, or Indian. I am from a long line of people that discovered this continent first. We migrated across the Bering Strait when it was still frozen between the easternmost tip of Russia and the western tip of Alaska. We overcame incredible odds against the cold, harsh frontier, staving off starvation and exhaustion before migrating further south to what would become known as the Canadian prairies. We found this beautiful, bountiful area in the midst of the largest bodies of fresh water in the world. We had found our hunting ground. We had found our home.
Mississaugas of New Credit First Nation (hitherto known as “we” or “Missisaugas”) made a deal with the British Crown in 1787 that supposedly “surrendered” 250,808 acres: a 14-mile stretch of land from what is now Ashbridges Bay to Highway 27, up to and including 28 miles north, around Bloomington side road. The now-urban centres of Markham, Toronto, York, North York, Etobicoke, Vaughan, Thornhill, and the Toronto Islands, were all essentially rented to the Crown at the time of the transaction for things including, and this is true, 2,000 rifle flints, 24 brass kettles, 120 mirrors, 24 laced hats, and 96 gallons of rum.
When I think about this moment, I can imagine the Red Coats walking away from the “negotiations” giggling and rubbing their hands. During the renegotiations in 1805, after it was clear that there was a disparity between value and payment, we were given an additional 10 shillings.
Although I did not get a laced hat or a jug of rum, I personally received a one-time cheque for $20,000 (CAD). Twenty thousand dollars is a lot of money to most people. No one I know would walk away from a stack of cash that large. Almost all of the 1,700 Mississaugas got a cheque for $20,000 in 2010 after a long land claim negotiations with the Canadian government.
There are two ways of thinking within the non-Anishnabe community—and I have personally had people express both to me. One way of thinking is that we were lucky to sort of stumble upon the reimbursement and that we should shut up and be happy that we received anything at all. The other way is that we have been, and continue to be, grossly under-compensated for this “rental” of our land.
The decision to award a one-time payment of $145 million to the Mississaugas was the product of a long negotiated settlement and our band’s willingness to finally put this grievance to rest. Band members voted in 2010 to accept the settlement. Our understanding in 1787 was that this land was to be made freely available to the settlers, that these “gifts” would be given in perpetuity, and that no one, in fact, can own the earth. A one-time payment of expendable materials in exchange for inexhaustible (or so we had thought) natural resources, not to mention the mass relocation of our people to a reservation just outside Hagersville, Ont., is neither acceptable nor fair. The implication that my ancestors would be so inconceivably naive as to sell their birthright—their home—so cheaply is, quite frankly, insulting.
* * *
Our country will soon celebrate its 150th year since Confederation. We could take a bittersweet view of these proceedings. On one hand, you have the idea of what Canada could have been. On the other, you have the reality of what it is. What would Canada look like today if First Nations and Europeans had started with a different relationship? What if we weren’t lied to, or details weren’t lost in translation during these treaty negotiations? What if we had refused to enter into alliances with these aliens? Would more of our natural resources be intact? Would Canada be a better place? We can never know, but this year is a good time to reflect on how we got to here and what could have been different.
As former Grand Chief Phil Fontaine put it in a 2008 speech, the treaties are “central to our identity as first peoples of this land…[they are] the lifeblood of our nations.” He also argues that the treaties were negotiated in good faith by the First Nations and are sacred agreements not “merely real estate transactions.” The treaty relationship requires ongoing conversations and anything else violates the “spirit and intent,” he argued. “Our treaties were not designed to have one party deny the other of its rights and interests…sadly and unfortunately that has been our history.”
The fact that the land dispute around Toronto has finally been settled, and that our community should (hypothetically) prosper because of it, brings me little to no relief. I am left to compare our situation with that of countless other First Nations in this country. Are their treaties less valid? Why have they not been honoured? Should we not just simply settle all of these grievances and grow as a country? After all, wasn’t the land this country is built on essentially stolen from us? Where are the ongoing conversations we should be having about these relationships?
* * *
Our people were initially divided on what to do with the settlement. Just split it up and give cash payout to all 1,700 members, maybe $30,000 or $50,000 each? Take the conservative approach and pay out $10K and invest the rest? At any rate, as part of the agreement, we first had to swallow a number of historical “truths”:
“Under the specific claims process the government is requiring you to assent to a number of historical points.
1. The original land in question was purchased properly from us (1787).
2. The land surrounding the original tract was authentically signed off for at a later surrender (1805).
3. The Islands were included in the surrender…”
Swallow these facts first. Then get paid.
The chief of the Mississaugas of the New Credit First Nation, R. Stacey LaForme, says that resolving the land claim meant that settlers now know us as the owners of the traditional land. “It furthered our ability to say that this is our traditional land, you must seek our consultation for your projects,” LaForme says.
“It also raised our political ability because we took active role in speaking to the various government officials and politicians…The land claim gave members the opportunity to do things they would not otherwise have been able to accomplish. It gave us the means to protect our education for our children. It gave us the opportunity to pursue economic sustainability. It gave us many things, but along with all that it gave us many new problems with which to deal. Let us hope we don’t squander opportunities.”
Whatever your political affiliation, know whose land you stand on. Whatever your feelings toward our history, this Canada Day, know that I am home. I have always been home. |
Keep checking back for updated cuts. They're added to the list below as they happen.
The Giants have begun paring down their final roster to get to the mandatory 53-man limit by 9 p.m. today, and there's already been confirmation of two players' being let go.
Defensive end Matt Broha was waived and will be asked to join the practice squad if he clears waivers, according to his agent Bill Deni on Twitter. Broha had 3½ sacks in the preseason. Word is Adewale Ojomo has made the active roster, though it's unclear at this point what Adrian Tracy's fate will be.
Meanwhile, the Giants have released defensive tackle Marcus Thomas, according to Thomas' tweets.
"It was fun working with a great organization like the giants and for y'all giant fans," Thomas tweeted. "I could only imagine if I started my career here."
Good for Thomas, by the way, to have a sense of humor about things.
"Oh yea I found a no toll route," he added. "it didn't cost me a penny to get cut POW"
Sadly, Thomas appears to have spiked the ball before reaching the end zone.
"How can I get here without paying a toll and on the way out hit two toll booths," he tweeted. "did y'all plant those on my route because that's a real lol"
Other quick notes as we get going:
--The Cowboys might have interest in WR David Douglas, according to my man Calvin Watkins of ESPN Dallas. I was told last night trying to slip him through waivers and onto the practice squad might be a dangerous move because a few teams were lurking. We'll see.
--DB Laron Scott tweeted he's "STAYING IN THE BIG APPLE." I don't know if he means practice squad or active roster, so stay tuned on that front.
--TE Larry Donnell has been waived but will be added to the practice squad if he clears.
* * * *
Here's your running roster that we will continue to update as news comes in:
OFFENSE (28)
QB: Eli Manning, David Carr, Ryan Perrilloux
RB: Ahmad Bradshaw, David Wilson, Andre Brown, Da’Rel Scott
FB: Henry Hynoski
WR: Hakeem Nicks, Victor Cruz, Domenik Hixon, Rueben Randle, Ramses Barden, Jerrel Jernigan
TE: Martellus Bennett, Bear Pascoe, Adrien Robinson
C: David Baas, Jim Cordle, Chris White
G: Kevin Boothe, Chris Snee, Mitch Petrus, Stephen Goodin
T: Will Beatty, David Diehl, Sean Locklear, James Brewer
DEFENSE (29)
DE: Jason Pierre-Paul, Justin Tuck, Osi Umenyiora, Adewale Ojomo, Adrian Tracy
DT: Linval Joseph, Rocky Bernard, Marvin Austin, Markus Kuhn, Shaun Rogers
LB: Michael Boley, Chase Blackburn, Mathias Kiwanuka, Mark Herzlich, Keith Rivers, Spencer Paysinger, Jacquian Williams
CB: Corey Webster, Prince Amukamara, Terrell Thomas, Michael Coe, Jayron Hosley, Justin Tryon, Laron Scott, Dante Hughes
S: Antrel Rolle, Kenny Phillips, Will Hill, Stevie Brown
SPECIALS (3)
K: Lawrence Tynes
P: Steve Weatherford
LS: Zak DeOssie
CUTS (14)*
RB D.J. Ware
DE Matt Broha
DT Marcus Thomas
CB Bruce Johnson (to injured reserve)
TE Larry Donnell
WR Isaiah Stanback
LB Greg Jones
OT Matt McCants
LB Jake Muasau
DE Craig Marshall
WR David Douglas
WR Dan DePalma
OL Selvish Capers
DT Dwayne Hendricks
*Reported by me unless otherwise linked
RESERVE/SUSPENDED LIST (1)
S Tyler Sash
Note: This entry originally had Sash listed in the cuts section above with a designation in brackets he was being put on the reserve/suspended list. But obviously that was too much for people like The Sports Network to comprehend. They erroneously reported that I and Ralph Vacchiano of the Daily News reported Sash was cut. So no thanks to those guys for making me, Vacchiano and Sash look bad.
BUBBLE GUYS WHO HAVE APPARENTLY MADE IT
DE Adewale Ojomo
DE Adrian Tracy
RB Andre Brown
RB Da'Rel Scott
S Stevie Brown
DT Marvin Austin (for now; he's one of three candidates for short-term IR, a designation that would come on Tuesday)
WR Ramses Barden
WR Jerrel Jernigan
Mike Garafolo: mgarafolo@starledger.com; twitter.com/MikeGarafolo |
The existence of the House Select Committee on Benghazi has always been hard to explain, even for those who support it enthusiastically. It’s only now that the panel’s purpose is coming into sharper focus.
The trouble, of course, is that the committee is wholly unnecessary. Over the course of two years, the deadly 2012 terrorist attack in Libya was investigated by the independent State Department Accountability Review Board, the Senate Intelligence Committee, the Senate Armed Services Committee, the House Intelligence Committee, the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, the House Armed Services Committee, the House Committee on Oversight & Government Reform, and the House Committee on Foreign Affairs. None of these probes uncovered evidence to substantiate right-wing conspiracy theories.
And yet, House Republican leaders decided what Congress really needs is another committee to re-do what the other committees have already done.
The explanation is ugly, but increasingly obvious. The Associated Press reported this week that the GOP-led panel “has devolved from an investigation into the deaths of four Americans in Libya into a political fight over Hillary Rodham Clinton’s emails and private computer server – a battle that is likely to stretch into the 2016 presidential election year.”
Committee Chairman Trey Gowdy (R-S.C.) and his GOP brethren are no longer being subtle about this. Just yesterday, several Democratic members of the committee wrote to Gowdy to remind him of his own Benghazi-related schedule, which Republicans are now ignoring. From the letter:
“At the beginning of this year, Select Committee Republicans provided Democrats with detailed information about their plans to hold 11 hearings between January and October on a wide range of topics relating to the Benghazi attacks. Since then, however, Republicans have completely abandoned this plan – holding no hearings at all since January and instead focusing on former Secretary Hillary Clinton. Amazingly, the last eight press releases on the Select Committee’s webpage deal entirely with Secretary Clinton.”
It’s almost as if the House’s Benghazi committee no longer has any interest in Benghazi.
The Democrats’ letter reminds GOP chairman that he released a schedule late last year, sketching out how the committee would proceed in 2015, with specific Benghazi-related hearings planned for each month, from January to October. Yesterday’s letter noted, “In 2015, the Select Committee has held only one hearing – on the status of document production – in January.” The letter added:
“In the past, Republicans have attempted to blame the Select Committee’s glacial pace on Secretary Clinton and the State Department. But it seems difficult to understand how they could be responsible for the Select Committee abandoning every single hearing it had planned to hold since January. “It appears that much of the Select Committee’s work has been shelved while Republicans pursue every possible avenue of political attack against Secretary Clinton. These actions by the Select Committee – which lack any legitimate basis – serve only to delay its work further into the election season and subject it to increasingly widespread criticism for its highly partisan actions.”
Daily Kos’ Laura Clawson joked yesterday, “Nobody could possibly have foreseen when Republicans set up a select committee to investigate the Benghazi attack after all the previous investigations failed to yield a politically satisfactory result that it would turn into a partisan fishing expedition trying to hurt Hillary Clinton. Oh, wait. Everyone paying even a little attention could foresee that.”
It certainly doesn’t help that there’s compelling proof that the Republican committee has deliberately leaked deceptive information to the press – intended to embarrass the Democratic presidential candidate – and Gowdy announced he has no interest in learning how or why this happened.
The committee is now in its 434th day, having spent roughly $3.8 million in taxpayer money |
Steven Stamkos was an observer, not a participant, in the NHL's free-agency frenzy on Friday, and that was just fine with him.
The Tampa Bay Lightning captain, who removed himself from the unrestricted-free-agent market on Wednesday by signing an eight-year, $68 million contract to stay with the team that drafted him No. 1 overall in 2008, was able to sit back, relax and watch the madness of free agency unfold without a hint of stress.
"I definitely was interested, like any other hockey fan was, to see where guys would end up and what would happen," Stamkos told ESPN.com on Saturday. "But there was never a moment where I said, 'What if?' I think in essence that kind of solidifies the decision that I made, and I'm happy about it."
Stamkos and the Lightning -- my early pick to win the Stanley Cup next season -- have a lot to be happy about these days. Somehow they have come out of the zaniness of the 2015-16 season, when Jonathan Drouin's trade request and the lingering Stamkos contract situation fueled headlines for much of the year, looking better than ever.
Stamkos, 26, and defenseman Victor Hedman, 25 -- who signed a $63 million contract extension on Friday -- are both now locked up with eight-year deals, the 21-year-old Drouin rescinded his trade request, and the future looks oh-so-bright for the Bolts.
"This year was pretty crazy, when you think about it," Stamkos said. "I don't think anyone could have expected all that stuff to happen -- some of the stuff we had to deal with as a team and as an organization this year. But that's a testament to the ownership and the management and the players' willingness to understand the situation that we have. The situation ultimately is that we have a really, really good team that can compete for a long time now."
It's funny how it all turned out, right?
"Victor and I are extremely close friends," said Stamkos (left) of Hedman (77). "We came up in this organization as 18-year-old kids. A big reason why both of us stuck around is because of the relationship that we have as friends as well as teammates." Rick Madonik/Toronto Star/Getty Images
"When Jonathan took the trade request back, that was huge," Stamkos said. "We all saw what he did in the last five regular-season games and in the playoffs. Given the opportunity, the way he prepared himself for games, he was almost a new player. Sometimes you need to go through some tough, adverse times in your career to learn. He did that. He learned that at a young age, and he's going to be a stud in this league for a long time."
Stamkos and Hedman have long shared a bond.
"Victor and I are extremely close friends," Stamkos said. "We came up in this organization as 18-year-old kids. To say that we're going to be together for the long run, and on one team, that's something special. We have talked a lot throughout this process. I joke with him that sometimes I forget the time difference [with Sweden] and I'm calling him at 4 in the morning. But he's always getting back to me as quick as he can. It was extremely exciting to see him sign. A big reason why both of us stuck around is because of the relationship that we have as teammates and as friends as well."
Stamkos left mind-boggling money on the table from the likes of the Toronto Maple Leafs, Montreal Canadiens, Buffalo Sabres and Detroit Red Wings to return to Tampa Bay. He put winning first. It tells you a lot about his character.
Some other free-agency news in my last blog of the season: |
Consumers who adopt a tablet or two-in-one convertible are primarily using these slates for touch input, but the touchscreen's storied history was drastically different a decade and a half ago. When Microsoft coined the Tablet PC term in 2011, it had envisioned a productivity-centric device where business executives and students can use the pen-enabled slates to take notes, capture ideas and draw.
With the renewed interest in tablets, thanks to the rise of more powerful hardware, new form factors and higher resolution displays, Intel wants to bring back the stylus. The Skylake chipmaker is one of the founding members of the Universal Stylus Initiative, a consortium that counts Lenovo, Dell, Synaptics, Sharp, Wacom and others as founding members, to bring a common stylus that is interoperable across multiple devices from different manufacturers. The goal is to have a universal stylus in the market by the end of this year.
The results of this initiative could be interesting, with Apple anticipated to head into the stylus market with its rumored iPad Pro and Microsoft with its N-Trig technology noticeably absent from the consortium.
The writing challenge
The plight for those who rely on stylus for input is that they don't work across different devices and you may need to buy a separate stylus for each tablet you own, said Arvind Kumar, Senior Principal Engineer at Intel, in a technical presentation at IDF 2015.
For example, I use a Samsung Galaxy Note Pro 12.2, a tablet that relies on an S Pen stylus based on Wacom's technology, at home and a Microsoft Surface Pro 3 at work, which uses a different N-Trig-based Surface Pen. My Surface can't register the S Pen and my Galaxy Note can't pick up signals generated by the Surface Pen.
Even between Dell tablet models launched within the same year, like the Venue 10 Pro and Venue 11 Pro, there are different stylus technologies on each, preventing pen interoperability.
While capacitive styli work across all devices with a capacitive touchscreen, like most modern smartphones and tablets, these devices are inaccurate, come with a large tip and doesn't emulate the pen-to-paper experience well.
To combat this complexity, the Universal Stylis Initiative, or USI, created a common stylus standard that works across any USI-compatible tablet or device. Additionally, manufacturers like Microsoft, Wacom and Samsung could add in their own proprietary technology to bring added features, like more pressure sensitivity.
A universal solution
USI will provide specifications for how the stylus will be detected by the device, common interactions such as pressure and button usage and support for legacy and proprietary systems. Companies that adopt the USI specifications are free to design their own pens and implement their own firmware for different operating systems.
The goal is to enable 12 months of battery life on a single charge, meaning that the universal stylus will be more similar to the N-Trig and Synaptics technologies compared to the batteryless Wacom pens. The stylus will use a compact AAAA battery, and Intel defines battery life as three hours of active use each day over a year, or 1,080 hours.
The stylus can even go into a low power mode when not in use to further conserve energy.
Types of universal stylus
If the universal stylus doesn't come with any additional or proprietary features, it will work on any device that supports a USI controller. However, if the universal stylus also supports proprietary technology, like if Wacom adds its own features on top of the USI specs, it can work on a USI tablet or phone, or a Wacom-enabled device.
On a Wacom device, the tablet will prefer to operate in a USI-preferred mode, unless the added features are required by the user or app. In this case, it will switch to the Wacom mode.
USI hopes to ease the transition to the universal stylus by supporting legacy and proprietary functions on top of its standard. This also helps the interoperability challenge when introducing a new standard.
Benefits of a stylus
For manufacturers, having a universal stylus can reduce the cost and time it takes to create a pen-enabled tablet that's optimized for writing and drawing. For consumers, you'll be able to reuse your stylus even if you switch between different manufacturers or models, and you won't need to worry about compatibility issues.
Right now, if you're headed to a meeting and are a Microsoft Surface 3 user who forgot your stylus at home, you better hope your colleague uses a Surface 3 or Surface Pro 3 so you can borrow their Surface Pen. If not, you're out of lock. Interoperable stylus can make borrowing a stylus as easy as borrowing your neighbor's ink pen.
Having a universal stylus can also create a baseline experience for users looking at digital inking for the first time. Currently, the experience varies widely between capacitive touchscreen stylus, like those from Adonit and Paper, and active digitizers like those with N-Trig and Wacom technology.
With a universal standard, consumers won't be burdened with trying to figure out which technology is best. Instead, they can choose the hardware and device that they prefer, and they can expect good performance. Advanced users will likely still opt for a stylus with additional proprietary technology built in for more pressure sensitivity, accuracy and unique functions.
In the meantime, some manufacturers and accessory-makers are resorting to hybrid solutions, allowing users to capture notes using a traditional pen and paper, and then digitizing those notes using hardware and software. Examples include the HP Pro Slate 8 and Livescribe 3 pen. |
Sunday on ABC’s “This Week,” Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump said he will get over the 1,237 delegates number “fairly easily” to secure the Republican nomination.
Partial transcript as follows:
STEPHANOPOULOS: Let me move on. this comes on the heels of you saying this week there could be riots in Cleveland if you entered the Republican convention with more voting than anybody else but didn’t get the nomination. Speaker Paul Ryan called you out. Did you go too far there? If you don’t have the 1237 delegates going into Cleveland, why should you be guaranteed the nomination?
TRUMP: I think if I’m a few short and I have 1200 or 1100 and somebody else is at 300, 400, 500, likely to be the case, and if I’m a little bit short, and one of the reasons was, we had so many candidates. I mean, we started off with 17 candidates. And, it came down to, you know, finally, it’s down to three, frankly. But there are so many candidates. It’s hard to get over that number. It’s unfair in a way. Now, here’s what I think. Now they’re out. Now they’re out. I think I will get over that number. I think i may get over that number fairly easily. Arizona was unbelievable yesterday. Utah, frankly, was unbelievable the day before. I think we will get over that number. Tremendous spirit about make America great again. That’s the whole thing. We’re going to make America great again.
STEPHANOPOULOS: If you don’t, there’s nothing unfair about having a multi ballot convention, is there?
TRUMP: I think the biggest story in all of politics are the millions of people that are coming out to vote for me, in fairness, for the Republican party. They’re up 75%, 72%, 102% different states in the primaries. It’s the single biggest story worldwide in politics is, what’s happening at the millions and millions of people that are going out to vote for me. Now, I will say this. the Democrats are down 35%. whereas the Republicans are up over 70%. and some cases even more than that. I say this. if you’re going to disenfranchise all of those people, some of whom have never voted before, and they’re 50 and older, but if you’re going the disenfranchise all of those people, independents, Democrats. we have a lot of people coming over.
STEPHANOPOULOS: It’s okay for them to riot?
TRUMP: I didn’t say — all I can say is this. I don’t know what’s going to happen. You’ll have a lot of very unhappy people. And I think frankly for the Republicans to disenfranchise all those people. if that happens, they’re not voting. The Republicans lose. If the Republicans embrace these great people showing up, the Republicans are going to have a massive victory. |
https://plus.google.com/u/0/+AndyMedders
HTC really likes to market their devices alongside popular fashion events. After all, HTC is a lifestyle and not just a phone in your pocket. The HTC Rhyme was revealed during last year’s fashion week in New York and this year we get to see a limited edition HTC One X take on the runway.
Although we are not seeing a brand new phone this year, HTC has brainstormed with the fashion-centered folks from Cushnie et Ochs and MADE Fashion Week to design the perfect tech accessory to go with the Cushnie et Ochs 2013 spring clothing line. The clothing line goes on display later this week and details on how limited the Cushnie et Ochs/MADE Fashion Week inspired HTC One X is are just that, limited. The source says the black and white HTC One X will come with a MADE Fashion Week app and other associated software. You can also see in the featured image that a pair of black and white headphones will accompany the stylish smartphone. More details will likely follow once we figure out how to get a hold of one. Stay tuned to what is happening in New York, because in a couple of weeks, HTC has a big announcement to make.
Update: HTC just dropped us a line, letting us know that the HTC One by Cushnie et Ochs will not be available to the public. Limited numbers of the handset will be distributed to celebrities and a few others who will be attending New York Fashion Week.
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HTC NAMED OFFICIAL TECHNOLOGY PARTNER FOR MADE FASHION WEEK
HTC and MADE Fashion Week Come Together to
Celebrate the Collision of Fashion and Technology
NEW YORK, NY (August 30, 2012) – HTC, a global leader of mobile innovation and design, has been named the official technology partner for the 2013 Spring/Summer MADE Fashion Week taking place in New York City at Milk Studios September 6-12. HTC and MADE have come together for a ground-breaking partnership that celebrates the collision of fashion, technology and art through one-of-a-kind collaborations with a renowned artist and burgeoning designer.
“HTC’s generous support has helped us give over 40 designers the opportunity to show at New York Fashion Week,” said Mazdack Rassi, Co-Founder of MADE, Creative Director of Milk Studios. “They have been an extraordinary partner to MADE Fashion Week and we have the upmost respect for the innovative and creative work they do within their industry.”
As a kick-off to fashion week, HTC will co-host a star-studded, exclusive party at Milk Gallery on September 4th in honor of famed photographer Ben Watts’ Mix Tape exhibition. Watts, whose photography has been seen in fashion publications such as Elle, Vogue, Harper’s Bazaar, and Vanity Fair, has taken several photos using his HTC One device that are being featured in the exhibit. The photos will be on display along with a series of behind-the-scenes videos documenting Watts’ experience creating them. A part of the Mix Tape exhibition will feature a custom built EVOLVE / Ben Watts scooter housing four HTC One devices. Guests will be able to take their picture as they strike a pose on the scooter, and this will be on display at MADE for the duration of fashion week.
HTC has teamed up with Watts to develop the “Wattsup Photo” app – now everyone can create imagery “just like Ben”. Watts’ punchy color saturation and neon gaff tape borders make every photo look like a behind-the-scenes shot from a swimsuit magazine shoot. Users will also be able to use the app to collage their photos in Watts’ signature scrapbook-style.
“I teamed up with HTC because of their strong presence in pop culture, which I like to shower myself in and am a big follower of,” said Ben Watts. “Now tap that HTC ‘WattsUpPhoto” app and get your collage on shhhhh.”
In addition, HTC has announced their collaboration with the dynamic fashion design team and MADE Fashion Week participants Cushnie Et Ochs to create the HTC One by Cushnie Et Ochs. This limited edition, beautifully designed device references the simple color palette and bold
sensuality of the Cushnie Et Ochs Spring 2013 collection, which will be shown at MADE Fashion Week this September.
“Bringing the Cushnie Et Ochs aesthetic to a world outside the realm of fashion was so new and inspiring and really allowed us to develop the ultimate sleek and sexy tech accessory,” said Carly Cushnie and Michelle Ochs.
And guests visiting MADE Fashion Week will be able to stay powered by plugging into several HTC charging stations. These stations will be accessible throughout Milk Studios during MADE Fashion Week including backstage, and VIP lounge areas. During the busy week, HTC will be providing select attendees with a VIP Fashion Week Survival Kit featuring essential items for stylistas on-the-go including a nail file, lip balm, sewing kit, hand lotion, stain treatment stick, mirror and mints.
Tweet us at #HTCMADE.
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Source: WWD |
Microsoft is updating its OneNote for Windows 8.1 app today with some significant changes. Visually the app remains very similar to the previous version, with some tweaks here and there, and the multiple Snap Views in Windows 8.1 are now fully enabled. OneNote now also supports the Share Charm in 8.1, allowing users to copy a website or information from an app directly into a new note in the app. If you’re sharing from a Windows 8.1 app or IE11 then it keeps the full richness of the images and text that’s captured into a note.
The biggest improvements come with a new Camera Scan feature and optical character recognition (OCR). OneNote has always supported capture from cameras, but the feature has been updated to improve scanning of documents and whiteboards. The idea is to make images look like there were scanned directly into a page, and Camera Scan automatically rotates, straightens, crops, sharpens, and remove shadows from images after they’re taken so they fit into a note.
OCR just like SkyDrive
OneNote combines Camera Scan with a new OCR feature that lets you search for text within an image embedded into a note, or simply copy text from an inserted image. You can insert any image to copy the text out of it, and it works in a similar way to the OCR recognition on Microsoft’s SkyDrive service. We tested the feature a number of times and found it’s a little hit and miss that depends largely on image quality. However, screenshots with text work perfectly, and the overall Camera Scan feature works well to crop and align documents.
Other improvements to the OneNote Windows 8.1 app include page previews in the notes list, a fullscreen view, and improvements to inking support. The OneNote for Windows 8.1 update is available immediately in the Windows Store. |
It’s a big weekend for fans of San Jose’s resident peregrine falcons, who’ll be watching to see if any of the four eggs in the nest box high up on City Hall begin to hatch.
Clara and Fernando El Cohete, her mate since 2012, have been taking turns watching over the clutch of eggs since their arrival over the past few weeks. Observers on the falcons’ Facebook page — of course they have a Facebook page — anticipate the eggs could begin hatching as soon as Friday.
Watching the falcons on the city’s FalconCam has been a daytime obsession for countless people since Clara first arrived on the scene in 2007. Should any of this year’s eggs hatch, this will be the 11th year that Clara has produced young. Last year, three eggs hatched and two chicks survived.
For falcon fans, the show is really just starting. Once any chicks arrive, Clara and Fernando will begin feeding them — never good news for any downtown pigeons who might wind up as baby food — and then the wait begins for them to “fledge,” or take their first, often tricky and dangerous, flights. The gender of the chicks won’t be known until they are banded by researchers with the Santa Cruz Predatory Bird Research Group, which monitors the population of peregrine falcons in the area and provides educational programs to schools about the birds.
SWEET DISPLAY: Artist Charlotte Kruk — who makes wearable art from an amazing array of recycled items — has put her talents to use decorating the storefront window of Deb Rohzen‘s Simply Smashing! boutique in downtown Campbell.
The whimsical display, titled “Circo, Cirque, Circus; Super Chocolate Circus,” features human-animal hybrid circus performers created out of papier mache and candy wrappers, as well as showcasing two acrobat costumes — the look like ballet tutus — made using “Mother’s Circus Animal” bags.
If you want to get a close-up look at the display and meet the artist, she’ll be at the “Art and Fashion Affair” reception Rohzen is having Saturday from 2 to 5 p.m. to celebrate the revamped boutique at 241 E. Campbell Ave.
NO FOOLIN’: Contestants for the sixth annual South Bay Teen Idol finals are getting ready for their big showdown 7 p.m. Saturday at the Addison-Penzak Jewish Community Center in Los Gatos. And it should be a pretty fun show: With the competition falling on April Fools Day this year, the songs are based on the theme of pranks and surprises.
They’re not kidding around about the top prize, though, which is $2,500, plus $500 for the music department of the winner’s school. The 10 young women who made the finals are from around the Bay Area: Abby Waterman (Los Gatos High), Ally Boles (Westmont High), Catherine Wellwood (Herman Intermediate School), Julia Owens (Pinewood High), Kristen Champlin (Leland High), Lyla Rose Neely (Oakland School of the Arts), Nicole Baranchuk (Westmont High), Sabrina Kazemipour (Sacred Heart Prep), Sierra McKenna (Christopher High) and Sophie Huang (Dublin High).
The judges include two people who know a lot about both music and being funny — Mix106.5 morning hosts Jeff Pope and Marla Davies — as well as Robert Hayes of local talent management firm Sound Management. Get more information and buy tickets at www.apjcc.org. |
Richard Sherman or Darrelle Revis?
It's no contest, according to New York Jets cornerback Antonio Cromartie, who said Tuesday that Sherman doesn't deserve to be mentioned with the top corners in the NFL.
Richard Sherman doesn't deserve to be called the top cornerback in the NFL, according to Antonio Cromartie. Cary Edmondson/USA TODAY Sports
Cromartie suggested that Sherman -- a three-time All-Pro selection for the Seattle Seahawks -- is a product of his scheme and a superior supporting cast.
"Go play in a defense where you don't have two All-Pro safeties," Cromartie said in an interview with Sirius XM NFL Radio, referring to Earl Thomas and Kam Chancellor. "That's what I would tell him.
"Go follow the No. 1 receiver. Follow him around for a whole entire game and let's see what you can do," Cromartie continued. "Darrelle Revis has done that his whole career. I've done that. Patrick Peterson has done it. Joe Haden has done it. [Sherman] is the only defensive back that hasn't."
That Cromartie defended Revis, with whom he reunited after two years apart, came as no surprise. But, in the process, he was critical of Sherman, who typically stays on one side of the field in the Seattle defense.
"If you want to label yourself as the No. 1 corner, the best corner in the NFL, follow the best guy on every single team," Cromartie said.
Save for one season in the Tampa Bay Buccaneers' zone-based scheme, Revis has covered the No. 1 receiver for most of his career with the Jets and New England Patriots.
"His [response] will be, 'We don't have to do that, I have my trust in the other corner on the other side,'" Cromartie said of Sherman. "That's not the point. If you're going to consider yourself the best, do what the best do. They follow around the best."
Revis, who signed a five-year, $70 million contract to return to the Jets, was an All-Pro selection last season. |
Image caption Residents hope the award will speed up plans to regenerate the town centre
Residents of a town have collected the Carbuncle award for the most dismal place in Scotland - after asking organisers for the trophy.
Denny residents approached the award's organisers after learning no-one wanted to pick up the award on behalf of this year's winners, John O'Groats.
Denny had been named as a runner-up in design magazine Urban Realm's list of the country's most awful towns.
Residents hope the award will speed up regeneration plans for the town.
PAULINE McLEAN'S BLOG I'm not sure whether the Carbuncle awards have been vindicated by the fact that a group of residents have ASKED for their town to win it. Admittedly, one of the biggest problems of the awards, was the way they were foisted on unsuspecting passers-by in damp and dreich town centres. At least in the case of Denny, where the Carbuncle was handed over at lunchtime today, the residents actually requested it. Well, some of them. Read more of Pauline's blog
The Plook-on-the-Plinth trophy was collected on Monday by a campaign group called Walk Around the Block, which has staged a series of protests over a block of condemned flats in the town centre.
Last March, a planned £15m regeneration of the run-down centre was halted after developers told Falkirk Council that it was not financially viable to proceed at a time of recession.
Then in June, the council said Denny's regeneration was "set to progress" with a less ambitious plan, which would see the block demolished in the next two years.
Walk Around the Block member Brian McCabe said many residents wanted to see it pulled down as soon as possible.
He said: "The town centre looks like Beirut on a bad day. It's a blot on the landscape.
Image caption The Plook on the Plinth was collected on behalf of Denny by Walk Around the Block campaigners
"It's a lovely town but as soon as prospective house-buyers drive down the main street, the deal is off.
"By accepting this award, we want to tap into Urban Realm's design expertise and approach Falkirk Council to see what can be done."
Mr McCabe added: "Presently Falkirk Council are not listening. This has to change."
Falkirk Council leader Craig Martin said: "It is deeply disappointing that anyone in Denny thinks this is a positive move for the town.
"Falkirk Council already has a plan in place for the regeneration of Denny town centre, alongside developer Henry Boot, and the response from the majority of the community has been very positive.
"The council has no interest in the Carbuncle awards - our priority is transforming Denny town centre."
He added: "John O'Groats are clearly offended and united in their refusal to accept it. Unfortunately there are a few individuals in Denny who are keen to have it, regardless of the feelings of the wider community."
'Unprecedented'
Urban Realm reporter John Glenday said the trophy handover to Denny was unprecedented.
He said: "This is the first time in the history of the Carbuncle that anyone has stepped up to the plate to collect the trophy.
"It is also the first time we have been solicited by the residents of one of our chosen towns to take up ownership of the trophy.
"We have always been at pains to stress that although, on the face of it, this trophy is an unwelcome sight, it should in fact be harnessed as a force for good."
Mr Glenday added: "Our Plook will provide Denny with just the catalyst it needs in order to spur Falkirk Council into action and articulate their plight to the wider country." |
1 Uzumaki (2000) In a small Japanese town, its inhabitants become increasingly obsessed with and tormented by spirals. Uzumaki is also known as Spiral.
2 Tomie (series) Tomie is a Japanese horror film series based on the manga of the same name. The first two films in the series, were from 1999, and the next six were in the years relevant to this list. It is about a demonic girl with the power to regenerate her cells (allowing multiple Tomie clones to exist) and the power to drive her admirers to madness (often resulting in her own death).
3 Ichi the Killer (2001) After a Yakuza boss disappears along with a large sum of money, his devoted masochistic enforcer Kakihara (the character shown in the movie posters) and the rest of the mob go looking for him. Soon they encounter Ichi, a mentally disturbed young man with great martial arts skills who has been conned into killing Yakuza. Directed by Takashi Miike.
4 Blue Spring (2001) Blue Spring is based on Taiyo Matsumoto's manga of same title, and tells a tale of school students at a run down Tokyo high school for boys.
5 Love Ghost (2001) Love Ghost (Shibito no koiwazurai) is a supernatural horror film about a teenage girl who moves with her family back to the city where she lived as a child.
6 Eko Eko Azarak (series) Eko Eko Azarak is a series of films which follow the character Misa Kuroi, a high school student who is also a witch with magical powers.
The movies:
Eko Eko Azarak I: Wizard of Darkness (1995)
Eko Eko Azarak II: Birth of the Wizard (1996)
Eko Eko Azarak III: Misa The Dark Angel (1998)
Eko Eko Azarak IV: Awakening (2001)
Eko Eko Azarak: R-page (2006)
Eko Eko Azarak: B-page (2006)
7 Kakashi (2001) Kakashi (Scarecrow) is about a girl searching for her missing brother, who encounters a cursed village where the insane villagers are mesmerised by the power of the kakashi (scarecrow).
9 Princess Blade (2001) The Princess Blade (Shurayuki-hime) is an action movie set in a dystopian future Japan ruled by an absolute monarchy. The story follows Yuki, a member of an assassin group hired by the government to suppress a rebellion.
11 Wangan Midnight (series) Wangan Midnight are a series of live-action movies based on the manga of the same name, which was about street racing on Tokyo's Shuto Expressway Bayshore Route. The two movies made during this list's decade were Wangan Midnight Return (2001) and Wangan Midnight The Movie (2009).
12 Stop the Bitch Campaign (trilogy) A black comedy series based on a manga.
15 Alive (2002) A sci-fi horror film about a man who survives his execution, and offered the choice of either another execution attempt or to participate in a bizarre experiment. He chooses the latter.
16 Oldboy (2003) Oldboy (2003) is a South Korean movie about a man who is kidnapped and held prisoner for 15 years. Upon his release (by his captors), he attempts to find out who his captors are and their motivations.
18 Sky High (2003) Sky High is about a detective who hunts a serial killer who is removing girls hearts. When the detective's own fiancée falls victim to the killer, he discovers the otherworldly intentions of the killer and is helped from beyond the grave by his fiancée.
20 Azumi (2003) In war-torn Japan, the Tokugawa Shogun, orders the assassination of three hostile warlords. The story follows Azumi, a young woman who is raised from birth with nine other orphans, to become an assassin. Based on the manga of the same name.
24 Umizaru (series) Umizaru (Sea Monkeys) are a series of live action films (plus a TV drama series, and two NHK high-definition specials), based on the manga series of the same name. It is about a group of rescue divers from the Japan Coast Guard. Umizaru means 'sea monkey'; a derogatory label slapped on the rescue diver trainees by locals due to their excessive and uninhibited behaviour during off hours.
The films:
- Umizaru (2004)
- Limit of Love: Umizaru (2006)
- Umizaru 3: The Last Message (2010)
- Brave Hearts: Umizaru (2012)
25 Last Quarter (2004) Last Quarter (Kagen no Tsuki, or Last Quarter of the Moon) is a film based on the supernatural themed manga of the same name.
26 Cutie Honey (2004) Cutie Honey (Kyuti Hani) is a Japanese tokusatsu (live-action) film adaptation, produced by Gainax, of the 1970s manga and anime series of the same name. The film loosely retells the story of Cutie Honey's battle to defend humanity against Panther Claw and avenge her father. Honey's professor father had saved her from an accident, by transferring her mind over to an android body. The android body allows her to transform into the pink-haired super hero 'Cutie Honey'.
27 Casshern (2004) Casshern (Kyashan) is a Japanese tokusatsu (live-action) film adaptation of the anime series of the same name. It is set in a dystopian Earth with an alternate history. After a war between the Eastern Federation and Europa ends, the Earth is left diseased and polluted. In an attempt to regenerate mankind, a scientist accidentally unleashes a race of savage mutants into the world. It is up to the warrior, Casshern, to stop these mutants.
29 Koibumi-biyori (2004) Koibumi-biyori (A Perfect Day for Love Letters) is based on the manga short story series of the same name, where each story depicted a relationship that involved the use of love letters.
30 Premonition (2004) Premonition (Yogen) is based on the manga Kyoufu Shinbun (Newspaper of Terror) by Jiro Tsunoda, published in Shonen Champion in 1973. It is a horror film about a university professor who finds a scrap of newspaper that predicts a future tragedy in his family.
31 Kekko Kamen (series) A series of live-action movies about a nude female superhero dressed only in a red rabbit-eared mask, with matching gloves, scarf, and boots.
32 Nana (2005) Nana is about the friendship between two very different young women, who are both called Nana.
34 The Neighbour No. Thirteen (2005) The Neighbour No. Thirteen (Tonari no hito 13-go) is based on Santa Inoue's manga Rinjin 13-go. It is a psychological horror film about a man who starts a new job as a construction worker, and finds that his supervisor is his middle-school bully. His supervisor doesn't recognise him.
35 Yaji and Kita: The Midnight Pilgrims (2005) Yaji and Kita: The Midnight Pilgrims (Mayonaka no Yaji-san Kita-san) is loosely based on the comic novel series Tokaidochu Hizakurige which was published in 12 parts from 1802 to 1822. The original comic novel was about two Edo-era men travelling from Edo to Kyoto on their pilgrimage to the Ise Shrine. The comic was primarily for entertainment, but seconded as a tourist guide. The movie however, is a crazy musical about two gay Edo-era men who get a 20th century motorbike and witness other post-Edo-era phenomena during their journey.
37 Touch (2005) Touch (Tatchi) is based on the 1980s manga (and later anime series) of the same name. It is about a Japanese high school baseball team.
38 Cromartie High - The Movie (2005) A live-action adaptation of the comedy manga Cromartie High, which is about a class of students at a Japanese high school for delinquent boys (which also includes a robot, a gorilla, and Freddy (Mercury) as students in the class).
39 Tetsujin 28 (2005) Tetsujin 28 is a remake of the 1960s anime TV series Tetsujin 28-go (which was based on a manga from 1956), and is about a boy with control over a giant robot.
40 Tokyo Zombie (2005) Tokyo Zombie is about two slackers who work in a fire extinguisher factory, and spend their lunch hours training to fulfil their dreams of being jujitsu champions. They murder their boss and dump his body on a Tokyo toxic waste dump. An army of the undead rises from the waste dump and begin to attack the living. The pair will have to use their limited jujitsu skills, to either help or escape Tokyo.
41 Angel (2005) Angel (Tenshi) is based on the manga Angel Nest (Tenshi no Su). It is about an angel that only lonely-hearted people can see.
42 Death Note (series) The Death Note series is a duology (Death Note (2006) and Death Note: The Last Name (2006)) followed by a spin-off movie (Death Note: L Change the World (2008) which focusses on the character L from the first two movies). In the first movie, A university student stumbles across a 'death note', a magical artefact that allows its wielder to kill anyone they know the name and face of, simply by writing the victim's name in it. The student attempts to kill all of Japan's criminals.
43 Cat-Eyed Boy (2006) Cat-Eyed Boy (Nekome kozo) is a live-action adaptation of Kazuo Umezu's manga from the 1960s about a boy who was the child of a cat spirit named Nekomata, but got rejected by other spirits for looking too much like a human.
44 Love My Life (2006) Love My Life is based on the Ebine Yamaji manga of the same name. It is a lesbian love story about two university students.
45 Bugmaster (2006) Bugmaster (also known as Mushishi, and Mushi-Shi: The Movie) is about a traveller who dedicates himself from protecting the population from supernatural creatures called Mushi.
46 God's Left Hand, Devil's Right Hand (2006) God's Left Hand, Devil's Right Hand (Kami no hidarite akuma no migite) is based on the violent horror manga of the same name. It is about a six year old boy with the ability to see the horrific images of other people's evil acts. This ability puts him in a coma, but has the ability to communicate with his sister via a broken cellphone, to help her stop a killer.
47 Sukeban Boy (2006) Sukeban Boy (Oira Sukeban) is a Japanese comedy (based on the manga of the same name) about a teenage boy with the face of a girl, who is sent to an all-girls high school by his biker father.
48 Honey and Clover (2006) Honey and Clover (Hachimitsu to kuroba) is based on the manga of the same name (and was also adapted as an anime series). It is a drama about a group of art-school students.
49 Lovely Complex (2006) Lovely Complex (also known as Love Com, or Rabu Kon) is a romantic comedy based on the manga of the same name. It is about the relationship between a tall girl and a short boy.
52 Tokyo University Story (2006) Tokyo University Story (Tokyo Daigaku Monogatari) is based on the Japanese manga series of the same name. It is about a pair of high school students who date and both worry about their upcoming university entrance examinations.
53 Yo-Yo Girl Cop (2006) Yo-Yo Girl Cop (also known as Sukeban Deka: Kodo Nemu = Asamiya Saki) is the third film based on the Sukeban Deka anime. It is about a girl who is recruited by a clandestine police organisation, and must stop a plot by student radicals, using her high-tech steel yo-yo weapon.
56 Kitaro (2007) Kitaro (Gegege no Kitaro) is about a half-human/half-yokai (a general term for creatures and supernatural beings), orphaned as a child and dedicated to keeping the peace between the human and yokai worlds.
58 Dororo (2007) Dororo is a live action adaptation of the Japanese manga series from the 1960s (that was also made into an anime TV series in 1969). Dororo was filmed in New Zealand. Unlike the manga/anime, the live action film's story has Dororo being a young woman, who assumes the identy of a man. She joins a young samurai's quest to recover 48 of his body parts from 48 demons and to avenge her parents death.
59 Happily Ever After (2007) Happily Ever After (Jigyaku no uta) is a drama about a husband and wife, who are a lazy gangster and hard working noodle shop worker respectively.
60 Prodigy (2007) Prodigy (Shindo) is about a 13 year old piano prodigy who helps a 19 year old to enter a conservatory to study the piano.
61 Yunagi City, Sakura Country (2007) Yunagi City, Sakura Country (Yunagi no machi sakura no kuni) is based on the manga Town of Evening Calm, Country of Cherry Blossoms (Yunagi no Machi, Sakura no Kuni). The manga had two connected stories:
- Town of Evening Calm, which is set in Hiroshima ten years after the atomic bomb was dropped, and is about a young woman who survived the attack.
- Country of Cherry Blossoms, which is set in 1987 and 2004 in Tokyo, and is about the woman's niece.
62 Sundome (series) A series of four live action movies released from 2007 to 2009, based on the manga of the same name. It is about some teenagers who are members of their school's 'Roman' club (a club for investigating ghosts, UFOs, and the paranormal).
63 Crows Zero (series) Crows Zero is a series of Japanese action movies based on the Crows manga. In the first film, the son of a Yakuza transfers to an ultra-violent all-male high school for delinquents, and sets out to take over the school and prove he is the toughest.
The films:
- Crows Zero (2007)
- Crows Zero II (2009)
- Crows Explode (2014)
65 Ikigami (2008) One in every thousand citizens aged 18 to 24, are randomly selected to die for the state, as part of a government policy known as the 'prosperity law'.
67 Boys Over Flowers: Final (2008) Boys Over Flowers Final (Hana yori dango: Fainaru) is the third and final chapter of the Boys Over Flowers romance/drama trilogy (the first two parts being jdrama TV shows) based on the Japanese comic series Hana Yori Dango.
69 Pussy Soup (2008) Pussy Soup (Neko Ramen Taisho) is based on the four-panel comic strip Neko Rahmen. It is about Taisho (meaning 'boss' or 'chief'), a cat who is a ramen chef and owner of the ramen restaurant 'Neko Rahmen'.
70 Words of Devotion (2008) Words of Devotion (Ai no kotodama) is about a young gay (male) couple whose relationship is disrupted by a girl who takes an interest in one of them.
71 SS - Special Stage (2008) SS - Special Stage (Esu esu) is about a middle-aged family man and former rally driver, who fixes up his Mitsubishi Starion 4WD (a Group B rally car which was banned at the end of the 1986 season), and becomes a boy-racer.
72 The Cherry Orchard: Blossoming (2008) The Cherry Orchard (Sakura no Sono) is about the members of a drama club of an all girl high school, who would be performing the play The Cherry Orchard by Anton Chekhov for the anniversary of their school's founding. Another live-action film adaptation was made in 1990.
73 Dark Love: Rape (2008) Dark Love: Rape (Daku rabu: Rape) is about a young woman who moves into an apartment that is rigged with hidden cameras. A voyeur, watches her every move and begins a strange relationship with her.
76 Sasori (2008) Sasori is a remake of the 1972 film, Female Prisoner #701: Scorpion; the first film in a series of 'women in prison' films.
77 Tamami: The Baby's Curse (2008) Tamami: The Baby's Curse (Akanbo Shojo) is a Japanese horror movie based on a manga by Kazuo Umezu. A teenage girl discovers that she is not really an orphan when her wealthy but very strange family welcomes her home to a mansion that many claim is haunted.
80 Air Doll (2009) Air Doll (Kuki ningyo) is a comedy about a life-size blow-up doll that develops a soul and falls in love with a video store clerk.
82 Gokusen: The Movie (2009) Gokusen: The Movie, ties in with the television drama which is an adaptation of the Gokusen manga series. The story follows Kumiko Yamaguchi, a teacher at an all-male private high school who is also the granddaughter of a yakuza boss.
83 Miyoko (2009) Miyoko (Miyoko Asagaya kibun) is based on the comic strip by Shinichi Abe which was based on his own life, while living in a tiny apartment in the Asagaya District of Tokyo during 1970s, where he drew inspiration from his then model girlfriend Miyoko.
91 Kamui Gaiden (2009) Kamui Gaiden is a Japanese film based on the manga series of the same name. It is about a runaway ninja who has abandoned his clan and his now pursued by assassins. |
Journaling can be hard
Sometimes we sit down to write and the words flow like a river from the pen. Other times, we go to write in our journals and it's as if our brain shuts down. Maybe we're thinking about our busy day - maybe it feels like watching Netflix would be easier - but the inspiration just isn't there.
Here's a quick list of 5 beautiful design techniques to spice up your pages and bring back that inspiration!
1. Add Some Color
Photo credit: u/NinaMJ
Pick yourself up some colored pencils and unleash that creativity. A change of pace can help new ideas flow and a touch of color makes it even more fun to flip back through your journal later.
2. Write Between The Lines (Or Go No Lines At All)
Photo: u/branches26
Rules? What rules? with a blank journal you can definitely get creative with how, where, and why you write. Sometimes doing a normal activity (like writing in your journal) just a little bit differently can help remove writers' block. This one is perhaps a little easier with blank journal pages, which you can find here.
3. Take Notes
Text: u/darahjagr
I always like to be learning something, whether it's the newest way to improve our website or cool journaling techniques like bullet journaling. I find that taking notes as I'm reading really helps me to remember the subject matter, but here's my tip: Include illustrations. They can be simple, like the planets shown above, or elaborate, depending on how much better you are than me at sketching ;) Taking the time to illustrate what you are learning further cements the idea and also makes you more likely to flip back through your notes, refreshing the concept.
4. Ditch The Pen
Design: u/levimills
We all love nice pens, especially fountain pens, but there are so many ways that one can fill up a journal that it's worth trying different things. The painting above is a combination of ink and watercolors. Another cool options is to try sketching with charcoal to create a very rustic look for sketches.
5. Mix It Up
Design: u/steveok
Steveok's scanned pages above are a perfect example of mixing media in a journal. He uses ink, paint, and pencil together with a variety of page layouts to create a journal that is classic, clean, and begs to be admired.
Go Forth and Create!
Journaling is all about finding an outlet from everyday life that can be both calming, exciting, and stress relieving. Going beyond the usual text-on-a-page approach can be a great way to keep the fire alive in times when we're feeling lazy.
Thanks for reading :) Feel free to subscribe to be notified when we release new articles and please comment below!
The Wanderings Crew
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Image caption Patient Concern says the aims of the scheme to share NHS records are "laudable"
Healthcare companies could be given access to anonymous NHS patient records and other NHS data under new plans.
On Monday, Prime Minister David Cameron is due to unveil the plans intended to help the UK life sciences sector become a world leader, and give patients faster access to new treatments.
Campaign group Patient Concern fears the "death of patient confidentiality".
The government promised "all necessary safeguards". It is unclear whether the plan covers all or part of the UK.
The prime minister, due to make a keynote speech on the plans in London on Monday, is expected to give life science companies more freedom to run clinical trials inside hospitals.
The government says that the cradle-to-grave principle of the NHS means it has some of the most detailed and comprehensive patient data in the world.
'Vital importance'
Ministers believe Britain can become a world leader in the field of life sciences because of the vast expertise within the NHS and its strong university-based research.
We will not allow David Cameron to throw away essential safeguards Andy Burnham , Shadow health secretary
The industry already employs 160,000 people in 4,500 companies, with a turnover of £50bn a year.
Under the plans, NHS records would be made anonymous, but it is not clear whether private firms would have to pay to access them.
A government spokesman said: "The life sciences industry is of vital importance to the UK economy and we are committed to greater collaboration with the NHS to ensure that patients can get faster access to valuable innovative treatments.
"All necessary safeguards would be in place to ensure protection of patients' details - the data will be anonymised and the process will be carefully and robustly regulated.
"Healthcare charities, researchers and clinicians are calling for this action in order to improve research, innovation and the development of medicines in the UK."
Mr Cameron will outline plans for an "early access" scheme allowing seriously-ill patients, such as those with cancer, to get new drugs up to a year before they are fully licensed.
Some medicines can take up to 20 years to be approved.
But the proposals have been criticised by privacy campaigners who oppose wider access to medical records.
'Desperation'
Roger Goss, from Patient Concern, told the BBC: "This is the death of patient confidentiality.
"There is no guarantee that information will be anonymised, in any case anonymised data can just as easily be re-identified.
"We understand GP surgeries will have the right to refuse to release their patients' records, but whether patients will ever be told what is happening, let alone have the choice to protect their privacy, is still unclear."
Patient Concern resigned from a Department of Health consultation committee looking at the plan because it was felt the organisation had been "recruited to applaud rather than advise", Mr Goss said.
But he added that the aims of the scheme were "laudable", and his organisation would approve if it was confirmed patients would get a choice whether to participate.
Shadow health secretary Andy Burnham said he did not object in principle to a closer partnership between the NHS and the life sciences sector as this "could be good for both sides".
But he told Sky News it was "absolutely essential" patient data was safeguarded and this could not be treated as "red tape to be brushed away".
"Proper regulation and essential safeguards need to be in place when it comes to patients data," he said. "It cannot be done in a way where essential rules are threatened."
Meanwhile, other government-held data - such as the Met Office's weather records - could also be opened up under the plans. |
(Asst. Secretary of State for East Asia Christopher Hill)
Tuesday night, The Washington Note confirmed that the Bush administration will "ask Congress" to de-list North Korea from America's "terrorist watch list." This request will be made on Thursday -- if there are no last minute, unexpected interventions.
Rumors have been kicking around that this might be happening, but no administration officials would confirm until yesterday that this was finally decided.
During the day Tuesday, I spoke with officials from the State Department, the CIA, the Department of Defense, President Bush's staff, and the Office of the vice president -- and several sources from these departments confirmed that the administration was moving forward on formally asking Congress to remove North Korea from the controversial watch list -- which is seen as a key confidence building step by North Korea and China in moving towards North Korea's eventual return to the nuclear non-proliferation club.
Sources also tell TWN that while the Bush administration will take this step Thursday, Vice President Cheney's office was a dissenting voice in the administration's internal discussions.
While North Korea's behavior continues to be erratic and often troubling, the Bush administration's decision will be considered a major victory for Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, Deputy Secretary John Negroponte, Defense Secretary Robert Gates and others -- but the real winner is Department of State Asst. Secretary for East Asia Affairs Christopher Hill -- who has been under almost constant assault from John Bolton and others opposed to deal-making with North Korea.
More on the implications later. |
Power football might sound like something your dad misses while watching today’s NFL, or how he tells you they used to play “back in the day!”. Now we all know that the power run game is not the most beautiful, or fun style to watch during a football game. However, the style is very crucial to an NFL offense, and if done correctly it can lead you to a Vince Lombardi Trophy. The Packers have one of the top offenses in the league, led by Aaron Rodgers of course, with dangerous guys on the outside like a returning Jordy Nelson, Randall Cobb, Davante Adams, Jeff Janis, and the speedy rookie out of Cal, Trevor Davis. But it’s the guy in the backfield that can prove to be the biggest part of the offense this season. That guy is Eddie Lacy. Lacy, who had a tough season last year dealt with nagging injuries all season but most notably dealt with weight and conditioning issues. But this offseason Lacy has been working with the creator of the P90x workout and fitness guru, Tony Horton. The Packers held an offseason practice near the end of May, and Lacy appeared to be slightly slimmer than he looked on game days last year. At the beginning of training camp last year, Lacy was listed at 242 lbs., and according to ESPN, Lacy has lost 15-18 pounds so far this summer although he is listed at 234 on the Packers roster page.
Having a slimmer, quicker Eddie Lacy could bring the Green Bay offense back to huge success like they saw in Lacy’s first two seasons with the team. In those first two seasons, Lacy was a force to be reckoned with in the power running game. In his rookie season, Lacy rushed for 1178 yards, and 11 Touchdowns, his second season was good for 1139 yards, and 9 TDs. During those two years, the offense was nearly unstoppable and was ranked top 10 in the entire league when it came to points, and yards. This last year saw a dramatic dip in production for the Packers offense however. Lacy only rushed for 758 yards, and 3 touchdowns throughout the entire season. This led to a dry, stagnant and ineffective offense that struggled throughout most of the second half of their season. Rodgers was out of sync with his wideouts, the run game was nowhere to be found and the Packers did not look like the Packers. Those bad memories can all go away this upcoming season with a rejuvenated and healthy Eddie Lacy to open up the offense. Eddie Lacy is a power runner that looks for guys to run at, and drag them along for big runs. Those big runs, are a huge part to a championship type of offense the Packers have. Establishing a power run game early in the season, will force defenses to bring more guys on the rush, and have the safeties in the defensive backfield crashing inside to try and get the hard runners down early. Bringing all those guys inside will make Aaron Rodgers a very happy guy because that will create tons of one-on-one matchups on the outside, something that he and Jordy Nelson are the best in the league at recognizing, and attacking. Pounding the ball inside with strong runs, will sharpen the offensive line and will also open up a key part of the passing game. Play action pass plays. While having more guys crashing on play action plays, Rodgers will have to be quick and precise while moving around the pocket and finding his receivers down field. That is one of Rodgers’ best skill traits, so having that opened up more will restore the league leading offense that Green Bay had in 2014, when they were a few minutes away from the Super Bowl, if not for a monumental collapse. That power running game led by Lacy, needs to be reestablished for the Packers to explode and return to the top offense in the league. With Nelson returning this year, Green Bay has as good a chance they have ever had to get back on track after a down season last year. There have been countless great, championship teams that won it all with a power running game. While it is a different style of power running, this past season the Carolina Panthers went 15-1 and ran through the NFC on their way to the Super Bowl. Jonathan Stewart, Mike Tolbert, and the NFL Most Valuable Player Cam Newton used the running game, and option running game to tear down defenses. With Newton being built like a fullback, he was able to run at defenders and them over with pure power. Using the power option put the defense in a bad position with them not knowing where the boom was going to come from. Carolina averaged 142.6 rushing yards per game which put them second in the league in that category, only finishing behind Buffalo. The strategy made Newton look like his alter-ego, “Super-Cam” when he was out on the field. With a less than elite receiving core, Newton was able to open up the passing game because the defense had to be prepared for the run game. Cam finished with 3837 passing yards to go along with 35 touchdowns in the passing game, and 636 rushing yards with 10 rushing touchdowns. That’s 45 total touchdowns from just the quarterback alone. Newton single handedly carried the Panthers to Super Bowl 50, only to come up short to the best defense in the league, the Denver Broncos. When it comes to winning a Super Bowl with a great power running game, most recently the Seattle Seahawks had a dominant season and won it all at Super Bowl 48. That season, Marshawn Lynch rushed for 1306 yards and 13 touchdowns in a running game that was considered very powerful. This resulted in Seattle quarterback, Russell Wilson having a very solid season in which he finished with 3475 yards, and 20 touchdowns to go along with a 64% completion percentage. The Seattle offensive line was one of the sharpest in the league that season in making sizable holes for Lynch to power through and dismantle a defense’s confidence play by play. Russell Wilson isn’t one of the top quarterbacks in the league when it comes to pure accuracy and dominating a game with his arm. When Lynch was powering through teams, they were getting worn down attempting to bring the guy known as “Beast Mode” down. This fatigued the defensive backs throughout the game, and made it easier for the Seattle wideouts to gain separation whether it be from crashing inside to try to stop Lynch, or from already being beat down by Lynch. With a quarterback that many consider the best in the league, if the Packers can get this style going with Eddie Lacy this upcoming season Green Bay’s offense will be virtually unstoppable. In a passing dominant league, the Packers having a power run game will catch teams off guard in their gameplans and how they prepare to go to battle with Green Bay.
While Eddie Lacy might feel the pressure from the organization to lose weight, the Packers are only trying to help Lacy’s long term health, and help him reach his full potential and return to the unstoppable force he once was. Aaron Rodgers may be the MVP of the Packers, and the guy that engineers the offense. But Eddie Lacy is the key that can open all the doors on the path to a Super Bowl Trophy. |
International Rugby
Healey: 'The ball should be luminous pink'
ESPN Staff
Changing the colour of the ball could help TMO decisions, according to Austin Healey © Getty Images Enlarge
Former England back Austin Healey has come up with a controversial suggestion to help improve the game by claiming officials should change the colour of the ball.
Citing examples where a TMO is brought in to determine whether a try can be given with the ball normally under a pile of bodies, Healey says that to help officials see where it is grounded, the traditionally white ball should be changed to a more vibrant colour and one that is unlikely to clash with the team's shirts.
"There are many occasions when a driving maul will end up with a collection of bodies over the line and the ball partially hidden," Healey wrote in his column for the Daily Telegraph. "The problem we have is that the ball might be the same colour as the shirt or it might be stuck on or near the white lines. It then becomes impossible to judge and, as a result, terribly difficult for the fourth official. That ball should be luminous pink or luminous green!
"So, every time it does go to the fourth official he has a better chance of seeing it and making the right decision. I know players would argue that you can't keep changing the colour of the ball to fit in with shirt colours, but there has to be a better way than the one we have now because how many tries this season have not been given because the fourth official can't quite see whether the ball is up or down.
"Let's also remember that, five years ago, the referee would have thought 'the ball is underneath him and some part of it must have touched the ground so it's a try'."
© ESPN Sports Media Ltd |
With so many new series popping up on streaming services and DVD, it gets harder and harder to keep up with recent shows, much less the all-time classics. With TV Club 10, we point you toward the 10 episodes that best represent a TV series, classic or modern. They might not be the 10 best episodes, but they’re the 10 episodes that’ll help you understand what the show’s all about—without having to watch the whole thing.
Star Trek’s fundamental promise has always been to boldly go where no one has gone before, but, by 2001, there really wasn’t anywhere left to go. The overlapping runs of The Next Generation, Deep Space Nine, and Voyager meant that the franchise had crammed 21 seasons into just 14 years, leaving precious little of the 24th century unexplored. Deep Space Nine’s Dominion War had brought the complex political and interpersonal dynamics between Star Trek’s various alien cultures to a rousing crescendo, while Voyager’s particular fondness for dizzyingly high-concept plots had blurred the line between 24th century technology and outright magic. In retrospect, given the creative exhaustion of its production team and the increasingly toxic nature of its fandom, the smart decision probably would have been to just let Star Trek rest for a few years, to give everyone involved a chance to miss it and to remember why they loved it in the first place.
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But since the realities of television production don’t really allow for such self-imposed hiatuses, longtime producers Rick Berman and Brannon Braga attempted to take Star Trek back to basics by returning to the tried-and-true format of an intrepid starship captain leading his crew into deep space on a multi-year mission of exploration. More than that, Enterprise would feature the first Starfleet vessel to bear that legendary name. Over a century before Captain Kirk and his crew journeyed through the galaxy in their Enterprise, the Constitution-class NCC-1701, this new show would chart the exploits of Captain Jonathan Archer and the Enterprise NX-01, the first human vessel capable of warp five travel—far slower than any of the later Star Trek ships, but fast enough for these early days of exploration. The show would be set in 2151, placing it in Star Trek’s distant past… but also the audience’s far future.
Indeed, that was the overriding tension that Enterprise would spend its entire four-year run struggling to resolve. Was the show primarily a look at what went on more than a century before the arrival of Captain Kirk—not to mention 200 years before the Next Generation-era crews—or was it instead an extrapolation of current trends into the distant future? After all, the original series’ aesthetic was an attempt by designers in the ’60s to imagine a universe 300 years from then; by 2001, simply incorporating four decades’ worth of intervening advances would mean that Enterprise, set only 150 years in the future, would look more advanced than Kirk’s ship.
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To solve this problem, Captain Jonathan Archer’s Enterprise is very consciously designed as a more cramped, utilitarian forerunner of Captain Kirk’s deep-space explorer or Captain Picard’s diplomatic flagship. The NX-01 has no talking computer, no holodeck, and only a relatively rudimentary transporter system, with shuttles instead being deployed in most situations. The day-to-day experience more closely resembles 21st century leisure activities than what was seen in any of the other shows: The crew members have a regular movie night, use the treadmills and exercise bikes in the onboard gym, and even have a pet in Archer’s beloved beagle Porthos. Even so, any side-by-side comparison of Archer’s Enterprise NX-01 with Kirk’s Enterprise NCC-1701 would be tempted to conclude that the former ship is the more advanced model, if only because it’s more in keeping with what is currently considered futuristic; it lacks the original series’ now retro look, something that the recent J.J. Abrams movies were able to make convincing, because they had a blockbuster film’s budget available to pull it off.
Still, while the design of NX-01 is a surprisingly effective compromise between the seemingly irreconcilable points of Kirk’s past and our future, the show would struggle to find its footing in almost all other areas. In its storytelling, Enterprise’s four-year run can be divided into three distinct eras, each owing significant inspiration to previous Star Trek shows. The first two seasons follow much the same formula as Voyager, with both largely content to repeat the episodic explorations of The Next Generation, albeit without the kind of earnest philosophical inquiry that elevated that program. The third season, which examines the aftermath of a devastating attack on Earth and follows the Enterprise crew as they search for and confront its perpetrators, plays like a reheated version of Deep Space Nine’s Dominion War. The fourth and final season benefits from a far more engaged creative team, as a new writing staff embraced Enterprise’s potential as a more direct prequel to the original Star Trek series. The latter two versions of the show are generally more successful than the first two years, which are little more than competently made Star Trek comfort food, but the show doesn’t really assert its own unique, vital identity until its final season, by which time Paramount and UPN had long since lost interest in continuing the show.
Enterprise, particularly in its first two seasons, is dragged down by many of the same creative problems that plagued Voyager, as both suffered from Berman and Braga’s fundamentally milquetoast creative instincts. Enterprise is, after all, the Star Trek show that takes as its theme music a cover version of a Rod Stewart song originally written for the Patch Adams soundtrack. In particular, the show suffers from characters who are vaguely likable at best, blandly dull at worst. All three of the Next Generation-era shows included multiple characters struggling with big, existential questions of identity: Data and his quest to be human, Worf and his attempt to understand his Klingon heritage, Odo and his destiny as a shapeshifter, the Doctor and his efforts to transcend his programming, Seven Of Nine and her quest to regain her humanity, and so on. Enterprise is much closer to the original series, in that both present a team of professional colleagues getting on and doing a job, beyond the occasional crises for its Vulcan first officer. But the original Star Trek cast triumphed there because of the particular alchemy found in the actors’ performances; each member of the ensemble complemented and brought out the best in one another in a way that would have been impossible individually, helping to make relatively one-note characters like Uhura or Chekov into part of the broader sci-fi iconography.
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Enterprise could not pull off the same feat with its ensemble, though most of its actors can flourish when given the right scripts. The casting of Quantum Leap star Scott Bakula as Captain Archer was yet another source of endless fan controversy, and he takes a long time to truly convince as a starship captain. To some extent, Enterprise makes the uncertainty of his performance part of the character, as Archer repeatedly admits he’s just making up the rules as he goes along—the same rules that would later offer such vital guidance to Kirk, Picard, and the rest. Bakula’s more grounded, laid-back acting style ultimately does prove a good fit for Enterprise’s relatively near-future setting; he isn’t capable of the operatic emotions or the rousing monologues favored by the other four captains, but then Archer is very specifically just the rough blueprint for those more evolved men and women of Starfleet. Plus, Bakula proves surprisingly adept at the darker dimensions Archer takes on throughout season three’s conflict with the Xindi.
Jolene Blalock brings more emotion to T’Pol than audiences had come to expect from Vulcans, but Enterprise hints that this is both a side effect of the character’s prolonged exposure to humans and a sign of deep-seated trouble in Vulcan society. Connor Trinneer plays Commander Trip Tucker, the ship’s chief engineer, as an even more brash and idealistic version of Archer, always trying to do the right thing without always considering the burdens of command. Dr. Phlox, the ship’s Denobulan physician, is played with a wonderfully epicurean joie de vivre by John Billingsley, while Dominic Keating does some nice work on the margins of the show as the emotionally withdrawn armory officer Malcolm Reed. These are all workable characters, but the scripts struggle to develop them much beyond general affability. Enterprise puts the most work into Archer, T’Pol, and Trip, and it does a quietly impressive job of sustaining their characterizations and occasionally confronting them with the consequences of their mistakes, but too often their arcs play like echoes of stories already told about previous Star Trek crews.
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But the bigger question was always what larger narrative arc Enterprise was going to tell with its prequel format. In theory, the show’s mid-22nd century setting gives Captain Jonathan Archer and his crew plenty of space to operate without brushing up against the continuity of the earlier—or later, depending on one’s perspective—Star Trek series. They could encounter previously unknown alien races and engage in preciously unchronicled conflicts, and the century-long gap between their time and that of the original series still left plenty of time for galactic affairs to transform into the status quo of Kirk’s era. To lend its chosen era particular importance, Enterprise revealed the 2150s were a flashpoint in the Temporal Cold War, a conflict fought between time travel-capable races in the far future. Reportedly included at the insistence of Paramount executives, the Temporal Cold War proved a convoluting, unsatisfying mess of a plot arc, but it did provide Enterprise’s creative team with a way to imply that the future is at least somewhat in flux, that the other four Star Trek series might never come into existence if Archer and his crew don’t make the right decisions in the here and now. It plays as a rough draft of the even more drastic time-travel convolutions the J.J. Abrams movies used to separate its continuity from that of the TV series.
The difference, though, is that Enterprise could not make the same kind of clean break from its prescribed future that the recent movies have managed. As much as the show’s 2150s setting was devised to give it room to operate, any big steps the show took in its ongoing story necessarily had to bring the show another step closer to its predetermined future of Jim Kirk, the Enterprise NCC-1701, and the United Federation Of Planets; otherwise, what was the point of watching this particular set of characters in the first place, if none of their actions were ever going to affect history still to come? These questions might not have mattered so much if the writing on the show had been stronger, if the creative teams could offer consistently compelling adventures revealing what deep-space exploration would be like at a time before the Federation, when any starship leaving Earth was genuinely on its own for months at a time, and the characters themselves often wondered whether humans had made the leap to interstellar species before they were truly ready to do so.
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It would be going much too far to claim Enterprise as some misunderstood classic; the original critical assessment of this as a deeply flawed, frustratingly underwhelming show is more or less accurate, even if some of the contemporary vitriol was a bit much. Still, there’s a more obvious place for the show now than there was when it originally aired. The original Star Trek and The Next Generation had pushed the fundamentally optimistic conception of space opera as far as it could go. Deep Space Nine had already begun to deconstruct the Star Trek mythos from the inside, and Enterprise’s run coincided with those of three superior sci-fi shows—Farscape, Firefly, and Battlestar Galactica—all of which offered strong revisionist takes on the genre. Compared to such shows, Enterprise’s vague optimism had little to offer, and its attempts to retool into something darker and edgier in its third season felt like a pale imitation of what more assured series were doing elsewhere. But now, nearly a decade after its cancellation, with Star Trek living on only as a Kirk-centric, not especially intelligent movie series, there’s more of a need for the story that Enterprise tries to tell. This show was all wrong for an era of deconstruction, but here are 10 episodes that reveal how the show, for all its weakness and for all its missteps, attempted to construct a better future, and why that isn’t worth completely ignoring.
“Broken Bow” (season one, episodes one and two): This double-length series premiere features most of the key ideas that would drive Enterprise—often in several different directions—over the course of its run. From the start, Jonathan Archer is depicted as a man more at home in our time than that of Jean-Luc Picard; he wears a baseball cap while inspecting his new starship, and he shows his rough edges when T’Pol suggests humans are too volatile to make their own decisions. Archer offers a distinctly modern-sounding rejoinder: “Volatile? You have no idea how much I’m restraining myself from knocking you on your ass.” Everything else, however, feels like Star Trek by the numbers, as Enterprise suggests a more compelling backstory but then begins at what is essentially the absolute earliest point where the future is recognizably Star Trek. The humans make first contact with the Klingons, use the transporter to beam up a person for the first time, and even get embroiled in their very first vast interstellar conspiracy. This particular one is the Temporal Cold War, to be fought against the Suliban Cabal and their mysterious benefactor, a character so poorly explained that even the production team adopted the derisive fan nickname “Future Guy.” It’s a faltering beginning, but it hints at the potential Enterprise would spend seasons trying to realize.
“Dear Doctor” (season one, episode 13): Depending on who is asked, “Dear Doctor” is either the very best or the very worst thing Enterprise did in its first season. One of the show’s more confident early entries, the episode focuses on the ship’s physician, the Denobulan Dr. Phlox, benefitting immensely from John Billingsley’s nuanced performance. The episode presents a profound ethical dilemma, as both Phlox and Archer wrestle with whether they have the right to use their superior technology to save a less advanced civilization from extinction at the hands of a deadly genetic mutation. The episode has been lambasted for its admittedly appalling understanding of evolutionary biology, which proves a bizarre hodgepodge of genetic determinism and social Darwinism. But the bigger issue lies in how the show resolves the core dilemma; this is the kind of issue past Star Trek captains have faced many times, generally electing to violate the Prime Directive and interfere in the name of doing the right thing. But here, Captain Archer can only engage in some rather on-the-nose musings about the need for a “directive” that would guide his actions. “Dear Doctor” ultimately reveals itself as more interested in cheekily foreshadowing a core element of the Star Trek mythos than in figuring out that this scenario offers a spectacularly poor case for the necessity of the Prime Directive.
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“Acquisition” (season one, episode 19): Several early episodes of Enterprise would not feel especially out of place on The Next Generation or Voyager; taking away two centuries’ worth of knowledge and technology allows Enterprise to more readily place its characters in jeopardy than its predecessors could, but the mechanics of the storytelling remain much the same. The most blatant example of this is “Acquisition,” which tries like mad to justify the profit-obsessed Ferengi storming the Enterprise when earlier series made it clear that humans had no real knowledge of them before the 23rd century. The solution is almost ingenious in its stupidity: The Ferengi simply never identify themselves, not even to each other, and they leave in ignominious defeat, assuring the humans they will never be seen again. While the episode’s crimes against franchise continuity are perhaps overblown, “Acquisition” suggests a show unable to carve out its own identity, content to rehash old stories when the show’s very premise demands new storytelling. Even so, what the episode loses in originality it does somewhat regain in execution, as the Enterprise officers prove themselves surprisingly adept at out-swindling the swindlers. In particular, Scott Bakula gets a long overdue opportunity to show off his comedy chops, as Captain Archer proves shockingly adept at passing himself off as an interstellar pirate. There’s nothing terribly vital about any of this, but it’s fun for the watcher in the right mood. This is Enterprise as Star Trek comfort food.
“The Catwalk” (season two, episode 12): Previous Star Trek shows had famously conceptualized space as the final frontier in fundamentally philosophical terms—space may be in the process of being civilized, but there are always new wonders to test the limits of comprehension—yet Enterprise’s premise reimagines the nature of this final frontier as a more concrete, physical phenomenon. On Enterprise,
deep space is dangerous not just because of alien antagonists, but also because Archer and his crew are operating at the very edge of their knowledge and their technology. The opening of “The Catwalk” hammers home this point, as aliens hail the Enterprise, informing them a deadly neutronic storm is approaching and the ship must go to warp seven immediately… but Enterprise can only reach warp five. The storm’s deadly radiation means the crew must hide themselves inside the most heavily shielded part of the ship—the catwalk of one of the warp nacelles—for the next several days. It’s a fascinating premise, and Enterprise does some fine if rather basic character work exploring how the crew deals with days of unbearably close quarters. This kind of vulnerability in the face of cosmic phenomena is what could set Enterprise apart and justify its prequel format; unfortunately, this generally strong episode decides to pursue a more traditional Star Trek plot, as the crew end up having to fight marauding, radiation-resistant aliens.
“Stigma” (season two, episode 14): To help explain why humans were only now venturing out into the stars, nearly 90 years after the invention of warp drive—an event chronicled in the Next Generation film First Contact—the show cast the Vulcans in an unfamiliar role as antagonists. The show posits that the Vulcans, fearful of human ambition, purposefully held back Earth’s advancement, creating lingering prejudices in Captain Archer and others; the Vulcans of Enterprise illustrate the old notion that, to quote another long-running sci-fi franchise, logic merely allows one to be wrong with authority. But the corruption of 22nd century Vulcan society does not only look outward; they also ostracize all Vulcans who participate in one of the hallmarks of the other Star Trek series: the mind meld. T’Pol, having been forced into a meld in the first season, contracts a neurological disorder causing the loss of her vaunted emotional control, and Phlox’s attempt to discreetly obtain aid from a Vulcan medical delegation brings her shameful secret into the open. The episode draws allegorical parallels with the stigma attached to the HIV/AIDS crisis, although the story overcomplicates its metaphor by simultaneously analogizing T’Pol’s psychic violation to sexual assault. It’s tricky material that doesn’t always quite land the way it should, but this is Star Trek at its most well-meaning, with Archer and T’Pol at their most idealistic. Plus, there’s a rather silly alien-sex subplot with Trip and one of Phlox’s three wives, and it just wouldn’t be Star Trek without the occasional silly alien-sex subplot.
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“Cogenitor” (season two, episode 22): After two seasons’ worth of diplomatic misunderstandings, belligerent aliens, temporal shenanigans, and various other maladies, the Enterprise crew finally makes contact with a friendly race; Archer’s shock is palpable when the Vissian Captain Drennik reveals that his people are also primarily interested in exploration and peaceable cultural exchange. For quite possibly the first time in Star Trek history, this isn’t some sort of trick, as Drennik and his people happily share their advanced technology while marveling at the beauty of the works of Shakespeare and Sophocles. This is the single most positive depiction of Enterprise as a show about exploration—Archer and Drennik spend three whole days in a tiny ship exploring a star, and they still come back best friends—but the good times can’t last. Trip discovers the Vissians have three genders, with the oppressed cogenitor gender used to catalyze the reproductive process between males and females. Trip’s efforts to educate a cogenitor represent just the kind of cowboy morality Star Trek has long championed, but his efforts result first in diplomatic tension, then a more personal tragedy. Probably the best episode of Enterprise’s first two years, “Cogenitor” takes a frequent criticism leveled against the show and makes it the central point of the episode: The Enterprise crew may not yet be ready to make contact with other peoples, if they are not yet ready to accept that not all species conform to human morality.
“Twilight” (season three, episode eight): After the tepid response to the first two seasons, Enterprise was drastically retooled for its third year. A devastating attack on Earth leaves 7 million dead, and a haunted, driven Captain Archer leads the Enterprise crew into the Delphic Expanse—a region of the cosmos crawling with dangerous spatial anomalies—in search of the culprits: the mysterious Xindi. While this was theoretically a metaphor for the War On Terror, the Xindi conflict doesn’t manage the kind of cultural immediacy of Battlestar Galactica; instead, the moral dilemmas play more like cover versions of better-executed Deep Space Nine plotlines. Still, Enterprise’s one great advantage was that the lack of a Federation meant that its heroes had to operate without any support network; any damage suffered could be devastating, and their failure could leave Earth defenseless against a still fiercer attack. “Twilight” takes that to its logical conclusion as an amnesiac Captain Archer reaches the bridge just in time to watch Earth be completely annihilated. The episode picks up several years later, as a now gray-haired Archer learns of the accident that left him unable to form new memories and of the terrible fate that has befallen humanity. A reset button is rather obviously coming—to its credit, “Twilight” comes up with a highly satisfying one—but the episode serves as a crucial illustration of just how much Star Trek’s entire future hinges on the Enterprise’s success in its mission, and, even more importantly, how the friendships forged among the crew endure even in the face of Armageddon.
“Similitude” (season three, episode ten): Considering Enterprise comes from a franchise notorious for killing anyone foolish enough to put on a red shirt, it’s remarkable just how low its death toll was; throughout its first two, exploration-focused seasons, not a single crew member died. That changed in a big way during the Xindi arc, as over two dozen men and women were lost in defending Earth. “Similitude,” a definite contender for Enterprise’s best episode, begins with what appears to be the most shocking death of all, as the crew gathers for Commander Tucker’s funeral. In flashback, the episode reveals that an explosion left the commander in a coma. Archer cannot afford to lose his chief engineer, and he allows Phlox to proceed with a grossly unethical procedure in which a short-lived clone of Tucker is created as an organ donor. As the clone becomes more and more like Tucker—he shares all the original’s memories, not to mention his feelings for T’Pol—Archer is forced to decide whether he can actually kill a sentient being for the sake of his mission. Multiple episodes this season emphasize how hard Archer has become in order to fight the Xindi, but the captain—once the very image of the goodhearted, inquisitive explorer—never appears quite so terrible and so desperate as when he seriously considers killing a man who looks, sounds, and acts just like his best friend.
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“United” (season four, episode 13): Though the third season represents a definite improvement, it isn’t until season four that Enterprise really finds its best self. Under the guidance of new showrunner Manny Coto, the series completely embraced its status as a prequel to the original Star Trek, telling a succession of multi-part stories that hinted at Kirk and company’s adventures in the century ahead. The season featured genetic augments like the infamous Khan Noonien Singh, explained why the Klingons of the 23rd century looked more human than those before or after, and reformed Vulcan society into something more closely resembling the later shows. But the most pivotal moment comes when the Federation’s four founding members—humans, Vulcans, Andorians, and Tellarites—first ally themselves to repel covert Romulan attacks. Among this storyline’s many virtues, it has a featured role for Commander Shran, an honor-bound Andorian who becomes one of Captain Archer’s closest friends over the course of the show’s run. Played with tremendous panache by Star Trek veteran Jeffrey Combs, Shran is Enterprise’s most consistently compelling guest character. As a blue-skinned, antennae-equipped Andorian, Shran represents science fiction at its absolute pulpiest—indeed, “United” prominently features a duel to the death between Shran and Archer—but this is just the kind of larger-than-life presence the often staid Enterprise most benefits from.
“Terra Prime” (season four, episode 21): After four seasons spent searching for its own identity, Enterprise went out on one hell of a high note with this series finale. (Technically speaking, the show officially ended with “These Are The Voyages…,” a glorified Next Generation episode that is one of the most profoundly miscalculated hours of television ever made, but it’s best just to skip that one entirely, as it ruins all the goodwill season four builds for itself.) Along with the preceding episode, “Demons,” this story finds the Enterprise crew confronting the xenophobic, isolationist terrorist organization Terra Prime, whose views have become all too mainstream after the devastating Xindi attack. Eight years before he would menace another Enterprise crew in Star Trek Into Darkness, Peter Weller shows up as one of the series’ most unnerving villains, a calculating zealot who is willing to violate Trip and T’Pol in the most monstrous of ways to accomplish his goals. And, after four years of adventuring through deep space, it’s fitting that this first Enterprise crew concludes its onscreen journey by turning its attention to the home solar system, helping to prove once and for all that humanity is truly ready to join the interstellar community that will one day become the Federation. As Captain Archer observes at the episode’s close to a group of alien dignitaries:
“We are all explorers driven to know what’s over the horizon, what’s beyond our own shores. And yet the more I’ve experienced, the more I’ve learned that no matter how far we travel, or how fast we get there, the most profound discoveries are not necessarily beyond that next star. They’re within us, woven into the threads that bind us, all of us, to each other. A final frontier begins in this hall. Let’s explore it together.”
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That’s a worthy sentiment. And, perhaps not as often as it should have, but far more often than it’s given credit for, Enterprise lived up to those ideals.
And if you like those 10, here’s 10 more: “Shuttlepod One” (season one, episode 16), “Detained” (season one, episode 21), “Carbon Creek” (season two, episode two), “Judgment” (season two, episode 19), “Regeneration” (season two, episode 23), “Damage” (season three, episode 19), “The Forgotten” (season three, episode 20), “Home” (season four, episode three), “Observer Effect” (season four, episode 11), “A Mirror Darkly Parts I & II” (season four, episodes 18 & 19)
Availability: All four seasons are available on DVD and Blu-ray. The show is also available on iTunes, Netflix, Hulu, and Amazon Instant Video. |
A motorcyclist suffered fatal injuries after a high-speed collision early this afternoon south of downtown.
At approximately 1:00 p.m. officers responded to East Marginal Way South and South Spokane Street for reports of a vehicle/motorcycle collision with injuries. Preliminary investigation indicates that a 24-year-old man was driving his white Yamaha motorcycle southbound on East Marginal Way South at a high rate of speed and passing vehicles using the bicycle lane. As the motorcyclist approached South Spokane Street he struck a green Isuzu Trooper SUV that had been travelling southbound on East Marginal Way South and was initiating a westbound turn onto South Spokane Street. The force of the collision caused the motorcyclist to be thrown from his motorcycle, and he subsequently sustained fatal injures.
Fire department medics responded and pronounced the motorcyclist deceased at the scene. King County Medical Examiner’s Office personnel responded and took custody of the deceased man.
The 50-year-old driver of the Isuzu was transported to Harborview Medical Center via ambulance for precautionary reasons. Officers evaluated the driver of the Isuzu for signs of impairment; none were detected.
Traffic Collision Investigation Squad detectives responded to the scene and continue to actively investigate. |
WASHINGTON ― Rex Tillerson, President-elect Donald Trump’s nominee for secretary of state, endangered Christians in Iraq in 2011, a top House Democrat argued in a Tuesday night letter.
The allegation is a serious one, given that many lawmakers ― including most Republicans ― frequently bemoan the plight of Christians in the Middle East.
Rep. Jan Schakowsky (D-Ill.) wants legislators on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee to press Tillerson on the issue in committee hearings on his confirmation this week. The former Exxon Mobil chief executive threatened the heartland of Iraqi Christians ― who are split among various groups, including Assyrians, Chaldeans and Syriacs ― when his company negotiated a 2011 oil deal, she wrote in a letter to the committee’s chair and ranking member.
“The number of Christians in Iraq has declined from 1.2 million residents in 2003 to less than 250,000 today,” Schakowsky wrote. “The deals Mr. Tillerson signed exacerbated an already perilous situation for those beleaguered communities. He helped further marginalize the Assyrian/Chaldean/Syriac Christians and embolden the territorial expansion into their ancestral homeland ― all with neither consent or input from nor compensation to the indigenous communities of the Nineveh Plain.”
She wants senators to ask Tillerson about his knowledge of the deal, whether he believes U.S. policy should protect such minorities and how he plans to shield these communities “from private companies and governments who put profit over human safety and security.”
Read the full letter here.
The oil executive’s 2011 agreement to develop six northern Iraqi oilfields has long been controversial because it undercut U.S. policy on Iraq. By signing a deal with officials in the country’s semi-autonomous Kurdistan region rather than the central Iraqi government, Exxon boosted the Kurds’ claim that they are stable enough to have their own separate country.
The Iraqi Kurds are trusted U.S. partners, but American experts worry that their region becoming independent could force the U.S. to pick between Kurdistan and Iraq, worsen ethnic and sectarian tensions in the area and leave the remainder of the country more vulnerable to Iranian dominance. American officials saw the oil company’s move as unhelpful and selfish. When he learned of the Exxon-Kurdistan deal in November 2011, James Jeffrey, then the U.S. ambassador to Iraq, “dropped a few F-bombs,” a former diplomat told Reuters.
Growing Kurdish power has caused unrest among Christians in northern Iraq. The U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom has said the Kurdistan government and Kurdish parties’ militias have subjected Christians to “pervasive discrimination and marginalization,” and advocates for those Christians say the Kurds have continuously encroached on their lands, which lie in disputed territory claimed by both the Kurdish region and Iraq. |
Acrobatics punctuated the final score, as Louisville City FC’s Luke Spencer celebrated his game-winning goal with a roundoff back handspring.
Orlando City B (0-2-0) couldn’t find a way to maneuver out of the deficit in its United Soccer League home opener Thursday night, losing 3-1 to Louisville (1-0-1) at Orlando City Stadium.
“Disappointed,” OCB head coach Anthony Pulis said. “We were, defensively, what I would call too much on the back foot tonight. Whether that was a little bit of fatigue, I don’t know, but it’s worrying a little bit at this stage in the season, probably a mindset thing.
“I don’t think you can defend the way we defended tonight and expect to win football matches. That’s something we’re obviously going to have to address. … So, on the whole a disappointing evening, but we have no time to sulk.”
OCB faces a quick turnaround, with home matches against Toronto on Tuesday and Charlotte four days later.
Pulis deployed a 4-4-2 formation, keeping in line with the club’s Major League Soccer team. Four MLS players started the match: goalkeeper Earl Edwards Jr., right back Kevin Alston, centerback Conor Donovan and midfielder Pierre Da Silva.
Nearly half the lineup changed from the season opener — a challenge OCB will continue to navigate as various MLS and academy players needing game time come and go — unlike Louisville, which is an independent USL club with a more static roster.
The lack of chemistry showed, and there was a timid style to OCB’s play, especially in the first half when players opted for conservative backward passes in most situations rather than pressing the attack.
The Louisville City FC at Orlando City B soccer game at Orlando City Stadium on Thursday, March 30, 2017. Louisville won the game 3-1. (Stephen M. Dowell) (Stephen M. Dowell)
Louisville took advantage of space between OCB’s midfielders and the back line in the 11th minute, when Cameron Lancaster whipped the ball from about three yards outside the box into the right side of the net to start the scoring.
Just before halftime, Tarek Morad’s errant header went into Louisville’s net for an own goal that evened the score, 1-1.
“We wanted to see them press more, that was the message at halftime,” Pulis said. “We needed to kind of get our back four up five yards, if you like. It was a little but better in the second half, but still not what we want. There were too many occasions where players were happy to play that safe, backward or square pass when really we want to be looking to be a bit more positive and play that forward pass if we can.”
Out of an announced crowd of 2,741, a home attendance record for OCB, about 100 people manned the 4,000-seat supporters section. They managed to fill the arena with the sounds of drums and chants.
Twelve minutes into the second half, Louisville’s Richard Ballard worked into Orlando City’s box and dumped the ball to George Davis IV, who finished for a 2-1 lead.
Spencer’s goal capped a three-pass sequence in the 76th minute.
“Very pleased,” said Louisville coach James O’Connor, who played for and coached Orlando City’s original USL team. “I thought we showed tremendous character at times, in the second half.”
OCB’s attack stepped up after that, mostly due to Da Silva’s service. He finished the night with seven of his team’s nine chances created.
Pulis was pleased the group improved on time of possession after their first match against the Tampa Bay Rowdies. OCB maintained nearly 51 percent possession Thursday against Louisville.
“We played better as a team, but unfortunately we lost,” Da Silva said. “We just have to put our heads up and work harder. It’s hard because every week we have a new team, new players coming in and out, so we have to get used to it, but it’s not an excuse.”
CAPTION Nani, the winger, was born in Cape Verde and represents the Portugal national team. He was officially introduced as Orlando City’s new designated player on Monday Nani, the winger, was born in Cape Verde and represents the Portugal national team. He was officially introduced as Orlando City’s new designated player on Monday CAPTION Nani, the winger, was born in Cape Verde and represents the Portugal national team. He was officially introduced as Orlando City’s new designated player on Monday Nani, the winger, was born in Cape Verde and represents the Portugal national team. He was officially introduced as Orlando City’s new designated player on Monday CAPTION Orlando Pride star and Brazilian legend Marta on Monday claimed her sixth FIFA Player of Year award after she was named The Best FIFA Women’s Player 2018 during Orlando Pride star and Brazilian legend Marta on Monday claimed her sixth FIFA Player of Year award after she was named The Best FIFA Women’s Player 2018 during CAPTION Orlando City goalkeeper Mason Stajduhar completed his final round of chemotherapy Tuesday Orlando City goalkeeper Mason Stajduhar completed his final round of chemotherapy Tuesday CAPTION After Orlando City's 1-2 loss to Atlanta United, fans threw trash onto the soccer field. After Orlando City's 1-2 loss to Atlanta United, fans threw trash onto the soccer field. CAPTION A high-tech business that makes crystal and silicon lenses for fighter jets and tanks was all shook up over construction of the Orlando City Stadium across the street — and now it’s suing the soccer team, the city and the general contractor. A high-tech business that makes crystal and silicon lenses for fighter jets and tanks was all shook up over construction of the Orlando City Stadium across the street — and now it’s suing the soccer team, the city and the general contractor.
ardelgallo@orlandosentinel.com |
Identification of new Neandertal remains at Goyet and their biogeochemical characterization
The reanalysis of the Goyet material comprised (i) the revision of the human skeletal material, (ii) systematic sorting of the faunal collections to check for unidentified human remains (Supplementary Fig. S2), and (iii) a multidisciplinary study of the human remains and their context. Two-hundred and eighty three human remains were identified from different periods, including 96 bone specimens and three isolated teeth identifiable as Neandertal (Supplementary Table S1 and Supplementary Notes S3, S4 and S5). A good number (n = 47) of the bone specimens refit, reducing the total number of isolated Neandertal remains to 64 (Fig. 1 and Supplementary Table S2), of which 10 were directly radiocarbon (14C) dated, 15 were sampled for stable isotope analyses, and 10 for DNA extraction (Table 1 and Supplementary Table S3). Based on their morphology and morphometric characteristics, developmental stage and side for paired elements, as well as the successful recovery of endogenous mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) sequences, the minimum number of individuals (MNI) represented by the Goyet sample is estimated at five (four adolescents/adults and one child represented by a single tooth; Supplementary Note S5 and Supplementary Fig. S3). Although the Neandertal sample includes cranial and postcranial elements (Fig. 1), with long bones best represented and extremities mostly absent, the minimum number of elements (MNE = 35) demonstrates a very low overall skeletal representation. The best represented elements are, in decreasing order, the tibia (six of the eight tibias expected for four adolescents/adults, 75% representation), femur and cranium (50%), humerus and mandible (25%; Supplementary Table S4).
Figure 1: Neandertal remains from the Troisième caverne of Goyet (Belgium). *Designates the specimens that have been directly dated. Scale = 3 cm. Full size image
Table 1: Sample information and results of the 14C and genetic analyses of the Neandertal remains from Goyet. Full size table
Chemical elemental analyses performed together with stable isotope analyses were used to assess collagen preservation in preparation of 14C dating (see Methods). The ecology of the Goyet Neandertals was also investigated using δ13C and δ15N isotope composition of bone collagen28. Direct 14C dates obtained from the newly identified skeletal material place the Goyet Neandertals to ca. 40.5–45.5 ky calBP. However, when the youngest ages, which likely reflect undetected bone collagen contamination, are excluded (Supplementary Note S6), we cannot rule out the possibility that the Goyet Neandertals represent a single chronological group dating to ca. 44–45.5 ky calBP. Although this appears the most parsimonious hypothesis when individual bone associations, taphonomic aspects and similar anthropogenic modifications observed across the sample are taken into account, we retain the conservative range of ca. 40.5–45.5 ky calBP for the Goyet Neandertals in the absence of definitive evidence.
Out of the 10 samples processed for genetic analysis, seven show three distinct complete or almost complete mtDNA lineages (noted 1–3 in Table 1). The newly reconstructed mtDNAs from Goyet were compared with the mtDNA of 54 modern humans, eight previously sequenced Neandertals and one Denisovan individual29,30,31,32,33,34. Phylogenetic relationships were assessed using maximum parsimony and maximum likelihood trees (Fig. 2 and Supplementary Fig. S4), confirming the analysed specimens to fall within the known diversity of Neandertal mtDNA. The Goyet Neandertal mtDNAs appear most closely related to late Neandertal mtDNAs from Central and Western Europe, such as those from the Neandertal type-site (Germany), El Sidrón (Spain) and Vindija (Croatia), which all show only modest genetic variation despite large geographic distances when compared to modern humans. As previously suggested31, this might reflect a low effective population size of Neandertals in general, and for the late Neandertals in particular.
Figure 2: Maximum parsimony tree for the seven analysed Goyet samples that produced complete or almost complete mitochondrial genomes compared to 63 published modern human, Neandertal and Denisovan mtDNAs. Numbers at the main branch nodes represent bootstrap values after 1,000 iterations. Full size image
Taphonomic analysis of the Goyet Neandertal material and anthropogenic modifications
Overall, the Neandertal remains are highly fragmented. Forty-nine percent of the bone specimens (47 out of 96) were refit to at least one other, with the number of specimens per refit set ranging from 2 to 8 (tibia I; Supplementary Fig. S5). Several examples of refits between levels 1 through 3 were also identified. None of the Neandertal bones are complete, although the proximal extremity of a hand phalanx (2878–37) is only slightly eroded (Fig. 1). Cortical surfaces are well preserved and exhibit limited post-depositional modifications. Most long bones fractures involve green breaks, as indicated by smooth margins and spiral fractures35. Traces of peeling may also provide evidence for the fresh bone fracture of a cranial fragment and several ribs (ref. 11; Supplementary Fig. S6). Although bears can produce such traces36, the presence of cutmarks on several ribs (see below) suggests that the most parsimonious hypothesis is that they are anthropogenic. Traces of human chewing37,38 are also suspected on the Neandertal phalanges but are inconclusive (Supplementary Fig. S6). The numerous unambiguous anthropogenic marks on the Goyet Neandertal remains can be attributed to three categories of bone surface modifications (Figs 3, 4, 5, Table 2, and Supplementary Figs S7 and S8):
Cutmarks. Nearly a third of the Neandertal specimens bear cutmarks. The locations of the limited number of cutmarks observed on the upper limb may indicate disarticulation whereas those on the lower limb are consistent with defleshing. Several cutmarks on the internal and external surfaces of the ribs may be connected to evisceration, dismemberment of the thoracic cage and removal of the thoracic muscles. An additional cutmark on the medial side of the mandible, close to the mandibular condyle, appears consistent with dismemberment. Two types of percussion marks (notches and pits) were identified. Observed only on a single radius alongside several femurs and tibias, notches are likely connected to the fracturing of fresh diaphyses and marrow extraction. Percussion pits are common and probably indicate failed attempts at fracturing bones. Both percussion notches and pits were also identified on eight bones (e.g. femur I, Fig. 5). Retouching marks. These marks, found on a femur and three tibias (Supplementary Figs S9–S12), result from retouching the edges of stone tools. The fact that none of the affected areas overlap on adjacent fragments suggests the bones to probably have first been marrow cracked. Femur III shows two retouching zones on the anterior and postero-medial surfaces, both located at mid-shaft. Interestingly, the traces found on the tibias are located in the same areas of the shaft on all three bones (posterior or postero-medial surface at mid-shaft). The retouchers are made on four different Neandertal bones that represent at least three of the four adolescent/adult Neandertal individuals (Supplementary Note S5).
Figure 3: Overview of the anthropogenic modifications observed on the Neandertal remains from the Troisième caverne of Goyet (Belgium). See Supplementary Fig. S8 for individual Neandertal bones with anthropogenic modifications. Skeleton diagrams modified from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Human_skeleton_front_en.svg and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Human_skeleton_back_en.svg using Adobe Illustrator CS4 v. 14.0.0. Full size image
Figure 4: Retouching marks (b1,b2) and cutmarks (c1,c2) present on the Goyet Neandertal bones (example of femur III). (a) femur III in anterior view; (b1,c1) close-up photos; (b2,c2) images obtained using a minidome (see Methods). Full size image
Figure 5: Percussion pits (b1,b2) and percussion notch (c1,c2) present on the Goyet Neandertal bones (example of femur I). (a) femur I in posterior view; (b1,c1) close-up photos; (b2,c2) images obtained using a minidome (see Methods). Full size image
Table 2: Numbers and proportions of Neandertal, horse, reindeer and carnivore remains bearing anthropogenic modifications and toothmarks in the Goyet assemblage. Full size table
While animal bone retouchers are common in European Middle Palaeolithic contexts (e.g., refs 39, 40, 41), Goyet is one of only four sites (Krapina in Croatia42, La Quina and Les Pradelles in France43,16) to have yielded retouchers on Neandertal skeletal elements and the sole to have produced multiple examples (Table 3). At Krapina and Les Pradelles, femur shaft fragments were used as retouchers, whereas the La Quina example is on a parietal fragment. According to the criteria proposed by Mallye et al.40, the blanks used for the Goyet retouchers made on Neandertal bones were most likely green due to the absence of scaled areas, and in addition, two of the five retoucher areas exhibit concentrated and superposed marks which imply prolonged use. The rectilinear morphology of the marks also supports the use of the bones for retouching flint flakes, the most common raw material found at Goyet.
Table 3: Description of the Neandertal bone retouchers from Goyet using the criteria of Mallye et al. 40 and Daujeard et al. 41. Full size table
Comparative taphonomic analysis of the fauna from the Troisième caverne
Due to the large size of the Goyet faunal collection (>30,000 specimens), only a sample from Dupont’s excavation was examined (see Methods; Supplementary Fig. S2 and Supplementary Table S5). The skeletal material analysed corresponds mostly to long bone shaft fragments from various species that were mixed together within the collection and did not appear to have been previously sorted. We focused on remains from levels 3 and 2, which yielded the Neandertal remains, and on material from the same storage trays containing the human remains in order to have an overview of the associated faunal spectrum and assess food procurement and management strategies. Horse and reindeer are by far the most frequent species in the studied assemblage (86% of the 1,556 identified specimens; Supplementary Table S5). No rodent toothmarks were observed, carnivore remains are relatively sparse and carnivore damage is extremely rare on the Neandertal, horse and reindeer remains (Table 2), indicating carnivores to have had limited access to the bone material.
Anatomical profiles reveal numerous similarities between the Neandertal sample on one hand and horse and reindeer on the other (Supplementary Table S6 and Supplementary Fig. S13). The tibia is the most abundant element of all three species, whereas the axial skeleton and extremities of the forelimb and hindlimb are poorly represented. Bones of the hindlimb are better represented for all three species compared to forelimb elements, this is especially the case with the Neandertal material. The only notable difference between the faunal and Neandertal remains is the high representation of cranial elements for the latter. Unfortunately, the absence of contextual data precludes an analysis of the spatial distribution of both the faunal and Neandertal remains within the Troisième caverne.
The most intensely processed Neandertal elements are femurs and tibias (Supplementary Fig. S7), which are also the bones with the highest nutritional content (meat and marrow). The same pattern was documented for horse and reindeer bones. Overall, anthropogenic marks on the Neandertal remains match those most commonly recorded on the faunal material (Supplementary Figs S14–S16). All three taxa were intensively exploited, exhibiting evidence of skinning, filleting, disarticulation and marrow extraction. However, the Neandertal remains stand out as they show a high number of percussion pits (Table 2), which may be linked to the thick cortical structure of Neandertal long bones. Although the Neandertal remains show no traces of burning, the possibility that they may have been roasted or boiled cannot be excluded. The high number of cutmarks and the fact that DNA could be successfully extracted are, however, inconsistent with this possibility44,45,46. Lastly, similar to what has been noted at other sites40,41,47, the Neandertal retouchers are made on fragments of dense bones with comparable mechanical properties to the horse and reindeer bones. At Goyet, as at several French Middle Palaeolithic sites, large bone fragments of medium and large-sized animals were selected40,41,48,49,50,51. Among the Goyet Neandertal material, the largest and thickest fragments were also selected, as was the case at Les Pradelles16 and Krapina42. Interestingly, a femur and tibias of cave bears were also among the retoucher blanks selected by Neandertals at Scladina52.
The observed patterns of faunal exploitation can be interpreted as the selective transport of meat and marrow rich elements to the site that were subsequently intensively processed. However, this apparent pattern may reflect a collection bias favoring the largest and most easily identifiable fragments. Similarities in anthropogenic marks observed on the Neandertal, horse and reindeer bones do, however, suggest similar processing and consumption patterns for all three species. |
Syracuse Athletics and Jim Boeheim have agreed to a contract extension that makes him the head coach past the 2017-18 season, the school announced Sunday evening.
This news comes after long-time SU assistant Mike Hopkins accepted the vacant head coaching position at the University of Washington on Sunday morning.
Current Syracuse assistant Adrian Autry has been named associate head coach.
The press release reads:
The extension of the veteran coach's contract came about as head-coach-in-waiting Mike Hopkins was hired to lead the program at Washington. Syracuse moved promptly to maintain stability in its program by negotiating the new deal with Boeheim, who had planned to step down following the conclusion of the next season. "Mike accepting the position at Washington has put us in a unique position," said John Wildhack, Syracuse Director of Athletics. "The circumstances are different now than they were when he was named head-coach-in-waiting. "After discussing it with Chancellor Syverud, we believe the best decision for the student-athletes currently in the program and those who are committed to attending the University is to extend Coach Boeheim's contract. Jim has enthusiastically agreed. "Mike received a great opportunity and we thank him and wish him the best," said Boeheim. "I'm happy to stay on to help the program and to continue the staff's devotion to success." "The Syracuse basketball program was built on the concept of family and that remains intact with Coach Boeheim agreeing to this contract extension," said John Wildhack. "Having experienced assistant coaches like Adrian Autry and Gerry McNamara on the staff helps us maintain the elite standing the program has earned."
This is the right move for all intents and purposes. It helps stabilize what could’ve been a troublesome offseason, it helps on the recruiting trail and it gives SU power when hiring another assistant coach.
Boeheim just completed his 41st season as head coach of the Orange. He enrolled at Syracuse in 1962 as a walk-on on the basketball team.
Boeheim has guided the Orange into the postseason 39 times during his tenure, including 32 NCAA Tournaments and seven NIT berths. Boeheim has coached Syracuse into the NCAA championship game three times and the Final Four five times. The Orange won the national championship in 2003. |
For Walter Keats, North Korea was far from the first out-of-the-way location he had taken tour groups to. A social anthropology graduate from Harvard, he began his travel industry career in China as the country opened up in the 1970s, making him one of the first American tour operators to arrange commercial tours there.
“Over the succeeding years I expanded the business into other East Asian countries,” he said over email. “Particularly Japan, South Korea, Hong Kong, Macau and Southeast Asia. Our focus also shifted from group tours to custom, upscale individual and small group tours with an emphasis on history, culture and food.”
“So you wanna know the exact date I joined the (Workers’ Party of Korea)?” he joked. It’s a dark joke, characteristic of his sense of humor, but the story of how he began taking tours to North Korea, only to be banned five years later, is undoubtedly an odd one.
COLLISION COURSE
It all lies with an eccentric Japanese wrestler and diet member with a soft spot for the DPRK. The year was 1995, and Antonio Inoki, hoping to honor a Korean mentor of his and build diplomatic bridges, was organizing the “Collision in Korea,” the largest pay-per-view wrestling event in history, to take place at the May Day Stadium in the heart of Pyongyang.
“All we knew was it was an international sporting event, and they were allowing Americans to go at pretty short notice,” Keats said. “But I was able to find out about it and was able to go.”
He went with a friend of his, an orthopedic surgeon from LA – the joke being that, if arrested and beaten up, they’d at least have a medical expert on hand. They were there for nine days, flying in from Beijing and seeing “a fair amount of the country,” with the highlight of the trip, said Keats, being a chance encounter in the Koryo Hotel with Mohammed Ali – who was in-country to observe Inoki’s Collision in Korea event.
The country stuck with him, but this was April 1995, and the famine that would kill millions was beginning to take hold, and so nothing happened for much of the ’90s. But opportunity returned a few years later at a travel industry trade show in Singapore, where Keats met a North Korean trying to promote tourism to the country. The two struck up a conversation, and when the man told Keats that Americans could not enter his country, Keats retorted that he’d already been several years previously.
“The left hand didn’t know what the right hand was doing,” he said. “I gave him my card, and didn’t hear anything for a while. Subsequently I started getting emails from this guy, if you can believe it.”
Numerous opportunities for tours were raised, but also at a month or so notice, not enough time to source customers and get together the paperwork needed. This changed in 2005, when the government began to get serious about foreign tourism as a source of currency. Keats heard word from Pyongyang that he could bring a tour for an Arirang event in the summer, and he began reaching out to groups who might be interested in going. Some 200 people signed up, particularly from prestigious universities such as Princeton and Harvard. They wanted to bring tourists genuinely interested in the country, he said, not “young males who wanna go get drunk in North Korea.”
But disaster struck when Typhoon Ewiniar made land on the Korean Peninsula. Pyongyang and the May Day stadium were flooded in a natural disaster that humanitarian groups would later estimate killed up to 10,000 people. The trip was off, but the North Koreans kept their word, and the next year Keats was able to bring people into the country.
“We weren’t real happy, but then they sent us stuff about doing 2007, and we started taking small groups there,” said Keats. “It started out basically as five-day trips, you go in on day one and come out on day five.”
They began sending tours into the country, and by 2012 Keats had taken, he estimates, “30-35” tours into the DPRK. But after a five-year run, he was banned.
It certainly came as a surprise. It was April 2012, and the news came at a busy time: Keats was arranging a large group to visit the country for a special occasion: the 100th birthday of the “Eternal President” Kim ll Sung, and the mass Arirang Games that were set to take place in Pyongyang.
“It was gonna be a big thing,” he said. “We had this group, and the North Koreans were dragging their feet for a while.”
“Then they finally said that, you know, my wife and I were not allowed to come back to North Korea.”
They were baffled – no official explanation was given. But it was strongly suggested that something had been done to cause offense and that they were being punished for it. Racking their brains they could think of only one explanation: in 2007 they had taken a Stanford professor of literature, Adam Johnson, on a five-day trip into the country.
At the time it had been impossible to know that Adam Johnson would go on to the write the best-selling, and later Pulitzer-winning, novel The Orphan Master’s Son. A story set in the DPRK about a government-paid kidnapper, and the tensions between his private life and the repression of North Korean society, it does not paint a flattering picture of life in the country, and it is harshly critical of the late Kim Jong Il.
The runaway success of the book and the international acclaim it received, Keats said, must have caused fury in Pyongyang. Looking around for someone to blame, the American tour company which had taken Johnson in-country in the first place was an obvious target.
“Somebody has to be blamed for that, it won the Pulitzer Prize,” he said. “It’s quite embarrassing, it didn’t just badmouth North Korea, it badmouthed Kim Jong Il, right? That’s even worse.”
“And so that’s the only thing to us that makes sense as to why we could have done anything that would piss them off. He’d come in (to North Korea) in 2007 for a short five-day tour, he was a professor of literature at Stanford – he didn’t say he was gonna write a book on North Korea!”
‘… it seems like everyone who deals with the North Koreans eventually gets burned’
Johnson told NK News in an email that he only met Keats once before his trip, for a coffee, and was struck by his knowledge of the country. He only found out about the ban two years later, from a journalist, describing it as “terrible news.”
“As you know, though, officials in Pyongyang rarely give reasons for their actions,” he said, “and it seems like everyone who deals with the North Koreans eventually gets burned.”
DEAR LEADER IS WATCHING
Looming over the question of how Keats was banned is how the North Koreans were able to so comprehensively find out that Adam Johnson had come into the country five years previously. The answer, he said, is that the North Koreans keep organized records of the foreigners coming into the country, digitizing Visas and, presumably, maintaining archives which can be referred to at a later date. If you’ve traveled to the DPRK, there’s a file on you, he said.
“So they know it all – in a police state that’s what you do, right? That’s how you control people,” he said. “There’s definitely a file, everybody’s got a file. They know everything.”
It was impossible, of course, for Keats to know that Johnson was planning to write a book, but the case of Walter Keats and Adam Johnson also brings to bear a crucial issue that many tour companies face: the question of to what degree to which companies are responsible for the behavior of the people they take into the country.
The authorities would like to hold companies accountable for all the misdeeds of their customers, and it’s something they try to set in stone with all prospective touring partners. Keats said that when making preparations for taking his first tours into the country, it was requested that they sign a contract with a clause that, if any of their tourists were to misbehave seriously, Asia Pacific Travel would be responsible and would have to pay the North Koreans for the trouble. But it was not prerequisite for taking tours, he said, and, oddly, there was no fuss when they refused to sign.
“It wasn’t something that went on and on for months, where they said you can’t bring anybody unless you sign this,” he said. “I mean it never got to that point, it didn’t appear to be that big a deal.”
“I resisted signing it, told them I didn’t wanna do it, and nobody forced us to do it.”
And they weren’t alone: both Simon Cockerell of Koryo Tours and Andrea Lee of Uri Tours – British and American-ran companies – told NK News they were never asked to sign such an agreement. But Gareth Johnson of Young Pioneer Tours, which describes itself as the “budget” alternative, said that he signed it.
That fact that that Keats and his colleagues did not sign any contract meant that, he admits, there was a great deal of trust placed in him by the North Koreans. And while many might assume that doing business with North Korean travel companies is as regimented as North Korean society, Keats argues that is it much more about building relationships and establishing a trusting working friendship than about a contractual partnership. He compares it to the Chinese notion of guanxi, which roughly translates to “connections” and “relationships,” and thanks to his trip in 1995, he had developed an on-again, off-again working relationship with KITC by 2007.
“If you know people then you can’t just make a cold call on somebody, you know they won’t talk to you,” he said. “You have to have someone introduce you, take them to dinner, wine them and dine them and stuff, build a relationship and then you can do business.”
It was with these connections at the KITC office in Beijing that Keats conducted much of the day-to-day business of running tours to North Korea, which included making payments. These were usually sent by Keats to individual bank accounts owned by North Korean state employees, not to accounts directly associated with KITC – presumably to avoid a paper trail leading back to the government.
“That was a little strange,” admits Keats. “In normal business you wouldn’t do that, but that’s the way they do it. Although can you really believe that a bank in China doesn’t know that these are North Koreans doing business? Come on, the Chinese are complicit in all this.”
Keats said at some point he made contact with the United States Department of the Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC), the division of the US government responsible for tracking North Korea’s international illicit money-making activities. He offered to tell them how he did business with DPRK-affiliated entities.
“I said, ‘Do you wanna know how I do business with North Koreans, how I’m sending the money?” he said. “They weren’t interested.”
ACCEPTABLE RISKS?
The money they were sending depended heavily on where the customer were coming from – a system similar to the one Keats encountered when working with communist state-run travel companies in the early days of tourism to China.
“The Chinese had a dual system, if you were Chinese, you paid 10 bucks, if you were a foreigner you paid 70 bucks,” he said. “And the same with hotels and other things, there were two prices, because the locals couldn’t afford these things.”
North Korea used “at least” four or five different pricing systems for foreigners: Japanese and Americans paid the highest rates, followed by Europeans and Russians, with tourists from third world countries, such as the Democratic Republic of the Congo, paying the lowest rates.
It was the level of trust built up between Asia Pacific Ltd. and the North Koreans he knew that led Keats to take the issue of safety and local etiquette very seriously, he said. He was sure to speak to as many prospective tourists as possible before setting off for North Korea, making clear the behavior that was expected of them when in-country, and estimates that he spoke to “99 percent” of customers over the phone at some point prior to the trip.
‘If you endanger somebody over there, then you’re immoral and unethical’
“I just told them general questions, making sure they understood how things operated there, etcetera,” he said, when asked what they discussed. “And just to make sure that some loony libertarians aren’t gonna go there and start spouting Adam Smith or Ayn Rand, I mean gimme a break.
“A lot of people when they visit think ‘I’m an American I can do what I want,’ I mean my ass you can. If you endanger somebody over there, then you’re immoral and unethical, you’re a goddamn murderer.”
Thankfully, Keats said he never had any kind of problems with this type of behavior from the tourists he brought in and, save for a few journalists, he never decided against taking someone into the country after speaking to them on the phone.
Keats’ company differed from most of the other tour companies who work with North Korea in a distinct way: It was a mainstream travel company, not one particularly specializing in leftfield holidays. Koryo Tours, for example, offers tourists trips to Turkmenistan – not a usual holiday destination, and Young Pioneer Tours will take customers anywhere from Iran to the unrecognized state of Transnistria. This meant that he was often dealing with customers quite different from what he accustomed to.
“Usually we deal with rich people who are going to China, Japan, Southeast Asia, and will stay in Peninsulas, Mandarin Oriental, Shangri La’s, Four Seasons, etc,” he said. “These are upscale people and they’re well traveled, and educated and all that. They wanna know what the rules are, too – they’re not interested in getting arrested, or anything.”
In contrast, he said, the majority of people interested in going to North Korea are “young males between 20 and 40 looking for adventure.” Not that, he insists, there’s anything wrong with that – but it does mean that a pre-trip briefing is essential. With the cases of Merrill Newman, Matthew Todd Miller, Jeffrey Fowle and Kenneth Bae still fresh in everyone’s mind, Keats’s strong insistence that tour companies should be doing more to keep a closer eye on their customers rings especially true.
Tourism to North Korea is on the rise, with increasing numbers of tourists flocking to Pyongyang for a chance to get a glimpse at one of the world’s most isolated states, or so it seems, and, despite the recent ban, more foreigners than ever participated in the recent Pyongyang Marathon.
But Keats paints a picture of a business model that is inflexible and far from becoming a big time money-maker any time soon, governed by the anxious whims of authorities struggling to balance the need for tourism dollars with the demands of North Korea’s unchallengeable political system and rigid state. He describes the job as a “crapshoot”: risky and full of uncertainty.
“You have make sure everything’s right,” he said. “It’s all very bureaucratic, and, you know, there’s group visas, you gotta get everybody’s things right, make sure nobody’s got any problems. They want the dollars but they’re still very wary of tourists – it’s “come give us your money,” but so they can control you when you’re there.”
Keats still follows developments in Pyongyang, and as well as still running his tourism company he is also a member of the National Committee on North Korea, an NGO comprised of experts on the country which aims to foster peace on the Korean peninsula. But he doesn’t see the future of tourism to the DPRK as particularly bright – at least as long as the government maintains its current restrictive policies.
Last year’s decision of the state, prompted by the panic over the West African Ebola virus, to close its borders to international travelers, was the latest example of this. Keats admits that he breathed a sigh of relief that he was no longer doing business there upon hearing the news, and while he said they had a “good run,” he now describes the ban of his wife and him, he said, as being “great” and meaning he is far less stressed than he used to be.
“Look what’s happened to other people, I mean nothing happened to anyone on our tour, whatever, maybe our luck would have run out too, you know,” he said. “That’s the problem with North Korea, there are so many unknowns.”
All photos courtesy of Walter Keats |
Hello kittens,
Welcome to part one of this series, “distinction without difference: why i’m rethinking my queer identity”.
I knew almost instinctively that 2012 was going to be a year of big changes for me.
But even I didn’t know how right I was.
If you had told me a year ago that I would be sitting in my office in 2012 writing about thinking about not calling myself queer anymore, I’d have washed your mouth out with rhinestones.
The thing is, nothing has fundamentally changed about me – except the way I view naming myself.
Objectively, I am as queer or queerer now than I’ve ever been. And although everyone loves to play queerer than thou, I’ve never actually considered that someone wouldn’t think me queer.
I am a gay~ish man~ish polyamor~ish genderqueer~ish person of MTF history. Ish. My core identity is perched perhaps precariously atop my queer feminism, and my flag is a flag of many colors.
Maybe it’s all the ~ish that gets to me. It certainly gets to other people.
When I was prepping to transition, someone told me I wasn’t really trans if I didn’t want to pass 100% of the time.
And I’ve never been able to escape the feeling that, when I look around at other gay men, I see people who are a lot like me and with whom I share a history and perhaps even a destiny, but I’ve never really felt at home.
And Lorde help me being a polyamorous person in a monogamous relationship.
Queer was a great word that really helped me out a lot when I decided that I didn’t want to spend all of any more days trying to figure out exactly what I was. I am Big Mama Schlomo, and that’s that.
I never foresaw myself having so much in common with the post-gay/post-gender kids. I thought it was really important to attach myself to an identity because there is obviously so much left to do. And there is. And I think not naming yourself because you’ve bought into the notion that we’re actually presently living in some sort of gendertopia is a big, fresh road apple.
Since I don’t have anything to lose, I will admit that I (shamefully) was initially against renaming the Office of LGBT Affairs (now known as the Spectrum Center) at the University of Michigan. We all heard the rumblings that were about to go above ground about the kids for whom even the alphabet wasn’t big enough anymore, and the good (nay, great) people at the Office responded rapidly and with great alacrity.
I was dismayed. And I still refuse to engage in the notion that the emergence of post-gay and post-gender identities somehow invalidates or decommissions sexual and gender identities. See, here’s one of the places where I just don’t even want to tango anymore with the contemporary queer dialectic anymore (fuck, and ps, fuck the notion that there is one truth to be found) – no one’s identity invalidates anyone else’ identity.
Honestly, had this discussion happened later, I probably would have recommended changing the name to The Interlinking Unbound Spectra Center. The alphabet is too goddam small.
And here again I’ve so often come back to the word queer.
Queer has served and continues to serve an amazing service for me and all other queer-identified people. But I of all people know how easy it is to take this work horse of a term for granted – and I’ve watched it really start to buckle under our neglect.
I’m not saying there has to be or should be a definition of queer. But I do think it’s interesting how fast our arguments devolve into the shallow and divisive when we do try to pin down just what queer means. More and more every day I come to see queer as a distinction without difference.
Do it for the cache
The gay rights movement lost its way. Some people might place the date earlier, but I think the present cluster-whoops that makes up the mainstream gay rights movement as represented to the American public by the Human (White Affluent Male) Rights Campaign is more or less directly attributable to the passing of the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA) in 1996.
Suddenly having a federal statute that excluded gay people from marriage where previously no federal definition of marriage even existed artificially turned the conversation to marriage. Like, all the way.
Now, to be sure, the soon-to-be very chunky wedge between gay and queer had been brewing for some time.
The widely distributed and influential leaflet, “QUEERS READ THIS” – which, on a personal note, gives me total naches (that’s Yiddish for ‘the warm fuzzies’) – generally uses “queer” and “gay and lesbian” synonymously and interchangeably. But that doesn’t mean the anonymous writer or writers didn’t see differences:
Being queer means leading a different sort of life. It’s not about the mainstream, profit-margins, patriotism, patriarchy or being assimilated. It’s not about executive directors, privilege and elitism. It’s about being on the margins, defining ourselves; it’s about gender-fuck and secrets, what’s beneath the belt and deep inside the heart; it’s about the night.
Predictably, it took about four minutes flat for queer identity to be overrun by all of those things. But more on that later.
It’s hard to remember (or imagine, for the people who don’t remember), but the gay rights movement was in a very different place in the 80s and early 90s than it is now. Picture it: 1991. Dan Savage, an unknown writer wants to start an advice column to make fun of straight people called “Hey Faggot!” His editors balked at the title, but he used the salutation in his column until 1999.
Dan Savage – possibly the most visible symbol of everything queers hate about gay people aside from Joe Solomonese – Dan Fucking Savage started his column to make fun of straight people and he wanted to call it “Hey Faggot!”
I think it’s safe to say that AIDS activism gave a pretty resolute kick in the pants to the more sedate gay rights movement of the late 70s and early 80s – which itself had ridden on the tails of the more radical gay liberation movement that followed in the years after Stonewall. There was no place for pleasantries and making straight people like us in the face of a health crisis that was tearing communities asunder.
DOMA did a bad, bad thing – it ushered in the newest wave of corporate monied white gay concern activism and helped to stamp out the visibly radical nature of queer activism in this country.
If you’re keeping track, these are roughly the four minutes I referred to earlier.
While the Pride industry is busy collecting vodka ad dollars and selling water at a higher price than the vodka being advertised to us, queerness is chased out of the streets and into the classrooms – out of reach of the people who created it and needed it most.
Which I guess more or less is where people my age come in.
I showed up to the University of Michigan gay with maybe some queer tendencies. I was already a Marxist after all.
But I definitely left queer. In a perfectly fitting twist of fate, becoming immersed in the queer dialectic (there’s that awful word again) gave me the vocabulary I needed to denounce queerness.
Queer has become a detached, disembodied panacea for gay panic. Queer is used like a holy noun, like milk and honey:
“queer unsettles and questions the genderedness of sexuality” – Teresa de Lauretis “A political statement, as well as a sexual orientation, which advocates breaking binary thinking and seeing both sexual orientation and gender identity as potentially fluid.”
Queer is your get out of gay free card.
Because in a world and time when gay is Joe Solomonese, gala dinners, vodka pride floats and marriage activism, and queer is DIY vegan potlucks, gay shame and hair dye, it’s almost a no-duh proposition what politically and socially engaged people are going to be – or call themselves.
You need a get out of gay free card when LGBT activism is cannibalized by the oppressions it should be fighting.
But when it stops there – when queerness becomes little more than not-gayness – it is an academic distinction.
And I choose my words carefully.
What’s so goddam queer about white college-educated people reading books by white college-educated people about what being queer is? And for obvious disclosure: I am a white college-educated person.
It could be queer. But academic queerness has assumed unto itself sole responsibility for the definition and direction of being queer, and being queer? It has become entirely too consumed with being not-gay.
Queer feminism has become a closed loop of teachers and students, of tuition bills and publications. We need queer studies. But we also need to rectify access to education. It’s not really enough to point out the bitter irony of taking or teaching classes about marginalized people who couldn’t get into your school because of institutional oppressions.
There is – or should be – room for queer feminism outside the walls of the ivory tower. And academic queerness should be taking its cues from the outside – not trying to force its privileged nouvelle definition(s) of queerness on queers.
To put it bluntly: I need to be told how to be queer like I need another hole in the head. Whom I love and whom I fuck and how many people I love and fuck and what we call it when we love and fuck and where we’re standing or sitting or lying when we love and fuck in the context of true and informed consent is as much Joe Solomone’s business as it is Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore’s.
Which is to say: it’s not.
I will not call myself queer for the sake of not calling myself gay. Let me say that again: I will not call myself queer for the sake of not calling myself gay.
I will not do it for the cache.
I will not do it when it feels like white queers my age – and, to again point out the obvious, I am a white queer my age – have about as much in common with ACT UP and Queer Nation as we do with the Human Rights Campaign.
I’m not saying people aren’t doing shit. Young people are totally doing shit. Don’t even get me started on the demonstrably false ‘kids these days’ bullshit.
But doing shit is not the goal of academic queerness. And if queerness doesn’t start in the streets, in our hearts and in our heads – then queerness is little more than the gossamer-thin bulwark we build against being called L, G, B or T.
___________________________________________________
You can continue onto part ii of this post here. |
Fighters linked to Al-Qaeda have seized territory from a moderate Syrian rebel group in a three-day campaign that has expanded their control into one of the few areas of northern Syria not held by hardline Islamists.
Syrian opposition activist and a military commander said the Nusra Front had taken several villages in Idlib province from the Syria Revolutionaries' Front led by Jamal Maarouf, a prominent figure in the moderate opposition to President Bashar Assad.
Speaking via Skype, he added that the Syria Revolutionaries' Front had taken 25 Nusra fighters prisoner.
The Nusra Front is Al-Qaeda's official affiliate in the Syrian civil war and one of the strongest insurgent groups fighting to topple Assad.
The Syria Revolutionaries' Front is one of the biggest groups in the Western-backed, moderate opposition to Assad.
... |
METAIRIE, La. -- The New Orleans Saints placed cornerback P.J. Williams on injured reserve Wednesday after he was carted off the field with a concussion on Sunday.
It's unclear whether Williams suffered any injuries beyond the concussion. Saints coach Sean Payton and Williams' agent, Deryk Gilmore, both said Monday that Williams' diagnosis was encouraging after he spent the night in a New York-area hospital for evaluation.
Williams is unlikely to return this season, since the Saints can return only one player from injured reserve -- and they will likely use that designation on defensive tackle Sheldon Rankins when he is eligible after the first eight weeks.
Williams was down on the field for several tense minutes Sunday before he was immobilized against a backboard, with his helmet strapped down, and lifted onto a cart. He appeared to have been hit by two knees to the head -- the first from the leg of New York Giants tight end Larry Donnell and the second from Saints teammate Craig Robertson in the back of his helmet.
Saints cornerback P.J. Williams was carted off the field Sunday with a concussion. This marks the second time he has been placed on injured reserve since being drafted in 2015. AP Photo/Seth Wenig
Players from both teams immediately waved for trainers to come onto the field and showed support and concern for Williams while he was being evaluated.
"It's a concussion, but yet it's one significant enough that you wouldn't really see on a normal basis," Payton said Thursday. "He'll be able to make a full recovery, he'll be able to return to football in the offseason. And yet, I would say probably one of the more severe concussions that I've seen."
"He's doing better," Payton continued. "None of this will carry over and limit him in any way in the future."
This is the second time Williams has been placed on injured reserve in his young career since being drafted in the third round out of Florida State in 2015. He missed all of last season with a hamstring injury. Then he won a starting job this summer, only to go back on IR after two starts.
The Saints' cornerback position has been ravaged by injury. Their top cornerback, Delvin Breaux, suffered a broken fibula in Week 1 that is expected to keep him out for at least six weeks. Veteran Keenan Lewis was released during the preseason after a setback with his lingering hip injury. Backups Damian Swann and Kyle Wilson were placed on IR during the summer.
That leaves New Orleans with recently signed veterans Sterling Moore and B.W. Webb and undrafted rookies De'Vante Harris and Ken Crawley heading into this week's matchup against star receiver Julio Jones and the Atlanta Falcons.
That's not great considering the Saints' secondary was struggling even when it was healthier last year. The Saints set NFL records for TD passes allowed in a season (45) and opponents' passer rating (116.1).
The good news is that New Orleans' makeshift lineup played surprisingly well against the Giants and receiver Odell Beckham Jr. in Week 2. Although QB Eli Manning threw for 368 yards, the Giants didn't score an offensive touchdown in their 16-13 win over the Saints.
New Orleans replaced Williams on the roster by re-signing veteran offensive tackle Tony Hills, who has been on and off the roster since last year. Saints right tackle Zach Strief left Sunday's game early with an unspecified injury. Hills could be needed as an alternative. |
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