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By Brandon Turbeville
So what’s the big difference between the “moderate” terrorists and the extremist terrorists running rampant in Syria today? At one time, we were told there were no terrorists at all. Then, we were told terrorists were indeed present but that there were also moderate, secular, democracy-loving freedom fighters in the country. Now, after the nature of the so-called “rebels” has been revealed ad infinitum by the alternative and independent press, it is admitted that the “fighters” in Syria are terrorists but, apparently, some are moderate and some are extreme.
Of course, they all have the same goal of Sharia. They all hate minorities, Christians, Alawites, Shiites, etc. They all torture. They all rape. We could go on and on. In the world of the West’s “rebels,” there is not one shred of difference between any of the armed groups fighting against the secular Syrian government besides the names they call themselves.
Still, we are told there are clear differences and that the U.S. State Department knows just what they are. Only, they aren’t telling the American people. Or the Russians. Or the Syrians. Or anybody. The “moderate” terrorists are thus a very mysterious force, a group of which we may speak but also one that never shows itself.
Of course, there are groups that the United States admits are brutal killers but somehow rationalizes to the public that they are “our” brutal killers. The U.S. can, at times, be forced to admit that the groups it supports as “freedom fighters” have committed atrocities, rapes, murders, torture, and establishment of Islamic theocracy upon unwilling inhabitants. Essentially, the U.S. can admit (when pressured) that these groups have the same ideology as ISIS, although the State Department will never say these exact words.
Thus, it is clear that any designation of terrorist groups as “extremist” or “moderate” is obviously based on political motivation and geopolitical designs, not the nature or action of the terrorist group in question. If that were the case, then Ahrar al-Sham, Jaish al-Islam, and other groups would easily be listed as terrorist organizations that would subsequently not be covered under the “ceasefire” agreement. After all, there is no distinguishing characteristic that sets these groups apart from ISIS or Nusra other than a name.
But when the Russians attempted to remove these groups from the list of non-protected terrorists in Syria (terrorists protected at the insistence of the West), the United States, Britain, France, and Ukraine rushed to their rescue and blocked the Russian proposal. This is, of course, despite the fact that both of these groups, which make up around half of the “Syrian opposition forces” thanks to Western name changes, have repeatedly worked together with Nusra and ISIS forces. Jaish al-Islam and Ahrar al-Sham have both worked so closely with ISIS and Nusra that the groups themselves are virtually interchangeable. Nevertheless, the U.S. is only digging its own international public relations grave with its refusal to designate known and obvious terrorists as precisely that, particularly when it has launched campaigns of destruction and death across the world on the basis of allegedly “fighting terror.”
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The Russians have now forced the Western nations to admit that, despite their rhetoric, terrorist organizations are doing their bidding and have never truly been the targets of NATO forces. While the Western public remains entirely befuddled as to the nature of the crisis in Syria (many do not even know there is a Syrian crisis) Western propaganda has created such a complex and distorted view of the situation that any newcomer or casual observer would find it incredibly difficult to navigate through the lies and deceit.
For the rest of the world, however, much of that propaganda is ridiculous and transparent and, for that reason as well as many others, the United States and NATO are losing more and more credibility by the day.
Videos courtesy of WTFRLY.com |
Obama's Rhetoric Chills Some Supporters of Israel
Barack Obama’s presidential campaign is moving to tamp down concerns among Democratic supporters of Israel with an e-mail from a Florida congressman to Jewish leaders singing the senator’s praises.
“What has always struck me about Senator Obama - and this is one of the reasons that I have endorsed his candidacy for president - is that a love for Israel and a desire to keep the Jewish people secure is evident not just in his work, but also in his heart,” wrote Rep. Robert Wexler (D) in the e-mail, which was sent to a list of Jewish community leaders.
Story Continued Below
The endorsement, which laid it on thick even by the standards of political communications, reflects a frustration that, despite Obama’s staunch support of the Israeli government in his words and votes, he has been dogged by questions from some of the most vocal and focused representatives of the pro-Israel community.
The root of the matter, as some observers of American Jewish politics see it, may be that Obama’s rhetoric and themes of reconciliation and common ground – the heart of his national popularity – sound off-key and even naïve in the context of a grim, confrontational moment in the Middle East.
Obama’s substantively hard line on Israel has cost him friends among Chicago’s Palestinian activists. But his rhetoric has given the pro-Israel side pause. As Israel’s most vocal American allies see it, the divisions there aren’t about partisan name-calling: they’re about murder and the survival of a Jewish state. Faced with apparently implacable enemies like the Palestinian group Hamas and the Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, backers of Israel see little room for reconciliation, and little reason for hope.
Obama “fails to understand the totalitarian politics and sensibilities of the folks over there, who are not well meaning,” said E.J. Kessler, a New York Post editor who’s a longtime observer of American-Jewish politics. “His approach will appeal to a lot of lefty Jews, but it won’t appeal to the serious players,” she said, referring to the better-organized and better funded groups like the American Israel Public Affairs Council, AIPAC, at whose conference Obama put in an appearance earlier this month.
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One of the attendees at that conference, in fact, said he was taken aback by elements of Obama’s rhetoric in an unscripted address to an evening reception.
“It was mystifying to me when [Obama] said that one of the reasons there isn’t peace in the Middle East is because of ‘cynicism.’ Cynicism? That’s the reason?” asked Morton Klein, the president of the Zionist Organization of America, a hard-liner who often gives voice to sentiments other Jewish leaders are more comfortable whispering “It makes me think that Barack Obama doesn’t understand the continuing Arab war against Israel.”
In those remarks, Obama worked his domestic assault on cynicism and hopelessness into an address on the Middle East. His attack on cynicism, and another line about the “cycle of violence” struck hard-line supporters of Israel as suggesting that the Israeli and Palestinian sides are equally to blame – something Obama himself has rejected in other, prepared remarks.
Klein said he found the notion of an Obama presidency “frightening.”
Obama is regularly rated the “worst for Israel” of leading American presidential candidates by a panel assembled by the liberal Israeli newspaper Haaretz. But Klein’s remarks, an open letter to Obama from an Iowa Jewish leader concerned that Obama had spoken of Palestinian suffering, and a host of more quietly expressed concerns, produce a certain weary frustration in Obama’s Jewish backers, who include prominent supporters of Israel. Obama has explicitly rejected any moral equivalence between the two side of the conflict. He has made his support for Israel’s government abundantly clear, and even voted for a resolution in support of the recent Israeli invasion of Lebanon.
He has “a strong record of support” for Israel, said Lee Rosenberg, a member of AIPAC’s board of directors.
“I attribute those doubts [in the Jewish community] to the fact that he is a relative newcomer and that his views are not widely known,” said Alan Solow, an Obama supporter who is prominent in Chicago’s Jewish community. “I also attribute it to the fact that he is an opponent of the war in Iraq and there are some members of the Jewish community who feel that aggressive support of the war in Iraq is somehow related to being pro-Israel.”
“The views that Senator Obama has expressed and the votes he’s made are totally consistent with every position that he’s ever expressed with me and they date back to the very, very early days when he was thinking about running for the U.S. Senate,” said Solow.
Solow said Obama’s views are all the sharper for having been formed by conversations with supporters of both the Israeli and Palestinian sides. Indeed, Obama has taken heat from some Palestinian activists who considered him an ally, and now consider him a sell-out.
According to interviews with Jewish leaders and activists, concern about Obama has a number of roots, ranging from recent engagement with the issue – he first visited Israel in 2006; to his opposition to the Iraq war, which many supporters of Israel backed; to his ties to Chicago’s black political scene, where leading figures like Jesse Jackson and Louis Farrakhan have been at odds with the Jewish community, though Obama has shown no sign of taking the lead of either.
Some among Obama’s supporters suggest he simply isn’t totally familiar with the code-like vocabulary that has grown up around the Israel-Palestine debate. Phrases like “cycle of violence” and – worse still – pledges to be “even-handed” are freighted with meaning in that context, and a second-hand report in January from the Jewish Telegraphic Agency in January that Obama had once pledged to be “even-handed” suggested to some Jewish critics that he was taking the Palestinian side.
The Iraq war also hovers on the fringes of the debate over candidates’ positions on Israel. One group of pro-Israel group, Norpac, recently circulated an email soliciting donations to any of six candidates from either party, excluding Obama. The group’s president, Ben Chouake, said this wasn’t intended as criticism of Obama, but just reflected a lack of interest. But he added that Obama’s pledge to withdraw troops from Iraq – as he understood it – raised concern that the U.S. would be less able to confront Iran. (Obama argues that the Iraq invasion made Israel’s plight worse.)
“If you’re serious of confronting the regime of Iran and Ahmadinejad and his plans for mass murder then you have to look at the map and say how do we do this – what is the only way that we do this, what is the most practical way to do this,” Chouake said. “That is something [Obama] needs to rethink.” |
BRUSSELS (Reuters) - The European Union on Wednesday condemned the resumption of judicial executions in the United States and said abolishing capital punishment was fundamental to protecting human dignity and furthering human rights.
The U.S. state of Georgia executed convicted murderer William Earl Lynd on May 6, the first person to be put to death in the United States since the Supreme Court ended a de facto moratorium on capital punishment last month.
EU president Slovenia said it had unsuccessfully appealed for the United States to stop Lynd’s execution. He was convicted of shooting his girlfriend to death in December 1988.
The death penalty does not exist in member states of the 27-nation EU, and no new country can join up without scrapping it. Some European parliamentarians have asked the EU presidency to push harder for its abolition elsewhere.
Expressing regret at Lynd’s execution, a presidency statement said: “We believe that the elimination of the death penalty is fundamental to the protection of human dignity, and to the progressive development of human rights.”
“Any miscarriage or failure of justice in the application of the death penalty represents an irreparable and irreversible loss of human life,” it said.
The moratorium, which had been in effect since shortly after September 25, ended on April 16 when the U.S. Supreme Court decided the use of lethal injection for capital punishment was permitted by the Constitution. (Reporting by David Lawsky; Editing by Richard Balmforth) |
The 23-year-old AWPer had a good performance on the first day of the WESG EU & CIS Regional Finals, averaging a 1.22 rating over the four played maps. The Spanish side started the tournament with two comebacks, getting a tie in the first game against Space Soldiers and a win in the second one against BIG, both after being 12-3 down after the Terrorist side of Overpass.
EasTor and SOKER are the two less experienced players on the team
After Wololos finished their group stage and earned a quarter-final spot, Rajohn "EasTor" Linato sat down with us to talk about playing with Oscar "mixwell" Cañellas and Christian "loWel" Garcia Antoran, preparation for this event and the two massive comebacks they pulled off.
How did you get approached to join Wololos?
Oscar talked to me to see if I was a Spanish citizen, asking whether I'd have any issues playing for Spain at WESG. I told him I am a Spanish national, that I was born here, and wouldn't have any problems.
He then told me he wanted to have me on the team, which is something that really motivated me because he made it out of Spain, and it's great that he showed interest in me. I didn't doubt for a second before I agreed to play because this will give me a lot of exposure internationally. I'm really happy and I want to thank mixwell and loWel, both, for thinking about me and trusting me.
Have you prepared the tournament, be it individually or as a team?
The truth is we haven't. We haven't practiced at all. We played the Vitoria qualifier as a mix team, which is what we are, without any practice. Our coach dracU really helps us with our rivals, studies them a bit, but that's all. Individually I've just been playing with G2V, my team, and that's it.
After qualifying for this tournament, what did you expect to take from it?
Honestly, when we qualified we just knew we had earned a spot. We didn't want to be cocky or anything, but it was more like we were thinking that now we had a chance to show the world that Spain also has some talent and can compete against teams like the ones in Barcelona.
Did you think you'd make it out of the groups when you saw the draw?
When we saw the draw we thought "wow, Space Soldiers and BIG, two strong teams," but on the server, we were really confident and we knew we could surprise people and fight for the matches. I think we showed up, almost beat Space Soldiers, came back against BIG... initially, we just wanted to make it to China, we didn't necessarily think we'd win the group stage.
Against Space Soldiers and BIG, the terrorist sides were pretty wobbly, but then the CT sides were really strong. What was going through your mind during the comebacks?
When we had lunch before the matches, while we were talking about what maps we wanted to play and what to veto and so on, we also talked about how if we didn't tilt, encouraged each other, kept fighting even if we went down 0-10, that we could win.
When we were losing 2-11 or so in our first matches, everybody was just saying on TeamSpeak "let's go, guys, come on, this isn't over!" That's the attitude Spanish teams don't have, and the attitude we need, to show some character and not throw the towel even when things get hard.
What difference do you see between the usual Spanish teams, that struggle to play at this level, and the team you guys set up?
I think a lot of it is about experience. For instance, mixwell and loWel have played Majors, they've played a bunch of top-flight international tournaments, and that's something that allows the rest of us to learn. That also gives an extra motivation, so we go into the server ready to give our all.
Kairi, who played 1.6 also has some experience, but SOKER and I particularly, we're the newest ones playing internationally at this level, but what I think makes this team different from the rest of Spanish teams is how much we want to enjoy the game and to live the game. I think it's truly a passion for all of us here.
If you had the chance to play outside of Spain, in an international team, would you do it?
Without a doubt. Without a doubt. The problem is my English is a bit limited. I mean I can play and make calls, but I still have a lot to learn in all aspects of the game, but I'm going to try and still be as good as I can at tournaments like this. One day, if I'm lucky... because one also has to be lucky, I hope it can happen.
Out of the group stages, what's Wololos' goal?
We're just focused on going one match at a time, giving everything we have. Just that. |
One of the more extraordinary phenomena on the Internet is the rise of altruism and of websites designed to enable it. The Random Acts of Pizza section of the Reddit website is a good example.
People leave messages asking for pizza which others fulfill if they find the story compelling. As the site says: “because … who doesn’t like helping out a stranger? The purpose is to have fun, eat pizza and help each other out. Together, we aim to restore faith in humanity, one slice at a time.”
A request might go something like this: “It’s been a long time since my mother and I have had proper food. I’ve been struggling to find any kind of work so I can supplement my mom’s social security … A real pizza would certainly lift our spirits.” Anybody can then fulfill the order which is then marked on the site with a badge saying “got pizza’d,” often with notes of thanks.
That raises an interesting question. What kinds of requests are most successful in getting a response? Today, we get an answer thanks to the work of Tim Althoff at Stanford University and a couple of pals who lift the veil on the previously murky question of how to ask for a favor—and receive it.
Their approach is straightforward. They analyze requests on the Random Acts of Pizza site and look for features that successful ones have on common.
They begin by downloading the entire history of the site from December 2010 to September 2013. This is more than 21,000 posts, which includes requests, fulfillment notes, and other posts.
They then looked at each person who had posted on the site and downloaded their entire history of posts across the whole of Reddit. That added up to a total of 1.87 million posts.
Finally, they filtered out requests where it was unclear whether they had been fulfilled, leaving a total of 5,738 requests. Of these, they were able to identify the benefactor in 379 cases.
They analyzed how various features might be responsible for the success of a post, such as the politeness of the post; its sentiment, whether positive or negative, for example; its length. The team also looked at the similarity of the requester to the benefactor; and also the status of the requester.
Finally, they examined whether the post contained evidence of need in the form of a narrative that described why the requester needed free pizza.
Althoff and co used a standard machine learning algorithm to comb through all the possible correlations in 70 percent of the data, which they used for training. Having found various correlations, they tested to see whether this had predictive power in the remaining 30 percent of the data. In other words, can their algorithm predict whether a previously unseen request will be successful or not?
It turns out that their algorithm makes a successful prediction about 70 percent of the time. That’s far from perfect but much better than random guessing which is right only half the time.
So what kinds of factors are important? Narrative is a key part of many of the posts, so Althoff and co spent some time categorizing the types of stories people use.
They divided the narratives into five types, those that mention: money; a job; being a student; family; and a final group that includes mentions of friends, being drunk, celebrating and so on, which Althoff and co call “craving.”
Of these, narratives about jobs, family, and money increase the probability of success. Student narratives have no effect while craving narratives significantly reduce the chances of success. In other words, narratives that communicate a need are more successful than those that do not.
“We find that clearly communicating need through the narrative is essential,” say Althoff and co. And evidence of reciprocation helps too.
(Given these narrative requirements, it is not surprising that longer requests tend to be more successful than short ones.)
So for example, the following request was successful because it clearly demonstrates both need and evidence of reciprocation.
“My gf and I have hit some hard times with her losing her job and then unemployment as well for being physically unable to perform her job due to various hand injuries as a server in a restaurant. She is currently petitioning to have unemployment reinstated due to medical reasons for being unable to perform her job, but until then things are really tight and ANYTHING would help us out right now.
I’ve been both a giver and receiver in RAOP before and would certainly return the favor again when I am able to reciprocate. It took everything we have to pay rent today and some food would go a long ways towards making our next couple of days go by much better with some food.”
By contrast, the “craving” narrative below demonstrates neither and was not successful.
“My friend is coming in town for the weekend and my friends and i are so excited because we haven’t seen him since junior high. we are going to a high school football game then to the dollar theater after and it would be so nice if someone fed us before we embarked :)”
Althoff and co also say that the status of the requester is an important factor, too. “We find that Reddit users with higher status overall (higher karma) or higher status within the subcommunity (previous posts) are significantly more likely to receive help,” they say.
But surprisingly, being polite does not help (except by offering thanks).
That’s interesting work. Until now, psychologists have never understood the factors that make requests successful, largely because it has always been difficult to separate the influence of the request from what is being requested.
The key here is that everybody making requests in this study wants the same thing—pizza. In one swoop, this makes the data significantly easier to tease apart.
An important line of future work will be in using his work to understand altruistic behavior in other communities, too.
The take-home message here is that if you want free pizza, it helps if you really need one, that you’re willing to pay it back in future, and above all that you can turn all that into a good story.
Good luck!
Ref: http://arxiv.org/abs/1405.3282 : How to Ask for a Favor: A Case Study on the Success of Altruistic Requests |
Good news for all the weekend warriors who think three days of Defqon.1 is not enough. Wouter Tavecchio, boss of Q-dance, announced that he plans to expand Defqon.1 by a fourth day. So maybe we can already drag our buggy carts and bags over the bridge on Thursday next year. One small thing: the license is not yet granted.
In the interview he says:
‘We want to add a fourth day to Defqon.1 next year. Arrive on Thursday and go home on Monday. Until now, Friday is an arrival day with a smaller program. We want to make it full Defqon.1 day and open the site on Thursday. I do not have the license yet, but the plans are very good and we’ve been talking about it for a long time. It’s good for everyone: the fans want it, we want it and it’s much better for security and logistics. We want people to compare Defqon.1 to events like Tomorrowland and Coachella. We think Defqon.1 should belong there. We are also working on a Q-munity, a community for the hardstyle scene. Our audience wants more info about the artists, behind the scenes and more engagement. I won’t be a money maker, but we want to do something with the involvement of our fans.’
What Wouter Tavecchio wants to do exactly to make Defqon.1 more like Tomorrowland and Coachella is not sure. But we should all be very happy that he is back at the Q-dance office in Landsmeer!
Source: 3voor12 |
Media playback is unsupported on your device Media caption Alex Salmond said independence would "rebalance the economic centre of gravity" across the UK
An independent Scotland with a strong economy would benefit the whole of the UK, First Minister Alex Salmond has told a gathering in London.
In his New Statesman lecture the SNP leader said a post-Yes Scotland would help "rebalance the economic centre of gravity" across the UK.
Scotland Office minister David Mundell dismissed Mr Salmond's address.
On 18 September voters will be asked the "yes/no" question: "Should Scotland be an independent country?"
Mr Salmond said he believed that an independent Scotland would be a "powerful economic counterweight to London", and that would benefit the rest of the UK.
He told his audience: "There's a growing realisation that wealth and opportunities are too concentrated, geographically and socially. UK government policies are working for too few, and denying opportunities to too many. Britain is imbalanced.
We share ties of family and friendship, trade and commerce, history and culture, which have never depended on a parliament here at Westminster Alex Salmond, First Minister
"After Scottish independence, the growth of a strong economic power in the north of these islands would benefit everyone - our closest neighbours in the north of England more than anyone.
"There would be a 'Northern Light' to redress the influence of the 'dark star' - rebalancing the economic centre of gravity of these islands."
Mr Salmond renewed his criticism of Chancellor George Osborne for suggesting Scotland would be a "foreign" country if voters backed independence.
He said: "Scotland will not be a foreign country after independence, any more than Ireland, Northern Ireland, England or Wales could ever be foreign countries to Scotland.
"We share ties of family and friendship, trade and commerce, history and culture, which have never depended on a parliament here at Westminster, and will endure and flourish long after independence.
"But the current 'Dambusters' rhetoric has betrayed an attitude as antiquated as it is unacceptable.
"From the myopic perspective of the Westminster elite, Scotland is last among equals."
'Love-bombed'
He also claimed Mr Osborne's recent speech on sterling was "a monumental error".
No one should be under any illusion that voting for independence means getting independence, which means becoming a new country outside the UK David Mundell, Scotland Office minister
Last month, Mr Osborne ruled out a formal currency union with an independent Scotland, a position that was backed by Labour and the Liberal Democrats.
The Prime Minister, David Cameron, had previously called on people elsewhere in the UK to urge Scots to vote against independence.
Mr Salmond said: "In the last three weeks people in Scotland have seen an array of approaches from the UK government - what they apparently call their 'Dambusters strategy'.
"We were love-bombed from a distance by David Cameron, then dive-bombed at close range by George Osborne.
"I believe George Osborne's speech on sterling three weeks ago - his 'sermon on the pound' - will come to be seen as a monumental error.
"It encapsulates the diktats from on high which are not the strength of the Westminster elite, but rather their fundamental weakness.
"In contrast, we will seek to engage with the people of England on the case for progressive reform."
'New country'
But Tory MP Mr Mundell said that Mr Salmond was saying that a choice to leave the UK and become independent "means staying exactly the same as we are now".
He added: "By definition, that simply cannot happen.
"No one should be under any illusion that voting for independence means getting independence, which means becoming a new country outside the UK.
"Scotland will also be a foreign country, in law as well as in practice.
"This desperate claim from the first minister suggests he is confused by his own independence policy or he is deliberately trying to confuse others." |
The truth is out there
There are a ton of alien species some people believe visit Earth, but these are the most popular.
The Reptilians, the Grays, and the Nordics.
I could talk forever about this, like the reptilians are usually considered the original inhabitants of Earth but are always lumped in with aliens. Also, they were invented by an American science fiction writer but were made popular in modern alien lore by an Englishman.
The Grays are an all American invention which is also why we see them most in fiction. The Americans make the most alien movies and shows.
Finally there's the Nordics, not to be confused with the actual Nordic people. They are called Nordics because they look like Nordic stereotypes and because they were originally only reported in the Nordic countries. They have since been replaced in Nordic UFO rapports with the Grays.
I used Norway to represent the Nordics here because he is pretty damn in love with himself and it's so rare that I get to show that part of his personality. |
Tom Brady's alma mater -- Junipero Serra High School in San Mateo, California -- dug deep into the video vault for an interesting throwback clip of the New England Patriots quarterback.
The school's Facebook page posted one of the earliest media interviews of Brady Thursday-- with the 17-year-old quarterback sitting down for a conversation with Hall of Fame QB Dan Fouts as part of a segment KPIX-TV in San Francisco.
Brady, who was set to enter his senior year at Junipero Serra, was already regarded as one of the top quarterback prospects in California at the time of the taping.
"My strengths? Well, everybody tells me that I have a pretty strong arm, which is good," Brady said. "I'm pretty accurate with it. I think I need to work on my speed a little bit, but hopefully that will come in time. Pretty good work ethic, so I think I can get the job done."
Check out the video of Brady's 1994 interview below: |
Inside Einstein's Mind
PBS Airdate: November 25, 2015
NARRATOR: It's a mysterious force that shapes our universe. It feels familiar, but it's far stranger than anyone ever imagined. And yet, one man's brilliant mind tamed it: gravity. Using simple thought experiments, Albert Einstein made an astonishing discovery: time and space are shaped by matter.
CLIFFORD JOHNSON (University of Southern California): You get rid of this force of gravity, and, instead, we have curvature of space-time.
JANNA LEVIN (Columbia University): Right now, the space around me is being squeezed and stretched.
NARRATOR: He called it the "General Theory of Relativity." How did one person, working almost entirely alone, change everything we thought we knew about the universe?
DAVID KAISER (Massachusetts Institute of Technology): Einstein is toiling as the world seems to fall apart.
ROBBERT DIJKGRAAF (Institute for Advanced Study): He was able, with pure thought, to solve the riddle of the Universe.
NARRATOR: Inside Einstein's Mind, right now, on NOVA.
Gravity: the most familiar yet most mysterious of nature's forces. One hundred years ago, Albert Einstein made a mind-blowing discovery: what we feel as gravity is, in fact, the push and pull of space and time, itself. He called his idea "general relativity." It is perhaps the most remarkable feat of thinking about nature to come from a single mind.
CLIFFORD JOHNSON: General relativity is undoubtedly one of the greatest scientific theories ever conceived. It's a theory of space, time and gravity.
JANNA LEVIN: One mathematical sentence, and from it, you can derive the understanding of the entire universe on the largest scale, and that is beautiful.
NARRATOR: Only now, a century after it was first proposed, do we have the technology to explore the extremes of Einstein's great theory: supermassive black holes at the center of galaxies, waves of gravity that distort space and time, the evolution of our entire universe.
How did a concept that explains so much come from the mind of one man?
JOHN NORTON (University of Pittsburgh): Einstein had a magical talent. He could take a hard physical problem and boil it down to a powerful visual image, a thought experiment.
SEAN CARROLL (California Institute of Technology): Suddenly, he realizes this is how the world works; all this abstract nonsense is the correct theory of reality.
NARRATOR: To gain an insight into Einstein's mind and the true wonder of general relativity, we need to trace the crucial thought experiments that led to his great breakthrough. The seeds for his ideas were planted when he was just a child.
Einstein grew up in a small house in Munich, in Southern Germany. His unique personality was evident early on.
WALTER ISAACSON (Biographer): Like many great innovators, Einstein was a rebel, a loner, but deeply curious. He was slow in learning to speak as a child, so slow that his parents consulted a doctor, but he later said that that's maybe why he thought in visual thought experiments. His sister remembers him building little card towers, using playing cards. He was a daydreamer, but he was deeply persistent.
NARRATOR: Einstein's father, Hermann, manufactured electrical equipment. He nurtured his son's interest in science. On one occasion he brought him a compass.
WALTER ISAACSON: Now, you and I maybe remember getting a compass when we were kids, and we're like, "Oh, look, the needle twitches and points north." But, you know, then we're on to something else, like, "Oh, look, there's a dead squirrel." But for Einstein, after getting that compass, he developed a lifelong devotion to understanding how things can be forced to move even though nothing's touching them.
NARRATOR: The young Einstein became gripped by a desire to understand the underlying laws of nature. He developed a unique way of thinking about the physical world, inspired by his favorite book.
WALTER ISAACSON: The book Einstein loved told little stories, like what'd be like to travel through space or go through an electrical wire, and it made Einstein think visually.
NARRATOR: These imagined situations that we often call "thought experiments," became a defining feature of Einstein's thinking.
DAVID KAISER: One of the critical thought experiments that Einstein began to play with, very young, around the age of 16, was trying to imagine what would happen if he could catch up with a light wave. It's one thing to see, to imagine a light wave zooming past him, at some seemingly impossible speed, but what if he could somehow just propel himself, really quickly. What would it look like if he could catch up with that light wave? What would he see?
WALTER ISAACSON: He said it caused him to walk around in such anxiety his palms would sweat. Now, you and I may remember what was causing our palms to sweat at age 16, and it was not a light beam. But that's why he's Einstein.
NARRATOR: This dream-like thought about the nature of light was Einstein's first step on the path to his great theory. It stayed with him, throughout his time at school and college.
DAVID KAISER: He was extremely gifted in science and math, as a young person, and very bad at other classes, mostly cause he kept cutting class and being very rude to his teachers. Many teachers from when...his high school days on, were convinced he'd never amount to anything. He was a discipline problem, and he was bad news.
WALTER ISAACSON: He applies to the second best university in Zurich, the Zurich Polytech, and gets rejected,—I'd love to meet the Admissions Director who rejected Albert Einstein—but eventually he gets in. And he does moderately well, but not good enough to get a teaching fellowship. And so he ends up at the Bern Swiss Patent Office, as a third class examiner.
NARRATOR: Undaunted by his university results, Einstein started work at the patent office in 1902, aged 23. Here, his job was to assess the originality of new devices.
DAVID KAISER: He was immersed in the kinds of, of, sort of, technical details that he'd been fascinated by as a very young kid. And here he was, sitting in the kind of wave of, of, of the modern age. This was the era of electrification, so all the latest clever ideas for switching technology, for coordinating clocks, in particular, those were all passing through his office.
NARRATOR: Time zones had recently been introduced in central Europe, and accurately synchronizing clocks was a major challenge of the day. Switzerland was a world leader in time technology. Dozens of patents to link clocks passed through Einstein's office.
WALTER ISAACSON: He could whip through these patent applications, and then, out of his drawer, he'd pull his physics notes. And his boss was very indulgent and would, sort of, turn a blind eye, as Einstein was doing his theories in his spare time.
SIMON SCHAFFER (University of Cambridge): It's really important to remember that theoretical physics was new when Einstein was a young man. You could do quite a lot of this work by reading a relatively small number of science journals and making the calculations yourself.
Einstein's world, in 1905, was dominated by two kinds of physics. One was about 200 years old, and it was founded by Isaac Newton, a British natural philosopher. For Newton, all there is in the world is matter, moving.
NARRATOR: Newton showed that the motion of falling apples and orbiting planets are governed by the same force: gravity. His equations are so effective, we still use them today to send probes to the farthest reaches of the solar system.
The other important theory of Einstein's day covered electricity and magnetism. That branch of physics had been revolutionized, in 1865, by the Scottish physicist James Clerk Maxwell. Maxwell's theory describes light as an electromagnetic wave that travels at a fixed speed. In Newton's world, the speed of light is not fixed.
SIMON SCHAFFER: Einstein can see that there's a contradiction between Newton and Maxwell. They just don't fit together. And one of the things Einstein hated, hated was contradiction. If there's one kind of physics that says this and another kind of physics that says that and they're different, that's a sign that something's gone wrong, and it needs fixing.
NARRATOR: For months, Einstein wrestles with the problem. Eventually, to resolve this contradiction, he focuses on a key element of speed: time.
WALTER ISAACSON: He realized that any statement about time is simply a question about what is simultaneous. For example, if you say the train arrives at seven, that simply means that it gets to the platform simultaneous with the clock going to seven.
NARRATOR: In a brilliant thought experiment, he questions what "simultaneous" actually means and sees that the flow of time is different for an observer that is moving, versus one that's standing still.
He imagines a man standing on railway platform. Two bolts of lightning strike on either side of him. The man is standing exactly halfway between them, and the light from each strike reaches his eyes at exactly the same moment. For him the two strikes are simultaneous. Then Einstein imagines a woman on a fast moving train. Travelling at close to the speed of light, what would she see?
As the light travels out from the strikes, the train is moving towards one and away from the other. Light from the front strike reaches her eyes first. For the woman on the train, time elapses between the two strikes; for the man on the platform, there is no time between the strikes.
This simple thought has mind-blowing significance. Simultaneity, and the flow of time itself, depends on how you're moving.
SEAN CARROLL: If there's no such thing as simultaneity, then there's no such thing as absolute time everywhere, throughout the universe, and Isaac Newton was wrong.
NARRATOR: This concept, that time, and space, as well, are relative, became known as "special relativity." It led to remarkable results, such as the famous equation relating energy to mass.
DAVID KAISER: So, Einstein published this article in 1905, to exactly no acclaim. Most people ignored it. This was not setting the world on fire. Two years go by before a very eminent physicist, Johannes Stark, invites Einstein to write a review article on Einstein's own work, precisely because no one was paying attention. He begins thinking about ways to generalize and to push his own results from 1905. What if he considers not only a train moving at a fixed speed past the platform, what if that train begins to speed up or slow down? What if there's acceleration?
NARRATOR: Adding acceleration to the equations was his first task. Then, there was that mysterious Newtonian force of gravity to contend with.
In Newton's theory, gravity is a force that acts instantaneously, but special relativity says that's impossible; nothing can travel faster than light.
ELEANOR KNOX (King's College London): What Newton's theory tells you is that, suppose the sun were to disappear, the orbit of the earth should change "at that very moment." But the notion of "at that very moment" in two different places is exactly one of these notions that special relativity has told you isn't a good physics notion. So, you've now got this challenge of trying to work out how to take the success of Newton's theory of gravity but fit into this new special relativistic picture.
NARRATOR: It was only when Einstein began to understand the link between gravity and acceleration that things began to fall into place.
ROBBERT DIJKGRAAF: We all know that when we are accelerated—and, of course, now we have cars and airplanes to give us the physical feeling—if you're in an airplane, and it's taking off, you're pushed back in your chair, actually a kind of force pushing you back, which feels very similar to the force of gravity. But you need the brilliance of Einstein to explain why they are related.
NARRATOR: Suddenly he hits upon what he describes as "the happiest thought" of his life. If gravity and acceleration feel the same, perhaps they are the same. Again, he examines the idea in a beautiful thought experiment.
He imagines a man in a box, floating weightlessly in a distant region of space, in zero gravity. Suddenly, the man stops floating and accelerates downward until he's standing in the box. What has happened? Either the box is now close to a planet, and the force of gravity has pulled the man to the floor, or someone has attached a rope and the box is now being pulled continuously and accelerated upwards. So which is it, gravity or acceleration?
Without being able to see outside, the man can't tell what's causing his fall to the floor.
SEAN CARROLL: Einstein realized there is no way to tell the difference between sitting in a gravitational field and being accelerated. They're equivalent situations.
CLIFFORD JOHNSON: The fact that these two effects are the same, give the same result, means that gravity is acceleration, not just like acceleration; it's the same thing.
NARRATOR: It's a big breakthrough. Einstein's theory of special relativity worked for motion at a constant speed. By extending his ideas to acceleration he could begin to formulate a new theory of gravity.
By 1912, Einstein is living in Zurich with his wife Mileva and two young sons Hans and Eduard. The academic world had realized the importance of special relativity and his career had taken off. He's now a professor at the esteemed Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, but spends as much time as possible working on his theory.
He needs mathematics that describes how objects move in space and time and soon realizes that the best tool for the job is a strange but powerful concept called "space-time."
JANNA LEVIN: If I think of space, I know that I can find anything, if I know where it is North-South, East-West and up-down, three points. But that doesn't mean I can find it, because I also have to know where it is in time. And so, if we start to think, to know everything about an event in the universe, I have to know, not just its spatial coordinates, but also its time coordinate. I can begin to think about where it is in space-time.
NARRATOR: Imagine a camera filming an action, capturing each moment in time as a single frame.
ROBBERT DIJKGRAAF: Einstein basically tells us, think of a movie reel: we have all these little pictures. Now, cut them apart, one by one, and stack them on top of each other. You get this pile. And if you go up in the pile, you go up in time. And now, kind of glue them all together into one big block, and that block has both space and time, and that's the space-time continuum.
It's almost looking at a movie, not frame by frame, but seeing the whole movie at once. There would now be kind of, two strands going up in space and time, and they would be, kind of, spaghetti strands. In fact, we all are spaghetti strands moving in this space-time.
NARRATOR: Einstein feels that space-time is the natural arena in which his theory of relativity should play out, but now he needs sophisticated mathematics.
SEAN CARROLL: By your standard or mine, Einstein was good at math. He was Einstein. But he was not really a mathematician, per se. He didn't prove theorems; he didn't pore over math books. He was a physicist. He did thought experiments. He thought of very tangible concrete situations and what would happen. So, when it came time for him to really bear down to the absolute cutting edge mathematics of his day, he required help.
NARRATOR: At university, Einstein had skipped the geometry classes, letting his friend Marcel Grossman take notes for him. Grossman had excelled in geometry and was now chairman of the math department. He suggests Einstein uses advanced mathematics, in which the shape of space and time could be curved.
SEAN CARROLL: Because space-time has a geometry, he thinks to himself, well, maybe it's the actual shape of space-time itself that is giving rise to gravity.
NARRATOR: After months of work, Einstein has an extraordinary idea: what if space-time is shaped by matter, and that's what we feel as gravity?
CLIFFORD JOHNSON: In struggling to figure out what causes gravity then, Einstein has this great insight. It is simply that a mass distorts the shape of space-time around it, so, you get rid of this force of gravity and, instead, we have curvature of space-time.
SEAN CARROLL: In Einstein's universe then, if space were empty, it would be flat. There'd be nothing going on. But as soon as you put objects down they warp the space and time around them, and that causes a deviation of the geometry, so that now things start moving.
ROBBERT DIJKGRAAF: Everything wants to move as simple as possible through space and time. But Einstein tells us that mass sculpts space and time, it's the curved motion through this sculpture that's the force of gravity.
ELEANOR KNOX: We have this feeling that the reason I can feel pressure on the soles of my feet, that the reason things are going to drop when I throw them, are because there's a force attracting us down to the center of the earth. What general relativity tells you is that's not the right way to think about what's going on there. What's really going on is that your natural path in space-time would take you to the center of the earth. And what's actually happening is the floor is getting in the way, it's pushing you upwards.
SEAN CARROLL: When we look at it, we go, "Ah, the force of gravity." But Einstein says, "No, no, no: the curvature of space-time."
NARRATOR: It's a stunning insight. Just as ant might feel forces pulling it left and right as it walks over crumpled paper, when, in fact, it's simply the shape of a surface dictating its path, Einstein saw that what we feel as the force of gravity is, in fact, the shape of the space-time we're moving through.
Einstein now has everything he needs to formulate his final theory of gravity, but he makes a critical mistake. He misinterprets one of his equations and, unaware of his error, continues working on incorrect ideas.
JOHN NORTON: The point at which Einstein is going to give the most essential equations of the theory, Einstein considers something like them, and then says, "Ah, but these don't work," and then writes down the wrong equations. What follows are alternations of confidence and despair, as he convinces himself that everything was fine with this theory, and then he realizes that things aren't so good with the theory.
It is a long, dark period for Einstein, as he struggles to reconcile himself with a theory that is just not working.
NARRATOR: Two years later, Einstein is in Berlin. At just 36 years old, he has one of the most prestigious positions in physics. But he is still struggling with his theory.
WALTER ISAACSON: By 1915, he'd reached the pinnacle of the profession. He's in the Prussian Academy and a professor at the University of Berlin. But his marriage is falling apart, his wife and his two kids have moved back to Switzerland. So he's pacing around almost all alone, in this apartment, in Berlin.
NARRATOR: And now, he has a competitor. Einstein had enthusiastically shared his ideas with the brilliant mathematician David Hilbert. Hilbert was so impressed, he decided to work on the theory, himself. Einstein is now in a race to the finish, with one of the world's best mathematicians.
DAVID KAISER: This is unfolding in a remarkably dramatic period in history. World War I has begun to ravage central Europe. Einstein is not just toiling in the abstract, he's toiling as the world seems to fall apart.
NARRATOR: By November, 1915, Einstein is scheduled to present his work in a series of four weekly lectures at the esteemed Prussian Academy. But he's struggling to formulate his ideas.
In the midst of these challenges, letters arrived from his wife in Zurich pressing the issue of his financial obligations to his family and discussing contact with his sons.
As his lectures begin, his theory is still far from complete. The pressure on Einstein is huge.
SIMON SCHAFFER: He would give a lecture, revise it, give it again, spot mistakes, correct them, get up on the podium, explain what was wrong in the previous week's lecture, correct it and then move on, and then do that again and again, for four weeks running. His work to convince them of the truth of this absolutely radical new theory of relativity that he was proposing, is one of the most intense periods of work in the history of science.
NARRATOR: Somehow he's able to focus on his theory with an incredible intensity, and he makes his breakthrough.
He tests his equations on a problem that Newton's theory of gravity couldn't solve: the orbit of Mercury. Mercury's path around the sun has an anomaly that Newton's theory can't explain: it deviates slightly each time it goes around. Einstein calculates the orbit with his new equations. The answer is correct, exactly what astronomers had observed.
He'd found the final equations for his general theory of relativity.
SEAN CARROLL: You have to think about the hubris of being Albert Einstein. He had already thrown out Newtonian mechanics with special relativity. And then he had gone off on his little personal quest to incorporate gravity. And at the end of the day, he boils it down to a prediction for a number that had been observed, the procession of the orbit of Mercury. And, miraculously, when the pages of algebra work out to their end, you get the right answer. And, suddenly, it's not just playing with equations anymore. He realizes this is how the world works; all this abstract nonsense is the correct theory of reality.
SIMON SCHAFFER: Einstein is, at last, able to present a successful theory. That's a triumphant moment, one of the great moments in the history of physics, and for Einstein, a victory very much against the odds. And he'd won.
NARRATOR: On the 25th of November, 1915, Einstein lays out his findings in his climactic fourth lecture at the Prussian Academy. He presents general relativity. The theory can be written as a single equation. It condenses sprawling complexities into a beautifully compact set of symbols…
ROBBERT DIJKGRAAF: So the formula is really simple: G-m-u equals…
NARRATOR: …G for the shape of space-time and T for the distribution of mass and energy.
ROBBERT DIJKGRAAF: So this very simple formula captures all of Einstein's general relativity. It's a beautiful, simple equation, but it's a lot of work to unpack the symbols, the mathematical symbols and see how, in this very simple formula, the whole geometry of the universe is hidden. It's, kind of, an acquired taste to see the beauty.
It's also a signature formula for Einstein. The true mark of his genius is that he combines two elements that actually live in different universes. The left-hand side lives in the world of geometry, of mathematics; the right-hand side lives in the world of physics, of matter and movement. And so, perhaps, the most powerful ingredient of the equation is this very symbol—equal sign here—these two lines that are connecting the two worlds. And it's quite appropriate the two lines, because it's two-way traffic.
Matter tells space and time to curve, space and time tells matter to move.
NARRATOR: When Einstein presented his great theory, few people understood it. He needed a way to prove to the world that the counterintuitive features of his theory were real.
SIMON SCHAFFER: The general theory of relativity made predictions of things which looked really strange, for example, the idea that light bends when it passes near a very heavy body. No one had ever looked for that. No one had ever observed it. Einstein was desperate, desperate to get astronomers to make that test.
NARRATOR: Einstein's theory predicts that when light from a distant star travels close to the sun, the warped space around the sun bends the light's path.
In May, 1919, the English astronomer Arthur Eddington traveled to the African island of Principe to record images that would show this phenomenon.
DAVID KAISER: What Eddington was able to do was take photographs of stars during a total eclipse of the sun, so that the moon blocked most of the brightness of the sun and little pin pricks of light could be seen around the sun. Otherwise, it would be lost in the glare. And Eddington and his colleagues were able to measure that the appearance of those stars had been shifted, compared to where they would have been had that big mass of the sun not been deflecting that light from far away.
SIMON SCHAFFER: He's able to show that Einstein's general relativity theory is right, and a revolution in science has been accomplished.
WALTER ISAACSON: When the eclipse experiments prove Einstein's theory right, he rockets to fame. Not just because he's explained a new way of looking at the universe, but at the end of World War I, you had the predictions of a German scientist be proven right by some British astronomers. And it becomes headlines across the world. New York Times says, "Lights all askew at the heavens, men of science more or less agog."—This is back when newspapers knew how to write great headlines.—But Einstein, kind of, loves this fact that he's now an icon of science.
NARRATOR: Einstein becomes a worldwide celebrity, the icon of genius we still recognize today.
SIMON SCHAFFER: The only person who was more widely known was Charlie Chaplin, and they got on like a house on fire. Chaplin said, "The reason they all love me is because they understand everything I do, and the reason they love you is that they don't understand anything you do. Can you explain that?" And Einstein said...
NARRATOR: But in 1930s Berlin, the Nazi party is gaining power. As a Jewish scientist, Einstein becomes increasingly caught up in the political turmoil.
DAVID KAISER: Einstein's theories became a target. They were deemed aesthetically repugnant to a, kind of, an Aryan sensibility. So people attacked not just Einstein the Jewish scientist, they would actually have people denouncing general relativity.
NEWSREEL: In January, Nobel-prized mathematician Albert Einstein visited California.
NARRATOR: He begins to make trips to America, where he is welcomed with open arms. And in 1933, he settles in Princeton, with his second wife Elsa, taking up a position at the Institute for Advanced Study.
Today, the Institute is headed by Professor Robbert Dijkgraaf.
ROBBERT DIJKGRAAF: He, basically, was still very much by himself, just, actually, as he was in Berlin, just concentrating on his deep ideas and struggling with understanding the universe. Of course, his office was here.
NARRATOR: At the Institute, Einstein worked to unify his theory of gravity with the other laws of physics.
ROBBERT DIJKGRAAF: With Einstein, you see this phenomena you see with many great scientists, that they climb this very high mountain and instead of celebrating their success, they're privileged to see a much wider landscape, and they see all these mountains behind it. And I think he was very much aware how much still there was to be done.
'Til the very last days of his life, he was trying to push these equations and find a description of nature, all of nature, in terms of the geometry of space and time.
NARRATOR: But general relativity was fading from mainstream science. Physics was now focused on the quantum theory of atoms and tiny particles, a theory incompatible with Einstein's ideas, but one that could be tested in the lab. Most of general relativity was then beyond the reach of experiment.
When Einstein died, in 1955, aged 76, his theory was seen as one with little hope of future discovery.
SEAN CARROLL: The best theories in physics always take us to places where the people who invented them didn't imagine. And a truly wonderful theory, like general relativity, predicts all sorts of things that Einstein didn't conceive of. The theory has a life of its own. We understand general relativity much better, right now, than Albert Einstein ever did.
NASA MISSION CONTROL/FILE FOOTAGE: Liftoff of space shuttle Discovery, with the Hubble Space Telescope, our window on the universe.
NARRATOR: Today, 100 years after general relativity was first presented, new technology is allowing us to explore the most remarkable predictions of the theory: an expanding universe; black holes; ripples in space-time; and perhaps the most bizarre, the idea that not just space, but time, itself, is distorted by heavy objects.
NARRATOR: To prove it, a team of physicists is carrying out a remarkable experiment. They're using two atomic clocks that are in near perfect sync, accurate to a billionth of a second. The master clock remains at sea level while they take the second clock to the top of New Hampshire's Mount Sunapee.
General relativity tells us that as you move away from the mass of the planet, time should speed up. After four days at the top of the mountain, the test clock is taken back to the lab for comparison. There, they compare it to the sea level master clock. Four days ago they were in ticking in unison. But what about now?
DAVID SCHERER (Microsemi Corporation): You guys ready? This is it, right here. The time interval counter is going to show us the time difference between these two clock ticks.
Twenty nanoseconds!
You can see the time difference between them represented here, graphically: the clock that was up at the mountain for four days and our master clock.
NARRATOR: Gravity, the distortion of space and time, becomes weaker as you move away from the surface of the planet, so while the test clock was up the mountain, time sped up. It's now 20 nanoseconds, 20 billionths of a second, ahead of the sea level clock.
DAVID SCHERER: This is awesome.
NARRATOR: This distortion of time has surprising consequences. The Global Positioning System, something we all take for granted, wouldn't work without taking this into account. The engineers who built the G.P.S. system we use every day to pinpoint locations, had to ensure it adjusted for the time difference between clocks on satellites and receivers on the ground. If they didn't, G.P.S. would be off by six miles every day.
JIM GATES (University of Maryland): Your G.P.S. units use the results of general relativity. When you navigate in your car, you perhaps should give a word of thanks to Uncle Albert.
NARRATOR: Of all general relativity's predictions that new technology has allowed us to explore, there's one that's straight out of science fiction: a black hole.
KIP THORNE (California Institute of Technology): Everything that we are familiar with in ordinary life is made from matter, but not black holes. Black holes are made from warped space and time and nothing else. A black hole is an object that is spherical, like a star or like the earth, with a sharp boundary, called the horizon, through which nothing can come out. So, it casts a shadow on whatever is behind it. It's just a black, black shadow, unbelievably black.
NARRATOR: This simulation shows the distortion of starlight around a black hole. Even though Einstein knew his theory predicted black holes, he found it hard to believe they would really exist in nature.
In the 1960s, Professor Kip Thorne worked on the mathematical concept of black holes. The idea made sense on paper and he began to feel that these science-fiction-like objects might actually be real.
KIP THORNE: Must be here somewhere. It's in one of these piles.
NARRATOR: Kip Thorne made a bet with fellow physicist Stephen Hawking about whether or not a strong source of x-rays, known as Cygnus X-1, was in fact a black hole.
KIP THORNE: I think it's in here, yeah, here we go: relativity, stars and black holes. Yeah, here it is. So, that is a copy of the famous bet: "Stephen Hawking bets one-year subscription to Penthouse magazine as against Kip Thorne's wager of a four-year subscription to a political magazine called Private Eye, that Cygnus X-1 does not contain a black hole of mass above the Chandrasekhar limit. It's witnessed this 10th day of December 1974."
Stephen Hawking had a terribly deep investment in it actually being a black hole, and so he made the bet against himself as an insurance policy, so at least he would get something out of it, if Cygnus X-1 turned out not to be a black hole.
The evidence mounted, thereafter, over the period of the70s and 80s, and in June, 1990, Stephen snuck into my office and signed off on the bet, that, finally, the evidence was absolutely overwhelming that Cygnus X-1 really is a black hole.
And eh, Penthouse magazine arrived. He sent me the British version of Penthouse, which was ever so much more raunchy than the American Penthouse, actually, enough to make my face turn red, when I received it, at first.
NARRATOR: Today, we have evidence suggesting that there are millions of black holes in our own galaxy alone. But perhaps the most profound prediction of general relativity is that our universe had a hot dense beginning that we call the "Big Bang."
The discovery that distant galaxies are moving away from us and that there's a background radiation permeating space, provided evidence for the Big Bang and a universe that's growing.
SAUL PERLMUTTER (University of California, Berkeley): With this picture of an expanding universe, there were natural questions: Is the universe slowing down as it expands? Is it so dense that someday it will come to a halt and collapse? Will the universe come to an end? These seemed like good questions.
NARRATOR: To find answers, in the 1990s, Saul Perlmutter and his team observed exploding stars, called "supernovae," to track the growth of the universe.
SAUL PERLMUTTER: When we made the measurement, we discovered that the universe is not slowing down enough to come to a halt; in fact, it's not slowing at all, it's speeding up! The universe is expanding faster and faster.
NARRATOR: But what's pushing it?
SAUL PERLMUTTER: In order to explain the acceleration of the universe within Einstein's theory of general relativity, we're considering an energy spread throughout all of space that we've never seen before. We don't know what it is. We call it dark energy. And if so, it would require something like 70 percent of all of the stuff of the universe to be in this form of previously unknown dark energy.
So, this is a lot to swallow, and you might imagine, at that point, you should go back and revisit your theory. The problem is that Einstein's theory is so elegant, and it predicts so many, many, many digits of precision, that it's very, very difficult to come up with any other theory.
NARRATOR: There is one final prediction of general relativity that remains untested: gravitational waves.
JANNA LEVIN: There are huge things in the universe happening, like black holes colliding or stars exploding, and they create these gravitational waves, waves in the shape of space and time that travel through the universe at the speed of light. And so, right now, the space around me is being squeezed and stretched by gravitational waves just getting here from, let's say, two black holes colliding a billion light years away. But the squeezing and stretching is so minute, I absolutely could not, personally, detect it. And so, what we're trying to do is build an instrument that can.
NARRATOR: In Louisiana and Washington State, a vast experiment called LIGO is in the final phases of calibration. It's hoped that laser beams, traveling two and a half miles between precisely aligned mirrors, will measure the squeezing of space caused by gravitational waves. This could open up an entirely new window on the universe.
For 100 years, general relativity has been proven to be correct time and time again, but Einstein himself knew that his great theory had limits. It remains incompatible with the quantum world of tiny atomic particles.
Here, at the Institute for Advanced study, where Einstein worked, the world's leading theoretical physicists are trying to solve the problem Einstein never could, finding a single set of rules that applies to both the cosmic and atomic scales, a unified theory, the Holy Grail of physics.
ROBBERT DIJKGRAAF: We are now in what, at this time, is the School of Physics. Here, people are still struggling with many of the same issues that Einstein struggled with, trying to capture the laws of the universe from the very small to the very large in a single equation. And it's still blackboards that are the weapons of choice.
The brightest minds of the world are coming here to work, 24 hours, 7 days a week, struggling to grasp the great mysteries of the universe. And I think we are still driven by the same dream, that, at some point, we can capture everything in elegant mathematics.
NARRATOR: One hundred years after Einstein transformed our understanding of nature, the stage is set for the next revolution.
SEAN CARROLL: When we finally move beyond Einstein, it might be another singular genius that comes along, someone struggling in a poor school in Kenya, right now, that we don't know about. Or it might be 20 different people, with 20 different points of view, gradually building, brick by brick, to finally figure out a more comprehensive view that includes general relativity.
ROBBERT DIJKGRAAF: I think the most important thing you learn from Einstein is the power of an idea. If it's correct, you know, it's just unstoppable. It's extremely encouraging that he was able, with pure thought, to solve the riddle of the universe.
JANNA LEVIN: Once we had general relativity, the world changed completely. Our point of view on the world changed completely. I mean, the origin of the universe is a prediction straight out of general relativity. We didn't have that before.
JIM GATES: I often wonder what Einstein would make of today's theoretical physics. I think he would really be saying, you know, get on with it, get the right story, get the details right.
ROBBERT DIJKGRAAF: You know, you have the huge universe, and it obeys certain laws of nature, but where in the universe are these laws actually discovered? Where are they studied? And then you go to this tiny planet, and there's this one individual, Einstein, who can capture this. And now there's a small group of people walking in his footsteps and trying to push it further. And I often feel, well, it's this small part of the universe that actually is reflecting upon itself, that it's trying to understand itself. |
Media playback is unsupported on your device Media caption Deputy PM Nick Clegg: "The current rules just simply don't suit lots of modern families"
The government has committed to introducing a year of shared leave for new parents by April 2015.
Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg said the rights would allow men to become more hands-on fathers and stop women feeling they have to choose between a career or a baby.
There should not be a "one-size-fits-all" approach, he added.
But the Institute of Directors described the new rights as a "nightmare" for employers.
Since April 2011, fathers and mothers have been able to share some of the 52 weeks' existing leave, with the father able to take up to six months beginning after the baby is 20 weeks old.
However, this can only be taken as a single block - as can the leave the mother takes.
Under the proposed new arrangement, first trialled last year, the existing 52 weeks of maternity leave, other than the first fortnight for a new mother's recovery, will be shared between the parents.
But, in an effort to allay fears of the impact on smaller firms, bosses will have to agree any proposed pattern of time off and will retain the right to insist it be confined to a continuous block, with no more than two subsequent changes.
'Under pressure'
Anyone taking total leave of six months or less over the period will be legally entitled to return to the same job.
Mr Clegg said the current "Edwardian" rules stopped parents from "taking the decisions" that best suited their own needs and those of their children.
Media playback is unsupported on your device Media caption Alexander Ehmann, Institute of Directors: "The problem is about the practical ramifications"
"Women deserve the right to pursue their goals and not feel they have to choose between having a successful career or having a baby," he said.
"They should be supported by their employers, rather than being made to feel less employable or under pressure to take unchallenging jobs.
"It is already illegal to sack a woman because she is pregnant, or on maternity leave, but we want to go further than that. We want to create a fairer society that gives parents the flexibility to choose how they share care for their child in the first year after birth.
"We need to challenge the old-fashioned assumption that women will always be the parent that stays at home, many fathers want that option too."
Mr Clegg added: "There shouldn't be a one-size-fits-all approach; that's not how families are set up. Many businesses already recognise how productive and motivated employees are when they're given the opportunity to work flexibly, helping them retain talent and boost their competitive edge.
"This is good for families, good for business and good for our economy."
'Unwieldy'
Campaign group Maternity Action said the reforms were "a useful but very modest step in the right direction".
But the Institute of Directors business group said the plan was a "nightmare" that would "heap yet more burdens on struggling employers."
Deputy director of policy Alexander Ehmann said: "The proposed system is considerably more complex and unwieldy than the current laws and employers will - once again - have to absorb the cost of adapting and implementing this new system.
Equalities Minister Jo Swinson told the BBC News Channel the government would be bringing in 'simple, straightforward' changes to put in place greater flexibility for employers and working mothers.
She outlined an example whereby a mother would be happy to return to work for four or five weeks to help out in busy periods, such as Christmas, before returning to maternity leave.
"At the moment that is actually not possible with the law - she would lose all of her maternity rights after that point," she said.
For Labour, shadow minister for women and equalities Gloria De Piero said: "Nick Clegg claims to be on parents' side but he and David Cameron have done nothing to support families in the last three years."
She added: "This reheated announcement contains nothing new for families suffering from this government's cost-of-living crisis."
TUC general secretary Frances O'Grady added: "Shared parental leave is a welcome new step that should encourage more fathers to get involved in childcare from the very beginning.
"But unless it is backed up with better pay, many couples simply won't be able to afford to take it." |
By Staff
A Saudi official appears to have paid a heavy price for staging “unethical parties” at his department, with a court in the Gulf Kingdom sentencing him to 25 years in jail and ordering him lashed 2,000 times in public.
The unnamed head of the government office in the southern town of Baha was also convicted of taking drugs, extortion of other officials and involvement in sodomy.
Newspapers said the court also fined the official SR200,000 and banned him from travelling outside Saudi Arabia during that period.
“He will be lashed in three batches after Friday’s prayers at the place where he committed his crimes in front of people,” Alsaudeh daily said.
It said the court also sentenced his aide to 15 years in jail, 1,500 lashes and travel ban, adding that the judge issued a recommendation the two would not benefit from any future pardon. The paper described it as a reduced sentence as the prosecutor had demanded the death penalty against the two.
“The two were found guilty of engaging in obscene acts, including staging unethical parties, using drugs and extorting other officials. They had also invited officials and other people to practice sodomy,” it said.
Image via Shutterstock |
A Virginia kindergarten teacher was busted along with her friend when she allegedly tried to hire a hit man for $8,500 to kill her ex-husband.
Angela Nolen, 47, blew her cover when she and Cathy Bennett -- the 37-year-old nurse at her school -- hired an undercover cop to do the dirty deed, the New York Daily News reports.
The two women, who work at Sontag Elementary School in Rocky Mount, were arrested Wednesday after plotting the murder of Nolen's former partner, 63-year-old Paul Strickler, police told the paper. Nolen was charged with solicitation to commit murder, and Bennett was slapped with accessory to solicitation.
Nolen allegedly met with an undercover state police agent on Feb. 19, asking him to take her husband's life, WSLS reports. She reportedly promised the agent more than $4,000 up front, and another $4,000 when the job was done. State police got wind of her alleged scheme from an anonymous tip.
Officers declined to comment on Nolen's motive in the murder-for-hire plot, according to The Roanoke Times. Strickler told a reporter that he and Nolen were working on a deal for her to buy his house.
"If I was dead, she would not have to give me the money," he told the paper. "That scares the H-E-L-L out of me. I'm just so glad that the state police found out about this and uncovered it." |
Jameer Nelson admitted there were times when he would raise an eyebrow at a player missing a game because of a wrist injury.
“You see a guy out with a wrist and you’re like, ‘Why is he out with his wrist?’ ” Nelson said.
Not anymore.
He fully understands the pain.
He’s living it.
“It’s funny; it happens to you and you see why,” Nelson said. “It’s a painful injury. Especially with a lack of blood flow to the area.”
Nelson is dealing with a sprained left wrist. Yes, he came back after missing six games to play well at Washington on Jan. 28. But he was not anywhere near 100 percent at the time. He was playing through the pain.
“I tried to, I tried to,” said Nelson, who also played two nights later at Indiana. “I played in those two games. But it was just like I told Coach, I felt pretty good in the Washington game, but the Indiana game I felt nowhere near myself. I didn’t feel like I could help the team. And if I’m not helping the team, I’m hurting it. So I just felt like it was better for me to sit down.”
Nelson, who has missed the past two games because of the injury, wears a brace on the wrist now and is undergoing tests to see exactly how long he will be out of action. It’s certain that the veteran point guard won’t play Friday against Chicago and is a longshot at best for Sunday’s game at New York and Monday’s game at Brooklyn. He has had an MRI on the wrist to help determine the severity of the damage.
“I’m just waiting on some things to get resolved to see what’s next, what’s best for it and how we approach the next step,” Nelson said. “I’m always going to be honest with Coach, the organization and the training staff. I just told them I was hurting. For whatever reason, before the game I was hurting in Indiana, so I tried to play through it. I’ve played through injuries before. I’ve dealt with pain.”
Nelson has had a good season as the primary ball handler off the bench with averages of 7.9 points, 5.0 assists and 3.0 rebounds. He has played alongside rookie Emmanuel Mudiay a lot this season, and has been relied upon to close out games when Nuggets coach Michael Malone has needed him.
“We should know something within the next couple of days,” Nelson said. “I’m hoping Monday at the latest.”
In addition to his on-court duties, he has been a stabilizing force in the Nuggets’ locker room.
“It’s more frustrating than anything because I want to be out there, I want to play,” Nelson said of his injury. “We’re talking playoffs, we’re talking getting better and taking that next step as a team and as an organization, and I signed here to be a part of that.”
Christopher Dempsey: cdempsey@denverpost.com or @dempseypost
CHICAGO AT DENVER 7 p.m. Friday, ALT; 950 AM
Spotlight on E’Twaun Moore:
The guard found himself in the starting lineup Wednesday in place of the injured Jimmy Butler — and Moore responded with the best performance of his career. He had a career-high 24 points and will be the starter again against Denver if Butler isn’t able to play. Moore is averaging 5.7 points in just over 17 minutes per game this season. In 284 career games, spanning five seasons, Moore has started 28 games.
NOTEBOOK
Bulls:
Jimmy Butler, Chicago’s leading scorer, is questionable because of tendinitis in his left knee. He was a late scratch in the Bulls’ most recent game, Wednesday at Sacramento. It was the first game he missed all season. … Center Pau Gasol is questionable with a left hand sprain. … Mike Dunleavy is closing in on a season debut, but it won’t be against the Nuggets. He remains out, still recovering from offseason back surgery.
Nuggets:
The NBA announced Thursday that guard Will Barton was selected for the slam dunk event Saturday, Feb. 13, in Toronto. Also participating are defending champion Zach LaVine of the Timberwolves, Andre Drummond of the Pistons and Aaron Gordon of the Magic. … Center Nikola Jokic fought through a strained left shoulder to play against Utah but remains a bit of a question mark to play Friday against Chicago. Even so, the expectation is he will. Jokic scored eight points and had nine rebounds and four assists in 29 minutes against the Jazz. … The Nuggets have won eight consecutive games at home against the Bulls. Their last loss to Chicago in Denver took place Feb. 8, 2006.
Christopher Dempsey, The Denver Post |
From the Minnesota Libertarian Party website:
Do you have what it takes to manage the Libertarian Party of Minnesota through massive growth towards our goals of electoral competitiveness and greater policy influence?
The LPMN is seeking an Executive Director to serve as principal administrative assistant to the Chair. Current Executive Director, Andy Burns, will step down September 14 to focus on National Libertarian Party efforts.
The ED will oversee all programmatic and fundraising activities of the state party, manage other directors and assist them as needed in setting and achieving their goals, and set priorities and deploy his or her energies based on the current needs of the party.
The primary responsibilities duties of the ED will be to develop, direct and conduct fundraising, and manage day-to-day activities.
Candidates should have experience with:
• Administration of nonprofit organizations or issue advocacy groups
• Political campaigns
• Fundraising
• Customer relationship management software, ideally CiviCRM
• Familiarity with libertarian principles and the LPMN would be a plus.
The ED serves at the pleasure of the LPMN Executive Committee and reports directly to the LPMN Chair.
Please read the full job description for more information. Send resumes and references to: Chris Dock at chris.dock@lpmn.org. |
Sonja Puzic, CTVNews.ca
Parti Quebecois Leader Pauline Marois will become Quebec’s first female premier after her sovereigntist party won a minority government and ended nearly a decade of Liberal rule in a tense election.
But as she delivered her victory speech late Tuesday night, Marois was suddenly whisked off stage because of a shooting outside PQ headquarters in downtown Montreal.
One person was killed and another was injured after a gunman opened fire behind the building. A man wearing what appeared to be a blue housecoat and a balaclava was arrested at the scene.
Marois returned to the podium to briefly resume her speech and ask everyone to slowly leave the room.
Liberal Leader and outgoing premier Jean Charest lost his seat in the riding of Sherbrooke to PQ candidate Serge Cardin, even as his party fared better at the polls than projected, assuming the role of official Opposition.
The minority PQ government may alleviate some fears of an impending referendum on Quebec’s independence, which Marois said she would only call under the “right conditions."
But Marois remained defiant in her victory speech, saying: “The future of Quebec is to become its own country.”
“To our friends and neighbours in Canada…As a nation, we want to make our own decisions that concern us,” she said.
Late Tuesday, the PQ had won or was leading in 56 ridings, short of the 63 seats needed to form a majority government in the 125-seat legislature.
The upstart Coalition Avenir Quebec party, led by Francois Legault, won at least 19 seats, landing in third place. Legault, a former PQ member, had promised a 10-year moratorium on sovereignty referendums.
The Liberals won or were leading in about 48 ridings. Charest’s stunning defeat was the first in his 28-year political career.
“Politics are difficult,” Charest said in his concession speech to a crowd of disappointed, but cheering supporters in Sherbrooke.
“I assume the entire responsibility for the results,” he said after congratulating Cardin and Marois.
Charest stressed the message of national unity, saying that “belonging to Canada” is one of the Quebec Liberal Party’s key convictions.
“The result of this election campaign speaks to the fact that the future of Quebec lies within Canada,” he said.
Charest said the Liberal Party will continue to thrive in the province, but did not discuss his political future.
Political observers said several factors contributed to Charest’s downfall.
His Liberal Party has tried to dodge corruption allegations, stemming from questionable practices in the province’s construction industry.
A recently launched public inquiry will look at allegations of corruption involving construction firms, municipal and provincial governments and organized crime. It is alleged that a number of election officials received kickbacks from shady construction projects.
Charest also drew the ire of Quebec’s post-secondary students this year when he announced a tuition fee increase, sparking a months-long student uprising that resulted in violent clashes with police on the streets on Montreal and Quebec City.
Many students favoured the PQ because Marois promised to nix the tuition hike. One of the most prominent faces of the student movement, Leo Bureau-Blouin, became a star PQ candidate and beat the Liberal incumbent in the Montreal-area riding of Laval-des-Rapides to become the youngest-ever member of the national assembly at age 20.
Now, for the first time since 2003, Quebec has a sovereigntist government that’s poised to revive tensions with Ottawa and other provinces.
Marois has said that she will contact Prime Minister Stephen Harper shortly after taking office to discuss the transfer of powers in areas like immigration, language and employment insurance from Ottawa to Quebec. If Harper refuses, Marois said that will only boost her case for an independent Quebec.
But as a minority government, the PQ will face tough challenges pushing its independence agenda. The party has won four majorities in previous elections, avoiding having to forge alliances in parliament.
Both Charest, a staunch federalist, and François Legault, the leader of the Coalition Avenir Québec, have tried to use the prospect of a sovereignty referendum as a way to lure votes away from Marois.
Many analysts said that, even with a majority PQ government, a referendum would be unlikely until late in the governing party’s term.
Bill 101 expansion, referendum talk spark concerns
It remains to be seen how Quebec’s federalists and anglophones will react to a PQ government. Some realtors in Ontario and Quebec have already noted an increase in calls from English-speaking Quebecers who are mulling a move to Ontario or other parts of Canada.
Marois’s promise to extend Bill 101, the law which enshrines French as the province’s official language, to small businesses and colleges, has many non-French speakers worried about their education and employment prospects.
When the first Parti Quebecois government was elected in 1976, under Rene Levesque’s leadership, the rest of Canada panicked at the prospect of Quebec’s secession. The province’s anglophones left in droves and the country’s stock and bond markets reacted negatively, lowering the value of the Canadian dollar.
The PQ’s referendums on Quebec sovereignty in 1980 and 1995 both failed, although the latter one was defeated by a very narrow margin. |
GRAND RAPIDS, MI - Grand Rapids Community College is partnering with several construction organizations to pay for 15 high school graduates to participate in a summer construction program. GRCC’s three-week
program aims to give recent high school graduates the skills to fill jobs within the construction industry. The program is based on GRCC’s Construction Core Certification, a 96-hour program offered by the college. It’s geared toward young adults who aren’t interested in a traditional degree and are eager to start their career in construction. The construction organizations participating in the effort are the Home Builders Association of Greater Grand Rapids, the American Subcontractor Association of Michigan and the Associated Builders and Contractors of West Michigan. “This is a great example of how we collaborate with local employer partners to ensure our region continues to supply the best-trained talent in the world,” said Julie Parks, director of workforce training at GRCC. In addition to covering students’ tuition for the program, the scholarship program guarantees students a minimum of two job interviews following completion of the course, GRCC said. To apply for the scholarship,
.
Brian McVicar covers education for MLive and The Grand Rapids Press. Email him at bmcvicar@mlive.com or follow him on Twitter |
Natural killer cells are key part of our immune system defence A master gene that helps mobilise the immune system to fight disease has been discovered by UK scientists. It causes stem cells in the blood to become disease-fighting "Natural Killer" (NK) immune cells. It is hoped the discovery will lead to new ways to boost the body's production of these frontline cells - potentially creating a new way to kill cancer. The Nature Immunology study may also help development of new treatments for type 1 diabetes and multiple sclerosis. These conditions are caused by a malfunctioning immune system turning against the body's own tissues, and it is suspected that faulty NK cells play a key role in this process. The researchers, from Imperial College London, University College London and the Medical Research Council's National Institute for Medical Research have created mice that lack the key gene - E4bp4. If we understand how these cells function, we can hope to exploit this knowledge to improve treatments for cancer patients
Ken Campbell
Leukaemia Research These animals are normal in every way except they have no NK cells at all. In theory, they should provide scientists with a golden opportunity to pin down the role of NK cells in auto-immune diseases - and possibly in other conditions such as female infertility. Properly functioning NK cells are a type of white blood cell central to the body's first line of defence, rapidly killing off tumour cells, viruses and bacterial infections. The latest work shows that the E4bp4 gene controls production of the cells from blood stem cells in the bone marrow. The aim now is to develop a drug treatment ramping up production of NK cells. Currently, NK cells isolated from donated blood are sometimes used to treat cancer patients - but the effectiveness of donated cells is limited because NK cells can be slightly different from person to person. 'Donor incompatibility' Lead researcher Dr Hugh Brady said: "If increased numbers of the patient's own blood stem cells could be coerced into differentiating into NK cells, via drug treatment, we would be able to bolster the body's cancer-fighting force, without having to deal with the problems of donor incompatibility." The researchers were initially studying the effect of E4bp4 in a very rare but fatal form of childhood leukaemia when they discovered its importance for NK cells. Ken Campbell, of the charity Leukaemia Research, said: "This study helps shed more light on the behaviour of NK cells, which is vital because if we understand how these cells function we can hope to exploit this knowledge to improve treatments for cancer patients."
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body of water between South America and the South Shetland Islands of Antarctica
Tourist expedition ship Akademik Ioffe sailing across the Drake Passage to Antarctica
Depth profile with salinity and temperature for surface
The Drake Passage (Spanish: Pasaje de Drake) or Mar de Hoces—Sea of Hoces—is the body of water between South America's Cape Horn and the South Shetland Islands of Antarctica. It connects the southwestern part of the Atlantic Ocean (Scotia Sea) with the southeastern part of the Pacific Ocean and extends into the Southern Ocean.
History [ edit ]
The passage receives its English-language name from the 16th-century English privateer Sir Francis Drake. Drake's only remaining ship, after having passed through the Strait of Magellan, was blown far south in September 1578. This incident implied an open connection between the Atlantic and Pacific oceans.
Half a century earlier, after a gale had pushed them south from the entrance of the Strait of Magellan, the crew of the Spanish navigator Francisco de Hoces thought they saw a land's end and possibly inferred this passage in 1525.[1] For this reason, some Spanish and Latin American historians and sources call it Mar de Hoces after Francisco de Hoces.
The first recorded voyage through the passage was that of Eendracht, captained by the Dutch navigator Willem Schouten in 1616, naming Cape Horn in the process.
Geography [ edit ]
The 800-kilometre (500 mi) wide passage between Cape Horn and Livingston Island is the shortest crossing from Antarctica to any other landmass. The boundary between the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans is sometimes taken to be a line drawn from Cape Horn to Snow Island (130 kilometres (81 mi) north of mainland Antarctica). Alternatively, the meridian that passes through Cape Horn may be taken as the boundary. Both boundaries lie entirely within the Drake Passage.
The other two passages around the extreme southern part of South America (though not going around Cape Horn as such), Strait of Magellan and Beagle Channel, are very narrow, leaving little room for a ship. They can also become icebound, and sometimes the wind blows so strongly that no sailing vessel can make headway against it. Hence most sailing ships prefer the Drake Passage, which is open water for hundreds of miles, despite very rough conditions. The small Diego Ramírez Islands lie about 100 kilometres (62 mi) south-southwest of Cape Horn.
There is no significant land anywhere around the world at the latitudes of Drake Passage, which is important to the unimpeded flow of the Antarctic Circumpolar Current which carries a huge volume of water (about 600 times the flow of the Amazon River) through the Passage and around Antarctica.
Ships in the Passage are often good platforms for the sighting of whales, dolphins and seabirds including giant petrels, other petrels, albatrosses and penguins.
Geology [ edit ]
The passage is known to have been closed until around 41 million years ago[2] according to a chemical study of fish teeth found in oceanic sedimentary rock. Before the passage opened, the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans were entirely separate, with Antarctica being much warmer and having no ice cap. The joining of the two great oceans started the Antarctic Circumpolar Current and cooled the continent significantly.
Gallery [ edit ]
Rough seas are common in the Drake Passage
Tourists watch whales in the Drake Passage
Seabird (light-mantled sooty albatross) flying over the Drake Passage
Humpback whales are a common sight in the Drake Passage
Hourglass dolphins leaping in the Passage
Drake Passage or Mar de Hoces between South America and Antarctica
Drake Passage
See also [ edit ]
References [ edit ]
Media related to Drake Passage at Wikimedia Commons
Coordinates: |
LOOK out from Crissy Field, in San Francisco, on a fog-free day and chances are you will see some technology entrepreneurs leaping into the sky. The hybrid sport of kitesurfing has become a favourite pastime of the Bay Area’s startup crowd. Lifted by high-tension rigging, unpredictable gusts and a delight in daring, they fly up into the air before splashing back to the cold surf. Some landings are smooth; others are not. The sport requires skill, good equipment and hard-won experience, but chance and ambition also play a part. And even the most experienced cannot control the winds.
On shore, too, exhilaration and risk go hand in hand. San Francisco, Silicon Valley and the strip of land that runs along the shore of the Bay between them have had a tremendous decade as the hub of the global technology industry. The area’s biggest companies have soared to heights once unimaginable, coming to represent all that the world finds most exciting about American capitalism. Even its smaller fry have attracted mountains of money. The Valley has reshaped lives and languages, creating new verbs—to google, to facebook, to uber—and repurposing old ones—to tweet, to message, to like.
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Every year new ideas grow from specks to spectacular. Startups are so commonplace that in San Francisco’s Mission district you can buy greeting cards that say “Congratulations on closing your first round.” Uber, a six-year-old taxi-hailing company, is valued at $41 billion; Airbnb, a seven-year-old firm through which people turn their homes into hotels, is valued at $26 billion. Each week bosses arrive from far off places to tour and learn from the centre of innovation. There is a pervasive sense of something wonderful afoot. Living in San Francisco today, with its bustle and big ideas, feels like “living in Florence during the Renaissance,” effuses Sander Daniels, the fresh-faced founder of Thumbtack, an app that matches skilled labourers with tasks that suit them.
Last year around 20% of American business-school graduates went to work for a technology firm, the highest percentage since 2000. As in gold rushes past, the influx generates grumbling from old-timers and newcomers alike. In every coffee shop from downtown San Francisco to Palo Alto you hear complaints about eye-watering property prices and unbearable traffic.
And at the same time, you hear the worry that the boom underpinning those problems cannot last. The NASDAQ has been hitting all-time highs, most recently on July 20th. Investors scrambling to profit from the next new thing are pushing up the valuations of the most popular, fast-growing startups by billions of dollars. Money has warped entrepreneurs’ expectations. When Facebook paid $1 billion for Instagram, a photo-sharing site with 13 employees and no revenue, three years ago many onlookers thought the price wildly generous. Kevin Systrom, Instagram’s 31-year-old founder, became the pin-up for startup success. Last year Facebook paid an astonishing $22 billion for WhatsApp, a messaging firm with just $10m in sales. Now people say Mr Systrom sold too soon.
Greed, profligacy, tiny companies with outlandish valuations: it is not hard to detect echoes of the turn of the century, when the dotcom bubble burst spectacularly and America’s economy stumbled as a result. But to see history as about to repeat itself is to miss how deeply things have changed. Today’s technology businesses are selling services and products from which they already generate income, rather than just saying that one day they might. And the group of people doing the investing is much smaller now than it was then. The risks are on fewer shoulders.
MBA graduates entering technology firms, %
1 of 12 Business schools; The Economist
A new breed of hero
That is not totally reassuring. If risks are limited to a smaller number, so too are benefits. The chance to invest in many of Silicon Valley’s most exciting companies is restricted to a charmed circle of connected, wealthy insiders. That not only excludes the average investor; it also shields firms from the scrutiny public companies receive. Such shielding may be letting weak ideas go further than they should, increasing the chances of a reckoning.
The nagging fear of 2000 redux stems in large part from the sheer scale of that bust. In the three years to 2000 the NASDAQ index tripled as millions of Americans used their newly opened online-trading accounts to buy internet stocks. Companies like Garden.com, a website where gardeners would buy supplies and exchange tips, were taken public with no proven business model and no cash reserves. When in early 2000 several telecom companies went bankrupt the whole edifice collapsed; the decline in the NASDAQ wiped out some $4 trillion between March and December 2000. Silicon Valley was devastated; many of its firms went bust. The ensuing “nuclear winter”, when tech deals were at a standstill, lasted for years.
Look beyond the mere size of that boom and bust, though, and the differences with today’s situation are clear. For one thing, the base of today’s success is broader. In 2000 some 400m people around the world had access to the internet; by the end of 2015 3.2 billion people will. And the internet reaches into these people’s lives in many more ways than it could 15 years ago. “Technology is no longer a vertical industry, as it’s been understood by everyone for four decades,” says John Battelle, a journalist and entrepreneur who launched the Industry Standard, a magazine which reported on the dotcom boom before itself going bankrupt in 2001. “Technology is now a horizontal, enabling force throughout the whole economy.”
Smartphones have opened up global business opportunities that could never have existed previously—a taxi-hailing business like Uber could not work without them. Turning such opportunities into embryonic businesses is easy. The cloud, which allows companies to expand their processing power and data storage with no capital investment, keeps costs low; so does open-source software. Firms can use free social media for marketing.
Those advantages apply well beyond the San Francisco Bay; there are thriving tech scenes elsewhere. But nowhere else rivals San Francisco’s special elixir of brains, experience and money. The total value of Bay area tech companies worth more than $1 billion is now a hair over $3 trillion, a figure that has been growing healthily for almost a decade.
Though most technology firms going public today are unprofitable, just as they were in 1999, they have more realistic business models; most are losing money in a premeditated effort to expand, rather than through having no alternative. Last year the average American technology firm that staged an initial public offering (IPO) was 11 years old and had $91m in sales, compared with an average age of four years old, with $17m in revenue, in 1999, according to Jay Ritter, a professor at the University of Florida who studies public markets.
Public investors, some of whom quit their jobs to trade stocks during the 1990s, are less feverish today. Of 632 tech IPOs in 1999 and 2000, around 29% saw the companies double in value on day one, according to Mr Ritter. Of the mere 53 technology companies that went public in 2014, only two “popped” that dramatically. In the first quarter of 2000 the average price-to-earnings ratio on NASDAQ was almost 170. For the billion-dollar tech companies in the Bay area today the ratio is a modest 21.
But this relative sobriety masks two trends towards excess: the ever higher values placed on bigger companies that stay privately held and the amount of cash investors are giving them to spend in order to dominate their business category. Both will continue to have far-reaching impacts on the dynamics of startups, public companies and the city of San Francisco.
Sudden impact
Starting a tech firm has never been easier. Not only does it cost less, but there are more “angel” investors who are willing to write small cheques to breathe life into founders’ ideas. It’s the next stage that demands nerves and deep pockets. Most entrepreneurs and venture capitalists subscribe to the view that technology markets work on a winner-take-most basis. Businesses like Uber’s thrive on “network effects”; the bigger their presence, the more it makes sense for drivers and passengers to do business with them, rather than their rivals. Thus the company that establishes itself early enjoys disproportionate rewards. “First prize is a Cadillac Eldorado…Second prize is a set of steak knives. Third prize is you’re fired,” explains Stewart Butterfield, the boss of Slack, a two-year-old software company with a $2.8 billion valuation, quoting from David Mamet’s play “Glengarry Glen Ross”. Such beliefs produce a positive feedback loop. More funding leads to a higher valuation, which generates more interest from the press, which makes it easier to attract and retain employees, which makes it possible to outperform rivals, which brings in more funding.
Investors are willing to stomach high spending on gaining customers and intimidating competitors in an attempt to create what they call, in hushed whispers, “natural monopolies”. Bill Gurley, a venture capitalist at Benchmark, calls it the “grand experiment”. “There is no precedent of giving all these companies hundreds of millions of dollars, growing them so big, and telling them we don’t care if they are profitable.” And it is an experiment in which everyone has to participate. “If your competitors are acting like capital is free and doesn’t matter, then you have to live in that world,” says Mr Gurley.
As startups grow faster than ever before, many are also staying private longer. It used to be extremely rare to find a startup valued over $1 billion, but today there are 74 such “unicorns” in America’s tech sector, valued at $273 billion (see chart). That is 61% of all the unicorns in the world by number, according to CB Insights, which tracks the private market.
Many entrepreneurs view life as a public company, with its quarterly appraisals and activist shareholders, as akin to being the giant effigy at the focus of the annual “Burning Man” gathering in the Nevada desert: yes, you may be quickly built into the biggest thing around, but the experience promises more than a little pain. And drumming up capital without the help of the public markets is unprecedentedly easy. In the face of low interest rates, investors have scrambled to find any sort of yield. Mutual funds such as Fidelity and T. Rowe Price are investing in unicorns in late-stage rounds, as are hedge funds, sovereign-wealth funds and large firms.
Foul play
As waiting to go public becomes the norm, the attraction of investing early grows. Nice as it was to be an early investor in Google, Amazon or Microsoft, most of the value at those older companies was created after they went public, which gave later investors a chance to make a killing too. By contrast, the venture-capital firm Andreessen Horowitz points out that at LinkedIn, a professional networking website, 40% of the company’s value was created before its 2011 IPO; for Twitter, all the value creation took place before its IPO.
Mark Mahaney, an analyst at RBC Capital, a Canadian investment bank, says it was Facebook that changed the way that investors thought about high prices. Started in 2004, it stayed private for eight years. In 2007, when a $240m investment by Microsoft valued the social-media firm at $15 billion, critical onlookers said the price was a “nosebleed”. Considering Facebook’s $276 billion public valuation today, most wish in retrospect that they had been able to join in the nasal discomfort.
The lack of other investment opportunities and the fear of missing out—an emotion so widely felt as to have earned its own acronym, FOMO—have driven unicorn valuations that are hard to justify using the firms’ financial performance. For example Pinterest, a website that allows users to share photos of things they would like to buy, has negligible revenues but a valuation of $11 billion. “We call [them] ‘private market’ valuations, but it’s not really a market. It’s a handful of optimists” who are setting prices, says one banker.
One cynical venture capitalist sees many of the valuations as relying on a “squint test”: if by squinting you can convince yourself that a company looks vaguely like one which has already commanded a high price, you should value it as people have the other one. For example, squint at Snapchat, a messaging service anomalously based in Los Angeles with more than 100m monthly users but no proven revenue model, and it might look a little like WhatsApp, which sold itself so lucratively to Facebook last year. That could go some way to explaining its $16 billion valuation, despite the firms’ very different offerings.
Magnum force
High valuations obviously come with a risk for investors. As tech firms move into new markets they can face a lot of regulatory uncertainty. Uber, for example, is sparring with regulators across much of the world and risks being forced to recategorise some of its drivers as employees instead of freelancers, which would damage its lean business model. Homejoy, a housecleaning service backed by venture capitalists, has announced it will shut down at the end of July because of lawsuits over whether its workers should be categorised as employees or contractors.
Less obviously, the valuations can damage the unicorns themselves. When a young entrepreneur desperate to join the “three comma” club accepts an overvaluation he runs the risk of a subsequent “down round”—a lower valuation when looking for future funding or going public. That is a reputation killer in a place where reputation has come to matter a lot. In 1999 the mainstream media were just beginning to home in on Silicon Valley; now the press covers it assiduously. “Today the cast of entrepreneurs is acting like Hollywood stars,” says Randy Komisar of Kleiner, Perkins, Caufield & Byers, a venture-capital firm. “There is a lot of strutting and vogueing for the cameras.”
Some unicorns have grown so big that they are sitting in a “valuation trap”, too expensive to be sold to a corporate buyer like Facebook, Google or Apple and unable to successfully float on public markets for what they are claimed to be worth. The high valuations across the board also make it harder for the unicorns to thin their ranks, or to ease the competitive pressures that are forcing them to spend so freely, by turning to eat each other. At least one mooted merger between unicorns in the same sort of business has fallen through because of the rate at which their values rose during the negotiations.
Another problem brought on by the enthusiastic investment in young companies is bidding up talent. Competition for skilled workers “is more intense than I have ever seen it,” says Jim Breyer, a prominent venture capitalist. The average software engineer in San Francisco now earns $150,000, according to Glassdoor, a database for employer reviews and job listings. In HBO’s comedy series “Silicon Valley”, the fictional startup Pied Piper finds itself so desperate for a good engineer that it is willing to make an offer to one who claims to be a cyborg, only to be turned down because he has so many other employers to choose from. It is the sort of exaggeration with a nub of truth that makes the show as popular among San Francisco techies as “Sex and the City” was among women in New York.
A particular bone of contention when it comes to hiring is common stock, which startups give to new hires. The value of common stock is assessed by outside firms, but the appeal of a low value, which maximises the upside for employees, leads some companies to try to make sure the assessment comes out that way. Public companies cannot play such games. Many employees have become wise to this and understand the arbitrage of going to work for a startup instead of a public firm. “Wall Street used to be the only place where there was profit without value,” says the boss of a public technology company. “Now there is the potential of this happening in Silicon Valley.”
INTERACTIVE: Track the fortunes of Silicon Valley firms over time here
The technology industry is starting to look like Wall Street in other ways, too. Ambitious young things who would once have headed for banks now go into tech instead. “The upside is better, the hours are no worse, and the economy is moving more in the direction of technology,” says Jon Bischke of Entelo, a software company that helps firms recruit. The attraction is not limited to those fresh from college: in some circles Uber is known as “Goldman West” because of its phalanx of former bankers. At a time when Wall Street has had its purse strings pulled tighter by regulations designed to curtail big bonuses, Silicon Valley can still offer spectacular reimbursement, as Google surely did when it recently hired Ruth Porat from Morgan Stanley to become its chief financial officer. Anthony Noto, Twitter’s CFO and a former Goldman Sachs executive, received over $70m in compensation last year.
The last stand
The backlash against such excess has not yet reached the scale achieved by the “Occupy Wall Street” movement in the wake of the financial crisis, but cause for resentment is building, particularly in San Francisco. In the 1990s most of the activity was to the south, in Palo Alto, Mountain View and Silicon Valley itself, which is still where the area’s big public companies are mostly based (see map). Today’s startups tend to be much closer to the city itself; Uber, Dropbox, Pinterest and Airbnb all have their headquarters there. Brash young “brogrammers” who work for companies farther south prefer to live in the city and travel to work each day by a luxurious company bus. Property prices have soared as a result. Districts that were once affordable, like Soma and the Mission, are being overrun by engineers and entrepreneurs, pricing out people who have long called them home.
Demand for office space is as heated as the housing market. Venture-capital firms once happy with just a spot on Palo Alto’s Sand Hill Road, which runs along the side of the Stanford University campus, have opened offices in San Francisco to be near the young, urban entrepreneurs who find the Valley distant and boring. Rents are rising fast enough—for San Francisco as a whole the price per square foot is up by over 30% since 2010—that some failed companies have made up a good bit of their losses thanks to the increased value of their office space. As in the dotcom bubble, startups are signing leases for offices far larger than they need so that they can lock in space at today’s high prices rather than tomorrow’s stratospheric ones. Those who think the property market is bad now should wait until more of the San Francisco-based firms go public, says Naval Ravikant of AngelList, a website that helps startups get funding.
As sure as the fog will roll in, at some point San Francisco’s tech economy will slow down. A rise in interest rates could make investors less enthusiastic about technology, because they could earn a higher yield elsewhere. A few well-known unicorns could collapse, killing the prospects of other startups raising funds. A sequence of down rounds across the sector could spook investors.
But the correction will not be like that of 2000. It will not be as indiscriminate, as deep, or as quick. The fact that so many of the large technology companies are private gives them more time to adjust to a market correction than technology companies had last time. Their investors could mark down the value of their investments slowly, as private-equity firms did during the financial crisis of 2008. In the dotcom bust many firms saw their values fall to zero. Many firms may be overvalued this time, too, but few are worth nothing.
Suspend your disbelief
A lot of the unicorns have strong underlying businesses and could pull in their horns if the market turned against them. Indeed, some firms are raising money so they have extra cash on hand just in case. “I’ve asked the board, what’s the best way to store fat for the winter,” says Mr Butterfield of Slack, the software company. “The best answer is cash. You can’t really store up goodwill.” According to Mr Butterfield, his firm has “hundreds of millions of dollars in the bank” and is close to breaking even. Many other unicorns have money that could help cushion them. Palantir, which does data analysis, had $1 billion in cash at the end of last year.
Booms and busts are part of the history of Silicon Valley, and California more generally. But the Valley’s influence over the future of consumers and capitalism is here to stay. It has become a nexus of dealmaking and fortune-seeking, a realm of creativity and wild ideas, and it will remain so. But the geeks and dreamers who populate the Valley will need to be able to navigate both smooth and rough waters. Some will try to go too high and wipe out into the bay. Others will be diverted by wild winds. But many will make it safely back to shore—only to head back out again for the thrill, the challenge and the future. |
[TLMC] Team Play Staff Showmatches Text by Plexa
It's been Thursday, Jul 18 7:00pm GMT (GMT+00:00) .
To remind you, the team play maps are competing for the following prizes provided by Blizzard and TeamLiquid:
1st Place: Mega Bloks Battlecruiser signed by the SC2 Dev Team, Razer Peripheral Set, $100
2nd Place: Kerrigan Action Figure signed by the SC2 Dev Team, Razer Peripheral Set, $50
3rd Place: HotS box art Poster signed by the SC2 Dev Team and Razer Banshee Headset
So which are the maps competing for these prizes?
The Finalists: Teamplay
TPW Drifas Throne
by Meerel
2v2
Features:
- Spawns are top vs bottom.
- Players are separated, but their naturals are joined via a back passage
- Both naturals can be easily walled, as if it were a 1v1 map
- Gold base between naturals will be a major focus point of strategy on this map
ESV Emrel Coast
by Timetwister22
2v2
Features:
- Spawns are bottom left, top right.
- Island expansions are very close to the mains
- Strategic highground divides the map in half
- Defensive macro oriented map
TPW Mystic
by monitor
2v2
Features:
- Spawns are Left vs Right or Top vs Bottom
- Map is split into two halves using a double layer of destructible rocks
- Left vs Right results in two '1v1' games until players break the rocks in the center or get air units
- Top vs Bottom results in an island map game
- Reminiscent of the hugely successful 2v2 map 'Iron Curtain'
TPW Sandlands
by lefix
2v2
Features:
- Spawns are bottom left vs top right.
- There are two in base expansions; one is safe one is exposed.
- Two central gold bases are very difficult to defend, but may prove to be major focal points in the late game
- One easy third base, other expansions are more difficult to secure
TPW Mooniacs
by lefix
3v3
Features:
- Spawns are bottom left vs top right.
- Every player has an easy to secure natural
- Thirds are reasonably easy to take as well
- Conducive to macro oriented play
TPW Rimfrost
by Meltage
3v3
Features:
- Spawns are bottom left vs top right
- Only two players have easy to secure naturals, the other has to do a little work before being able to secure the base
- Defensive highground allows players to fend off attacks easily but there are multiple paths so unit positioning is very important
CruX Breeze
by Semmo
4v4
Features:
- Spawns are top vs bottom (light circles vs dark circles)
- Highly aggressive map, most games will be mass Tier 1 or Tier 1.5 units
- Map will be very simple to play, but will require good team synergy to win games
- Channels the spirit of the map "The Hunters" from Brood War
ESV Retribution
by NewSunshine
4v4
Features:
- Spawns are bottom left vs top right.
- Standard style 4v4 map
- Every player has a possible natural and third to take
- Central gold bases may prove to be the difference in long games
Now what?
Each of the maps is going to be play tested by various factions of the TeamLiquid staff in a mini-tournament using a GSL style bracket (with an additional playoff between the two advancing teams). The competing teams are: TL Strategy, TL Writers, TL General and Liquipedia; each competing for eternal bragging rights over the other factions. After the tournament concludes we will open up the public vote for the maps, more details on that once the tournament concludes.
Writers Waxangel
Strategy Monk
TL General TheEmulator
Liquipedia pPingu
See appearances from Pokebunny, RSVP, Blade5555, thedwf, and more! Maybe your favorite staff member!
We also included a one gm per game rule, so TL Strategy doesn't destroy everyone. The matches are as follows, every set is best-of-3 except the finals which are best-of-5 with no winner's side advantage.
TeamLiquid Inter-staff Brawl Casted by ROOT.Nathanias
Thursday, Jul 18 6:00pm GMT (GMT+00:00)
TL Writers < Match 1 > TL Strategy
Liquipedia < Match 2 > TL General
??? < Winners > ???
??? < Losers > ???
??? < Consolation > ???
??? < Grand Final > ???
The map order is predetermined and is as follows:
Match 1: Mystic, Rimfrost, Drifas Ridge
Match 2: Retribution, Sandlands, Mooniacs
Winners: Emrel Coast, Breeze, Drifas
Losers: Rimfrost, Drifas Ridge, Retribution
Consolation: Sandlands, Mooniacs, Emrel Coast
Grand Final: Breeze, Mystic, Emrel Coast, Mooniacs, Retribution
It's been a little over a month since we crowned Frost as the victor of the 1v1 portion of the contest. But the TeamLiquid map contest is not over just yet, we still have to decide the winning team play maps. We thought the best way to showcase these maps off to you was to have a brawl between the various factions within the TeamLiquid staff and have the whole thing casted by ROOT.Nathanias for your viewing pleasure. This will happen atTo remind you, the team play maps are competing for the following prizes provided by Blizzard and TeamLiquid:Mega Bloks Battlecruiser signed by the SC2 Dev Team, Razer Peripheral Set, $100Kerrigan Action Figure signed by the SC2 Dev Team, Razer Peripheral Set, $50HotS box art Poster signed by the SC2 Dev Team and Razer Banshee HeadsetSo which are the maps competing for these prizes?Each of the maps is going to be play tested by various factions of the TeamLiquid staff in a mini-tournament using a GSL style bracket (with an additional playoff between the two advancing teams). The competing teams are: TL Strategy, TL Writers, TL General and Liquipedia; each competing for eternal bragging rights over the other factions. After the tournament concludes we will open up the public vote for the maps, more details on that once the tournament concludes.WritersWaxangelStrategyMonkTL GeneralTheEmulatorLiquipediapPinguSee appearances from Pokebunny, RSVP, Blade5555, thedwf, and more! Maybe your favorite staff member!We also included a one gm per game rule, so TL Strategy doesn't destroy everyone. The matches are as follows, every set is best-of-3 except the finals which are best-of-5 with no winner's side advantage.The map order is predetermined and is as follows:Match 1: Mystic, Rimfrost, Drifas RidgeMatch 2: Retribution, Sandlands, MooniacsWinners: Emrel Coast, Breeze, DrifasLosers: Rimfrost, Drifas Ridge, RetributionConsolation: Sandlands, Mooniacs, Emrel CoastGrand Final: Breeze, Mystic, Emrel Coast, Mooniacs, Retribution Administrator ~ Spirit will set you free ~ |
Information is power. This is the logic — or at least the aspiration — behind the U.S. government’s current approach to intelligence gathering: the more data (or metadata) in hand, the more control. The National Security Agency’s surveillance leviathan, funded by a black budget and presided over by a star-chamber court, suctions up almost inconceivable amounts of material from around the world, including your phone and computer. How did this begin, and where will it end?
History shows us that this is a story about empire. For more than a century, major innovations in U.S. intelligence-collection capacity have accompanied major expansions of U.S. influence on the world stage. In some cases, U.S. government agencies used distant theaters to test approaches they would later deploy on the home front. Elsewhere, they helped foreign police build internal surveillance systems. The trainers then returned to work in domestic law enforcement, employing the same practices locally. Either way, U.S. residents should worry. The information-management strategies the U.S. has used in projecting its power abroad have usually come home to roost.
It was during the United States’ bloody occupation of the Philippines after the Spanish-American War that U.S. policymakers first yoked intelligence collection to imperial expansion and then repatriated it. As the historian Alfred W. McCoy writes in “Policing America’s Empire,” U.S. colonial police, powered by a nascent information revolution and unfettered by constitutional restrictions, built an elaborate covert surveillance apparatus to help quell resistance. Their system maintained individual file cards on an astonishing 70 percent of the local population.
When the U.S. scaled down the occupation during World War I, veterans of the counterinsurgency effort, including the military intelligence pioneer Ralph Van Deman, returned to lead a large-scale ramp-up of domestic surveillance infrastructure, designed to provide the enforcement muscle for new legislation such as the 1917 Espionage Act and the 1918 Sedition Act. Among Van Deman’s achievements: a collaboration between his military intelligence division and the American Protective League, a private network of 300,000 citizen spies that even after the war spent decades targeting German-Americans, repressing labor militancy, spying on civil rights activists and identifying Hollywood communists for blacklisting. (Van Deman also amassed a personal archive of file cards on a quarter-million suspected U.S. subversives.)
As fears about fascism and communism escalated during the 1930s, U.S. attentions turned outward again. Franklin Roosevelt’s administration, eager to access the intelligence collected by foreign police forces, directed the Federal Bureau of Investigation to develop relationships with its counterparts abroad. The FBI helped countries such as Brazil and Colombia set up secret intelligence services from which the U.S. could profit, both by gaining access to foreign surveillance data and by honing strategies that could later be integrated into domestic police practices.
As the Cold War set in and the Central Intelligence Agency and the NSA were established (in 1947 and 1952, respectively), the U.S. not only stepped up its own intelligence collecting capabilities but also trained police forces in Japan, Greece and Uruguay, among others, in anti-communist counterinsurgency methods. Best dramatized by Costa-Gavras in the film “State of Siege,” this proxy training aimed to build on-the-ground surveillance capacity, allowing local allies to share the work of Cold War containment and simultaneously guaranteeing the U.S. government access to the information their allies could now capture.
Take the case of Guatemala. There, soon after the CIA helped orchestrate the 1954 coup that ousted the democratically elected leftist President Jacobo Arbenz, U.S. trainers arrived to help the new military government consolidate power. Their first order of business, as one U.S. adviser reported back, was to help the Guatemalan police optimize its “almost neurotic hypersensitiveness to communist activity” by updating its “hopelessly inadequate” filing system. Simply put, to hunt down enemies of the state — to track their movements, record their political opinions, identify their associates, map their daily routes and, ultimately, eliminate them — you had to keep good files on them. |
Is renting a picket fence the new American Dream?
You’ve probably seen the slew of reports recently confirming that homeownership is on the decline around the country — a trend begun during the Great Recession that has not changed during the recovery. The Census Bureau reported last month that the share of homeowners in America dropped to its lowest level since 1967 — since before humans walked on the moon!
This is not good news for renters. The more competition for rental units, the higher the prices. Zillow reported recently that rental prices were up 4.3% in June year over year, leading to this dismal proclamation by Zillow’s chief economist Stan Humphries: “Rents are insanely unaffordable on a historical basis in the United States right now.” Rent increases are far outpacing wage increases.
When rents rise like this, renters normally turn to purchasing homes. Mortgages offer one clear advantage over renting: fixed monthly payments. But housing prices are rising in many markets too, and the for-sale inventory is shrinking, Zillow says, meaning there aren’t many home bargains out there either.
The compromise between renting an apartment and buying a home is renting a single-family home. That’s traditionally a choice made by only a small number of Americans, but one of the trends-within-a-trend in the housing market is a tremendous surge in families doing just that. Here are some startling numbers from a recent report published by the Joint Center for Housing Studies at Harvard University.
‘Unprecedented’ Change
During the 1990s, single-family homes for rent grew at an average of 73,000 units annually. Pre-recession, growth jumped to 138,000. When the recession hit, that number soared to 513,000 annually. Add it all up, and one hidden consequence of the housing bubble burst is 3.2 million more American households rent their single-family home, rather than owning — a figure that accounts for nearly half the jump in all rentals post-recession.
“The recent growth of single-family rentals is unprecedented,” the Harvard report says.
Some of the reasons for this are obvious, some less so. Many Americans hit by the recession could no longer afford their house payments, or were no longer able to obtain mortgages because of bad credit scores or limited income. Renting single-family, detached homes became an attractive option for this group. Also, single-family housing construction projects begun during the housing bubble became difficult to sell when the bubble burst. Builders rushed to convert them to rental stock.
“When rental demand began to climb after the housing bust, conversions of owner-occupied single-family homes to rentals accommodated much of this growth. These shifts also helped to stabilize for-sale markets, especially in the Sunbelt metros with the largest inventories of distressed and vacant single-family homes,” the Harvard report said.
So conversion to rentals helped restore order to neighborhoods plagued by foreclosures; but some now fear that as the trend continues, it’s another factor squeezing out young adults trying to start families. Investors noticing the solid returns on rental homes are gobbling up that excess single-family housing stock, and have begun renting out homes en masse.
Data from RealtyTrac demonstrates the trend. Owner-occupant buyers accounted for 63.2% of all residential single family home and condo sales in the first quarter of 2015, down from 68.6% a year ago, to the lowest quarterly level going back to the first quarter of 2011, the earliest quarter with data available. Meanwhile non-owner-occupant buyers — any buyer who purchased a property but has their property tax bill mailed somewhere else — reached a new high of 36.8% in the first quarter of 2015.
Bad News for Would-Be Buyers
This trend is having unfortunate consequences for would-be first-time homebuyers. First, those who might rent a single-family home as a transition stage are facing the same competitive atmosphere that all renters are — rental fees are rising. More important, investors who have no plans to occupy the homes they buy are pushing up prices on what would otherwise be low-priced starter homes for families.
RealtyTrac data hints that, in some markets, larger investors have pulled back slightly from single-family home purchases … but smaller “mom-and-pop” investors have taken their place.
“Investor activity continues to represent a disproportionately high share of all home sales activity in this housing recovery,” said Daren Blomquist, vice president at RealtyTrac.
And hot housing markets are a big target for investors — contributing to rising prices and rents.
“Among metropolitan statistical areas with a population of at least 500,000, Memphis, Tennessee, posted the highest share of institutional investor purchases of single family homes in the first quarter of 2015 — 14.1 percent — followed by Charlotte, North Carolina (12.1 percent), Atlanta, Georgia (9.6 percent), Jacksonville, Florida (8.5 percent), and Oklahoma City, Oklahoma (7.6 percent),” RealtyTrac says.
It all adds up to higher prices for families trying to move out of apartments and trying to find a home to live in, buying or renting. But the shift to a renter-heavy mix in neighborhoods might have longer-term social consequences, warns housing expert Logan Mohtashami, a loan officer in California.
“Are we at the beginning of a sociological movement away from middle-class home ownership and towards a cultural split between the investment property landlords and their renters both of whom may have less personal investment in neighborhood security, local schools and shared public facilities compared to primary homeowners,” he said. “The longer-term consequences of an unstable residential real estate market may be more serious than just the destruction of individual wealth. The ideal of middle-class homeownership may be at stake.”
More From Credit.com: |
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Sunken treasure lies 25 feet beneath the sea off North Carolina, where archaeologists are probing the wreck of the Queen Anne’s Revenge -- the flagship in the dread pirate Blackbeard’s flotilla.
But this treasure won’t sparkle and gleam, and it definitely isn’t locked in a dead man’s chest.
“The project calls for the recovery of all the materials. Everything. All the weapons, all the bits of the ship, all the personal items. Everything. If it’s down there, it’s coming up,” project leader Billy Ray Morris told FoxNews.com on Wednesday.
Morris and a group of 14 marine archaeologists, technicians and restoration experts from the Underwater Archaeology Branch of the N.C. Department of Cultural Resources believe the Queen Anne's Revenge itself is a treasure trove, a unique repository of history from centuries ago. They plan to salvage the entire remains of the pirate ship by 2014. Cannon by cannon, plank by plank.
'We’ve got the plates they ate off. We’ve got bones with butcher’s marks.' — Project director Billy Ray Morris
“I’ve worked on shipwrecks all around the world, and this is one of the coolest,” Morris said.
Pulled from the ocean's chemical stew, the artifacts are taken to a lab in Greenville, where it may take as much as a decade to leach out 300 years worth of salt and sea, preparing the ship for the final phase of its life out of the water. More than 280,000 such artifacts have already been recovered; many are Many artifacts are displayed in an exhibit at the N.C. Maritime Museum in Beaufort. It will ultimately provide a detailed look at 18th century life, information Morris said is hard to come by.
“It’s not like these guys left their memoirs," he told FoxNews.com. "We’re looking at the stuff that these guys used on a daily basis.”
The Queen Anne's Revenge ran aground in Beaufort in June 1718, on the western side of the channel. Morris said the ship was most likely intentionally grounded; historical documentation indicates Blackbeard wanted to downsize his flotilla of four ships -- and the crew that sailed on them.
“So there would be fewer guys he had to split the goodies with,” Morris said.
Intersal, Inc., a private research firm, discovered the site in late 1996. The Department of Cultural Resources has been working it ever since, bit by bit. In 2009, they recovered the ship's anchor. The interest is driven in part because this pirate ship was not always a pirate ship: Queen Anne’s Revenge was built as a privateer, then served as a slave ship before coming under Blackbeard’s command.
“We’re going to have a magnificent collection,” Morris told FoxNews.com. “We’ve got the plates they ate off. We’ve got bones with butcher’s marks.”
A treasure chest is an unlikely find in the wreckage: When you sink your own pirate ship, you pull the loot off it first. But what does exist, 300 years after the ship was abandoned in shallow waters, will be of incalculable value for future scholars, Morris said. There is navigation equipment, weaponry, ceramics, glass wear, personal effects, material from the African slave trade and more. These items often are locked in a concrete like crust of sand, shells and marine life that must be removed during the conservation process.
But first, bits of the ship itself.
“Right now I’m working on anchors and ballast and some exterior planking,” Morris said.
A mid-June dive ended with the recovery of two 8-foot long cannons; 15 have been recovered to date, and six other cannons still await recovery. The weather Tuesday was unfit for diving, however, even in the shallow waters where the Queen Anne’s Revenge lies.
“In shallow water, 6-foot swells will throw you all over on the bottom and preclude doing any sort of work,” Morris told FoxNews.com.
“This is a really cool wreck,” he said. |
Judge To Redraw Florida's Congressional Maps After Legislature Fails To Reach Deal
Enlarge this image toggle caption Chris O'Meara/AP Chris O'Meara/AP
A Florida judge will draw up new maps for the state's 27 congressional districts. After meeting in a two-week special session, Florida's House and Senate adjourned without agreeing on what the maps, ordered by the State Supreme Court, should look like.
This was the Florida Legislature's third attempt to draw congressional maps that comply with the state Constitution. Under an amendment adopted by voters in 2010, Florida's Legislature must compile maps for congressional and legislative districts that don't protect incumbents or political parties.
But although Florida's House and Senate are both controlled by Republicans, the two bodies were unable to come to an agreement. They adjourned amid acrimony between House and Senate leaders. It was an atmosphere similar to that when the regular session ended in April with an impasse over whether to expand Medicaid. Republican leaders denied that feud carried over into this special session.
With the failure of the Legislature to produce new maps, the job of shaping Florida's 27 congressional districts now falls to state Judge Terry Lewis, who has ordered hearings in September.
Even though finalized congressional maps are still at least a month away, redistricting has already shaken up next year's races in Florida. After the State Supreme Court said Florida's 13th Congressional was one of several to be redrawn, Republican Rep. David Jolly announced he would not run for re-election. Instead, he joined the race for the seat being vacated by Florida Sen. Marco Rubio. When it's redrawn, Jolly's district is expected to lean Democratic. Former Florida Gov. Charlie Crist, a Democrat who lives in the district, now says he's likely to run.
Redistricting is also likely to affect several other incumbents in Florida, including Republican Daniel Webster, whose 10th Congressional District near Orlando is likely to lean Democratic when redrawn. Florida's 2nd Congressional District is expected to become more Republican. Democratic first-termer Gwen Graham says she is waiting to see final maps before making a final decision on whether to run for re-election.
The breakdown in Tallahassee over congressional maps is a preview of what may be another dysfunctional special session of the Legislature set for October. The Legislature is reconvening then to draw up new maps for state Senate seats after agreeing in court that those also had improperly injected politics into the redistricting process. |
The common wisdom is that gas stations make almost no profit off the gas itself (the gas companies make a ton of profit, of course) and must have side businesses like garages and, above all, snack shops to turn a profit.
What if you were to turn that equation on its head and add a "filling station" to, say, a Starbucks? That's the intriguing possibility raised by an article on SFGate about Hyatt Hotels and Tesla Motors, the Google-founders-financed electric car start-up. (It's also been written up on CNET News.com.)
"Hyatt will install Tesla recharging stations at three hotels, stretching in an arc from San Francisco to Lake Tahoe.... By placing rechargers at Hyatts at Fisherman's Wharf, Sacramento and Incline Village on Tahoe's North Shore, a Tesla owner could drive from San Francisco to the lake without fear of running out of juice. Tesla has already driven one of the roadsters from Tahoe back to the company's San Carlos headquarters without recharging, but that was downhill, said Diarmuid O'Connell, Tesla's director of corporate marketing."
The two companies talked up the brand alignment between them, and how a Tesla customer is a Hyatt customer. Whether that's true or not, it's rather more upscale than an oil company aligning itself with, say, a fast food company to supply burgers at its stations.
Hotels are good places for charging because customers will leave their cars overnight. Starbucks could enter the picture when you can charge more quickly.
A separate news item in Technology Review about secretive battery manufacturer EEstore claims that they have a battery technology that will give a range of 200 miles--and charge in less than 10 minutes. If it's true (and there are plenty of skeptics), that would make a Starbucks a perfect place to add a charger. Pull up and park, plug your car in, stand in line for a latte, come on out and you're off with another 200 miles. It would transform the aesthetic and tone of "filling up" from one that has become grimy and unpleasant to one that is clean and faintly European.
Star Wars Episode 9 filming wraps: But where's that title? Director J.J. Abrams says the milestone "feels impossible." The great white shark's genetic healing powers have been decoded: We know more about how they potentially stave off cancer.
The gas station as a " third place ." I love it. |
Washington D.C. — (RT) A GOP congressman has called on the Bible for help with a verse condemning homosexuality – right ahead of the vote on a Democrat-proposed amendment that would prohibit work discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation.
Shortly before voting started on Thursday on the Energy-Water appropriations bill, a freshman member had read a verse that essentially calls for death to homosexuals.
Rick W. Allen, the Georgia Republican with the Bible, went straight for the jugular with Romans 1:18-32 and Revelations 22:18-19, which greatly antagonized gay activists who called for him to be censured.
“And likewise also the men, leaving the natural use of the woman, burned in their lust one toward another; men with men working that which is unseemly, and receiving in themselves that recompense of their error which was meet,” the verse goes.
@RepRickAllen We admire your courage. God bless you for referencing Scripture in determining legislation and reading publicly. — Zane Lassiter (@ZaneLassiter) May 28, 2016
“Being filled with all unrighteousness, fornication, wickedness, covetousness, maliciousness; full of envy, murder, debate, deceit, malignity; whisperers, Backbiters, haters of God, despiteful, proud, boasters, inventors of evil things, disobedient to parents, Without understanding, covenant breakers, without natural affection, implacable, unmerciful: Who knowing the judgment of God, that they which commit such things are worthy of death, not only do the same, but have pleasure in them that do them,” some of the other colorful bits went that Allen read.
Allen’s aide told journalists he hadn’t said any of this in reference to the gay discrimination amendment, but senior vice president with the Human Rights Campaign, Jo Dee Winterhof, decided to take aim at Allen for the remarks, which she says could have serious repercussions, whether he intended them to or not.
“At a time when LGBT people face staggering rates of discrimination, harassment and violence, Representative Allen’s comments spread hate that does real harm,” she said in a statement.
https://twitter.com/georgiapreacher/status/736401648143077378
The actual bill had nothing to do with homosexuality and contained a lot of other provisions on water and energy; the LGBT rights amendment went as one of the attachments.
The amendment passed by a vote of 223-195. But the spending bill was ultimately defeated by 305-112. The GOP constituted the bulk of the ‘no’ votes.
Democratic Rep. Sean Patrick Maloney, the first openly gay congressman, who introduced the proposal, heard of Allen’s reading after the fact, saying the Republicans “are starting to show their true colors” if they think it’s ok to threaten “eternal damnation” on those who protect people from being fired for who they are. |
Icons following colors
As breeze is a monochrome icon set the contrast is one of the biggest issues. With Plasma 5.6, the developers solved this problem by applying the system color scheme to the icons. Now the icons use the same color (and contrast) as the text. With this shiny new feature, users can define the colors of the icon set by themselves.
To bring this feature to the user, ALL icons have to have include a style component. Marco Martin added the style stuff with a script but we had a second issue, the file size. In the last release (KF 5.20), the breeze icons need 28 mb of disk size, the applet icons for the widget explorer therefore need way too long to render, … so it was time for a rework.
How does the style stuff work? It follows an SVG standard and you define in the header <defs> area the styled colors and in the body you use in style instead of fill:#f2f2f2 fill:currentColor and define the class=”ColorScheme-Text” which say use the defined Text color from the color scheme.
With the Qt app “SVG Cleaner”, the colored icons were optimized and all monochrome icons were optimized in this way:
<svg xmlns="http://www.w3.org/2000/svg" viewBox="0 0 22 22"> <defs id="defs3051"> <style type="text/css" id="current-color-scheme"> .ColorScheme-Text { color:#f2f2f2 } </style> </defs> <path style="fill:currentColor;fill-opacity:1;stroke:none" d="M 3 3 L 3 4 L 3 19 L 4 19 L 14 19 L 14 18 L 4 18 L 4 10 L 7 10 L 7 9.9921875 L 7.0078125 10 L 9.0078125 8 L 18 8 L 18 14 L 19 14 L 19 5 L 12.007812 5 L 10.007812 3 L 10 3.0078125 L 10 3 L 4 3 L 3 3 z M 16 14 L 16 16 L 14 16 L 14 17 L 16 17 L 16 19 L 17 19 L 17 17 L 19 17 L 19 16 L 17 16 L 17 14 L 16 14 z " class="ColorScheme-Text" /> </svg>
Remove ⅔ of the code
Make a template file with only the needed elements, SVG header, style element and the path section was removed with the individual file input. As I’m not a developer it was done by hand. So it took a while but now all monochrome icons can be styled according to the color scheme and the disk size is now 9,4 mb instead of 28,0 mb for the 6.183 breeze icons.
As the icons got rid of unnecessary code the rendering should now be way faster, and with the style stuff I hope to find users to play with it and will find nice solutions for our awesome Plasma desktop.
Open Issue
All in all there is one (big) issue: The style stuff works for now only for Plasma and QML apps, but I hope that in the future we can have this feature for the (QWidget) KDE applications, too.
So if you are an icon designer, bring this shiny new functionality to your icon set and the devs will bring the functionality to the KDE applications.
Werbeanzeigen |
AP Photo Trump: Reports of delegates organizing against him are media 'hoax'
Donald Trump says he isn't worried about delegates organizing against him at the Republican National Convention next month — but he spent a large part of his rally in Las Vegas on Saturday afternoon insisting that it won't happen.
The presumptive Republican nominee, speaking from the Treasure Island hotel and casino, insisted that the story "is all made up by the press. It's a hoax."
Story Continued Below
POLITICO reported on Friday the efforts by dozens of anti-Trump delegates to block Trump from securing the GOP nomination in Cleveland. Republican National Committee officials and party leaders have dismissed the idea that someone other than Trump could be the nominee, but the effort is one of the most significant to come together since the Republican primary ended.
“Who are they going to pick? I beat everybody,” Trump said. “I beat the hell out of them. And we’re going to beat Hillary.”
Trump continued: “And it’d be helpful if the Republicans could help us a little bit.”
Trump also suggested that if Republicans don’t unite behind him, he’ll move forward by funding his own campaign.
“If they don’t want to help out as much, I’ll fund my own campaign,” he said. “I'd love to do that.”
Continuing to fund his own campaign, Trump said, would be “the easy way” to go about raising money.
“I’ll just keep doing what I’m doing,” he said. |
U.S. Chamber of Commerce
1615 H Street Northwest
Washington, D.C.
In 1802, when Washington, D.C., was still a federal territory, the land on which the United States Chamber of Commerce stands was valued at two cents per square foot. Today, that location — directly across Lafayette Park from the White House — is one of the most historic and valuable pieces of real estate in the nation's capital — if not in the entire country.
The rich history of the U.S. Chamber building traces itself back to one of the 19th century's greatest thinkers, Daniel Webster. In 1841, friends of Webster purchased a three-and-a-half story home on the ground now occupied by the U.S. Chamber building. Webster's home was the site of a number of historic events, including final negotiations with Great Britain over Maine's boundaries that resulted in the Webster-Ashburton Treaty of 1842.
In 1849, Webster sold his house to the prominent Washingtonian W.W. Corcoran, whose art collection today remains close by. Several other dignitaries lived in Webster's former home over the years before the U.S. Chamber of Commerce ultimately purchased the land. It broke ground in 1922, having selected Cass Gilbert, designer of the Supreme Court Building and the Treasury Annex in Washington, D.C., and one of the most renowned architects of the day, to design a building to reflect the organization's prestigious mission.
Three years and $3 million dollars later, the U.S. business community had its headquarters. Marked by three-story Corinthian columns and an Indiana limestone surface, the exterior of the building reflects the Chamber's commitment to solid, traditional American values, while the interior public rooms and space reflect the organization's dynamic, forward-thinking mission.
Meeting Spaces
The first floor of the Chamber is lined with a series of public meeting rooms, the largest and grandest of which is the Hall of Flags, referred to for many years as the Council Chamber. With teakwood floors, high walls of French Crazanne marble, and an elaborate ceiling design reminiscent of the Italian Renaissance, the Hall of Flags has been the site of important addresses delivered by a succession of U.S. presidents, including Gerald Ford, Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan, George H.W. Bush, Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, and Barack Obama. Foreign leaders regularly speak at the Chamber, and this roster includes Egypt's Anwar Sadat and Hosni Mubarak, the Philippine's Corazon Aquino, and India's Rajiv Gandhi.
The Hall of Flags takes its name from the banners of 12 great explorers who blazed the paths of trade and planted the first seeds of commercial and industrial growth in the New World: Columbus, Cabot, Vespucci, Hudson, Cartier, La Salle, Ponce de Leon, de Soto, Magellan, Drake, Balboa, and Cortez.
The Library, originally called the Reception Room, has a ceiling decorated in an elaborate carved effect similar to that in the Hall of Flags, and today functions as a meeting place for Chamber staff and visitors.
The Briefing Center, which occupies a former open-air courtyard, is, like all of the Chamber's public rooms, equipped with state-of-the-art communications technology for audio and visual broadcasts and cybercasting. The architecture of this meeting room was designed to capture the feeling of an atrium — the patterned carpet symbolizes the central fountain, the ceiling resembles a blue sky, and the frosted glass doors surrounding the room on all sides are what one would expect around a garden. |
cal - Display a Calendar in Your Terminal 2016-05-09 — 2072 Words — 14 min
This is my first post in the Command Line Monday series. It gives a short introduction to a useful command line tool every Monday.
cal is part of the Single UNIX Specification and is should therefore be installed on every unix-like operating system.
The official manual of cal in the unix specification defines only 3 commands:
$ cal May 2016 Su Mo Tu We Th Fr Sa 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31
$ cal 2015 2015 January February March Su Mo Tu We Th Fr Sa Su Mo Tu We Th Fr Sa Su Mo Tu We Th Fr Sa 1 2 3 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 29 30 31 April May June Su Mo Tu We Th Fr Sa Su Mo Tu We Th Fr Sa Su Mo Tu We Th Fr Sa 1 2 3 4 1 2 1 2 3 4 5 6 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 26 27 28 29 30 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 28 29 30 31 July August September Su Mo Tu We Th Fr Sa Su Mo Tu We Th Fr Sa Su Mo Tu We Th Fr Sa 1 2 3 4 1 1 2 3 4 5 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 26 27 28 29 30 31 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 27 28 29 30 30 31 October November December Su Mo Tu We Th Fr Sa Su Mo Tu We Th Fr Sa Su Mo Tu We Th Fr Sa 1 2 3 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 1 2 3 4 5 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 29 30 27 28 29 30 31
$ cal 9 2015 September 2015 Su Mo Tu We Th Fr Sa 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30
Simple but useful. That’s what we love about Unix.
Real world implementations which can be found on Mac OS, BSD and of course GNU/Linux are, however, much more powerful and have some nifty additional features. We’ll have closer look at the GNU version, also called gcal . It’s installed on Ubuntu per default and can be installed on Mac OS with Homebrew: brew install gcal
One very useful command for example is gcal --holiday-list --cc-holiday=<location-code> or the short form gcal -n -q <location-code> , where <location-code> is a two letter country code plus (sometimes) a two letter territory code.
Example output:
$ gcal --holiday-list --cc-holidays=us_ca Eternal holiday list: The year 2016 is A leap year New Year's Day (US_CA) + Fri, Jan: 1st:2016 = -51 days Martin L. King's Day (US_CA) + Mon, Jan:18th:2016 = -34 days Groundhog Day (US_CA) - Tue, Feb 2nd 2016 = -19 days President Lincoln's Birthday (US_CA) + Fri, Feb:12th:2016 = -9 days St Valentine's Day (US_CA) - Sun, Feb 14th 2016 = -7 days Presidents' Day (US_CA) + Mon, Feb:15th:2016 = -6 days St Patrick's Day (US_CA) - Thu, Mar 17th 2016 = +25 days Good Friday (US_CA) * Fri, Mar 25th 2016 = +33 days Cesar Chavez Day (US_CA) + Thu, Mar:31st:2016 = +39 days All Fool's Day (US_CA) - Fri, Apr 1st 2016 = +40 days Prayer Day (US_CA) - Thu, May 5th 2016 = +74 days Nurses' Day (US_CA) - Fri, May 6th 2016 = +75 days Mother's Day (US_CA) - Sun, May 8th 2016 = +77 days Armed Forces Day (US_CA) - Sat, May 21st 2016 = +90 days Remembrance/Memorial Day (US_CA) + Mon, May:30th:2016 = +99 days Father's Day (US_CA) - Sun, Jun 19th 2016 = +119 days Independence Day (US_CA) + Mon, Jul: 4th:2016 = +134 days Parent's Day (US_CA) - Sun, Jul 24th 2016 = +154 days Friendship Day (US_CA) - Sun, Aug 7th 2016 = +168 days Labour Day (US_CA) + Mon, Sep: 5th:2016 = +197 days Admission Day (US_CA) + Fri, Sep: 9th:2016 = +201 days Grandparents' Day (US_CA) - Sun, Sep 11th 2016 = +203 days Citizenship Day (US_CA) - Sat, Sep 17th 2016 = +209 days Children's Day (US_CA) - Sun, Oct 9th 2016 = +231 days Columbus Day (US_CA) + Mon, Oct:10th:2016 = +232 days Sweetest Day (US_CA) - Sat, Oct 15th 2016 = +237 days Bosses' Day (US_CA) - Sun, Oct 16th 2016 = +238 days Mother in Law's Day (US_CA) - Wed, Oct 26th 2016 = +248 days Halloween (US_CA) - Mon, Oct 31st 2016 = +253 days Veteran's Day (US_CA) + Fri, Nov:11th:2016 = +264 days Thanksgiving Day (US_CA) + Thu, Nov:24th:2016 = +277 days Thanksgiving Day (US_CA) + Fri, Nov:25th:2016 = +278 days Christmas Day (US_CA) + Mon, Dec:26th:2016 = +309 days Kwanzaa (US_CA) - Mon, Dec 26th 2016 = +309 days Kwanzaa (US_CA) - Tue, Dec 27th 2016 = +310 days Kwanzaa (US_CA) - Wed, Dec 28th 2016 = +311 days Kwanzaa (US_CA) - Thu, Dec 29th 2016 = +312 days Kwanzaa (US_CA) - Fri, Dec 30th 2016 = +313 days Kwanzaa (US_CA) - Sat, Dec 31st 2016 = +314 days
There are also countless options to change the display range and the output formatting.
gcal . - Display the last, the current and the next month
- Display the last, the current and the next month gcal -j - Display the days as day of the year instead of day of the month (e.g. 342 instead of 7)
- Display the days as day of the year instead of day of the month (e.g. 342 instead of 7) gcal 3-7 - Display days of month 3 to 7
- Display days of month 3 to 7 …
Time range and filtering options can of course also be combined.
Another interesting feature is gcals ability to load calendar entries from a so called resource file. Basically it’s a list of dates and a corresponding text. To try it out create the file ~/.gcalrc with following content:
20160428 1. Write your first "Command Line Monday" post! 00000428 It's John's %B1987 Birthday 0 Today is %>1*K , %>02&*D %U %Y ! 0 It's the %>03&*N day of the year. 0 The week number is: %k 0 It's %t* o'clock, Mr. %-USER 0 Hurry up with your work,\ sunrise is at %o+5158+00738+61,2: . 0 Moon phase %>03*O ~Text %Z
If you now run gcal --today and it was 2016-04-28 or you specify the date with gcal --list-of-fixed-dates %20160428 (short gcal -c %20160428 ) you get following result:
$ gcal --list-of-fixed-dates %20160428 Fixed date list: Thu, Apr<28th>2016: 1. Write your first "Command Line Monday" post! Thu, Apr<28th>2016: Hurry up with your work, sunrise is at 06:03. Thu, Apr<28th>2016: It's 09:56am o'clock, Mr. adrian Thu, Apr<28th>2016: It's John's 29 Birthday Thu, Apr<28th>2016: It's the 119th day of the year. Thu, Apr<28th>2016: Moon phase 066%- Text @@@@@@@@@@ ) @@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@ ) @@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@ ) @@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@ ) @@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@ ) @@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@ ) @@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@ ) @@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@ ) @@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@ ) @@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@ ) @@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@ ) @@@@@@@@@@@@ ) Thu, Apr<28th>2016: The week number is: 17 Thu, Apr<28th>2016: Today is Thursday, 28th April 2016!
As you can see gcal has some crazy features. And displaying the current moon phase as well calculating the current sunrise and sunset times are just the beginning. There is even a feature to adjust the sunrise time by specifying the current atmospheric air pressure. 😯 This, however, is completely out of the scope of this post. If you want to dig deeper, I recommend you to check out the official gcal manual. It’s quite a read.
I’d be really excited to hear all the use cases for gcal one can come up with. Seems really suited for a TODO list manager or to never forget a birthday again. Maybe even as a ssh-synced shared company calendar app where every employee has its own resource file.
Let me hear your thoughts on this!
I hope you enjoyed my first post of the “Command Line Monday” series. Make sure to come back next Monday for a new post! If you are afraid that you might miss it you can go to the landing page and sign up for my newsletter to get a friendly reminder!
This post got unexpectedly quite some traction on Hacker News 😁 and therefore I just wanted to highlight a few of the interesting things people mentioned in the comments.
A lot of people thought that Monday should be the first day of the week and I completely agree! It’s the official ISO 8601 standard after all. (And as you can read in Germany — You have failed the metric system, standards mean a lot to me!)
For convenience I use following script on my mac to alias cal :
#! /usr/bin/env bash gcal --starting-day = 1 " $1 "
This uses Monday as the first day of the week. Problem solved 😊
Bushra8 also mentioned a cool flag which displays the astronomical holidays. I.e. the next full moon or the next lunar eclipse.
$ gcal --holiday-list --astronomical-holidays Eternal holiday list: The year 2016 is A leap year New Moon 01:30 ( Ast ) - Sun, Jan 10th 2016 = -127 days Waxing Half Moon 23:26 ( Ast ) - Sat, Jan 16th 2016 = -121 days Full Moon 01:46 ( Ast ) - Sun, Jan 24th 2016 = -113 days Waning Half Moon 03:28 ( Ast ) - Mon, Feb 1st 2016 = -105 days New Moon 14:39 ( Ast ) - Mon, Feb 8th 2016 = -98 days Waxing Half Moon 07:46 ( Ast ) - Mon, Feb 15th 2016 = -91 days Full Moon 18:20 ( Ast ) - Mon, Feb 22nd 2016 = -84 days Waning Half Moon 23:11 ( Ast ) - Tue, Mar 1st 2016 = -76 days New Moon 01:54 ( Ast ) - Wed, Mar 9th 2016 = -68 days Solar Eclipse/Total 01:57 ( Ast ) - Wed, Mar 9th 2016 = -68 days Waxing Half Moon 17:03 ( Ast ) - Tue, Mar 15th 2016 = -62 days Equinox Day 04:30 ( Ast ) - Sun, Mar 20th 2016 = -57 days Full Moon 12:01 ( Ast ) - Wed, Mar 23rd 2016 = -54 days Lunar Eclipse/Penumbral 11:47 ( Ast ) - Wed, Mar 23rd 2016 = -54 days Waning Half Moon 15:17 ( Ast ) - Thu, Mar 31st 2016 = -46 days …
If you have any comments, thoughts, or other feedback feel free to tweet me @AdrianSieber. Thanks for your help! 😊 |
Oregon Sues Oracle Over Failed Healthcare Website
Oracle first sued Oregon, and now the state responds with lawsuit claiming the company's "shoddy" performance is to blame for health insurance exchange website debacle.
10 Big Data Online Courses (Click image for larger view and slideshow.)
As threatened, the State of Oregon is suing Oracle, blaming the quality of the company's software and consulting services for the state's failure to produce a health insurance exchange website where citizens could sign up to receive coverage.
Although many state health insurance websites and the federal HealthCare.gov failed to perform as intended on October 1, 2013 -- the scheduled start of open enrollment under the Affordable Care Act championed by President Obama -- Oracle was the runt of the litter. The Cover Oregon website never enrolled anyone entirely online, although the state managed to enroll more than 100,000 citizens anyway through back-end processes, including a version of the website available only to insurance agents and other intermediaries.
For months, Oregon Gov. John Kitzhaber has been threatening a lawsuit against Oregon, the lead contractor on the project. It took long enough that, meanwhile, Oracle filed its own lawsuit against the state, suggesting that the state was dragging the company's name through the mud as a political tactic without any legal basis. Oracle disputes many of the basic facts, including the charge that the version of its website intended for public consumption was never functional enough to launch. Oracle says the state elected not to launch it for political reasons.
[Cloud storage gets down to business -- read Google Drive For Work: Unlimited Storage Tempts Businesses.]
Oregon's complaint filed Friday morning in Marion County Circuit Court accuses Oracle of charging hundreds of millions of dollars for software and consulting services and "then repeatedly breached those contracts by failing to deliver on its obligations, overcharging for poorly trained Oracle personnel to provide incompetent work, hiding from the State the true extent of Oracle's shoddy performance, continuing to promise what it could not deliver, and wilfully refusing to honor its warranty to fix its errors without charge."
In response, Oracle released a brief prepared statement: "The lawsuit filed today against Oracle by the Attorney General of Oregon is a desperate attempt to deflect blame from Cover Oregon and the Governor for their failures to manage a complex IT project. The complaint is a fictional account of the Oregon Healthcare Project. Oracle is confident that the truth - and Oracle - will prevail in this action and the one filed by Oracle against Cover Oregon two weeks ago in federal court."
"Today's lawsuit clearly explains how egregiously Oracle has disserved Oregonians and our state agencies," Attorney General Rosenblum said in a prepared statement, part of a press release announcing the lawsuit. "Over the course of our investigation, it became abundantly clear that Oracle repeatedly lied and defrauded the state. Through this legal action, we intend to make our state whole, and make sure taxpayers aren't left holding the bag."
Although the state lays responsibility for the failure of the project on Oracle, one of the counter-claims from Oracle -- and also an observation made in several independent audits and investigative reports -- is that the state took on overall responsibility for the project when it decided against hiring a systems integrator. Oracle never accepted that responsibility, at least not officially, and maintains it was merely the largest contractor among several working on the project. A systems integrator might have acted as the general contractor, keeping everything on schedule and making sure requirements were clearly defined, but because the state was acting as its own integrator it bears the ultimate responsibility for whatever pieces fell through the cracks.
The state's lawsuit claims this structure was the result of behind-the scenes maneuvering early in the project. Oregon's Department of Health Services originally planned to hire a systems integrator, but Oracle personnel argued that doing so would just cause delay. "Oracle recommended to the State that it hire Oracle's own internal consulting unit, Oracle Consulting Services, to play the same role. Oracle also offered to provide training services to State employees, enabling the State to believe that it, along with Oracle, could co-manage the Projects without hiring an independent Systems Integrator. Oracle continued to support the State's decision through the life of the project," reads the complaint.
"Oracle's behind-the-scene scheme paid off, for Oracle," it continues. "Oracle convinced the State to spend millions of dollars more to use Oracle Consulting Services to design, plan, integrate and manage the Projects. Oracle became, in effect, the Systems Integrator, bringing on project managers and taking the lead in proposing system architecture, selecting software and hardware, and managing the Projects. From 2011 on, Oracle was the technical lead on both Projects and was responsible for the development of the technology."
Oracle presented the state with more than $240 million in "false claims," according the lawsuit. In addition to going after Oracle Corp. for penalties and a refund of money paid to it, the suit names six Oracle employees including CEO Safra Catz as having personal responsibility for the alleged failures.
Find out how NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory addressed governance, risk, and compliance for its critical public cloud services. Get the new Cloud Governance At NASA issue of InformationWeek Government Tech Digest today. (Free registration required.)
David F. Carr oversees InformationWeek's coverage of government and healthcare IT. He previously led coverage of social business and education technologies and continues to contribute in those areas. He is the editor of Social Collaboration for Dummies (Wiley, Oct. 2013) and ... View Full Bio
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This reform could allow a student to completely customize her transcript – and “college” experience – while allowing federal aid to follow her through all of these different options.
Students could mix and match courses, programs, tests, on-line and on-campus credits a la carte, pursuing their degree or certification at their own pace... while bringing down costs to themselves, their families, and the taxpayers.
This is what conservative reform should be trying to create: an open, affordable, innovative higher education system to better serve and secure all Americans in a global information economy.
Taken together, some more take-home pay, more time with the kids, a shorter commute, and more access to college won’t necessarily revolutionize our society, or cause the oceans to recede, or make everyone rich.
What they – and other conservative reforms – could and should do is make our economy a little stronger, our society a little fairer, and life a little better for America’s moms, and dads, and children.
And that’s a mandate for leadership in any generation.
There is obviously much more to be done. But the point I’ve tried to make – and the lesson I hope we take – is that the Republican Party, at its best, is a Party of Ideas.
It is ideas that unite and inspire conservatives. The leaders of Reagan’s generation understood that. And we must, too.
Especially in the wake of recent controversies, many conservatives are more frustrated with the establishment than ever before. And we have every reason to be.
But however justified, frustration is not a platform. Anger is not an agenda. And outrage, as a habit, is not even conservative. Outrage, resentment, and intolerance are gargoyles of the Left. For us, optimism is not just a message – it’s a principle. American conservatism, at its core, is about gratitude, and cooperation, and trust, and above all hope.
It is also about inclusion. Successful political movements are about identifying converts, not heretics. This, too, is part of the challenge before us.
In his 1977 CPAC speech effectively kicking off that era’s great conservative debate, Ronald Reagan said:
“If we truly believe in our principles, we should sit down and talk. Talk with anyone, anywhere, at any time if it means talking about the principles for the Republican Party. Conservatism is not a narrow ideology, nor is it the exclusive property of conservative activists.” |
Buy the Perth Mint 5 gram Gold Bar for as low as $17.95 over melt!
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Mint: Perth Mint
Composition: Five grams of .9999 fine gold
Comes protected inside an assay card
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Obverse
The obverse features the Perth Mint’s seal, which showcases a graceful swan; the swan is the state emblem of Western Australia, home to the Perth Mint. Below, the purity and weight are stamped into the bar.
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Assay Card
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The technical specifications of each bar are printed on the back of the card, including purity, weight, and an individual serial number. Bars may come in either green or black assay cards.
Shipping Info
Each gold bar ships in a sealed tamper-evident assay card in new condition.
Place your order online or call a customer service representative at 800-313-3315. |
Image Ownership: Public domain
The Haitian Revolution has often been described as the largest and most successful slave rebellion in the Western Hemisphere. Slaves initiated the rebellion in 1791 and by 1803 they had succeeded in ending not just slavery but French control over the colony. The Haitian Revolution, however, was much more complex, consisting of several revolutions going on simultaneously. These revolutions were influenced by the French Revolution of 1789, which would come to represent a new concept of human rights, universal citizenship, and participation in government.
In the 18th century, Saint Dominigue, as Haiti was then known, became France’s wealthiest overseas colony, largely because of its production of sugar, coffee, indigo, and cotton generated by an enslaved labor force. When the French Revolution broke out in 1789 there were five distinct sets of interest groups in the colony. There were white planters—who owned the plantations and the slaves—and petit blancs, who were artisans, shop keepers and teachers. Some of them also owned a few slaves. Together they numbered 40,000 of the colony’s residents. Many of the whites on Saint Dominigue began to support an independence movement that began when France imposed steep tariffs on the items imported into the colony. The planters were extremely disenchanted with France because they were forbidden to trade with any other nation. Furthermore, the white population of Saint-Dominique did not have any representation in France. Despite their calls for independence, both the planters and petit blancs remained committed to the institution of slavery.
The three remaining groups were of African descent: those who were free, those who were slaves, and those who had run away. There were about 30,000 free black people in 1789. Half of them were mulatto and often they were wealthier than the petit blancs. The slave population was close to 500,000. The runaway slaves were called maroons; they had retreated deep into the mountains of Saint Dominigue and lived off subsistence farming. Haiti had a history of slave rebellions; the slaves were never willing to submit to their status and with their strength in numbers (10 to 1) colonial officials and planters did all that was possible to control them. Despite the harshness and cruelty of Saint Dominigue slavery, there were slave rebellions before 1791. One plot involved the poisoning of masters.
Inspired by events in France, a number of Haitian-born revolutionary movements emerged simultaneously. They used as their inspiration the French Revolution’s “Declaration of the Rights of Man.” The General Assembly in Paris responded by enacting legislation which gave the various colonies some autonomy at the local level. The legislation, which called for “all local proprietors…to be active citizens,” was both ambiguous and radical. It was interpreted in Saint Dominigue as applying only to the planter class and thus excluded petit blancs from government. Yet it allowed free citizens of color who were substantial property owners to participate. This legislation, promulgated in Paris to keep Saint Dominigue in the colonial empire, instead generated a three-sided civil war between the planters, free blacks and the petit blancs. However, all three groups would be challenged by the enslaved black majority which was also influenced and inspired by events in France.
Led by former slave Toussaint l’Overture, the enslaved would act first, rebelling against the planters on August 21, 1791. By 1792 they controlled a third of the island. Despite reinforcements from France, the area of the colony held by the rebels grew as did the violence on both sides. Before the fighting ended 100,000 of the 500,000 blacks and 24,000 of the 40,000 whites were killed. Nonetheless the former slaves managed to stave off both the French forces and the British who arrived in 1793 to conquer the colony, and who withdrew in 1798 after a series of defeats by l’Overture’s forces. By 1801 l’Overture expanded the revolution beyond Haiti, conquering the neighboring Spanish colony of Santo Domingo (present-day Dominican Republic). He abolished slavery in the Spanish-speaking colony and declared himself Governor-General for life over the entire island of Hispaniola.
At that moment the Haitian Revolution had outlasted the French Revolution which had been its inspiration. Napoleon Bonaparte, now the ruler of France, dispatched General Charles Leclerc, his brother-in-law, and 43,000 French troops to capture L’Overture and restore both French rule and slavery. L’Overture was taken and sent to France where he died in prison in 1803. Jean-Jacques Dessalines, one of l’Overture’s generals and himself a former slave, led the revolutionaries at the Battle of Vertieres on November 18, 1803 where the French forces were defeated. On January 1, 1804, Dessalines declared the nation independent and renamed it Haiti. France became the first nation to recognize its independence. Haiti thus emerged as the first black republic in the world, and the second nation in the western hemisphere (after the United States) to win its independence from a European power.
Source: Thomas O. Ott, The Haitian Revolution 1789-1804 (Knoxville, Tennessee:University of Tennessee, 1973); http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/aia/part3/3p2990.html. |
“Star Wars” actress Carrie Fisher was spending Christmas in intensive care at UCLA Medical Center two days after suffering a “cardiac episode” during a flight from London to Los Angeles.
Fisher’s mother, entertainer Debbie Reynolds, said on Twitter on Sunday that her daughter was in stable condition.
“If there is a change, we will share it. For all her fans & friends, I thank you for your prayers & good wishes,” Reynolds tweeted.
Fisher, 60, was rushed to the hospital by Los Angeles Fire Department paramedics shortly after noon Friday, after her 11-hour flight touched down at LAX.
A source who was not authorized to discuss the incident said the actress was “in a lot of distress on the flight.”
Hospital officials have not provided any details about Fisher’s condition. But family members have suggested doctors have been able to stabilize her.
“She’s obviously a very tough girl who’s survived many things,” Todd Fisher, Carrie Fisher’s brother, told KABC-TV Channel 7. “I encourage everyone to pray for her.”
A statement released by United Airlines said that medical personnel met Flight 935 from London on arrival Friday after the crew reported a passenger was unresponsive.
“Our thoughts are with our customer at this time,” the statement read.
Just prior to arrival, a pilot told the control tower that passengers who were nurses were attending to an “unresponsive” passenger.
“They’re working on her right now,” the pilot said in a public recording of the conversation on liveatc.net.
According to the Los Angeles Airport Police, officers responded to Terminal 7 around 12:15 p.m. to a call of a female passenger in cardiac arrest. On arrival, they found paramedics performing CPR on the victim, according to Officer Alicia Hernandez.
Fisher, who rose to stardom as Princess Leia on “Star Wars,” recently published an autobiography titled “The Princess Diarist,” her eighth book.
She is the daughter of famous Hollywood couple Debbie Reynolds and Eddie Fisher.
Fisher, who has written and spoken openly about her struggles in the movie business, is considered Hollywood royalty. She took on her prickly relationship with her mother in the book-to-movie “Postcards From the Edge.” She’s also been outspoken about her mental health issues and the solution she found: radical-sounding electroshock therapy.
News of Fisher’s condition sparked an outpouring of support and sympathy on social media.
Many of her “Star Wars” co-stars wished her well on Twitter, including Peter Mayhew, who played Chewbacca; Mark Hamill, who played Luke Skywalker; Anthony Daniels, who played C-3PO; Dave Prowse, who acted as Darth Vader; and Billy Dee Williams, who played Lando Calrissian.
“I’m shocked and saddened to hear the news about my dear friend. Our thoughts are with Carrie, her family and friends,” co-star Harrison Ford said in a statement Saturday.
richard.winton@latimes.com
joe.serna@latimes.com
Twitter: @LAcrimes and @JosephSerna
ALSO:
In her unflinching 'The Princess Diarist,' Carrie Fisher revisits her Princess Leia days and her affair with Harrison Ford
The new documentary 'Bright Lights’ peels back the curtain on Carrie Fisher's legendary Hollywood family
Carrie Fisher insists: I never said Harrison Ford was bad in bed
From the Archives: 'Star Wars' hails the once and future space western
UPDATES:
Dec. 25, 1 p.m.: This article was updated with more news about Fisher’s health.
Dec. 25, 12:30 p.m.: This article was updated with comments from Debbie Reynolds.
Dec. 25, 6:45 a.m.: This article was updated with the latest on Fisher’s health and more reactions.
Dec. 24, 5 p.m.: This article was updated with additional comments from Fisher’s siblings.
Dec. 24, 10:30 a.m.: This article was updated with new tweets from well-wishers.
Dec. 24, 7:30 a.m.: This article was updated with details that Fisher is in the intensive care unit at the hospital.
Dec. 23, 4 p.m.: This article was updated with more details on Fisher’s condition.
Dec. 23, 3 p.m.: This article was updated with comments from Hamill and Mayhew.
Dec. 23, 2:30 p.m.: This article was updated with additional information about the pilot’s conversation with ground control.
Dec. 23, 2:05 p.m.: This article was updated with additional details from LAX police and United Airlines officials.
This article was originally published on Dec. 23 at 1:35 p.m. |
All Chargers want to yell at Norv Turner for his decisions. We all yell at him through the TV screen or our seats in the stands.
What happens when the starting quartberback, Philip Rivers, yells at him? NOTHING. Norv turns and ignores it.
After Philip Rivers was sacked for an 8 yard loss, the Chargers decided to go for a 55 yard field goal in the 2nd quarter instead of punting the ball away and pinning Drew Brees back. The Chargers missed the field goal, then Philip decided to yell at Norv for not punting the ball away.
No faith in your defense to get the stop? Maybe yell at Norv before he sends out the kicker, instead of yelling at him after he misses the field goal.
Norv ignored Philip and carried on with the game. Maybe Norv should have yelled back at him and said, “Get rid of the stupid football and don’t take that sack, then I wouldn’t have to make that dang decision!” “Who is the effing coach of this team!?!?”
Philip, let the man coach! You asked that the team bring him back and now you have to trust him, even if the decision looks better in hindsight.
What do you all think of Philip yelling at Norv? |
We recently took a look at a new type of “spongy carbon” developed by researchers at the University of Texas at Austin which shows great promise in creating a supercapacitor with the ability to store much more energy than is currently possible. The development is hailed as a breakthrough because of the potential it has to considerably improve energy storage technologies but we now learn that scientists at the Stevens Institute of Technology in Hoboken, New Jersey have come up with a development of their own that shows promise in improving supercapacitors whilst also taking advantage of a natural by-product of biomass incineration.
In a statement, the student scientists at Stevens point out that the problem with existing supercapacitors is that they use activated carbon to store energy and that the material is both unsustainable and expensive. The alternative that the students came up with uses “biochar.” Biochar is what is left over when organic matter is burned and, as the team points out, biomass energy facilities are already producing it. Now the students have designed, fabricated, and tested a prototype supercapacitor electrode using biochar and, apparently, the project was a success.
Since the creation of biochar is linked to biofuels production, as the use of biofuels increases, so will the availability of biochar. The Stevens students see this relationship as a benefit because the increased use of biofuels will ultimately drive down the costs of producing a supercapacitor that uses biochar.
While this development doesn’t seem to address the storage capacity limitations of conventional supercapacitors, it appears to be an attractive and environmentally considerate alternative to activated carbon as a supercapacitor electrode and could end up reducing costs on supercapacitors and, perhaps, the solar power systems and hydrogen fuel cell batteries that depend on them. |
It has been an accepted fact of life that, love her or hate her, Hillary Clinton brings with her enough baggage to fill the belly of a C-5 transport plane. It’s just part of the package — exacerbated by her undeniable instinct to hide, to parse and to obfuscate.
But as the saying goes, even paranoids have real enemies. Oh sure, congressional Republicans have long been on that list, forcing Clinton to give account of her actions in the wake of the terror attack at Benghazi and on whether her insistence on using a private email server put national security at risk.
Surely if she wins the White House her Republican opponents will not let up on the latter charges. But angry partisans may be the least of her worries now that the integrity of the Federal Bureau of Investigation is on the line.
Yes, the case against Hillary Clinton isn’t just an issue for FBI Director James Comey, whose personal reputation has already been besmirched by Clinton operatives and supporters. The deep fractures within the nation’s top law enforcement agency are now in plain view. So too the role of the U.S. Justice Department and whether an agency led by a Clinton appointee — even if it is holdover Loretta Lynch or perhaps especially if it is Loretta Lynch — can possibly function in the overheated atmosphere that will follow this election.
Comey’s letter to congressional leaders a week ago informing them of the discovery of new emails possibly relevant to the Clinton case have unleashed a torrent of leaked information, presumably from within the ranks of FBI field agents. Many, it seems, have been frustrated by inaction at Justice about what they consider actionable information relative to the Clinton Foundation.
Such tensions between investigators and prosecutors aren’t uncommon. But if, in fact, Justice told FBI investigators to “stand down” when there were active leads to be pursued in whether a “pay to play” relationship existed between the foundation and a Clinton-led State Department, then this republic is in real danger.
And if those shots were being called by political operatives at Justice, who seem to be such influential players, then this post-election season will be headed into uncharted territory indeed. |
After her husband asked for a divorce, Amber Clisura gave back her engagement ring, kicked him out of the house and tossed everything that reminded her of the ruined marriage. Except for one item: a polished steel barbecue smoker that her future ex-husband had fashioned for her from an old oil drum.
"It sat there on the patio and rusted and rusted, and it became a sad symbol of the relationship," Clisura said.
The Museum of Broken Relationships, Private Opening on June 2, 2016 in Los Angeles, California. Credit:Getty
The four-legged smoker had been a treasured handmade gift, but eventually Clisura couldn't bear to look at it. She considered giving it to a neighbour or selling it for scrap but then read about a call for submissions at the new Los Angeles branch of the Museum of Broken Relationships.
The original museum opened in Zagreb, Croatia, in 2010 after growing out of a touring collection that crisscrossed Europe, Asia and the US. On display in Zagreb are artifacts from failed unions, most of them mundane under ordinary circumstances. A single stiletto heel. A wine opener. A worn old Snoopy doll. |
Amira Behari (pictured) wore a long leather coat and gloves as well as her traditional Islamic garb
A Muslim woman who refused to remove her burka to testify against a man accused of abusing her has been warned by a German judge she will be jailed if she does not comply.
Amira Behari, 43, refused to reveal her face at the State Court in Munich last year when she appeared to testify against a man who allegedly abused her in a train station.
The man, identified only as Kai.O, allegedly called her an 'a******e' and told her to 'go back to where you belong.'
Judge Thomas Mueller said at the original hearing in November he wanted to see her face to 'read her emotions,' adding: 'I need to see you otherwise there will be considerable problems in adjudicating your case.'
Behari refused, saying: 'I have a God at the end of the world who will see me right at the end. I will not do this.'
In court she wore a niqab, which is an ultra-burka with only a gap for the eyes. She also wore gloves and a long leather coat.
Judge Mueller gave up and said he had no alternative but to find the accused not guilty.
But his decision enraged judges anjd prosecutors in Germany who appealed the decision and have now scheduled the case again for next week.
The prosecutor's office in Munich consulted with Koranic experts who said it was permissible for a woman to remove her niqab before the judicial authorities such as judges, police, prosecutors on the basis of needs and damage prevention.'
If she fails to comply on March 17, she faces a fine or even a spell in jail. |
Despite a quick knockout loss to former title challenger Glover Teixeira (25-4 MMA, 8-2 UFC) at UFC on FOX 19, ex-UFC champ Rashad Evans (19-5-1 MMA, 14-5-1 UFC) picked up the highest disclosed pay this past Saturday’s FOX-televised card.
Evans banked $150,000 for his efforts compared to Teixeira, who took home $120,000 ($60,000 of which was a win bonus), in their main-event fight.
MMAjunkie today requested and received the list of disclosed paydays from the Florida State Boxing Commission, which oversaw the event at Amalie Arena in Tampa, Fla.
UFC on FOX 19’s main card aired live on FOX following prelims on FOX and UFC Fight Pass.
The total disclosed pay for the event was $995,000.
The full list of UFC on FOX 19 payouts included:
Glover Teixeira: $120,000 (includes $60,000 win bonus)
def. Rashad Evans: $150,000
Rose Namajunas: $86,000 (includes $43,000 win bonus)
def. Tecia Torres: $20,000
Khabib Nurmagomedov: $48,000 (includes $24,000 win bonus)
def. Darrell Horcher: $12,000
Cub Swanson: $88,000 (includes $44,000 win bonus)
def. Hacran Dias: $16,000
Michael Chiesa: $66,000 (includes $33,000 win bonus)
def. Beneil Dariush: $28,000
Raquel Pennington: $40,000 (includes $20,000 win bonus)
def. Bethe Correia: $25,000
Santiago Ponzinibbio: $32,000 (includes $16,000 win bonus)
def. Court McGee: $27,000
Michael Graves: $24,000 (includes $12,000 win bonus)
def. Randy Brown: $12,000
John Dodson: $70,000 (includes $35,000 win bonus)
def. Manny Gamburyan: $33,000
Cezar Ferreira: $48,000 (includes $24,000 win bonus)
def. Oluwale Bamgbose: $12,000
Elizeu Zaleski dos Santos: $20,000 (includes $10,000 win bonus)
def. Omari Akhmedov: $18,000
Now, the usual disclaimer: The figures do not include deductions for items such as insurance, licenses and taxes. Additionally, the figures do not include money paid by sponsors, including the official UFC Athlete Outfitting sponsorship program pay. They also do not include any other “locker room” or special discretionary bonuses the UFC oftentimes pays. They also do not include pay-per-view cuts that some top-level fighters receive.
For example, as previously reported, UFC officials handed out additional $50,000 UFC on FOX 19 fight-night bonuses to Teixeira, Chiesa, Zaleski dos Santos, Akhmedov. Teixeira and Chiesa earned “Performance of the Night” awards while Zaleski dos Santos and Akhmedov earned “Fight of the Night” honors.
In other words, the above figures are simply base salaries reported to the commission and do not reflect entire compensation packages for the event.
For more on UFC on FOX 19, check out the UFC Events section of the site. |
Easy monetary policy suggested to stop deceleration.
BEIJING: China’s industrial production growth slowed sharply to its lowest level for more than five years at 6.9% in August, intensifying concerns for the world’s second-largest economy.
The key indicator measuring output at factories, workshops and mines, slumped from a 9% year-on-year expansion in July and was the worst since 5.7% in December 2008, during the global financial crisis.
Retail sales, an indicator of consumer spending, rose 11.9% in the same month year-on-year, also down from 12.2% in July. Fixed asset investment, a measure of government spending on infrastructure, expanded 16.5% on-year in the first eight months of 2014.
It was below the 17% reading for the first seven months of the year and also below the 16.9% forecast.
China’s Communist Party government is targeting an expansion of about 7.5% in gross domestic product (GDP) this year to steer the country’s growth model towards consumer spending and away from exports.
“Past experience suggests that China needs to maintain around 9% industrial production growth to deliver 7.5% GDP growth,” ANZ Bank economists wrote in an analysis.
“Chinese authorities should further relax monetary policy as soon as possible to prevent the growth momentum from decelerating further,” they added.
Since April, authorities have deployed measures to boost growth, including small business tax breaks, targeted infrastructure spending and incentives to spur lending in rural areas and to small companies.
Recent concerns have centred on fallout for the economy from a potentially damaging knockdown in China’s huge property sector, where new home prices have fallen for four straight months.
A plunge in bank lending in July had also raised fears of slowing economic growth, though figures for August showed a strong rebound to what analysts described as approaching a normal level.
Chinese banks granted 702.5 billion yuan ($114.5 billion) in new loans last month, the People’s Bank of China said, nearly twice July’s 385.2 billion yuan though still below June’s 1.08 trillion yuan and lower than the amount recorded in August 2013.
Published in The Express Tribune, September 14th, 2014.
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Canadian beekeepers are suing the makers of popular crop pesticides for more than $400 million in damages, alleging that their use is causing the deaths of bee colonies.
The proposed class action lawsuit was filed Tuesday in the Ontario Superior Court on behalf of all Canadian beekeepers by Sun Parlor Honey Ltd. and Munro Honey, two of Ontario's largest honey producers, the Ontario Beekeepers Association announced Wednesday.
"The goal is to stop the use of the neonicotinoids to stop the harm to the bees and the beekeepers," said Paula Lombardi, a lawyer with London, Ont.-based law firm Siskinds LLP, which is handling the case.
As of Thursday morning, more than 30 beekeepers had signed on to participate in the class action.
The lawsuit alleges that Bayer Cropscience Inc. and Syngenta Canada Inc. and their parent companies were negligent in their design, manufacture, sale and distribution of neonicotinoid pesticides, specifically those containing imidacloprid, clothianidin and thiomethoxam.
The pesticides, which are a neurotoxin to insects, are widely coated on corn, soybean and canola seeds in Canada to protect the plants from pests such as aphids. Studies have shown that bees exposed to the pesticides have smaller colonies, fail to return to their hives, and may have trouble navigating. The pesticides were also found in 70 per cent of dead bees tested by Health Canada in 2013.
The European Commission restricted the use of the pesticides for two years and Ontario has indicated it will move toward regulating them, due to concerns over bee health.
Bayer maintains that the risk to bees from the pesticide is low, and it has recommended ways that farmers can minimize bees' exposure to the pesticide.
Both Bayer and Syngenta told CBC News they wouldn't comment on the lawsuit because they haven't yet been served with it.
The lawsuit is seeking more than $400 million in damages, alleging that as a result of neonicotinoid use:
The beekeepers' colonies and breeding stock were damaged or died.
Their beeswax, honeycombs and hives were contaminated.
Their honey production decreased.
They lost profits and incurred unrecoverable costs, such as increased labour and supply costs.
Beekeepers or companies involved in beekeeping services such as honey production, queen bee rearing and pollination who are affected and want to join the lawsuit are asked to contact Lombardi.
The Ontario Beekeepers Association is not directly involved in the lawsuit, but along with the Sierra Club Canada Foundation, helped connect beekeepers with the law firm. The association also helped with the research for the lawsuit. |
Danny Johnston/Associated Press
There is no shortage of people in the Republican Party who think the message voters sent in November was that Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan weren’t conservative enough.
In Kentucky, USA Today reports, Tea Party groups are hoping to oust Senator Mitch McConnell, because he has only paid “lip service” to the causes of the right wing. It’s hard to imagine anyone more dedicated to those causes than Mr. McConnell, who infamously declared at the start of President Obama’s first term that his top priority would be denying him a second one.
But there also are an increasing number of influential Republicans who at least sound like they are trying to drag their party back from the edge.
Gov. Bobby Jindal of Louisiana, whose name is often mentioned as a future presidential candidate, had a very blunt message for the Republican National Committee at its winter meeting this week. “We must stop being the stupid party,” he said. “I’m serious. It’s time for a new Republican Party that talks like adults.”
He said the G.O.P. is guilty of “insulting the intelligence of voters” and has spent too much time “dumbing down” its ideas. “We must reject the notion that demography is destiny, the pathetic and simplistic notion that skin pigmentation dictates voter behavior,” he said. He added that “the first step in getting voters to like you is to demonstrate that you like them.”
It seemed like an extraordinary acknowledgment of what the polls showed in November, which was that minority voters — including a large percentage of Hispanic voters — overwhelmingly rejected the Republicans’ candidates and policies.
But the rest of Mr. Jindal’s remarks suggested that he wants to change the jingle on the commercial rather than the product itself.
“As I indicated before, I am not one of those who believe we should moderate, equivocate, or otherwise abandon our principles,” he said. “This badly disappoints many of the liberals in the national media of course. For them, real change means supporting abortion on demand without apology; abandoning traditional marriage between one man and one woman; embracing government growth as the key to American success; agreeing to higher taxes every year to pay for government expansion; and endorsing the enlightened policies of European socialism.”
That, he said, “is what real change looks like to the New York Times editorial board.”
I appreciate the product placement, but that’s a rather extreme caricature of our positions. (Yes, we support same-sex marriage, but that doesn’t mean we want to “abandon traditional marriage.” We think they can co-exist.)
Another leading Republican political figure (at least in his own mind), Newt Gingrich, told the same Republican gathering: “I am for 100 percent of the American people believing that they have a party that cares about their future. I would like to say to every consultant in this party, if you think you can target less than 100 percent, you’re not going to get any more business.”
Mr. Gingrich was referring to Mr. Romney’s infamous 47 percent comment, but, just like Mr. Jindal, he didn’t seem to be calling for a change in policy so much as a change in tone. Lawmakers, he said, should stop complaining about Mr. Obama’s agenda and practice “cheerful persistence.”
“We need to be the happy party,” he said.
Mr. Jindal and Mr. Gingrich both seem to assume that those who oppose the Republican Party don’t object to Republican programs and goals. They just don’t understand the G.O.P. message. If that’s not “insulting the intelligence of voters” (as Mr. Jindal put it), I don’t know what is. |
Media playback is not supported on this device T20 tournament 'future-proofs' county game - ECB chief tells BBC's Dan Roan
Glamorgan captain Jacques Rudolph believes the new Twenty20 tournament planned by the England and Wales Cricket Board (ECB) could benefit the county game.
The competition is set to start in 2020 and Glamorgan will bid for their Cardiff home to be among eight new city venues playing 36 games in 38 days.
The host city bidding process starts on Wednesday, 29 March.
"I think it's exciting for the game of cricket," Rudolph told BBC Wales Sport.
"Potentially the ECB realise that in terms of T20 competitions around the world they're just lagging behind, and they need something new to try and bolster county cricket."
South Africa international Jacques Rudolph has played for counties such as Surrey and Yorkshire as well as Glamorgan
Squads of the eight T20 teams will be made up of 15 players and include three overseas players.
That will leave 96 players being selected from the 18 counties, which averages out at just over five apiece.
"I think it's potentially a great incentive for young players coming through the ranks, the young Aneurin Donalds and Kiran Carlsons [both Glamorgan players] of this world," added Rudolph.
"I don't think I will be around that time, but I'm happy for guys who can potentially play in that."
ECB chief executive Tom Harrison hopes the new competition will rival the Indian Premier League and Big Bash in Australia as the leading T20 tournaments in the world.
What is changing?
On Monday, the ECB presented a detailed overview of its proposals for a new Twenty20 competition to its 41 members. These included:
Eight new teams playing combined total of 36 games over a 38-day summer window, with four home games per team
All games televised, with significant free-to-air exposure
No scheduling overlap with the existing T20 Blast competition
An Indian Premier League-style play-off system to give more incentive for finishing higher up the league
A players' draft, with squads of 15 including three overseas players
Each of the 18 Counties guaranteed £1.3m
What next?
A referendum has been sent out, inviting stakeholders to sanction a tournament including eight teams, rather than the 18 counties, who traditionally contest the main domestic competitions.
The ECB is made up of 41 stakeholders, which includes the 18 first-class counties, the MCC, the Minor Counties Cricket Association and the recreational boards, and a minimum of 31 will need to vote in favour for the plans to progress.
"I will ask the ECB board to trigger a change in our Articles of Association to enable the introduction of the proposed new T20 competition," said ECB chairman Colin Graves.
"We face a ground-breaking opportunity in the weeks and months ahead - and if our members embrace it, the ECB will work with everyone in the game to ensure this huge potential and the investment that will come with this delivers an even stronger future for the game." |
Rightwing Israeli politicians like Binyamin Netanyahu are squawking furiously about the prospect that Sec. of State John Kerry might reach an agreement with Iran over its civilian nuclear enrichment program.
The US is trying to convince Iran to scale back its program to the point where it cannot be used to produce a weapon in a short time period, and is solely a fuel-producing program. Nuclear fuel is typically enriched to 3.5-5%, whereas a bomb typically requires over 90% enrichment. Any gas centrifuge enrichment program theoretically could be ramped up to produce a bomb, but limitations on the number and kind of centrifuges used could make such a project time-consuming (at least a couple of months) and more easily detected by inspectors.
Why is the Israeli Right really apoplectic about such a deal? Here is my analysis of the faux and hypocritical outrage (Iran has no nuclear weapons program, but Israel has hundreds of nuclear warheads).
1. Since they broke their word to President John F. Kennedy and went for broke to produce their own bomb, the Israeli leadership can’t imagine that Iran won’t cheat on any deal. This is an example of mirror thinking. But Iran is being inspected, unlike Israel, and no country under active UN inspection has ever developed a bomb.
2. A US-Iran deal that involves the UN Security Council would make it impossible for Israel unilaterally to attack Iran. It would therefore reduce Israel’s range of options and detract from its position as Middle East regional hegemon.
3. A remaining Iranian nuclear program would always imply a “break-out” capacity for Tehran. Being known to be able to make a nuclear weapon has some of the same deterrent effects as actually having one, increasing Iranian clout in the region. (This is on analogy to Japan in East Asia).
4. Israel’s Likud Party still has designs on annexing southern Lebanon, deeply regretting Ehud Barak’s 2000 withdrawal, but is blocked by Hizbullah backed by Iran. An Iran with a break-out capacity would permanently end Israeli expansionist ambitions to the north and permanently deny Israel the waters of the Litani River, which its leaders covet.
5. Much of the Israeli public isn’t that wedded to being in Israel, a big problem for hawks like PM Binyamin Netanyahu. Probably a million or so first and second generation Israeli immigrants live in Europe and North America; it is not even clear that some of them aren’t being counted in the 5.5 million Israeli Jews claimed by Israel. Around 20,000 Israelis now live in Berlin! Nearly a third of Jewish Israelis have said in polling that they would consider emigrating if Iran developed a nuclear weapon. Keeping Iran weak is key to winning the hardliners’ psychological war in the Middle East.
6. Netanyahu uses the supposed threat of Iran, a poor weak global South country ( 78th by GDP per capita) with a military budget somewhere between that of Norway and Singapore, to distract attention from Israeli colonization of Palestinian territory. A Western deal with Iran would throw the spotlight on the Palestinian West Bank, where Netanyahu is engaged in grand larceny on a cosmic scale.
7. If Iran is widely viewed by the international community to have stepped back from nuclear ambitions, Israel’s own nuclear arsenal will come to the fore as a focus, since it is the only Middle Eastern country with an arsenal of warheads, and that arsenal clearly drives a regional arms race (starting with Iraq in the 1980s). |
In a March 31 memo, Attorney General Jeff Sessions initiated a "sweeping review of police reform" initiated under President Barack Obama, or at least that's how USA Today reported it. That's clearly what Sessions was up to, as underscored by his follow-up attempt to block implementation of the Justice Department's consent decree with the Baltimore Police Department, an attempt that was opposed by the city's mayor and police commissioner, and which a federal court quickly shot down, much to Sessions' dismay.
But the actual text of Sessions' memo was far more muddled than that sounds. Its real motives were tucked into the folds and creases of the text, while its main thrust and broad outlines would actually support a continuation of Obama-era policies, according to activist and data analyst Samuel Sinyangwe.
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A co-founder of Campaign Zero, Sinyangwe authored a study and co-authored a related report last September, as part of the Use of Force Project, finding that if departments implemented eight common-sense regulations on use of force, not only would they reduce the number of police-involved killings by 72 percent, they would make police officers safer too. What’s more, only one-third of America’s largest departments currently have at least four or more of the policies in place — meaning there’s a huge untapped potential for a proven win-win approach that saves lives of officers and the public as well.
A key passage in Sessions’ memo declared that "The [Justice] Department will use its resources to effectively promote a peaceful and lawful society, where the civil rights of all persons are valued and protected." It then went on to present a set of bullet points, presented as "principles that will advance those two goals," the very first of which was: "The safety and protection of the public is the paramount concern and duty of law enforcement officials."
“If Sessions were serious about protecting civil rights in America, he would continue what the Obama administration started," Sinyangwe told Salon, "with initiating more investigations of police departments, getting consent decrees that would mandate these types of changes to happen. I would encourage him to look at the evidence — instead of the rhetoric and the fear-mongering — that shows that when these things are implemented it does not have a deleterious effect on officer safety, which is what is put out as being his primary goal.”
There are, in effect, two contrasting worldviews in play, as Sinyangwe described. “From the police side of things, most of the conversation ... is that deadly encounters with civilians are the result of resisting [arrest] or threats to officers, and it's purely based on the actions of the subject, rather than the officers,” he said. In this view, "the officers are sort of reacting reasonably to the threats that they face.”
What's missing from that argument is any analysis of the role that policies and practices can play in determining the outcome of any encounter. That kind of analysis also differs from the activist focus “that these police interactions are guided purely by racism, and a dominance of the privileged classes over the low-income communities of color.” Unsurprisingly, Sinyangwe believes there's clearly something to that view. “We do find support for the fact that police are more likely to kill folks in communities that are minorities, so that theory hasn't been discounted," he said, "but we've added that the policies also matter in terms of those interactions.”
Sessions' biases were clearly on display in his response to the Baltimore consent decree. “I have grave concerns that some provisions of this decree will reduce the lawful powers of the police department and result in a less safe city,” the attorney general wrote, adding, “there are clear departures from many proven principles of good policing that we fear will result in more crime.”
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But “proven principles” in common speech are a far cry from what a scientist would mean. It’s not enough that you’ve done something the same way for years, and seem to get good results — as in football before the invention of the forward pass, or basketball before the Harlem Globetrotters reimagined the game. It might seem common sense that restricting use of force in any way would make officers less safe, but it also seems to the naked eye that the earth is flat. You could even have called it a “proven principle.” When you shift your frame of reference, however, “common sense” can change, too.
The main argument put forward by police unions trying to block use-of-force regulations is that they endanger officers. “Whenever this argument is put forward," Sinyangwe noted, "there's never any data to support it. The police unions have never presented any national data showing that the stated relationship actually exists. They just sort of taken it at face value. What we've done is actually tested that proposition and found that the departments that have the most restrictive policies on use of force are actually the safest for officers.” Increased officer safety was reflected in reductions of the number of officers assaulted and killed in the line of duty.
These findings point to a different sort of common sense, coming out of a different frame of reference. “Departments that have more reasonable and less confrontational interactions with the public because of these types of policies," Sinyangwe explained, "are going to be less likely to anger civilians and provoke civilians into attacking law enforcement.
“It's a two-way street. If you have a department that is operating consistent with community expectations and upholding the decency and dignity of civilians, it makes sense to think that in those areas civilians will respond in kind and be more trusting towards the police. So that's one explanation of what's happening.”
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Two facts combined to create the perfect conditions for a “natural experiment” to see if use-of-force regulations could reduce officer-involved killings. Ironically or otherwise, the first scientific findings about improved officer safety came out of this effort as well. First of all, officer-involved killings vary widely from place to place. Rates of police killings per million people ranged from a low of zero (in seven jurisdictions) to a high of 25.2 in Orlando, Florida. Five other cities had more than 20 killings per million, and another 26 cities had rates in the double digits. Second was the fact that use-of-force regulations have been widely but not universally adopted. The average department employed three of the eight policies, but none employed all eight. The number employing any single given policy ranged from 15 to 77.
Three regulations produced dramatic life-saving results. “The three were banning choke holds and strangleholds; requiring officers to exhaust all other reasonable means before using deadly force; and requiring comprehensive reporting — meaning that every time an officer uses force, or threatens to use force, that is being documented and followed up on by the agencies,” Sinyangwe said. “Those three policies really stood out as having the largest difference. When departments have these policies in place they’re about 25 percent less likely to kill folks.”
The complete list of regulations studied — and the associated reductions in police killings — are as follows:
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31 departments require officers to exhaust all other reasonable alternatives before resorting to using deadly force: 25 percent reduction.
15 departments require officers to report all uses of force, including threatening a civilian with a firearm: 25 percent reduction.
21 departments explicitly prohibit chokeholds and strangleholds (including carotid restraints), or limit these tactics to situations where deadly force is authorized: 22 percent reduction.
77 departments have a "force continuum" or "force matrix" included in their policies, defining the types of force or weapons that can be used to respond to specific types of resistance: 19 percent reduction.
34 departments require officers to de-escalate situations, when possible, before using force: 15 percent reduction.
30 departments require officers to intervene to stop another officer from using excessive force: 9 percent reduction.
19 departments prohibit officers from shooting at people in moving vehicles unless the person poses a deadly threat by means other than the vehicle (for example, shooting at people from the vehicle): 8 percent reduction.
56 departments require officers to give a verbal warning, when possible, before using deadly force: 5 percent reduction.
In the report itself, each regulation is presented with the language from one of the departments that implements it. This underscores perhaps the most important point that can be made about these regulations: Although they have often been adopted as a result of outside pressure (including Justice Department consent decrees), they are now part of the lived experience of thousands of officers, at all levels, in jurisdictions all across the country. Adopting them now can and should be seen as a matter of learning new best practices from fellow officers in the law enforcement community — best practices that directly benefit them.
One point that critics have often raised is that imposing consent decrees from outside creates resistance within law enforcement agencies, and is hence counterproductive. “It may be that police department policies adopted voluntarily have a greater impact than those adopted as requirements under Department of Justice consent decrees,” Sinyangwe wrote in his study, adding that it “should be the subject of further research.”
“There is mixed evidence around the effectiveness of consent decrees,” he explained in our conversation. “Every consent decree is not the same.” The regulations in the study are more commonly found in recent Obama-era decrees, but not in earlier ones, he explained. “So it's hard to evaluate them, because there are not that many consent decrees that have happened, and each one is different.
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That being said, he went on, the argument about whether the culture of a police department matters more than its policies is something of a dead end: "Obviously it's both," Sinyangwe observed. “But we don't say in education that standards don't matter, right? So we shouldn't expect in policing that standards don't matter either. Standards are important in every field, and they also need to be enforced with a culture that values and upholds those standards.”
With the Trump-Session DOJ pulling back from police reform — even if courts won’t let them roll things back entirely — citizen activism will be more important than ever. So I asked Sinyangwe what people could do to help move us in the direction of a more fact-based approach that would actually make both police and communities safer.
“I would encourage communities to first learn about policies of their police departments,” he said. People can go to UseOfForceProject.org and look up their police department’s policy in the project's database there, if they live in one of the cities covered. “Then they can reach out to us, and we can provide research and evidence to support advocacy campaigns to implement these types of changes,” he said. “We have successfully pushed for changes, for example in the Orlando Police Department to implement two of the eight recommendations. We've also been involved with Baton Rouge and other police departments. There is a lot of work happening, and I will encourage people to learn about their communities, reach out to their police chief and city leadership, city council members and mayors, and ask them when they are going to push for more comprehensive changes that can keep communities safe.”
Ironically, the Trump-Sessions effort to reverse the tide of consent decrees may actually end up increasing the level, coherence and effectiveness of bottom-up citizen activism. As more and more policies are implemented through this route, the everyday life-and-death changes we need will simply outflank the hollow posturing that seems to have the upper hand today. As has happened with health care in the last few years, reality on the ground around the issue of police reform has shifted dramatically, in ways that many people in Washington seem ill equipped to grasp. |
I plowed through 14 bags of pasta in 31 days. Kathleen Elkins/Business Insider
When Elon Musk was 17, he lived off a dollar a day for a month to see if he had what it takes to be an entrepreneur.
He explained the experiment to astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson in an episode of Tyson's StarTalk Radio podcast:
In America it's pretty easy to keep yourself alive. So my threshold for existing was pretty low. I figured I could be in some dingy apartment with my computer and be okay, and not starve.
In fact, when I first came to North America — I was in Canada when I was 17 — and just to sort of see what it takes to live, I tried to live on $1 a day, which I was able to do. You sort of just buy food in bulk at the supermarket ... I was like, "Oh, okay. If I can live for a dollar a day — at least from a food-cost standpoint — it's pretty easy to earn $30 in a month, so I'll probably be okay.
I decided to replicate the challenge this past month. I adjusted for inflation — $1 in 1988, when Musk was 17, is the equivalent $2 today — and set aside $62 for the 31-day month of January.
Musk lived off mostly hot dogs and oranges, occasionally mixing in pasta and jarred tomato sauce. I bought mostly bananas, pasta, and peanut butter and would switch it up with the occasional fried egg or sweet potato.
I reached out to Musk after completing the challenge. "That's great, although I would not encourage anyone to live on $1 a day," he wrote me in an email. "That would not be super fun. Also, I did this back in 1990, so a dollar went a lot further back then. Would be much harder to do that today."
(Yes, I realize he just said 1990, but I did the entire month based on the value of a 1988 dollar, and I'm not about to re-do it ... so bear with me. The point still stands.)
Thirty-one days, 14 bags of pasta, six jars of peanut butter, and too many bananas to count later, I completed the "Elon Musk Challenge" with $1.07 to spare. Here's what it was like: |
ROUBAIX, France (VN) — Filippo Pozzato (Farnese Vini-Selle Italia) abandoned Paris-Roubaix in frustration Sunday after watching Tom Boonen’s winning move ride free.
“He thought he could pull it back,” the team’s sports director, Luca Scinto told VeloNews. “Going free 60 kilometers out was something you’d only see [Franco] Ballerini or [Andrea] Tafi do. Those were other times.”
The Italian fought Boonen until the end in the Tour of Flanders last week and was billed as his strongest rival for Paris-Roubaix. Fans were surprised today to see him watch Boonen and Omega Pharma-Quick Step teammate Niki Terpstra ride free with 56 kilometers to go.
Boonen took the race into his own hands one kilometer later, riding free from Terpstra on the Auchy-lez-Orchies cobbled sector. Behind, Pozzato, Alessandro Ballan (BMC Racing) and Sébastien Turgot (Europcar) looked at each other. The gap quickly jumped to 30 seconds and only Team Sky seemed to care.
Last week, Pozzato nearly left behind Boonen on the Paterberg climb, 15 kilometers from the finish at Flanders. Was he not as brilliant this time around?
“Absolutely not,” Scinto said. “On the pave, when Boonen was pushing the pace, it was always Pippo who could easily follow.”
Pozzato crashed shortly after Boonen attacked, at 50.8km to race, and abandoned 20km later. At the bus, the team said that he was too frustrated to speak.
Scinto looked to the heavens to find answers.
“He is very disappointed. We’re all angry and disappointed because we rode in a strong way but we were unlucky,” Scinto said, looking to the sky. “Maybe someone doesn’t want us to win. I don’t know who.”
Pozzato switched to the second division Farnese Vini team over the winter after his first 12 years at the top level of the sport. It was a gamble as the team needed wildcard invitations to attend the biggest races. They received the invites they needed to fill out the Italian’s spring schedule, including to Flanders, Roubaix and next Sunday’s Amstel Gold Race.
Bad luck struck, though, when Pozzato fell and fractured his collarbone in the fifth leg of the Tour of Qatar. Instead of waiting for it to heal fully, he returned immediately, nine days later in Trofeo Laigueglia. He kept his fitness level high, which helped him score a string of top-10 finishes through the semi-classics and classics in Belgium. In France, though, things didn’t go well.
“He discussed it a little bit with Ballan when the other two went away. However, there were still 60 kilometers to the finish and you’d never think that a person could do such a ‘numero,'” Scinto continued.
“Pozzato kept calm and believed that after falling down that he could chase back. I don’t know if he could’ve reached him and how it could’ve finished, but of course, he was the only one who could take on Boonen.” |
Progress in controlling fusion heat bursts
18 March 2015
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Researchers from General Atomics and the US Department of Energy's Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory (PPPL) have made a major breakthrough in understanding how potentially damaging heat bursts inside a fusion reactor can be controlled.
Scientists performed the experiments on the DIII-D National Fusion Facility, a tokamak operated by General Atomics in San Diego.
The findings represent a key step, General Atomics said, in predicting how to control heat bursts in future fusion facilities including ITER, an international experiment under construction in France to demonstrate the feasibility of fusion energy. This work is supported by the DoE Office of Science.
The studies build upon previous work pioneered on DIII-D showing that these intense heat bursts - called ELMs for short - could be suppressed with tiny magnetic fields. These tiny fields cause the edge of the plasma to smoothly release heat, thereby avoiding the damaging heat bursts. But until now, scientists did not understand how these fields worked.
"Many mysteries surrounded how the plasma distorts to suppress these heat bursts," said Carlos Paz-Soldan, a General Atomics scientist and lead author of the first of the two papers that report the seminal findings back-to-back in the same issue of Physical Review Letters last week.
Computer simulation of a cross-section of a DIII-D plasma responding to tiny magnetic fields. The left image models the response that suppressed the ELMs while the right image shows a response that was ineffective (Image: General Atomics)
The team of researchers found that tiny magnetic fields applied to the device can create two distinct kinds of response, rather than just one response as previously thought. The new response produces a ripple in the magnetic field near the plasma edge, allowing more heat to leak out at just the right rate to avert the intense heat bursts. Researchers applied the magnetic fields by running electrical current through coils around the plasma. Pickup coils then detected the plasma response, much as the microphone on a guitar picks up string vibrations.
The second result, led by PPPL scientist Raffi Nazikian, who heads the PPPL research team at DIII-D, identified the changes in the plasma that lead to the suppression of the large edge heat bursts or ELMs.
"The team found clear evidence that the plasma was deforming in just the way needed to allow the heat to slowly leak out," General Atomics said.
The measured magnetic distortions of the plasma edge indicated that the magnetic field was gently tearing in a narrow layer, a key prediction for how heat bursts can be prevented.
The configuration changes suddenly when the plasma is tapped in a certain way, Nazikian said, and it is this response that suppresses the ELMs.
Researchers involved in the project include people from General Atomics, PPPL, Oak Ridge National Laboratory, Columbia University, Australian National University, the University of California-San Diego, the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and several others.
The new results suggest further possibilities for tuning the magnetic fields to make ELM-control easier, General Atomics said.
"These findings point the way to overcoming a persistent barrier to sustained fusion reactions," it said.
The identification of the physical processes that lead to ELM suppression when applying a small 3D magnetic field to the inherently 2D tokamak field "provides new confidence" that such a technique can be optimized in eliminating ELMs in ITER and future fusion devices, said Mickey Wade, the DIII-D program director.
Researched and written
by World Nuclear News
Related topics |
For most of his childhood in pre-revolutionary Iran, Dr. Ali M. heard virtually nothing about his family’s religious heritage. (He declined to share his full name out of concern for family members still living in the country) But when Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini seized power following the 1979 revolution that overthrew the Shah, Ali’s family left for Germany. Experiencing a foreign culture for the first time, Ali, who now works as a physician in southern California, began to ask questions about his background. “When I lived in Germany, I was going through my teenage years,” he explained. “I tried to find out who I am and what was going on around me in a world of chaos and displacement.”
Ask someone about the Zoroastrian religion and—assuming they’ve heard of it—you will typically get three responses. Your interlocutor might inaccurately describe followers of the Zoroastrian faith as “fire-worshippers.” He or she may recognize Zoroaster, the priest who founded the religion, as the protagonist of the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche’s classic work, “Thus Spoke Zarathustra.” And there’s the oft-quoted “fun fact” that Freddie Mercury, the flamboyant vocalist of rock group Queen, was and still is the world’s most famous Zoroastrian.
Much less well-known is that Zoroastrianism is a living faith, with communities in India, Europe, the United States, and the Middle East—especially Iran. Ten years ago, a study by the Federation of Zoroastrian Associations of America concluded that there were, at most, 190,000 followers of the faith around the world. But as Laurie Goodstein noted in The New York Times, there was reason to be skeptical of this number, because of the “wildly diverging counts in Iran, once known as Persia – the incubator of the faith.”
In common with other religions, Zoroastrians in Iran have confronted both persecution and a concerted attempt by the Islamist regime in Tehran to destroy the very foundations of their faith. One critical consequence of this—no doubt unintended by the ruling mullahs—is that growing numbers of Iranians inside and outside the country are exploring a faith that crystallized two millennia before the Prophet Muhammed appeared on the scene. “Converting back” to Zoroastrianism, as many refer to the process of rediscovering their roots, has encouraged a view of Islam as an alien Arab faith that was imposed on unwilling Persians during the Muslim conquest of the seventh century.
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Ali began asking his parents about their religious heritage and ancient roots. That’s when he found out through conversations with his mother that his grandfather’s family was descended from the Zoroastrian priestly lineage
Anxious to acquire more knowledge about his hidden faith, Ali began studying Zoroastrian teachings. He learned about the three principles propagated by Zoroaster: Humata, Hukhta, and Hvarshta, “Good Thoughts, Good Words, and Good Deeds” in Avestan, an ancient Iranian language. He learned that fire, which plays such a central role in Zoroastrian religious ceremonies, represents the divine light of wisdom. Then he decided to undergo the Navjote, an initiation ceremony into the faith that is similar to a Bar Mitzvah.
At first, the priests whom Ali met in America were apprehensive about performing the ceremony, pointing out that doing so would be regarded as apostasy by Iran’s rulers, which could cost Ali his life if he returned home. According to Iran’s official records, Ali’s father is registered as a Muslim. Under Iranian law, children automatically take their father’s religion. Iranians who depart Islam for another faith face imprisonment or even execution. |
Everybody likes French Montana. The rapper is friends with everyone, from the A-listers (Kanye, Drake, the Kardashians) to his day ones (DJ Khaled, Max B). He’s one of hip-hop’s most affable and well-connected figures, rap’s Mr. Congeniality.
But sometimes bad things happen to good people. Sample clearance issues and an unfortunate leak in August led French to cancel his sophomore album, Mac & Cheese 4 (MC4), he revealed exclusively in an interview with Complex. “I made it how I made Mac & Cheese 3,” he said— meaning that he made it like a mixtape, outside of the strict legal guidelines required for an official album release. Rather than cobble together some other, less-than-ideal version of the project, originally slated for an Oct. 14 release, French opted to move on to the next one. After all, you don’t earn a reputation like French’s by wallowing in your problems.
Ahead of his scheduled appearance at the first-ever ComplexCon (Nov. 5–6 in Long Beach, California), French spoke with us about the hard decision to scrap MC4, his new release plan, his plans for the 2016 election (which unfortunately won’t include voting, as his publicist informed him mid-interview), and what’s happening with his friend Max B’s impending release from prison.
Can you explain the setbacks with MC4?
Songs like "I'm Heated" and "Two Times" couldn't be cleared. By the time I got the mix how I recorded it, it wasn't the same. I just ain't have the same feeling for it. Everybody had to replay shit, and do all this extra shit, so I wasn't in the mood to put it together. All the music going to come out, you know what I'm saying, just packaged differently. Plus, the album got leaked.
Do you feel like you let the fans down?
Nah, I feel like I didn't because I'm going to still drop something.
Was it hard walking away from MC4?
Yeah, of course. [But] let me tell you something: I'm never married to a date. I got 17 mixtapes I put together, and one album—that's 18 projects in my whole career. I'm never married to a date. I put it out whenever it's right. You could force yourself to make it to that date, but if it's not right, [if] it don't come out right, you can't force it.
Have you started working on a new project?
Yeah, I'm like 70 percent done.
What's something you want to accomplish with the new release that you didn't with Mac & Cheese 4?
Just make sure it don't get leaked. That's why I don't want to announce the name or nothing. I just want to wait until it's done and just drop it. Make sure it don't leak, make sure everything is cleared before I announce anything.
You’re supposedly going to drop a mixtape in October?
Yup, a project. It's going to be some of the best music you've ever heard.
You and Max B came up together, and you’ve stayed in touch with him since he was sentenced to 75 years in prison in 2009. In September, it was revealed he will be up for release in just two years. Where were you when you first heard that news?
I been knew he had an appeal, but I found out from [music executive] Frank Babar—Frank is this guy who helped me and Max out—while I was on the Bad Boy Tour. We been working trying to get him out since he got in. We had our fingers crossed, you know? |
In remembrance of Srila Bhakti Raksak Sridhar Dev-Goswami Maharaj and the three day observance of Sriman Mahprabhu’s sannyas-lila he instituted in Sri Chaitanya Saraswat Math, we are presenting a Bengali poem written by Srila Sridhar Maharaj in which he expresses the grief-stricken hearts of the residents of Nabadwip.
In a lecture about Sriman Mahaprabhu’s sannyas-lila, Srila Govinda Maharaj commented:
We have seen that Srila Guru Maharaj was always deeply intoxicated with Mahaprabhu’s sannyas-lila. He established as a rule in Sri Chaitanya Saraswat Math that for the three days the devotees will live very simply and eat only some rice and dalma, dal with mixed vegetables.
Sri Nimai Sannyas
Om Vishnupad Srila Bhakti Raksak Sridhar Dev-Goswami Maharaj
Originally published in Sri Gaudiya Darsan: Volume 12, Issue 11, Sunday 11 June 1967.
miśra-suta viśvambhara navadvīpa vāsa
śachīra nimāi ai karere sannyāsa [1]
Vishvambhar, the son of Jagannath Mishra, who resides in Nabadwip, Shachi’s Nimai, oh! He has taken sannyas.
nyāya-dakṣa lakṣa lakṣa adhyāpaka trāsa
śachīra nimāi ai karere sannyāsa [2]
He is expert in logic and feared by hundreds of thousands of scholars. Oh! Shachi’s Nimai has taken sannyas.
kandarpa jiniyā rūpa-yauvana-prakāśa
śachīra nimāi ai karere sannyāsa [3]
His youthful beauty surpasses Cupid. Oh! Shachi’s Nimai has taken sannyas.
sārā navadvīpa kare andhakāra grāsa
śachīra nimāi ai karere sannyāsa [4]
Darkness engulfed the whole of Nabadwip. Oh! Shachi’s Nimai has taken sannyas.
kaṇṭaka nagare keśava bhāratī sakāśa
śachīra nimāi ai karere sannyāsa [5]
From Keshava Bharati in Katwa, oh! Shachi’s Nimai has taken sannyas.
kṣubdha jana-sindhu tuṅga taraṅga prakāśa
śachīra nimāi ai karere sannyāsa [6]
Great waves manifested in an ocean of agitated people. Oh! Shachi’s Nimai has taken sannyas.
uddhata janatā dekhāya bhāratīke trāsa
śachīra nimāi ai karere sannyāsa [7]
The agitated crowd frightened Keshava Bharati. Oh! Shachi’s Nimai has taken sannyas.
krandanera uchcharola bharila ākāśa
śachīra nimāi ai karere sannyāsa [8]
A tumult of cries filled the sky. Oh! Shachi’s Nimai has taken sannyas.
śire karāghāta kare antaraṅga dāsa
śachīra nimāi ai karere sannyāsa [9]
His intimate servants slapped their foreheads. Oh! Shachi’s Nimai has taken sannyas.
tāpa dagdha jīva-duḥkhe-duḥkhī janollāsa
śachīra nimāi ai karere sannyāsa [10]
Those sorrowed by the sorrow of other souls scorched by worldly distress rejoiced. Oh! Shachi’s Nimai has taken sannyas.
uttarāyaṇa saṁkramaṇe sannyāsa prakāśa
śachīra nimāi ai karere sannyāsa [11]
He revealed His sannyas as the sun completed its northern course (at the time of Makara Sankranti, mid-January). Oh! Shachi’s Nimai has taken sannyas.
sundara chā̐chara keśa chā̐da mukhe hāsa
śachīra nimāi ai karere sannyāsa [12]
His beautiful curly hair decorated His smiling moon-like face. Oh! Shachi’s Nimai has taken sannyas.
keśera karttane kibā premera ullāsa
śachīra nimāi ai karere sannyāsa [13]
What joy born of divine love He exhibited as His hair was cut away! Oh! Shachi’s Nimai has taken sannyas.
krandane ākula loka keha vā udāsa
śachīra nimāi ai karere sannyāsa [14]
Some people cried in distress. Others became despondent. Oh! Shachi’s Nimai has taken sannyas.
keha kruddha keha mugdha kāra matta hāsa
śachīra nimāi ai karere sannyāsa [15]
Some became angry, some were stunned, and some laughed madly. Oh! Shachi’s Nimai has taken sannyas.
auddhatya karite dhāya bhāratīra pāśa
śachīra nimāi ai karere sannyāsa [16]
Some impudently ran after Keshava Bharati. Oh! Shachi’s Nimai has taken sannyas.
nadīyā paṇḍita dalera svastira niḥśvāsa
śachīra nimāi ai karere sannyāsa [17]
The scholars of Nadia breathed a sigh of relief. Oh! Shachi’s Nimai has taken sannyas.
nārī-gaṇa ninde vidhi sṛjila sannyāsa
śachīra nimāi ai karere sannyāsa [18]
The women blasphemed Providence for creating sannyas. Oh! Shachi’s Nimai has taken sannyas.
śrī kṛṣṇa chaitanya nāma ha-ila prakāśa
śachīra nimāi ai karere sannyāsa [19]
His name ‘Sri Krishna Chaitanya’ was revealed. Oh! Shachi’s Nimai has taken sannyas.
maṇḍita hemāṅge śobhe aruṇa suvāsa
śachīra nimāi ai karere sannyāsa [20]
His golden form was adorned with beautiful saffron cloth. Oh! Shachi’s Nimai has taken sannyas.
kare daṇḍa kamaṇḍalu bhikṣuka prakāśa
śachīra nimāi ai karere sannyāsa [21]
He became a mendicant, with staff and water-pot in hand. Oh! Shachi’s Nimai has taken sannyas.
kāṭoyā gaṅgāya kṛṣṇa kolāhalollāsa
śachīra nimāi ai karere sannyāsa [22]
Beside the Ganges in Katwa, there was an ecstatic uproar of ‘Krishna!’ Oh! Shachi’s Nimai has taken sannyas.
pāpa aparādha bhikṣā sarva-jīva pāśa
śachīra nimāi ai karere sannyāsa [23]
He begged all souls for their sins and offences. Oh! Shachi’s Nimai has taken sannyas.
sarva-jīve yāchi dena kṛṣṇa-prema rasa
śachīra nimāi ai karere sannyāsa [24]
He begged from all souls and gave them the ecstasy of Krishna-prema. Oh! Shachi’s Nimai has taken sannyas.
chauddaśa ektriśa śaka māghādya divasa
śachīra nimāi ai karere sannyāsa [25]
On the first day of the month of Magh in the year 1431 of the Shaka era, oh! Shachi’s Nimai has taken sannyas.
śrī-charaṇa-reṇu yāche rāmānanda dāsa
śachīra nimāi ai karere sannyāsa [26]
Ramananda Das begs for the dust of His holy feet. Oh! Shachi’s Nimai has taken sannyas. |
Free agency is a weird time of the year. Every March the NFL allows teams to sign free agents and welcome new players to their franchise in the hopes of winning a championship or building a team that can someday compete for said championship.
In Detroit, it is unequivocally a time for dreams that will never come true, and in some cases, really shouldn’t come true. That’s why three years ago I started the “Just Say No” series to help protect us all from dreaming too hard or protect us from dreaming the wrong dreams altogether.
Here’s how it works: I noticed three years ago that we Lions fans have a bad habit of seeing a free agent and saying “we should sign that guy.” What I’ll be doing is crushing those dreams. Much like D.A.R.E. in the 90’s, we should all Just Say No to these guys. Without further adieu, here’s part one.
Lions fans: you don't want Sam Shields. Good teams don't just give up on useful players without good reason. — Jeff Risdon (@JeffRisdon) February 8, 2017
Nailed it, my friend. This type of thing will be a constant of the Just Say No series. While the Lions will be in need of corner help this summer, Sam Shields is not the way to go. Why? Because shields has played one game since Week 12 of the 2015 season. To elaborate further on that, Shields has never played a full season in his seven-year career.
Pushing 30 and dealing with concussion issues that saw him get sent to the IR in 2016, is all you need to see when making this decision.
Maybe I’m alone in this boat. To me, there is no corner in the league that gets paid as much as he did to play as bad as he did. Carr certainly was deserving of a hefty payday in his early days with Dallas. Now all I have is the image of Calvin Johnson ripping his soul out of his chest in route to 329 yards.
I will say this, of all on this list, Carr has the best chance of landing in Detroit. Being that he is from the area and some players like to end their careers at home. The Lions should not look at this as a another Rashean Mathis experiment. Take a pass. Carr is probably going to retire anyways.
Back to Green Bay again. I can see why Peppers could be seen as an option. He’s a future Hall of Famer who has been to the Pro bowl multiple times and even won Defensive Player of the Year in 2004. But the key word here is 2004. I was still in high school when that happened. I’m now a 31-year-old balding (handsome) man.
Julius Peppers is 37 years old. He really should be thinking about retiring. With that in mind, the Lions plan here should be to get younger. Peppers is old enough to be my father. Well, not realistically, but metaphorically. Is it metaphorically? I digress.
Peppers has begun to lose that step. It happens with age. After not missing a start since 2009, Peppers only started eleven games for the Packers in 2016. It’s time to get younger.
This one is tempting. There are two things in this world that I am certain of. One is that cereal is the greatest food ever created. The other is that Alshon Jeffery will be on the first thing smoking out of Chicago, but I say he keeps on moving past Detroit.
It wasn’t long ago that Calvin Johnson was retiring and everyone looked at Alshon Jeffery as if he were the only replacement the Lions could possibly get if they hoped to ever win a game again. Fast forward a year, and the Lions are a playoff team without an elite wide receiver. Do they even need Alshon Jeffery?
The next big part of this is a simple question: Is Alshon even that good? If you go back in time to 2013, you’ll see that Alshon had a big year. He racked up 1,421 yards and went to the Pro Bowl. He’s since been coasting off that one season.
This is what happens in the NFL. Player A has a really good season or even a really good game. team A pays them big money based on that alone. In the past two years, this is what Alshon has done.
Alshon Jeffery stats 2015-2016 Receptions Yards Touchdowns Receptions Yards Touchdowns 106 1,628 6
Please don’t forget that Jefferey spent part of his 2015 season out with a hamstring injury that eventually put him on the IR. Also don’t forget that Alshon missed part of the 2016 season because he was suspended for violating the NFL’s PED policy. Now I ask you, do you think the Lions should be Team A?
Another constant in the Just Say No series is the once great player whosr career was marred by injury. In case you missed it, the Giants released Victor Cruz on Monday afternoon.
The Giants have released veterans Victor Cruz and Rashad Jennings in an effort to create salary-cap space: https://t.co/kz0b5paUm8 pic.twitter.com/theLTu07IU — ESPN (@espn) February 13, 2017
Within seconds, this happened.
The lions should pick up victor Cruz he got something to prove now @Lions — TheBrownSkinAssassin (@Tru_lilbro) February 13, 2017
I get it. When you think of Victor Cruz, you think of 2011 and 2012 Victor Cruz. He was a bad man that looked like he would be one of the best receivers in the league for years to come. It’s really easy to forget 2013, 2014, 2015 and 2016 Victor Cruz who accumulated just 135 receptions for 1,921 yards and six touchdowns all in the span of 35 games over four years.
I like Victor Cruz. If the Lions gave him a shot at camp, I wouldn't even be upset about it, but it’s important to know that Cruz’s days of being a starting receiver are long past due. Unfortunately, in 2014 Cruz suffered a devastating injury that is particularly hard to come back from: a torn patella in his knee. At 30, he made an amazing effort, but Detroit may not be the place for him to continue his career.
What are your thoughts Lions fans? Be sure to leave your comments below. Until then, if somebody tries to offer you these free agents, show them this. |
After more than a year of waiting, fans of one of Prairie Artisan Ales’ most popular releases will be getting their wish this month.
The beer is Vanilla Noir, a 12.5 percent ABV imperial stout aged in whiskey barrels for approximately six months before being “dosed with vanilla beans.” The imperial stout was released for the first time in late 2013 before being rereleased in October 2015.
There have now been six different bottled variants in the Noir line:
Prairie Noir (11 percent ABV)
Coffee Noir (11.5 percent ABV)
Pirate Noir (12 percent ABV)
Wine Barrel Noir (11 percent ABV)
Apple Brandy Noir (12 percent ABV)
Vanilla Noir (12.5 percent ABV)
In emails, Zach Prichard, president of Krebs Brewing Co., told Tenemu that the newest release of Vanilla Noir will be packaged in 12-ounce bottles and that “every market will get a small amount of (Vanilla Noir)…sometime later this month.” |
August 1, 2011 -- Monthly Review Press has kindly given permission to Links International Journal of Socialist Renewal to publish "The growth imperative of capitalism", an exclusive excerpt from Fred Magdoff and John Bellamy Foster's just released What every environmentalist needs to know about capitalism. You can download the excerpt HERE (PDF), or read it on screen below.
John Bellamy Foster will be a featured international guest at the second World at a Crossroads: Climate Change – Social Change Conference, Friday, September 30 – Monday, October 3, 2011, Melbourne University.
Readers of Links are also urged to purchase copies of What every environmentalist needs to know about capitalism; click HERE to order.
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There is a growing consensus that the planet is heading toward environmental catastrophe: climate change, ocean acidification, ozone depletion, global freshwater use, loss of biodiversity and chemical pollution all threaten our future unless we act. What is less clear is how humanity should respond. The contemporary environmental movement is the site of many competing plans and prescriptions, and composed of a diverse set of actors, from militant activists to corporate chief executives.
This short, readable book is a sharply argued manifesto for those environmentalists who reject schemes of “green capitalism” or piecemeal reform. Environmental and economic scholars Fred Magdoff and John Bellamy Foster contend that the struggle to reverse ecological degradation requires a firm grasp of economic reality. Going further, they argue that efforts to reform capitalism along environmental lines or rely solely on new technology to avert catastrophe misses the point. The main cause of the looming environmental disaster is the driving logic of the system itself, and those in power—no matter how “green”—are incapable of making the changes that are necessary.
What Every Environmentalist Needs To Know about Capitalism tackles the two largest issues of our time, the ecological crisis and the faltering capitalist economy, in a way that is thorough, accessible, and sure to provoke debate in the environmental movement.
I’m not sure who needs to read this relentlessly persuasive book more: environmentalists who imagine we can solve the ecological crisis without confronting capitalism, or leftists who have yet to recognise the ecological crisis as the highest expression of the capitalist threat. How about both, and then some. Indispensable. — Naomi Klein, author, The Shock Doctrine As we journey through the early stages of the end of the industrial mind an ecological world view awaits us on the horizon. We have no map, but rather a wildly oscillating compass needle. These two bold grown-ups, old hands at hard thinking, are steadying the needle. This book properly pondered will reveal that capitalism is the product of abstract thought whose particularity is to propel us to the edge of humanity’s version of a Petri dish. — Wes Jackson, president, The Land Institute With the debate about environmental collapse so dominated by technological, population and market-based solutions, this book is a powerful antidote. Only by addressing global capitalism can we hope to avert catastrophe. Magdoff and Foster have written an up-to-date, accessible, and comprehensive account of a grim situation, yet manage to inspire the reader with their call for an ‘ecological revolution,’ already in process in parts of the world. An essential book for classroom use, to give to friends who need to learn more about what’s happening to the planet, or for the nightstand as a continual reminder of what’s really important. — Juliet Schor, author, True Wealth: How and Why Millions of Americans are Creating a Time-Rich, Ecologically-Light, Small-Scale, High-Satisfaction Economy A superb introduction to an essential conversation about capitalism’s ability to coexist with environmental progress. Magdoff and Foster do an excellent job of addressing the important issues at stake in this debate. — Michael T. Klare, author, Rising Powers, Shrinking Planet: The New Geopolitics of Energy
Fred Magdoff is professor emeritus of plant and soil science at the University of Vermont. His most recent books include Agriculture and Food in Crisis (edited with Brian Tokar), The ABCs of the Economic Crisis (with Michael Yates) and The Great Financial Crisis (with John Bellamy Foster). John Bellamy Foster is editor of Monthly Review. He is professor of sociology at the University of Oregon and author of The Ecological Revolution, The Great Financial Crisis (with Fred Magdoff), Critique of Intelligent Design (with Brett Clark and Richard York), Ecology Against Capitalism, Marx’s Ecology and The Vulnerable Planet.
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Download the excerpt HERE (PDF), or read it on screen below.
Fred Magdoff & John Bellamy Foster: What every environmentalist needs to know about capitalism (exclusive... |
Oh I most certainly did eat that. The ‘that’ in question is a crispy edged, deliciously spiced, sweet potato and chickpea burger slathered in tahini yoghurt. This recipe is based on one that my mum makes for sweet potato fritters – they are delicious and we used to eat them with poached eggs and hollandaise sauce for a funky take on eggs Benedict.
I decided to burgerize those light, herby fritters and this is what I came up with! The burger version turned out so well that it’s now a regular in my kitchen. Here’s hoping it can become a regular in yours!
And yes, this is a totally vegetarian dish. Not vegan, though. Can I be honest with ya’ll? I’m 24 and I live on a budget. Eating something that tastes this good, which has plenty of protein and doesn’t include expensive meat just makes sense.
If there are members of your share-house, family or just your partner who are iffy on skipping the meat, then I’m sure I don’t have to tell you that making a meatless burger is the way to go! Especially if it’s crispy and has plenty of texture and flavour like this baby. And it’s so easy! A 30-minute meal MAX. Here’s how it’s done!
The burgers come together super quickly, so I like to make the tahini yoghurt first. It’s my new condiment obsession – on a piece of grilled salmon, or on felafel, or just to dunk an entire bowl of sweet potato chips into, it’s SO GOOD. And it’s as simple as dumping some yoghurt, tahini (aka sesame seed paste), salt pepper and lemon juice into a bowl and stirring it together. Sometimes I add a little garlic, and sometimes I don’t – totally up to you.
Then I throw some rinsed, canned chickpeas into a bowl, grate up a sweet potato – you want about 2 heaping cupfuls, and crack in an egg.
To that mixture, I add some flour, ground coriander, smoked paprika and dried oregano. A little chopped fresh parsley or some sliced spring onions are great if you have them, but today I went without.
From there, just squelch the mixture together with your hands, aiming to break up some of the chickpeas and leave others whole for a nice variety of textures. Then shape the mix into four patties and cook in a little olive oil in a frying pan until golden brown and crisp on both sides.
Then it’s time to build your burger! I always like to let people assemble their own burgers, firstly because it means they can customize it however they like. And secondly because it’s super fun, and I would feel bad hogging all of the stacking good times to myself.
These patties are really delicious, and I like to taste the sweet potato, so I make mine fairly simple with just the yoghurt, some rocket (aka arugula) and red onion. But hey, throw on hot sauce, sliced tomato, coleslaw, mayo, barbecue sauce or whatever you like! I don’t want to tell you how to burger. Just know that you should burger. You should THIS burger.
xx Sarah.
P.S. Burger is a verb now. |
Samsung had no choice but to suspend sales of the Galaxy Note 7 after multiple reports revealed that even replacement devices aren’t safe. A day later, the company confirmed it will no longer manufacture and sell the phone. Samsung may lose some $17 billion in revenue, but that might not be the worst thing for the company. Damage to the Samsung and Note brands might be irreparable in the short term.
DON’T MISS: Don’t expect a Surface Book 2 to take on Apple’s new MacBook Pro this year
Following the first Galaxy Note 7 recall, analysts said they expected the company to lose $5 billion, in missed sales and recall costs.
“In the worst-case scenario, the U.S. could conclude the product is fundamentally flawed and ban sales of the device,” HI Investment Securities analyst Song Myung-sub told Reuters, before Samsung announced that it would stop Galaxy Note 7 sales for good.
Samsung will lose nearly $17 billion the company was expected to generate during the Galaxy Note 7’s product cycle. The estimate comes from Credit Suisse analysts and others who expected the company to sell 19 million phablets.
“This has probably killed the Note 7 brand name,” Charter Equity Research managing director Edward Snyder said. “By the time they fix the problem they have to go through recertification and requalification, and by the time that happens, they’re going up against the (Galaxy) S8 launch.”
“We think the Note 7 incident may hurt demand for Samsung’s other smartphone models as well,” broker Nomura said, adding that it may have to lower Samsung mobile’s profit estimates for the fourth quarter by 85%.
“The (Note 7) unit is forever going to be tarnished, and the danger is that the brand becomes irretrievably damaged as well,” UK law firm Weightmans partner Stephen Robb said. ”They need to be writing to every customer with an apology and some form of ‘compensation’… It will clearly be costly for the company, but the alternative is to end up going the way of Nokia and Blackberry.”
Finally, in addition to the long-term impact on reputation and brand, the Galaxy Note 7 scandal may have an adverse impact on Samsung’s component business. |
I’m guessing that last slice of honey glazed ham with a dollop of pickle, was the proverbial straw that has left you incapable of rising out of that chair and moving to that comfy sofa to sit in front of the TV for the rest of the year...
... Good. I have you exactly where I want you.
While that excessive lunch goes down, and your turkey curry simmers slowly away until dinner, let's take the time to welcome in the new year. 2298 that is. For tomorrow sees the release of episode 1 of this brand new show!
Welcome to Behind The Mic Anthony. And a huge welcome to the FateCrafters Network. You have definitely sparked my interest with this show so let’s dive straight in with the first question.
Who or what would you say are the main influences in your work?
“My general influences are any and all epic fantasy, along with dystopian classics like ‘1984’, ‘The Giver’, ‘Brave New World’, and ‘We’. It should also be mentioned that 2298 is also very much a product of my undying love for Richard Matheson’s classic ‘I Am Legend’.”
Some of my favorite stories here. I absolutely love Zamyatin, and if that’s anything to go by then I’m sold already!
So what factors led to you deciding to do an Audio Drama Podcast?
“Paul Sating, Mac Rogers, Koba Vega, and Sarah Rhea Werner were my introductory points into audio drama, and it captured me so much that I decided not only would I finally finish the novel I’d been writing on & off for years, but now I’d use the medium, and its incredible community, as the vehicle to do that.”
So the show is based on the novel, or is this a different story? Will you be releasing it in novel form as well?
“It’s based on the novel! I had written half of it and was in a never ending cycle of editing before Audio Drama completely changed my mindset, and subsequently my life I suppose too. I am hoping to release it in conjunction with the final episode but I’m probably getting way ahead of myself; gotta focus on making good episodes first!”
Lol. So true. Let’s not too far ahead of ourselves. How have you found the whole process of creating an ADP?
“Honestly, magical. Sure, editing is awful and time consuming and yes, I’m also doing the voice acting without acting experience, plus finishing the actual writing, but it’s so worth it. With the constant encouragement and help that’s always around, it never lets you feel overwhelmed or that you shouldn’t keep going. In my experience so far anyway.”
So what can we expect from this show? Can you give us a brief overview?
“Years after an invasion nearly destroys Earth, a new society has coalesced around the only thing left: the internet. The Network makes sure ‘Profiles’ eat right and stay focused, but No. 24 - thanks to the sudden appearance of a mysterious bird - is finding that difficult. Many things are set into motion by this, and slowly the truth of how we reached the, very probable, future will appear and hopefully make us question some of our own society.”
So the release date is new years eve, what will be the release schedule, and how many episodes/seasons have you planned for?
“It’s going to be one season - I’m open to more but it could stand alone as well - with 20 episodes, to be released weekly.”
Brilliant. Okay, let’s change it up a bit. What are your all time favorite top three audio drama podcasts?
“This question is impossible. Gun to my head - Bright Sessions, Girl in Space, and Rose Drive. This answer would change daily FWIW.”
LOL! That’s why I ask it. I know I could never answer the question from one month to the next. Do you have plans for any other AD podcasts in the future, and if so what genres would you love to explore?
“Absolutely! If things go well for 2298, I’d love to explore a lot of other ideas I have in all genres. Funny enough, I think what I’d like the most would be the opportunity to work with other people on a story. Whether actors or directors or writers, I think it’d be fun to not be the only one running the ship; a crew would be fun!”
Cool. Who would you love to work with?
“I would kill to write a part/story for (and with) Brittany Williams (@blknrdproblems and @BrittanyActs), because I want to explore different perspectives and identities, while using any strengths I have to help project them out bigger and larger into a world that’s so in need of understanding. I’m not totally sold on my acting abilities yet but to be directed by Rick Coste would probably be a lot of fun.”
Are we ever sold on our acting abilities? I’ve had one ‘attempt’, and while it was a whole lot of fun, I don’t foresee me doing much. Maybe the odd cameo here and there.
As we wind this up, is there anything you would like to add?
“I just want to speak again to the culture and community within audio drama, because it’s too incredible to not mention. I’ve always been a very self deprecating person, which I’m sure many artists can relate to, and have always found other mediums to feel like a club I had no access to; it made me think I wasn’t good enough or I was foolish for even attempting. With audio drama, I received so much encouragement, advice, and love that was completely unsolicited, so I owe everything I do and every success I have to them.”
Well thanks Anthony for your time and patience with this interview, it’s been a blast!
I’m sure that all my readers will join me in wishing you all the best for 2298. I for one can’t wait to hear it!
I suggest you put on your headphones and check out the three treats that await you before tomorrow's release over at soundcloud.com/2298pod. Once you’ve done that, be sure to look up the show on the Twitters @2298pod for updates and other news. |
USA Today
The Atlanta Hawks are a deep, experienced, cohesive group that maximizes the full potential of what it has.
In other words, they're a dramatically different test than the ones LeBron James and the Cleveland Cavaliers have passed so far this postseason.
The Boston Celtics had great chemistry and an enjoyable bellicosity, but they lacked the top-level talent needed to threaten the Cavs. The Chicago Bulls weren't short on intriguing individual pieces, but not all of them were healthy and their whole never looked as good as the sum of those parts, anyway.
Cleveland hasn't coasted through the playoffs, but its 8-2 postseason record shows how often it's been tested. Atlanta has the combination of ability and ambition needed to change that.
And the Cavs know it.
"They're a great team. They've been a great team all year," James said of the Hawks, via Northeast Ohio Media Group's Chris Haynes. "They've been the No. 1 seed in our conference all year for a reason and it's going to be highly competitive."
If the NBA is truly a superstar's league, James and the Cavs should have their key to the second NBA Finals appearance in franchise history. For all of the championship criteria the Hawks have—depth, discipline, good coaching, two-way balance—their lack of an elite star has concerned outside observers all season.
But it didn't keep this club from establishing itself as one of the regular season's greatest powers.
Recapping the Hawks' Ridiculous Regular Season Category Statistic NBA Rank Wins 60 Second Point Differential Plus-5.4 Fourth Offensive Rating 106.2 T-Sixth Defensive Rating 100.7 Seventh Net Rating Plus-5.6 Fourth NBA.com, ESPN.com
The Hawks aren't merely a good team; they're a great one.
And they've always viewed their supposed biggest weakness as perhaps their essential strength.
"Give me four or five really good players compared to just one superstar," Paul Millsap said in late January, via Paul Newberry of the Associated Press. "I'll take that any day."
The Hawks have fashioned themselves as the San Antonio Spurs of the East. And like their role models from the Alamo City, the Hawks have staked their greatness on an unwavering commitment to selflessness.
It's apparent in everything they do.
They had the regular season's highest assist percentage (67.6) and ranked fifth overall with 322.9 passes per game. Their entire starting lineup shared the Eastern Conference Player of the Month award in January. Four of those players—Millsap, Jeff Teague, Al Horford and Kyle Korver—were selected for the All-Star Game.
Nathaniel S. Butler/Getty Images
"We're about playing our style of basketball, whether it's preseason, regular season, postseason," Millsap said, per Fox Sports Ohio's Sam Amico. "We're going to continue to play our style. We know who we are. We're not going to let everybody else tell us what we're not."
Atlanta's style, overseen by head coach and former Gregg Popovich disciple Mike Budenholzer, almost seems like a different sport than what Cleveland is playing. Atlanta trusts its system; Cleveland depends on its stars.
The Cavs rely on James and (when he's healthy) Kyrie Irving to create most of their offense. Both had a usage percentage north of 26 during the regular season (James at 32.3, Irving at 26.2). Teague led Atlanta's starters with 25.3.
Cleveland went to the isolation game more than any other team in the league during the regular season. Atlanta avoids ball-stopping possessions at all costs.
"The Spurs Lite approach installed by Budenholzer these past two seasons is all about ball movement and spacing," noted NBA.com's Steve Aschburner.
Teague and reserve point guard Dennis Schroder set Atlanta's offense in motion with dribble penetration. Stopping those attacks is only the first part of the battle for opposing defenses. This Atlanta roster was built in a way that ensures every player who sees the floor is a scoring threat, and almost all of them can light the lamp from anywhere on the court.
Sleep for one second, and the Hawks can burn you with both player and ball movement.
Atlanta has all the pieces to give Cleveland's defense some problems.
Cavs center Timofey Mozgov can't sit back and patrol the paint, since Millsap, Horford, Mike Scott, Mike Muscala and Pero Antic can all make plays away from the basket. James can't leave his assignment to roam, and there's nowhere to hide the banged-up Irving.
Though it is worth noting the Hawks offense hasn't been flying nearly as high as it did during the regular season.
The Hawks are scoring 4.2 points per 100 possessions fewer now than they did then. Shooting percentages have plummeted throughout this rotation. Korver has dropped to 35 percent three-point shooting after hitting 49.2 percent in the regular season; Teague's field-goal percentage has slipped from 46 to 39.9.
But none of this has shaken the players' trust in their approach. This hasn't been the prettiest playoff ride, but it still delivered Atlanta its first ever Eastern Conference Finals berth.
There's no reason to try reinventing the wheel.
"We have to win being ourselves," Millsap said, via ESPN.com's Kevin Arnovitz. "We're not going to win being someone else or being a different team. We're not going to change overnight. We've got to stick to who we are, stick to our basics, stick to our principles."
Dale Zanine-USA TODAY Sports
Maybe the Hawks won't have enough.
It's quite possible their lack of a full-fledged star could be a fatal flaw when they run into the league's biggest and brightest. And if Irving can somehow put his left knee and right foot problems behind him, the Cavs could have the two best players in this series.
That won't be easy for Atlanta to overcome.
But the Hawks present their own problems.
James knows firsthand how dangerous a free-flowing, selfless squad can be. Last season, San Antonio used the same style to dethrone King James and the Miami Heat.
The Hawks don't have the same Hall of Fame talent as the Spurs, but clearly, the blueprint has already assisted Atlanta. And it's far from the only advantage this club will have in the series, as the battles of both the benches and the coaches could be won decisively by the Hawks.
Despite having the higher seed and the home-court advantage that comes along with it, the Hawks won't enter this series as the favorites. James' presence alone guarantees that.
But that status won't matter when these two teams step between the lines and the Cavs square off with their most dangerous adversary to date.
Unless otherwise noted, statistics used courtesy of Basketball-Reference.com and NBA.com.
Follow @ZachBuckleyNBA |
Beijing: Ahead of Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s visit to the US, Chinese official media said on Friday that any gains made by him in his talks on immigration and climate change with President Donald Trump will also benefit China.
“It will be interesting to see how Modi’s visit to the US will influence the two countries’ bilateral economic ties," an article in the state-run Global Times said. “Chinese people will take a close look at the summit because some of the issues also concern China’s interests," it said. “For instance, Trump is reforming US immigration policies, including the H-1B visa, a type of visa whose biggest and second-biggest recipients are India and China, respectively." The H-1B visa programme is the most sought-after by Indian IT firms and professionals.
“The curb on H-1B visas is bad news not only for the Indian IT sector but also Chinese students studying in US universities. China will most likely be willing to express support for India’s stance over the H-1B visa, and hopefully the problem can get solved during Modi’s summit with Trump," it said. Also, in the backdrop of Trump withdrawing from the Paris climate deal, any gains made by Modi on climate issues will benefit China, the article said. “The dispute over climate issues will perhaps continue to evolve during the upcoming (Modi-Trump) summit. Will Modi use the opportunity to pressure the US to undertake its obligations?," it asked. China had announced its adherence to the Paris deal.
“Against this background, some key issues such as the H-1B visa programme and Paris agreement are likely to have a much greater impact on the whole picture of the bilateral ties, and thus the two countries may have more motivation to solve these problems. If the Modi-Trump meeting can make achievements in this regard, other countries like China are also expected to benefit from it," the article said.
“China is glad to see India and the US strengthening their economic ties. However, New Delhi’s bargaining power in negotiations with Washington is limited, so it is unrealistic for Modi to totally change Trump’s attitude toward the H-1B visa and Paris agreement. China needs to have a clear anticipation of the summit and be prepared for any eventualities," it said. |
According to the theologians at the New York Times, a “strong Catholic Faith” and “abortion rights” coexist without contradiction in the person of Nancy Pelosi.
In a puff piece by Jennifer Steinhauersept Monday, the Times said that Ms. Pelosi had accused Republicans of mixing politics with Francis’s visit, something Ms. Pelosi would never do.
For the House Minority Leader, Steinhauersept wrote, “the issue of abortion rights has always been ancillary to her unwavering faith and deep approbation for generations of popes.” If by “ancillary,” Steinhauersept means “in open contradiction to,” then perhaps she has a point.
For Ms. Pelosi, “abortion and family planning access—as important proxies for women’s rights—are core values central to her party’s platform and base,” the essay states.
Steinhauersept laments “that one issue, abortion, is adding a thick layer of tension to the otherwise convivial mood as Congress prepares for the arrival of Pope Francis this week.” If we could only stick to the nice topics, like immigration and the environment, she seems to suggest, everything would be just fine. Why make an issue out of the one tiny topic of abortion?
The wrench in the works, of course, are those nasty Republicans.
“Scores of House Republicans, responding to undercover videos claiming that Planned Parenthood affiliates illegally profit from selling aborted fetal tissue to researchers, are demanding that any bill to keep the government open be stripped of all federal funding for Planned Parenthood,” she wrote.
The videos did not “claim” anything of the sort, of course. They merely showed it.
“If they [the Republicans] think they are making the pope more welcome” by putting abortion measures on the legislative calendar the week he is in Washington, “they are mistaken,” Pelosi said. “The pope is his own reason.”
Yet just this past January, Ms. Pelosi said that she knew “more about having babies than the pope,” and that a woman has “the right” to an abortion.
In her acceptance speech for Planned Parenthood’s highest honor—the Margaret Sanger Award—Pelosi went still further, calling pro-lifers (like the pope) “dumb,” “closed-minded” and “oblivious.”
In her New York Times article, Steinhauersept praised Pelosi for what can only be called a remarkable feat of overcoming cognitive dissonance. “For Ms. Pelosi,” she wrote, “the notion of disagreeing with other Catholics about abortion has not weighed on her sense of faith,” and that “she has lived with the conflict all her life.”
Steinhauersept further claimed that Ms. Pelosi is a huge fan of the popes and “carefully reads each encyclical with the rapt attention of a serious cook who devours every issue of “Bon Appétit.”
If that is so, one can only imagine her disgust at certain recipes offered by the Papal chefs.
Pelosi seemed to have missed the March 1995 issue, for example, where Saint John Paul II, in his encyclical letter The Gospel of Life, wrote that “among all the crimes which can be committed against life, procured abortion has characteristics making it particularly serious and deplorable.”
“The Second Vatican Council defines abortion,” he continued, “as an ‘unspeakable crime.’”
In a pointed comment, John Paul wrote that “responsibility likewise falls on the legislators who have promoted and approved abortion laws.”
“In this sense,” he concluded, “abortion is a most serious wound inflicted on society and its culture by the very people who ought to be society’s promoters and defenders.”
How a “strong Catholic” legislator such as Nancy Pelosi can publicly defend the “unspeakable crime” of abortion is a theological mystery that only the New York Times can fathom.
Follow Thomas D. Williams on Twitter @tdwilliamsrome |
Alex Oxlade-Chamberlain: Arsenal ace out for at least six weeks
Gunners manager Arsene Wenger told a press conference on Tuesday that the 20-year-old will be out for at least six weeks with a knee injury.
The player himself later tweeted that he hoped to be "back playing in three months".
Oxlade-Chamberlain limped out of Arsenal's 3-1 home defeat by Aston Villa on the opening day of the Premier League campaign on Saturday.
Reports suggested he could be set for an even longer spell of rehabilitation, but Wenger moved to calm fears of a serious injury as he spoke ahead of the Champions League play-off first leg against Fenerbahce on Wednesday.
"He will be out for at least six weeks. He has a posterior cruciate problem, a ligament which is stretched," Wenger said.
"We don't think it will need surgery. He is consulting tonight, but it will be at least six weeks out."
But the player, who did not travel to Turkey and was due to see a specialist on Tuesday evening, later gave a much more pessimistic update on his official Twitter feed.
"Gutted I'm injured so early in the season," he wrote, "but I'm going to be working hard to hopefully be back playing in 3 months. Thanks 4 all ur support."
Oxlade-Chamberlain will miss September's crunch Group H World Cup qualifiers against Moldova and Ukraine.
The midfielder also stands to miss the October dates against Montenegro and Poland as Roy Hodgson's team bid to reach next summer's finals in Brazil, as well as the important early league and European games in Arsenal's campaign. |
He could not go up to the boy and ask him where he lived, lift him and carry him -- he was so small -- to his home. Nor could he scold the child's parents for having sent him out on this errand without proper shoes or winter clothes. He could not even take up the buckets and have the child lead him to his home. For each of these possibilities demanded that he be able to speak to the boy, and this he could not do.
Back in 1975, in a review of Thomas M. Disch's collection, M. John Harrison highlighted a passage in one story, 'The Asian Shore', and excoriatingly compared its uncompromising realism with the airless constructions and frictionless problems and discourse of much contemporary SF. In the story, an American recently moved to Istanbul, haunted by an identity crisis, crosses the Bosphorus to the Asian side of the city and comes across a boy crying by a public fountain. It's winter. The boy has been sent to collect water in two buckets, but he is shod in plastic slippers with a thong that must be grasped by the first and second toes. When he tries to walk, freezing water slops onto his feet, his numb toes lose his grip, and he cannot keep his slippers on. He can't leave them behind, and he can't leave the water buckets, either. But as far as the story's non-Turkish-speaking protagonist is concerned, the worst of it is the horror of his own helplessness:Harrison's explication of that passage made a huge impression on me at the time; as far as I was concerned, it epitomised the division between genre science fiction and the ambitions of the New Wave. And I was strongly reminded of it while watching Aleksei German's film, just released on Blu-ray in the UK.An adaptation of Arkady and Bros Strugatsky's science fiction novel, it's an epic drama the director planned over four decades, spent a dozen years making, and did not live to complete -- the final post-production work was carried out by by his widow and his son. Filmed in black and white, it's set on an alien planet whose people and history are much like our own, except that its nascent Renaissance has been snuffed out by the persecution of intellectuals and artists by a violent sect, the Greys. Its inhabitants are imprisoned by squalor, violence and meaningless ritual. Crumbling buildings are swept by seething rain or muffled by fog, and mired in glutinous lakes of mud and shit through which everyone must struggle on their daily rounds.The film's densely imagined, claustrophobic world is depicted in crowded, busy scenes that deliberately echo the paintings of Breugel pere and fils, and Heironymus Bosch (many of the extras were chosen for their resemblance to characters in their work), and the restless camera not only immerses the viewer in the action but also becomes a character in the film. Passers-by often turn to address it with complaints or knowing looks; it roves with a kind of avid detachment over faces and animals, corpses and atrocities, peers under tables or into corners of rooms while elsewhere something else is always going on. Passages are reminiscent of the films of Terry Gilliam (especially), Sergei Eistenstein's, and Elim Klimov's World War 2 masterpiece, but the sheer density of its world-building and its unblinking documentation of human folly and degradation are arresting, exhausting, and wholly unique.This universal misery is watched and recorded by a small group of anthropologists from Earth. The film's narrative, recounted in elliptical episodes, centers on one of them, Don Rumata (Leonid Yarmolnik), who masquerades as a swordfighter descended from a local god. We are never shown the spaceship that brought him and his colleagues to this backward world, but he wears a crystal camera eye, his sword can effortlessly cut through armour, he plays jazz on a complicated clarinet, and affects an ironic detachment. He cuts off the ears of his enemies rather than killing them, and insists on a plentiful supply of hot water and white linen to set himself apart from the grimy, stinking locals, but gradually becomes mired in a struggle between the Greys and a rival sect, and an intricate sequence of betrayals. He wants to do good, but doesn't know how. He wants to stay aloof, but is forced to take violent action to defend himself. And it slowly becomes clear that his seprior powers can have no effect on the dead-end of the planet's civilisation: remove the Greys, and another sect will take its place; kill all the noblemen, and others equally violent and corrupt will take their place.The parallels between the fantastical world of this compassionate, compelling, witty, intelligent film and our own are obvious; the contrast with much contemporary science fiction, with its super heroes, worlds designed to reward their protagonists, and simplistic morality plays, is as strong as it was forty years ago. |
2013 was a good year to become a worker-owned company. Although just a selection of some of the newest worker-owners on the block, we highlight 17 new and existing businesses that were founded as or transitioned into worker-ownership in 2013. If these businesses are local to you, we encourage you to support and welcome your newly worker-owned neighbors.
One that is easy to support when faced with the myriad of beer selections available at the market is New Belgium Brewery (known for their amber ale, Fat Tire). New Belgium has been 41 percent employee-owned since 2000, but as of two days before 2013, the brewery became 100 percent employee-owned and remains to be 100 percent wind-powered. Working towards joining the list of fully employee-owned breweries is the fifth-largest craft brewery in the country, Deschutes Brewery (recommending their Black Butte Porter), who made their first contribution to their ESOP trust in April 2013, currently at 8 percent of the company’s total stock. Also following suit in 2013 was the Alaskan Brewing Company, who makes beer-powered beer by repurposing brewing by-products as fuel.
A couple other mentionable businesses in the beverage industry are 4th Tap Brewing Co-op in Austin, TX and the Artisan Beverage Cooperative in Greenfield, MA. The newly founded, Cooperation Texas graduate, 4th Tap is aimed to be the first worker-owned production brewery in America when it opens in 2014. In the meantime, it is testing and tapping new brews (like their Zephyr Pale Ale) with the help of its brewing neighbors at the Black Star Co-op. The Artisan Beverage Cooperative, founded in March 2013, is the merged businesses of Katalyst Kombucha and Green River Ambrosia Meads, who are actually co-located in the same brewing facility and have overlapping staff. Both cooperatives are new members of the US Federation of Worker Cooperatives (USFWC).
Also in Greenfield, MA, Real Pickles announced its successful conversion to a worker cooperative in May 2013. Most amazing is how 77 individuals and organizations throughout Massachusetts and Vermont raised $500,000 in investments to help their neighbors with the transition.
Probably the largest company on this list is The Saxton Group with 2,000 employees, known for its McAlister’s Deli and Pinkberry franchises in Texas. The Saxton Group became 100% worker-owned just five days before 2013, but joined the ranks of America’s 100 largest majority employee-owned companies in 2013 curated by The National Center for Employee Ownership.
On a much smaller scale in Richmond, CA, five women run a cooperative business called Fusion Latina, celebrating their grand opening in February 2013. The catering cooperative serves Latin “fusion” food, while specializing in empanadas. This business was spurred by the support of the city through a $5,000 loan from the Richmond Cooperative Revolving Loan Fund, which was inspired by Richmond’s Mayor after a trip to Mondragon. Also in Richmond, Pamoja Energy Solutions was started by Solar Richmond as a cooperative solar company. In August 2013, Pamoja completed its first solar installation and started its second shortly after.
For those in the Pacific Northwest looking for a bite to eat, the new worker-owners of The New Moon Cooperative Café in Olympia, WA had their grand re-opening in August 2013. The 14 members of the Black Moon Cooperative (who are also the worker-owners of the café) purchased the café founded in 1996 from former owner Dylan Elkhart. Along with the not-yet-open worker-owned and -operated vegan dessert bar Au Paon which has been setting up in the People’s Food Co-op Farmers’ Market in Portland, OR all year, The New Moon Café is also a new member of the USFWC.
Also on the USFWC’s list of new members are small, unconventional businesses such as the three-member Chinese herbal pharmacy in Portland, OR called The Vital Compass, and across the country in Portland, ME is a four-member video store (yes, video) called Jet Video that became worker-owned in January 2013.
In the manufacturing sector, the resilient New Era Windows in Chicago, IL had its grand opening on May Day 2013 after a few tough years under the ownership of Republic Windows and Serious Energy. Their efforts consisted of a six-day sit-in and occupying the factory, respectively, before it became a worker-owned, unionized cooperative of 17 members.
Wellspring Upholstery opened its doors in the fall of 2013 in Springfield, MA with plans to hire six low-income residents in its first year. The Wellspring Collective’s first company works closely with the Hampden County Sheriff’s Department, which provides a pool of trained candidates who would otherwise face limited employment opportunities after incarceration.
In Chicago, IL, four teenage female students at the Austin Polytech Academy are worker-owners of MECH Creations, a trumpet mouthpiece manufacturing company with a product line of three, including a patented product. Finding its origins in an after-school program on entrepreneurial skills, a business plan was created, materials were acquired, and production began in May 2013.
Lastly, in the information technology field, the Boston TechCollective in Boston, MA joined the USFWC in 2013. The five worker-owners of the worker-owned tech support business offer home and business computer repairs and a free weekly workshop every Thursday covering topics from Smartphones 101 to online privacy.
Though these 17 companies are just a sliver of a selection of businesses that have become worker-owned cooperatives or ESOPs, it shows that the structure of a democratized workplace is not limited to industry or scale. It is encouraging to see new and existing businesses transition to a more democratic workplace, and it was always exciting to highlight these new developments throughout 2013 on our social media platforms. We hope to see these businesses grow stronger and for many more to come in 2014. |
American University
Dr. Kerwin is AU's 14th president and the first president in the university's history to also be an alumnus.
American University President Neil Kerwin announced today that he plans to step down after more than a decade of leadership that transformed the institution in academic quality, campus facilities, and national standing.
Kerwin informed the Board of Trustees of his decision to step down when his current contract expires in May 2017.
American University’s 14th president and the first alumnus to serve at its helm, he was appointed interim president in 2005, having served as professor, dean of the School of Public Affairs and Provost. In 2007 following a national search, the AU Board of Trustees appointed him president. His tenure at AU—as a student, professor, dean, provost and president—spans 42 years.
“It has been my privilege to lead this extraordinary institution at an important time in its history.” Kerwin said. In a memo to the AU community announcing his plans to step down, he said, “I do so filled with well-founded optimism for the future of our institution.”
Kerwin brought transparency, openness, planning and strategic thinking to an institution that was confronting governance and leadership challenges in 2005. His steadfast insistence on effective planning, shaped by wide participation and linked to resource allocation, provided a roadmap for a university that is now measurably stronger in terms of academic quality, financial position, facilities and stature.
“Neil Kerwin’s lasting impact on AU has been to elevate the university and advance areas vital to its continued progress,” said Chairman of the AU Board of Trustees Jack Cassell. “The Kerwin era will be remembered for a new level of academic and research rigor, a culture of tackling the great issues, a commitment to make the university more affordable, accessible and diverse, a reduction of the university’s carbon footprint and investment in sustainability, increased engagement with alumni, enhanced recognition and reputation, and a period of greater impact in the city of Washington DC, across the nation and around the world.”
A Transformed Research Institution
Affirmation of AU’s progress came at the conclusion of the Middle States accreditation report:
“American University, inclusive of its trustees, administrative leadership, faculty, staff, students, and alumni has been deeply engaged in a transformation exercise since 2008. The institution’s “Statement of Common Purpose” remains the same, as does its fundamental nature as a research university with a strong leaning toward the social sciences and related professional programs, and in its focus on providing a high touch, high impact experience for its students. Almost everything else about the University has changed based upon the ambitions of the leadership, a living strategic plan deeply rooted in AU’s values and realities, widespread benchmarking, the willingness of the faculty and staff to assess their programs and activities and then modify them, and a healthy dose of creativity.
Overall, the transformation exercise has been an extremely successful one, with stronger board governance, an exceptional leadership team including many new deans, a larger and demonstrably stronger faculty, a transparent and widely supported change in the mix of faculty, greater support for research, active faculty, a more diverse undergraduate student body that is now reflective of the values of the institution and more consistent with the demographic future of the nation. The entire American University community is to be commended for its efforts and its success; American University is stronger, more vibrant, more relevant, and better positioned as a result of what has transpired…
—Middle States Accreditation Team, 2014
A few measures demonstrate how much progress has been achieved under Neil Kerwin’s leadership:
The demand for undergraduate admission to AU has never been greater. Today, only one in four applicants is admitted to AU. A record number of applications for Fall 2016 and rapid increases in yield rate (the percentage who accept an offer of admission) over the last two years mean that AU has become much more selective, so as not to exceed capacity for classes and residence halls. The result: an admit rate of 25.7% for freshmen applicants, a drop of almost 20 percent from just two years ago.
Research and scholarship are more rigorous and intensive. The university’s research classification by the Carnegie Commission on Higher Education moved from the lowest tier among research universities to the middle tier, called “Doctoral: Higher Research Activity." The reclassification is a result of strategic decisions to expand AU’s array of doctoral programs, as well as a reflection of increased productivity in externally funded research. AU is now grouped with institutions like Dartmouth and William and Mary.
Financial stability and growth are reflected in bond ratings and endowment. Ratings agencies consider a host of factors, including demand, reserves, financial statements, and debt, when they advise potential investors and creditors about the financial position of universities. AU’s rating was one of few private universities to improve during the recession and continues to be strong. Moody’s rated AU an A2 in 2005 and is A1 now. Standard & Poor’s rated AU an A in 2005 and A+ today. AU’s endowment, with careful investment and management, has grown from $272 to $550 million.
The university’s transformation is changing perceptions and its reputation is growing. With intentional commitments to increase visibility and recognition, AU’s momentum is being noticed. One measure is AU’s position on the top 100 of U.S. News & World Report’s Best Colleges over the last ten years. AU is one of the fastest movers on the list, rated 87 in 2005; today it is 72.
Responding To the Important Issues in Higher Education
AU during Kerwin’s tenure strengthened the rigor of the academic programs at the undergraduate level and focused on improving the quality of the student experience. AU also has worked to address national higher education challenges, most notably on access and affordability, prevention and response to sexual assault and most recently, on a plan to improve diversity and inclusion.
Living up to a commitment to make financial access a high priority for his tenure, AU improved affordability, radically shifting financial aid resources from merit to need based aid.
In addition, AU substantially reduced average student debt by 21% over the last five years, and increased the proportion of enrolling students from low-income families.
Kerwin also focused on measuring and effectively communicating AU’s return on the student’s investment and graduate outcomes. A first of its kind website, We Know Success, provides the employment and graduate school admission rates, as well as income level by degree program and major.
Engagement in Washington and The World
Doubling down on commitments in the university’s mission to engage with the city of Washington and to maintain its role as a global education leader, Kerwin helped AU expand its reach nationally and internationally.
He served as a member of the board of directors of the American Council on Education (ACE) (2012-15) and on the board of the National Association of Independent Colleges and Universities (NAICU) from February 2012 to February 2014. He is a member of the Greater Washington Board of Trade, and DC Chamber of Commerce; chaired the Consortium of Universities of the Washington Metropolitan Area Board of Trustees (2013-15) and was Patriot League Council of Presidents (academic years 2013-14 and 2014-15).
Improved Position in Higher Education
AU’s stature and reputation have grown remarkably. In 2016, American University attracted a record number of applicants (more than 19,300) at the undergraduate level, sharply lowered admit rates to historic levels (25.7%), and expects to exceed the 2015 yield rate (32%) for students offered admission. More than half of all freshmen identify AU as their first choice.
It now competes with the nation’s most elite institutions for faculty and wins its share, with recent hires from Columbia, Berkeley, Stanford, Georgetown, Northwestern, Syracuse, University of Arizona, University of Missouri, LSU and University of Glasgow. AU is growing rapidly in the sciences and the faculty is focused on finding solutions to the great issues of our time by examining emerging research topics that will be critical to the well-being of a global society in 2030.
Building Alumni Engagement and Philanthropy
AU alumni are showing their Eagle pride by getting more involved with the university. During the last five years, alumni participation has increased 178 percent. New alumni groups and events support the university's commitments to diversity and inclusion, including Latino Alumni Alliance, Black Alumni Alliance, Pride Alumni Alliance, Women's Network and the Multicultural Alumni Reunion.
AU has also benefitted from increased philanthropic efforts. Since 2005, donors have contributed more than $300 million, a third of which has been raised in the last three years.
Additionally, annual gifts and pledges have nearly doubled, representing 19 percent of all funds raised since 2007. AU has secured 37 gifts of at least $1 million each from 30 unique donors.
Honors & Awards
Kerwin is a noted scholar and expert on rulemaking, which made him a natural choice for the United States Senate Task Force on Federal Regulation of Higher Education. His book, Rulemaking: How Government Agencies Write Law and Make Policy is in its fifth edition. Kerwin founded the Center for the Study of Rulemaking at AU’s School of Public Affairs.
For his contributions to the Washington, DC, area in higher education, economic development, and public policy, Washingtonian magazine named him a “Washingtonian of the Year” in 2009.
During Kerwin’s presidency, AU has received numerous national accolades, including repeat appearances on or in the following: the President's Higher Education Community Service Honor Roll; the Peace Corps ranking of top volunteer-producing schools; and the Institute of International Education’s “Open Doors” report, which lists universities that have the greatest number of students studying abroad.
AU is a top school in the nation for the percentage of students holding internships and the top producer in the nation for Boren scholars and fellows, combined. The university is regularly among the top schools in the nation for producing Presidential Management Fellow semifinalists and Fulbright Scholars.
The American Dream is Green
Sustainability will be another enduring legacy of his presidency. Kerwin promised carbon neutrality by 2020, the first institution of its size to commit to this date and signed the President’s Climate Commitment. In 2014, AU combined with George Washington University, the GWU Hospital to reduce their carbon footprints through a 20-year solar energy deal with Duke Energy Renewables—which will eliminate about 60,000 metric tons of carbon emissions per year—the equivalent of taking 125,000 cars off the roads. Kerwin also worked with the AU Board of Trustees to establish an investment green fund, allocating $5 million in endowment to a green investment fund.
Athletics
During the past 10 years, the university has championed its commitment to recruiting scholar-athletes who excel in the classroom and on the playing fields. Since spring 2005, AU scholar-athletes have held an average cumulative GPA of 3.31, well above the NCAA’s Division I eligibility requirement that a student athlete maintain a 2.0 GPA in his or her core courses.
For the first time in school history, the men’s and women’s basketball teams won Patriot League Championships and earned trips to their respective NCAA tournaments. The men’s team’s first NCAA tournament appearance was in 2008, followed by repeat appearances in 2009 and 2014. The women’s team’s first NCAA tournament appearance was in 2015.
During this time, AU’s field hockey, volleyball, and men’s cross country teams also earned multiple Patriot League Championships and participated in the NCAA tournaments for their programs.
Twenty-three Eagles scholar-athletes were named All-Americans, with several of them earning the title numerous times during their collegiate athletic careers.
WAMU 88.5 FM
Washington, DC’s NPR station WAMU 88.5 grew from a $9 million operation in 2005 to a $23 million one in 2015. During this time period, its total weekly audience (for all platforms) grew from 620,000 to more than 800,000 people; membership nearly doubled from 33,064 to nearly 60,000 donors; and membership support grew from nearly $4 million to more than $10 million.
Milestones for the broadcast media outlet include its 50th anniversary in 2011; moving to a new facility at 4401 Connecticut Avenue in 2014; and Diane Rehm receiving the National Humanities Medal from President Obama—also in 2014.
Personal
President Kerwin is a native of Waterbury, Connecticut. His wife, Ann Kerwin, served as a strong and important influence during his presidency, particularly in terms of her support for the Arts at AU, the library and the Arboretum. They met as students at AU and have served as one of AU’s proud alumni sweetheart couples. They are the proud parents of two adult sons, one of whom followed in his parents' footsteps and is also an AU alumnus.
New President Search
“Now we must to turn our attention to the opportunity Neil has given us,” said Chairman Cassell. “Our transformation and rise among universities gives us extraordinary momentum and allows us to think even more ambitiously as we kick off the search for the next president of American University. Mindful of Neil’s intentions to step down when he completes his current contract, the Board has been planning for the search and transition. We will begin with the announcement of the Search Committee, to be led by past Board Chair, Jeff Sine, and with the introduction of the search firm that will help us develop a timeline and process to ensure wide participation and input to shape expectations for the next presidency. I will share more on our plans within the next week.” |
SINGAPORE: A 21-year-old Singapore Armed Forces (SAF) full-time National Serviceman died after he was involved in a vehicular mishap at the Shoalwater Bay Training Area in Queensland, Australia at around 6.15pm on Friday (Sep 15).
3rd Sergeant (3SG) Chan Hiang Cheng Gavin, a Vehicle Commander from 41st Battalion Singapore Armoured Regiment, was travelling in a Bionix Infantry Fighting Vehicle as part of an exercise when the incident happened, the Ministry of Defence (MINDEF) said in a statement.
An SAF medic commenced resuscitation efforts on 3SG Chan, who was unconscious at the time. He was evacuated via a helicopter to Rockhampton Hospital, where he succumbed to his injuries and was pronounced dead at around 10.36pm.
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A safety pause on training in Shoalwater Bay Training Area has taken effect, and an investigation of the incident is ongoing, MINDEF said.
"The Ministry of Defence and the SAF extend their deepest condolences to the family of the late serviceman and are assisting the family in this time of grief," the statement added. |
AHMEDABAD: The doctors of the Jivdaya Charitable Trust on Friday were shocked when they found nearly 100 kg of waste including iron nails, plastic bags and socks from the stomach of the cow that was brought to the trust for treatment.Kartik Shastri from Jivdaya Chartiable Trust said “The cow was rescued from Sabarmati area and was brought for treatment at the trust hospital. During the treatment the doctors realised that the cow was pregnant and was weak. But the cow was not able to even walk and after diagnosis, the doctors decided to operate the cow.”During the operation, the doctor found three buckets full of garbage from the stomach. This included nails, screws, wires which was disposed of in the garbage. The doctors even found socks, pieces of clothes and even banned plastic bags which were less than four microns.Shastri said that this is not the first time that such plastic waste has been found from the stomach of the cow. “Earlier we had found around 25-40 kg of plastic waste from the stomach of the cow.”He further said as per the rules the plastic bags below 4 microns are banned by the ministry of forest and environment, but in the 98kg of the waste that was recovered, maximum was plastic waste. |
Late last year, on December 10, Donald Trump briefly slipped away from the public eye to give a closed-door, pretrial deposition in a class-action lawsuit filed against him in California, Yahoo News reports, relating to the now-defunct Trump University.
The lawsuit revolves around the school Trump launched in 2005, promising to turn “anyone into a successful real estate investor,” but which former students now say was little more than a bad “infomercial” that scammed them out of $60,000 for a bad seminar in a hotel ballroom. The lead plaintiff, Tarla Makaeff, a California yoga instructor, has accused Trump of threatening to ruin her financially for bringing the suit.
“None of it is true. No one was defrauded,” Alan Garten, the Trump Organization’s general counsel, told Yahoo News last year. “The people that take these classes go into it with their eyes open. A lot of people did very well [with Trump University]. A lot of people enjoyed it. But like everything else, if people don’t put the effort into it, they don’t succeed.”
But New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman has also sued Trump, alleging in a $40 million lawsuit, in 2013, that the “university” was never accredited, awarded no degrees, and was essentially “an elaborate bait-and-switch.”
“No one, no matter how rich or famous they are, has a right to scam hardworking New Yorkers,” Schneiderman said in a statement. “Anyone who does should expect to be held accountable.” The attorney general said that Trump appeared in advertisements making “false promises” that persuaded more than 5,000 people around the country, including 600 New Yorkers, “to spend tens of thousands of dollars they couldn’t afford for lessons they never got.”
In 2014, the Atlantic reported on a 41-page “Private & Confidential” playbook, printed on “Trump University” letterhead, that detailed the choreography for selling people on the allegedly fraudulent school.
The playbook, prepared for Trump University seminars in Texas in 2009, might be summed up in one word: sell. Or as the playbook puts it on page 23, “Sell, Sell, Sell!” The playbook posits a “Minimum Sales Goal” of $72,500 per seminar, meaning that the seminars leaders needed to convince at least 20 percent of attendees to sign up for three-day seminars costing $1,495. Under the heading “Registration Goal & Procedure,” Trump U. staffers are instructed to “Welcome attendees and build a Trump-esque atmosphere,” “Disarm any uncertainty,” and “Set the hook.” The hook in this case consists of selling seminar attendees on increasingly costly additional courses, culminating in the “Trump Gold Elite” package, for a cool $34,995. Pricey, yes, but the playbook notes that the list price of the Trump Gold Elite package is $49,415, a savings to students of 29 percent. Even before Trump University students had made their first real-estate transaction, they had managed to get themselves a deal, of sorts. The seminars were usually held in hotel meeting rooms, and the playbook spells out in painstaking detail how the space should be set up. Chairs should be close enough together to give attendees sufficient space, while still “bringing attendees out of their comfort zone.” Room temperature should be set at “no more than 68 degrees.” A sales corral was to be set up within close proximity to the door, “so that attendees need to walk past sales tables in order to exit.” It was at the sales tables that Trump U. staffers would hawk the pricey seminar packages. As soon as attendees entered the registration area, the song “For the Love of Money” by the O’Jays greeted them. The tune had been used as the theme to Trump’s reality television shows “The Apprentice” and “The Celebrity Apprentice,” presumably because of the song’s incessant chant of “Money, money, money, money...money!”
Incidentally, Trump University has since changed its name to The Trump Entrepreneur Initiative.
For his part, Trump will likely have to take the witness stand in the California case, in San Diego, late this spring or early summer—the final pretrial conference is set for May 6, and court documents show the judge wants the case to move forward.
Meanwhile, in the New York case, Crain’s reports that a state judge has ruled that Trump is personally liable for damages, to be determined at a later time, resulting from the fact that Trump University lacked the required licenses. Trump’s lawyers have been ordered to take depositions from about 5,000 former students for whom the attorney general is seeking restitution. |
General Motors is set to shut down the European arm of Chevrolet by the end of 2015.
The move will allow GM to focus its efforts on the Opel and Vauxhall brands, which have been struggling in the increasingly tough European marketplace.
Speaking to Reuters, Stephen Girsky, vice chairman of General Motors, said: "We have growing confidence in the Opel and Vauxhall brands in Europe. We are focusing our resources in mainstream Europe."
Chevrolet's current line-up includes the Aveo, Cruze and Camaro. Many of its models - including the Volt, Captiva and Trax - are also offered by Vauxhall, however, badged the Ampera, Antara and Mokka.
Reputedly the decision has been made without any influence from the company's associations with Peugeot. "This is done independent of the PSA relationship," said Girsky.
"Basically (we will) shut away the one per cent share company in Europe. The financial results have been unacceptable."
A GM spokesperson told Autocar: "The market has been in decline for a couple of years. This decision has no impact on GM's focus on Europe and it is 100 per cent behind Opel and Vauxhall.
"Customers in the UK and Europe will be looked after. Depending upon the model, we can guarantee availability of original parts for up to ten years. And together with our dealers and authorised repairers we will ensure that service will be provided indefinitely."
Many Chevrolet dealerships are also dual branded with Opel or Vauxhall, allowing them to continue serving existing customers despite the dropping of the Chevrolet brand. |
Remember when you were a kid and everyone was always asking what you wanted to be when you grew up? If you’re anything like us, your answers usually involved Disney characters. Even imaginary job hunting can be a bit overwhelming with so many Disney jobs to choose from (is Fairy Godmother an option?), which is why we’ve invented this handy quiz. Find out which Disney job is your destiny:
1 A job should always be fun challenging exciting outdoors 2 My preference is to work in groups by myself with friends as little as possible 3 My friends describe me as ambitious secretive devious entertaining 4 If I could give a gift to everyone in the world, I would give them puppies gold happiness cookies 5 My most prized possession is my scrapbook diary coin collection recipe book 6 My favorite season is spring summer winter fall 7 My favorite thing to do on weekends is clean my room read the newspaper go to parties work 8 My favorite thing to wear to work is a hat a heavy coat a suit an apron 9 Pick a subject history math English recess 10 If I’m not working I’m probably working more playing sleeping eating 1 of 10 You should be a chimney sweep! You’re a master of “work hard, play hard.” You like to sing and dance while you work, which motivates others to do their best by your side. You can pull off any look, even if you’re covered in soot. Share on Facebook Share on Pinterest Share on Twitter Take this quiz again! You should be an ice harvester! You love cold climates and you don’t mind working outdoors. In fact, you thrive in nature and know everything there is to know about the elements. Like Kristoff, you also don’t let anything like, say, an ice storm keep you from doing your job. Share on Facebook Share on Pinterest Share on Twitter Take this quiz again! You should be a restaurant owner! You are a go-getter and you don’t let anything stand in the way of your dreams. Like Tiana, you are cheerful, diligent, and patient while you work. Sign us up for a job at your restaurant! Share on Facebook Share on Pinterest Share on Twitter Take this quiz again! You should be a newsie! You love working with other people, especially your friends. You are charming and like being the center of attention while you work. You also know when to seize the day and stand up for what you believe in. Share on Facebook Share on Pinterest Share on Twitter Take this quiz again! You should be a pirate! Like Jack Sparrow, you’re quick on your feet and nothing scares you, not even a kraken. Even though you seek adventure and its rewards, you know that not all treasure is silver and gold. Share on Facebook Share on Pinterest Share on Twitter Take this quiz again! You should be a detective! You’re very observant and can use those skills to help others. You like to work on your own, and you love a good mystery. Like Darkwing Duck, you can really pull off a great hat and cape. Share on Facebook Share on Pinterest Share on Twitter Take this quiz again!
Posted 4 years Ago |
When money is no object and you’re a big speed junkie, you probably want to enjoy a track-oriented machine whenever the time and weather conditions allow it. If that is the case and you’re looking for a proper driver’s car, there’s no better choice than the brand new Porsche 911 R.
This pure sports car comes with a classical design and filled with track-oriented 21st century technologies. Inspired by legendary predecessors, the latest 911 variant features a lightweight construction, tipping the scales at just 1,370 kg, being the lightest version of the 911 yet.
Powered by a 4.0-liter naturally aspirated flat-six engine, which develops 500 PS and 460 Nm (339 lb-ft) of torque, the Porsche 911 R version will do 0 to 100 km/h (0-62 mph) in 3.8 seconds.
The owner of this beauty will enjoy a six-speed manual sports transmission, with short gearshift travel, which will make accelerating to the top speed of 323 km/h (200 mph) incredible. Porsche has focused on making the 911 R as maneuverable and precise as possible and as such, it’s been equipped with a specially tuned standard rear-axle, a mechanical rear differential lock and ceramic composite brakes (PCCB).
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Porsche made it clear that this is a track-oriented car, not exactly meant for day-to-day driving. It’s still a perfectly capable cruiser within city limits, even with heavy traffic around. As such, the cabin offers carbon full bucket seats, with fabric center panels, an R-specific GT sport steering wheel, carbon trim and pull straps as door openers. Please note that only 991 units of the limited-edition 911 R will be delivered so you’d better hurry up if you can afford one. |
“RIP Jiwon Lee” – Liza Dye
“Sad to hear about Jiwon Lee. I hadn’t seen her since high school, but her voice and mannerisms still stand out in my memory. RIP.” – Nick Hurwitch
“Hard part about losing Jiwon is knowing she would have been there for anyone struggling. #jiwonlee” – Diana Saez
“Jiwon Lee ?? miss you, beautiful girl. http://instagram.com/p/nl8n5dC-Kp/” – Anya Garrett
“Here’s Jiwon Lee playing “Doctor” with @peteholmes @mccarthyredhead in 2008 http://youtu.be/dpdP0t0Fd2I” – TheComicsComic
“Truly sorry to hear about Jiwon Lee. My heart is with her friends and family. Suicide truly sucks. Lost my cousin a month ago & it’s tough.” – Emily Cohen
“Thanks all for sharing info about #JiwonLee They found her. My thoughts are with her family. A stunner and a star. ” – Abbi Crutchfield
Comedian and dental student Jiwon Lee went missing at the beginning of April. Rumors started to circulate that she may have commited suicide. Today a body matching Jiwon’s description was pulled out of the Hudson. Those close to Jiwon are telling us that it was in fact Jiwon. Tragic news. Rest in Peace Jiwon.
Services are planned for this weekend. More details to follow.
UPDATE: The family has released the following statement via the GoFundMe page they had running:
Dear Friends,
Thank you for your continued prayers, donations, and support. Unfortunately, Jiwon, beloved daughter, sister, and friend has gone on to a better place. Our family thanks you at this time for respecting our privacy. We are currently planning a memorial service to honor Jiwon and will post further details as soon as possible.
The NY Post notes: “Her cellphone was tracked to the George Washington Bridge, prompting speculation she had jumped.” |
Git Pull vs Git Fetch (and Stashing)
Git is one of, if not the, most popular and most widely used source code management systems. In this short post, we’ll explore differences between git pull and git fetch and talk about stashing.
This post assumes that you are familiar with the basic operation of Git.
1. Difference Between git pull and git fetch
git pull will download latest changes from the remote repository and automatically merge those changes in the local repository. It doesn’t give you a chance to review the changes and as a result conflicts might occur (and they often do). One important thing to keep in mind is that git pull will merge only into the current working branch. Other branches will stay unaffected.
If you only want to download the latest changes and review them before merging or want to merge at a later time, git fetch is your friend. Like git pull , it will download latest changes. Unlike git pull , it will not merge those changes. You might wonder where the changes are stored since they are not merged. The answer is that they are stored in your local repository in what are called remote tracking branches. A remote tracking branch is a local copy (or mirror) of a remote branch. For example, when you run git branch -a you might notice origin/master in the output which is the remote tracking brach for master .
In short: Both are similar with one key difference: git fetch only downloads latest changes where as git pull also merges them.
2. Quick Look at Stashing
Let’s say you are in the middle of implementing a new feature and you need to switch branches to fix a bug or revert back to where you started in the current branch. You don’t want to commit half-done work or lose your changes. git stash is a handy feature for these types of situations. It takes your changes, saves them to a temporary place and cleans up your working directory. This allows you to switch to other branches or work elsewhere. Let’s look at some examples.
To stash your work in progress:
$ echo "Improvement 1 of 3" >> file.txt $ git status On branch master Your branch is ahead of 'origin/master' by 1 commit. modified: file.txt $ git stash save "Partial improvement to file.txt" $ git status # On branch master nothing to commit, working directory clean
Once you stash, you are free to switch branches. When you are ready to resume working on the changes you stashed, you can apply the stash:
$ git stash apply
You can stash multiple times. Use git stash list command to see to list of stashes stored on the stash stack.
$ git stash list [email protected]{0}: WIP on master: d724198 partial improvement 2 [email protected]{1}: WIP on master: d724198 bug fix for Unity [email protected]{2}: WIP on master: c9a03f4 added partial improvement 1
git stash apply restores the most recent save, [email protected]{0} in this case. To restore one of the older stashes, specify its name e.g. git stash apply [email protected]{2} .
A stash could be applied to any branch not just the same branch it was saved from.
Note: Stash will ignore ‘un-tracked’ files. If you added a new file, you must first add it to the index using git add before stashing.
Bonus: Useful Git Tips
1. Deleting Remote Branches
To delete a remote branch named feature :
$ git push origin --delete `feature`
Bonus: git branch -d deletes a local branch. Use -D instead of -d to force delete a local branch without checking its merge status.
2. Fixing the Commit Message Before git push
I often notice a typo or a mistake in my commit message after I commit. Luckily, Git has a way to fix this problem.
$ git commit --amend -m 'New commit message'
To bring up the message editor, don’t provide the -m parameter:
$ git commit --amend
Keep in mind that it will not just modify the commit message but also commit any new changes that you might have. This will not work if you have pushed the commit to remote repository.
Summary
I’ll leave you with couple of links that you might find useful:
A collect of .gitignore templates .
Tired of boring git diff ? DiffMerge is a great utility to compare files and changes visually.
This article was written by Umer Mansoor. Please leave your comments below and like on Facebook or follow on Twitter to stay up-to-date. |
The House of Representatives’ legislation on self-driving cars aimed very low on protecting rider privacy, but new legislation introduced in the Senate manages to go even lower.
Sen. John Thune and Sen. Gary Peters introduced legislation on Thursday to advance testing and deployment of autonomous vehicles. According to the two legislators’ press releases, the Senate Commerce Committee will consider their bill on Wednesday. The new legislation comes so close to completely ignoring the privacy dangers inherent in self-driving cars that it would be fair to say it ignores it.
The two senators have long been interested in moving forward this new industry, but the House of Representatives moved faster, passing the SELF-DRIVE Act in early September. We previously reported on how the House legislation addressed many of the points in a framework released by the two senators this summer.
Thune and Peters’ legislation, the AV START Act (S. 1885), covers much the same ground as the SELF-DRIVE Act. In fact, the section on its relationship to existing state and local laws copies the first bill’s language. The main goal for Thune-Peters appears to be to accelerate the pace at which carmakers could put self-driving cars on the road, reaching 50,000 for each in the first year (currently, they can only get an exemption for 2,500). The theory here is that we need cars to actually be in use before designers can really know how well they work.
The SELF-DRIVE Act was weak on privacy. It just required a privacy plan, which primarily focused on giving consumers notice about the kind of data that would be collected and how it would be shared. It also nudges the Federal Trade Commission to give the matter some thought.
A policy is a bridge too far for the senators from South Dakota and Michigan, however. The legislation never addresses rider privacy in any definitive way. It requires the Secretary of Transportation to convene a “Highly Automated Vehicles Technical Committee.” The committee is charged with studying 7 topics. One of them is “event data recording and data access and sharing.”
That’s the only direct way the bill points to privacy, and it’s just something that committee members should think about.
Arguably the bill also indirectly addresses privacy in its cybersecurity section. It requires that manufacturers have a cybersecurity plan. It also specifically encourages the Secretary of Transportation to work with them to develop a disclosure policy so that security researchers could quietly inform them if vulnerabilities. Smart companies often pay independent researchers for finding these weaknesses, called “bug bounties.” Bad companies seek prosecutions against researchers who find gaps in security. One of the most common gaps researchers find is ways in which gadgets leak private data.
The Senate legislation does make sure to protect carmakers’ privacy however. It requires an annual report from makers of autonomous cars, and it requires the report to be made publicly available; however, it allows the carmakers to keep trade secrets discussed in the report out of public view. We’ll look for original equipment manufacturers to take a pretty broad view of what counts as privileged information. It also permits the committee to close its meetings to the public if trade secrets will be discussed.
Now is the only realistic opportunity the public has to put strong privacy protections in place on this industry. Some of the most powerful companies in the world are investing in self-driving cars, but the work isn’t profitable yet. As hard as it would be to win protections today, it will be all but impossible once this technology starts producing returns. |
The “Mad Men” actress is raising awareness for the world’s most misunderstood predators.
The sharks in Hollywood are much more dangerous than the ones in the ocean — that’s the message from Mad Men and X Men: First Class star January Jones, who is appearing in a just-released public service announcement calling for the protection of sharks worldwide.
“Shark attacks and bites are, thankfully, very, very rare,” says Jones. “And sharks play a critical role in our oceans as top predators. Without them, things go out of balance. And, now tens of millions of sharks are caught, mostly for their fins, every year. So it’s silly to be scared of them. We should be scared for them.”
In the spot — filmed for nonprofit conservation group Oceana — Jones herself swims with a shark, an enormous whale shark, which is actually a plankton-eating fish that can grow up to 65’ feet long. She and the beast met up in Belize’s Gladden Spit Marine Reserve. “I wasn’t intimidated so much as in complete and utter awe. Seeing an animal of that size in the wild was incredible,” adds Jones, who has been involved with Oceana since 2009. That year, she travelled to Capital Hill to meet with Congress and push for the passage of the Shark Conservation Act. Congress passed the bill in December 2010; it prohibits shark finning in U.S. waters, a practice in which a live shark’s fins are hacked off and it slowly dies as it sinks in the ocean.
It’s Jones’ second year in a row starring in a spot for Oceana, which counts several other entertainment industry names as supporters. Ted Danson is a founding board member and high-powered Industry Entertainment manager Keith Addis serves as board chairman. Danson is the author of the recently published Oceana: Our Endangered Oceans and What We Can Do To Save Them(co-written with Michael D'Orso, Rodale, $32.50), the actor’s first book, which takes a comprehensive look at the perils facing the world’s oceans. Proceeds of sales benefit Oceana.
Shark finning is also in the news in California, where a proposed law introduced in the California legislature would ban the sale and possession of shark fins, the key ingredient in the popular Asian dish, shark fin soup. Chinese basketball star and Houston Rockets center Yao Ming — who played for the Shanghai Sharks as a teenager — has lent his name to fighting the use of shark fins. The athlete recently filmed his own PSA for environmental organization Wild Aid calling for an end to eating shark fins. Up to 73 million sharks are kill each year for their fins and some species of sharks
January Jones Swims with Whale Sharks from Oceana on Vimeo. |
The world’s first malaria vaccine may just be a year away, after a thorough trial of a new drug showed promising results.
PLOS Medicine on Tuesday published a study, in which researchers found that for every 1,000 children who received the vaccine, 800 cases of illness could be prevented. The children also retained protection 18 months after being injected.
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Now, pharmaceutical manufacturer GlaxoSmithKline (GSK) has applied the drug for regulatory approval — the first time a malaria vaccine has reached this stage.
“This is a milestone,” Sanjeev Krishna, professor of molecular parasitology and medicine at St. George’s, University of London, who reviewed the paper for the journal, told the BBC. “The landscape of malaria-vaccine development is littered with carcasses, with vaccines dying left, right and center. We need to keep a watchful eye for adverse events, but everything appears on track for the vaccine to be approved as early as next year.”
Around 800,000 people die from malaria every year, most of them children under 5 in sub-Saharan Africa. Several African countries were involved in the trial of the new vaccine, which is developed by GSK in cooperation with the nonprofit Path Malaria Vaccine Initiative, for which they have received funding from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.
Contact us at editors@time.com. |
German Interior Minister Thomas de Maiziere attends a Christian Democratic Union (CDU) and Social Democratic Party (SPD) fraction meeting at the Bundestag in Berlin, Germany November 26, 2015. REUTERS/Hannibal Hanschke
Brüssel/Berlin/Koblenz (Reuters) - Die Innenminister von Deutschland und Frankreich wollen die Souveränität von EU-Staaten beim Schutz der Außengrenzen in Ausnahmefällen beschneiden.
Bundesinnenminister Thomas de Maiziere forderte von der EU-Kommission am Freitag in Brüssel einen Vorschlag, wie die EU-Grenzschutzagentur Frontex Aufgaben an den Außengrenzen von Nationalstaaten übernehmen kann. Die Innenminister der Bundesländer mahnten in Koblenz eine rasche Beschleunigung der Asylverfahren in Deutschland an. Deutliche Kritik wurde bei ihrer Konferenz am Chef des Bundesamts für Migration und Flüchtlinge (BAMF), Frank-Jürgen Weise, laut.
De Maiziere bezog sich auf Ideen, die mit seinem französischen Kollegen Bernard Cazeneuve erarbeitet wurden. Das Recht von Frontex, auf eigene Initiative Grenzschützer in ein bestimmtes Mitgliedsland zu schicken, würde deutlich über die bisherigen Kompetenzen der Agentur hinausgehen und in die Souveränität eines Staates eingreifen. Viele EU-Staaten sind bei der Grenzsicherung vor allem mit Griechenland unzufrieden, wo das Gros der Flüchtlinge ankommt. Am Donnerstag bat die Regierung in Athen aber die EU um Hilfe beim Grenzschutz.
Ein Sprecher des Bundesinnenministeriums verwies darauf, dass Frontex schon in Griechenland tätig ist. In diesem Rahmen seien 41 deutsche Beamte im Einsatz. Die Bundesregierung habe aber 100 Beamte angeboten. Regierungssprecher Steffen Seibert betonte, Ziel von Kanzlerin Angela Merkel sei es, die Freizügigkeit im Schengen-Raum zu erhalten. Eine Sprecherin der EU-Kommission kündigte an, die Brüsseler Behörde wolle am 15. Dezember Vorschläge zum Schutz von Außengrenzen vorlegen.
Den Innenministern der Bundesländer gehen angesichts des anhaltenden Zuzugs von Migranten die geplanten Änderungen beim BAMF nicht schnell genug. “Wir fordern den Bund eindringlich auf, für eine Beschleunigung der Asylverfahren zu sorgen”, sagte der Vorsitzende der Innenministerkonferenz, Roger Lewentz. Der rheinland-pfälzische Innenminister und seine Kollegen kritisierten, Weise habe den Ländern bei der Konferenz auf wichtige Fragen etwa zur Bewältigung der Antragsflut keine Antwort gegeben.. Der nordrhein-westfälische Ressortchef Ralf Jäger (SPD) sagte, Weises Vortrag sei “weitgehend enttäuschend, in manchen Teilen sogar erschreckend” gewesen. Zurzeit würden 1600 Anträge pro Tag bearbeitet, das sei nicht einmal die Hälfte der Neuankömmlinge. Zudem dauere es oft acht Monate, bis ein Asylverfahren überhaupt beginne.
Mecklenburg-Vorpommerns Innenminister Lorenz Caffier (CDU) schloss sich der Kritik der SPD-Kollegen an. Er sagte, in den Ländern und Kommunen werde auch am Wochenende gearbeitet, um Flüchtlinge unterzubringen. Auch im Bundesamt müsse es einen “Zwei-Schicht-Betrieb” geben.
Seit rund einer Woche kommen täglich weniger Flüchtlinge an als zuvor. Am Donnerstag wurden nach Angaben der Bundespolizei 3169 Einreisen gezählt, davon 3069 in Bayern. Rund 361 weitere Migranten hätten angegeben, in ein anderes Land weiterreisen zu wollen. Auch an der österreichisch-slowenischen Grenze blieb es ruhig. De Maiziere hat allerdings gewarnt, schon von einer Trendwende zu sprechen. Von seinen Länderkollegen erhielt er Rückendeckung für seinen Plan, für syrische Flüchtlinge zur verschärften Überprüfung mit mündlicher Anhörung zurückzukehren. Die Minister erklärten, sie hielten die Einzelfallprüfung aus Sicherheitsgründen für sinnvoll. Das Recht auf Schutz für Menschen aus Kriegsgebieten müsse aber unangetastet bleiben. |
Ctone23 Profile Blog Joined December 2012 United States 1813 Posts Last Edited: 2015-07-28 20:41:23 #1
Hello friends! Today I am happy to announce the second installment of GauntletSC2 events with a 1K USD NA Series! That's right, we (myself in conjunction with ESL and others) are pitting 8 known, invited pros to play against 8 open bracket qualified players for a total prize pool of 1K USD. Do you have what it takes to take on known pros in an online event? [
Hello friends! Today I am happy to announce the second installment of GauntletSC2 events with a 1K USD NA Series! That's right, we (myself in conjunction with ESL and others) are pitting 8 known, invited pros to play against 8 open bracket qualified players for a total prize pool of 1K USD. Do you have what it takes to take on known pros in an online event? [ ~Wait, What?
The tournament will feature 8 open bracket qualified players and 8 invited players battling it out on Heart of the Swarm . Players must be of at least Masters ranking and live/play within the NA region to play in the open bracket, i.e. similar to the WCS region lock currently in place. However, SEA players will be allowed to play in the NA qualifier. Please know I look forward to doing a global event soon tm.
The tournament will feature 8 open bracket qualified players and 8 invited players battling it out on. Players must be of at least Masters ranking and live/play within the NA region to play in the open bracket, i.e. similar to the WCS region lock currently in place. However, SEA players will be allowed to play in the NA qualifier. Please know I look forward to doing a global event soon tm. ~Back-to-Back Open Bracket
The open bracket qualifier will feature two separate qualifiers, with the semi-finalists from each qualifier (8 total) automatically qualifying for the main tournament. The format will be best-of-three series, single elimination. Winners of the first semi-final matches will get a more favorable seed. EDIT: ESL decided to randomize seeding due to seeding conflicts, apologies for the confusion.
The open bracket qualifier will feature two separate qualifiers, with the semi-finalists from each qualifier (8 total) automatically qualifying for the main tournament. The format will be best-of-three series, single elimination.EDIT: ESL decided to randomize seeding due to seeding conflicts, apologies for the confusion. ~When?!?
Open Bracket NA Qualifier Tuesday, Jul 21 11:00pm GMT (GMT+00:00)
Sign Up here for the NA Open Bracket!!
NA Finals will be held on Friday, Jul 24 4:00pm GMT (GMT+00:00)
***RULES***
You must be a citizen (passport) or resident with a valid visa of the Americas. SEA Players will be allowed to play on the North American server. More detailed rules can be found on the Sign up page. Masters + only if that wasn't obvious.
~Prize Pool Breakdown will be identical to the first Gauntlet SC2 event.
http://wiki.teamliquid.net/starcraft2/The_Gauntlet_Cup_1
$650
$200
$100
$50
~Where?
Main Stream
B Stream [ro16 &ro8]
~Confirmed Players
Jaedong (Gauntlet Cup 1 Champion)
Jaedong (Gauntlet Cup 1 Champion) puCK
puCK HuK
HuK qxc
qxc MaSa
MaSa Xenocider
Xenocider JonSnow
JonSnow Arium
~Qualified Players
Neeb
Neeb bioice
bioice EJK
EJK PsychO
PsychO Kelazhur
Kelazhur RuFF
RuFF avilo
avilo intense
Thank you to the folks at ESL for helping me get this put together. Also thank you to Element, Bobbyawsm, Ascarecrow, Bloodyrafe, and other admins who have put in a lot of effort to make things run as smooth as possible! I will continue to update this post as we get more confirmations. I apologize that it's somewhat late notice, we wanted to wait until ESL was in possession of the prize money, etc before we made the announcement. Hope to see a lot of players sign up! Cheers and good luck all! Thank you to the folks at ESL for helping me get this put together. Also thank you to Element, Bobbyawsm, Ascarecrow, Bloodyrafe, and other admins who have put in a lot of effort to make things run as smooth as possible! I will continue to update this post as we get more confirmations. I apologize that it's somewhat late notice, we wanted to wait until ESL was in possession of the prize money, etc before we made the announcement. Hope to see a lot of players sign up! Cheers and good luck all! Gauntlet Esports
Ctone23 Profile Blog Joined December 2012 United States 1813 Posts Last Edited: 2015-07-24 04:25:46 #2
Gauntlet Esports
Kimb3r Profile Joined April 2010 Peru 588 Posts #3 Jadeong ez! Maru | Life | Leenock
EJK Profile Blog Joined September 2013 United States 1285 Posts #4 so 1 qualifier for...8 spots? Sc2 Terran Coach, top 16GM NA - interested in coaching? Message me on teamliquid!
Ctone23 Profile Blog Joined December 2012 United States 1813 Posts Last Edited: 2015-07-25 02:28:57 #5 On July 18 2015 02:57 EJK wrote:
so 1 qualifier for...8 spots?
Yes there will be two brackets within the open qualifier, if you make it to the semi-finals you have qualified. If you win the semi-final match you get a better seed. Qualifiers ended up being back to back.
EDIT: Updated the OP to better explain the Open Bracket Qualifiers ended up being back to back.EDIT: Updated the OP to better explain the Open Bracket Gauntlet Esports
A_Scarecrow Profile Joined March 2013 Australia 721 Posts #6 any questions or concerns feel free to ask
NightEnD Profile Joined April 2010 Romania 107 Posts #7 lotv or hots? fsdfds
A_Scarecrow Profile Joined March 2013 Australia 721 Posts #8 On July 18 2015 14:39 NightEnD wrote:
lotv or hots?
hots mate hots mate
A_Scarecrow Profile Joined March 2013 Australia 721 Posts #9 make sure to use the right account and no barcodes please.
GGzerG Profile Blog Joined January 2010 United States 9295 Posts #10 Very nice! Also very smart choice to not have this in LOTV yet, the game is no where near balanced lol. Awesome work! AKA: TelecoM[WHITE] Protoss fighting
A_Scarecrow Profile Joined March 2013 Australia 721 Posts #11 On July 19 2015 12:58 GGzerG wrote:
Very nice! Also very smart choice to not have this in LOTV yet, the game is no where near balanced lol. Awesome work!
thanks mate. surprised low amount have signed up pretty big prize pool and few names have accepted barely any eu players want to so high chance a non pro could take 1st place for eu. thanks mate. surprised low amount have signed up pretty big prize pool and few names have accepted barely any eu players want to so high chance a non pro could take 1st place for eu.
Ctone23 Profile Blog Joined December 2012 United States 1813 Posts Last Edited: 2015-07-21 01:02:58 #12 **Effective Immediately, EU Series has been cancelled, will update OP**
Due to lack of interest from EU pro's after IEM/DH, plus with WCS coming up, Gauntlet-SC2 EU Series has been cancelled, all prize money will be put towards another event that will include the EU playerbase. We will continue on with the NA series as we have a full line up of confirmed players and a decent number of sign ups for the qualifier. I apologize for any inconvenience, I will post a new thread with the replacement tournament for the cancelled EU series once I have more definite information. Thanks Gauntlet Esports
A_Scarecrow Profile Joined March 2013 Australia 721 Posts #13 less than 12 hours to go for am qualifiers.
Ctone23 Profile Blog Joined December 2012 United States 1813 Posts Last Edited: 2015-07-21 14:34:34 #14 two chances to qualify for the main event on Friday with the 1K usd prize pool, as we will be running back-to-back qualifiers for you guys.
Remember, all you have to do to qualify is make it to the semi-finals! If you get knocked out early in the first qualifier, you will have another chance. Our admins will speak to you more specifically about the format and answer any questions you have in-game.
Sign Up!! We have over 50 signups so far, all you NA/SEA masters please sign up! You will havechances to qualify for the main event on Friday with the 1K usd prize pool, as we will be running back-to-back qualifiers for you guys.Remember, all you have to do to qualify is make it to the semi-finals! If you get knocked out early in the first qualifier, you will have another chance. Our admins will speak to you more specifically about the format and answer any questions you have in-game. Gauntlet Esports
A_Scarecrow Profile Joined March 2013 Australia 721 Posts #15 On July 21 2015 23:33 Ctone23 wrote:
We have over 50 signups so far, all you NA/SEA masters please sign up! You will have two chances to qualify for the main event on Friday with the 1K usd prize pool, as we will be running back-to-back qualifiers for you guys.
Remember, all you have to do to qualify is make it to the semi-finals! If you get knocked out early in the first qualifier, you will have another chance. Our admins will speak to you more specifically about the format and answer any questions you have in-game.
Sign Up!! We have over 50 signups so far, all you NA/SEA masters please sign up! You will havechances to qualify for the main event on Friday with the 1K usd prize pool, as we will be running back-to-back qualifiers for you guys.Remember, all you have to do to qualify is make it to the semi-finals! If you get knocked out early in the first qualifier, you will have another chance. Our admins will speak to you more specifically about the format and answer any questions you have in-game.
hope to see more people! hope to see more people!
Mistakes Profile Joined February 2011 United States 1097 Posts #16 Reschedule for a weekend so us working folk can participate. StarCraft | www.psistorm.com | www.twitter.com/MistakesSC | www.twitch.tv/MistakesSC | Seattle
Ctone23 Profile Blog Joined December 2012 United States 1813 Posts #17 On July 22 2015 07:28 Mistakes wrote:
Reschedule for a weekend so us working folk can participate. Reschedule for a weekend so us working folk can participate.
Go ahead and sign up! We're doing two qualifiers tonight back to back. Sorry I should of made that more clear in the OP. since the semifinal players advance the first qualifier shouldn't take too long, maybe a couple of hours. Go ahead and sign up! We're doing two qualifiers tonight back to back. Sorry I should of made that more clear in the OP. since the semifinal players advance the first qualifier shouldn't take too long, maybe a couple of hours. Gauntlet Esports
EJK Profile Blog Joined September 2013 United States 1285 Posts #18 um trying to check in right now, theres no chat channel name, i dont see the admn name, and esl website isnt loading for me Sc2 Terran Coach, top 16GM NA - interested in coaching? Message me on teamliquid!
Payson Profile Blog Joined April 2011 United States 363 Posts #19 On July 22 2015 07:52 EJK wrote:
um trying to check in right now, theres no chat channel name, i dont see the admn name, and esl website isnt loading for me
Same issue here. ESL site went down and I'm unable to check in. Same issue here. ESL site went down and I'm unable to check in. @WilliamPayson l Broncos fan for life l Incoherent Writer
Ctone23 Profile Blog Joined December 2012 United States 1813 Posts Last Edited: 2015-07-21 22:58:44 #20 Second Qualifier Sign Up
The link above will allow you to sign up for the second qualifier this evening. Sign ups are open all the way until the qualifier starts.
The link above will allow you to sign up for the second qualifier this evening. Sign ups are open all the way until the qualifier starts. On July 22 2015 07:52 EJK wrote:
um trying to check in right now, theres no chat channel name, i dont see the admn name, and esl website isnt loading for me
Sorry about that it appears ESL is down across the board right now. Hopefully they get it back up soon. This has obviously delayed the event. Apologies, we'll get going as soon as we can. Sorry about that it appears ESL is down across the board right now. Hopefully they get it back up soon. This has obviously delayed the event. Apologies, we'll get going as soon as we can. Gauntlet Esports
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NASA On March 5, 2017, NASA’s Operational Land Imager captured this view of water, sea ice and phytoplankton above Antarctica’s Granite Harbor near the Ross Sea. This first image shows a wide view of the area. The next two images show detailed views of the green slush ice.
Just in time for St. Patrick’s Day, NASA has released images of a region in Antarctica called Granite Harbor ― a cove near the Ross Sea. (See main image above.)
These pictures ― taken by the Operational Land Imager on the Landsat 8 satellite on March 5 ― offer details of what is apparently green slush ice, according to NASA’s Earth Observatory site.
The following images are zoomed-in areas of the Granite Harbor region.
NASA This is the first zoomed-in area showing the green hue of the Antarctic ice.
NASA This is the second zoomed-in area showing the green hue of the Antarctic ice.
Earth Observatory reports that marine glaciologist Jan Lieser, of the Australia Antarctic Climate and Ecosystems Cooperative Research Center, believes the green hue in the ice is a result of a bloom of phytoplankton on the water, which has discolored the ice.
According to the National Ocean Service, phytoplankton are microscopic marine plants, part of the oceanic food chain that provides nourishment for many aquatic creatures, like whales, shrimp, snails and jellyfish. (See image below.)
National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration NOAA Mesa Project Phytoplankton, microscopic marine plants, part of the oceanic food chain that provides nourishment for many aquatic creatures, like whales, shrimp, snails and jellyfish.
This isn’t the first time that scientists have discovered phytoplankton in an icy region of the world. In 2011, at the opposite end of Earth in Arctic waters, NASA researchers were stunned when they found a massive phytoplankton bloom growing beneath the sea ice, as shown in the following video:
Microalgae abounds in the Antarctic, but Earth Observatory indicates the following factors are necessary for plankton to survive in large amounts that would make it visible from space: sea ice, winds, sunlight, nutrient availability and predators.
“Do these kinds of late-season ‘blooms’ provide the seeding conditions for the next spring’s bloom?” Lieser asked Earth Observatory. “If the algae get incorporated into the sea ice and remain more or less dormant during the winter, where do they end up after the winter?” |
CLOSE Roger Ailes is out as chief executive at Fox News Channel after 20 years, following allegations that he forced a former network anchor after she spurned his sexual advances. (July 21) AP
Donald Trump speaks in New York on June 22, 2016. (Photo: Drew Angerer, Getty Images)
Over the weekend, Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump defended Roger Ailes, the former chairman and CEO of Fox News who resigned from his position Thursday amid allegations of sexual harassment.
On Showtime’s The Circus, Trump called Ailes a “great guy” and lauded him for his achievements in media. “Roger is – I mean, what he’s done on television, in the history of television, he’s gotta be placed in the top three or four or five," Trump said, adding that his resignation is “too bad.”
During his appearance on NBC's Meet the Press on Sunday, Trump noted that many of the women who have accused Ailes were also helped by the former Fox News leader in the past.
“Some of the women that are complaining, I know how much he's helped them,” he said. “Now all of a sudden, they are saying these horrible things about him; it's very sad because he's a very good person."
Trump said that the media mogul had been a friend of his "for a long time." When asked if Ailes was helping Trump's campaign, Trump declined to comment but noted that many "are thinking he’s going to run my campaign.”
On July 6, Ailes was sued by Gretchen Carlson, a former Fox & Friends co-host, over claims of sexual harassment. New York magazine reported that more than a dozen women have contacted Carlson’s attorney with detailed sexual allegations against Ailes over a 25-year period.
While several female broadcasters spoke out in support of Ailes during the controversy, Fox News broadcaster Megyn Kelly stayed silent until she also told investigators that Ailes had harassed her too.
Fox News debate moderator Megyn Kelly waits for the start of a Republican Presidential debate, sponsored by Fox News and Google. (Photo: Jim Lo Scalzo, EPA)
Trump and Kelly have a particularly heated history with one another. During the first Republican debate in August 2015, she asked Trump about comments he had made toward women. Following the debate Trump blasted Kelly on Twitter and was thought to have implied Kelly was menstruating during the debate.
The two put their differences aside when they met up earlier this year, which aired during a special called Megyn Kelly Presents on May 17. Trump said a feud could still happen between them in the future.
Follow @samm1son on Twitter.
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Blood pressure is the force exerted by the blood upon our blood vessels and this force must be maintained inside the normal parameters for blood pressure.
So, What mechanisms are used by our bodies to keep these normal values?
Autonomous Nervous System.
For blood regulation the autonomous nervous system will send stimulatory signals for the Sympathetic Nervous System and inhibitory signals for the Parasympathetic Nervous System, this will have three consequences.
Most of the arterioles of the systemic circulation will contract increasing thus the peripheral resistance which in time will cause an increase on blood pressure.
The veins will contract making more blood return to the heart, the extra blood will expand, more than usual, the heart walls and this will cause a reactionary stronger than normal heart contraction, this will put more blood into the circulation and this extra blood will increase blood pressure.
The heart will be directly stimulated by Sympathetic nerves to improve its pumping
Baroreceptors.
These are receptors sensitive to stretching, an increase on blood pressure will stretch this receptors and they will send signals to the Central Nervous System which in time will send back signals through the Autonomous Nervous System to reduce blood pressure.
These receptors respond better to changes on pressure than to static high blood pressure.
Baroreceptors are found in the carotid sine and the aortic arch.
Chemoreceptors.
These receptors respond to low O2, high CO2 and high H+.
Their mechanism of action is through an associated baroreceptor system that works exactly as the explained above. The difference here is that the regulation is initiated by changes on chemical substances instead of the stretching of the arterial walls.
Source: Guyton and Hall Textbook of Medical Physiology 13th Ed.
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A project to provide Canada’s special forces with new armoured vehicles for the Arctic has been cancelled.
The government was supposed to buy 17 vehicles for the Canadian Special Operations Forces Command (CANSOFCOM), as well as consider whether to purchase five more at a later date.
The project, expected to have cost around $60 million, would have seen the acquisition of what the military was calling a marginal terrain vehicle, or MTV.
Industry sources say funding issues are behind the decision to cancel the project. A similar project for the Canadian Army had been sidelined earlier.
Dan Blouin, a Department of National Defence spokesman, said in an email that “after a thorough examination of the MTV’s capabilities and limitations, training requirements, acquisition and sustainment costs, it was determined that it is not an essential requirement for CANSOFCOM.”
“As a result, it was decided to no longer pursue this procurement,” he said.
The new armoured vehicles were to be capable of operating in snow and desert terrain. They were also to offer a significant amount of protection from explosive devices and gunfire.
Delivery of the vehicles had been planned for 2016, and companies were expecting to put in bids in August.
The Canadian military currently uses a small fleet of BV-206s for northern operations, but those vehicles were purchased in the 1980s.
The special forces command said earlier this year it needed the MTV “because currently, there are no in-service armour vehicles that meet the desired requirements and that are capable of operating equally-well in extreme global environments ranging from the Arctic to Arid regions.”
The email sent by Blouin said that other alternatives to the MTV will be considered but no further details were provided. “There is no impact on CANSOFCOM capabilities as a result of not moving forward with the proposed MTV,” the email added.
The army also had a project in 2011 to acquire a marginal terrain vehicle, with up to 100 of those vehicles to be purchased for Arctic and other missions.
But industry representatives have been told by the army that the procurement is being delayed until sometime after 2023.
Military officers privately admit budget issues are behind the delay.
In February, the Conservative government announced it was removing $3.1 billion from DND’s procurement budget over the next four years. Officially, however, DND and Canadian Forces say not a single equipment project is being affected or delayed by the government action.
DND instead says that after reviewing its books, it found billions of extra dollars that could be removed without causing any problems.
Defence analysts and industry representatives are incredulous at the claim being made by the DND. They say the department and Canadian Forces are downplaying any impact caused by budget cuts or funding delays so as not to embarrass the Conservative government.
Canadian special forces also hope to purchase another fleet of multi-role vehicles but a contract for that won’t be in place until 2018. That proposed project is estimated to cost between $100 million to $249 million, according to the government’s defence acquisition guide.
The government, however, has stated that the projects outlined in the guide can be cancelled without notice.
dpugliese@ottawacitizen.com
Twitter.com/davidpugliese |
“The next time you’re riding down the road and you happen to see an open barbecue stand, make sure you think about this story before you take a bite of that sandwich. You never know who you might be eating.” – Joe Metheny
Serial killer Joe Metheny was found dead in his prison cell on Saturday, 5th August – his death is currently under investigation. The 62-year-old, who is notorious for chopping up his victims and selling the flesh as BBQ sandwiches, was sentenced to death in 1998; a ruling which was later overturned and instead he was ordered to serve two life sentences at Western Correctional Institution in Cumberland, Maryland.
Metheny turned to murder after discovering his wife, who had left him and taken their young son with her, was smoking crack under a nearby bridge close to their home in Baltimore. Although he did not find his runaway wife, he did find two homeless men to take his rage out on and under the bridge, he killed them both. This was not only Metheny’s first taste of blood but also getting away with it – he was released on both counts of murder due to lack of evidence.
Next, Metheny moved on to murdering prostitutes and he lured 45-year-old Cathy Ann Magaziner and 26-year-old Kimberly Spicer back to his trailer before stabbing them and strangling them to death. The twisted serial killer then admitted to chopping up their bodies, before opening a roadside BBQ and it was from there he sold the BBQ sandwiches – which contained the flesh of his victims.
He revealed, “I opened up a little open-pit beef stand. I had real roast beef and pork sandwiches. They were very good. The human body taste was very similar to pork. If you mix it together no one can tell the difference.”
When he ran out of his “special meat” he attempted to lure a third victim back to his trailer. Another prostitute named Rita Kemper had fallen into his trap, he recalls, “I got her in there and started to rip her clothes off and knock the hell out of her. She was screaming. I just kept on laughing at her.”
Luckily, Kemper was brave enough to make a run for it, Metheny said, “I turned around for a split second. She ran out the door. There was an eight-foot chain link fence with barb wire on top of it around the front. There was a stack of wooden pallets next to the fence about 10 feet high. That b***h scaled those pallets like a monkey and jumped the fence, and ran down to the main road.” Kemper was able to reach a local gas station and from there she alerted authorities.
During his chilling confession, he told investigators that his only regret was not killing his ex-wife and added, “It ended up as a passion for the taste of blood, and the overwhelming sense of power one gets from taking the life of another.” It is believed he killed more than ten women according to his confession – although their bodies have never been recovered as – disturbingly – the evidence has likely been digested. |
Home > Library > Articles & Essays > Memories & Abuse
...But why didn't I tell?
© 2009 Pandora’s Project
By: Katy
Many of us, in response to being told that being abused as children was not our fault, respond with the line, “…But I never told anybody?”. We berate ourselves for not being able to tell, and somehow conclude that the fact that we “didn’t tell anyone” about the abuse, somehow makes us culpable for it.
It doesn’t!
As an older teen or adult, it is very easy to look back and think of all the missed opportunities for when we could have broken the silence. But what’s very very important to remember, is that when we do this, we are looking back from the perspective of an adult, not from the perspective of a confused and / or frightened child. It's necessary to remind ourselves of why we didn’t tell as children, so that we can perhaps have more acceptance, compassion and understanding of our child selves.
There are so many reasons that children feel they are unable to report sexual abuse, and many survivors have more than one reason for keeping it secret. This is by no means an exhaustive list, but here are some of those reasons. Maybe you can identify with one or two of them.
“No one will believe me”: Abusers very often threaten that if you tell, no one is going to believe you. You then face the risk of looking like you are telling lies, and perhaps even that you will get punished for not telling the truth. After all, children believe that adults believe other adults over children.
Abusers very often threaten that if you tell, no one is going to believe you. You then face the risk of looking like you are telling lies, and perhaps even that you will get punished for not telling the truth. After all, children believe that adults believe other adults over children.
Threats of Harm to Others: Abusers can openly threaten that if you tell, then they are going to punish you by hurting someone you love. It’s not unusual for an abuser to threaten that they will, for example, kill the family pet, or hurt a parent or sibling. This, especially to a young child, is incredibly scary – and can result in believing you are responsible for keeping silent in order to protect others that you care about.
Abusers can openly threaten that if you tell, then they are going to punish you by hurting someone you love. It’s not unusual for an abuser to threaten that they will, for example, kill the family pet, or hurt a parent or sibling. This, especially to a young child, is incredibly scary – and can result in believing you are responsible for keeping silent in order to protect others that you care about.
Threats of further harm to yourself: Abusers can also threaten even worse punishments for you is you do tell. They can think up punishments that literally freeze survivors into silence.
Abusers can also threaten even worse punishments for you is you do tell. They can think up punishments that literally freeze survivors into silence.
“It’s my fault”: Many abusers “groom” their victims, and over time, they can make you feel that you have been doing something wrong, and that you are guilty of what’s been happening. If this is said often enough to you, then you start to believe it. You may be told that if anyone finds out then you will be sent to a children’s home or a jail for children, and that everyone will think you are x, y, and z. Its understandable therefore, that many children don’t tell because they are frightened of being blamed for being complicit in the abuse.
Many abusers “groom” their victims, and over time, they can make you feel that you have been doing something wrong, and that you are guilty of what’s been happening. If this is said often enough to you, then you start to believe it. You may be told that if anyone finds out then you will be sent to a children’s home or a jail for children, and that everyone will think you are x, y, and z. Its understandable therefore, that many children don’t tell because they are frightened of being blamed for being complicit in the abuse.
Not wanting the abuser to get into trouble: As many abusers are close to their child victims i.e. a parent, sibling, family friend, religious leader etc. then sometimes the child doesn’t want the abuser to get into trouble. They can fear the abuser being sent to prison, or being told they are not allowed to see this person again – and obviously if you feel love for that person, then silence often wins through. The idea of being responsible for the break up of their family, in particular, can be too much to bear.
As many abusers are close to their child victims i.e. a parent, sibling, family friend, religious leader etc. then sometimes the child doesn’t want the abuser to get into trouble. They can fear the abuser being sent to prison, or being told they are not allowed to see this person again – and obviously if you feel love for that person, then silence often wins through. The idea of being responsible for the break up of their family, in particular, can be too much to bear.
“I don’t know what to say”: Obviously a child's vocabulary, especially when talking about sexual acts, is not as sophisticated as that of an adult. There are very real practical barriers to telling, like not knowing what words to use, or not knowing how to bring it up in conversation. Even many adults struggle to talk about sex, especially when abusive in nature, and so how could you expect yourself as a child to be able to do this. Also, if you are very confused about what exactly has been done to you, it is almost impossible to know how to describe it.
Obviously a child's vocabulary, especially when talking about sexual acts, is not as sophisticated as that of an adult. There are very real practical barriers to telling, like not knowing what words to use, or not knowing how to bring it up in conversation. Even many adults struggle to talk about sex, especially when abusive in nature, and so how could you expect yourself as a child to be able to do this. Also, if you are very confused about what exactly has been done to you, it is almost impossible to know how to describe it.
Bribery: Some children are bribed in order to keep a secret. For example, the abuser may promise to give you money, or may buy you nice things. These “rewards” can very much confuse your feelings towards the abuser and towards the abuse itself.
Some children are bribed in order to keep a secret. For example, the abuser may promise to give you money, or may buy you nice things. These “rewards” can very much confuse your feelings towards the abuser and towards the abuse itself.
“But I liked it”: Some survivors keep silent because of things about what’s happening that are deemed “positive”. For example, children who are very deprived of love and affection, may crave the love and affection they feel they are receiving from their abuser. Some human contact is better than no human contact. Understandably, sexual stimulation can also result in arousal, and this can be very confusing for a child to disentagle the nice feelings with the bad feelings. It can make a child feel “special” and wanted, possibly for the first time in their life.
Some survivors keep silent because of things about what’s happening that are deemed “positive”. For example, children who are very deprived of love and affection, may crave the love and affection they feel they are receiving from their abuser. Some human contact is better than no human contact. Understandably, sexual stimulation can also result in arousal, and this can be very confusing for a child to disentagle the nice feelings with the bad feelings. It can make a child feel “special” and wanted, possibly for the first time in their life.
“I didn’t know it was wrong”: Especially if abuse began at a very early age, you may not have even been aware that this wasn’t something that didn’t happen to everyone. The abuse becomes part of your normal everyday life, and so challenging it wouldn’t even occur to you.
"Not telling" does not make you in any way responsible for the abuse that happened to you as a child. If you think about how difficult it is to talk about the abuse as an adult, just ask how you could expect yourself as a child to have be able to do that. For many children, "telling" just doesn't feel like an option.
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How Poverty Moved To Chicago’s Suburbs 10 years ago, 60 percent of the Chicago area’s poverty was in the city. Now, it’s less than half. But in the suburbs and nearby cities, the population is shrinking and poverty is on the rise.
Photo: E. Jason Wambsgans/Chicago Tribune
Gary, Indiana, 2005
Not long ago, America passed an important statistical barrier, as Emily Badger writes: “Today, more poor people live in the suburbs (16.4 million of them) than in U.S. cities (13.4 million), despite the perception that poverty remains a uniquely urban problem.” I think calling it “uniquely” urban is a bit off—while I might be a bit overinvested in Appalachian history, the problem of rural poverty is, I think, pretty well recognized, going back through the War on Poverty in the 1960s and rural electrification before that.
But the focus on suburban poverty is fairly new. It preceded the post-2010-Census statistics, which intensified the focus. But to see why it’s become such an issue of late, and why poverty was so linked with urban centers, it helps to see the movement of the poor people over time.
Margery Turner and Graham MacDonald of the Urban Institute built a mapping application that allows you do do just that, at least for the period from 1980-2010 and the decades in between. Looking down at the poverty of Chicagoland from space, it almost looks like a sand painting that’s been blown from the east. The racial patterns, which divide the city into slices, like a cake, are actually similar over time—they just extend farther out.
The shift is really quite dramatic, in broad terms:
Between 2000 and 2007/11, Cook County’s poverty rate moved from 13.5 percent to 15.8 percent; at the beginning of the decade, its poverty rate was highest in the region, but by 2007/11 it had been surpassed by DeKalb County and Lake County, Indiana, where the rates jumped from 11.4 to 15.9 percent and 12.2 to 16.6 percent, respectively.
[snip]
Chicago city’s share of its CBSA’s population below poverty declined from a stunning 60 percent of the total to 48 percent of the total between 2000 and 2007/11.
It highlights something important: the decrease in Chicago’s population over the past few decades has gotten a lot of attention, but not the more recent decrease in population in the surrounding cities:
Chicago’s suburban poverty growth stems partly from the hollowing out of older inner suburbs noted by Lucy and Phillips (2003), Hanlon (2010), and others, in which who have more resources move away and are not replaced by others, leaving poor and near-poor households behind. Although the metropolitan area gained population in the 2000s, 122 of the Chicago region’s municipalities lost population. Among these declining cities, the average increase in poverty was 4.2 percentage points, compared with an average poverty growth of 3.1 percentage points in the growing cities.
Indeed, the best known and most severe poverty rate increases in Chicago occurred in a series of suburbs south of Chicago that lost population, including Harvey, Chicago Heights, and Calumet City. This zone of spiraling poverty—increases of 8 to 12 percentage points—amid population loss extends into northwest Indiana. The poverty rate in Gary and East Chicago exceed 30 percent citywide; Hammond’s poverty rate increased from 14 to 22 percent over the decade. Among these cities, only Hammond had a majority-white non-Hispanic population in 2000, and both Gary and Harvey were at least 80 percent black.
It’s a considerable challenge—the problem stretches across cities, counties, and states, requiring difficult coordination across governments that are both competing and interdependent. And more recently, the problem has been worse for those governments that have fewer resources to address it.
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The Premier League won an identical court order in early March, at the tail end of the 2016/17 season. ISPs are no strangers to requests to restrict torrent sites and such, but what's unique about their arrangement with the Premier League is that they block illegal streams in real-time, as matches are being played. The technology that's used to find streams and track down the servers hosting them is something of a trade secret. Naturally, the League would rather pirate captains didn't know the whole process, thereby giving them the opportunity to come up with a workaround. Brits can still circumvent the blocks with VPNs, but in that sense only a few enterprising fish are wriggling through the net.
The reason the Premier League sought the injunction in the first place is because it's so easy (or at least it was) to watch matches for free. You don't need to be at all tech-savvy to hook a Kodi box up to your TV, download the right plugins and press play. And if people stop paying for sports channel packages, broadcast rights start losing their value. By blocking streams at the server level, in real-time, you cut the feeds the user-friendly, pirate IPTV services rely on. Kodi particularly, you may've seen, is being hunted by rights holders with escalating intensity, even if it's third-party plugins responsible for the witchcraft.
The Premier League, which flexed its court order by blocking over 5,000 server IP addresses during the last two months of the 2016/17 season, renewed its license to block in July to cover the whole 2017/18 season. And like that injunction, UEFA seeking permission from the UK's High Court for one of its own was little more than a formality. After all, UEFA's application is backed by the Premier League and the Formula One World Championship, and supported by all major ISPs barring TalkTalk, which communicated neither approval nor complaint to the courts (the provider reacted the same way to previous applications). What's more, UEFA is using the same classified technology to identify illegal streams, so judge Justice Arnold was hardly going to deny the football association blocking powers having overseen the Premier League's applications.
The only difference this time around is the injunction contains "an additional safeguard" against over-blocking -- a scenario whereby UEFA might be throwing so many IP addresses at ISPs that servers get blocked or remain blocked erroneously. Justice Arnold noted, however, that there's no evidence injunctions issued to date have resulted in this to any great extent. As with previous court orders, UEFA's has an expiry date. The association's kicks in on February 13th next year and ends on May 26th, which just so happens to cover the entirety of the Europe-wide UEFA Champions League tournament. BT is doubly invested this year, since it's both the exclusive pay-TV broadcaster of the matches -- it pays UEFA hundreds of millions of pounds a year for this privilege -- and it's responsible for blocking illegal streams as and when they pop up. |
Like many advocates of financial reform, I was a bit disappointed in the bill that finally emerged. Dodd-Frank gave regulators the power to rein in many financial excesses; but it was and is less clear that future regulators will use that power. As history shows, the financial industry’s wealth and influence can all too easily turn those who are supposed to serve as watchdogs into lap dogs instead.
There was, however, one piece of the reform that was a shining example of how to do it right: the creation of a Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, a stand-alone agency with its own funding, charged with protecting consumers against financial fraud and abuse. And sure enough, Senate Republicans are going all out in an attempt to kill that bureau.
Why is consumer financial protection necessary? Because fraud and abuse happen.
Don’t say that educated and informed consumers can take care of themselves. For one thing, not all consumers are educated and informed. Edward Gramlich, the Federal Reserve official who warned in vain about the dangers of subprime, famously asked, “Why are the most risky loan products sold to the least sophisticated borrowers?” He went on, “The question answers itself — the least sophisticated borrowers are probably duped into taking these products.”
And even well-educated adults can have a hard time understanding the risks and payoffs associated with financial deals — a fact of which shady operators are all too aware. To take an area in which the bureau has already done excellent work, how many of us know what’s actually in our credit-card contracts? |
One of the things that really angers all NBP people is how sig people just do not recognise their sig privilege. So this post is to educate you on the sig privilege that you have, even if you do not recognise it.
You have sig privilege if:
1. Strangers don’t assume they can ask you how you can be alive if you are not breathing.
2. Your validity as a human being is not based upon how accurately other people view your status as an alive person
3. Strangers do not ask you if you have mental health problems or are “fucking crazy”
4. People do not purposefully disrespect you by constantly saying that you are breathing and pointing to your chest whilst arguing that natural movements are a sign that you are lying and you are breathing
5. If you tell people you are a breathing person, you do not get lots of ridicule and questions about your alive status
6. You are not expected to explain to strangers, family and friends why you wear a surgical mask, how you knew you were a NBP person, or whether your NBP status is attention seeking or a sign of mental health problems
7. You do not get people calling your GP with their “concerns” when you disclose your NBP status
8. You do not get people using breagenist words like sigh, or gasping, purposefully trying to oppress and invalidate your existence, even though you have already explained they are being breagenist
Please recognise you have sig privilege that NBP people do not have.
Source. |
Most Users Want A La Carte TV, Don't Care About ESPN
More than 80% of consumers have at least some interest in being able to pick and choose individual pay TV channels, according to a new survey. According to a new study by DigitalSmiths (registration required), if allowed to choose their own individual pay TV channels, most users would choose ABC, Discovery channel, CBS, NBC, and the History Channel. The same isn't true of ESPN, the primary culprit when it comes to soaring cable bills, and a huge reason many people want more custom options and lower prices.
ESPN ranked 20th in the survey, with only 35.7% of those surveyed saying they'd want the channel included in their pick-and-choose TV bundle.
Discovery Channel (62%), History Channel (57.7%), Comedy Central (43%) and the recently much maligned The Weather Channel (39.9 percent) ranked ahead of ESPN in the survey.
Based on the results of the survey, Digitalsmiths' data suggests that users ideally want to pay, on average around $38 for a selection of about 17 channels. The survey comes as a growing number of Internet video options like SlingTV begin to offer users an allotment of "skinny" channel bundles.
Some large cable providers, like Verizon, have responded by offering their own skinny bundle options to consumers to try and prevent defections. However, when you look closely at these offers, an assortment of fees and device rental surcharges quickly erode the added value these options companies like Verizon insist they provide. |
About
These minimalist map prints detailing the Steel City's almost 100 unique and ethnically diverse neighborhoods will make any Pittsburgher proud to hang in their living room or bedroom.
Pittsburgh Map Print
The goal of this project is to raise money to get the first six posters (Pittsburgh, Bloomfield, East Liberty, Lawrenceville, Shadyside, and South Side) printed and sold online before making prints of every neighborhood available.
The larger goal? When sales start for all the neighborhood prints, a portion of the profits will be donated back into those neighborhoods either by giving to local charities or by donating to neighborhood associations.
The prints will be printed in full color using ECO-SOL MAX INK on glossy 8 mil paper. The canvases will be on Satin Finish Canvas, 22 mil thick. Each print will include a personalized note on the back.
The money will be used for printing, shipping fees+supplies, and Kickstarter fees.
I am always available to answer any questions or take your suggestions. Follow me on Twitter: http://www.twitter.com/carrollalex |
A 38 North exclusive with analysis by Joseph S. Bermudez Jr.
Recent commercial satellite imagery reveals several developments suggesting that North Korea may be accelerating the development of the sea-based leg of its nuclear forces. Of particular interest in the imagery is that netting or tarps have been suspended above both the fore and aft decks of the SINPO-class submarine obscuring any activity taking place beneath them. This was last done prior to the July 9, 2016 test of the Pukguksong-1, suggesting that the North may be preparing for a new series of “at sea” test launches, has undertaken modifications or upgrades to the submarine’s launch systems, or is developing a more advanced version of the Pukguksong-1. Recent ejection tests of an SLBM also support the assessment that an at-sea SLBM test may be forthcoming.
Additionally, imagery of the Mayang-do Navy Shipyard and Submarine Base shows the same number of ROMEO-class submarines that are usually berthed there, indicating that a recent spike in ROMEO activity in the East Sea (Sea of Japan) was a singular rather than force-wide event.
Activity at the Secure Boat Basin
Commercial satellite imagery from August 7, although partially cloud covered, provides a limited look at the status of the SINPO-class[1] experimental ballistic missile submarine (SSBA), the submersible test stand barge and parts of the Mayang-do Navy Shipyard and Submarine Base.
As noted in our July report, sometime during the last week in May, the SINPO-class submarine was repositioned forward along its dock and the submersible test stand barge was moved to a position aft of the submarine (both had previously been in their former positions since December 9, 2016). Since the July report, netting or tarps have been suspended above both the fore and aft decks of the submarine obscuring any activity taking place beneath them. The only other time this was seen was during May-July 2016 and prior to the failed July 9, 2016 Pukguksong-1 test. It is unclear if this activity is signaling a forthcoming at sea SLBM test, although the recent ejection tests would support such an assessment. No activity is noted on or near the submersible test stand barge in the latest image.
Figure 1. Netting or tarps suspended over SINPO-class SSBA in the secure boat basin.
Figure 2. Netting or tarps suspended over SINPO-class SSBA observed in May 2016.
Elsewhere at the Sinpo South Shipyard
Much of the Sinpo South Shipyard is obscured by clouds, as is the static test stand. In the area of the construction and fabrication halls, the continued movement of large parts in and out of the parts yard and the associated gantry and tower cranes is noted. There is, however, no indication of what is being constructed within the halls. At the southern tip of the Yuktaeso-ri (Sinpo) Peninsula, construction of the new construction hall and its associated L-shaped pier continues at a very slow pace.
Figure 3. Movement of parts observed near the construction halls.
Figure 4. Construction activity continues at new construction hall.
Figure 5. Construction of L-shaped pier continues at a slow pace.
Activity at Mayang-do Navy Shipyard and Submarine Base
Imagery of the Mayang-do Navy Shipyard and Submarine Base shows the same number of ROMEO-class submarines that are usually berthed there, indicating that a recent spike in ROMEO activity in the East Sea (Sea of Japan) was a singular rather than force-wide event. The week-long patrol by a ROMEO-class attack submarine in the East Sea (Sea of Japan) was “highly unusual and unprecedented,” as Korea People’s Navy submarines have not been known to venture far from their home ports over the past ten years. The few times they have, it has been only to participate in short annual military exercises. The purpose of this recent activity is unclear, but there are several potential explanations including: Kim Jong Un’s desire to expand his provocative policy of the past two years into the naval arena; a practical exercise demonstrating renewed North Korean offensive naval capabilities (potentially a component of the strategic review of military capabilities ordered by Kim Jong Un when he came to power); a training cruise intended to prepare a submarine and its crew for a longer cruise to monitor future ballistic missile tests or conduct offensive conventional attack missions; validation of upgrades to the ROMEO-class submarine (a number of ROMEO-class submarines have been undergoing extended maintenance and refurbishment during the past five years)—or some combination of the above.
The Mayang-do Navy Shipyard and Submarine Base is the largest submarine facility in North Korea and the primary ROMEO-class submarine base on the east coast. A smaller secondary submarine base is located at Chaho, 45 km northeast of Mayang-do. It is unclear from which base the ROMEO-class submarine involved in the July “unusual activities” was deployed, but it was likely from Mayang-do.
A preliminary comparison of the submarine activity at both the Mayang-do Navy Shipyard and Submarine Base during the past twelve months with the August 7 image shows the number of ROMEO-class submarines has remained relatively constant, averaging 12-15; and the number of SANGO-class coastal submarines averaging 11-15.[2] In the August 7 image, 12 ROMEO- and 15 SANGO-class submarines are berthed.[3] This suggests that the July “unusual activities” were a singular event rather than a force-wide event. Regardless, extended North Korean operations in the East Sea should be viewed with concern.
Figure 6. Multiple SANGO and ROMEO-class submarines berthed in the Mayang-do Navy Shipyard.
Figure 7. One SANGO-class and three ROMEO-class submarines berthed at the south pier of the Mayang-do Submarine Base.
Figure 8. One SANGO-class and four ROMEO-class submarines berthed at the east pier of the Mayang-do Submarine Base.
Figure 9. SANGO-class submarines berthed at the northeast pier of the Mayang-do Submarine Base. |
Earlier this week, The Print – a portal founded by senior journalist Shekhar Gupta, which mysteriously dropped Barkha Dutt as co-founder for some reasons – published an article by Taslima Nasreen, a well known author and critic of Islamic fundamentalism.
The article was titled “Why are Hindus trying to prove that they can become ISIS-like extremists: Taslima Nasreen” suggesting that Taslima believes that the entire Hindu society is becoming extremist and supportive of ISIS like terror organizations and acts.
This came as a shock to many because this passion to equate Hindus with ISIS was hitherto known as a fantasy restricted only to the ‘secular-liberal’ crowd of India, which harbors Hinduphobia hiding it beneath flowery language.
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In her article, Taslima indeed brings in ISIS, though she uses it in context of ghastly murder of a Muslim laborer in Rajasthan, who was accused of ‘love jihad’ and killed in by one Shambhulal Regar. The ghastly murder was recorded on video and shared on social media later. Taslima says that the murder-video and its broadcast on internet was done the way ISIS does the same.
Taslima also mentions about ‘rising intolerance’ though she doesn’t equate the entire Hindu community as wanting to become terrorists like ISIS fighters, which the headline by The Print suggested. Such a sweeping Hinduphobic argument was not expected from someone like Taslima, and she drew a lot of flak for it on social media.
Among those who criticized her was an Australian Imam, who argued how even isolated acts like that of Shambhulal can’t be equated with ISIS:
I don’t agree with @taslimanasreen that Hindus can be compared with ISIS, simply because ISIS is founded upon an ideology of hate and war, and Hinduism wasn’t founded by the sword. I have seen nothing but love and kindness from every Hindu I have come across. https://t.co/e0PLsPEEd0 — Imam Tawhidi (@Imamofpeace) December 16, 2017
Your article compares the violence of some Hindus to ISIS. This is a false comparison because if a Hindu is an extremist, it is an individual matter. If ISIS are extremists, they are simply following their books. Hindus retaliate locally and don’t go around bombing other nations. https://t.co/cTTPacg4ZG — Imam Tawhidi (@Imamofpeace) December 17, 2017
Amid all the criticism, Taslima clarified that the headline was not chosen by her and she blamed it for all the ‘hate’ and ‘abuse’ she was receiving. She said that the original article was written in Bengali and the headline was entirely different:
My original article about Shambhulal in Bengali which was translated and published by ‘The Print’ . Headline was changed by them. হত্যার ভিডিও প্রচার https://t.co/PpuMxXQxUm — taslima nasreen (@taslimanasreen) December 16, 2017
The way I was abused & hated today for being misunderstood or for a twisted headline of an article or for being truthful & honest is really sad. But this is my life. I lost admirers? No, they’re not real admirers who hear lies & garbage & start hating without checking facts. — taslima nasreen (@taslimanasreen) December 16, 2017
Interestingly, Taslima even shared a Twitter exchange with Shekhar Gupta where she had asked Gupta to change the headline to accurately depict her thoughts, but Gupta kept on adopting delaying tactics despite Taslima insisting on it:
The headline had not been changed despite repeated requests by Taslima to Gupta (till this report was published).
Perhaps Shekhar Gupta is chasing traffic for his new website with such provocative headlines – and he has been successful at least in this case – but it surely has not amused Taslima Nasreen.
This is not for the first time that Taslima Nasreen and Shekhar Gupta are part of a social media controversy. Recently, an old video clip, which had Taslima cornering Gupta over calling radical Islamic leader Owaisi his friend, had gone viral on social media:
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An image on the Russian Defense Ministry's website purports to show an airstrike Sept. 30, 2015, in Syria. (Photo11: AFP/Getty Images)
WASHINGTON — Russia on Wednesday launched its first airstrike in Syria following its military buildup in the embattled country, drawing a sharp rebuke from the United States and raising tensions further in the region.
Defense Secretary Ashton Carter called Russian policy in Syria "ill-advised" and said it was "doomed to fail."
The airstrike came only days after President Obama met with Russian President Vladimir Putin at the United Nations General Assembly to discuss Russia's military buildup in Syria.
The United States and Russia share a common goal of repelling the Islamic State from Syria, but they differ over the future of Syrian President Bashar Assad. Russia has been a principal backer of his regime during the country's four-year civil war while the United States has called for the Syrian leader to be removed because of documented abuses against Syrian civilians.
The administration's concern is that in combating the Islamic State, a potent threat to Assad, Russia would strengthen the Syrian leader's hold on power and prolong the war.
Russia's escalated involvement in Syria is tantamount to "pouring gasoline on the fire," Carter said, since it is Assad who has drawn the Islamic State and other radicals into Syria's raging civil war. He said it is critical for Russia to push for new leadership in Syria at the same time it is targeting the Islamic State.
The Pentagon called into question Russian claims that its military strategy is to target the Islamic State militants, suggesting the real aim is to prop up Assad. Carter pointed out that the Russian airstrike, which the Pentagon had said was near Homs, is not in an area known as an Islamic State stronghold.
Any attacks on moderate forces opposing Assad would be a blow to the United States, which is backing those rebels, but it was not clear how the Pentagon would respond to attacks on U.S.-supported opponents of Assad.
Syrian President Bashar Assad greets religious figures after the morning prayer of the Muslim holiday of Eid al-Adha at the Al-Adel mosque in Damascus on Sept. 24, 2015. (Photo11: SANA via AFP/Getty Images)
The United States was given one hour's notice before the Russian strike took place, the Pentagon said. The Russian notice was provided in Baghdad, where the Russians have set up a coordination unit with Iraq’s government. A high-ranking Russian officer there notified a U.S. military official at the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad.
Russia's airstrike was carried out with multiple aircraft. It remained unclear whether the Russians planned to conduct regular airstrikes.
Carter said the U.S.-led coalition planned to continue its daily airstrikes on Islamic State targets regardless of Russian actions.
The Pentagon has said it plans to hold regular meetings with Russian military officials to avoid inadvertent clashes between Russian and coalition military activities in Syria.
“The purpose of these de-confliction discussions will be to ensure that ongoing coalition air operations are not interrupted by any future Russian military activity, to ensure the safety of coalition air crews and to avoid misjudgment and miscalculation,” Pentagon press secretary Peter Cook said Tuesday.
News of the Russian airstrike came after Russia's parliament granted Putin permission to launch airstrikes against the Islamic State in Syria.
Speaking at a government meeting Wednesday, Putin said the only way to fight terrorists there is to act pre-emptively, Reuters reported.
He said Russia's military involvement would be temporary, and it is still possible and necessary to “unite international efforts to take on Islamist militants in Syria,” the news agency reported.
Sergey Ivanov, the Kremlin's chief of staff, told journalists Russia will only use its air force in Syria, the news agency TASS reported. He said Assad had asked Russia to provide military assistance.
Ivanov said that the number of Russians joining the extremist group, also known as ISIL or ISIS, is growing. "The operation’s military goal is exclusively air support of the Syrian armed forces in their fight against ISIL," he said, according to TASS. "We are not pursuing any foreign political goals or ambitions, of which we have been regularly accused. The point is just to defend Russia’s national interests."
In Paris on Wednesday, prosecutors opened a preliminary investigation into allegations of crimes against humanity committed by the Assad regime. The probe focuses on atrocities allegedly committed between 2011 and 2013 and is based on photos of mutilated corpses, the Paris prosecutor’s statement said.
President François Hollande announced Sunday that France launched its first airstrikes against Islamic State positions in Syria, destroying one of the group’s training camps in a bombing raid.
Onyanga-Omara reported from London.
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Artificial intelligence (AI) may conjure up images of intelligent systems rising up to enslave us, with sadistic driverless cars taking passengers on terrifying joyrides and malevolent smart fridges refusing to order milk.
But in reality, AI is already here; many of us just do not realise it yet. Through the development of machine learning, the technology industry has created smart systems designed to help, not hinder, people.
Rather than send murderous robots back in time to destroy us, machine learning sits behind the scenes in the form of algorithms that learn from data to better deliver services offered by software applications.
This is the direction that Forrester principal analyst Diego Lo Giudice believes AI is heading: "While some AI research still tries to simulate our brain or certain regions of it - and is frankly unlikely to deliver concrete results anytime soon - most of it now leverages a less human, but more effective, approach revolving around machine learning and smart integration with other AI capabilities," he said in a blog post.
One example of this is Office Graph, created by Microsoft. Office Graph sits behind Office 356 and maps the relationships between people, content and activity across the company's productivity software suite.
Office Graph uses these relationships to serve up documents, files, email messages, and other elements in Office 365 that are relevant to the work the user is carrying out, with the goal of making the user more productive.
Another example is Microsoft's Skype Translator, which uses machine learning capabilities to improve the accuracy of its translation of spoken languages, something CEO Satya Nadella likens to "magic".
"The one fascinating feature of this is something called transfer learning. What happens is you teach it English and it learns English. Then you teach it Mandarin, and it learns Mandarin, but it becomes better at English," he said.
"Then you teach it Spanish, and it gets good at Spanish but gets great at both Mandarin and English. Quite frankly none of us knows exactly why. It's magic."
Not wanting to be left behind, Google recently announced an update to Google Translate to provide real-time translations that use machine learning to deliver better results the more it is used.
Big data analytics
But, while machine learning might improve the performance of consumer-level services, it is in the enterprise world that it really shines.
Big data is a big business, but trawling through hundreds of gigabytes of often unstructured information can be a lengthy and resource-sapping process. Add machine learning into the mix and that process becomes a lot easier.
Rather than rely on data analysts to come up with patterns and predictions based on samples taken from vast reams of diverse data, machine learning can crunch an entire set of big data and use algorithms to come up with accurate and tailored results.
Given the ability of computer programs to crunch data faster than the human mind, machine learning offers data-driven organisations a much faster and efficient way to exploit big data.
Furthermore, by having algorithms take care of the resource-intensive and complex work, machine learning means big data analytics becomes accessible to business users, rather than just highly trained data scientists.
New tech battleground
Creating machine learning algorithms and systems is a complex and costly task, so most enterprises will prefer to buy in external machine learning-based services to use with their harvested data.
Some of the world's biggest tech companies are now looking to tap into this burgeoning market. IBM, for example, has built an entire machine learning ecosystem around its Watson supercomputer.
This ecosystem includes the Watson Discovery Advisor, which seeks out hidden connections in big data, and Watson Analytics, a cloud-powered service that adds natural language recognition to data analysis.
Microsoft also has a stake in cloud-based machine learning with its Azure Machine Learning service, which gives users the ability to deploy machine learning onto their data sets from Microsoft's cloud platform.
Being based in the cloud, Azure Machine Learning allows users to select custom analytics algorithms that best suit their business from a web browser, thereby bypassing the need to install equipment or resource-intensive applications.
Meanwhile, Amazon has entered the fray with its cloud-powered Amazon Machine Learning service, which aims to give developers access to machine learning without requiring them to learn complex algorithms.
Through the use of application programme interfaces (APIs), Amazon's service provides developers with a way to plug machine learning into their apps, bypassing the need for them to hard-code algorithms into their software.
"You can build and fine-tune predictive models using large amounts of data, and then use Amazon Machine Learning to make predictions (in batch mode or in real-time) at scale," said Jeff Barr, chief evangelist at AWS, nothing how this will widen the ability for business of all shapes and sizes to use machine learning.
"You can benefit from machine learning even if you don't have an advanced degree in statistics or the desire to set up, run and maintain your own processing and storage infrastructure."
From insight to action
The majority of machine learning services use predictive analytics to serve up insights and forecasts from big data to business decision-makers.
But, in future algorithms could tell users what actions to take, rather than just make predictions, effectively moving from predictive to prescriptive analytics.
This is the direction in which cloud-based machine learning firm Inside Sales is heading, with the help of backing from Microsoft and Salesforce. It uses its proprietary algorithms to sift through a vast collection of aggregated data harvested from its users to provide salespeople with guidance on how best to pursue a lead or close sales with potential customers.
Inside Sales' machine learning technology works by harvesting data from each of its users' customer relationship management systems and databases, anonymising that information and analysing it against similar data gathered from other salespeople and their databases.
That machine learning is then applied against a salesperson's custom parameters to recommend actions that will improve their chances of securing a sale.
For example, through machine learning data analysis, Inside Sales can discover that people working in finance within London are more likely to answer sales calls at 3pm rather than 11am.
Furthermore, just as Skype Translator learns as the data it is fed increases, as more firms sign up to services like Inside Sales, the larger the database it has to anaylse, in turn helping improve its analytical capabiltiies and insights.
The rise of the truly intelligent machines may be some way off, but there's no doubt smart machines and systems are going to play an ever increasing role in the way enterprises function. |
Share. A trip to Italy. A trip to Italy.
Like many works of horror, Town of Light appears to be based on a true story. It takes place in a real asylum, which stands to this day. But, of course, this is all part of the set-up. From the earliest Gothic novels to found footage movies, the air of authenticity is a horror trope with considerable pedigree, and Town of Light is consciously tapping into this tradition – blurring the line between fiction and fact to great effect.
Exit Theatre Mode
Set in the Ospedale Psichiatrico di Volterra – a psychiatric hospital in the otherwise idyllic location of Tuscany, Italy – it’s an emotionally dark tale. Its developers, also from Italy, are keen to state there are no jump scares or literal monsters hiding in its shadowy corridors, But having played an early build of Town of Light, I still think it’s best to think of it as a horror game, but one that’s more firmly in the tradition of the psychological ghost story. And it’s definitely found the perfect location for this type of narrative.
Volterra was once home to more than 6000 patients, but was closed down in 1978 after an investigation deemed its procedures to be cruel. In truth, this was more of a prison than a place of genuine medicine; it’s patients rarely returned to health or home. The asylum still stands to this day, and being an exceptionally creepy abandoned psychiatric hospital, there is no shortage of photos online taken by fearless urban explorers.
Looking through these pictures it’s clear why Volterra was selected. The best ghost stories can be appreciated as a painful and disturbing conversation with the past, one that’s never been resolved. Sometimes the ghost is real, a genuine supernatural phenomenon; sometimes it turns out to be a form of psychological disturbance. In one sense, the difference is irrelevant – both depict the past exerting an unnatural influence on the present and creating trauma. Volterra is exactly one of these places.
You play as Renee, a former patient who has returned to confront what happened to her there. While you’re soon taken into deeply disturbing territory – which I won’t go into because to do so would be to ruin the revelation itself – the game opens on a warm, sunny day, and everything seems to be right in the world. Even though you’re stood outside the asylum, which is stashed away in a deep forest, there’s nothing overtly gothic or sinister about the set-up. But as you walk up the path that leads to Volterra, a palpable sense of melancholia begins to seep into the game. It’s clear you’re returning to the worst place you’ve ever been.
The game places you into an interesting position. Like Gone Home, to which you could make several easy comparisons, you’re playing a character with a very specific backstory of which you’re entirely oblivious. The game seemingly plays with that ignorance. What happened to Renee? Curiosity draws you into the asylum.
Exit Theatre Mode
In the hospital courtyard, the walls are scarred by the carvings of the patients who were trapped within. Its musty rooms are littered with broken mirrors, empty wheelchairs, and – in one room – a forgotten doll. The atmosphere is intimidating but not overly oppressive; it almost feels like an early Guillermo del Toro movie. Like the orphanage in The Devil’s Backbone, this a place that rests upon terrible memories and dark secrets. Gameplay, like Gone Home or Dear Esther, rests upon a slow mixture of exploration and puzzle solving, with the latter being a touch opaque at times.
Ultimately Town of Light’s real appeal lies within its treatment of memory. I only spent a small amount of time exploring Volterra, but it’s evident the developers are prepared to tackle seriously delicate and sensitive issues. While it’s nailed the wistful but sour atmosphere of this place, it’s real success will hinge on how well it depicts these very sensitive story elements. Horror is a provocative genre, regularly using potent imagery and situations to stir strong emotional, physical, and intellectual responses. Town of Light touches some of the most provocative – childhood trauma, abuse, mental illness – and for it to succeed it needs to explore them responsibly, not just use them to shock.
Daniel is IGN's Games Editor over in London. He writes about movies, too. You can be part of the world's most embarrassing cult by following him on IGN and Twitter. |
European Union has launched legal action against a string of countries for failing to register migrants as asylum claims in Europe surged over the summer to more than 400,000, figures showed on Thursday.
Some 413,800 applied for asylum in the EU in the three months between June and September, the peak of the migration crisis. It was more than double the previous three months, and a fourfold increase since the beginning of 2014.
A third were Syrians, 14 per cent Afghanis and 10 per cent Iraqis.
But the figures also included 26,000 Albanians – a country which hopes to join the EU – 21,000 Pakistanis and 11,175 Nigerians, one of the fastest growing states in Africa.
The European Union on Thursday threatened to take Greece, Croatia and Italy to court for failing to fingerprint asylum seekers within three days of landing in the country, a process designed to prevent them from heading onwards into central Europe and Germany.
Photo: EPA/GEORGI LICOVSKI
Hungary, which has taken a hard line against migrants and was the first to build a border fence to halt the influx, was threatened with action over allegations it had failed to respect the rights of failed asylum seekers.
According to the EU, Budapest has ignored rules that say a failed asylum seeker cannot be deported while they are appealing. Hungary’s new fast-track deportation regime also ignores migrants’ rights to an interpreter, and judicial decisions were being made by unqualified secretaries, the commission said.
The figures released show how Hungary, whose government’s stance is regarded in Brussels as ugly and populist, has born the brunt of the crisis.
Photo: EPA/GEORGI LICOVSKI
It received 108,085 asylum applications in three months – or nearly 11,000 for every million Hungarians.
Mapped: Where do migrants apply for asylum in Europe?
Germany, held up as the main destination, received 108,305 applications – just 1,334 per million. The UK in the same period had 11 870 asylum applications, or 183 per million.
Action was also threatened against Greece and Malta over rules on standards of reception centres given to migrants. It means the commission has threatened more than 82 separate legal actions against member states – a sign of how badly the EU’s single asylum rules have been disregarded.
Photo: EPA/DJORDJE SAVIC
The Council of Europe, which sits outside the EU, said the continent’s “handling of the arrivals of migrants and asylum-seekers has been simply disastrous”.
“Some countries toughened their asylum and immigration legislation, sometimes making it a crime to entry and stay irregularly. Others have erected fences or detained migrants or asylum-seekers in prison-like structures.
"This approach is wrong and causes unnecessary suffering to people, many of whom are children, who have already been through very traumatising experiences and taken perilous routes in search of protection,” said Nils Muižnieks, the commissioner for human rights. |
ABALONE fishers are warned to take care on Sunday, the second day of the heavily restricted season, following the death of a Malaysian fisherman on the first day.
A 20-year-old Malaysian man was swept into heavy seas by a strong rip in Yanchep Lagoon, 55km north of Perth, on November 4.
The accident triggered calls for metropolitan abalone fishing spots to be closed in dangerous weather.
Instead, Surf Life Saving Western Australia (SLSWA) will put on additional patrols and has urged fishers to be cautious.
"With the body of the fisherman still missing and 15 rescues performed on November 4, surf lifesavers are calling for abalone fishermen to not go beyond their own capabilities or take risks on Sunday," SLSWA community safety manager Chris Peck said.
Department of Fisheries principal management officer Martin Holtz advised abalone fishers to be aware of the water and weather conditions, and wear appropriate clothing and footwear for clambering over reef tops.
Sunday is forecast to be mainly sunny, with temperatures reaching a maximum of 30C.
The abalone season is open for five days between early November and early March, and only for one hour a day. |
Her Majesty's Inspectorate of Constabulary (HMIC), which inspects Britain's police forces, has reported on several cases of misuse of the Police National Computer (PNC) by non-police organisations.
The PNC is a law enforcement database that holds personal information about people arrested by police or convicted of crimes – as well as similar information about people who have come to police notice for whatever reason but are not convicted of any offence.
After its inspections, which were carried out in 2014, HMIC reported it found that the Scottish Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (SSPCA), the Gangmasters Licensing Agency, the FCA and Children and Family Court Advisory and Support Service were all accessing the PNC. They once had contracts allowing them do so, known as Supply Agreements, but they have long since expired.
In a blog post on these reports, campaign group Big Brother Watch noted:
The FCA was one of the worst offenders, not only had they failed to re-apply for access for three months prior to the inspection, but the original agreement setting out what uses of the PNC were permitted was found to be extremely vague. The fact that under the Investigatory Powers Bill the FCA are set to get more powers to snoop on our browsing habits is something that adds even more concern to the situation.
Big Brother Watch additionally stated: “It is astonishing that all these agencies could continue accessing the PNC, in some cases for years, without anything being done to stop it. They may well have persuasive cases to make supporting their access, but they have to follow the rules and actually make them rather than simply carrying on regardless.
Hullo hullo hullo, what's all this, then?
The PNC exists in one of the more curious and obscure legal hinterlands of British law enforcement.
Based on the same Fujitsu mainframe it was installed on in the 1970s, the PNC was owned by the Association of Chief Police Officers (ACPO) until that body was replaced by the National Police Chiefs' Council (NPCC) last year .
Unlike ACPO, which was a private company, the NPCC doesn't exist as a legal entity but is rather a collaboration established by a legal agreement between “relevant parties” under Section 22A of the Police Act 1996. Whether the NPCC may therefore own the PNC isn't clear, and neither the NPCC press office nor the Home Office were able to clarify this for The Register at the time of publication.
While the PNC is managed and controlled by the Home Office, the ministerial department in charge of policing, the information it contains is contributed thereto by the individual police forces, who together form the NPCC. While individually these forces are beholden to the Home Office, they collectively, as ACPO in 2014, actually had “the right to withdraw the use of PNC from the Home Office if they have reason to believe it has been misused.” (PDF)
Police misuse of the PNC has been widely documented. Earlier this year the Biometrics Commissioner reported that forces have been hacking the PNC in different ways to avoid it flagging suspects' biometric data for deletion after their release.
Access to the PNC extends much further than the cops, however, and HMIC has published a number of reports highlighting misuse amonst 10 non-police agencies, including the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) and the Scottish Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (SSPCA).
While the list of non-police organisations that HMIC reported on is not an exhaustive list of all who can access the PNC, the 10 inspected agencies alone made more than 50,000 queries of the PNC in less than two years, either through “discrete computer terminals installed in their premises”, which is known as “direct access”, or “through a third party, usually a police force”, a process known as “indirect access”.
“In either arrangement,” HMIC reported, “the public needs to have confidence that access is properly regulated and that effective auditing arrangements are in place. This is important because much of the information held on the PNC is sensitive and personal.”
Big Brother Watch had the final word: “It’s high time that more information is released to give citizens a better understanding of who can access the PNC, what is held on it and how long it is kept for. For too long the PNC has been run in a shadowy and un-transparent way. This news simply raises the possibility that even those in charge of it have no idea what is going on.” ® |
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