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Twitter has offered TweetDeck up to $40 million to buy the software application. Cash and stock were used to make this purchase. Earlier in the week, Twitter had not confirmed this rumor and TweetDeck had made no confirmation that the deal was taking place. TweetDeck and UberMedia had also been in discussions for a deal that is possibly less than what Twitter is offering, $30 million. Some say UberMedia and Twitter may soon become rivals as UberMedia continues to purchase many third-party Twitter applications. The two continue to battle. While UberMedia was close, Twitter swooped in and bought TweetDeck.
The popular social network, Twitter, has been growing more and more popular over its five years of service. From everyday people, to celebrities, to wannabes, Twitter receives millions of users a day. It allows people with an account to send “tweets” to followers in the form of 140 character messages. TweetDeck was created buy Ian Dodsworth in 2008 and allows the Twitter user easier and more efficient access to not only Twitter but Facebook and other social networks as well.
This new purchase will more than likely continue to strain the already rocky relationship between UberMedia and Twitter. Twitter stopped three UberMedia applications in February citing a violation of Twitter policy. Talk of of UberMedia creating its own version of Twitter has been floating around. Of the many third party apps users tweet from, UberMedia—now called UberSocial, is the third popular way to send tweets from iPhone and directly from Twitter.
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US Presidential hopeful Ted Cruz has been pulled up by the Washington Post for telling some "whopper" tales about Australia, gun control and crime.
Cruz reckons that since Australia's 1996 gun buyback program, "the rate of sexual assaults, the rate of rapes, went up significantly, because women were unable to defend themselves."
Analysis by the Washington Post shows while the rate of sexual assaults in Australia increased slightly between 1996 and 2014, "there was no significant spike or drop after the 1996 legislative changes or buyback program".
"The increase likely is affected by the increase in reporting, and there wasn’t prevalent use of handguns for self-defense before 1996, as Cruz suggests," they wrote.
The WaPo also points out, correctly, there was no blanket exemption allowing people to use handguns for self-defence before the Howard Government introduced gun control legislation.
There also hasn't been a mass shooting in Australia since the gun buy back.
The newspaper, which once brought down a president, graded the presidential hopeful with four Pinocchios -- a whopper.
The Washington Post does not have a fifth Pinocchio.
"[W]e wavered between Three and Four Pinocchios. Despite the litany of caveats, there was a gradual increase in sexual assault rates over a decade after the 1996 changes -- which places his claim in the range of Three Pinocchios," the WaPo wrote.
"But the rates didn’t go up 'significantly' after the buyback, and there’s no evidence that changes to gun laws in Australia affected sexual assault rates or jeopardized (sic) the ability of women to protect themselves.
"His false characterization of this law and its effects tipped his statement to Four Pinocchios."
It is not the first time pro-gun lobbyists have been accused of cherry picking facts when it comes to statistics.
Cruz is currently locked in an intense Republican primary battle against the frighteningly popular Donald Trump, who is now polling at 41 percent.
Cruz notched 19 percent support in the CNN/ORC poll. |
On Saturday, presidential spokesman Sean Spicer claimed that the Trump inaugural had “the largest audience to witness an inauguration, period — both in person and around the globe.”
Entertainment Weekly reports, however, that Presidents Reagan and Obama enjoyed bigger TV ratings:
The only inauguration over the last three decades that tops Trump’s number in the linear ratings? Barack Obama’s first inauguration back in 2009, which had a record-setting 37.8 million viewers. So Trump was down from the last new president to take office. But before that, to get an Inauguration Day number this high, you’d have to go all the way back to Ronald Reagan in 1981, who was seen by 41.8 million viewers (Nielsen released tracking for inauguration ratings back to 1969).
News sites, such as The Daily Mail, eagerly corrected the Trump Administration:
Trump boasts about inauguration viewing figures which were second biggest in 36 years. [But] omitted his had 7 million less viewers than Obama’s first inauguration.
“Snopes” says Spicer’s claim was “unproven.”
Monday, Spicer said that his statement included online streaming:
Spicer argues without evidence that Internet streaming made Trump's inaugural the most-watched in history https://t.co/DlCDFq35NV pic.twitter.com/UKbbPe88nH — The Boston Globe (@BostonGlobe) January 23, 2017
Though it does have the capability to do so, these Nielsen TV ratings don’t take into account all of the streaming and online viewing that was done via Twitter and Facebook and everywhere else:
Retweet for a reminder to watch the Inauguration of Donald J. Trump this Friday! #DayOne Streaming LIVE on Twitter at 11am ET. pic.twitter.com/0Eofuf3GTK — Twitter Government (@TwitterGov) January 17, 2017
PC World reports that multiple websites streamed the inauguration live for free. Those viewer numbers are not included in the Nielsen ratings. Here are the channels on YouTube alone that live streamed the event:
The White House, CBSN, NBC, Fox News, Reuters, NewsOn and even Democracy Now! all live streamed the events on their websites.
The Washington Times reports that the tech company Akamai Technologies reported a record number of eyeballs on computer screens:
Video streaming coverage of the 2017 Presidential Inauguration is the largest single live news event that the company has delivered,” calling the event “a new benchmark for live video traffic” which bested such events as the Rio Olympics and the 2016 Euro soccer tournament. Their measurements are precise. The coverage reached a peak of 8.7 terabytes per second at 12:04 p.m. ET during the opening of the president’s speech, exceeding the previous record of 7.5 terabytes — Tbps — set during Election Day coverage in November. And what the heck is a terabyte? The term refers to a data transmission rate equivalent to 1,000 gigabytes — or 1,000,000,000,000 bytes — per second. In terms of an audience, that measurement translates into 4.6 million people watching the streaming coverage — about what ABC and CBS garnered during the same time period.
Advanced Television also reports that Akamai says Trump’s 8.7 terabytes-per-second (Tbps) streaming set a record, followed by the Euro 2016 final which reached a peak of 7.3, followed by the 2016 Rio Olympics women’s gymnastics finals with a 4.5 Tbps, the 2011 Royal Wedding at 1.3 Tbps and, rounding the top five, was the Obama 2009 inauguration at 1.1 Tbps.
The full numbers of eyeballs on screens isn’t known, but with the numbers so far it looks as if President Trump had at least about 36 million eyes on him on Friday.
On what medium did you watch the Inauguration? Let us know in the comments. |
Last October, New York Governor Andrew Cuomo signed legislation that effectively banned short-term rentals within the state. Now, New York City is making good on the state’s threats and has begun punishing those attempting to skirt the new regulations on homesharing.
Manhattan took “mercy” on Fried and Cames, fining them each only $1,000 per violation.
Hank Fried and Tatiana Cames have officially become the first casualties of New York’s war on homesharing.
Within a week of the new regulations going into effect, New York City lawmakers were eager to make an example of those continuing to list short-term rental properties online. Fried and Cames are, unfortunately, the state’s Guinea pigs, used to see just how much the authorities can get away with when it comes to penalizing those participating in the homesharing economy.
While the new law allows the state to fine guilty parties up to $7,500 per violation, the city of Manhattan took “mercy” on Fried and Cames, fining them each only $1,000 per violation.
After a thorough investigation into the matter, the state concluded that Cames and Fried had accumulated 17 violations between the two of them, bringing their total combined fines to $17,000.
While New York officials have justified these new regulations under the rationale of protecting vulnerable tourists, the real cause is far murkier and reeks of cronyism.
Now You're in New York
New York City is one of the most popular travel destinations in the world. While homesharing services, like Airbnb, have helped travelers see the city without breaking the bank on hotel accommodations, the hotel industry itself has been less than enthusiastic about the sharing economy revolution.
NYC hotel moguls have done all they can to make sure that Airbnb is regulated out of existence.
As homesharing has risen in popularity over the last several years, New York City hotels have experienced record lows when it comes to hotel bookings.
Manhattan hotel costs are infamously known for being extravagant, but before the days of Airbnb, hotels were the only real option available to out-of-town guests. Fortunately, homesharing has worked in the favor of tourists in numerous ways, since hotels have now been forced to decrease their rates to the lowest they have been since 2009.
Unwilling to actually compete with their sharing economy rivals, the hotel industry did what many large industries do when they feel their business is being threatened: they asked the state to help squash the competition.
Putting pressure on local legislators, New York City hotel moguls have done all they can to make sure Airbnb and other homesharing sites are regulated out of existence.
Unfortunately, local lawmakers were either unwilling to stand up for the right of all New Yorkers to do as they please with their own property, or had a vested interested in the local hotel industry. Either way, New York hotel owners appear to have gotten their way as the state has now initiated a crackdown on local participants of the homesharing economy.
The Good Fight?
While the state and the hotel industry are largely to blame for these new egregious regulations, Airbnb has not put up much of a fight on behalf of their customers.
Cronyism has set its sites on the sharing economy, and consumers are the ones who will suffer.
When the new regulations were adopted in october, Airbnb initially promised to fight the new laws by filing suit against the state. However, its dedication to this cause quickly diminished once a deal was struck which resulted in Airbnb dropping the lawsuit.
After discussing the situation with the state of New York, Airbnb agreed to abandon their lawsuit and in return, the state promised to only prosecute those listing their homes on the site, instead of the company itself.
While it is understandable that Airbnb would prioritize looking after its own interests, its platform is successful only because of the property owners willing to rent out their homes.
But whether the hotel industry, local lawmakers, or Airbnb is mainly to blame for Fried and Cames’ current predicament, it is clear that cronyism has set its sites on the sharing economy, and consumers are the ones who will suffer the consequences. |
DUDE, THAT SIGN SUCKS,NOBODY'S GONNA SHOW UP !
WHAT'S WRONG WITH IT ?
LOOK AT IT, DUDE,
YOU'RE NOT OFFERINGANY FABULOUS PRIZES.
YOU HAVE TO OFFERFABULOUS PRIZES
IF YOU WANT PEOPLE TO SHOW UPFOR YOUR STUPID CRAP.
HERE...
FREE HAT ?
YEAH, IF YOU OFFER FREE HATS,MAYBE PEOPLE WILL SHOW UP.
BUT WE DON'THAVE HATS !
WE CAN MAKE THEMOUT OF PAPER.
IT'S NOT HARD, JUST STUPIDLITTLE PAPER HATS.
PEOPLE JUST NEED FREE STUFF.
DON'T YOU GUYSKNOW ANYTHING ?
YOU SEE ?
FIRST WE WERE JUST FORMING ACLUB, NOW WE HAVE TO MAKE HATS !
WHERE DOES IT END ?!
ALRIGHT, LET'S GO GETTHE GYMNASIUM READY.
TWEEK, YOU GO MAKE50 HATS.
50 HATS ?OH JESUS !
I'LL NEVER MAKE IT !I'LL NEVER MAKE IT !
TWEEK !
CALM DOWN, SON.
REMEMBER WHATDR. NORRIS TOLD YOU--
FIND YOUR CENTER.
MY CENTER ?
MY CENTER.
CALM... PUPPIES.
( Cartman )TWEEK !
TWEEK !!
TWEEEEEEKK !!!
HOW MANY HATSHAVE YOU MADE ?
OH GOD !
WE ONLY HAVE UNTIL 10 A.M.TOMORROW, GET THE LEAD OUT !
AAGH, OH GOD ! |
Posted 31 October 2016 - 12:26 PM
Greetings MechWarriors,In the October patch notes we called that month out as fairly light in the grand picture, and November is much the same in that regard. Behind the scenes however we continue to work on a few 'banner' features planned for release either in December or in the coming months.We know everyone is eager to hear what these items are in further detail, but Mech_Con is almost here, and with it will come much more detail about what's in store for December and the new year.Some of these in-development items, such as the Skill Tree revamp, the latest update to Faction Play, the Assault Game Mode revamp, and the brand new Quick Play Game Mode have been touched on briefly in previous posts and Town Halls, but there's much more to come in the way of details and surprises.As we approach Mech_Con however, and the end of 2016, it's time for a brief look ahead at the November patch.
November
The long-awaited Clan Wave 1 Hero variants will become available to eligible owners in November, with a subsequent in-game MC release date on May 16th 2017.Another set of the usual lore-related Decals will be included in the November patch, along with a few symbol and word Decals, but we'll be going a step further with the release of alphanumeric Decals as well. Support hasn't seen a significant impact on in-game moderation since the release of Decals, and we're hoping the introduction of numbers and letters will allow for more personalized customization of 'Mechs, with a (hopefully) minimal amount of abuse.It's worth pointing out that Support can audit player Decal placements, and will take action as needed for things that cross the line.The artists continue to work on providing full Pattern support for the older 'Mechs. The Kintaro, Orion, Banshee, Shadow Hawk, and Locust all receive full Pattern support in November.An array of Weapon and Equipment balance changes are coming in November, brought over from or informed by the various Energy Draw PTS sessions. Patch Notes will have a full rundown on these changes, along with design notes where necessary. Energy Draw itself is currently on-hold however, and may be re-approached in the new year.The November patch also includes Quirk adjustments for a total of two Inner Sphere 'Mechs and ten Clan 'Mechs.As usual, thank you for reading and thank you for playing. We look forward to seeing you all at Mech_Con 2016, whether in person or through the live Twitch broadcast. |
The Amazon has long been known as the "lungs of the world"
In the last five months of 2007, 3,235 sq km (1,250 sq miles) were lost.
Gilberto Camara, of INPE, an institute that provides satellite imaging of the area, said the rate of loss was unprecedented for the time of year.
Officials say rising commodity prices are encouraging farmers to clear more land to plant crops such as soya.
The monthly rate of deforestation saw a big rise from 243 sq km (94 sq miles) in August to 948 sq km (366 sq miles) in December.
"We've never before detected such a high deforestation rate at this time of year," Mr Camara said.
His concern, outlined during a news conference in Brasilia on Wednesday, was echoed by Environment Minister Marina Silva.
Expensive soya
Ms Silva said rising prices of raw materials and commodities could be spurring the rate of forest clearing, as more and more farmers saw the Amazon as a source of cheap land.
"The economic reality of these states indicate that these activities impact, without a shadow of a doubt, on the forest," she said.
The state of Mato Grosso was the worst affected, contributing more than half the total area of forest stripped, or 1,786 sq km (700 sq miles).
The states of Para and Rondonia were also badly affected, accounting for 17.8% and 16% of the total cleared respectively.
The situation may also be worse than reported, with the environment ministry saying the preliminary assessment of the amount of forest cleared could double as more detailed satellite images are analysed.
President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva is due to attend an emergency meeting on Thursday to discuss new measures to tackle deforestation in the Amazon.
The latest figures will be an embarrassment for the Brazilian president, says the BBC's Americas editor, Warren Bull.
Last year, President Lula said his government's efforts to control illegal logging and introduce better certification of land ownership had helped reduce forest clearance significantly.
Even as he celebrated the success, though, environmentalists were warning that the rate was rising again. |
Graphene reveals new, revolutionary properties on a monthly basis.
Over the last decade, this wonder material went from a curious carbon allotrope to the single-most-expensive material in the world. As production costs for exfoliated graphene crashed to levels comparable with tilapia fillets, so did interest in its practical application. With new techniques, exotic possibilities, and technologies emerging on an almost monthly basis, graphene promises to change the world before we fully understand its potential.
Breaking the Graphene Hype Cycle
Attentive engineers can map the nanomaterials hype cycle to a neat curve: lab results predict revolutionary industrial and commercial applications, pop science and business journalists crank out reams of hyperbole, someone writes yet another article about space elevators, and then the whole cycle crashes against the realities of exorbitant production costs and scalability.
Not too long ago, graphene was on the same course. In 2008, for example, exfoliated graphene was the most expensive material anywhere on the planet, at roughly $100 million per square centimeter. This was par for the course for nanomaterials manufacturing; input costs stood to kill any applications development, regardless of potential. Today, however, the same input stock is projected to hit $11 per kilogram, and patents are flying. Serious international investors and corporate players bet graphene will deliver major developments in information technology, consumer electronics, photovoltaic battery design, water treatment, and more.
We’re going to focus on four major applications where graphene is a game-changer: solar energy, information technology, battery power, and water treatment. In each case, applications are moving out of the lab and into the workshop with uncanny speed.
#1 – Solar Energy
Existing solar cells are expensive to produce, costly to the consumer, and not terribly efficient. The current commercial standard only makes use of a narrow spectrum of available light for an efficiency somewhere in the neighborhood of 17.4%. While a number of workarounds exist to boost this figure, such as splitting incoming light into monochromatic streams, no photovoltaic panel on the market today can compete with fossil fuels in terms of cost per kWh.
Graphene’s unique thermoelectric properties could change all that. When exposed to light, graphene’s electrons heat up and vibrate, but its carbon lattice structure is too strong to vibrate without much higher energies. As a result, it stays cool and the electrons retain their potential. If two regions of a graphene sheet are treated so as to have different levels of conductivity, the result is a “hot carrier” thermoelectric response. This is something only previously observed at very high energies or near absolute zero, but graphene can do it at room temperature under low levels of visible and infrared light.
In terms of materials cost and efficiency, graphene solar panels could easily outperform their silicon predecessors, at last bringing solar energy into competition with fossil fuel. CVD-generated sheets would appear to be ideal for this application due to the ease of forming contiguous, defect-free sheets with tight domain control, but a panel design using exfoliated graphene would be even less expensive.
As much as we hate hyperbole, the appearance of it is unavoidable: cheap, efficient solar power collection in low-light conditions would change the world.
#2 – Battery Power
Lithium-ion batteries are an unavoidable design constraint in many applications. Their capacity, charge time, and physical size set a lowest-size limit on many consumer electronics, such as your smartphone, and make energy storage a non-trivial problem in electric vehicles and solar power installations. For transportation technology especially, battery size and capacity poses a familiar Space Age design problem: the energy storage medium is heavy and large, requiring more energy to transport, and so on.
What if you could store ten times the power in a comparable volume, charge it ten times faster, and do so with a battery that maintained its efficiency for five times as long?
This isn’t a hypothetical question. A team of researchers at Northwestern University, under Harold Kung, have already done it.
The prevailing design uses a graphite anode for energy storage (the positive end), a metal oxide cathode to accept electrons (the negative end), and lithium salts as an electrolyte. Kung’s team replaced the anode with alternating layers of graphene sheets and silicon clusters, with 10-20nm holes in the graphene sheets to speed transfer of lithium ions (which would otherwise need to path to the edge of the sheet). While normally every six carbon atoms in an anode would retain one lithium ion, the silicon clusters can hold four ions per atom. This unique structure allows ten times the capacity and ten times the transmission speed of conventional batteries.
A graphite anode would degrade relatively quickly given the wear and tear on the silicon clusters. Graphene, however, can not only take the strain but hold the silicon clusters together through five times as many charge/discharge cycles.
Nor is the Northwestern team finished. Having proved the effectiveness of perforated graphene and silicon anodes, they’ve moved on to examine cathode and electrolyte design. Their existing work on the anode already promises improvement to the range and power of electric vehicles and removes a nagging design constraint from whole classes of consumer electronics.
Image credit: Pacific Northwest National Laboratory
#3 – Information Technology
Optical modulation switches are the backbone of the Internet’s routing structure and its most intractable constraint. When a packet enters a router, a physical connection must be made to the appropriate output in order to route data correctly. The speed with which these routes can switch between outputs, and the amount of data which can then cross the switch fabric, is a major limitation on modern network speeds.
Currently, 40 Gbit optical network switches are centimeters across and modulate at 40GHz. They are also limited to three specific bands of light around 200nm across. Recently, however, UC Berkley scientists, under Professor Xiang Zhang, discovered that graphene films can modulate between opaque and transparent states with incredible speed. Their test case, a graphene optical modulator 25 square microns large, only modulates at 1GHz, but is theoretically capable of speeds in the 500GHz range.
Even restricted to a narrow spectrum of light for data transmission, graphene optical modulators would give us network speeds roughly 12 times our current maximum. That’s just the beginning: graphene interacts with light across the spectrum, from infrared to ultraviolet, so it can use nearly the entire spectrum of light to transmit data. Rather than “only” creating an Internet infrastructure a dozen times faster, these graphene modulators can jump us directly to petabit and exabit speeds (between 10^15 and 10^18 bits per second).
To put that in perspective: according to the 2009 Digital Britain Report, the sum of all data transferred anywhere in the globe on June 15, 2009 was “only” 494 exabytes. A single, 1 exabit/second router could pass all of that data through its switch fabric in 65 minutes.
#4 – Desalination and Water Treatment
As Warren Ellis observed, our species has yet to master the art of clean drinking water. Our existing solutions are either energy-intensive or imperfect, limiting access to portable water for an unacceptably large percentage of humanity. This constitutes not only a health crisis, but promises to spark intractable geopolitical conflicts over access to clean water for drinking and agriculture.
One solution is already patented and nearly ready for the field. This March, Lockheed-Martin patented a graphene water filter under the name Perforene, intended for use in desalination and water filtration. Building on the work of a team of MIT researchers, Perforene uses an array of 1nm holes in a graphene sheet as a reverse osmosis filter. Simply put, water molecules fit through the holes and any other molecule is too large, making this the perfect water filter.
The first large-scale application for Perforene is thought to be desalination. As the filtration membrane is so thin, it takes very little energy to force water through it. MIT graduate student David Cohen-Tanugi, lead author of the paper describing the technology, indicated to MIT News that desalination could be accomplished “hundreds of times faster than current techniques, with the same pressure”. In a press release, Lockheed-Martin points out the converse: the same volume of water can be desalinated for pennies on the dollar as compared to current technologies.
Graphene oxide membranes present an alternative for chemical process engineers to passively remove water from solution through evaporation. Graphene oxide is cheaper to manufacture and has the property of arranging itself into layers, like a laminate. The layers are spaced so that a single layer of water molecules can fit between them, and capillary channels through the membrane either shrink closed in low humidity or rapidly clog with water molecules. The result is a vacuum-tight seal which frictionlessly passes water vapor and blocks all other materials from escaping, even helium.
Between these two approaches, in theory, pure water can be recovered from almost any source. Desalination and recovery of waste water become relatively inexpensive and incredibly efficient, while passive filtration through graphite oxide membranes suggest a range of affordable and human-portable methods of purifying drinking water on the fly. With the access to potable water shaping up as a contentious matter for our geopolitical future, these technologies can’t be implemented soon enough.
New Developments, Monthly
Samsung is developing transparent, conductive screens 300 times stronger than steel. IBM and UCLA have taken the first steps towards a replacement for silicon processors, which is smaller, exponentially faster, and works in temperature ranges from deep space to 30C over current operating maximums. Chinese researchers recently produced a graphene aerogel, the lightest material on Earth. New applications for and properties of graphene come out of the lab nearly every month, limited only by the cost of production and the imagination of researchers.
See also: Jobs in Graphene and Graphene research
And, yes, graphene ribbons would make fine cable material for a space elevator.
Do you work with graphene, either in research or practical application? We would love to interview you! Tweet us @EngineerJobs, or comment below, and share your discoveries with your fellow engineers. |
Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton said on Wednesday that the administration was “still in the preliminary stages of testing whether this can be successful.”
But she went on to say that for the first time there appeared to be support for a political resolution that included leaders of the radical Islamic government that ruthlessly ruled the country from 1996 until the American invasion after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.
“The reality is we never have the luxury of negotiating for peace with our friends,” Mrs. Clinton, who has pressed the initiative within the administration, said at the State Department.
“If you’re sitting across the table discussing a peaceful resolution to a conflict, you are sitting across from people who you by definition don’t agree with and who you may previously have been across a battlefield from.”
The negotiations — potentially as historic and as politically wrenching as the Paris peace talks that ended the Vietnam War — come after more than a decade of war in Afghanistan and they could unfold in the middle of President Obama ’s re-election campaign.
The reversal of the Taliban’s longstanding public refusal to negotiate with the United States — and the administration’s willingness to reciprocate — punctuated a highly compartmentalized effort that has proceeded in fits and starts, with the knowledge of very few officials, according to administration and Afghan officials involved in the negotiations. Begun by the American envoy Richard C. Holbrooke , who died in 2010, it has been conducted by his successor as senior representative to Afghanistan and Pakistan , Mr. Grossman, a former ambassador to Turkey who came out of retirement to take on what has been described as one of the most difficult jobs in government. His team includes about a half-dozen State Department, Defense Department and intelligence officials.
Only a month ago, when envoys from dozens of countries gathered in Bonn , Germany, hoping to announce a new push for political reconciliation in Afghanistan, the effort appeared moribund. The fiercest opposition came from Mr. Karzai, whose position on the prospect of talks, one senior administration official said, involved wild swings in mood and position.
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Under pressure from the administration, however, Mr. Karzai ultimately relented, dropping his objections, though he continued to make demands on the location of any Taliban office until the day after it was announced.
With the United States and NATO already having announced that they would withdraw most international forces from Afghanistan by 2014, the search for some kind of political reconciliation between the new government and the Taliban became an imperative for the administration.
Nearly a year ago, Mrs. Clinton first signaled the opening for talks by recasting the administration’s longstanding preconditions: that the insurgents lay down their arms, accept the Afghan Constitution and separate from Al Qaeda . Instead, she described them as “necessary outcomes.”
By then, Germany’s intelligence agency had already brokered a meeting in Munich in November 2010 between the Americans and Tayeb Agha, an English-speaking former aide and spokesman for the Taliban’s leader, Mullah Omar, who is believed to remain in hiding in Pakistan.
Initially, the Americans were wary, having been recently embarrassed by an imposter posing as a top Taliban envoy (who ultimately made off with tens of thousands of dollars in payments).
Photo
The killing of Osama bin Laden in Pakistan last May added momentum to the peace efforts, underscoring the increasingly limited ties between Al Qaeda and the remaining Taliban. One of the conditions that the United States has sought is a Taliban renunciation of Al Qaeda and international terrorism.
Over the course of what officials described as several meetings, Mr. Agha verified his true identity and connection to the Taliban leadership in hiding by posting a prearranged message on a Web site used by the group, according to the officials.
That led Mr. Grossman, a veteran diplomat whose style has been far more low-key than the flamboyant Mr. Holbrooke’s, to meet with Mr. Agha personally in October in Doha, Qatar, to discuss “confidence building” measures, including the opening of a political office.
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Then things ground to a halt. Mr. Karzai, still angered by the killing the month before of the official in charge of reconciliation, Burhanuddin Rabbani , balked at the prospects of a Taliban office in Qatar. Mr. Karzai has often reacted angrily to diplomatic efforts that he perceives are under way without sufficient consultations. His aides in this case said he was properly notified.
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Mrs. Clinton and other officials have repeatedly said publicly that any reconciliation effort must be led by the Afghans themselves, and yet privately they have pressed very hard for the Afghans to do so, the officials said.
”I don’t think it’s a secret that we need the Afghans — we need Karzai to be part of this,” said a Western diplomat in Kabul. Is he? “He says so. We’ll have to see.”
The situation pivoted sharply shortly after Christmas, officials and Western diplomats in Kabul said. In meetings up and down Afghan government, American and other Western officials made the stakes clear: if President Karzai wanted to leave a peace deal in place when his final term ends in 2014, this was his best chance. The Americans wanted the Qatar office to happen, the Europeans were on board and, most important, it appeared the Taliban’s leadership was willing.
A senior Afghan official acknowledged “divisions” in the presidential palace over the matter between those with pro-Western sympathies within President Karzai’s inner circle, and those whose wariness of America and its objectives in Afghanistan runs deep.
The official said that even though Mr. Karzai agreed to the Qatar office in the days after Christmas, he remained “uncertain” about whether the Taliban were sincere. That skepticism is shared by many in Washington.
“What actually ends up unfolding and what understandings are reached to launch something more visible and serious — all of that has not been fully determined yet,” a senior administration official familiar with the effort said.
As the process becomes more visible it is likely to face more intense scrutiny, especially on Capitol Hill. The release of high-level Taliban leaders from Guantánamo would certainly risk a political backlash in an election year. To criticize Mr. Obama for trying to close the prison, Republicans often point to instances in which some former detainees took part in terrorist or insurgent activity, and lawmakers from both parties tied the administration’s hands even further by imposing new restrictions on transfers.
A Taliban transfer could be the trial run of that system, and administration officials are studying the most recent version as they consider the deal. It requires the secretary of defense and the secretary of state to certify to Congress that the government to which a detainee would be transferred has certain steps to ensure that the detainee will not engage in terrorist activity.
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Such a certification must take place 30 days before any transfer. While the administration provided a classified briefing to leaders of the Armed Services and Intelligence Committees about aspects of the reconciliation talks proposal late last year, it has apparently not yet made any formal certification.
Rather than releasing the five Taliban leaders in Afghanistan, the idea appears to be a transfer to the custody of Qatar, whose government would keep them under some form of control — like surveillance, house arrest and blocking them from travel abroad. Those conditions remain subject to negotiation.
Mrs. Clinton, who met with Qatar’s prime minister at the State Department on Wednesday, said no transfers were imminent.
Even now, the officials said, much remains uncertain, including the role of Pakistan in any negotiations, as well as the willingness of any of the sides to come to terms on meaningful, lasting reconciliation that would protect what the United States considers nonnegotiable: a peaceful, democratic government that preserves the gains made over the last decade.
Syed Muhammad Akbar Agha, a former Taliban commander who lives in Kabul and a cousin of the administration’s liaison with the Taliban, Mr. Agha, said in an interview that the former government now sought peace, even if it remained committed to its Islamic vision of Afghanistan.
“The Taliban want peace like all of our Afghan brothers and sisters,” he said. “We believe in Islam, and we believe that Afghanistan should be an Islamic state. But the Taliban do not think that they can bring a true Islamic state only by force. We can bring those changes in many ways — by negotiating, by speaking.” |
The past week saw yet another assault on those reformers who seek to cure federal dysfunction by promoting a “Convention for proposing Amendments.”
The latest attack took the form of an opinion column that in content offered nothing new. It featured many of the usual errors of commission and omission: The author confused a “Convention for proposing Amendments” with a constitutional convention. He alleged that convention protocols are unknown, and that “anything goes” with “no rules, guideposts, or procedures.” He asserted that the courts won’t provide any guidelines and that the convention would threaten “the freedoms we take for granted under the Bill of Rights.” He demonstrated no awareness whatsoever of the history behind the amendment process nor of the long line of judicial decisions, from the Supreme Court and other tribunals, prescribing ground rules for that process.
But this alarmist column was distinctive in two respects. It was not penned by one of the conspiracy types with whom we usually associate such stuff. It was written by Robert Greenstein, a Washington, D.C. insider who served in the Carter and Clinton administrations and on the Obama transition team. Moreover, the medium of publication was the liberal establishment’s iconic newspaper, the Washington Post.
So why are pillars of the liberal establishment picking up the flag from rightwing conspiratorialists?
The answer to this question has three parts:
* They are resorting to a playbook that was, in fact, scripted not by conservatives but by the Left;
* the Left has a great deal to lose if the convention movement goes forward; and
* at least some establishment Leftists have become concerned about reformers’ recent successes.
First, as to the playbook:
For many years after the Founding, no one seems to have confused an amendments convention with a constitutional convention. For decades, everyone seems to have recognized that an amendments convention was a convention of states that—like all previous interstate gatherings—was nothing more than a diplomatic task force of state government representatives (“commissioners”) operating under a prescribed agenda.
At the turn of the last century, however, when state legislatures were applying for a convention to propose direct election of U.S. Senators, a few opponents began to contend that any such gathering would be a “constitutional convention.” During the 1960s and 1970s, the liberal establishment elaborated this contention into the “runaway convention” scenario often advanced today.
Several perceived threats precipitated the Left’s invention of the runaway scenario. The first was an effort by Senator Everett Dirksen (R.-Ill.) for a convention to propose an amendment overruling the Supreme Court’s legislative reapportionment decisions. The second was a movement to adopt a federal balanced budget amendment. The third was talk of a convention to propose an amendment reversing the Supreme Court’s abortion decision in Roe v. Wade.
Russell Caplan’s book Constitutional Brinksmanship (Oxford University Press, 1988) chronicles some of the methods the Left used to respond to those perceive threats. Senators Robert Kennedy (D.-N.Y.) and Joe Tydings (D.-Md.) led opposition in the Senate, and several Kennedy associates, such as Theodore Sorensen and Arthur Goldberg, led a public disinformation campaign. Various liberal academics also participated.
Perhaps the most heated anti-convention rhetoric came from the New Yorker’s Richard Rovere, a Kennedy sycophant. Rovere charged that a convention could “reinstate segregation and even slavery; throw out much or all of the Bill of Rights . . eliminate the Fourteenth Amendment’s due-process clause . . . and perhaps, for good measure, eliminate the Supreme Court itself.” In the 1980s, Chief Justice Warren Burger, apparently concerned for the power of his court, adopted a less heated version of the same line.
From the participants’ viewpoint, the disinformation campaign was an unqualified success: It frightened enough people effectively to disable one of the Constitution’ most important checks and balances. Unfortunately, it was a disaster for the country, because it removed a crucial constitutional curb on federal overreaching.
During next 20 years, figures on the political Left found it unnecessary to do their own heavy lifting because many naive conservatives did it for them by alarming enough people to defeat all efforts to impose restraint, fiscal or otherwise, on Washington, D.C.
A few years ago, however, the tide began to change. Several scholars, I among them, undertook previously-neglected legal and historical research into the amendment procedure. We restored for all to read the rules as the Founders understood them and as the courts apply them. Then Mark Levin publicized these findings in his best-selling book, The Liberty Amendments.
Empowered by this new information, state lawmakers began to resume their constitutional responsibilities in the amendment process. Most state legislatures now participate in the Assembly of State Legislatures, an organization planning for a possible amendments convention. Since 2011, at least 11 states have adopted at least 15 formal applications for a convention. Most of those applications are targeted at federal fiscal excess.
Obviously, reinvigorating of a procedure by which the people, acting through their state legislatures, can check federal overreaching, is not something that people like Mr. Greenstein and other Washington, D.C. power brokers want to see. It poses to them the threat of authority seeping out of Washington and back to the state capitals and to the people at large. Hence their wish to bury the movement as quickly as they can. If scaremongering from the Right won’t do the job, then they’ll try scaremongering from the Left.
Several years ago, I advised reformers that they would know they were winning when the liberal establishment stopped using misguided conservatives as cannon fodder, and entered the fray directly. That has now happened.
I further advised that the power of the Left would pose a far greater challenge than the arguments of conservatives. Reformers have largely overcome the lesser challenge. America’s future depends heavily on whether they can overcome the greater. |
An elementary school teacher will not return to school for 21 days after she returns from Africa.The second grade teacher works at Cline Elementary. She is on a family vacation in Tanzania. The Friendswood Independent School District sent a letter home to parents, informing them of the teacher's trip and its decision to keep her out of school for 21 days when she gets back."To minimize concern about exposure from plane trips home, people that were in the cities or at the airports, we have informed the teacher that she will not return to her classroom for 21 days once she returns to Friendswood," Cline Elementary Principal Barry Clifford said in the letter.Several parents agree with the decision. Stephanie Ploeger's daughter is in the second grade."I know that it's probably a very, very overly conservative reaction, but when it's your kids, definitely," Ploeger said, "I think they made the right choice and I'm really glad they did."The teacher is in Tanzania, which is more than 3,000 miles away from any country with cases of Ebola. That distance is farther than the distance between Miami and Seattle.UTMB Doctor David Callender said he would not have advised the school system to keep the teacher home."But then again, they're thinking about this from the perspective of the absolute safety of their students, and so that's really their decision," Callender said, "But from a disease control perspective, it's not something that's really necessary."Nevertheless, many parents say they would rather play it safe."I want them to take every precaution they can to ensure the kids are safe," Michael Heineman said.Eyewitness News spoke with the teacher's father. He said this precaution is a little bit extreme, but that his daughter understands the school community's concerns. |
The 'Attack the Block' filmmaker was attached to the 'Star Trek Into Darkness' sequel, but has since vacated the project.
Good things happen to those who wait — but sometimes, bad things happen, too.
Case in point: After weeks of waiting for "Attack the Block" filmmaker Joe Cornish to sign on for the "Star Trek Into Darkness" sequel, the other shoe has dropped. Variety reports that Cornish is no longer circling the project. With J.J. Abrams out of the seat and Cornish not accepting the captain's chair, the next voyage of the U.S.S. Enterprise is currently without a leader.
"Star Trek 3," as we're calling it until we hear otherwise, does not yet have a release date, though it's rumored to arrive at some point in 2016. That's not tomorrow, but it's not far down the line, either. If Paramount wants to hit 2016, they need someone at the helm, and soon. With that in mind, here are a few filmmakers we could see in the role:
Not J.J. Abrams or Joss Whedon
The former because he's too busy with "Star Wars," the latter because he's too busy with "The Avengers." Yes, many fans want to see Abrams back, and yes, many fans believe Whedon is perfect for basically everything. But it's not going to happen. Let's get that out there, right up front, and move along.
Jon Favreau
Whedon gets all the credit these days, but never forget who launched "Iron Man" in the first place.
Favreau's work since directing Ol' Shellhead hasn't exactly brought the house down (still trying to forget about you, "Cowboys & Aliens"), but his Marvel movies, and earlier efforts like "Zathura," more than prove his ability to take on effects-heavy, big-budget blockbusters, set in extreme and far-out locations. Beyond that, Favreau knows character, and he understands comedy. After "Into Darkness," which took itself so damn seriously, a light-hearted touch could be exactly what the "Trek" films need.
Jonathan Frakes
Whoa, whoa, OK. Before anyone Frakes out, let's just pump the Frakes a second.
Yes, we're talking about the man more commonly known as Commander William T. Riker, alias "Number One." Frakes not only played the best beard in Starfleet history, he also helmed many of their adventures behind the camera, including the beloved "Star Trek: First Contact." Sure, his experience with the classic Kirk-led team is limited, but Frakes has worked in other areas of the "Star Trek" universe beyond the "Next Generation" era. He brings experience as a "Star Trek" director and some much-needed fan-service to the affair. Plus, it would bring this to the attention of a wider audience, and that's reason enough.
Guillermo del Toro
If you can name a director with a keener sense of joy and wonderment than GDT, please let me know so I may eat my hat.
(I'm not really going to eat my hat.)
Del Toro is the guy when it comes to taking childhood geek-dreams and blowing them up big on the movie screen. "Pacific" and "Rim" are the only two words needed to further that argument, but "Hellboy" works as a nice third. Few filmmakers have a better handle on unique, impossible-to-forget creature design, yet another key factor in making a "Star Trek" film work. It's likely that del Toro is too busy or simply uninterested in making a "Star Trek" movie, but if he's not — if he feels he has room on his dance-card to boldly go up to the stars — then he's my top choice for the job.
Peter Weller
First he was RoboCop, then he was the corrupt commander of Starfleet. Can we really trust this man with the keys to the "Star Trek" kingdom? I vote ... maybe.
Even though he's best remembered for serving time as a cybernetic officer of the law, Weller has made a name for himself as a director on the small-screen, having directed numerous episodes of "Sons of Anarchy" and other shows. It's a big leap from the biker-filled streets of Charming, California to the Klingon conflict in the stars, but Weller is a proven talent behind the camera, and having starred in "Into Darkness," he's a known quantity on the "Star Trek" set. Perhaps Weller is a bit of a stretch, but there are certainly worse choices, and he's far from a bad one.
Who do you want to see direct the next "Star Trek" movie? (And please, for the love of all things holy, don't say Joss Whedon. Trust us, we know.) Leave your suggestions in the comments below! |
Lord Chief Justice for England and Wales John Thomas (C) gestures in the Prince's Chamber before the State Opening of Parliament in the House of Lords, at the Palace of Westminster in London Britain May 27, 2015. REUTERS/Suzanne Plunkett. Suzanne Plunkett/Reuters One of the most important constitutional cases in Britain's history came to an end on Tuesday and the case for forcing the government to ask parliament's permission to trigger Article 50 is a lot stronger than first imagined.
Since Thursday, three of the UK's most senior judges heard arguments regarding whether prime minister Theresa May is legally obliged to pass an act of parliament before invoking Article 50.
The case, which Business Insider attended, was held at the Royal Courts of Justice in central London.
A long line of people snaked around the court building hours before the doors opened each morning, a level of interest which had not been seen for any case at the court before, a security guard told us. And protesters gathered outside the court while the case was being heard.
That is because the case is a blockbuster. The final verdict will have a huge say in how and when Britain leaves the European Union. It will set a historic constitutional precedent.
After three days of intense discussion and interrogation, it was clear that the case being made against the UK government was much more compelling than most commentators and media had initially believed.
Lord Pannick QC, who was representing lead claimant Gina Miller, who BI interviewed in August, argued strongly that triggering Article 50 will mean statutory rights enjoyed by Brits as EU citizens — like the right to vote to in EU elections and refer a legal dispute to the European Court of Justice — will be destroyed in an instant.
The government, Pannick added, cannot use prerogative power to do this. He said UK law demands MPs to give Theresa May their permission before the prime minister triggers Article 50.
The consequence of notification is to destroy rights and take the preservation of rights out of parliament's hands. This cannot be done
"There is no dispute, that once notification is given, there is a direct causal link between notification and the removal of statutory rights," Pannick said.
"The consequence of notification is to destroy rights and take the preservation of rights out of parliament's hands. This cannot be done. By the time parliament comes to look at the matter, the dye will already be set."
The government's case, represented by Attorney General Jeremy Wright, James Eadie QC, and James Coppel QC, argued that the mandate to initiate Britain's exit from the EU resides in the result of the June 23 referendum.
They added that parliament was told before the referendum that the government would act on the will of the people and that the referendum legislation did not state further legislation would be necessary to put the result into effect.
Without a doubt, though, the stand-out moment of the case was when the Lord Chief Justice twice said he was "baffled" by Coppel's claim that EU citizenship rights have never been a matter for UK parliament.
"I'm baffled," Lord Thomas said. "These rights are under treaty. If amending the treaty, parliamentary approval is needed. So, I don't understand why the content of these rights are not controlled by parliament?"
It was a shaky moment for Coppel and the government's legal team. It was just one of the many occasions where the three judges appeared to be less-than-convinced by the points they were making. It was a signal that the government really does have something to worry about.
That's not to say the verdict, which is expected in mid-November, is set in stone. As legal commentator David Allen Green noted, the case is "finely balanced" and both sides articulated strong arguments.
But, as Green later tweeted: "The government and Leavers should brace themselves for real possibility that court rules Article 50 needs parliamentary consent." This case is much more balanced than most people thought.
But the judges' verdict is unlikely to be the end of the matter. The losing side is likely to launch an appeal to the Supreme Court, a process which will inevitably force May to delay the timetable for invoking Article 50 no matter what happens. |
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Three people have been arrested after a crowd of antifa and left-wing counterprotesters surrounded a conservative free speech rally in Boston.
A few dozen free speech advocates rallied peacefully during the 'Rally For The Republic' Saturday on Boston Common, where they were outnumbered by a much larger crowd of counterprotesters.
The rally was held by conservative groups Boston Free Speech and Resist Marxism, which has denounced racism repeatedly and publicly.
Rally speakers warned that free speech was under threat and accused Antifa and Black Lives Matter groups of being terrorist organizations.
A few dozen free speech advocates (background) rallied peacefully during the 'Rally For The Republic' Saturday on Boston Common, where they were outnumbered by a much larger crowd of counterprotesters (foreground)
Conservative demonstrator Jovi Val of New York City speaks to reporters during the free speech rally in Boston
A right wing speaker addresses small group of rally participants during the 'Rally For The Republic' on Saturday
A right-wing speaker identified only as Tammy was one of the speakers where a small group of right wing demonstrators held a rally and a much larger group of counter demonstrators gather for an unpermitted rally on Boston Common
Michael Bodnor of Wilmington, Massachussetts dressed as a Minuteman as he joined a group of right wing demonstrators
At least 100 counterprotesters showed up to the Common. Boston police say two counterprotesters were arrested.
A third person was arrested, but it it not known if the individual was a counterprotester or attending the rally.
Police said two were charged with disorderly conduct and the third was charged with assault and battery on a police officer.
Although the event went forward after organizers failed to get a permit, cops were well prepared and maintained barricades separating the two crowds, preventing major violent clashes.
Photos from the event show demonstrators and counterprotesters briefly scuffling over a Gadsden flag, a libertarian symbol, before police intervened.
Cops were well prepared and maintained barricades separating the two crowds, preventing major violent clashes
A group of masked antifa counterprotesters stand behind police lines looking on at the free speech rally in Boston
Vermin Supreme speaks to police through his megaphone next to counterprotesters at the free speech rally
Right-wing demonstrators scuffle with left-wight counterprotestors over a Gadsden flag, a libertarian symbol
A man is seen encircled by police after scuffling with conterprotesters over his Gadsden flag
Two men are seen being taken into police custody during the free speech rally. Police said that the event went as well as could be expected and that there were no major incidents.
'From a public safety perspective, today’s event on Boston Common couldn’t have gone much better and I certainly have my officers to thank for that,' Boston Police Commissioner William Evans said in a statement.
'Their constant poise and professionalism never goes unnoticed and I thank them again for a job well done,' the commissioner said.
Following the speeches on Boston Common, the rally participants marched to the Massachusetts State House.
The event follows a similar rally in Boston in August, which drew massive crowds of counterprotesters who said they feared white nationalists might show up.
At that event, some clashed with police and more than 30 were arrested.
Following the speeches on Boston Commons, the rally participants marched to the Massachusetts State House
Right-wing demonstrators are seen marching through the streets of Boston to the Massachusetts State House
Demonstrators react to a flag that was dropped on the ground during a right-wing rally on the Statehouse steps |
Since being named Gatorade Boys Soccer High School Player of the Year out of his Dallas-area high school in 2005, Lee Nguyen has traveled many miles, some of them off the beaten path, to get to where he is today.
Things didn't always go smoothly for Nguyen, with the New England playmaker getting his career off to a less-than-ideal start before landing with the Revs in 2012. Now entering his fifth season in MLS, Nguyen is a legitimate star in the league and an emerging member of the US men's national team.
Just how has Nguyen's journey affected him? Let's find out:
The road less traveled
After one season at Indiana University, where he was named national freshman of the year by Soccer America, Nguyen began his professional career with Dutch club PSV Eindhoven.
After only two appearances in two years there, he moved on to play for Randers FC in Denmark for two seasons before Vietnamese side Hoang Anh Gia Lai came along in 2009 with an offer he couldn’t refuse.
“I enjoyed my time there,” said Nguyen, whose father Pham emigrated from Vietnam to the United States in 1975. “The fans were great. They made it a great experience for me.”
So you want to be a rock star?
The first American to play in the V.League 1, Nguyen spent a season with Hoang Anh Gia Lai and another with Becamex Bing Doung. He had an almost rock star-like level of fame in Vietnam, an eye-opening experience for the then 23-year-old.
“Yeah, I was a bit of a celebrity over there,” Nguyen said. “I remember one time after a game I had to use security to help me get to the bus because my jersey, my shorts were all getting pulled from left and right from the fans. That was probably the craziest.”
Seeing what was once missed
This offseason Nguyen got an opportunity to visit Vietnam for the first time since he moved to MLS. This time around, he got a better look at the beauty of the country, something he missed when he was playing there.
“[I] went to Vietnam and Thailand for a couple of weeks in the offseason,” he said. “It was great because when I was playing over there, most of the time in the offseason, the time I had off, I tried to be back in the States as much as I could. So this time around I was trying to get over there to basically try to see the sights and go to more of the things I didn’t get to see when I was there.”
Seven-year itch
While having status in Vietnam was nice, Nguyen didn't sniff the US national team while playing there. He wanted another shot after debuting with the US senior side in 2007, and engineered his move to MLS with an eye on making it happen.
He first landed in Vancouver, but was waived by the Whitecaps prior to the 2012 season. He was picked up by the Revs, and, after three solid seasons in New England, finally made his return to the national team in November 2014.
“It’s tough,” said Nguyen of waiting so long between call-ups. “Obviously you go through and you try to play and make the most of your career. At the same time it was tough to be seen [in Vietnam]. So I wanted to get back and try to prove myself again, make a stamp in the States.”
Resetting spiritually
Getting the opportunity to travel this past offseason was something that Nguyen feels was greatly beneficial to his mind and body.
After the 2014 season, in which the Revolution went to the MLS Cup final, there was almost no down time for Nguyen as he quickly entered the US Men’s National Team’s January training camp and then transitioned into the 2015 MLS season. Though he again participated in the USMNT's January camp, he had more time this year, as the Revs season ending after a Knockout Round loss to D.C. United on October 28.
“Mentally, physically it was a good time off,” said Nguyen, who admitted that the time away from the game helped reset him ahead of the start of USMNT camp.
Getting the hang of this USMNT thing
Nguyen made his first January camp appearance with the National Team in 2015, but didn’t quite take full advantage of his opportunity, failing to truly impress head coach Jurgen Klinsmann.
This year was vastly different. He entered camp with a calm mindset and became one of the standout performers, turning in solid shifts in friendly wins against Iceland and Canada. He even earned high praise from Klinsmann, who called him "one of the winners" of the camp.
“The camp was great,” said Nguyen. “Lots of familiar faces. It was just a little more relaxed this time. We didn’t have as many two-a-days and I think a lot of it we were focused on trying to get our fitness levels back and high in the first week or so. Mainly we were trying to get ready for the games.
“It was great. I got to make a few starts and it was great to be able to wear the jersey. It’s always an honor. To enjoy that experience is a proud moment and I tried to make the most of it.”
Comfort is key
Nguyen points to a greater level of comfort with the national team as one of the main reasons for his continued progress within the group.
Since his return to the team in November 2014, Nguyen had made four sub appearances for the USMNT before starting twice for the Americans against Iceland and Canada to kick off 2016.
“The more times you get called in, the more comfortable you’re going to get,” said Nguyen. “Playing with a lot of the core guys helps. They’ve been instrumental in helping us get comfortable with the squad. It’s basically being comfortable and enjoying yourself so you can play like you do with your club team.”
The hair up there
Another area where Nguyen is comfortable is with his hairstyles, a subject of discussion for many on and off the pitch.
From the ponytail/headband combo to the swooping, bleached blond wave, he enjoys keeping things interesting up top.
“I like to change it up every now and then,” said Nguyen. “It adds a bit of personality. I enjoy it. It seems like the fans always enjoy it as well. You’ve got to keep it fresh at all times.”
Where we’re going, we don’t need roads
Nguyen may keep his hair fresh, but that's not always the case with his Jeep.
Looking something like Bumblebee on steroids, the Texas native is not afraid to taking his rugged vehicle off-roading whenever he gets the chance.
“One of my buddies knows a place in Dallas that soups up Jeeps,” said Nguyen. “I wanted to get it done in the offseason, so I can enjoy it in the summer in Boston because there’s a lot of places to get off-road and obviously, getting down to the beach. It’s definitely an all-purpose vehicle in Boston.”
Different club, same drive
When he isn’t driving through defenses or across the beaches of New England, you can likely find Nguyen driving golf balls.
“I learned from the Golf Channel,” Nguyen said when asked how golf became an integral part of his life. “I got into it probably about seven years ago. I really enjoyed the game and had a lot of respect for it. You learn how hard it is and you basically start to respect all the guys that make it their careers. I was basically getting into golf by watching a lot of it. It became a good hobby for me after training. Now I try to play a few times a week, as much as I can.”
As far as who is the best golfer on the Revolution, the usually humble Nguyen hesitated for only half a second before declaring, “I’d have to say myself.” |
Google recently launched a project to map out the flow of small arms, light weapons and ammunition transfers in and out of countries around the world. The result: An interactive visualization that lets the user examine the history of arms trading between 1992 and 2010.
The Peace Research Institute Oslo (PRIO), a Norwegian initiative focused on the dealing of small arms, provided information for the undertaking, including "[m]ore than 1 million data points on imports and exports [...] across 250 states and territories," according to a post on the Google Blog. The project was developed by Google’s Creative Lab and the Brazil-based Igarape Institute.
The tool allows the user to search by country and view where imports come from and where exports go each year; it also shows how much each country spends and receives as a result of this trade. Civilian and military purchases are displayed as well. (Note: The Google Blog defines "light weapons" as revolvers, assault rifles and light machine guns. The blog also states that "three quarters of the world’s small arms lie in the hand of civilians -- more than 650 million civilian arms.")
Looking only at the United States, we can see that in 1992 the amount of small arms and ammo imported ($272 million) and exported ($455 million) pale in comparison to 2010's figures ($955 million imported; $606 million exported). Forbes examined the United States' traffic flow of small arms and noticed that "[o]ver half a billion of those [import] dollars went to civilian weapons. [...] Among the exporters that stand out, $151 millions dollars worth came from Brazil, $45 million from Republic of Korea, $92 million from the Russian Federation, $46 million from Israel."
However, the global figures aren't perfect. The Igarape Institute points out in a PDF (viewable here) that the dataset used to produce this visualization is incomplete. Among some of the limitations listed are the following:
[L]arge producing countries frequently censor reporting on military style light weapons and small arms while other less developed countries may lack the capacity to monitor and record all arms shipments. It is possible to assess the transparency of country reporting at small arms survey barometer. [...] Due to weak or non-existent reporting, the MAD visualization tool provides an incomplete assessment of overall flows of small arms, light weapons and ammunition. For example, countries such as China, North Korea, and the Republic of Iran along with most of Central Asia and Sub-Saharan Africa are extremely weak in reporting.
Igarape also states that the data does not reflect illegal transfers or re-transfers.
Earlier this summer, Google announced a plan to take on Mexico's drug cartels by working to improve the way information is shared between communities and various law enforcement agencies fighting the illicit networks. |
One of our priorities in developing the STEM System is to give you the ability to create custom attachments for both the STEM Controller and the STEM Pack. Your ideas will most likely go way beyond what we can imagine, but we’re providing a few ideas (along with CAD models) to get you started.
Here’s how it works for the STEM Controller:
The STEM Controller has an accessory port on the top/front into which a removable plug fits flush to the surface.
When the plug is removed, other accessories (such as the gun shown below) can be attached.
We are providing CAD models for both the plug and the top/front of the STEM Controller to assist you in designing your own accessories.
Here’s how it works for the STEM Pack:
The STEM Pack has a “male” slide on its bottom plate, which can be used to attach it to the surface of any object with the appropriate “female” mount.
We are providing CAD models for both the bottom plate of the STEM Pack and the slide.
The STEM Pack can also be completely embedded within another peripheral if that best suits the application.
Here are some photos showing 3D printed attachments connected to STEM Controllers:
Gun barrel (3D print) attached to STEM Controller
Gun barrel (3D print) with STEM Controller
Below are images and descriptions of the CAD models that can be downloaded from our site.
DOWNLOAD CAD MODELS HERE: https://sixense.box.com/STEMSystem-accessories
The STEM Controller gun attachment is also on Shapeways and Thingiverse.
Here is a video showing the peripherals in use:
STEM Pack mount and bottom plate (3D prints)
STEM Pack clip (with mount incorporated) and bottom plate (3D prints)
We encourage everyone to share the models that you create through services like Shapeways and Thingiverse.
-Steve Hansted, Community Manager |
Academic work may have impact in a variety of ways, depending on purpose, audience and field, but this is most likely to happen when your work resonates in meaningful ways with people. Ninna Meier encourages a more systematic investigation of the role of writing in achieving impact. Impact through writing means getting your readers to understand and remember your message and leave the reading experience changed. The challenge is to make what you write resonate with an audience’s reservoir of experiential knowledge. If the words do not connect to anything tangible, interest can be quickly lost.
I am currently finishing a three-year impact study and I have so many things I want to share from this and other projects: in short, I am an impact geek. But whenever I started writing this text, I stopped; I wasn’t satisfied with what I wrote, it never came out right, and I didn’t know quite why. Why is writing about impact hard, while researching it or talking about it comes much more natural to me? Could it be something in the nature of the concept or phenomenon itself? Or is it just me? Once I start reflecting on the impact of my work, my usual academic language does not suffice. Sure, I can write the academic paper presenting the theoretical framework, the method and data analysis and share the results, but the really interesting questions of impact escapes this kind of writing to some degree. And I think writing as a way of impacting holds some of the answers.
I first started thinking about this back when I was ‘writing up’ the results of my PhD and I had what I then thought of as surplus material in the lots and lots of field notes and my interview material from the study of clinical managers in different types of bed units. ‘My’ managers were often not involved in the clinical work with patients, but they were managers of people, who diagnosed, treated, cared for and comforted very sick people. And although the relational nature of clinical managerial work made it in to the PhD as an important result, I was never completely happy with the way I wrote about it. A crucial link was not unfolded sufficiently explaining the potential effects of how a certain local context could impact work and vice versa. In short, what impact a certain place and practice had on the work and people who performed it and how I managed to convey this in order to impact research and practice.
One of my units was a stroke unit and I was dissatisfied with the way I wrote about the connections between this unit as a place, the type of patients that were there, the rehabilitation and care they needed, the way work was organized and politically governed, and the kind of clinical managerial work that was practiced there. The texts always seemed devoid of the life, the physical bodies, the complexity and pace of work, the urgency felt when an alarm rang, or the genuine welcoming atmosphere the place had.
I started experimenting with how to write as to include the messy world of context, an advice one of my committee members gave me at my defence. I wrote to let readers experience the impact of being there, detailed sensory laden accounts of the sights, smells, noises and impressions I had experienced. But these kinds of text were not entirely right either. What is it, then? In my current project, I use drawings, I experiment with composite characters, and I build stories in which the small, almost unnoticeable, yet immensely important details can be included, because I can show them as possible experiences: ‘this is how it could happen’, as examples of experiential knowledge for the reader to relate to.
But I still struggle, even with writing this text. It is as if the words themselves, for writing about this in an academic text, are not there; as if the vocabulary belongs to real life and seemingly small lived experiences and not academia. It is the language of particulars, of everyday life with patients and colleagues, where impact might mean you help someone regain the ability to speak or shower. And then again; although these are important aspects, they cannot stand alone in our world: for academic work to have impact, we usually aim to reach people beyond the particular setting and share the results much more broadly. Impact through writing means getting your readers to understand and remember your message and leave the reading experience changed. Real impact, the kind we academics dream about, means that other people take your work/message/results and change something because of this.
And one of the main points arising from my work is that this is most likely to happen when your work resonates in meaningful ways with people. This leaves the challenge of making what you write resonate with them through how it connects to their reservoir of experiential knowledge (which you cannot know in advance, only offer the possibilities for). As Wikan (2012) points out, this kind of writing is connected to your methods and the things you’ve seen, learned and engaged in during your research. For me, being there in person is an indispensable part of the process and it is tied to how you write and which possible connections you offer your reader to latch on and relate their own experience to. Writing that is too ‘far’ from life makes it difficult for me to ‘see’ what this means in practice. Papers can be abstract, philosophical or theoretical in nature, and remain ‘attached’ to the concept or phenomenon they are about. But if the words do not connect to anything I can picture and understand, I quickly lose interest and have a hard time remembering the paper.
I am not done thinking about and writing about impact in practice, but it all comes down to this important part of the process: what happens after the reader puts down the paper or leaves the auditorium? Does she use your work in her own research? Does he tell his colleagues about it over lunch or share it on social media? Will it become part of the theoretical foundation on which future impact studies build? Our work may have impact in a variety of ways, depending on purpose, audience and field, but I would like to encourage a more systematic investigation of and attention to the role of writing in achieving this!
Note: This article gives the views of the author, and not the position of the LSE Impact blog, nor of the London School of Economics. Please review our Comments Policy if you have any concerns on posting a comment below.
About the Author
Ninna Meier is a postdoctoral fellow at Department of organization, at Copenhagen Business School. She has researched organization and management practices in health care work since 2009, currently exploring what it takes to achieve coherency in patient pathways. How to impact in practice, specifically the role of writing in this, is one of her main interests |
Image caption Vodafone says it wants to change the nature of the tax debate
Vodafone, the world's second largest mobile phone firm, paid no UK corporation tax for a second year running in 2012.
Vodafone said UK network investment and interest payments wiped out corporation tax liabilities for the year to April.
It said operating profits of £294m in 2012 were offset by interest payments of £300m on loans to buy 3G spectrum.
Vodafone's annual report also revealed chief executive Vittorio Colao was paid some £11m.
The company said it was committed to "integrity in all tax matters" and that it paid £882m in other UK taxes and contributions during the year.
Vodafone said the UK contributed just 2.5% to its overall profits.
"We believe the UK tax debate should be wider than just merely looking at corporation tax, because different industries make their - in our case significant - contributions in a variety of ways," a company spokesman said.
There is currently a high profile debate in the UK around corporate taxation, with Google, Starbucks and others being criticised for the small amount of corporation tax paid in the UK.
The company could be about to secure a huge windfall if a much-mooted sale in the US goes ahead.
Vodafone owns 45% of Verizon Wireless, a highly profitable US mobile network. The rest belonging to Verizon Communications, which would like to own the whole company.
Anticipation has been rife in recent months that the deal is about to go through, and the share prices of both companies have leapt in anticipation.
Verizon has named a buying price of $100bn (£65bn), but some analysts have estimated that Verizon will probably need to pay between $135bn and $140bn to make Vodafone sell. |
FAYETTEVILLE, Ark. (AP) -- A northwest Arkansas house once occupied by former President Bill Clinton that was damaged by fire has been deemed a total loss.
The home now owned by Stephanie and Robert Dzur and occupied by Stephanie Dzur's father burned June 8.
The Arkansas Democrat-Gazette (http://bit.ly/2rtuHjM ) reported Sunday that Stephanie Dzur says her insurance agent told her the home is damaged beyond repair and will have to be torn down.
The home was built in 1957 and is listed on the National Register of Historic Places as the Adrian Fletcher Residence. Clinton lived there in the mid-1970s when he was a law professor at the University of Arkansas in Fayetteville before moving to another home and marrying Hillary Rodham Clinton.
The home where the Clinton's lived after marrying is now the Clinton House Museum. |
This video from BCE demonstrates how the reforestation project works.
National Geographic produced this content as part of our partnership with Rolex, formed to promote exploration and conservation. The organizations will join forces in efforts that support veteran explorers, nurture emerging explorers, and protect Earth’s wonders.
Every year, about 15 billion trees are cut down to make way for agriculture, mining, logging, and urban sprawl. Such mass deforestation has accelerated global warming and imperiled the survival of millions of species. Though many nations, organizations, and even individuals have tried, no one has been able to plant enough trees to make up for that loss—but some innovative entrepreneurs are working on a high-tech solution.
BioCarbon Engineering (BCE), a U.K.-based start-up, has developed a technique that they say could potentially plant one billion trees per day. The method? Drones.
Current tree-planting programs "are just not fast enough,” said Irina Fedorenko, a co-founder of the company. “But our technology is automated, so we can scale up quite realistically and quite quickly.” (Learn about the teenager who is on track to plant a trillion trees.)
Trees are critical to absorbing the greenhouse gases that contribute to global warming. Without them, the speed and severity of climate change will continue to escalate. But for their part, BCE has dubbed their strategy “industrial-scale reforestation.”
First, a drone scans the terrain and develops a 3-D map of the area. Then, using the data from this “smart map,” the team develops an algorithm for a unique planting pattern. A “firing drone” uses the algorithm to carry out the planting strategy. The drone flies about six feet above the ground, firing germinated seed pods at a speed that will get them under the soil. One drone operator can manage six drones.
It’s similar to strategies used for precision farming, except in this case, the firing drones take the place of tractors—“sky tractors,” as Fedorenko refers to them.
The system’s designers say their technique is much more efficient and accurate than regular aerial seeding methods. Initial testing in the U.K. found that the species planted by drone had a better survival rate than helicopter spreading that's more commonly used. Some species even had survival rates nearly identical to hand planting.
“We are bridging this gap between ground-based technologies like tractors and aerial technologies such as helicopters,” Fedorenko says.
Speed is the most revolutionary aspect of BCE’s “precision planting” technology, but the drones can also reach places that tractors and humans cannot, at least without significant bodily risk—for example, steep mountainsides or areas with contaminated soil. Drones may even one day help terraform other planets.
But it’s not just about trees: “We have a title of tree-planting drone company, but we also do grasses, bushes, flowers, and a lot of fungi,” Fedorenko says. “It’s about restoring what is right for the environment, not just trees.”
India Man Plants Forest Bigger Than Central Park to Save His Island
Pioneer plant species are usually the most successful, “but the general rule is that if you can restore the forest from seeds, then you can use drones to do that,” Fedorenko says.
In June, BioCarbon planted 5,000 trees in a day to rehabilitate land ravaged by coal mining in Dungog, Australia. They’ve also worked in South Africa and New Zealand. Since the company’s inception, they’ve used drones to plant more than 25,000 trees across the globe.
“If you re-forest a large area of land, you bring back not just fertile soil, but you can really impact local climate, improve the water table, carbon sequestration, increase biodiversity, and, of course, landscapes are never empty so you always have people who are benefiting from the ecosystem,” Fedorenko says.
The Big Picture
Experts caution that planting itself is not always as important as protection from factors such as overgrazing, agriculture, and fires, to allow natural regeneration of forests to occur. Some experts worry that the efficiency of drone reforestation could even lower motivation for countries to save existing forests. Additionally, in traditional reforestation enterprises, the planting work can provide employment for communities that need it—jobs that could one day be replaced by drones.
"It's probably easier, in the short term, to plant trees with a drone than fix the issues on the ground, but in the long run, that fix is necessary," says Richard Houghton, a senior scientist at the Woods Hole Research Center, a climate change think tank based in Massachusetts. "A technical fix is generally easier than social change, but not as long lasting."
With constantly improving GPS and imaging technologies, experts agree that drones have become very useful for accurately mapping large swaths of land and measuring tree and vegetation growth or degradation—even mapping carbon sequestration. But some scientists are more skeptical about their success as a planting technology to combat deforestation on a large scale. For one thing, they only have so much range and battery life.
"Drones are good for measuring secondary growth and looking at where the forest is coming back, but you fight deforestation at a socioeconomic level," says Arturo Sanchez, director of the University of Alberta's Center for Earth Observation and Sciences. "The issue of climate change is not forest restoration, the issue is energy. It is controlling coal plants, power plants, automobile emissions. Planting trees is very important, but when you look at the distribution of CO2 emissions, deforestation accounts for 10 to 15 percent. The rest is energy. That’s what needs to be controlled."
Fedorenko acknowledges that drones alone cannot eliminate all the causes or impacts of deforestation, but she says they could become a useful tool. (See how drones set controlled burns by shooting fireballs.)
Field Tests
BCE just started work on a large-scale project to plant mangroves in Myanmar, incorporating this integrated approach to ecosystem restoration. Mangroves in Myanmar’s low-lying Ayeyarwady Delta have been decimated by years of deforestation for agriculture and aquaculture—eighty-four percent of the original mangrove cover is gone.
“Mangroves have huge potential to actually save people’s lives because they protect coastal communities from tsunamis,” Fedorenko says. “Not only do they have an impact on the ecosystem, like fish stocks, so that people can maintain their livelihoods, but they are also a literal shield from the ocean.”
Their tangled roots also protect coastal areas from erosion.
The project spans more than 600 acres and involves a “holistic” approach to measuring success: BCE will be partnering with local women farmers, training and employing them to collect and prepare the seeds, as well as monitor the ecosystem as the project progresses. BCE will be able to assess whether the mangroves are growing successfully in less than a year.
Mangrove forests are also some of the most carbon-rich habitats on the planet, sequestering carbon up to 100 times faster than terrestrial forests. That means they’re incredibly efficient at mitigating the impact of global warming.
The project is one step closer to BCE’s main goal: “Of course, our ultimate ambition is to stop climate change,” Fedorenko says with a smile. |
We usually think of woolly mammoths as purely Ice Age creatures. But while most did indeed die out 10,000 years ago, one tiny population endured on isolated Wrangel Island until 1650 BCE. So why did they finally go extinct?
Wrangel Island is an uninhabited scrap of land off the northern coast of far eastern Siberia. It's 37 miles from the nearest island and 87 miles from the Russian mainland. It's 2,900 square miles, making it roughly the size of Delaware. And until about 4,000 years ago, it supported the world's last mammoth population. For 6,000 years, a steady population of 500 to 1,000 mammoths endured while their counterparts on the mainland disappeared.
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It's truly remarkable just how recent 1650 BCE really is. By then, the Egyptian pharaohs were about halfway through their 3000-year reign, and the Great Pyramids of Giza were already 1000 years old. Sumer, the first great civilization of Mesopotamia, had been conquered some 500 years before. The Indus Valley Civilization was similarly five centuries past its peak, and Stonehenge was anywhere from 400 to 1500 years old. And through all that, with all of humanity in total ignorance of their existence, the mammoths lived on off the coast of Siberia.
So then, what finally killed off the mammoths? That's been the subject of a four-year research project by British and Swedish researchers, and they now believe that the final extinction of the mammoths was not inevitable, that they could have survived indefinitely if a couple circumstances had worked out differently. Co-author Love Dalen explained to BBC News:
"We wanted to find out why these mammoths became extinct. Wrangel Island is not that big and it was initially thought that such a small population could have suffered problems of inbreeding and a lack of genetic diversity. But the problem is mammoths don't display that much genetic variation - especially towards the end of their line. The DNA investigations found there was a 30% loss in genetic diversity as the population levels dropped - but that was to be expected. But when we examined the samples from the island, there reached a point when this reached a plateau and there was no more loss. This stage continued until the creatures became extinct. This therefore rejects the inbreeding theory. The mammoths on the island were isolated for nearly 6,000 years but yet managed to maintain a stable population."
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Instead, Dalen and the rest of the team believes some drastic change must have occurred on Wrangel Island to kill off the mammoths, and there are two likely culprits: humans and climate. Archaeological evidence suggests that humans reached Wrangel Island at roughly the same time the last mammoths vanished, but there's no evidence yet to indicate that they ever hunted the mammoths. The more likely answer is climate change, which as a side effect might well have made it easier for humans to reach the island to serve as witnesses to the mammoths' final days.
Whatever the exact cause of the mammoth extinction, the fact that they did not succumb to inbreeding is very good news for conservation. According to the Dalen, this means that a small population of even a large animal can maintain genetic diversity and survive indefinitely on a small piece of land. And hey, if anyone ever does figure out how to clone a mammoth, I've got a very good idea where we should put their nature preserve.
Molecular Ecology via BBC News. Image by Catmando, via Shutterstock. |
With 186 stores in the US, Apple has a retail presence in 37 of the 50 states. 29 of those states have multiple stores, including New York with 13, Florida with 14, and California with 38. That's why it makes total sense that Apple would build an entire fake store on the Warner Brothers parking lot in Los Angeles over Memorial Day weekend in order to film a commercial. According to Valleywag, that is exactly what the computer company did.
According to the site's sources, the set took two days to build and was used to film a commercial that will air during the WWDC keynote. The store was full-size and sported all of the hardware and software that one would expect in a (real) Apple Store.
Rather then shutting down a low-traffic Apple Store somewhere in middle-America, Apple instead chose to presumably pay workers overtime and holiday time to have an almost completely private set in California. The set was apparently closed to all but a few select crew members; Valleywag assumes the move was made to prevent the amount of hoopla that surrounded the closing of the 5th Avenue store for a commercial shoot recently.
If all this is to be believed, and we have no reason to think it isn't, then Apple seems to be up to some super top-secret commercial filming here. Could it be just 3G iPhones or something bigger? Just one more week. You can do it. |
The Verizon researchers analyzed data spanning 25 countries and 20 years. The 1,900 breaches in the dataset accounted for nearly 400 million stolen health records—but the actual number of stolen records is likely much higher, because some organizations did not report the extent of their breaches.
Although the phrase “data breach” calls to mind large-scale hacking operations like the one that targeted the U.S. Office of Personnel Management earlier this year, the majority of the breaches in the report were actually the result of a lost or stolen item—for example, an employee’s laptop might get swiped, or even just left in the backseat of a taxi during a business trip. Whoever found or stole these computers got much more than just a piece of hardware to resell: Many contained unencrypted databases full of sensitive health information.
If the contents of these laptops were encrypted—a relatively simple change that would protect them from unauthorized access—a large portion of reported breaches could be avoided. Some companies say they’ve left their data unencrypted out of fear that encryption could slow access to files that need to be pulled up quickly. But it’s more likely, Widup says, that building in strong encryption is just not a priority for many organizations.
The upside of breaches that result from laptop theft is that they’re reported quickly, allowing cleanup crews to get a jumpstart on minimizing the damage. According to the Verizon dataset, of all the incidents discovered in 2014, nearly one-third were reported within days. But half had taken place months or even years earlier, leaving a massive window for multiple thefts from a database.
The researchers found that the majority of the breaches that go undiscovered for a long time are perpetrated by an insider: It’s much harder to detect someone snooping around if they’re just abusing their own network-access privileges. There are certain tools that monitor network activity and raise flags when something unusual happens—if an unauthorized person, for example, downloading gigabytes of sensitive health data all at once—but even when these tools are installed, they often go unmonitored, Widup says.
No matter how they leak, stolen health records don’t just affect the individuals whose data is compromised. These breaches can also ripple outwards to harm the entire health-care system—studies show that people who don’t feel confident that their information will be kept private are likely to share less with their doctors, which can hinder life-saving diagnoses and treatments.
But these patients’ lack of confidence is not unfounded. It’s hard to know the full extent of the health data that is breached every year—companies are generally reluctant to announce embarrassing breaches, and uneven reporting requirements mean they’re often not compelled to do so. Studies like the Verizon report highlight just a small fraction of a widespread problem; meanwhile, many organizations are unlikely to care about the health information they possess with until it’s already gone.
* This article has been updated to clarify that the theft of personal data from Excellus is possible, but still unconfirmed. |
For the release of this week's big PC games, AMD launched a new graphics driver that provides optimal performance on systems equipped with Radeon video cards. Crimson ReLive edition 17.10.2 boosts framerate for Destiny 2, Assassin's Creed Origins, and Wolfenstein II: The New Colossus by sizable margins. The new driver also makes a few quality of life changes and fixes some bugs.
AMD conducted its own internal tests using a PC running an Intel Core i7-7700K at 4.2GHz and 16 GB of RAM. The performance improvements are based on a comparison between driver version 17.10.1 and the new 17.10.2 driver. Both the Radeon RX Vega 56 and Radeon RX 580 video cards were used.
Destiny 2
Using the highest graphics settings preset, Destiny 2 runs up to 43% faster with the RX Vega 56 (52 FPS to 74.6 FPS) and up to 50% faster with an RX 580 (34.7 FPS to 52.2 FPS) at a 1440p resolution. We spent a significant amount of time with the PC version and we covered some of the ways it differs from the console release, including how well it runs.
Assassin's Creed Origins
For Assassin's Creed Origins at the highest graphics preset, the RX Vega 56 runs up to 16% faster (44 FPS to 51 FPS) at 1440p, while the RX 580 performs up to 13% faster (45 FPS to 51 FPS) at 1080p. Required and recommended hardware specs for the game were unveiled earlier this month. As far as AMD video cards go, you need at least an R9 270, but an R9 280X (or better) is recommended.
Wolfenstein II: The New Colossus
With the game's highest graphics preset, Wolfenstein II: The New Colossus gets up to 8% faster performance on an RX Vega 56 (102.8 FPS to 110.7 FPS) and up to 4% faster the RX 580 (74 FPS to 77.3 FPS) using the 1440p resolution. Minimum requirements and recommended PC specs for the game were unveiled recently; you'll need at least an R9 290, but an RX 470 is suggested.
As for bug fixes, this new driver covers the following issues from previous versions:
Radeon Software may not appear in the uninstall options under "Apps and Features" on Windows operating systems after a Radeon Software upgrade.
Minor corruption may appear in Playerunknown's Battlegrounds in some game locations when using Ultra graphics settings in game.
Radeon Wattman may fail to apply user adjusted voltage values on certain configurations.
AMD XConnect Technology enabled system configurations may not be detected when plugged in or connected to a system after being previously unplugged during system sleep or hibernation.
Hearts of Iron IV may experience a crash or system hang during some scenario gameplay.
Radeon Settings gaming tab may not automatically populate games detected on the users system.
AMD users can find and download the proper driver on the company's official website. For everything you need to know about the aforementioned games, be sure to read through our extensive coverage on Wolfenstein II, Assassin's Creed Origins, and Destiny 2. |
Mar 6, 2017 | By Benedict
Researchers at the U.S. Army Armament Research, Development and Engineering Center have test fired a 3D printed grenade launcher called RAMBO (Rapid Additively Manufactured Ballistics Ordnance).
Donald Trump’s first budget as President of the U.S.A. will propose a huge hike in defense spending. If the President gets his way, an extra $54 billion will be pumped into the military, with foreign aid likely to be the biggest casualty. Arts funding will also be cut significantly, though there was a brief period when it appeared that might not be the case…
Around Christmas time, Trump reportedly asked Sylvester Stallone, the actor who played the headband-wearing war hero Rambo, if he would consider taking a senior arts role in his administration. Stallone declined, perhaps causing a few extra million being to be siphoned from the arts budget to the military.
But the president’s commitment to defense spending may yet procure his government, along with its inflated department of defense, a new kind of Rambo—not an Italian-American war veteran, but a 3D printed grenade launcher.
Long before the budget was announced, researchers at the U.S. Army Armament Research, Development and Engineering Center were busy developing a new 3D printed weapon called RAMBO, which stands for Rapid Additively Manufactured Ballistics Ordnance. Now, the 3D printed grenade launcher has been successfully tested, paving the way for a new era of 3D printed weaponry.
The 3D printed grenade launcher was developed in collaboration with the U.S. Army Manufacturing Technology Program and America Makes, the national accelerator for additive manufacturing, and was made using direct metal laser sintering (DMLS) 3D printing technology.
Unusually for a 3D printed weapon, the RAMBO grenade launcher was almost entirely 3D printed. Every part of the M203A1 grenade launcher besides its springs and fasteners was produced using a 3D printer.
The purpose of the 3D printing research was to determine whether weapons and munitions could be made using additive manufacturing processes—not to see if 3D printing could be used to save money or resources (it looks like that won’t be much of a concern…), but to see if 3D printed weapons will effectively fire.
Although the aluminum receiver and barrel of the 3D printed RAMBO grenade launcher required some machining and tumbling after being printed, the entire manufacturing process was still much faster than traditional methods. This speed could allow the military to supply soldiers with modifications and fixes for their weapons in just hours or days.
The barrel and receiver of the RAMBO grenade launchers took about 70 hours to 3D print, with a further five hours needed for machining. The post-processing stage involved the barrel being tumbled in an abrasive rock bath, and both parts undergoing Type III hard-coat anodizing—a process that traditionally made parts are also subjected to.
The researchers say that the powdered metal used to 3D print the RAMBO grenade launcher costs around $100 per pound. But with no scrap material wasted and no staff required to man the 3D printer, the money and labor saved with the process is significant, even if cost-cutting remains a lower priority than ensuring high functionality.
In addition to 3D printing the grenade launcher, the researchers also attempted to 3D print a munition, a M781 40 mm training round. 3D printing was used to create the windshield, projectile body, and cartridge case, with selective laser sintering (SLS) and other processes used to print the glass-filled nylon cartridge cases and windshields.
Both the 3D printed grenade launchers and munitions were remotely fired, for safety reasons. 15 test shots were fired with no sign of degradation: the grenade launcher did not show any signs of wear on the barrel, and the rounds achieved velocities of within 5% of those achieved with production-grade M781 rounds shot from a production-grade grenade launcher.
Although not part of their plan, the researchers ended up demonstrating just how useful 3D printing can be for rapidly amending a design. During testing, some cartridge cases of the 3D printed munitions were cracking, so the design was quickly modified and re-printed.
The RAMBO grenade launcher and 3D printed munitions were first seen at the 2016 Defense Manufacturing Conference. Although 3D printed weaponry is unlikely to find its way into soldiers’ hands in the immediate future, the successful testing of the creations shows great promise for defense-focused additive manufacturing.
Rumors of a fifth Rambo movie, tentatively titled Last Blood, have been rife since 2008.
Images & Source: U.S. Army For Life
Posted in 3D Printing Application
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Sunny Burns wrote at 3/7/2017 4:14:54 PM:The 2-minute video for this project can be viewed here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1ajfVX_7CrU&t=54s |
(Reuters) - Belgian fresh and frozen foods company Greenyard NV said on Tuesday it was in advanced negotiations to acquire Dole Food Company [DFCI.UL], the world’s largest fruit and vegetable producer, confirming a Reuters report.
FILE PHOTO: A Dole vessel transporting containers with boxes of bananas is anchored at Dole's Port in Guayaquil, Ecuador, February 23, 2012. REUTERS/Guillermo Granja/File Photo
The California-based company, one of the largest producers of bananas and pineapples, could be valued at more than $2.5 billion, including debt, people familiar with the matter said on Monday. Greenyard has a market capitalization of 869 million euros ($1.03 billion) according to Thomson Reuters data.
“Greenyard has secured appropriate financing, and is confident in its ability to complete the transaction with a balanced financing approach should a definitive agreement be reached,” the company said in a statement.
The deal would create a company with annual revenue of around 8 billion euros.
Shares in Brussels-listed Greenyard, half-owned by the family of Belgian entrepreneur Hein Deprez, were up 1.9 percent at 0830 GMT, after a 3.3 percent rise on Monday.
For Dole’s 94-year-old chairman David Murdock a deal with Greenyard would offer a quick way to cash out on his ownership of the California-based company, which has also been considering a potential initial public offering.
For Greenyard, an acquisitive company that started out as a mushroom grower in the 1980s, the deal would allow it to branch out into the U.S. market. It could also supply the U.S. businesses of existing customers such as Aldi [ALDIEI.UL], Lidl and Ahold Delhaize.
“It is a very fragmented fruit and veg distribution market they’re operating in... some of the markets where they’ve talked about being more ambitious are France, the UK and the U.S., and certainly Dole would give them that key into the U.S.,” said Berenberg analyst Fintan Ryan.
“From a strategic point of view, the acquisition would make sense creating a large player in both Europe and America,” KBC analysts said in a note, adding that Greenyard would need to raise about 500 million euros to keep its net debt/EBITDA level ratio to below 3.5.
Dole Food Company could not immediately be reached for comment.
($1 = 0.8471 euros) |
If you’re going to be fined for something, this is it! Bears Linebacker Lance Briggs intends to wear Red, White, & Blue cleats & gloves during the Bears season opener against the Falcons. The week 1 game falls on the 10th anniversary of the September 11th attacks. Major props to Briggs for doing this.
A lot of fans are excited and happy about Briggs’ decision to wear the red, white, and blue on Sunday. Briggs approval rating has jumped somewhat after he informed the Bears he wished to seek a trade.
This leaves Bear fans unsure of how to feel towards Briggs. Part of me wants to tell the guy to kick rocks, and part of me wants to shake his hand for being awesome.
I am excited to see Briggs’ dawning the red, white, and blue because they look kick ass!
UPDATE: NFL has announced they will not be fining players. However an interesting point brought up is that just a week ago Briggs was demanding a raise or be traded. Yet, he scoffs at the idea of paying what he thought would be a fine. Hmmmm……..
Is Briggs being an attention whore? Let us know in the comments.
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Request by This one, of them all, definitely took the longest to complete, for fairly obvious reasons. (A.K.A. More 'scenery,' yet not really. LoL)Once more, the request was to draw the ponies within their human forms, without the skin tones originally given, and then to also make them each a Guardian of the Veil (and also notable allies).In the case of Sunset Shimmer, here, however, she was requested last minute, in general, but also if she could take the position of Orube/'Rebecca Rudolph,' and her "Might wanna start running, because I'm about to literally kick your ass" fighting attire (with same pose, another fave of mine).And, once again, as I do not watch the series or am involved within the community as a result, I had to ask SEGASister for lots of info, one of which was what people usually make the ponies, ethnicity and/or ancestry wise, whenever drawn within human form. However, this time around, since, according to her, this one's a pretty new character, 'no one' really knows or has a set ethnicity upon her yet.Sooooo, I just left her more or less the skin tone she does possess within the canon.And as for the hairstyle, it was rather "....Huh...." when looking at the reference SEGASister gave me, and then also looking at a few on Google and seeing she seems to have two, but . . . not . . . really? o_O' LoL EITHER way, I used the ref SEGA gave, which I can say to YOU, those viewing/reading this, that think of it as Sunset assuming Orube's role even more, in the sense that when Orube's within her 'fighter garb,' her hairstyle is different by comparison to when she's masquerading around as 'Innocent Earth Civilian' Rebecca.Also, I did decide to keep, or show, rather, her pony ear, as well as keeping Orube's rather long kitty-like nails within combination just to sort of maintain the "I'm actually an alien, and your Earthly ways and customs are just . . . wtf to me at the moment" notion of Orube's character within the beginning.Finally, as for the scowl, again, I know zero about Sunset Shimmer, but am assuming she's clearly the typical counterpart most series do where main characters are concerned. So she's most probably Twilight Sparkle's rival, or was, judging from a few of the screenshots I saw within Google Images. Regardless, I used, or 'kept' the scowl I kept seeing on her face within said image search . . . which works with this pose, considering she's being Orube at the moment, and probably about to beat someone's ass into the ground, anyway.ANYWAY! Was really fun to attempt drawing Orube-related crap, again (since I haven't in years and years, since the first, and 'last' Orube drawing I'd done during my beginnings of attempting more active color-based works), even if I had to 'morph' her head into another person's . . . which took a few tries to get it ALL right, overall.Still.I'M just glad I'm FINALLY done with this damned 'series' (not the show-series, although it's still not my personal cup of tea, this version, nope ^_^' But I STILL have my soft spot for cutie Fluttershy, gotdamn it >_< LoL), because it just feels like I've been doing it my entire pregnancy . . . which, technically, I have, now being 2 weeks away from meeting Evie.NEXT time someone asks for possible MLP artwork, I'll definitely reopen my commissions for them, if they'll be this many, again, anyway. ^_^' Phew. . . .-------------------- |
Photo: Molly Wiedemann
Outside of a rarefied top tier, it can be extremely hard to make money in creative fields online. Writers are continually asked to work for pennies or, even worse, “exposure.” Artists may have it even worse. Clients want to pay a paltry sum for work that can take hours — and is then snatched and put to use by third parties without credit or payment.
But there is still at least one online community that treats artists with respect and pays fair prices for original work — one community that artists can rely on when editors, publishers, and social networks make it more and more difficult to get paid. When it comes to commissioning original works of art, nobody can match the furries.
At an unsteady time to be a professional creative, furry commissions offer stable supplementary income for many artists. Sara Jensen, a 28-year-old artist in Minnesota, estimates that she makes around $500 drawing ten or so illustrations per month. “Some people make a lot more than me, some people make just, you know, ‘I want to go out tonight, can I take a commission so I can go to a movie or whatever.’”
-original work to keep chugging
-fanart to draw attention to your original work
-furry commissions to pay the bills — Colin Spacetwinks (@spacetwinks) March 7, 2016
Either way, the furry fandom is a reliable place to find work. “The demand in the furry community, such as it is, is a very different thing than in other fields and groups that want/need art,” writer and self-described furry community historian Colin Spacetwinks explained to me over Twitter DM. The main reason is that furries, people interested in anthropomorphic animals, often have animal alter-egos known as a fursona. “Say you’ve got a fursona,” Spacetwinks says. “You’ve imagined it. You know in your head what they look like, you think they look pretty cool, and you think to yourself, ‘Gosh, I’d like to see that somewhere other than in my own brain.’ But you can’t draw. There’s only one way you’re going to get that: Someone else draws it for you.”
Because fursonas are unique for every person, it’s practically impossible to get a rendering of one’s fursona without paying money for it. (Dressing up as one’s fursona is also common practice, but high-end costumes can run thousands of dollars.) Using generic images is frowned upon in the community, and using a drawing of someone else is practically begging for punishment. “I’d say that [getting a drawing of your fursona is] pretty much expected, to be honest with you,” Ted, who goes by Doctor Fox online, tells me. Not having a drawing of your fursona, according to Ted, “would kind of be like having a Facebook profile with no picture. Just because you have your name on there, your friends are gonna be like, ‘Uh, who’s this?’” He estimates that “99 percent” of furries have something they’ve commissioned from an artist.
Illustrator Amber Hill, who goes by Vantid online, says that she took her first furry commission when she was 19 years old. She’s now 33. “When I accept new work, it’s usually about a quarter to a half of my income,” she wrote over email. While she wasn’t comfortable discussing specifics, she said that furry commissions were “enough to support my mortgage habit, ha-ha.”
Katie Hofgard, a full-time freelance illustrator, uses her income from furry commissions and a variety of other projects to support both herself, her boyfriend, and their cat. “People in the furry fandom usually want a depiction of one of their personal characters, usually an anthropomorphic animal or fantasy animal of some kind,” she said over email. “It’s their imagined world, which I get to bring to life for them. Maybe they’re exploring a ruin, going for a peaceful walk, enjoying a cup of tea, or enacting a part of their story.”
“I really enjoy hearing the backstories behind each character I paint for people,” she admitted. “Some people just make characters that are fun to look at and draw, and some have volumes of tales for each of their characters.”
(The furry art economy isn’t static, either — it goes through trends. When the show BoJack Horseman debuted, getting your fursona drawn in the style of the show’s character designer, Lisa Hanawalt, was super popular. The trend right now, according to Ted, is getting custom stickers to use on the messaging app Telegram. “One that I have is my character in front of the American flag, to replace the American-flag emoji, and then one of my other hobbies is shooting, so I have my character with a pistol in one of them,” Ted explained.)
Furry commissions aren’t one-and-done. By his own estimate, Ted spends between $500 and $700 a year on commissions (put in perspective, that’s about as much as daily delivery of the New York Times). He says he gets a new commission every two or three months, usually by browsing FurAffinity or through word of mouth. He describes it as ”Oh, I have $50 in my rainy-day funds, this artist is open, I really wanted this from them so I’m gonna go ahead and spend my money.”
The lowest pricing tiers are generally black-and-white sketches and head shots for around $25, but if you wanted something more painterly, or a full-body sketch, it could run you hundreds of dollars.
For this piece, I briefly considered asking artists if they wanted to contribute work for free, before immediately realizing how hypocritical that was. So after deciding on Select All’s fursona (my colleague Madison suggested a raccoon because we dig through internet trash), I emailed artist Molly Wiedemann and commissioned a piece. Six hours, and one $50 PayPal transfer later, I had the beautiful specimen — a raccoon using our blue-and-yellow color scheme — that you see at the top of this page. A painless process that, if for some reason I need a bespoke anthropomorphic animal drawn, I’d gladly go through again.
“One thing that I really like from working with furries versus working with other people is furries are really easygoing, which is awesome,” Jensen admitted. “A lot of the time they’ll be like, ‘You can do whatever you want,’ or they’ll give me a really general theme and I can draw what comes to mind.”
Which is not to say that she doesn’t get interesting requests. “One of the weirdest ones I got was someone who was like, ‘Hey, do you draw My Little Pony?’ I’m like, ‘Of course I do.’ I draw basically anything. And they’re like, ‘Would you draw a — just a normal My Little Pony, but like super muscle-y?’ And I was like, ‘What? Yeah, I’ll do that.’”
Hill said that the only type of requests that qualify as “weird” are the ones that ask her to work for free or “exposure.”
Hill, who does not consider herself a furry, was ebullient in her praise for the fandom. “The furry fandom has been remarkable to me, and I am so thankful for the people who are a part of it,” she wrote. “I’ve become dear friends with some of my clients, traveled the world with a few. In 2008, I was commissioned for a piece of art with a coyote and a raven. In 2014, I married that client … and I still owe him some artwork!! Ha!” |
Marcus Smart is under some pressure this season. The Celtics guard enters his third season after a terrific playoff showing against the Atlanta Hawks in which he actually made some shots. Boston is set to hopefully contend in the East this season with the addition of Al Horford, but they'll need a much-improved offense to get there. Boston finished 10th in offense after a late-season surge but also struggled for much of the year and was particularly bad at shooting, finishing 24th in effective field goal percentage.
Smart, especially, struggled. Among all players to play at least 20 minutes last season, Smart had the 7th-worst effective field goal percentage. Synergy Sports ranked Smart in the 21st percentile offensively overall, and in the 19th percentile in jump shot points per possession. He shot a startling 27.6 percent on jump shots last season.
But Smart says he's looking to be more of an offensive weapon this season.
ICYMI: Marcus Smart says he's "becoming more of an offensive threat." Hear Smart's 2016-17 goals in his own words:https://t.co/0SoQFJdzgO — Boston Celtics (@celtics) August 26, 2016
"(I'm planning on) becoming more of an offensive threat," Smart told Celtics.com
Smart's offense was generally a train wreck, but there are some interesting things in the data, via Synergy Sports.
Smart shot 23 percent on catch-and-shoot shots, an absolutely abysmal percentage for the highest efficiency jump shots possible. In isolation, he shot 25.9 percent. It was all bad. Oddly, Smart shot a very decent 40 percent out of the pick and roll as the ball-handler, which put him in the 50th percentile, and he shot 19-of-44 (43 percent) on jumpers in such sets.
Here's the really crazy part, though: Smart was very good at off-the-dribble jumpers. One of the more difficult shots in basketball, he was 81st percentile, shooting 40 percent in the half-court. Basically, in efficient situations, Smart was a disaster, and in inefficient situations, he was decent-to-very good, although in small samples.
This gives you confidence that some of this he can move beyond and develop. In catch-and-shoot situations, barring a major problem in his jumper (he has a hitch but it's not a Ricky Rubio situation), one can generally improve with repetition. Avery Bradley, his back-court partner, underwent the same kind of development.
Marcus Smart is looking to make offensive strides. USATSI
Having the ability to score with the ball will be beneficial, especially if Smart takes on a sixth-man role as the primary bench weapon on a versatile roster.
The issue of course comes with the glut of guards that Boston has. Isaiah Thomas is their All-Star cornerstone, Bradley is their best defender and a high-quality scorer at this point, and the team has several other young guards competing for roster time (like R.J. Hunter and Terry Rozier). Smart is considered a building block of the Celtics' future, but they're also looking to compete now. Smart needs to make those offensive leaps this year because Boston has positioned itself to pursue multiple outlets toward success.
Smart can be one such avenue, but he's also far from Boston's only route forward. This is a big year for him. |
(CNN) The Justice Department and the FBI are in discussions with lawyers for Hillary Clinton aide Huma Abedin to secure approval that would allow the FBI to conduct a full search of her newly discovered emails, sources familiar with the discussions told CNN.
Authorities have not yet sought a search warrant for the emails, law enforcement sources told CNN. Government lawyers hope to secure a search warrant to permit investigators to review thousands of emails on a computer Abedin shared with her estranged husband, Anthony Weiner, officials said.
The new search warrant is needed because the existing authorization, covered by a subpoena, related only to the ongoing investigation of Weiner, who is accused of having sexually explicit communications with an underage girl.
Investigators from the FBI's New York field office who are conducting the Weiner investigation stumbled on the Abedin emails while they were reviewing emails and other communications on the computer, which was considered to belong to Weiner, the officials said. They stopped their work and called in the team of investigators from FBI headquarters who conducted the probe of Clinton's private email server.
Abedin's lawyers didn't respond to requests for comment.
Read More |
Average Arctic sea ice extent for November set a record low, reflecting unusually high air temperatures, winds from the south, and a warm ocean. Since October, Arctic ice extent has been more than two standard deviations lower than the long-term average. Antarctic sea ice extent quickly declined in November, also setting a record low for the month and tracking more than two standard deviations below average during the entire month. For the globe as a whole, sea ice cover was exceptionally low.
Overview of conditions
In November 2016, Arctic sea ice extent averaged 9.08 million square kilometers (3.51 million square miles), the lowest November in the satellite record. This is 800,000 square kilometers (309,000 square miles) below November 2006, the previous lowest November, and 1.95 million square kilometers (753,000 square miles) below the 1981 to 2010 long-term average for November. For the month, ice extent was 3.2 standard deviations below the long-term average, a larger departure than observed in September 2012 when the Arctic summer minimum extent hit a record low.
At this time of year, air temperatures near the surface of the Arctic Ocean are generally well below freezing, but this year has seen exceptional warmth. The overall rate of ice growth this November was 88,000 square kilometers (34,000 square miles) per day, a bit faster than the long-term average of 69,600 square kilometers (26,900 square miles) per day. However, for a brief period in the middle the month, total extent actually decreased by 50,000 square kilometers, or 19,300 square miles—an almost unprecedented occurrence for November over the period of satellite observations. A less pronounced and brief retreat of 14,000 square kilometers (5,400 square miles) occurred in 2013.
Ice growth during November as a whole occurred primarily within the Beaufort, Chukchi and East Siberian Seas, as well as within Baffin Bay. Ice extent slightly retreated in the Barents Sea for the month. Compared to the previous record low for the month set in 2006, sea ice was less extensive in the Kara, Barents, East Greenland, and Chukchi Seas, and more extensive in Baffin Bay this year.
Conditions in context
Continuing the warm Arctic pattern seen in October, November air temperatures were far above average over the Arctic Ocean and Canada. Air temperatures at the 925 hPa level (about 2,500 feet above sea level) were above the 1981 to 2010 average over the entire Arctic Ocean and, locally up to 10 degrees Celsius (18 degrees Fahrenheit) above average near the North Pole. This is in sharp contrast to northern Eurasia, where temperatures were as much as 4 to 8 degrees Celsius (7 to 14 degrees Fahrenheit) below average (Figure 2b). Record snow events were reported in Sweden and across Siberia early in the month.
In autumn and winter, the typical cyclone path is from Iceland, across the Norwegian Sea and into the Barents Sea. This November, an unusual jet stream pattern set up, and storms instead tended to enter the Arctic Ocean through Fram Strait (between Svalbard and Greenland). This set up a pattern of southerly wind in Fram Strait, the Eurasian Arctic and the Barents Sea and accounts for some of the unusual warmth over the Arctic Ocean. The wind pattern also helped push the ice northwards and helps to explain why sea ice in the Barents Sea retreated during November.
Sea surface temperatures in the Barents and Kara Seas remained unusually high, which also helped prevent ice formation. These high sea surface temperatures are a result of warm Atlantic water circulating onto the Arctic continental shelf seas.
November 2016 compared to previous years
Through 2016, the linear rate of decline for November is 55,400 square kilometers (21,400 square miles) per year, or 5.0 percent per decade.
Warm Arctic delays ice formation in Svalbard’s fjords
In the Svalbard archipelago, sea ice usually begins to form in the inner parts of the fjords in early November. This November, however, no sea ice was observed. Throughout autumn, the wind pattern transported warm and moist air to Svalbard, leading to exceptionally high air temperatures and precipitation, which fell as rain.
Atmospheric and oceanic conditions in the fjord system were assessed by students from the University Centre in Svalbard. They noted an unusually warm ocean surface layer about 4 degrees Celsius (7 degrees Fahrenheit) above the salinity-adjusted freezing point (Figure 4a). Coinciding with exceptionally high air temperatures over Svalbard during autumn, the water has hardly cooled at all, and it is possible that no sea ice will form this winter.
The above average ocean temperatures arose in part from changes in ocean currents that bring warm and salty Atlantic Water into the fjords. As the warm Gulf Stream moves east, it becomes the branching North Atlantic Drift. One small branch is named the West Spitsbergen Current (Figure 4b). This current flows along the continental shelf on the west coast of Svalbard and is one mechanism for transporting heat towards the fjords. Since 2006, changes in atmospheric circulation have resulted in more Atlantic water reaching these fjords, reducing sea ice production in some and stopping ice formation entirely in others.
Antarctic sea ice continues to track well below average
This year, Antarctic sea ice reached its annual maximum extent on August 31, much earlier than average, and has since been declining at a fairly rapid pace, tracking more than two standard deviations below the 1981 to 2010 average. This led to a new record low for the month of November over the period of satellite observations (Figure 5a). Average extent in November was 14.54 million square kilometers (5.61 million square miles). This was 1.0 million square kilometers (386,000 square miles) below the previous record low of 15.54 million square kilometers (6.00 million square miles) set in 1986 and 1.81 million square kilometers (699,000 square miles) below the 1981 to 2010 average.
For the month, Antarctic ice extent was 5.7 standard deviations below the long-term average. This departure from average was more than twice as large as the previous record departure from average, set in November 1986.
Ice extent is lower than average on both sides of the continent, particularly within the Indian Ocean and the western Ross Sea, but also to a lesser extent in the Weddell Sea and west of the Antarctic Peninsula in the eastern Bellingshausen Sea. Moreover, several very large polynyas (areas of open water within the pack) have opened in the eastern Weddell and along the Amundsen Sea and Ross Sea coast.
Air temperatures at the 925 mbar level were 2 to 4 degrees Celsius (4 to 7 degrees Fahrenheit) above average near the sea ice edge during late October and early November, corresponding to the period of rapid sea ice decline (Figure 5b).
The entire austral autumn and winter (since March 2016) was characterized by generally strong west to east winds blowing around the continent. This was associated with a positive phase of the Southern Annular Mode, or SAM. This pattern tends to push the ice eastward, but the Coriolis force acting in the ice adds a component of northward drift. During austral spring (September, October and November), the SAM index switched from strongly positive (+4 in mid-September, a record) to negative (-2.8 in mid-November). When the westerly wind pattern broke down in November, winds in several areas of Antarctica started to blow from the north. Over a broad area near Wilkes Land, the ice edge was pushed toward the continent. Areas with southward winds were also located between Dronning Maud Land and Enderby Land, and near the Antarctic Peninsula. This created three regions where ice extent quickly became much less extensive than usual (Figure 5c), reflected in the rapid decline in extent for the Antarctic as a whole. Interspersed with the areas of compressed sea ice and winds from the north, areas of south winds produced large open water areas near the coast, creating the polynyas.
Arctic sea ice loss linked to rising anthropogenic CO 2 emissions
A new study published in the journal Science links Arctic sea ice loss to cumulative CO 2 emissions in the atmosphere through a simple linear relationship (Figure 6). Researchers conducting the study, including NSIDC scientist Julienne Stroeve, examined this linear relationship based on observations from the satellite and pre-satellite era since 1953, and in climate models. The observed relationship is equivalent to a loss of 3 square meters (32 square feet) for every metric ton of CO 2 added to the atmosphere, compared the average from all the climate models of 1.75 square meters (19 square feet). This smaller value, or lower sensitivity, from the models is consistent with findings that the models tend to be generally conservative relative to observations in regard to how fast the Arctic has been losing its summer ice cover. The observed rate of ice loss per metric ton of CO 2 allows individuals to more easily grasp their contribution to Arctic sea ice loss.
Global sea ice far below average
As a result of both Arctic and Antarctic sea ice currently tracking at record low levels, global ice extent near November’s end stood at 7.3 standard deviations below average (Figure 7). However, the processes governing the evolution of sea ice in both hemispheres is a result of different atmospheric and oceanic processes and geographies and it unlikely that record low conditions in the two hemispheres are connected. Also, it is not especially instructive to assess a global sea ice extent because the seasons are opposite in the two hemispheres. In November the Arctic is in its ice growth season while Antarctic is losing ice. Antarctic sea ice as a whole has slightly increased over the past four decades (but with the last two austral winters having average and below average extent, respectively). The slight overall increase in Antarctic ice over the satellite record can be broadly linked to wind patterns that have helped to expand the ice cover towards the north (towards the equator).
NASA Operation IceBridge completes its 2016 Antarctic campaign
In October, four NSIDC personnel accompanied the NASA Operation IceBridge campaign on its airborne surveys over Antarctica. The campaign completed a total of 24 flights over the continent in October and November, covering sea ice, land ice, ice shelves, and glaciers as Antarctica headed into its austral summer. Missions surveyed sea ice in the Weddell and Bellinghausen Seas with instruments that measure both sea ice extent and thickness. These measurements add to a time series of data that measures changes in sea ice and helps researchers assess the future trajectory of the ice pack and its impact on the climate. Visual observations from the flights confirmed that areas in the Bellingshausen Sea that are typically covered in sea ice were open water this year.
One of this year’s missions flew over a massive rift in the Antarctic Peninsula’s Larsen C Ice Shelf. Ice shelves are the floating parts of ice streams and glaciers, and they buttress the grounded ice behind them; when ice shelves collapse, the ice behind accelerates toward the ocean, where it then adds to sea level rise. Larsen C neighbors a smaller ice shelf that disintegrated in 2002 after developing a rift similar to the one now growing in Larsen C.
The IceBridge scientists measured the Larsen C fracture to be about 70 miles long, more than 300 feet wide and about a third of a mile deep. The crack completely cuts through the ice shelf but it does not go all the way across it. Once it does, it will produce an iceberg roughly the size of the state of Delaware.
The mission of Operation IceBridge is to collect data on changing polar land and sea ice and maintain continuity of measurements between NASA’s Ice, Cloud and Land Elevation Satellite (ICESat) missions. The original ICESat mission ended in 2009, and its successor, ICESat-2, is scheduled for launch in 2018. Operation IceBridge, which began in 2009, is currently funded until 2019. The planned overlap with ICESat-2 will help scientists validate the satellite’s measurements.
Further reading
Nilsen, F., Skogseth, R., Vaardal-Lunde, J., and Inall, M. 2016. A simple shelf circulation model: Intrusion of Atlantic Water on the West Spitsbergen Shelf. J. Physical Oceanography, 46, 1209-1230. doi:10.1175/JPO-D-15-0058.1
Notz, D. and J. Stroeve. 2016. Observed Arctic sea-ice loss directly follows anthropogenic CO2 emission. Science, 11 Nov 2016: Vol. 354, Issue 6313, pp. 747-750. doi:10.1126/science.aag2345.
Parkinson, C. 2014. Global sea ice coverage from satellite data: Annual cycle and 35-year trends. Journal of Climate, December 2014. doi:10.1175/JCLI-D-14-00605.1.
References
Fetterer, F., K. Knowles, W. Meier, and M. Savoie. , updated daily. Sea Ice Index, Version 2. Boulder, Colorado USA. NSIDC: National Snow and Ice Data Center. doi:10.7265/N5736NV7. |
In “Court,” a powerful and richly praised new Indian film that is showing in San Francisco this week, the camera has a restful, unblinking gaze. It behaves as if it is filming a documentary, even though the film is a work of fiction. It does not continuously scurry to show faces in close-up or cut away for effect, as one might expect in a courtroom drama. It loves attrition as much as tension. In long, steady shots, it absorbs the unglamorous details of judicial procedure in a single case that unfolds at glutinous pace. The camera’s patience mirrors that of the court, where time appears to be of no consequence at all; a hundred years hence or a thousand, this case may well be trudging along, awaiting a witness or rummaging through its trove of antiquated laws. The film’s stillness and the court’s lack of urgency nearly fool us into forgetting that a man’s freedom is at stake.
That man is Narayan Kamble, a white-bearded folk singer who has been arrested during a matinee performance amid a clutch of tenements in Mumbai. Kamble is ordinarily taciturn, but onstage, after he has been introduced as a “people’s poet,” he is electric with fury. He sings, in Marathi, about the oppressions of class and caste, and bemoans greed and corruption: “Pandemonium is here / Time to rise and revolt / Time to know your enemy.” Kamble is arrested on the charge of abetting the suicide of a sewer cleaner whose body has been pulled out of a manhole. A couple of days earlier, it is alleged, Kamble had performed in the neighborhood and incited sanitation workers to kill themselves in protest of their inhuman working conditions.
“Court” makes clear that the authorities are abusing a moribund judicial process to harass a man who is advocating for change. The prosecution itself is, in a way, the punishment, and through the rest of the movie, its director, Chaitanya Tamhane, a twenty-eight-year-old first-time filmmaker, lays bare some of the deep dysfunctions of the Indian judiciary, beginning with the ponderousness of Indian trials. In a Mumbai courtroom with lethargic ceiling fans and walls of peeling blue paint, Kamble’s case progresses inch by inch. When one hearing ends, the next is scheduled for a month or more later, so that even the presentation of the patently thin evidence against him is stretched out over the course of a year. (He stays in jail throughout, having been denied bail and remanded to judicial custody.)
Tamhane’s film is as much commentary as cinema. India’s courts are indeed choked, with more than thirty-one million open cases awaiting resolution. “If the nation’s judges attacked their backlog nonstop—with no breaks for eating or sleeping—and closed 100 cases every hour, it would take more than 35 years to catch up,” Bloomberg Businessweek calculated in January. Delays are the defining feature of the system. Cases linger for decades. Infamously, a postal worker was acquitted, in 2013, of the charge of embezzling fifty-eight rupees, a full twenty-nine years after legal proceedings began. Defendants will sometimes try to turn this lassitude to their own advantage, slowing things further still. “Deferment consists of keeping proceedings permanently in their earliest stages,” the painter Titorelli advises Josef K. in Kafka's “The Trial.” “The trial doesn’t stop, but the defendant is almost as certain of avoiding conviction as if he’d been acquitted.”
The logjam has left India’s prisons crowded less with convicts than with inmates who are, like Kamble, awaiting or undergoing trial; two-thirds of India’s four million prisoners are “undertrials,” according to Amnesty International. Last September, the country’s Supreme Court had to direct judicial officers to release undertrials who had already been in prison for more than half of the maximum term that their charges would allow. (A law mandating such releases was already on the books, but had rarely been followed in practice.)
Last July, India’s Law Commission, a government agency, published a report warning that judicial delays were “leading to a dilution of the Constitutional guarantee of access to timely justice and erosion of the rule of law.” The report cited several reasons for this situation. For one, India has no equivalent of the U.S.’s Speedy Trial Act, which sets time limits for the different stages of a federal criminal prosecution. Also, traffic and other ticketed offences that require nothing more than payments of fines nevertheless entail court dates, leading them to comprise a third of pending cases before the lower judiciary.
But primarily, the report concluded, India suffers from a paucity of judges, with roughly fifteen judges for every million people, compared with more than a hundred judges per million in the U.S. The Law Commission report recommended doubling the number of judges and putting the fresh recruits to work first at clearing the backlog, but such appointments can take years; new courtrooms will have to be built for them, and new infrastructure provided. In “Court,” the acerbic Judge Sadavarte, who presides over Kamble’s trial, is one of the circuit’s livelier eminences, packing an average of five hearings into each day. He has clearly learned to accept his lot, though, displaying only the merest flicker of annoyance when a witness fails to appear on the appointed date or when an intelligence report, purportedly crucial to the case against Kamble, turns out to be a month away from completion.
The film also speaks to another sort of judicial reform, often discussed but never acted upon: the revision of old laws and regulations. More than a thousand of India’s laws date back to the British Raj, when a colonial power formulated them to help rule the subcontinent. Tamhane plays these incongruities for mordant laughs. The prosecutor Nutan presents, as evidence of Kamble’s dark designs, the fact that he owns two banned books: Arthur Koestler’s “The Lotus and the Robot” and a Marathi book proscribed soon after its publication in 1899. She also reminds the judge that Kamble had earlier received a warning, under the Dramatic Performances Act, for staging “seditious material.”
Kamble’s lawyer, Vinay Vora, protests the introduction of this precedent. The act is a Victorian law, created in 1876 to shut down theatrical shows that challenged the British, he says. It shouldn’t be relevant to postcolonial India.
“This is not a valid argument,” Nutan responds. “It is a law. It is there.”
The absurdity of some of the accusations against Kamble is compounded by the casual indiscipline of the investigation, which hints at deeper and more malign manipulations of Indian law. Policemen search his house without a warrant; when the prosecution produces a man who claims to have heard Kamble sing the inflammatory song about sewer cleaners, Vora exposes him to be a stock witness who has taken the stand in several cases to lie in support of the police. Toward the end of “Court,” Kamble is set briefly at liberty, but is soon detained again under the baroque ambiguity of the Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act—a law that was passed in 1967, has been augmented twice in the past decade, and was actually used, in 2011 and 2013, to arrest activists from a theatrical troupe called the Kabir Kala Manch.
In Sadavarte’s courtroom, Nutan reads aloud, in full, this law’s definition of a terrorist act. A poet such as Kamble may be said to have committed terrorism if he has acted “by using bombs, dynamite or other explosive substances or inflammable substances or firearms or other lethal weapons or poisonous or noxious gases or other chemicals or by any other substances (whether biological radioactive, nuclear or otherwise) of a hazardous nature or by any other means of whatever nature.”
Vora almost laughs out loud. “Where is the bomb? Where are the lethal weapons?”
“Or by any other means of whatever nature,” Nutan reminds everyone. That malleable phrase contains a provision for any conspiracy the state wishes to perceive.
Tamhane’s admonitions of India’s judiciary are not delivered clinically; instead, with immense skill, he works them under the skin of his movie, allowing the story to shine. The cast, an assembly of little-known or first-time actors, is a marvel of verisimilitude, and Tamhane fleshes out his characters with loving attention to their lives outside the courtroom. After a hearing, we follow Nutan home on the local train, and we accompany her family into a theatre to watch a Marathi play. Vora wanders around a grocery store, picking out cheeses; he squabbles with his parents when he visits them, and he meets friends for beers at a bar where a singer croons Portuguese love songs. Sadavarte takes a family vacation with a large group of friends, many of whom look up to him with evident respect. Only Kamble is, with great deliberateness, kept beyond the boundaries of our understanding. He remains a cipher, just as he is within the court—an unknowable man with no personal history, trapped in a maze that he cannot fathom. |
With Android and Chrome OS, Google already has its fair share of operating systems to work on, but there's apparently another coming down the pipe: Android Police spotted a reference to Fuchsia ("a new operating system") in some code left on GitHub.
Unlike Chrome OS and Android, Fuchsia won't be based on Linux, and that suggests Google wants it to be able to run on devices of every size, shape and scale - think smart thermostats, car dashboards and wearables, where the Linux kernel can be overkill.
It would still be able to run on smartphones and computers, and based on the code that's available it looks like there are some advanced security and graphics features being prepped here. Of course with no official word from Google we're just speculating.
Pink and purple are the colours
For non-horticulturists, fuchsias are a type of flowering plant covering almost 110 species. We'll leave you to decide whether or not this says anything about Google's plans for the fledgling OS, or hints at what kinds of devices it could potentially run on.
Rumours have swirled for years that Mountain View executives would eventually decide to combine Chrome OS and Android, and Chromebooks are now being upgraded to support Android apps. Maybe Fuchsia is an attempt to start again from scratch.
Right now we just don't know - it's just a tantalising glimpse into what Google might be planning at the moment. If we hear anything official about the new OS (which apparently blends pink and purple as its key colour), we'll let you know.
How to take 360 photos and upload them to Facebook: |
Uber announced a new privacy policy back in May that will allow it to track you even when you’re not currently using its app. The new agreement comes into effect on July 15, and unsurprisingly it’s now facing a legal challenge.
Washington D.C.’s Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC) is particularly bothered with how Uber’s policy deals with reporting your location. It has submitted a complaint to the FTC.
Uber’s new policy gives it the option to allow tracking even if the app is closed and your GPS is turned off. In that case, it would still report approximate information using other means. It would also be able to access your address book and use the contact information it finds there.
EPIC says: “This collection of users’ information far exceeds what customers expect from the transportation service. Users would not expect the company to collect location information when customers are not actively using the app.”
When it announced the new approach, the company said the changes will “allow Uber to launch new promotional features that use contacts – for example the ability to send special offers to riders’ friends or family.”
Just the ‘option’ to track you all the time
It also said that it does not actually plan to start tracking your location and accessing contacts on July 15, but obviously the privacy policy gives it the option to do so.
Uber says customers will be able to choose not to share their information but EPIC argues that forcing them to opt out “places an unreasonable burden on consumers.”
The group’s complaint asks the FTC to open an investigation into Uber’s business practices, compel it to stop collecting user location data “unnecessary for the provision of the service” and entirely prevent it from accessing contact information.
The EPIC filing isn’t limited to Uber. It also asks the regulator to look into other companies which may be pursuing similar policies.
It’s been yet another rough month for Uber following a ruling by the California Labor Commissioner that its drivers are employees and not simply contractors. But given the company’s cockroach-like resilience and huge war chest, it’s still unwise to bet against it.
We’ve contacted Uber for comment on the complaint and will update this post if we hear more.
Update: Uber sent us this statement:
There is no basis for this complaint. We care deeply about the privacy of our riders and driver-partners and have significantly streamlined our privacy statements in order to improve readability and transparency. These updated statements don’t reflect a shift in our practices, they more clearly lay out the data we collect today and how it is used to provide or improve our services.
➤ EPIC TFC Uber Complaint [EPIC via US Today]
Read next: California Labor Commission rules Uber drivers are employees, not independent contractors
Read next: Now watch this learning AI attempting to master Mario Kart |
Called a rapist: Second-year George Lawlor fears for his future at Warwick University after being ostracised and bullied for challenging a student union drive to hold rape awareness sessions
Pity today’s male undergraduate, tasked with navigating his way through the thorny thicket of university gender politics.
For surely Oliver Cromwell himself, history’s most notorious puritan, would have admired the zeal of the new generation of self-styled feminist campaigners, with all their fury over perceived grievances.
The latest target of their rage is George Lawlor, a second-year politics and sociology student at Warwick University, who dared to question the effectiveness of sexual consent workshops run on his campus.
The brainchild of the Left-wing National Union of Students, these consent classes are being rolled out across the higher education sector.
Oxford and Cambridge hold mandatory sexual consent workshops for students during Freshers’ week to discuss ‘myths and misunderstandings’ around rape and harassment.
But Lawlor made the mistake of challenging the feminist orthodoxy by writing on an internet blog that he was offended by the invitation to attend since the vast majority of men ‘don’t have to be taught not to be a rapist’.
Brainwashing
He claimed — and, I believe, quite rightly — that this student union initiative would do nothing to address the real issue of sexual crimes against women, since every workshop would ‘just be an echo chamber of people pointing out the obvious and others nodding’.
But the validity of George Lawlor’s points did nothing to quell the tempest that engulfed him. Like someone labelled a heretic in the 17th century or a Communist in Fifties McCarthyite Washington, he was deemed to have offended the dogma of our times.
So he was subjected to a relentless campaign of personal vilification, abused on a bus travelling to the university and hounded out of a bar in Leamington. So ferocious was the condemnation that he even stopped attending lectures.
Some might say that George Lawlor had wilfully tried to pick a fight with the hardline feminists and their fellow travellers, particularly because — to accompany his blog article — he posed for a selfie photograph holding up a placard with the slogan: ‘This is not what a rapist looks like.’
To his detractors, he was pandering to stereotypes; after all, there is no Identikit image for a rapist, not on the basis of age or colour or size or height or affluence or attractiveness.
But the feminist argument is wrong on several levels.
Lawlor should be allowed to express his opinion, no matter how offensive some people find it, without ending up a pariah.
Universities are meant to be citadels of open debate, not hermetically sealed fortresses of brainwashing.
Nor should they be free of humour. With his placard, Lawlor was poking fun at that sanctimonious T-shirt campaign entitled ‘This is what a feminist looks like’, run last year by the self-appointed pressure group the Fawcett Society, attracting support from politicians such as Ed Miliband and celebrities including Benedict Cumberbatch.
But those engaged at the forefront of gender politics do not tend to appreciate people challenging their viewpoint.
I am not remotely under-estimating the seriousness of rape and sexual assault. Apart from murder, they are among the darkest crimes known to humanity. But it is precisely because they are so serious that they should not be used as vehicles for doctrinaire point-scoring or political power games.
Sadly, that is what seems to be happening in this case.
For decades, the repugnant theory that ‘all men are rapists’ has lain at the heart of radical feminism, and statistics are quoted to support the tenor of that argument.
Considerable coverage was given to an American study this year that suggested nearly one-third of male students had admitted they would act on ‘intentions to force a woman to have sexual intercourse’ if they could get away with it.
Shocking, certainly — but then it emerged the sample size was not 10,000 men or even 1,000, but just 73 students.
Writing in a blog, Mr Lawlor (pictured) argued that the overwhelming majority of people ‘don’t have to be taught to not be a rapist’ – and that men inclined to commit the crime would be unlikely to attend such a workshop
Another U.S. campus study — this time of a large number of students — found nearly a quarter of female undergraduates said they were victims of sexual assault and misconduct.
Yet when that disturbing figure is examined, it should be noted the average response rate to the survey was just 19 per cent, sparking worries that the result was artificially skewed because hundreds of thousands of students did not reply, and it is thought that victims are more likely to take part in such a study.
As George Lawlor had the temerity to point out, the view that all men have the potential to be sexual attackers seems to prevail within the student union movement in Britain, prompting the demand that men should undergo ‘re-education’ in order to quell any criminally sexual urges.
But this is all a lot of nonsense. The overwhelming majority of men are not rapists, just as they are not violent criminals or fraudsters or thieves.
There would rightly be outrage if the police invited all men in a certain neighbourhood to attend an anti-burglary or anti-car theft workshop, so why is it any different for sexual crimes?
Dogmatic
Even with a minor offence such as speeding, the only people who are sent on ‘speed awareness workshops’ are those who have actually been caught speeding.
Contrary to the idea that rape awareness classes can lead to greater understanding between the sexes, I think that they can actually promote friction and suspicion.
Students — who should be enjoying the freedoms that come with exploring adult life for the first time — can find themselves thrown into an atmosphere of distrust.
Indeed, as the mother of a son in his early 20s, I often feel anxious for young men as they embark on relationships, because of the social and legal minefield that the dogmatic feminists have created.
I just don’t think consent workshops are the most sensible path to forming healthy relationships between the sexes.
Besides, if they are voluntary, as is often the case, one questions whether the men who attend them are likely to be the ones at risk of going on to sexually assault women.
The other point to make in all this is about the language of modern gender politics.
The idea of sexual ‘consent’ has become such a shibboleth that little consideration is given to what might go on even if consent has been agreed.
Only this week we learned that scandal-ridden Tory activist Mark Clarke is said to have dislocated the jaw of one of his lovers by slapping her during a ‘consensual sex session’. The blow was so hard that she ended up in hospital.
People took to Twitter to express their anger (pictured) after Mr Lawlor wrote a blog about 'consent workshops'
Degrading
Any mature adult knows that sexual ethics involve far more than just ticking a box marked ‘consent’ before you begin — then doing what the heck you like. But a dangerous assumption seems to be growing that sex can be brutal or degrading just so long as you’ve sought and obtained the magic word ‘yes’.
The truth is sex is not a business transaction, like signing a mobile phone contract. It should be about love, emotions and two people treating each other with kindness and respect.
The pernicious effect of this simplistic concentration on consent is that an ‘anything goes’ culture surrounds sex in modern feminist circles.
Those who are deemed not sufficiently liberated or ‘sex positive’ — who might question the ethics of consensual activities such as prostitution, for example — are lambasted for ‘shaming’ other women.
There is no easy answer to the troubling questions of modern sexuality and how men and women should interact in an age of internet pornography and online apps such as Tinder that allow couples to ‘hook up’ at the touch of a button.
But what doesn’t help the sexes find an accommodation is for a man who declines to go to a university seminar being vilified as a ‘rapist’ by self-righteous critics whose own obsession with ‘consent’ is dangerously flawed.
George Lawlor does not deserve the abuse heaped on him for making his brave trumpet blast against the prevailing creed. |
In his New York Post column, Ralph Peters defended the controversial Arizona immigration law in part by citing "soaring crime rates in our border states." However, crime rates in Arizona -- as well as crime rates for each state bordering Mexico -- have dropped during the past decade.
Peters defends AZ law in part by citing "soaring crime rates in our border states"
From Peters' April 29 New York Post column:
Our ruling class simply doesn't feel the pain. So the DC elite demonizes Arizona's desperate effort to shove the narco-revolution's disorder back across the border. Murdered ranchers, overwhelmed emergency rooms and soaring crime rates in our border states mean less to the White House than a terrorist detainee's claims of abuse.
In fact, according to BJS, crime rates in border states have dropped during past decade
Crime rates in Arizona at lowest point in decades. According to the Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS), the violent crime rate in Arizona was lower in 2006, 2007, and 2008 -- the most recent year from which data are available -- than any year since 1983. The property crime rate in Arizona was lower in 2006, 2007, and 2008 than any year since 1968. In addition, in Arizona, the violent crime rate dropped from 577.9 per 100,000 population in 1998 to 447 per 100,000 population in 2008; the property crime rate dropped from 5,997 to 4,291 during the same period. During the same decade, Arizona's undocumented immigrant population grew rapidly. The Arizona Republic reported: "Between January 2000 and January 2008, Arizona's undocumented population grew 70 percent, according to the DHS [Department of Homeland Security] report. Nationally, it grew 37 percent."
Crime rates have dropped during past decade in other border states. The BJS data further show that violent crime rates and property crime rates in California, New Mexico, and Texas dropped from 1998 through 2008 -- the most recent year from which data are available:
In California, the violent crime rate dropped from 703.7 in 1998 to 503.8 in 2008; the property crime rate dropped from 3,639.1 to 2,940.3 during the same period.
In New Mexico, the violent crime rate dropped from 961.4 in 1998 to 649.9 in 2008; the property crime rate dropped from 5,757.7 to 3,909.2 over the same period.
In Texas, the violent crime rate dropped from 564.6 in 1998 to 507.9 in 2008; the property crime rate dropped from 4,547 to 3,985.6 over the same period.
Cato's Griswold: "[I]t is a smear to blame low-skilled immigrant workers from Latin America for creating a crime problem in Arizona." In an April 27 post, Daniel Griswold, director of the Cato Institute's Center for Trade Policy Studies, wrote that "Arizona's harsh new law against illegal immigration is being justified in part as a measure to combat crime" and that "drug-related violence along the border is a real problem." But, Griswold continued, "it is a smear to blame low-skilled immigrant workers from Latin America for creating a crime problem in Arizona." From Griswold's post:
Arizona's harsh new law against illegal immigration is being justified in part as a measure to combat crime. The murder of an Arizona rancher in March, allegedly by somebody in the country without documentation, galvanized support for the bill. The death of the rancher was a tragedy, and drug-related violence along the border is a real problem, but it is a smear to blame low-skilled immigrant workers from Latin America for creating a crime problem in Arizona. The crime rate in Arizona in 2008 was the lowest it has been in four decades. In the past decade, as the number of illegal immigrants in the state grew rapidly, the violent crime rate dropped by 23 percent, the property crime rate by 28 percent.
Peters also claimed that AZ bill "empower[s] police to pursue criminal aliens"
From Peters' column:
But these issues are all interwoven with the Mexican government's existential crisis. Drug wealth fuels criminal empires. Those narco-empires are now so powerful that they've risen against the state. Human trafficking is a useful sideline for drug lords. And illegal immigration drives crime rates in bankruptcy-threatened US cities and states. Cross-border trade's the next target. Narco-insurgents now feel sufficiently confident to attack Mexican army installations and US consulates. The maquiladoras, those thousands of assembly plants along the border, won't escape the mayhem. Given their enormous contribution to Mexico's fiscal stability and employment rates, those plants are obvious targets as the narco-challenge to the state intensifies. Mexican journalists, too, have been killed by the hundreds. Their torture and execution doesn't generate much excitement north of the border, though. It's their bad luck to be butchered by Mexican narcos. Had they been killed accidentally by US forces in Iraq or Afghanistan, they'd be famous martyrs. And Arizona's "discriminatory" new state law empowering police to pursue criminal aliens? Should Phoenix let the rule of law collapse because Washington prefers political correctness to public safety? In DC, it's about politics. In Arizona, it's about survival.
But officers reportedly could already inquire about immigration status of those who are suspected of another crime
LA Times: "Currently, officers can inquire about" immigration status "if the person is a suspect in another crime." The Los Angeles Times reported of the Arizona bill on April 13: "Currently, officers can inquire about someone's immigration status only if the person is a suspect in another crime. The bill allows officers to avoid the immigration issue if it would be impractical or hinder another investigation." From the article: |
Gay GOP group GOProud chairman Christopher Barron on Thursday defended his group's right to participate in February's Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC). GOProud's co-sponsorship of the event has enraged three socially conservative groups.
The three-day convention to be held at the Marriott Wardman Park Hotel in Washington, DC will feature such anti-gay figures as media personality Ann Coulter, South Carolina Senator Jim DeMint, former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, former Arkansas Governor Mike Huckabee and former Pennsylvania Senator Rick Santorum.
The political arm of the Family Research Council, FRC Action, Concerned Women for America (CWA) and the National Organization for Marriage (NOM) have announced they won't attend the event because of the presence of the gay Republican group.
When asked by MSNBC The Ed Show guest host Cenk Uygur, “Why on God's green Earth are you even a Republican?” Barron insisted the conservative movement accepted – even welcomed – gay Republicans.
“Because I believe in free markets, because I believe in a strong defense, because I believe in the power of the individual,” Barron responded. “That's why I'm a conservative Republican.”
“I get that,” Uygur said, “But what I don't get is how you can with a good conscious vote for a party that does not like you.”
When Barron insisted the conservative movement was united and winning, Uygur interrupted with “No you're not.”
“What I'm telling you right now is that the conservative movement is absolutely welcoming to gay people,” Barron said. “I can tell you right now, I have an easier time being openly gay with the conservatives than I do being a conservative with other gay people. That's the truth. You might not like it but it doesn't change reality.”
“You gotta wake up, man. In 2004 they ran the whole national campaign against hating you. In 2006, they ran the whole national campaign against hating you,” Uygur added.
“I am wide awake,” Barron interrupted, “and the conservative movement [is] winning and we are a proud part of that movement.” (The video is embedded in the right panel of this page.)
On Wednesday, sex advice columnist and gay rights activist Dan Savage called GOProud a “little gay window dressing.” |
President-elect Donald Trump, once again, downplayed Russia’s involvement in election-related cyber hacking and has taken to Twitter to promote comments WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange made on Fox News’ “Hannity” on Tuesday night.
President Obama, CIA Director John Brennan, FBI Director James Comey and Director of National Intelligence James Clapper all agreed that the Russian government interfered with the election. But Trump — not so much.
Julian Assange said "a 14 year old could have hacked Podesta" – why was DNC so careless? Also said Russians did not give him the info! — Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) January 4, 2017
Also Read: WikiLeaks' Julian Assange Tells Hannity 'Our Source Is Not the Russian Government' (Video)
Trump appears to believe Assange’s claim that Russia was not his source for the hacked DNC and John Podesta emails that many have credited with influencing the presidential election. This is despite the fact that U.S. intelligence members claim that the Russians were behind the cyber security breech.
“We have said, repeatedly that over the last two months that our source is not the Russian government and it is not a state party,” Assange told Sean Hannity. The president-elect spent Wednesday morning firing off a series of tweets related to the interview.
"@FoxNews: Julian Assange on U.S. media coverage: “It’s very dishonest.” #Hannity pic.twitter.com/ADcPRQifH9" More dishonest than anyone knows — Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) January 4, 2017
Somebody hacked the DNC but why did they not have "hacking defense" like the RNC has and why have they not responded to the terrible…… — Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) January 4, 2017
things they did and said (like giving the questions to the debate to H). A total double standard! Media, as usual, gave them a pass. — Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) January 4, 2017
Also Read: Donald Trump Finally Books a Star for His Inauguration: Hillary Clinton
Assange said the U.S. “does not have the evidence” that WikiLeaks is involved with Russia.
Ex Pentagon and CIA spokesman George Little, who served under former President George W. Bush and President Barack Obama, denounced Trump’s apparent support of the Wikileaks mastermind, saying on Twitter that “we will be less safe” once the president-elect takes office.
Let's stare this reality square in the face: PEOTUS is pro-Putin and believes Julian Assange over the @CIA. On Jan. 20 we will be less safe. https://t.co/3qhDLjuGMk — George Little (@georgelittledc) January 4, 2017
Meanwhile, President Obama clearly believes his own intelligence, as he took action against Russia for the alleged hacking just days ago.
Obama ordered the removal of 35 Russian intelligence officials from the U.S. and announced an executive order sanctioning nine Russian entities and individuals, including two Russian intelligence services, four individual Russian intelligence officers and three companies that provided material support for the country’s cyber operations.
The president has also ordered the State Department to shut down two Russian intelligence-gathering compounds in Maryland and New York. Obama previously vowed to retaliate against Russia for interfering the election in what U.S. intelligence agencies characterized as an attempt to help Trump win the White House.
Also Read: Tucker Carlson Dumbfounded by College Student's Call for 'Flipping Cars' to Protest Trump (Video)
“I think there is no doubt that when any foreign government tries to impact the integrity of our elections, that we need to take action. And we will,” Obama promised in an interview with NPR in mid December.
Assange, who didn’t think Trump would defeat Clinton, explained that if the emails did hurt her campaign, it’s not WikiLeaks’ fault.
“Did it (WikiLeaks) change the outcome of the election? Who knows, it’s impossible to tell,” said Assange. “But if it did, the accusation is that the true statements of Hillary Clinton and her campaign manager, John Podesta, and the DNC head Debbie Wasserman Schultz — their true statements is what changed the election.” |
TOKYO – President Rodrigo Duterte should consider talking to North Korean leader Kim Jong-un to help ease the tensions in the Korean Peninsula, his incoming spokesman said.
Rep. Harry Roque (Kabayan party-list) thinks Duterte can “make a difference” on the issue as a “respected” leader in the region.
“I will strongly advise him because I think he has the stature in the region. I think leaders respect him as a strong and able leader. And he could be the person to make a difference,” Roque told reporters last Tuesday here.
Roque, a former professor of international law, believes Duterte will welcome an opportunity to engage with Kim.
“I have not had the occasion to confer with him but now that you mentioned it, I will confer with him. And I would say that if there is an opportunity the President would welcome that opportunity,” he said.
“Although I do not know how much influence we could exert over the North Korea, quite frankly. The perception is that bulk of their economic and military ties is with China. China is still the most influential country as far as North Korea is concerned.”
Asked how the Philippines could help address the threats posed by North Korea, Roque replied: “The President, in his departure speech, said countries should still try to engage and talk to North Korea. So I do not know if the President would be instrumental in this kind of communication. But that is one way.”
North Korea missile tests
North Korea has been conducting ballistic missile tests, worrying its neighbors who are concerned about their impact on peace and stability in the region.
The totalitarian state stepped up its nuclear program under Kim’s leadership despite the economic sanctions slapped by the United Nations.
Member countries of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations have expressed concerns over the missile tests and have urged North Korea to comply with its obligations under all relevant UN Security Council resolutions.
Last August, Duterte described Kim as a “crazy man” and a “maniac” who is playing with “dangerous toys.” He warned that the Far East would end up becoming an arid land if the North Korean dictator commits a mistake.
Earlier this week, the Philippine leader said a nuclear war was “unacceptable” and called on stakeholders to negotiate with Kim to diffuse the tensions in the Korean Peninsula.
Duterte and Japan Prime Minister Shinzo Abe condemned the North Korea missile tests after holding a bilateral meeting last Monday here.
“We need to address many issues confronting the region and threats to the stability and security (in the) Asia-Pacific. Foremost among our shared concern are developments in the Korean peninsula and the continuing missile launch tests of North Korea,” Duterte said.
“We condemn these tests and call on all concerned stakeholders to return to the negotiating table to peacefully resolve the situation,” he added.
Duterte and United States President Donald Trump are expected to discuss the North Korean threat when the American leader visits the Philippines this month. |
It looks like Google isn’t out of the antitrust hot water just yet. Bloomberg’s sources claim that the Federal Trade Commission is in the early stages of an antitrust investigation into Google’s business practices with Android, its popular mobile operating system.
FROM EARLIER:Surprise: Rose gold iPhone 6s appears to be the most preordered new iPhone
While the bare bones of Android are completely open source, not every part of Android can be used by anyone free of charge. If a device manufacturer wants their device to have access to the Google Play app store and Google’s app ecosystem, they have to pay Google licensing fees.
What does this have to do with antitrust law, you ask? It seems that making device manufacturers bundle Google’s own apps on their phones as a precondition for getting Google Play on their phones could be legally problematic.
“The practice of bundling products and services together may violate antitrust laws if a company dominates the market for a product that customers need, and then forces them to buy a complementary product or service,” Bloomberg writes.
That said, the FTC’s case against Google hinges on whether Android really dominates the market or if consumers have adequate choice. With iOS an extremely popular operating system in its own right, this new antitrust investigation might not have any legs. |
Samsung quietly added its 4 TB 850 EVO SSD model to the product to the lineup back in May (according to its own datasheet) without making any formal announcements. Earlier this month the company lifted the embargo on reviews of the product (you can read ours here) and began to ship the high-capacity SSD to its partners. By now, all the major retailers already either have the product in stock, or are taking pre-orders with ETA about a week from today, at a US MSRP of $1499.
The Samsung SSD 850 EVO 4 TB (MZ-75E4T0) comes in a 2.5”/7 mm form-factor with SATA interface and is based on the company’s TLC V-NAND memory (3D, 32-layers). The 850 EVO 4 TB drive is based on the MHX controller and is equipped with 4 GB of LPDDR3 cache (previously we were told we knew about the MHX ASIC supported 2GB max, which is interesting). Like the rest members of the 850 EVO family, the 4 TB model fully supports 256-bit full disk encryption that is compatible with the TCG/Opal 2.0 and IEEE1667 specifications, which is important for workstation users.
Samsung SSD 850 EVO Specifications Capacity 120 GB 250 GB 500 GB 1 TB 2 TB 4 TB Controller MGX MEX MHX NAND Samsung 32-layer 128 Gbit TLC V-NAND DRAM 256 MB 512 MB 1 GB 2 GB 4 GB Sequential Read 540 MB/s Sequential Write 520 MB/s 4KB Random Read 94K IOPS 97K IOPS 98K IOPS 4KB Random Write 88K IOPS 88K IOPS 90K IOPS DevSleep Power 2 mW 2 mW 2 mW 4 mW 5 mW 10 mW Slumber Power 50mW 60mW unknown Active Power (Read/Write) Max 3.7W / 4.4W 3.7W / 4.7W 3.1W / 3.6W Encryption AES-256, TCG Opal 2.0, IEEE-1667 (eDrive) Endurance 75 TB 150 TB 300 TB Warranty Five years
As for performance, the Samsung 850 EVO 4 TB drive resembles other higher-end models in the 850 EVO family. The manufacturer declares maximum sequential read speed of 540 MB/s as well as maximum sequential write speed of 520 MB/s for the SSD. As for random performance, the drive delivers a top speed of 98,000/90,000 4K random read/write IOPS. Maximum power consumption of the drive is 3.1 W/3.6 W during active read/write operations, which is also in line with the rest of the high-end 850 EVO SSDs.
Right now, virtually all the biggest retailers in the world already have the Samsung 850 EVO 4 TB in stock, or, at least, list the drive and take pre-orders. We could say that the highest-capacity consumer-class SSD is now widely available, however, we should note that in many stores the first batch was sold out immediately and some only have several units left.
The Samsung EVO SSD with 4 TB capacity has MSRP of $1,499 in the US, and the high price indicates that this remains a prosumer play at this point. At $1,499, the price is over two times higher than the 2 TB 850 EVO model ($675.76 at Newegg), indicating a higher cost per GB in exchange for density. Ultimately the product will likely find its buyer among those who need a large amount of solid-state storage (in 2.5"/7mm form-factor).
Other Options, Mainly for Enterprise
Typically SSDs of such capacity are designed for servers and datacenters and come with professional grade features which makes them even more expensive. For example, the SanDisk Optimus Max 4 TB (SAS) is available for $2,685 at Amazon and for $2,718 at Ebay. Likewise, Samsung’s own enterprise-grade PM863 3.84 TB SSD (SATA) has suggested price of $2,200, whereas its faster PM1633 3.84 TB (SAS) brother is sold for $3,092. Moreover, if you go to companies like Fixstars or Foremay, they build special-purpose SSDs for various non-PC applications. These products typically aren't even quoted for pricing, because they can feature different configurations and the order quantity affects the pricing, along with any support deal.
Nonetheless, when it comes to performance, capacity, endurance and price, the sky is the limit for solid-state storage. Multiple companies (including Samsung and Fixstars) now offer 2.5” SSDs with over 10 TB capacity and there are specialized solutions (such as those from HPE) that can easily cost $10,000 and north. In short, $1,499 may not be that expensive for a consumer drive. |
SACRAMENTO — John Burton, the state Democratic Party chairman, came under fire Friday for suggesting Gov. Jerry Brown “try shooting” a Republican to persuade them to vote for taxes.
In an interview with Bay Area News Group this week, Burton said Brown “can try shooting somebody and tell the next guy, ‘You don’t want that to happen to you, you better step up and vote.’ “… What’s Jerry going to do unless he took out a gun?”
The comment, made on the eve of the state party’s convention kickoff, went over the line, said Mark Standriff, communications director for the state GOP.
“Is it open season on (Republicans) now?” Standriff wrote in a Twitter message.
“Having a salty reputation is no excuse for poor judgment,” Standriff later said in an interview. “I’d ask him for an apology, but frankly all I’d expect in return was a well-directed expletive.”
The California GOP, Standriff added, is making it “our mission to travel the state with open and civil discourse and we’d hope we’d get the same from the other side. To have this happen doesn’t seem to be advancing civil discourse.”
Conservative radio talk show host Eric Hogue asked in his own Twitter message: “Is this rhetoric unbecoming of a party chair?”
Sensitivity over violence-laden political remarks has come under scrutiny since the assassination attempt on U.S. Rep. Gabrielle Giffords, an Arizona Democrat, that some believe was incited by heated political rhetoric.
A spokesman for Burton said Republicans are in no position to criticize Democrats for using violent political metaphors.
“This is the same party that has an assemblyman talking about picking off Democrats with a .50-caliber rifle,” said Tenoch Flores, Burton’s spokesman.
He was referring to Assemblyman Tim Donnelly, R-Hesperia, who told the Los Angeles Times that a “full-blown war” and guerrilla tactics were needed to fight Democrats.
“We’ve got a .50-caliber with cross hairs and “… we’re going to pick off two or three of them using this issue,” he said, three weeks after Giffords was shot in the head.
As party members on Friday descended on Sacramento for the Democrats’ state convention, the party’s position in California remains strong.
Democratic registration continues to outpace that of Republicans, Democrats swept all nine statewide offices, including the governorship, successfully defended U.S. Sen. Barbara Boxer’s seat, and added a seat to their majority in the Assembly. Voters even gave them the power to pass a budget on a majority vote.
Yet the state budget remains mired in a stalemate as Republicans continue to use the power of the two-thirds majority required on taxes to stymie Democratic efforts to close the remaining $15.4 billion deficit.
Burton’s comments reflect a frustration with Republicans shared by many Democrats. This week, Senate Leader Darrell Steinberg, D-Sacramento, suggested targeting budget cuts in Republican districts, an idea that has floated around in Democratic circles for weeks and is being taken more seriously as the stalemate continues.
Democrats are considering cutting services such as the Department of Motor Vehicles, community colleges or parks in districts represented by Republicans, said Bob Blumenfield, D-Los Angeles, the chairman of the Assembly Budget committee.
“If we have to close down a community college, maybe do it in a district of folks who don’t believe in government,” Blumenfield said. “At some point, we have to look at everything.”
Lt. Gov. Gavin Newsom, who gave a fiery speech on job creation to an environmental caucus at the convention, was not too supportive of the idea.
“There should be accountability.
“I get the spirit of what Darrell Steinberg is saying,” he said, “but the practical application is that people who need us most tend to be in these rural areas in these red districts and they’re counting on us not to do that.”
Contact Steven Harmon at 916-441-2101. Follow him at Twitter.com/ssharmon. Read the Political Blotter at IBABuzz.com/politics.
Democratic Party convention agenda
At the Sacramento Convention Center
Saturday Speakers: U.S. Sen. Dianne Feinstein, U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vermont, former U.S. Labor Secretary Robert Reich
Sunday Speakers: Gov. Jerry Brown |
Stephen Colbert is generally keeping a low profile in the news media while he prepares to take over CBS’ “The Late Show” from David Letterman in September. But he gave a video interview to the Catholic publication America Magazine that offered a glimpse into his personal faith credo.
During the long run of “The Colbert Report,” Colbert often billed himself as “America’s foremost Catholic.” He proves his bona fides in this nearly seven-minute interview with Father Jim Martin, the magazine’s editor at large. He riffs on his favorite hymns, passages from scripture and explains why the “super flawed” Peter is his favorite saint. And for good measure, he throws in a quote from Frank Herbert’s “Dune.”
Colbert is also set to don a collar to play a clergyman in an upcoming episode of “The Mindy Project,” as creator/star Mindy Kaling teased in a tweet last month. |
You can find out more about HavenCon 2017 at HavenConTx.com
The Queer Geeks Of Texas Find A Haven At HavenCon
Texas is known for a lot of things, both good and bad. But whatever your thoughts may be on the lone star state, it's clear that the Queer Geeks love HavenCon based in Austin.
Established in 2014 with it's first show in April of 2015, HavenCon has had over 1000 attendees (2015 boasted 1200 with this year's show seeing roughly 1400) through it's deliciously queer doors.
Is it the celebrity guests? Is it the video games? Or how about the cosplay? It could be all of the above, but it's clear that "Love, Community, and an Inclusive space" are the driving forces behind HavenCon's success.
Brain child of Shane Brown, a life long geek himself, HavenCon has seen geeks of every shape and size come through it's doors.
Cosplaying Drag Queens? Check.
Gender Bent Cosplay? Double Check.
Furries? Got Em!
LGBT Artists and Creators? Absolutely.
With panels ranging from "Coming Out In The Gaming Industry" to "Pups 101", HavenCon has offered a space for everyone to express themselves in the most open and friendly way possible. (Source: https://havencon2016.sched.org/)
HavenCon is currently fundraising to secure upgraded space for 2017 tentatively scheduled for April 28th - 30th. So far they've achieved a whopping 80% of their goal in just 1 week and the geeks are abuzz with the theme for next year titled "That's So Retro" - Showcasing the geekdoms from the 70s, 80s and 90s.
While planning and preparations are underway, HavenCon will need to reach that magic 100% to move forward. So head on over to their Indiegogo and check out the fun retro themed perks for those wishing to attend or if you just want to support an awesome, geeky, inclusive event. |
Former NBA player DeShawn Stevenson made over $28 million in salary during his NBA career.
However, it seems as though that wasn't enough to pay for his exorbitant spending. Stevenson, who last played for the Atlanta Hawks back in 2013, is in trouble with American Express, according to Bossip . Stevenson had a coveted AMEX Black Card based on the fact that he was rich (once), but never paid the bill and now owes the company $384,000.
In a judgement against Stevenson, a court ruled that American Express could go into his bank accounts to cover the outstanding balance. The only problem? He had $62.09 available in his Bank of America account.
While it's entirely possible that he's hiding his money elsewhere, images like the one below lead me to believe he didn't plan ahead financially.
Hilarious!! DeShawn Stevenson does have a ATM in his kitchen. i just have a george foreman grill @DanWolken @GodsSport pic.twitter.com/2R5XmBco — JT (@JtESPN991) May 30, 2012
The disturbing trend of ex-athletes who are now broke continues. Upon entering the big-money sports leagues, athletes should be educated on all of the risks involved with excess spending. Unfortunately, Stevenson can be used as an example of what not to turn out like.
For our best sports content and jokes, follow @12up on Twitter.
And for everything you missed, swing by our Facebook page! |
For five months, the Luas strike was seemingly intractable, incapable of solution, before a change of heart by one shop steward broke the log-jam late last week.
However, if the Luas settlement came suddenly in the end, its effect will live long, as other transport workers set the 18 per cent increase over 4½ years as the starting point for their own demands.
In a fortnight’s time the Labour Court will hear claims from Dublin Bus workers who want rises of 20-30 per cent over a number of years.
The impact of the Luas dispute on the industrial relations landscape is hard to overstate, since it has ratcheted up expectations, altered mindsets and created new ideas of what is possible. It has also shown that a hard-fought campaign of disruptive industrial action, in the face of largely hostile media and public opinion, can win rises over and above recent norms.
The initial 54 per cent pay claim seemed excessive. However, management’s opening position was a deal linked to the Consumer Price Index – one that could be close to zero.
Supported
The Labour Court recommendation is considered by unions to have a set an important precedent. Unions such as the NBRU have already signalled they want pay parity between bus and tram drivers. In the absence of any centralised pay bargaining after the collapse of social partnership, prior to the Luas deal, a number of key unions such as Siptu and Mandate have concluded 2-3 per cent deals for the private sector. A survey of private sector employers published by specialist journal Industrial Relations News last March forecast pay deals this year would be an average of 2.2 per cent.
Under the deal, Luas drivers will receive increases of about 18 per cent phased over 55 months to late 2020 – far more than the company had wanted, but less than they could have received if they had accepted an earlier offer.
Ahead of trends
Some, though, contend that if the deal is extended back to October 2014, when the previous agreement expired, then the new increases fall within the 2-3 per cent pay norms.
However, this argument is unlikely to hold much sway. Last month, Dublin Bus unions rejected a proposal in talks at the Workplace Relations Commission for increases of 8 per cent over four years for its 3,400 staff.
Siptu is likely to argue to the Labour Court on June 30th that it can accept nothing less than the 18 per cent proposed for Luas drivers. Extra productivity will cost more, too.
Both the NBRU and Siptu want to bridge the pay gap between bus and tram drivers – which could lead to claims running up to 30 per cent.
However the knock-on effects of the Luas dispute may also be felt further afield in other commercial State enterprises and into even in the broader public service. Already this week craft workers in the TEEU union in the ESB rejected increases of 5.5 per cent over two years as well as a lump sum payment of €2,750. |
The New Epic Dhol Ensemble is the most comprehensive and deep-sampled collection of large-scale Epic Dhol Ensembles on the market. The library is a completely remastered, redesigned and reprogrammed edition of our original Epic Dhol Ensemble. The New Epic Dhol Ensemble contains over 2.000 samples, built-in articulation browser, internal step-sequencer, front-face FX, textural convolutions and our newest 3.3 Chaos Engine.
The New Epic Dhol Ensemble VST consists of a large ensemble of Punjab Dhol drums and recorded them in the same orchestral hall as our New Epic Toms Ensemble.
The Punjab Dhol is a double-sided barrel drum large and bulky to produce the preferred loud bass. The drum consists of a wooden barrel with animal hide or synthetic skin stretched over its open ends, covering them completely. These skins can be stretched or loosened with a tightening mechanism made up of either interwoven ropes, or nuts and bolts. Tightening or loosening the skins subtly alters the pitch of the drum sound. The stretched skin on one of the ends is thicker and produces a deep, low frequency (higher bass) sound and the other thinner one produces a higher frequency sound. In contemporary Punjabi music, dhols with synthetic, or plastic, treble skins are very common.
The Epic Dhol Ensemble VST drums follows our over general direction in terms of recording all articulations at 10 velocity layers and 10 round robin pr. velocity layers. It contains a great variety of articulations, since each side of drum produces very different sounds. Essentially its divided into a bass section and a snare section. We played the bass section with the traditional big wooden Dhol stick, mallet, hands and fingers to ensure we covered the entire range. The sound is similar to that of Taiko drums, but with a little more tonality to it. The snare side was recorded with the traditional thin bamboo Dhol stick, however we also recorded this side with mallets, brushes and fingers. In addition we recorded different rimshot positions on the drum, so the users can create a variety of different soundings rhythmic textures on the drum. Th library also contains a substantial amount (+800) of BPM based loop banks for instant user gratification. We recorded the dhols and other smaller complimentary percussion instruments together. The loops work perfect with the multisampled sets, but also work perfectly as stand-alone instant-gratification type of music loops. |
A woman in Ontario, Canada, says she was fired from her job at Walmart earlier this week because she called the police on a customer who had left his dog in a hot car with the windows rolled up — and after she told her boss she’d do it again.
She tells the CBC that she was on her way into work on Tuesday when she saw a customer lock his dog inside the truck and close the windows.
“I said, ‘Is this really happening? I’m going to give him about five or 10 minutes and then I’m going to call the police,'” says the now-former Walmarter. When the man didn’t return, she contacted the police. An officer arrived, took down the license plate number and went into the store to find the vehicle’s owner.
The customer eventually came out, but before he left the Walmart parking lot, he approached the employee who had reported him.
“He pulled up to us and said, ‘Hello, ladies, how are you?’ And I said, ‘You shouldn’t leave your dog in the car,'” recalls the woman. “He told me it was none of my business and I said that that was fine, that if I saw him do it again I would just call the police next time. He said he was no longer going to be shopping at that Walmart, and I said, ‘OK.'”
Later in the day, she says her boss called her into his office, where she claims he told her to bring any dog-in-hot-car related issues to him in the future. She declined.
“I [told him] if I did see something unsafe, that I would just go to the police if I thought it was necessary,” she tells the CBC. “He told me then that I was terminated, he wanted my vest, my badge, and to clean out my locker and that I needed to leave.”
She says that Walmart’s official reason for the firing is that she was rude to a customer, “but I felt because I was not even on the clock, it shouldn’t have been an issue anyways. And I don’t think it should be an issue even if I was on the clock… because it’s on the news and we’re being told not to leave animals and children in cars.”
Walmart Canada declined to comment on the incident to the CBC but did say that it has guidelines in place for handling these sorts of situations, and that it’s reviewing these guidelines with employees. |
Post written by Leo Babauta.
I’ll confess: I recently let stress beat me.
I know, some of you think I’m perfect and never get stressed out, ever, especially as I’ve written about slowing down and simplifying for five years or so now.
But I do get stressed out, and I do sometimes overwork myself. It doesn’t happen much anymore, but it does happen. This week was one of those times.
Stress beat me … but stay with me until the end. In the end (spoiler alert), I beat out stress.
How Stress Beat Me This Week
As you might know, I created the Sea Change Program to help people change their lives, and The Mindful Diet course as part of the program because many members wanted help with healthy eating.
Unfortunately, there was a glitch in the registration process that caused 400 people to have registration problems, and so I spent two days manually fixing the problems (along with the trustworthy Dean, Zen Habits Creator of Smiles). It was tedious, exhausting work, and I did it until late at night and starting early in the morning.
I learned to do it almost as a form of meditation — trying to be mindful as I did it, much as I try to do when I sweep or wash dishes or take a walk.
Still, the overwhelming amount of people needing help at once stressed me out for two days, and at the end of it, I was wiped out.
How I Measured the Effect of Stress
Normally, we can feel the exhausting effects of stress, subjectively, but it’s hard to really know how much of an effect this is having on our minds and bodies.
On Tuesday, I found an objective measure of the toll stress had on me: strength training. I’ve been sticking to a regular weight lifting program for about 7 weeks now, doing the same four workouts (mostly barbell stuff with chinups and dips) and logging my progress. So I know pretty much exactly how much I should be able to lift for each workout.
But on Tuesday, I tried to lift the same amount I had lifted a week earlier, no more, on the exact same lifts with the exact same rest periods. I was too tired to make it through even half the workout. My body (and mind) couldn’t do what it had done a week before.
There are lots of possible reasons: not enough fuel (but I eat the same thing every day), too much other types of activities (but that is also very consistent on my current schedule), not enough sleep (this was slightly less in the last two weeks, but that amount hasn’t hurt me this much in recent weeks), burnout due to too much exercise over a period of weeks (possibly a factor, but looking at my log, probably not), illness (but I’m not sick, actually very healthy right now).
After evaluating the many possible factors, stress is the most obvious. A few of the other factors probably played a smaller part, but stress was most likely the biggest factor. And it had a major effect, judging from my objective test.
How I Beat Stress
Here’s what I did:
After two stressful, exhausting days, the workout was actually my first step to recovery. It might seem counterintuitive — why exercise when you’re exhausted? And sometimes that can be dangerous — adding the stress of lots of exercise to physical and mental exhaustion can put you at risk of burnout or injury. But I’ve found that a good bout of exertion works wonders for when I’m stressed. So I ran and lifted a few weights. I instantly felt better. Then I meditated for about 10 minutes. Bringing myself back to the moment is a great way to beat stress. I then shut down my computer, got outside, walked, met with a friend and spent a few hours of disconnected time. When I got back, I did return to the computer, but only allowed myself shorter bursts. I also took a short nap (highly, highly recommended). I massaged my shoulders (OK, my wife Eva also helped with the shoulder massage). I read for a bit. I spent some time reading with my kids. And I had some green tea while drinking it slowly and savoring it.
This is a de-stressing routine that works wonders. You don’t need to do the entire routine, but pick three or four and apply generously. |
For the first time the true scale has been revealed of a coldly calculated, deliberate and sustained scheme by scores of Volkswagen executives and engineers to defraud American car buyers and deceive American regulators.
The biggest scandal in the 130-year history of the auto industry has been laid bare in a five-count civil complaint against VW announced by New York State Attorney General Eric Schneiderman and Massachusetts Attorney General Maura Healey on Tuesday.
It goes far beyond in detail what was revealed when the company last month agreed to pay $15.3 billion to settle consumer and regulator lawsuits, alleging a company-wide conspiracy to ignore the consequences of seriously polluting the atmosphere, to lie to regulators, spend millions on patently false advertising and to desperately persist in a cover-up.
The complaint throws a devastating light on a company culture that from the top down remained committed for years to cheating on U.S. emissions tests for not just VW models but also Audi and Porsche models using diesel engines—to the extent that the engines on some models emitted up to 40 times the permitted levels of nitrogen oxide pollution.
Executives even carefully evaluated what the cost would be to the company if they were caught. Reviewing previous cases of violations of environmental regulations by auto manufacturers in the U.S. they predicted that the likely fines posed “only a moderate cost risk.” They cited the highest fine, imposed against Hyundai/Kia as amounting to “barely $91 per vehicle” and added “fines in this amount are not even remotely capable of influencing the share price of a globally operative company such as Volkswagen.”
Portraying what it calls “a cynical fraud on the American car-buying public,” the lawsuit claims that once VW realized, last summer, that regulators in California were about to expose the scandal, the automaker’s staff deleted or removed incriminating data from the company’s records.
The company also embarked on a multi-million-dollar advertising campaign in the U.S. designed to sell diesel as a “green and clean” form of power (complete with ads using towels and coffee filters to show how pure the exhaust was) when they knew that it was anything but.
“Defendants sold vehicles that, based on initial estimates, have illegally emitted over 45,000 additional tons of NOx emissions in the United States,” the lawsuit said, “often into economically disadvantaged communities adjoining highways whose residents are prone to asthma and other respiratory diseases that NOx emissions exacerbate.”
The basic trick used by VW to cheat is already well known. Put simply, the software in the German cars could detect when the car was in the shop for an emissions test—or in a regulator’s lab. On sensing this the computers adjusted the exhaust settings so that the emissions fell within the permitted range. Once the car returned to the road the engine reverted to its dirty normal. This is known as a defeat device.
In the course of 10 years, VW produced six generations of defeat devices. Writing the software, VW engineers spotted that one sure indication that a car was being tested on a dynamometer was if, as it accelerated and decelerated, the steering wheel did not move.
And the New York case provides a whole lot more insight into the lengths VW went to cheat the system. It details six successive versions of defeat devices used across the range of VW, Audi, and Porsche diesels. Moreover, it reveals that VW went a further step to make sure it was not caught. In New York and other states the annual inspections do not actually measure the exhaust emissions. They rely on the car’s onboard diagnostics (OBD) to detect whether the car is running clean.
“To allow its defeat device equipped vehicles to pass New York’s inspection and maintenance tests,” says the lawsuit, “Volkswagen therefore needed to, and in fact did, implement a further cheat: It programmed the OBD systems to falsely report at inspection time that the automobile emissions systems were working properly.”
In part this astonishing narrative is the story of how a mighty corporation was brought down by a handful of dedicated investigators. The fake performance of the diesel engines was finally exposed by a team of engineers from West Virginia University. On drives between Los Angeles and Seattle they discovered that a VW diesel sedan’s emissions exceeded by as much as 35 times the permitted amount of nitrogen oxide.
Following this revelation, according to the attorneys general, VW executives launched a 17-month campaign “to mislead and confuse regulators and the public about the true cause of the high real-driving NOx emissions.”
In this their main adversary appeared in the defiant form of the California Air Reserves Board, or CARB, an environmental watchdog set up by then-Gov. Ronald Reagan in 1967.
VW executives were feeling the heat because they had a great deal at stake: the U.S. launch of new VW sedans for the 2016 model year, all of them being shipped with the sixth generation defeat devices.
In an October 2014 teleconference with the CARB, VW fielded a team of managers who “cited phony technical explanations for the high emissions, omitted any mention of the true cause of the high NOx emissions and assured regulators it could ‘optimize’ the vehicles’ emissions performance by conducted software recalls.”
One of the engineers cited in the complaint, James Liang, had been directly involved in developing the first defeat device in 2006. In 2014 he was sent to California to devise tests intended to bamboozle the CARB and also VW dealers into believing that everything could be fixed by a recall to update software.
By mid-July 2015 the new models were piling up in the docks awaiting clearance from the CARB that they met emissions standards. But the CARB demanded more information and, not getting it, got hold of a 2016 model and tested it. At that point VW knew that the campaign of obfuscation was not working and that their great fraud was finally about to be exposed.
At a meeting with the CARB on Sept. 3 six VW executives admitted to the illegal defeat devices, although it was not until Sept. 18, with an announcement from the Environmental Protection Agency that it was taking action, that the scandal became public and reverberated around the world.
The most senior VW officer listed in the indictment is Martin Winterkorn, who was CEO of Audi from 2002 to 2007, when the original defeat device was developed, and CEO of VW from 2007 until resigning on Sept. 23, 2015. The day before he resigned, Winterkorn made a video statement that referred to “irregularities” in the diesel engines and said the company would act with “the greatest possible openness and transparency.”
A few weeks earlier, according to the complaint, a senior VW attorney advised multiple employees that a litigation hold was about to be issued, making it impossible to destroy or delete documents. A team of at least eight employees, all in the departments involved in designing the defeat devices, then deleted or removed data from the company records.
“Some, but not all, of the data has been recovered,” the lawsuit said.
At the same time VW’s Management Board, the nine men who had presided over the perpetration of fraud, the cover-up and then a public relations debacle that followed its exposure, were awarded $70 million in executive compensation for 2015 alone.
While the true scale of the scandal and the complicity of company executives in the deliberate deception is now becoming a lot clearer, scant attention has so far been paid to the pressures that could have caused them to take such desperate steps in the first place.
Just how VW’s corporate culture was corrupted, as alleged in the complaint, has a lot to do with the company’s consistent failure to become a major player in the North American market, and the uniquely German mindset that they displayed over the many decades of that failure.
For example, a very telling clue to this mindset could be seen in 2001 at the North American International Auto Show in Detroit. One vehicle drew crowds by the thousands. It was a re-imagining of that Woodstock-era dreamboat, the Volkswagen Microbus.
VW presented the new version as a concept car. It brilliantly fused nostalgia for the original, that little bus with the cute rounded edges and panoramic windows, with 21st century technology and interior luxury.
Auto journalists raved. Pictures of the new Microbus appeared on the front pages of scores of newspapers, along with flashback images of the original in the psychedelic colors applied by hippie roadies.
For years VW had been struggling to find a breakout vehicle just like this that would give the brand a new energy in the North American market.
But the reborn Microbus was stillborn. A production model never got the green light from VW management in Wolfsburg, Germany.
Mark Rechtin, the auto editor at Consumer Reports, cited the Microbus episode as symptomatic of VW’s Germany-first thinking.
“People would have gone berserk for this thing,” he said, “but the politics of the organization and the pridefulness of the home headquarters leads to the attitude ‘We are German engineers. We know how to make things that work right, that are logical, that show this is the way a car should be and Americans should understand how great this is.”
The Daily Beast asked Rechtin, with many years of experience of covering the global auto industry, why, of all the world markets, the U.S. has always defeated VW’s best efforts to become a major player.
“This is a brand that has the technology, the design skills, the scale of production and by all rights they should be as successful as any of the major Japanese brands in the U.S. but they just can’t seem to get out of their own way,” Rechtin said.
“You have to break a million to be a player in America, and VW shows no signs of getting close to that. They had planned to double sales to 800,000 units by 2018 but the scandal has put in doubt that they can get anywhere near that.”
To give context to the competitive pressures on VW it is necessary to begin in 2005. Toyota was the most successful foreign manufacturer in the North American passenger car market. And Toyota, once viewed as conservative in its engineering, had produced a revolutionary sedan, the gas-electric-powered hybrid Prius that eco-minded Americans were suddenly warming to.
VW had no experience in hybrids and no inclination to go there. They did, however, have a long history with diesels, and diesels offered the potential of at least matching the high mileage-per-gallon of the Prius. The only problem was that even the newest diesel technology did not offer the hope of meeting tougher new U.S. emissions standards.
The New York lawsuit reveals internal VW documents under the title of “Volkswagen’s Opportunities with Clean Diesel” and the company’s declared intent to “OWN the segment before the competition comes to market” and to “own Clean Diesel in the way Toyota owns Hybrid.” VW marketing was instructed to use Clean Diesel as an “environmental halo” in its campaigns.
In fact, the revelation of VW’s cheating explained a lot to engineers at Honda and Mazda who had been trying to figure out the secret of VW’s magic sauce. They were so effectively stymied that they decided not to compete with VW because they thought that the German diesels couldn’t be matched.
But, ironically, even the great diesel swindle has done little to help build the VW brand in North America.
“They were basically making one car for the world,” Rechtin told The Daily Beast. “The way they treat overseas markets is very paternalistic. If the overseas markets have any say at all it’s basically in color and trim.”
Looked at with a 60-year perspective VW’s failure to give Americans a mass-produced sedan with, say, the record of Toyota’s perennially dominant Camry is even more astonishing. In the annals of car marketing one campaign remains unequalled for its hutzpah and brilliance in branding: the launch of the original VW Beetle in the 1950s. They never found another campaign or product to match it.
So it’s enlightening to note that the story of Toyota, the foreign brand that bestrides the North American market year on year, did not begin well.
“Their first products were terrible,” Rechtin said. “In the early 1960s they basically walked away from the American market after three years. They went back with their tail between their legs, admitting that they didn’t know what they were doing.
“It took until the late 1960s for them to produce a car that people could respect. They built a beachhead and market share on the West Coast, then moved to the Southwest and up the Eastern Seaboard. By the late 1980s they were building spectacular products.”
And what did Toyota do that the Germans did not?
“Genshi Genbutsu”—a Japanese maxim usually interpreted as “go and see” but, more literally, “actual place, actual thing.”
In other words, Toyota, Honda, and Nissan listened to what the Americans wanted.
“If you’re a chief engineer at Toyota, working on products largely sold in America, you’re going to live in America, you’re not going to make ivory tower pronouncements from Japan,” Rechtin said. “You’re going to drive prototypes for hundreds of thousands of miles on American roads. That’s what they do. It’s real world experience. German chief engineers may get on a plane to America once or twice, but that’s it. For years German cars didn’t have cupholders because in Germany they said ‘You’re driving, what are you doing drinking soda pop?’”
VW persisted in believing that “German engineering” was simply in itself enough to make a brand, employing the slogan “Das Auto” to make it language-explicit, even though they proved incapable of making a diesel engine that would meet emission standards.
And, it turns out that, notwithstanding the scandal, German engineering, at least in the hands of VW, is not always that great. Consumer Reports has unique independence and authority when it comes to testing new cars—they buy as many as 70 cars a year as regular customers from dealers, not taking special test cars with company plates, and 740,000 readers give annual follow-up reviews on reliability and satisfaction.
And reliability has been a persistent problem with VW models in the U.S.
“They make fun vehicles to drive,” Rechtin said, “and they always do well in the way they handle in the road tests but the reliability just isn’t there, especially when the car is new to the market. For all the raves that the new Golf has received its reliability is below average and so therefore we cannot recommend it.”
There is another puzzle. When it comes to quality and reliability, auto analysts and reviewers have often drawn a comparison between the corporate pairings of VW and its upscale sibling Audi and Toyota and its upscale brand Lexus.
The difference is striking. Consumer Reports combines the results of road tests with predicted reliability and owner satisfaction to score the relative performance of brands.
“Lexus and Toyota were within shouting distance of each other, well above the industry average, but while Audi topped the rankings VW finished a distant 15th,” Rechtin said.
In the end, what’s really damning is not just the “we don’t need to listen to you, America, you need to listen to us” arrogance of VW’s managers but how long they have persisted in this belief.
There’s really not much of a mystery in why Toyota went from zero sales to selling two and a half million vehicles a year in the U.S. in little more than four decades.
Genshi Genbutsu—they came, they listened, they conquered. And they didn’t cheat. |
The Tennessee Titans have their man.
The team announced Saturday that it has promoted interim leader Mike Mularkey to the role of head coach.
It's a move that comes as little surprise after Rapoport noted that this was Mularkey's gig "to lose" after the coach was "given every indication that he is getting the job."
Mularkey took over the interim role in November after the Titans fired coach Ken Whisenhunt following a 1-6 start. Tennessee went 2-7 the rest of the way to finish at 3-13 on the year -- missing the playoffs for the seventh consecutive season.
Tennessee had three months to spread a wide net for their next coach, but opted for a tight search that included interviews with Lions defensive coordinator Teryl Austin, Jaguars assistant head coach Doug Marrone and Titans defensive play-caller Ray Horton.
Mularkey's hiring comes after Jon Robinson, the former director of player personnel for the Bucs, was named Tennessee's new general manager. Robinson's former ties to New England left some to wonder if Patriots play-caller Josh McDaniels might get a chance to audition for the chance to coach second-year quarterback Marcus Mariota.
Instead, the task falls to Mularkey, who flamed out in Buffalo and Jacksonville and holds an 18-39 career record as a head/interim coach in the NFL. |
Cornucopia 0.3.3 - Legendaries, MI's, Relics and more! Grim Dawn: Cornucopia v0.3.3I1
hotfixed/bugfixed 3/18/17
Cornucopia003 Dropbox Link
Do not use the version below. It's for whoever has been ignoring that it will be discontinued. The version below will not exist in the next release. We are abandoning the below 002 version because it used a naming method for files we had to use when the mod tools were first released and there were errors in files sharing vanilla file's name. But the below version is harder to merge for other modders, and takes up more space on your computer. We were going to let it run for one more release but it's just been a major PITA and just complicated the process of development for Ceno and I. I personally can no longer stomach it, and coupled with solid reasons we're just going to abandon it now. It won't receive hotfix updates either, so please only use 003 above.
Cornucopia002 Dropbox Link
Mirror Link
Introduction
Are you guys excited? We’ve been working on this since 1.0.0.6 vanilla! (yikes) Long story short, real life came for both Ceno and I and we made due. But here it is, Cornucopia v0.3.3! Item phase: Legendaries/MI’s/Relics! Be assured that we need your help more than ever to get feedback on our changes. Some of what we’ve done has definitely gone too far, some not far enough. The simple fact of the matter is that the scope of this version was far too large for us to personalyl test. So please be patient and let us know your opinions on things (after you’ve actually played with them) and we’ll do our best to release hotfixes tuning this into a reasonable place. Be aware that we are now finally entering the next phase after this: Making the game harder again, but in hopefully more interesting ways. Version 0.4 will be monster balance, and we’ll most likely divide it up by each act (0.41, 0.42 etc.)
I personally plan to do a lot of hotfix support for things that fell to a lesser priority rung in our development but still nags at my soul. I’ll probably tweak faction rares a bit more, update some more epics that still suck, etc. So do provide us feedback, elaborate or not. We also ask for your patience in this specific release because we have finally tackled rebalancing the attributes! (Changes below) Attribute changes affect all enemies of course, and while we tried to balance the changes out a bit via the enemy difficulty modifiers, some enemies heavily slanted toward singular attributes may need to be fine tuned individual. A lot of this won’t make it until 0.4 but I will try to handle worst case outliers in hotfixes.
Basically: Balancing attributes is rather complex and may take a lot of work to get it right, so that means multiple iterations. We hope you’ll be patient because in getting this right we will create a much more rich and interesting meta where your attribute choices matter, and monster attributes also define them a little better as well. Another thing worth noting is that a TON of the skill icons for the abilities/buffs we added are the same as already existing icons. Well… art takes a lot of time and we didn’t feel like delaying this release another month or more because of some small square icons. So be patient because they’re placeholders and eventually they’ll be phased out for some fresh ones (probably just recolors of existing icons lolol).
And as always, consider that some of our changes may be made with long-term goals in mind, so what seems OP now may not seem OP after monsters, specifically heroes and bosses, get a good deal tougher. Finally, many thanks to Kathanious who helped us implement all these changes, his assistance was a great boon to this mod. Final Note: The hover-text on attributes in your inventory screen is inaccurate. PMed Zantai to see if I can edit the text there and fix it... but if not you will have to reference the change below... which I will put in bold
Please see https://docs.google.com/document/d/1...it?usp=sharing for our google doc listing all changes. It’s fucking huge and worth skimming over. The changes in this forum thread only represent a fraction of what is in this link
[Game] Marginally reduced enemy OA in Ultimate difficulty on account of other changes made here. Substantially reduced enemy DA in all difficulties on account of other changes here, but all in all, enemies will have a very slight DA buff in Ultimate.
Revamped Attributes! Not balanced yet, especially in regard to monsters but this paves the way for future changes that will be balanced around this system. Need feedback for tweaks until we get it right regardless. Physique: Removed Defensive Ability. HP per physique 2.5 -> 3. HP regen per physique 0.04 -> approx. 0.07. Added physique hp regen multiplier of (1 + (physique/3500)) so if you have 3500 physique you’d be multiplying your hp regen by 2. Cunning: Added 0.6 DA per cunning. 0.5 OA per cunning -> 0.8. Removed physical and pierce damage bonuses. Spirit: Gained Cunning’s %damage type bonuses. Added 0.25 DA per spirit. 2 energy per spirit -> 2.5, +0.25% energy regen per point -> ~+0.3%, +0.01 flat energy regen -> +0.04. Now gives 0.45% all damage per point.
Changed Offensive Ability Crit Threshold multipliers from x1.1/1.2/1.3/1.4/1.5 to x1.05/1.1/1.2/1.3/1.4. Also changed the final crit threshold from 135% chance to hit to 140% (you need a higher OA - enemyDA difference to reach the 1.4 multiplier now)
Fixed issue where Legendaries introduced in 1.0.0.6 weren’t dropping in Cornucopia.
Cleaned up component tooltip text to correctly reflect which slots components could be placed in.
Merged the latest version of the GDReforge mod.
Reduced enemy health in Ultimate to Vanilla, 1.0.0.7 levels, but increased enemy health on Normal/Elite to 1.0.0.7 levels as well. Increased enemy movement speed on Ultimate by a flat 5%.
Swept through the files of Cornucopia in comparison with the base game and patched up any inconsistencies we neglected between version releases for Grim Dawn.
Merged a variant of the autoloot mod (People Are Lazy). This variant only autoloots rare (purple) crafting materials, no components.
Fixed around 70 bugs, including certain completion bonuses for mythical relics not rolling correctly. Let us know of any persistent issues. [Itemization] Enabled Spears and Staves on item skills as appropriate. The schematic used for doing so is thus: any skills which required a caster offhand or a 2H ranged weapon will also work with Staves. Any skills requiring a 1H melee weapon will work with Spears.
Following the schema described above, Augments/Components are now usable on Spears/Staves. Spears count as Swords for edge cases. Staves use Potent Augments, Spears regular Augments.
All legendary items below lvl 65 have now been raised to 65 or higher, and had their stats improved. We want to create a higher variety of end-gear choices and we felt there were so many legendary items with cool concepts and/or abilities that it’d be nice to be able to have them end up on your finished character. Base stats have been increased for most legendaries that had their level increased, among other changes we’ll list.
Mandates are now tradeable (previously could be put in stash, but not dropped or traded).
Reduced Pierce Chance of Rifles with 100% Chance ((Empowered) Will of Fate, Vortex of Souls) to 70% chance so as to bring them in line with other rifles while maintaining their uniqueness.
Combat Medic Mark heal nerfed.
Obsidian Seal now gives +1 flame touched
Empowered Obsidian Seal now gives +2 flame touched
Increased the duration of consumable elixirs without cooldowns (or 1 second cooldowns) and improved the effects of those with cooldowns. The intent here is partially a QoL change so you don’t need to spam Oils so much, but also a buff to the existing Tinctures to get them to be used more often: Elixir of the Hunt: Duration increased from 30 seconds to 10 minutes. Bloodfang Oil: Duration increased from 30 seconds to 90 seconds. Arcanum Oil: Duration increased from 30 seconds to 90 seconds. Venomfang Oil: Duration increased from 30 seconds to 90 seconds. Dermapteran Oil: Duration increased from 30 seconds to 90 seconds. Heartseeker Oil: Duration increased from 30 seconds to 90 seconds. Ice-Blood Oil: Duration increased from 30 seconds to 90 seconds. Kymon’s Sacred Oil: Duration increased from 30 seconds to 90 seconds. Rhowari Oil: Duration increased from 30 seconds to 90 seconds. Stoneheart Oil: Duration increased from 30 seconds to 5 minutes. Blade-Ward Tincture: Increased Duration from 10 seconds to 25 seconds; Cooldown from 30 seconds to 40 seconds. Swapped +400% Piercing Retaliation with +500% All Retaliation. Courageous Tincture: Cooldown reduced from 60 seconds to 1 second (identical to ‘Oils’). Duration increased from 30 seconds to 10 minutes. Now also grants 5% Physical Resist to affected allies. Frostguard Tincture: Duration increased from 5 seconds to 8 seconds; Cooldown reduced from 30 seconds to 15 seconds. Now also reduces enemies’ DA. Kymon’s Wrath Tincture: Doubled the duration of the Burn DoT. Wrath of the Beast Tincture: Duration increased from 10 seconds to 60 seconds. Cooldown increased from 30 seconds to 90 seconds. Now grants your pets +12% OA but -4% DA.
[Class & Skills]
Devotion Amatok - Blizzard: Reduced projectiles 20->12. Shrank target radius a bit. But boosted cold damage by 68% and frostburn by 75% (multiplicatively). So this is ever so slightly a buff, and was done to reduce fps drops from blizzard going off.
Targo the Builder - Fixed a bug where the shield recovery node made you worse at using a shield.
Anvil - Targo’s Hammers: Halved stun chance. It was found that, because we removed the ability for the hammers to be broken when they collided with a projectile, it was far too easy to amass a collection of hammers that could permanently stun a crowd of enemies. It should be harder to do so now than before, but may still be possible...in which case we may well wind up removing the stun chance altogether and maybe replacing it with something else...Armor Reduction, maybe? -Ceno
Viper - reverted our nerf, now has 20% elemental resist reduction. “I was wrong” -Doom Soldier Blade Arc - Now works with Spears.
Blitz - Now works with Spears.
Shred - Now works with Staves.
Veterancy - Increased Health Regenerated per second by a whopping 108% (multiplicatively). At 20/10, you’ll have a permanent Giant’s Blood’s (Devotion proc) worth of health regen (240/second). Following this adjustment, non-Ultimate ranks had the health regen reduced by 33% (multiplicatively), for a slight increase in effectiveness at earlier ranks before the gargantuan increase you can get with substantial investment. Demolitionist Fixed the layout of this fucking mastery already.
Removed flat damage and AoE nature of Ulzuin’s Chosen. Now behaves like any other Exclusive Buff. -I thought I already did this >.> -Ceno
Searing Strike - Now works with Spears. No longer works with 2H weapons (this was a Cornucopia bug, not a Vanilla bug).
Searing Might - Now works with Staves.
Mortar Trap - 5s cooldown -> 4.5s. Now can summon 2 at a time right from rank 1, up to 3 at your first ultimate rank. Occultist Bloody Pox -%hp regen now scales to 250% at +10 ultimate rank. Removed -fire resist. No idea why this was here. Added scaling for -OA and -DA. Nerfed ranks 1-16 by 8%.
Fevered Rage - Nerfed Damage Modified 25% -> 15%. Given how much I buffed the BP line’s base values, this was too much. Oversight that i forgot to do this in the first place. May need more nerfing.
Wasting - Nerfed ranks 1-16 by 8%. Nightblade Shadow Strike - Now works with Spears. Arcanist A popular point of contention with Arcanist’s iteration of PRM is that it simply didn’t do enough damage and had too high an energy cost (similar to AAR, hm?). We had previously increased its damage in some places and reduced the energy cost of Proliferation, but now we’re taking it one more (slight) step further.
Panetti’s Replicating Missile - Reduced energy cost in Ultimate ranks by 1/rank, down from 56 to 46 at 26/16. Damage at all ranks increased by 8%, multiplicatively.
Distortion - Energy cost at 21 and 22/12 reduced to 31 and 32, from 32 and 34, respectively.
Supercharged - Now has identical energy cost requirements as Distortion at all ranks. %Chance of Stun Target increased by 2.5% (flat) at all ranks.
Devastation - Now works with Staves.
Albrecht’s Aether Ray - Now enabled to work with Staves.
Trozan’s Sky Shard - Removed the scaling radius we added and moved it to frozen core.
Frozen Core - Increased frostburn damage by 20%, improved %cold damage scaling, especially in ultimate ranks. Added projectile explosion radius scaling. Hopefully this makes this stop being a 1 point wonder. Now only scales to a max of 2.3 radius. Was too consistent on top of our other buffs. This skill is still top tier, trust me.
Mirror of Ereoctes - Now starts at only 65% damage absorb. Scaling to 88% at 12/12, 90 at ultimate rank 13 and onward, but gains a bit of duration in ultimate ranks. Feel free to ask me (doom) why I don’t let this scale to 100% yet let some items give 100% invuln. I have good reasons. Shaman Savagery - Removed the 9th Charge Level. Energy cost of Ultimate ranks increased by 0.33/rank, unnoticeable at early Ultimate ranks but raised from 10->13 at 26/16. This is intended to be a minor nerf to Savagery’s double-scaling with % Weapon Damage and the charge multiplier to bring things like the Ultos set back in line with other sets.
Mogdrogen’s Pact and Heart of the Wild. Took a flat 10% of the bonus health from heart of the wild and moved it onto Mogdrogen’s Pact, dispersed all the way through it’s ultimate ranks. Mog’s Pact gets the 10% health at 20/12 so you’ll need +8.
Might of the Bear - Now works with Staves.
Wind Devil - Merged 1.0.0.7 changes. Also increased its base movement speed from 0.8 to 2.7 (slightly exceeding that of a player with 150% movespeed, the Cornucopia cap). It seemed as though part of the problem with Wind Devil’s AI was that it took forever for them to reach their targets and, once their target died, it took too long for them to get back to helping the player. We may make them faster still, depending on how this plays out.
Maelstrom - Merged 1.0.0.7 changes. Also made the lightning interval 1.5 seconds rather than 2.0 seconds. This results in 2 extra instances of damage over the 12 second duration.
Storm/Corrupted Totem: Increased Damage scaling (to approximately that of 1.0.0.7). Fixed bug where Corrupted Totem was not dealing Vitality Damage. Resources
Old Version:
Development Thread: Mirror Link Thank you 420WeedWizard for hosting the mirror! Full Patch Notes - This post only represents a fraction of this release, and covers mostly over-arching changes.Are you guys excited? We’ve been working on this since 1.0.0.6 vanilla! (yikes) Long story short, real life came for both Ceno and I and we made due. But here it is, Cornucopia v0.3.3! Item phase: Legendaries/MI’s/Relics! Be assured that we need your help more than ever to get feedback on our changes. Some of what we’ve done has definitely gone too far, some not far enough. The simple fact of the matter is that the scope of this version was far too large for us to personalyl test. So please be patient and let us know your opinions on things (after you’ve actually played with them) and we’ll do our best to release hotfixes tuning this into a reasonable place. Be aware that we are now finally entering the next phase after this: Making the game harder again, but in hopefully more interesting ways. Version 0.4 will be monster balance, and we’ll most likely divide it up by each act (0.41, 0.42 etc.)I personally plan to do a lot of hotfix support for things that fell to a lesser priority rung in our development but still nags at my soul. I’ll probably tweak faction rares a bit more, update some more epics that still suck, etc. So do provide us feedback, elaborate or not. We also ask for your patience in this specific release because we have finally tackled rebalancing the attributes! (Changes below) Attribute changes affect all enemies of course, and while we tried to balance the changes out a bit via the enemy difficulty modifiers, some enemies heavily slanted toward singular attributes may need to be fine tuned individual. A lot of this won’t make it until 0.4 but I will try to handle worst case outliers in hotfixes.Basically: Balancing attributes is rather complex and may take a lot of work to get it right, so that means multiple iterations. We hope you’ll be patient because in getting this right we will create a much more rich and interesting meta where your attribute choices matter, and monster attributes also define them a little better as well. Another thing worth noting is that a TON of the skill icons for the abilities/buffs we added are the same as already existing icons. Well… art takes a lot of time and we didn’t feel like delaying this release another month or more because of some small square icons. So be patient because they’re placeholders and eventually they’ll be phased out for some fresh ones (probably just recolors of existing icons lolol).And as always, consider that some of our changes may be made with long-term goals in mind, so what seems OP now may not seem OP after monsters, specifically heroes and bosses, get a good deal tougher. Finally, many thanks to Kathanious who helped us implement all these changes, his assistance was a great boon to this mod.Old Version: v0.3.2 Development Thread: Development Thread __________________
Come check out mods I've worked on!
Cornucopia - - - "http://www.grimdawn.com/forums/showthread.php?t=37644"
Grim Hell (and 2 smaller mods merged within) - - - "http://www.grimdawn.com/forums/showthread.php?t=79573"
# of level 100 characters I have atm: 102 Last edited by adoomgod; 03-18-2017 at 06:20 AM . |
Right-wing preacher Lance Wallnau posted a video on Periscope today in which he declared that if Americans rebel against the will of God and give Democrats control of Congress in the 2018 elections and allow them to impeach President Trump, it’ll mean that “the spirit of Antichrist” has triumphed over the church.
Streaming from inside the Center for National Renewal in Washington, D.C., with whom he apparently has an official connection, Wallnau declared that charismatic Pentecostal Christians such as himself have been called to “have access to presidents as the voice of God” so that they can “release this warrior angel for America.”
“If America goes down,” he warned, “if we screw up these midterms coming up, if we let the devil put a false impeachment on this president, if the will of man rebels against the will of the majority of the people that put him in through the Electoral College, then the spirit of Antichrist beat the spirit that was in the church of Christ.”
“So that is why I am at the gates of influence,” Wallnau added. “Because Washington is where the gates of hell want to take over and it’s not gonna happen.” |
E! News has reached out to Mirra's rep for comment.
City of Greenville mayor, Allen Thomas, also released a statement: "We mourn the loss today of a great friend and wonderful human being who touched the lives of so many around the world with his gift. He called Greenville, North Carolina home and was as humble a guy talking with kids on a street corner about bikes as he was in his element on the world stage. A young life with so much to offer was taken too soon."
The release from the police department continues to state that they will be handling the death investigation, and that the family of Dave Mirra would appreciate privacy during this very difficult time.
Mirra is survived by his wife and two children.
"Holding nearly every accolade possible for a BMX or action sports athlete, Mirra has won everything from 'Freestyler of The Year' by BMX Magazine to the ESPN Action Sports and Music Award for BMX Rider of the Year in 2000," his website states.
"After a brief stint hosting the popular MTV series Real World/Road Rules Challenge, Mirra and his wife settled down in Greenville, N.C., quickly making it the hub of the BMX world."
Aside from being a fixture in the world of BMX riding, Mirra was a proud husband and father. Posting various photographs with his two young children, the 41-year-old often tagged the snapshots #BeaDadNotaFad.
He also shared a quote about fatherhood on his Twitter photo that read:
"As a father, you are automatically inducted into the Hall of Responsibility. "Life is about ups and downs, great times and tough times. My responsibility as a father is to show my kids balance, education and character. Although I'm not perfect, I am always keeping my eyes open for a better way to be the best father I can be."
Our thoughts go out to his loved ones during this tragic time. |
Sarnia City Hall (BlackburnNews.com photo by Melanie Irwin)
Tensions Flare Between Mayor And Council Over Closed Meeting
The ongoing feud between Sarnia’s mayor and some members of council has reared its ugly head again.
A lengthy public meeting to discuss plans for a new residential development in Brights Grove, was overshadowed by a debate over the scheduling of Monday’s closed meeting.
When Mayor Mike Bradley stated that the closed in-camera meeting to discuss the Centennial Park boat ramp should have been public, Councillor Matt Mitro interrupted.
“Absolutely untrue,” Mitro said over Bradley.
Bradley responded and apologized to the general public, and stated “this is an internal issue. This is why developers may have some challenges in Sarnia.”
“Point of order,” Mitro challenged. “If you wish to debate sir, get out of the chair, have someone else come, and let’s go.”
Mitro’s comment was not addressed, despite its implication.
Mayor Bradley, who didn’t attend the closed meeting, went on to question why he wasn’t consulted about it.
“If the ombudsman was to investigate, they would come to me about why the meeting was called,” said Bradley. “I was not consulted on that meeting.”
Councillor Mitro pointed out that councillor Anne-Marie Gillis — who was absent Monday — was appointed to act as an intermediary for all communications between city staff and Mayor Mike Bradley last fall.
“You’re saying that you are not being consulted and you’re not having the opportunity as chair to be consulted in the process to set up the meeting, is that correct?” said Mitro. “As I recall, we set up a process by which councillor Gillis was to be the go between, have you consulted with her on this matter?”
Sarnia council reported from the closed meeting that Golder Associates had been dismissed as the contract administrator for Centennial Park, due to unsatisfactory performance.
The city will now act as its own contact administrator for the construction of the boat ramp.
During the regular meeting, council approved up to $680,000 in additional spending for Bre-Ex Construction to build the ramp in the water.
City staff said in a report to council that a dewatering contractor was consulted and geo-tech work done has shown that dewatering the site and building a boat ramp in a dry environment would cost an additional $2.2-million.
It’s not known when the work will commence, but staff expect construction and installation could to take ten-12 weeks.
Area boaters are being accommodated at the Bridgeview Marina boat ramp until the new one at Sarnia Bay Marina is operational. |
The Premier League is understood to be confident that any legal attempt to reverse its decision not to dock Sunderland points for fielding an ineligible player would fail.
The Observer exclusively revealed on Sunday that Norwich, Fulham and Cardiff have instructed lawyers to challenge the decision to merely fine the Wearside club a six figure sum despite their deployment of Ji Dong-won in four league games.
In theory a points forfeiture could dictate that Gus Poyet's side were relegated rather than, as seems most likely, Norwich, but the so called "gang of three" appear to have overlooked the formidable strength of Sunderland's potential defence.
With no Premier League appeal mechanism available any action would involve suing the governing body at vast expense. Logistically it would be virtually impossible for a case to be heard by a court before August and the start of next season.
Although there have been a string of precedents in which clubs lost points for selecting ineligible players, Premier League rules allow scope for leniency in situations such as Ji's which involve a lack of international clearance.
Moreover the South Korea forward was officially registered with the Premier League and Football Association as part of Sunderland's 25-man match-day squad at the time of the offence. Both governing bodies had ratified his inclusion on their electronic extranet systems.
While a clerical error on an online Fifa form meant that Ji technically lacked international clearance after a loan stint at Augsburg last season, Sunderland remain adamant the form was originally filled in correctly but information was subsequently deleted by accident during its electronic submission.
With Ji having returned to Augsburg in January the mistake would almost certainly have gone undetected had Sunderland not noticed that his name failed to feature on a Fifa list compiled for doping control purposes and immediately contacted the Premier League.
Due to the mitigating factors it issued a discreet fine, details of which later leaked to a national newspaper. At the time Sunderland said: "The club has never accepted any wrongdoing but did acknowledge that a technical fault occurred."
The hushing-up of the incident understandably prompted annoyance but the Premier League still acted within the remit of rule 6.9 of its handbook. It states: "Any club found to have played an ineligible player in a match shall have any points gained deducted from its record and have levied upon it a fine. The company may vary this decision in respect of the points gained only where the ineligibility was due to the failure to obtain an international transfer certificate."
Paolo Di Canio's side gained only one point – in a 1-1 draw at Southampton – during the four league games in which Ji was involved, primarily as a substitute making minimal impact. It was initially thought Sunderland's rivals accepted that docking them a point would have been overly harsh with a heavy fine representing an appropriate sanction.
The issue was aired during a Premier League shareholders' meeting in early April and no club objected. This fact could weaken any legal case.
The ruling body invited anyone harbouring concerns to ask for further information as to the reasoning. Given the horrendous cost of relegation, three clubs, believed to be relegated Fulham and Cardiff as well as Norwich, have done so, two in early April and one more recently. Sunderland and the Premier League await their next move with interest.
The Norwich manager Neil Adams refused to be drawn on his club's next move following their 0-0 draw with Chelsea which all but ends their Premier League survival hopes. "It's not for me. I'm not ducking that one, but it's for the board," he said. "They'll look at it, I'm sure, but I wouldn't want to comment on that. It's not a football matter. But I'm well aware of what's happened. They're aware of it, and I'm aware that they're aware of it. But that's for them. My brief is football matters. That's the legal side." |
Republicans are now openly campaigning on the fact that they want to shoot down Russian planes over Syria, and seem to be trying to out tough-guy each other for who would be willing to start World War III the quickest.
At least that’s what it sounds like from their comments in the past week, where most of them have stepped up their advocacy of a no-fly zone (and ground troops) in Syria while bragging that they have no problem shooting down Russian fighter jets to enforce it.
The still-somehow Republican frontrunner Ben Carson said of his call for a no-fly zone and Russian planes: “You shoot them down, absolutely” then added “Whatever happens next, we deal with it”. No word on what he would do if “Whatever happens next” involves some of the thousands of nuclear weapons Russia still has in their arsenal.
US 'reasonably certain' it has killed 'Jihadi John' – as it happened Read more
Carly Fiorina said “I think we must be prepared” to shoot down Russian jets, saying separately that she would never talk to Putin beforehand (while at the same time bragging that she talked to him before). Lindsey Graham, an asterisk in the Republican polls who’s never met a war he didn’t like, opined that he “would shoot [Putin’s] planes down, I would literally shoot his planes down”.
Chris Christie said he would “call Putin, and tell him, ‘Listen, we’re enforcing a no-fly zone against everyone, and that includes you, so: don’t test me.’” After being asked “And then he flies through your territory?” by a reporter, Christie responded: “You take him down.” Just in case there was any ambiguity, he confirmed he meant shooting their fighter jets out of the sky and potentially starting a hot war with Russia because “we spent untold American treasure and blood to eliminate the Soviet Union. We should not let it come back”.
The smarter candidates don’t say that they would shoot down Russian planes out loud - since that is insane - they just call Putin “a gangster”, like Marco Rubio did during the most recent debate, and insist on a no-fly zone that would inevitably lead to such a confrontation. Jeb Bush too called for a no-fly zone during the Fox Business debate this week, then two minutes later declared that the US shouldn’t be “the world’s policeman”, apparently without a hint of self-awareness.
'Jihadi John' killed my friend, but his own alleged death won't affect the war | Sulome Anderson Read more
Amazingly, the rest of the candidates are making Donald Trump’s position on Syria – that he backs Putin’s airstrikes in Russia, saying “I am all for it, 100%” – look almost sane in comparison. That position on Syria is disturbing too, just not as disturbing as the rest of the Republican field, who are itching for full-scale war with Syria and Russia.
The sole Republican exception to all this is Rand Paul, who was the only one who gave a rational and logical answer to the question of what the United States should do in Syria. He claimed that shooting down Russian planes is a dangerous idea and that continuing to arm various factions associated with al-Qaida in a civil war is only going to lead to more long-term problems for the United States. He deserves more credit for being so honest, unfortunately he’s being drowned out by those itching for another cold war.
On the Democratic side, Hillary Clinton is at least being somewhat less apocalyptic in her call for a no-fly zone, saying that it would need Russian support or it wouldn’t work. But while her plan is not as calamitous as those of her Republican counterparts, it is still a dangerous idea for the region and almost certainly will ensnare the US troops in Syria for years to come.
'Boots on the ground' and other military jargon are designed to confuse | Scott Beauchamp Read more
As journalist Adam Johnson has continually pointed out, it seems most people think that no-fly zones are enforced by magic. But they aren’t: they involve destroying the air defenses of the entire country. That means the US will have to take out Syria’s air force and ground artillery for it to come close to “working.”
That will require tens of thousands of troops (General Dempsey told Congress it would take 70,000), untold billions of dollars and an outright war with the al-Assad regime on one side and Isis on the other. Virtually every no-fly zone in the past – the 2011 military intervention Libya, for example – has led to direct war. And there’s no game plan for what comes next if and when that happens.
So while Republican candidates are itching for war with one of the world’s biggest military powers, with one of the largest arsenals of nuclear weapons in the world, I guess there is one silver lining: they’re finally being honest about what a no-fly zone entails. |
Media playback is unsupported on your device Media caption The BBC's Aleem Maqbool takes an early look at Senator Rand Paul's newly launched presidential campaign.
Senator Rand Paul has announced he is launching a 2016 presidential election campaign on the Republican ticket.
"Today begins the journey to take America back," he said in a campaign event in Kentucky.
Mr Paul, a Kentucky senator, stands out from the Republican pack because of his comparatively libertarian views.
He becomes the second Republican to enter the contest that concludes in November 2016.
Speaking in front of a large crowd at the official campaign kick-off, he said: "The Washington machine that gobbles up our freedoms and invades every nook and cranny of our lives must be stopped."
A first-term senator hailing from one of the country's most well-known libertarian families, Mr Paul first held elected office when he rode a wave of Tea Party popularity to the US senate in 2010.
Once there, he soon drew attention when he spoke for more than 12 hours in protest about President Barack Obama's drone policy and the nomination of John Brennan to lead the CIA.
Image copyright Reuters
Image copyright Getty Images
Rand Paul - at a glance
an ophthalmologist and Kentucky senator
a libertarian and Republican, also son of Ron Paul, who ran for president several times
anti-surveillance and anti-drone, but conservative on same-sex marriage and abortion
attacked by some in his party as being isolationist on foreign policy
has testy relationship with senior party figures like John McCain and Mitch McConnell
Listen to a BBC Radio profile
The danger and promise of Rand Paul's father
He has proven to be a thorn in the side of many of his fellow Republicans, openly challenging them on issues such as government surveillance, drone policies and sanctions on Iran and Cuba.
He has also questioned the size of the US military and proposed relaxing drug laws that lock up offenders at a high cost for tax payers.
It is not clear how successful Mr Paul will be amongst mainstream Republican supporters.
His father, former member of the US House of Representatives Ron Paul, ran several unsuccessful presidential campaigns that had strong appeal to libertarians who favour limited government and lower taxes.
At the scene: Anthony Zurcher, BBC News
On a stormy Tuesday morning, deep in the bowels of the massive 1,200 room Galt Hotel in downtown Louisville, Kentucky, Rand Paul launched his bid for the 2016 Republican presidential nomination.
Mr Paul doesn't sound like your average Republican presidential candidate, and at times his event didn't look much like a traditional Republican presidential kick-off. Very early on, he criticised both Republicans and Democrats for being creatures of a political establishment that is unresponsive to the American people.
"Too often when Republicans have won we have squandered our victory by becoming part of the Washington machine" he said "That's not who I am."
The morning started with a video by country music singer John Rich featuring a blue-collar factor worker being laid off and the refrain, "Here' in the real world they're shutting Detroit down" - interspersed with wonky sound bites of the Kentucky senator talking about "economic freedom zones".
Enter, the 'fuzzy' libertarian Rand Paul
Mr Paul is expected, however, to run a very tech-savvy campaign that could create appeal to new Republican demographics, like young voters.
Indeed, the campaign's official announcement first came in a post on his website several hours before he appeared on stage in Louisville, Kentucky.
"I am running for president to return our country to the principles of liberty and limited government," he said in the online message.
He joins Senator Ted Cruz as the two most prominent declared candidates.
He could face up to 20 other fellow Republicans doing battle for the nomination, including former Florida Governor Jeb Bush and Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker, both of whom are expected to enter the race soon.
Image copyright AP Image caption Former Texas Rep Ron Paul and his wife, Carol, talk before their son's campaign announcement
Image copyright Getty Images Image caption Sen Paul in New Hampshire, an important primary state, last month
The triumphant individual is widely expected to battle with Hillary Clinton, the Democratic favourite and former US Secretary of State.
Ms Clinton has yet to officially announce her candidacy, but is expected to do so in the next two weeks.
Mr Paul attended Baylor University, but did not graduate. He later attended Duke Medical School.
Mr Paul lives in Bowling Green, Kentucky. His wife Kelly and he have three sons. |
Israel has angrily rejected what it called a "one-sided" resolution by the UN human rights council today that backed a highly critical report on the Gaza war and opened the way to possible international war crimes investigations.
The council voted to endorse the report by a South African judge, Richard Goldstone, which accused both Israel and Hamas of committing war crimes and possible crimes against humanity during the three-week war in Gaza in January. Goldstone, whose work was hailed by leading international human rights groups, found there may be individual criminal responsibility over the killing of civilians.
The report will go to the UN general assembly and could lead to a rare international criminal court investigation if Israel and Hamas fail to mount their own credible independent inquiries into the war crimes allegations within six months.
Today's vote carries major implications for the Middle East conflict. It is the first time such serious investigations have been contemplated at such a high level. It may encourage reconciliation between the rival Palestinian factions, but it is also likely to complicate US efforts to restart Israeli-Palestinian peace talks. And in the end it may result in a US veto at the UN security council to protect Israel from scrutiny.
"Israel rejects the one-sided resolution adopted in Geneva by the UN human rights council and calls upon all responsible states to reject it as well," the Israeli foreign ministry said. The resolution "provides encouragement for terrorist organisations worldwide and undermines global peace". Israel has criticised the council in the past for an anti-Israel bias.
In Ramallah, a spokesman for the Palestinian president, Mahmoud Abbas, welcomed the result but said he wanted to see action. "What is important now is to translate words into deeds in order to protect our people in the future from any new aggression," said Nabil Abu Rdeneh.
Hamas for its part welcomed the resolution as "the beginning of the prosecution of the leaders of the occupation," even though it too risks international investigations.
The resolution not only dealt with the Goldstone report but condemned Israel's policies in east Jerusalem, particularly over access to Muslim holy sites, demolitions of Palestinian homes and excavation work near the Haram al-Sharif, also known as the Temple Mount.
It was passed with 25 votes in favour, six against and 11 abstentions. The US voted against the resolution, while Britain and France did not take part after failing to secure a delay. Neither Israel nor the Palestinians sit on the 47-member council, which is dominated by countries in the developing world, but both worked hard to influence the outcome of the vote.
Intense US pressure initially led Abbas to drop his efforts to secure a vote endorsing the Goldstone report. Abbas had wanted to put the vote off for six months, but that was greeted with such an outcry among Palestinians who demanded accountability for the hundreds of civilians killed in Gaza that he quickly backtracked and called for this special council session.
Goldstone had recommended that the human rights council pass his report to the UN security council, the UN general assembly and the international criminal court. He proposed that both Israel and Hamas should be given six months to conduct their own "appropriate investigations that are independent and in conformity with international standards". If either side failed to investigate properly, then he said the security council should pass the case on to the prosecutor of the international criminal court.
Hamas looks unlikely to investigate its actions during the war and Israel's prime minister, Binyamin Netanyahu, has already insisted he will not allow any Israelis to face war crimes trials. Around 1,400 Palestinians and 13 Israelis died in the three-week war.
The US diplomat at the council in Geneva, Douglas Griffiths, criticised the Goldstone report for an "unbalanced focus on Israel, the overly broad scope of its recommendations and its sweeping conclusions in law". However, he also said Washington had wanted more time before the vote to allow the two sides to conduct their own investigations into war crimes allegations. That suggests the US may yet put pressure on Israel to hold a credible inquiry. Western countries may be concerned that they too could face the threat of similar investigations in future over their conduct in wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
The UN high commissioner for human rights, Navi Pillay, called on both sides to hold "impartial, independent, prompt and effective investigations".
Gordon Brown reportedly had a heated telephone call on Wednesday with Netanyahu, who pressed him to vote against the resolution. Brown spoke again with Netanyahu this morning, hours before the vote, and Britain then decided not to take part at all. A Downing Street spokesman said: "We did not participate in the vote. We were involved in discussions with Israel and the Palestinians about potentially substantive improvements in the situation on the ground and therefore asked for a delay to the vote."
How they voted
In favour (25): Argentina, Bahrain, Bangladesh, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, China, Cuba, Djbouti, Egypt, Ghana, India, Indonesia, Jordan, Mauritius, Nicaragua, Nigeria, Pakistan, Philippines, Qatar, Russia, Saudi Arabia, Senegal, South Africa, Zambia.
Against (6): US, Italy, Holland, Hungary, Slovakia, Ukraine.
Absentions (11): Belgium, Bosnia, Burkina Faso, Cameroon, Gabon, Japan, Mexico, Norway, South Korea, Slovenia, Uruguay.
Britain, France, Madagascar, Kyrgyzstan and Angola did not vote. |
The Guardian science desk is hunting down the sharpest, funniest, most fascinating science blogs on the internet. And we need your help ...
Are there websites or blogs that you check every day? Places that you know you'll always find some worthwhile insights and analysis, or perhaps some guaranteed humour to keep things ticking along during those difficult afternoons? Are there places you turn to after news stories are published to make sure you've got the real story behind the latest cancer scare or acupuncture research?
With so many science-related blogs on the web, a good way to identify the most interesting ones, while blocking out the noise of the dud ones, is to ask your friends (real and virtual).
In that spirit, the Guardian's science desk want to share with you some of our favourite science-related blogs. Regular readers will be familiar with most of these scientific stars of the web and you'll notice that the list isn't very long - we're more interested in hearing what you read than what we read.
People argue endlessly about whether or not blogs are journalism but, frankly, that question is not what we're interested in here. We just want to find the places that are doing interesting things on the web and are being rewarded with engaged audiences, big or small.
So here, in no particular order, is our list:
http://layscience.net
http://jackofkent.blogspot.com/
http://www.labspaces.net/
http://www.dailygalaxy.com/
http://www.dcscience.net/
http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/notrocketscience
http://www.newscientist.com/blogs/shortsharpscience/
http://www.nhs.uk/news/Pages/NewsIndex.aspx
http://www.sciencepunk.com
http://scienceblogs.com/moleculeoftheday
http://www.mindhacks.com/
http://www.drpetra.co.uk/blog/
http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/cosmicvariance/
http://lifeandphysics.wordpress.com/
http://lifeunbounded.blogspot.com/
http://www.realclimate.org/
http://scienceblog.cancerresearchuk.org/
http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula
If you know them already, tell us why you like them. If you've never seen them, we encourage you to check them out.
Most importantly of all we'd love to know your favourite science blogs and websites. The ones you wish you had thought of. The ones you can't spend a day without checking, or even the ones where you go to for a quick respite from real life. Either leave your thoughts below or tweet me (@alokjha) or the science team (@guardianscience) direct. We'll collate the suggestions over the next few days and post a list of readers' reccomendations. |
PARIS, France (CNN) -- Interpol is chasing more than 200 leads on the potential identity of a pedophile suspected of molesting young boys, just one day after launching a global manhunt.
Interpol has launched a global appeal to find this man, accused of abusing young boys.
The organization, which facilitates global cooperation among police agencies, said its Web site logged 30 times more visitors than in an average day after it made its plea for the public's help Tuesday.
Interpol is trying to locate a man who is pictured sexually abusing young boys in hundreds of images on the Internet.
"'The public's response has been very positive," said Kristin Kvigne, assistant director of Interpol's Trafficking in Human Beings unit, in a news release.
"The smallest piece of information from anywhere in the world could be crucial in identifying this man."
The man is featured in 100 photographs sexually abusing at least three boys between the ages of six and 10, Interpol said.
The organization posted six pictures of the suspect on its Web site.
The pictures came to light in 2006, when Norwegian authorities discovered them in the possession of a man they arrested. Watch a report on Interpol's man-hunt »
Don't Miss Web site: Interpol
"While these images were only discovered two years ago, we believe the photographs were taken between April 2000 and May 2001, so clearly this man will be older than he appears in the pictures," said Kvigne.
Last October, Interpol disseminated pictures of another man whose face appeared in more than 200 images of sex acts with children. It dubbed its operation Vico, because the images were thought to have been taken in Vietnam and Cambodia.
Ten days later, Christopher Paul Neil -- a 32-year-old Canadian man who had been working as an English-language teacher in South Korea -- was arrested in Thailand and charged with child abuse.
Following the success of that operation, the organization's general assembly approved a resolution allowing Interpol to seek public help in child sex abuse investigations.
All About Interpol • Sexual Offenses |
Computer scientists have discovered that password re-use is far more prevalent than previously thought after comparing a sample of matched passwords that spilled out at a result of the revenge attack by Anonymous against security researchers HBGary with the earlier Gawker password breach sample set.
Hackers affiliated with Anonymous used one of the stolen credentials, and some social engineering trickery, to gain root access a site established by HBGary, rootkit.com. The subsequent release of 81,000 hashed passwords from rootkit.com’s SQL databases has allowed researchers to compare the databaset with the much larger sample of hashed passwords from the earlier Gawker tech blog breach. Both HBGary and rootkit.com were hit by hackers affiliated with Anonymous.
By comparing passwords associated with email addresses registered at both Gawker and rootkit.com, computer scientists at Cambridge have been able to find out whether these users picked the same passwords for both sites.
A total of 522 email addresses were registered at both HBGary and rootkit.com. Eliminating throwaway and dubious addresses whittled the sample down to 456 pairs.
Gawker and rootkit.com use different hashing functions, so a brute force attack had to be used to extract the passwords used in both cases before any comparison could be attempted. This process involved generating a rainbow table of hashes created from a dictionary of 10 million widely used passwords. One rainbow table was created for Gawker, using its hashing algorithm, and another for rootkit.com, using its hashing algorithm. It was them possible to look for hits from the hashed passwords spilled by the breaches and the rainbow tables.
Joseph Bonneau, the Cambridge University researcher who carried out the exercise, found that in many cases the tech-savvy combined users of both Gawker and rootkit.com were using the same weak passwords on both sites.
"Of the 456 common users, 161 had their password cracked in both datasets, 46 only had their rootkit.com password cracked and 77 only had their Gawker password cracked, leaving 172 with neither password cracked," Bonneau writes on the Light Blue Touchpaper blog. "Of the accounts for which passwords were cracked at both sites, 76 per cent used the exact same password. A further 6 per cent used passwords differing by only capitalisation or a small suffix (eg ‘password’ and ‘password1′)."
Taken overall this leads to a password re-use rate of at least 31 per cent. This figure rises to 49 per cent if users of cracked passwords from one site are assumed to have used a minor variant (not in the dictionary) on the other site and if some of the users of untracked passwords also re-used their more secure login credentials between the two sites.
But even with the most conservative estimate of password re-use - 31 per cent - from real world data of the users of the two tech sites is much lower than previously published studies, which suggest somewhere between 12 and 20 per cent. Sampling error of 5 per cent either way doesn't explain the discrepancy, so Bonneau concludes that either password re-use has become more prevalent in the five years since these earlier academic studies were completed or else users were less careful to pick secure passwords for access to rootkit.com and Gawker. Users at both sites, after all, register to post comments in their respective forums rather than to transfer money or access private email correspondence.
"It would also be very interesting to study the password overlap between higher-value accounts, such as those with a large email provider or an online bank, with low-security accounts like Gawker and rootkit.com which are more likely to be compromised," Bonneau concludes. A blog post by Bonneau explaining his password re-use research in greater depth can be found here. ® |
The prime minister's move comes during a turbulent period for his government, which took power after last September's elections. Australia's attorney general, George Brandis, awkwardly declared that "people have the right to be bigots" during a Senate debate this week on the government's plan to repeal parts of the Racial Discrimination Act. Last week, the government's assistant treasurer stepped aside amid a widening corruption probe in New South Wales. "The focus on this right now shows the government has its priorities all wrong," said Labor deputy leader Tanya Plibersek in a radio interview.
The move also threatens to re-open a national debate about the future of the monarchy. Australian Communications Minister Malcolm Turnbull, a prominent leader of the country's republican movement, which wants to abolish the monarchy, tried to assuage the fears of fellow republicans by observing that "most countries have an honours system and many of them have an order of knighthood," including France, Italy, Peru, Argentina, and Guatemala. France still calls its lowest rank in the Légion d'honneur "chevaliers" despite abandoning monarchy in the 19th century, for example.
But while some republics do retain modernized forms of knighthood, traditional knighthoods are exceedingly rare. Today, only Antigua and Barbuda, Barbados, New Zealand, the United Kingdom, and now Australia—all realms of Queen Elizabeth II—maintain honors that entitle recipients to the honorific "Sir" or "Dame." Foreigners can also be made knights and dames in the Order of the British Empire but can't use the honorific, and they swear no allegiance to the Queen.
Foreign heads of state are the most frequent recipients of these highest awards, which can cause controversy. Elizabeth II stripped Robert Mugabe, Zimbabwe's autocratic president, of his honorary knighthood in 2008 for his abysmal human-rights record. Romanian dictator Nicolae Ceauşescu also lost his honorary British knighthood on Christmas Eve in 1989 during the bloody Romanian revolution, one day before his execution by a revolutionary tribunal.
"This is not Game of Thrones," Green Party MP Adam Bandt told reporters on Tuesday. "It shows a government bereft of ideas, and a social policy that isn't even stuck in the last century, it's stuck centuries ago."
The United States—a republic with a strong anti-monarchical and anti-aristocratic tradition— honors distinguished Americans and foreign citizens with the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the Congressional Gold Medal, and other lesser awards. Article I of the Constitution forbids establishing any "title of nobility" in the United States and bars U.S. citizens from accepting offices and titles "from any king, prince, or foreign state" without the consent of Congress. Even the president of the United States is simply called "Mr. President," although John Adams briefly proposed the title "His High Mightiness, the President of the United States and Protector of Their Liberties." It didn't stick. |
Mark Cavendish has been ruled out of Gent-Wevelgem due to a viral infection and a fever, his Omega Pharma-QuickStep team announced on Friday. The Manxman was one of the favourites for victory in the race, where he was set to lead a strong QuickStep line-up. Related Articles Exclusive: Cavendish to ride Milan-San Remo
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Cavendish, who finished in 5th place in a wet and cold edition of Milan-San Remo last weekend, began to feel unwell on Wednesday and his illness deteriorated after a training ride on Thursday.
"Already on Wednesday I didn't feel well, but I went out on my bike," Cavendish said in a statement released by his team shortly after E3 Harelbeke. "I went out yesterday again, but after an hour I had muscle pain and couldn't keep going. I went home at about 15 kilometres per hour. I couldn't go any faster and I spent the rest of the day on my bed."
In spite of a slight upturn in his condition on Friday, Cavendish was unable to train and he took the decision to withdraw from Gent-Wevelgem, where André Greipel (Lotto-Belisol), Peter Sagan (Cannondale) and John Degenkolb (Giant-Shimano) are among the fast men slated to line up.
"Today my situation was a little bit better, but not enough to jump on my bike and train. I am a little bit disappointed because I was really motivated for Gent-Wevelgem. It's a race I've never won," Cavendish said.
Cavendish’s place in QuickStep’s team for Gent-Wevelgem will be filled by Iljo Keisse. The team also features Tom Boonen, Gert Steegmans, Martin Velits, Matteo Trentin, Nikolas Maes, Stijn Vandenbergh and Zdenek Stybar. Boonen sustained a thumb injury in a crash during Friday’s E3 Harelbeke but for now he remains a part of QuickStep’s Gent-Wevelgem line-up.
Cavendish, meanwhile, is still pencilled in to ride the Three Days of De Panne next week, and he expressed his hope that he could recuperate in time. "There is nothing to do now other than recover and try to be there at Driedaagse van De Panne, as scheduled," he said. |
This is the first gift I've received from this round of exchanges, and the two days between getting the slip in my letterbox and actually being able to make it to the post office while they were open (they never react very well to the CCTV footage of me banging on the window and crying at midnight) were sheer anticipatory agony. With all three gifts en route, which one would this be? Would I have delicious snacks to hoard and nibble at? Would I have a new book to curl up with in this very rainy season? Or would I have a new soft scarf to keep me warm through winter?
Today I trudged home through the rain with only the post office in my thoughts. The slip was in my bag, and my ID was at the ready. I queued for the traditional 17 hours, and at last! The package was mine! I knew straight away which gift this was. No snack has ever been this squishy. No book has ever been so abundant in softness. I had myself a glorious scarf.
I floated home as if in a dream. Cars stopped for me, schoolboys turned to stare, because I was walking on air. No longer would I need to carry on wearing last year's scarves. No longer would I have to face the cruel jests of my peers as they sported the latest fashions. I was about to start my new life as a bescarved human being.
It may be important to note here that I am, in fact, a nerd. But I do not flaunt this knowledge to the uncultured. In public, my nerdery is subtle. I therefore indicated to my Santa that, in the case of nerdy fashions, subtlety was key. Little suspecting that Santa would rise to the occasion in such a way, what did I discover when I was finally able to open my precious package? A lovely scarf, of course, but also a replica of that which was once sported by that most whimsical of Gallifreyans, the Fourth Doctor. And who will know, but those like me, that I am paying tribute to a universe other than our own?
Thank you, Santa. This gift has ninja-level subtlety, and I will wear it until its stitches no longer hold together.
TL;DR: Santa delivered. An awesome scarf. |
Former Vancouver Police Department detective Lori Shenher. (John Lehmann/The Globe and Mail)
That Lonely Section of Hell
An excerpt from former Vancouver Police detective
Lori Shenher's forthcoming book about the botched investigation that
almost allowed serial killer Robert Pickton to get away
In 1998, former Vancouver Police Department detective Lori Shenher was assigned to investigate the growing number of women who were going missing from the Downtown Eastside. There were no bodies, no witnesses and at the time, no crime scene. There was also a prevailing attitude among police that sex-trade workers were transient and would turn up eventually, maybe in another city or maybe in the morgue. But as she dug into the files of the missing women, Ms. Shenher learned they had suddenly dropped out of sight – vanishing from regular hangouts, failing to pick up welfare cheques and not showing up in a medical system with which they had had regular, repeated contact. They were simply gone. In her first week on the job, she learned of a tip suggesting that Robert William Pickton be considered a suspect in the disappearances. But it wasn’t until February, 2002, that RCMP – acting on a warrant unrelated to the missing-women investigation – searched the Pickton property in Port Coquitlam, B.C., triggering a search and investigation that would become the biggest serial-murder case in Canadian history.
In her book, That Lonely Section of Hell: The Botched Investigation of a Serial Killer Who Almost Got Away, Ms. Shenher chronicles the missed opportunities, lack of resources and jurisdictional challenges that plagued her investigation and resulted in more women going missing even as Mr. Pickton was on her – and others’ – radar.
Chapter 3
How It All Began
“No one can tell you what goes on in between the person you were and the person you become. No one can chart that blue and lonely section of hell. There are no maps of the change. You just come out the other side. Or you don’t.”
Stephen King, The Stand
Ibought two pairs of John Fluevog Angel Michael brogues – one black, one burgundy – with soles bearing little rubber angels, guaranteed Satan-resistant for my first real detective assignment. As a recovering Catholic, I figured any extra Devil-proofing couldn’t hurt, and my purchases felt right as I embarked on my career as a gumshoe fighting evil and injustice.
In the spring of 1998, VPD civilian Missing Persons clerk Sandra Cameron had reported that drug-addicted women working in the Downtown Eastside sex trade were going missing at a higher rate than normal. July 27, 1998, was my first day in Missing Persons, and I would mostly be working on the files of the missing women. I sat down at my desk in the tiny office and inadvertently kicked a plastic box at my feet. I reached down and pulled the black rectangular tray out into the light, reading the raised letters “Rat Poison – Danger Toxic” above a skull-and-crossbones insignia. Nice. Binders of files with the pages falling out lined the messy bookshelves. I opened a file drawer hoping to find paper and instead caused a small avalanche of dental molds of varying ages, some labeled, others not.
I was thrilled to learn my supervisor would be homicide sergeant Geramy Field. I had worked alongside Geramy on several files when she was a supervisor in the Sexual Offence Squad and I was in the Strike Force, and I respected her a great deal. She was the VPD’s – and Canada’s – first female police dog handler and a trailblazer for women in policing. Geramy brought a calm, assured presence to whatever team she worked on, and she was a natural leader. Geramy supervised our four-member Missing Persons office, in addition to one of the VPD’s two overworked homicide squads during the height of a gang war.
My partner was Detective Al Howlett, a highly principled man and oddly brilliant investigator burned out from too many years investigating bad cops in the Internal Investigation Section (IIS). As I got to know him, I learned that Al was frustrated because he knew that even if he proved a case against a corrupt or negligent member of the force, often little or no action was taken and that person would be back working in the community before the ink had dried on Al’s report. Al’s desk was an oasis of order in a desert of disorganization. Each night before leaving, he made certain the entire surface of his desk was free of everything but his telephone. A couple of hours into our first day together, Al casually looked up from his file and spoke for the first time since we had introduced ourselves.
“This is what they call a sick building, you know. They won’t tell you that, but a lot of the guys who’ve worked in the DO (Detective Office) for years get cancer when they retire.” He gazed down at his file.
“Is there anything you can do about it?” I asked. “Like, to protect yourself?”
“Nope.” I sat waiting for more, but when I saw no further information was forthcoming, I went back to organizing my desk.
Al was an excellent detective, and he taught me how to put a file together in an orderly, organized way. I also learned that he would not willingly act as my mentor; the missing women files would become predominantly my thing, but he would help me when I needed it. What he didn’t know was that I would learn a great deal from him, and he was an excellent mentor. His note-taking and record-keeping were flawless, and although I never reached his high standard, I did improve my record-keeping from passable to more than acceptable. He had been the investigator on several of the first missing women files and felt there would be no happy ending to their stories. He found working on these files frustrating dead-end work, and he was at a loss – as was I – about how to take the investigations further. He was extremely capable, but policing had sucked him dry long ago.
In those days, I felt a certain pity for Al, thinking how sad it was that a man so close to retirement could have so little good feeling about his work or the organization he worked for, clinging only to his unwavering routines and idiosyncrasies. In less than three years, I would become Al. Now I recognize all the signs of burnout that Al suffered, brought on by doing a horrible job for an organization ill equipped to support him, because I have suffered from them, too. I understand the look of panic I would see on his face when our day’s plan would suddenly change and we would be forced to do something or go somewhere out of the ordinary. I understand why he wouldn’t bring his gun, that mine would be enough. I know now how much strength it took for Al to make it to retirement, and it saddens me to think of what this job has cost him and others like him. I only hope he has found peace in his retirement.
In April 1998, a woman named Sarah de Vries had disappeared, and a friend of hers, Wayne Leng, had set up a 1-800 tip line. Wayne was a single middle-aged man who worked in the automotive industry and had an interest in computers. On July 27, 1998 – my first day working in the VPD Missing Persons Unit – a man named Bill Hiscox phoned Wayne’s tip line suggesting that Robert William Pickton be considered a suspect in the disappearance of Sarah and the other missing women. It would be several days before this information would reach me, and I would work feverishly to interview Hiscox myself and search for any links between the victims and the Pickton farm.
Bill Hiscox speaks to reporters outside B.C. Supreme Court in New Westminster as the jury deliberated the verdict for Robert Pickton. (Richard Lam/The Canadian Press)
As I worked to follow up on the Hiscox tip in early August 1998, I also began setting up our investigative office and scouring the missing women’s files for clues surrounding their disappearances. These first few weeks were a strange mix of investigation and administration that would come to characterize my job for the next two years.
In addition, I was surprised to learn I would be responsible for covering the Coroner’s Liaison Unit (CLU) officer’s job every Friday. We shared our office with the CLU officer, who worked to identify deceased people and to coordinate with the morgue and next of kin, and it was viewed as important enough to warrant five-day-per-week coverage. But the officer only worked four days a week, so 20 per cent of my time searching for the missing women would now be spent at the morgue, determining the identities and collecting the personal effects of Vancouver’s deceased. Taking valuable time away from my investigation to give another detective a four-day workweek seemed shortsighted to me.
When I began, there were seventeen women on my list. My approach was clinical, and I had not yet turned my mind to the bigger philosophical and political pictures, but those would begin to intrude on my thoughts, both awake and in sleep. In those first months, I strove for efficiency, well aware that one detective working on seventeen files needed to stick to the germane. My initial goal was to assess just how large the number of missing was and how much of an anomaly this number was in comparison with a normal year for Vancouver missing persons from a similar demographic.
One of my first tasks was to re-interview the people who had reported the women missing. I wanted to closely study each case so that I could identify any links or common threads. The obvious similarities were there – the women were adults, addicted to drugs, working in the sex trade, living on the Downtown Eastside – but I needed to look beyond those similarities for information about where they hung out, who they bought their dope from, who they had ripped off over the years, who they were.
As I worked on the files, I remained alive to anything I could use to bolster the credibility of the information about the Pickton farm and strove to identify and locate Bill Hiscox for an interview. Whenever I had a spare moment, I read the files over and over. I sought out the women’s families, social workers, landlords, mental health workers, street nurses, friends, drug dealers, boyfriends, and ex-boyfriends to try to get a sense of their daily lives and activities. There had to be something beyond their lifestyle and neighborhood that linked them: a place, a person, an activity aside from drug use. But what was the link?
My initial work involved database searches. The VPD record management system itemized interactions with police to assist with the creation of timelines, but the majority of this intelligence was still on paper index cards, and the work was slow. The Canadian Police Information Centre (CPIC) computer system outlined criminal charges, convictions, and jail sentences served.
This frame grab from an undated Global Television broadcast shows Robert Pickton inside a barn on his pig farm in Port Coquitlam, B.C. (AFP/Global Television)
Once I possessed a basic grasp of the victim files, I had Wayne Leng come in for an interview, in mid-August of 1998. All of our telephone dealings to that point had been uneventful. Wayne was small and compact and wore glasses. He spoke softly, with a slightly high-pitched voice, and he seemed gentle and kind. I found him to be helpful, conscientious, and knowledgeable about the Downtown Eastside – all traits that alternately comforted and worried me. I continued to ask myself if he could be a serial killer. The only way to rule him in or out was to go at him hard, and I did. I questioned him about why he would put everything in his life on the back burner for this woman who had such problems, who so clearly couldn’t give Wayne the kind of love that he had to give. He simply said he was patient and knew she had the potential to live a good life and be a solid citizen. Try as I might, I couldn’t anger him – specifically, I couldn’t bring him to express anger at Sarah.
Editor’s note: * indicates the author has changed a name for the individual’s privacy or legal reasons.
I asked Wayne if he would be willing to take a polygraph, and he agreed, saying he would do whatever I asked if it would help. He would call me several times a week with information, and I enlisted him to help me get the only possible witness to Sarah’s disappearance – Samantha Moore* – to come in for an interview. This would be the first time I would seriously question Wayne’s judgment.
Samantha was supposedly working near Sarah on April 14, 1998, the night Sarah disappeared. One of the first things I did when I began reviewing Sarah’s file was to go out on the stroll and try to locate Samantha, because she could be a key witness. She wasn’t hard to find, and I pulled over next to her. From talking with her, it was immediately clear to me that Samantha was fairly astute and her faculties were not completely destroyed by drugs or mental illness, as is so common on the Downtown Eastside. She was high and working, and I hoped to build some rapport with her by making an appointment to talk at another time so that she could make the money she needed that day and not have her clientele scared off by my unmarked police car. This would turn out to be a mistake.
I knew the chances of her showing up were slim, but I felt the risk was worth it because the quality of a street interview in the Vancouver drizzle is so low when a woman is in a hurry to get back to work. Time spent talking to the cops was time wasted, so I felt an interview was best planned for when she wasn’t working. If I was going to take her statement, I wanted to do it properly, and that meant audio and videotaping it. She agreed to see me at my office a few days later. She never showed up. I called her cell number and was unable to reach her for several days, until, finally, she answered. We again made a date to talk, and again, she failed to show up. A few weeks later, I drove past her again on the street and stopped to talk. At this point, she told me she really hadn’t seen anything the night Sarah went missing and an interview wouldn’t be very useful. I implored her to come in and allow me to do a cognitive interview with her that can very often help to jog a witness’s memory, and she said she would try. She never came in.
In the summer and fall of 1998, as I worked in that tiny Missing Persons office, reports of new missing sex workers piled up at an alarming rate, each one a seemingly more hopeless and impossible case than the last.
Throughout this time, I had been in contact with Wayne because he and Samantha kept in touch and I hoped he could encourage her to talk to me. He told me he was doing all he could to persuade her to be interviewed, but somehow she was not getting in the door. Some months later, I went onto Wayne’s website www.missingpeople.net, as was my custom every few months to see whether there was anything of interest. I was horrified to discover the “statement” of Samantha Moore, a National Enquirer-style account of the night Sarah went missing, complete with all sorts of detail that had been absent from our conversations. Furthermore, there was a preamble attached in which Samantha was quoted as saying the VPD had not tried to contact her and was not interested in hearing what she had to say. It seemed her entire take on this course of events was markedly different from my experience with her.
It was clear to me that Samantha’s story had become more and more elaborate and incredible with each retelling, and it would be impossible to tell truth from fantasy. I called Wayne, furious he would publish this online “statement” rather than continue to encourage Samantha to come to me with what she thought she knew. He stood by his actions, fueled by his new role as webmaster, determined to make public everything he learned about the investigation, even if it compromised the integrity of that investigation. Samantha was ruined as a witness, and I was left asking myself what more I could have done to get her statement while the events were still fresh in her mind.
In the summer and fall of 1998, as I worked in that tiny Missing Persons office, reports of new missing sex workers piled up at an alarming rate, each one a seemingly more hopeless and impossible case than the last. Kerri Koski, missing in January 1998; Inga Hall, missing in February; Sarah de Vries, April; Sheila Egan, July; Angela Jardine, November; Michelle Gurney, December; Marcella Creison, December; Cindy Beck, missing in August 1997 but not reported until April 1998; Helen Hallmark, missing in June 1997 but not reported until September 1998; Jacquie Murdock, missing in September 1997 but not reported until October 1998. All gone. Vanished. Ten women. An entire basketball team.
When I began, I was unaware there was interest in forming a missing women’s working group. In September 1998, soon after I began in Missing Persons, Inspector Gary Greer, who was in charge of the Downtown Eastside, and Detective Inspector Kim Rossmo, the lone member of the Geographic Profiling Unit, invited me to a meeting. The Geographic Profiling Unit had been underused since Rossmo created it nearly five years earlier, after completing his PhD in criminology. Rossmo’s promotion from constable straight to detective inspector – an unprecedented jump to a special VPD rank created just for Rossmo – and his installation as the head of this one-man unit ruffled many feathers. Since his promotion, he had been ostracized by the detectives and many in management. My manager, Major Crime inspector Fred Biddlecombe; SOS Sergeant Axel Hovbrender; Downtown Eastside neighborhood safety officer Constable Dave Dickson; and I attended the meeting.
A poster showing 48 missing women outside the courthouse during Robert Pickton's trial. (Andy Clark/Reuters)
There was a surreal quality to the invitation for me. For some six weeks, I’d been toiling away in my office, completely unaware that anyone else in the VPD was interested in or working on the missing women cases. I had sent out bulletins to patrol members, other sections of the VPD, and police agencies across the country asking for information and received no indication that others sensed a problem. My first reaction was enthusiasm: here were others I could work with, people I could share my theories and ideas with. I envisioned a cohesive team setting where we would band together toward a common goal: finding the women.
From the meeting’s opening, tension hung in the air. Rossmo and Greer took the lead, while Biddlecombe sat back with his arms folded, a scowl on his face. Fred Biddlecombe was a dour, intense man who rarely smiled. He wasn’t given to casual conversation, and it seemed the pressures of his position were great.
“We see this as an opportunity to–” Greer began, before Biddlecombe cut him off.
“I know exactly what opportunity you two,” he gestured toward Greer and Rossmo, “see in all this. But I won’t have my people paraded around in your dog and pony show. Lori’s barely been here a month, and she needs the chance to see where her investigation leads before we start sounding alarm bells that will have every quack in the city calling her.”
Dave Dickson passed around a handout: two sheets of paper filled with more than fifty names of mostly Indigenous women from the Vancouver area who had gone missing or been murdered. Biddlecombe looked at it quickly and turned on Dickson.
“Where did you get this?” he demanded. I sat there wondering the same thing. I’d been working for six weeks to compile a comprehensive list of the missing women. Most of these names were new to me, and I worried I’d missed even more. “That’s not current. A good number of those women have been found,” Biddlecombe finished, visibly upset.
“Yes, sir, you’re right. Unsolved accounted for all those first ones I brought to them. This is a new list from the Vancouver area,” Dickson replied.
Biddlecombe pushed the handout back toward Dickson as he spoke. “And when Unsolved did start working on locating them, important information was leaked to the press, which is why I’m not thrilled to devote any of my people to this working group.” He looked pointedly at Dickson, but it was as though he hadn’t heard him. “I don’t want to open Major Crime files to people I can’t trust not to run to the press. I don’t want this investigation moving outside of Major Crime.”
Robert Pickton is shown in this still image taken from a police video. (The Canadian Press/HO)
I sat there, openmouthed, watching the back and forth like a spectator at a tennis match.
When he spoke of “opportunity,” I suspected Biddlecombe was alluding to Greer’s less-than-secret desire to be the next chief and Rossmo’s need to justify the existence of his fledgling Geographic Profiling Unit. Now nearing the end of his five-year contract, Rossmo seemed to be looking for a life raft. I failed to understand why singling out Dave Dickson or airing dirty laundry was fair or served any purpose.
Rossmo and Greer had composed a press release for this meeting, warning of the possibility that a serial killer was at work on the Downtown Eastside, and they wanted it issued immediately. The rest of us in this newly created working group were opposed – not because we didn’t agree there was probably a serial killer. We felt it was premature, given that I hadn’t yet fully investigated many of the missing women files to rule out any other possible fates. In hindsight, there would have been little harm in issuing the release, but most of us felt it would cause more trouble than it would prevent.
Specifically, we thought the language of the release was inflammatory and likely to meet indifference from the sex workers while inciting panic among many outside the community. Typically, these women knew better than anyone the dangers associated with working the streets, and news of the operation of a serial killer would not come as a surprise to them. Warning the women would not stop them from working and putting themselves at risk; it would merely satisfy Downtown Eastside community leaders that we were doing something. Greer and Rossmo agreed to hold off on the release.
After Biddlecombe left the room, I approached Rossmo.
“Can you help me with something?” I asked.
“Sure.”
“I need to analyze the number of missing women I have so far, to show it’s statistically unusual and a real problem, not just a strange blip or something. Can you do that?” His eyes lit up.
“I can do an epidemiological analysis of the numbers to look for patterns or anomalies over the years,” he answered.
“Perfect. Come and see me and I’ll give you what you need.” I lowered my voice. “And keep it between us. Biddlecombe will have an aneurism if he knows I’m showing you the files.”
Abandoned vehicles litter Robert Pickton's farm as police searched the property in February 2002. (Richard Lam/The Canadian Press)
After this meeting, two of the participants, Sergeant Axel Hovbrender of the Sexual Offence Squad and Constable Dave Dickson, joined me back at my office. I’d known Dave from my time on patrol, and he would prove to be an invaluable ally and friend over the years. He deserves an entire book on his own; his work with the youth and sex workers in the Downtown Eastside is legendary and his compassion boundless. We talked for a few minutes about the meeting before Dave begged off to get back on the road, responding to his constantly vibrating pager for which so many desperate, disadvantaged kids had the number. As always, he left me with strict orders to call him if I needed anything. Everybody calls Dave when they need anything.
Axel sat quietly for several long moments. I didn’t know him well, but my experience of him had always been as someone who didn’t speak often, but when he did, people listened.
“Lor, I don’t have a lot of advice for you. You seem to know where you’re going with this.” He paused. “But I will tell you this: document everything, every single thing, and ask for help, ask for what you need to do the job. Document it every time you ask for help and document it when they turn you down.” He looked meaningfully into my eyes, and I swallowed hard, feeling a weight descend upon me. I knew he was sending me an important message in the only way he could, without scaring me right off the entire police department. He knew how this was very likely to go, and he was trying to protect me.
More than any other moment in this investigation, I am grateful for those words, because they woke me up and forced me to see what I was getting into. It wasn’t perfect by any stretch, but I took Axel’s advice and documented everything I did as well as I could. I asked for help, and I wrote it down when help was denied. I even kept a list of what I’d written down so that when many of my most important documents seemed to disappear before the Missing Women Commission of Inquiry, I could at least say I had had them at some point. As someone told me during my legal prep for the inquiry: He with the most notes wins. No one wins in this story. But I was able to stand up for my work, or at least that which wasn’t misplaced years later by Project Evenhanded, the RCMP’s exploration of missing and murdered women in British Columbia.
A Letter to Sarah de Vries
Sarah de Vries, whose remains were found on Robert Pickton's farm. Pickton was charged with her murder but the charges were among 20 that were stayed.
Dear Sarah,
I feel as though you and I have somehow been partners on this strange journey. We both came to this investigation in 1998, you a couple of short months before me—the mentor, a big sister of sorts, much in the same way you were one to so many of the girls on the street.
I had known you on the street but not nearly as well as I would come to know you after you left. You were a writer, a gifted, educated, articulate young woman defeated by a world that seemed unable to allow you to just be—to be a woman of color in a white family, to be different and beautiful and yet not be seen as some sort of commodity or jewel to be had, possessed. You struggled valiantly, but in the end, your pain brought you to the Downtown Eastside, and it was that pain that made you such a compassionate friend to so many.
The men who used you, the men who purported to love you—it was nearly impossible to tell the difference between them. Could you? Did you ever know which to trust? I had always got the sense you saw above and beyond the bullshit. You knew who was giving you a line and who really wanted to see you do well—you worked the middle ground and got what you needed without giving up too much of yourself. Was that how it was for you?
You and your family—Maggie; your mom, Pat; your aunt Jean; Jeanie; Ben—are all so inextricably tied into these years for me. I feel in many ways you are—or should be—the poster child for this tragedy. You are every daughter, every person’s schoolmate, every young girl’s best friend from Brownies—perhaps you represent just how vulnerable we all are, our children all are. And it scares us, doesn’t it? We don’t want to say, Look what happened to Sarah. She came from a good neighborhood, went to a good school, had two parents at home, every advantage—look what happened to her.
More than with any other family, I have wanted to open up to yours. Perhaps it’s because yours is a family of writers, or because I’ve found them to be so even, so thoughtful and balanced, even in their assessment of this case, this heartbreak, this world. They are phenomenal women, your mom, Jean, Maggie, Jeanie. I often bump up against that keen awareness that I must walk that line between speaking from the heart and speaking as a part of this goddamn investigation that makes us all walk and talk like automatons.
When I called your mom to tell her about Pickton’s arrest, she was out and your aunt Jean answered. You’d get a kick out of this, I know. Her first question to me was What are you reading these days? And we entered into a lengthy discussion of the latest mystery writers—not really my thing, but she assumed as a cop it would be, and I was just thrilled to talk to someone about something other than this horrible man and the horrible things he’d done. Maggie was equally warm, wanting to know how I was after I had just given her this oddly bittersweet news. In her quiet voice she whispered the words to me I will never forget: This is that man you had told me about, isn’t it?
When I think of you, I think of that fit, well-groomed young woman rollerblading around the Downtown Eastside, grooving to her Walkman—you always reminded me of those images we often see from war-torn countries of children playing a game of soccer or basketball in the midst of mass destruction and total disarray. It was as though you were able to transport yourself away from that filth, back to Kits Beach or UBC. Back to somewhere supposedly safe.
You touched a great many people. I think those people have a difficult time accepting you didn’t survive your journey. I think everyone expected you would be someone who would hit bottom, then bounce back to do amazing things and teach others what you had learned about yourself and this often harsh world. In the back of my mind, I guess I felt about you the way some parents feel about a favorite child—that you more than anyone would be okay, that you would turn up, that in some way, I wouldn’t have to worry for you the way I did the others because you would make it.
I still half-expect to see you come rollerblading around the corner, world tuned out, earphones on. |
Image copyright Reuters Image caption Supporters of Salvador Nasralla clashed with riot police in the capital Tegucigalpa
Riot police in Honduras have clashed with supporters of the main opposition contender in the presidential election, Salvador Nasralla, after he accused the electoral court of fraud.
Police fired tear gas at protesters on the streets near the centre where the result is due to be announced.
Incumbent Juan Orlando Hernández, who is seeking a second term, is thought to be ahead by about 40,000 votes.
Both Mr Hernández and Mr Nasralla had earlier claimed victory.
In addition to the clashes in the capital Tegucigalpa, there are reports of demonstrators marching on some of the country's main roads.
The election in the Central American country of nine million people has been widely criticised, and vote counting has dragged on for four days.
With more than 90% of the ballots reportedly counted, the incumbent president has moved ahead of his opposition rival.
At the beginning of the week Mr Nasralla, whose supporters are deeply suspicious of the electoral tribunal that counts the ballots, had established a lead of five percentage points.
However, as his lead diminished in the days that followed, Mr Nasralla accused the authorities of manipulating the results.
Image copyright Getty Images Image caption Salvador Nasralla alleges he is being robbed of his election victory
Tension was lowered temporarily on Wednesday when both Mr Nasralla and Mr Hernández signed a document vowing to respect the final result after every disputed vote had been scrutinised.
But another pause in counting attributed by the electoral tribunal to a computer glitch led to Mr Nasralla saying a few hours later that the document "had no validity".
"They take us for idiots and want to steal our victory," he said and again rallied his supporters to protest.
The distrust over the poll count is partly due to the fact that the tribunal is appointed by Congress, which is controlled by Mr Hernández's National Party, and partly due to the sudden reversal of Mr Nasralla's initial lead.
There has also been criticism of the slow pace of the count, which came to a 36-hour halt after the first partial results were released on Monday.
Image copyright AFP/Reuters Image caption Salvador Nasralla (left) is challenging Juan Orlando Hernández for the presidency
Salvador Nasralla
64-year-old former TV presenter and sports journalist
Heads the Opposition Alliance Against the Dictatorship, a coalition of parties from the left and the right
His parents are of Lebanese descent
Ran for the presidency in 2013 but lost to Juan Orlando Hernández
Has campaigned on a promise to battle corruption
Juan Orlando Hernández |
“If no water flows to Rajasthan, the question of treating it will not arise” Dal Khalsa to Punjab Govt
February 6, 2017 | By Sikh Siyasat Bureau
Chandigarh: The pro freedom Sikh group Dal Khalsa today has urged the Punjab government to fend-off the National Green Tribunal (NGT) and take up measures to implement the resolution of the Punjab Vidhan Sabha adopted on Nov 16 last year seeking charges (royalty) for state’s river waters from non-riparian states.
The party president Harpal Singh Cheema reportedly wrote a letter to Chief Secretary to protest against the current order of the NGT directing the Punjab government to file an affidavit on Feb 8 regarding the quality of water being supplied to Rajasthan through the Indira Gandhi Canal.
In a letter e-mailed to Chief Secretary and Secretary of Science Technology and Environment, Harpal Cheema reportedly pointed out that Rajasthan seem to have forgotten the saying “Beggars cannot be choosers.” As per Riparian rights of Punjab, water has been illegally flowing to Rajasthan and now through one of its residents, it has the temerity to demand clean water.
While referring to the resolution passed in the state Assembly on Nov 16, demanding charges for river waters flowing to the non-riparian states over the decades, Harpal Singh Cheema further said that under the present circumstances, rather than the quality of water, it is the flow to Rajasthan that is the basic issue. “If no water flows to Rajasthan, the question of treating it will not arise”.
He is of the view that till the subject of enforced flow of water to Rajasthan and other areas was settled, the NGT or any other executive or appellate authority at the central or state level has no power to intervene.
Does anyone in Rajasthan realize the damage that has been done to the crop produce, waters, fertility of land and ground water of Punjab because of the continuous flow of water to Rajasthan, Haryana and Delhi, he questioned.
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Related Topics: Bhai Harpal Singh Cheema, Dal Khalsa, NGT, Punjab Politics |
Human beings have two sides to them, physical and psychological, and these have had two contrasting repercussions in business. The material needs of man have led to the great corporations of our age. The giant multinationals have arisen on the back of providing us with things we need to wear, to eat, to house ourselves, to call each other and to transport us to work. However, remarkably, the psychological dimensions of man, despite their importance, have had very little business impact. There are no multinational corporations that make it their task to guide us to the meaning of life, or to help us to be good and kind or to lead us through our rites of passage, from birth to death. Those who operate in the psychological space tend to be a motley crew, who work on their own and are suspicious of all organizations. The therapists, poets, artists and intellectuals of our time are cottage industries. |
The Abbott government has revealed plans to repeal a section of Australia’s environment laws that allows green groups to challenge approvals for mining projects and other large developments in the courts. Federal Attorney-General George Brandis said the government would seek to repeal section 487 (2) of the Environment Protection and Biodiversity Conservation Act and “return to the common law”, after it was used successfully by the Mackay Conservation Group to overturn the federal environment minister’s approval of the Carmichael mega-coal mine in Queensland’s Galilee Basin.
The following is a run-down of the six big lies at the centre of the Coalition’s latest attack on the environment…
It’s the economy versus the environment
Last week Prime Minister Tony Abbott declared that the world only had one planet (true enough) and that we should try to protect it. But he was damned if was going to sacrifice the economy just to save the environment. The Fairfax economics editor Ross Gittins shows the stupidity of this thinking in this analysis today, pointing out that the economy was in fact a wholly owned subsidiary of the environment. Gittins writes that two characteristics of economists stand out when it comes to climate change. First, they accept what the scientists are telling us without argument, and they don’t believe we can go on thinking “the economy” can be kept in a separate box to “the environment”. There are major interactions between the two that can’t be ignored.
The parade of projects
Industry minister Ian Macfarlane was sent out on ABC TV on Tuesday to defend the move to rescind all or part of the EPBC Act (the Abbott government has yet to make up its mind which one it is). “What we’re seeing is project after project held up in very various environmental courts,” Macfarlane told 7.30. “But the alarming thing about the case for Adani is it’s showing that the environmentalists are taking this war against economic development in Australia to a whole new level.” Asked to identify this so-called parade, or even a single example other than the Carmichael decision, Macfarlane was unable to provide one.
Remember, this is legislation introduced by the Howard government. As The Australia Institute points out, third-party appeals to the Federal Court have only affected 0.4 per cent of all projects referred under the legislation. Since the EPBC Act commenced in July 2000, about 5,500 projects have been through the EPBC process and only 33 have been taken to the Federal Court by third parties. Of the 33 actions, four were discontinued or resolved with the consent of the parties and six were ‘legally successful’, in the sense that the applicant received a judgment and/or orders in its favour.
Coal jobs at risk
Abbott and his team continue to use the 10,000 jobs figure for Adani’s Carmichael coal mine. This is despite the fact that the economists retained by the mine developers themselves put the jobs at just 1,642. And as The Australia Institute also noted on Tuesday, the biggest risk to coal mine jobs is the industry itself. Australia’s coal exports have jumped 39 million tonnes since 2013, but job numbers in the industry have fallen 32,000 in that time – the result of “efficiencies” such as autonomous trucks and other technology improvements.
Activists destroying the industry
The Federal Court victory of the Mackay Conservation Group has elicited a number of strong responses from the Coalition, including accusations that “vigilante” green groups were “waging war on economic development” – or, as per Senator George Brandis, “extreme green lawfare.” Abbott has described it as a “sustained campaign of harassment” against plans for a coal mine in Queensland’s Galilee Basin.
But the biggest reason that Carmichael remains stalled is that international banks are walking away from the project, including the two banks poised to collect millions in advisory roles, Standard Chartered and Commonwealth Bank of Australia. As Tim Buckley points out, the project makes no economic sense, simply because the cost of imported coal is now more than that of solar farms, and the thermal coal price has fallen below the point where the cost of extraction, let alone the transport by rail and ship can be recovered.
The cost of emissions reductions
Clive Hamilton today neatly summarises how Greg Hunt’s environment department conjured up the $600 billion “economic cost” of pursuing higher emission reduction targets, as recommended by the Climate Change Authority. Hamilton, a board member of the CCA, describes the estimate as “one of the most egregious beat-ups you’ll ever read.” Hamilton said the CCA modelling misrepresented by Hunt showed you would need a magnifying glass to compare the economic cost of strong action compared to no action, let alone the weak action proposed by the Abbott government.
The sheer hypocrisy of it all
It’s not as though the corporate world doesn’t take advantage of the court systems for its own purposes. Monsanto has a veritable armada of lawyers to protect its patents for genetically modified crops. But while Abbott is trying to remove the right of environmental groups to object to coal projects, his government has created a new mechanism for anyone to protest against wind projects, including the creation of a “wind farm commissioner” and proposals to tighten laws. Abbott has made it clear he doesn’t like wind farms, a declaration that prompted the co-developer of Australia’s biggest wind farm to date, New Zealand energy giant Meridian Energy, to declare that it is no longer worth pursuing wind farm projects in Australia. |
WHITE: I might have to stay in the Buzz Aldrin room.
ALDRIN: It’s gonna be there for a while—I hope. They might tear it down eventually and put up the name of somebody else who has been to Venus or Mercury. You’re in Memphis?
WHITE: Yeah, we’re playing here tonight. Where are you, Buzz?
ALDRIN: I’m in Los Angeles, in Century City. We’re occupying a temporary residence . . . I filed for divorce back in June. You don’t know about things like that, do you?
WHITE: [laughs] No, I’m not familiar.
ALDRIN: Anyway, I got a sweet young lady keeping me company.
EHRLICH: You live in Nashville now, don’t you, Jack?
WHITE: Yeah. I grew up in Detroit, but I’ve been living in Nashville for the last six or seven years.
ALDRIN: I understand that Detroit was a pretty rough place to grow up in the ’70s and ’80s.
WHITE: It was, man. But it’s got a stiff upper lip, that town.
ALDRIN: You get beat up? Mugged? Threatened?
WHITE: [laughs] Not too much. You know, I think you learn how to walk down the street in a certain way. I think you just learn to have a way about yourself, a style of walking down the street, that keeps people away from you.
EHRLICH: Did you actually grow up in the City of Detroit or in the suburbs?
WHITE: I grew up in the city. I don’t think there have been too many musicians who have made it out into the mainstream who are actually from the inner city of Detroit—except for the Motown artists, really.
EHRLICH: Did you grow up in the Cass Corridor?
WHITE: Yeah, close to the Cass Corridor, in southwest Detroit.
ALDRIN: I grew up in New Jersey, but it turns out I’ve been in California half of my life now.
WHITE: Really? You can’t resist the weather out there.
ALDRIN: It’s pretty good. But I travel quite a bit.
Ehrlich: Before we get too far, I had a quick question about space travel. I just got back from Thailand, and I’m really jet-lagged, and I’m sure Jack deals with that all of the time because of all of the traveling he does. But if you travel to the moon, Buzz, is there any sort of jet lag that you experience when you come back to Earth? Or is it not even an issue because you’re traveling so far beyond all the time zones?
ALDRIN: Well, we didn’t really have jet lag in the same way. We all wore watches and stayed on Houston time while we were gone so that we would be in sync with the mission crews and the flight crews controlling the mission. Of course, when we came back, we’d been away for eight days in reduced gravity or floating in zero gravity with the spacecraft going and coming, and it takes a while to get used to gravity again. We had to get our land legs—kind of like a sailor who has been rolling around on the ocean has to do. You feel like you’re really heavy for a day or so after you get back. All of that, of course, was overshadowed by the success that we had on the mission. But after we got back, we went on a tour of the world for 45 days, visiting kings and queens and all that. On that trip, there was jet lag. |
[Editor’s note: The current team-by-team cap report as of September 3 appears below. It remains based on the top 51 cap numbers for all players under contract. The calculation converts to entire 53-man roster plus all players on injured reserve and other reserve lists at the launch of the regular season.]
Jaguars: $28.7 million.
Chiefs: $26.6 million.
Eagles: $20.2 million.
Titans: $17.0 million.
Bengals: $15.2 million.
Buccaneers: $14.9 million.
Browns: $13.3 million.
Seahawks: $13.2 million.
Packers: $11.6 million.
Broncos: $11.1 million.
Colts: $10.1 million.
Patriots: $10.0 million.
Cardinals: $10.0 million.
Panthers: $9.2 million.
Vikings: $8.9 million.
Saints: $8.2 million.
Jets: $8.1 million.
Bills: $7.9 million.
Redskins: $7.5 million.
Bears: $6.3 million.
Raiders: $6.0 million.
Cowboys: $5.3 million.
Ravens: $5.3 million.
Steelers: $4.5 million.
Chargers: $4.1 million.
Dolphins: $4.0 million.
Rams: $4.0 million.
Giants: $3.6 million.
49ers: $3.5 million.
Falcons: $3.4 million.
Lions: $2.3 million.
Texans: $2.3 million. |
Recently by Gary North: The Police State Is Doomed
Almost nobody these days likes to call a spade a spade in public. In fact, calling a spade a spade in public is a form of political incorrectness. The Establishment puts negative pressure on all those who identify a spade as a spade, if that identification might cost the government a loss of power.
Here are a few examples. We are not supposed to say “government handouts.” Instead, these are called “entitlements.” It is not proper to say “central bank inflation.” This is called “quantitative easing.” Illegal aliens are “undocumented workers.” In true Orwellian fashion, the systematic practice of deception is called “transparency.”
The word “entitlement” is the most value-laden in this list. The promoters of government handouts have long suffered in the United States from a sense of shame associated with taking checks from the government. Most Americans have tried to avoid receiving private charity. To receive charity is a mark of weakness, of failure.
They said to recipients: “This is not charity.” It told voters that handouts were an “investment in the future.” This never sold well. This is why the word “welfare” was substituted for “charity.” But this change in wording did not deflect the stigma attached with going on the dole. So, “entitlement” replaced “welfare.”
THE USES OF DECEPTION
The idea of entitlement conveys the sense of ownership. The recipient receives funds that were extracted at gunpoint by the government. Yet the recipients are assured by the government that they are recipients of lawfully earned funds. The real meaning of “earned” in this case is “earned at the ballot box.” The defenders of this system have rewritten the commandment: “Thou shalt not steal, except by majority vote.”
The implication of an entitlement is that the recipient is owed support by the government. His situation — being without money — is not seen as his fault. It is society’s fault. Full employment is a divine right, and the State is regarded as the god of the social order. When the State fails to provide full employment, its agents blame the private sector. It hands out entitlement checks to ease the pain.
The key to the welfare State strategy of extending government safety nets — another phrase for handouts — to the general population is to extract payments and call them insurance. There is unemployment insurance. This is widely accepted. Yet it means going on the dole.
There is old age insurance. Here, we enter the Orwellian world. The Social Security Trust Fund is officially called the Old Age and Survivors Insurance (OASI) Trust Fund. Consider the word magic.
“Social” means State.”Security” means statistical bankruptcy.”Trust” means systematic deception.”Fund” means nonmarketable government IOUs.”Insurance” means revocable contract.
The United States Supreme Court determined half a century ago that Social Security is not in any sense a form of insurance. We read this on Social Security’s Website.
There has been a temptation throughout the program’s history for some people to suppose that their FICA payroll taxes entitle them to a benefit in a legal, contractual sense. That is to say, if a person makes FICA contributions over a number of years, Congress cannot, according to this reasoning, change the rules in such a way that deprives a contributor of a promised future benefit. Under this reasoning, benefits under Social Security could probably only be increased, never decreased, if the Act could be amended at all. Congress clearly had no such limitation in mind when crafting the law. Section 1104 of the 1935 Act, entitled “RESERVATION OF POWER,” specifically said: “The right to alter, amend, or repeal any provision of this Act is hereby reserved to the Congress.” Even so, some have thought that this reservation was in some way unconstitutional. This is the issue finally settled by Flemming v. Nestor. In this 1960 Supreme Court decision Nestor’s denial of benefits was upheld even though he had contributed to the program for 19 years and was already receiving benefits. Under a 1954 law, Social Security benefits were denied to persons deported for, among other things, having been a member of the Communist party. Accordingly, Mr. Nestor’s benefits were terminated. He appealed the termination arguing, among other claims, that promised Social Security benefits were a contract and that Congress could not renege on that contract. In its ruling, the Court rejected this argument and established the principle that entitlement to Social Security benefits is not contractual right.
The typical voter has never read this. The statement is “transparent,” but it is buried deep in the Social Security System’s Website. It is a classic case of “The large print giveth, and the fine print taketh away.” It has never occurred to the average voter until quite recently that the promises made by Congress can be revoked at any time for political reasons. Who says so? The Social Security System.
The fact that workers contribute to the Social Security program’s funding through a dedicated payroll tax establishes a unique connection between those tax payments and future benefits. More so than general federal income taxes can be said to establish “rights” to certain government services. This is often expressed in the idea that Social Security benefits are “an earned right.” This is true enough in a moral and political sense. But like all federal entitlement programs, Congress can change the rules regarding eligibility — and it has done so many times over the years. The rules can be made more generous, or they can be made more restrictive. Benefits which are granted at one time can be withdrawn, as for example with student benefits, which were substantially scaled-back in the 1983 Amendments.
The phrase, “an earned right,” is another term for “entitlement.” So, “entitlement” in fact means “not legally entitled.” Who says so? The United States government.
IGNORING THE DEFICIT
The Social Security numbers do not add up. This is slowly becoming obvious to a minority of voters. When combined with Medicare, the numbers are simply ridiculous. There is no way that the promises can be fulfilled.
The estimates of the unfunded liabilities keep rising. The most shocking is the estimate of Prof. Lawrence Kotlikoff of Boston University. He says the U.S. government is in the red by about $200 trillion.
The problem is that this is the estimate for the lifetime deficit of the various programs. This means that there will not be a default for at least a decade, assuming that the Asian central banks keep buying U.S. government debt, and assuming that investors in the United States also roll over the debt. Anything with a timeline longer than five years is considered politically irrelevant. So, despite the fact that the numbers say “guaranteed bankruptcy,” the voters do nothing.
The politicians who run on a tax-cutting ticket usually do not challenge Social Security or Medicare. So, these two programs continue to spiral upward. These are by far the main entitlements, meaning handouts, but because they have been sold to the voters on the basis of insurance premiums rather than payments for the government’s immediate bills (IOUs), the voters regard the promised benefits as contracts: payment for premiums received. This is not what the payments are, as the Social Security site admits, but the voters are unaware of this.
The voters think they are entitled to these payments. “After all, we paid for this.” No, they didn’t. They paid for whatever the government wanted to pay for when it collected the taxes — not “premiums.” The money is long gone. Future payments will be based on political battles over who gets what. The outcome will be based on who has the most votes in Congress. As Forrest Gump’s mother might have said, “Entitlement is as entitlement does.” You are entitled for as long as you have the votes — and no longer.
THE POLITICS OF PLUNDER
In 1850, in the year of his death at age 49, Frédéric Bastiat’s booklet, The Law, was published. It remains a masterpiece in political philosophy. Bastiat was an elected member of the French Assembly. He described the politics of plunder.
Men naturally rebel against the injustice of which they are victims. Thus, when plunder is organized by law for the profit of those who make the law, all the plundered classes try somehow to enter — by peaceful or revolutionary means — into the making of laws. According to their degree of enlightenment, these plundered classes may propose one of two entirely different purposes when they attempt to attain political power: Either they may wish to stop lawful plunder, or they may wish to share in it.
We are at the tail end of nearly a century of political plunder. It began in earnest in the years following World War I. There are a few signs that the politics of plunder is moving to the spending-cut phase — the initial phase. Political rhetoric by a few newcomers is not the same as a reversal of political tradition. What tradition? Getting in on the loot.
Woe to the nation when this latter purpose prevails among the mass victims of lawful plunder when they, in turn, seize the power to make laws! Until that happens, the few practice lawful plunder upon the many, a common practice where the right to participate in the making of law is limited to a few persons. But then, participation in the making of law becomes universal. And then, men seek to balance their conflicting interests by universal plunder.
Instead of cutting back on the existing entitlements, the voters at the margin have said: “No new entitlements.” But the existing ones are sufficient to bankrupt the government.
Instead of rooting out the injustices found in society, they make these injustices general. As soon as the plundered classes gain political power, they establish a system of reprisals against other classes. They do not abolish legal plunder. (This objective would demand more enlightenment than they possess.) Instead, they emulate their evil predecessors by participating in this legal plunder, even though it is against their own interests.
Then what is the cure? Bastiat offered only this: universal suffering.
It is as if it were necessary, before a reign of justice appears, for everyone to suffer a cruel retribution — some for their evilness, and some for their lack of understanding.
The bankruptcy of the programs can be delayed by mass inflation. So can partial default: raising the age of eligibility, imposing means testing. “If you have saved too much money, you will not be eligible.” But that is a form of default — bankruptcy.
A few voters see it coming, but they take no steps to get out of the way of the fiscal freight train that is heading toward them. They hear the whistle. They see the headlight. But they do not take steps to avoid getting run over. They think, “The government will find a way out of this dilemma.” Yes, it will: bankruptcy, either open (default on the programs) or rationing.
AFTER THE PAIN: OUTRAGE
There will be pain. The system will gore a lot of oxen. The obvious victims will be the oldsters who have become dependent on Federal handouts. They are a powerful swing vote today, but they are in the minority. When the majority of working citizens finally perceive that it is an inescapable choice between handouts to oldsters vs. their families’ solvency, they are going to vote away the oldsters’ handouts.
The oldsters will be trapped. They will be too old to return to the labor force. They will be without capital, other than their homes. They will have planned on lifetime entitlements, despite the clear warning on the Social Security Website. They are entitled only for as long as they have the sympathy vote of workers. When the Federal government cannot sell its bonds, that sympathy will evaporate.
There will be blame-seeking on a scale never before seen in American history. The obvious place to lay the blame will be the biggest Federal budgets: the Pentagon and the geezers. Both special-interest groups will see their budgets cut. Both will see resistance to the now-successful calls for ever-more funding.
To imagine that there will be no retribution is to ignore the history of democracy. Today’s trade-off — “You vote for the military budget, and I’ll vote for more free Medicare” — will switch: “I’ll vote to cut the military if you’ll vote to cut Medicare.”
That day will not come until Medicare threatens the solvency of the Federal government. That will not be before the next Presidential election. It may not be before 2016, although this is not a sure thing. But by 2020, the cuts will be politically inevitable. The workers who are paying the freight will revolt. Politicians will listen to the majority. The majority will say, “Cut them, not us.”
It is imperative that people who are planning to live in comfortable retirement see what is coming. The era of the handouts to old people, merely because they are old, will come to an end when it is clear to voters that it is either the oldsters or the workers who will wind up on the sacrificial altar of political plunder.
CONCLUSION
In 1850, Bastiat asked a pair of rhetorical questions. They bear repeating.
But if the government undertakes to control and to raise wages, and cannot do it; if the government undertakes to care for all who may be in want, and cannot do it; if the government undertakes to support all unemployed workers, and cannot do it; if the government undertakes to lend interest-free money to all borrowers, and cannot do it; if, in these words that we regret to say escaped from the pen of Mr. de Lamartine, “The state considers that its purpose is to enlighten, to develop, to enlarge, to strengthen, to spiritualize, and to sanctify the soul of the people” — and if the government cannot do all of these things, what then? Is it not certain that after every government failure — which, alas! is more than probable — there will be an equally inevitable revolution?
That day is coming: a revolution. It is unlikely to be violent. It will involve the reduction of the entitlements State. It will involve the vast reduction in entitlements.
The Establishment does not believe in a day of reckoning. Its members do not believe in accounting. They think the welfare State can be saved in much the same way as the insolvent banks were saved in 2009: by changing the accounting rules. But accounting is reckoning, and the day of reckoning is coming.
The government can manipulate the signals of accounting. This leads to the misallocation of capital. That misallocation has economic effects. These effects eventually make themselves felt. When these effects are sufficiently painful, the system of government plunder will change. Today’s beneficiaries will be cut off.
Don’t be one of them when it happens.
Gary North [send him mail] is the author of Mises on Money. Visit http://www.garynorth.com. He is also the author of a free 20-volume series, An Economic Commentary on the Bible.
Copyright © 2010 Gary North |
HE last time I saw Mark Strong he was beating up an 11-year-old. The time before that, he was pulling off George Clooney’s fingernails. He’s played an assassin in Revolver, a traitor in Tristan & Isolde, an alien super villain in Green Lantern and the chilling Lord Blackman in Guy Ritchie’s Sherlock Holmes.
He is one of those actors you will almost certainly know through his work but probably not by name. He’s one of the hardest working men in Hollywood, with an unbroken run of great films, in which he tends to play the characters we love to hate, rather than the glorious hero. It’s a niche he cemented when he went head to head with Chloë Moretz’s foul-mouthed pre-pubescent in comic book adaptation Kick Ass. This has helped him follow in the footsteps of legendary Brits Gary Oldman and Alan Rickman as Hollywood’s go-to baddies. All of this makes it hard to detach Mark Strong the actor from the menacing characters he plays.
“I love playing the villains. They’re great fun – we all love the bad guy. We all love dabbling in the dark side of things,” he says. “Look at the Bond villain. It’s now become an established character. Look at Breaking Bad, where a humble chemistry teacher finds out he has cancer and starts to cook crystal meth, becoming a dealer to provide for his family. And look at Dexter, who is a serial killer we are allowed to like because he kills other serial killers. We have a fascination with the dark side of things, and as an actor, I share that. Plus bad guys get the best lines and the best clothes.”
His uncanny ability to metamorphosise goes a long way in explaining why people often can’t place his face. In 2007 science fiction movie Pinbacker, for example, he spent six hours a day in the make-up chair to create the character’s dramatic facial scars. In both Stardust and Tristan and Isolde he was given a long wig.
But Body of Lies, in which he stars opposite Leonardo DiCaprio and Russell Crowe, was his favourite role costume-wise. “I played the head of the Jordanian secret service and the costumes were incredibly dapper. The costume designer took me to Huntsman on Savile Row, where we found all of the stuff for the character and the guys there made me the most beautiful three-piece suit. I wear it whenever I can without wearing it so much that it looks like the only suit I own.”
This it isn’t the only fortuitous sartorial meeting he’s had: “I was really fortunate to meet Ozwald Boateng at the premiere of Sherlock Holmes. He said to me, ‘If you ever want a suit, let me know’. At the time I didn’t take it seriously. It was my wife who said, ‘What? Go and see him right now.’ He’s made me a couple of suits over the years. If you’re wearing Huntsman or Ozzie Boateng, you can’t go wrong.”
*****
BORN Marco Giuseppe Salussolia (his mother later changed his name by deed poll) in Islington to an Italian father and Austrian mother, Strong started off on the stage, getting his first break playing the first murderer in Richard III at the National Theatre. He later swapped the stage for the small screen, joining the cast of BBC serial Our Friends in the North, in which he starred alongside Daniel Craig, who is now godfather to his eldest son. “It opened up the world of TV to me and once I’d done that, I felt like I was working on similar things again and again. I made a decision to stop doing TV and wait for a good film to come along.” The six-month wait before he bagged his first movie role was the last time the 49 year-old found himself unemployed.
His latest project, Welcome to the Punch, sees him team up with British director Eran Creevy, who he met by accident at a hotel in LA.
“We sat down by the pool in a very ‘Hollywood’ way and he took me though the script – what he intended to shoot and how he intended to shoot it. I remember sitting listening to some music that he had on his iPod. We shared an earphone each and he tried to explain to me musically the idea he had for the film. I liked him, I liked his idea and that’s how it happened. If I saw that scene in a movie, meeting a director by the pool in LA, I wouldn’t believe it. It was just very fortuitous that he and I both happened to be staying there.”
In Welcome to the Punch, he plays former criminal Jacob Sternwood, who is forced to return to London and a life of crime to help his son, who is involved in a heist that goes wrong. This gives detective Max Lewinsky (played by fellow British actor James McAvoy) one last chance to bring him down. So far so hackneyed: but don’t be fooled, Strong says, this isn’t just another low budget British gangster flick. “I’ve worked with Guy Ritchie many times and he and Matthew Vaughn invented that genre with Snatch and Lock Stock. But Eran shows a completely different kind of London.
“He’s made the city look amazing. It’s extraordinary that nobody has ever shot Canary Wharf the way he has. It makes you realise just how beautiful London is.”
And London is exactly where Strong plans to stay. Despite his growing stardom, he says he is content living a relatively normal life in Queen’s Park, where he stays with his wife Liza Marshall and their two sons, Gabriel and Roman. “I’ve got no desire to live anywhere else. I was born here, my wife was born here, my kids were born here and this is where we’re going to stay,” he says. “I feel like I have a lovely balance in London. I’m able to keep my head below the parapet. I get on with my work, I have a family and I get on the tube. It just so happens that I’m doing this job.”
It is this attitude that distinguishes British actors from their American peers, he says. “We’re professionals. We turn up on time, we know our lines, we hit our marks and we’ve been trained to do the job. We’ve had over 400 years of acting as a tradition – it’s not something exotic for us. We go to drama school, we learn how to do it and then we try to earn a living from it. In America people can get carried away. The stories about the way some actors behave off set are hair-raising.”
Next up for Strong is a remake of Low Winter Sun, a series he originally filmed in the UK six years ago, for AMC, the network behind Mad Men and Breaking Bad, which will see him head to Detroit for five months for shooting. “I’ve been really aware of all of the British actors out there doing TV. You’ve got Damian Lewis in Homeland and Idris Elba in The Wire. Then they came calling for me.”
When asked about just how busy he is, he responds modestly: “People always say, ‘You never stop, you must be really busy’ but the truth is, I’m not.” He is, though, already working on his next film, in which he stars opposite Nicole Kidman, and he’s dabbling with the idea of returning to the stage (“I’m just looking for the right play”).
So, if you’re not already acquainted with Mark Strong, 2013 is the year you certainly will be.
Welcome to the Punch is in cinemas now. |
Wednesday was a fierce day of fighting in Iraq. The self-proclaimed Islamic State set off 21 car bombs in Ramadi as Iraqi forces gained ground in Tikrit, re-taking control of a military hospital there.
Back in the U.S., the debate continues about how best to deal with the terrorist group known as the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria. But for some veterans the time for talk is over. Unknown numbers of American war vets have taken up with foreign fighters battling ISIS.
Texas Standard speaks to retired Marine Corps. Sergeant Patrick Maxwell, who lives in Austin. Maxwell left the military with an honorable discharge in 2011. More recently he was a volunteer fighter with the Kurdish Peshmerga forces.
Maxwell says doesn’t necessarily disagree with the U.S.’s handling of ISIS in Iraq, but that his reasons for fighting the terrorists were more personal.
“I’m very libertarian in my beliefs and I don’t think we need to be committing U.S. boots to the ground to do another long war like that, ” he says. “But myself as a private citizen – if I want to go take a vacation and shoot some terrorists in the process, that should be my own business.”
Although Maxwell said his experience was eye-opening, it wasn’t as active as you would imagine.
“We weren’t actively seeking out the enemy,” Maxwell says. “There’s not a lot of incentive to go out and find the enemy and engage them, so [it’s] … sitting back and watching each other across a no man’s land with trenches and flags set up.”
Realizing they wouldn’t be engaging in a large scale offensive, Maxwell returned to the U.S. in January, two months before his initially anticipated return home.
“In a perfect world, [would I be] back with a rifle in my hand and actually able to do something that I want to do? Yes, but I don’t think that’s the way it would play out. I think it would be back to the same way it was – that political correctness, ‘let’s keep him out of the direct line of fire.’ … I don’t foresee if I went back that it would’ve changed anything at all.” |
Republican presidential candidate Ben Carson went to Jordan over the holiday weekend to meet with Syrian refugees—he left a completely unchanged man.
Despite meeting with families who fled ISIS to live in an overcrowded camp, Carson concluded they should stay in the Middle East and proceeded to put forth a policy prescription that experts say would not work.
During the trip, Carson stopped at the Azraq and Zaatari refugee camps, where he concluded upon his return that the conditions there were surprisingly nice. He left out the fact that many women are economically forced into prostitution and the Free Syrian Army recruits young men within the camps’ confines. One Syrian refugee, who forced to go to the Zaatari camp after being discovered illegally working in Jordan, told The Atlantic: “It’s terrible. I only lasted 24 hours there.”
Carson’s biggest takeaways from the region, besides the political ad his campaign put together over the weekend, were that Syrian refugees should not be resettled in the United States and that the current strategy employed by Jordan and other Middle Eastern nations is functioning quite well.
“I believe that the right policy is to support the refugee program that is in place, that works extremely well, but does not have adequate funding,” Carson said during an appearance on ABC’s This Week on Sunday. “If you do that, you solve that problem without exposing the American people to a population that could be infiltrated with terrorists who want to destroy us.”
Carson hasn’t been shy about his position that Syrian refugees could pose a threat to American safety, analogizing them to “rabid dogs,” just a couple of weeks ago. But to many experts, the suggestion that refugees need not be permitted to come to the United States is a thinly veiled attempt from Carson to pass the buck of responsibility on to other nations.
“It sounds to me like Ben Carson the political campaigner (rather than Ben Carson the scientist) showed up in Jordan, spent a few hours touring around, had some photo-ops, and came away with an idea he probably had going in: better to let someone else deal with these refugees, not the United States,” Courtland Robinson, the deputy director for the Center for Refugee and Disaster Response at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, told The Daily Beast. “In my view, that is not the kind of leadership that is needed on this issue.”
Robinson agreed with Carson that Syrian refugees are not primarily interested in coming to the United States because the process is arduous, time-consuming and expensive, often viewed as a last resort when remaining near family and returning to a home country is no longer an option.
Yet the idea that refugees could remain in camps like Azraq, where there are over 27,000 residents, is unfeasible as well. And it doesn’t just come down to capacity issues.
Azraq, as Carson acknowledged, can hold more than 100,000 refugees at a time. But economic opportunities for individuals living there are limited and conditions are nowhere near adequate for long-term sustainable living. The Zaatari camp has a reputation for cases of rape and prostitution, many of which go unreported. The Free Syrian Army convinces young men to join their ranks in Zaatari as a means of returning them to their home country.
The UNHCR estimated in July that nearly one-third of the children in these camps are not attending school and 80 babies are born every week in the Zaatari camp.
“If I could move directly to another country, I would not stop for a second, if we ever get such a chance then we will definitely take it,” a man living in the camp told The Guardian in September.
So whatever happiness Carson saw, was probably fairly limited.
“It is true that the refugee camps are shrinking in size and could accommodate more people if necessary, but that’s not to say it’s a good idea to put more people in refugee camps,” Jon Alterman, senior vice president for the Center for Strategic and International Studies, told The Daily Beast.
“Refugee camps often suffer from organized crime and prostitution. Residents don’t have enough to do, and many have been leaving the camps at the first moment they can. Jordan still has Palestinian refugees living in camps dating from 1948, and I’d suspect they and the Syrians both are wary of following that precedent,” Alterman said. “The solution to this problem is ending the conflict in Syria, not making it more comfortable for people to wait out the war while fighting rages on.”
Part of the low capacity in Azraq can be attributed to the fact that residents began leaving due to extremely high temperatures, lack of electricity, and higher food prices. Many refugees are now taking their chances in urban areas of Jordan just to get out of the camps themselves. But a whopping 86 percent of refugees in Jordan live below the poverty line of $95 a month. The country is already bearing the economic weight of over 630,000 registered refugees struggling to integrate into the country.
“So Ben Carson’s now an instant expert on refugee policy?” Shadi Hamid, a senior fellow in the Project on U.S. Relations with the Islamic World at the Brookings Institution rhetorically asked The Daily Beast. He suggested that Carson was speaking in wide, uninformed platitudes about the refugee crisis.
“Unless he conducted a full-on survey in [the] Zaatari refugee camp during his short stint in Jordan, he has no way of knowing whether refugees want or don’t want to come to the U.S. His claim, in other words, is evidence-free and quite frankly absurd.”
Hamid also seemed to think that Jordan has had just about as many refugees as it can take.
“The idea that Jordanian camps aren’t ‘full’ is mind-boggling,” he told The Daily Beast. “Jordan has taken in 633,000 Syrian refugees and those are only the registered ones. That means that more than 10 percent of Jordan’s population is now Syrian refugees, which would be the equivalent of having at least 30 million Syrian refugees in the U.S.” It should be noted that the United States plans on admitting 10,000 in the next fiscal year.
“To suggest that Jordan can or should take in more therefore makes little sense,” Hamid continued. “They’re already under considerable strain and it’s remarkable that they’ve been both able and willing to take in so many refugees so far. They’ve gone above and beyond. But Jordan’s economy is struggling under the strain. It’s simply not right—or practical—to ask one country to carry so much of the burden, a country that isn’t exactly resource-rich and has enough problems already. That’s a dangerous proposal.”
On top of this, the World Food Program, which is responsible for providing vouchers for refugees in Middle Eastern countries, had to stop services for a third of Syrian refugees due to budget cuts in September. This includes some 229,000 Syrians in Jordan alone who stopped receiving food aid.
According to Carson, the American people should engage in a “humanitarian drive” to raise the billions of dollars necessary to help refugees get permanently settled in European and Middle Eastern countries.
“All they need is adequate funding. It’s really quite impressive when you go over there and see it,” Carson told the AP in Jordan. “They were a lot happier. They were quite willing to stay there as long as it takes before they can get back home.”
Carson’s campaign did not respond to a request for comment for this article.
The idea that Syrian refugees would like to return home is, of course, valid. But in the immediate future, for many, this is completely unfeasible.
So while Carson may have found out that all hope is not lost for those living in Jordanian camps, it seems he still has a lot left to learn. |
It’s the day after the Super Bowl and the talk all around the internet is, of course, the big game and everyone’s favorite commercial (Imported from Detroit!). Amidst all this, trying to fly under the radar is Blizzard, making their announcement for dates for their sixth Blizzcon at the Anaheim Convention Center. This year the dates for the convention will be on October 21st and 22nd in Anaheim, CA. Of course Blizzard will be showcasing their three main titles at the convention—Warcraft, Starcraft and Diablo.
“We look forward to holding another exciting BlizzCon this year, filled with some great entertainmet and competition, as well as the latest news about Blizzard games,” said Mike Morhaime, CEO and cofounder of Blizzard Entertainment. “BlizzCon is built from the ground up with our community in mind—we’re pleased to be able to host an event where players can come together to have fun and celebrate their passion for gaming.”
If you never been to a BlizzCon event, here is some of the things you get to enjoy while attending the two days of Blizzard goodness:
Hands-on play time with the latest versions of Blizzard Entertainment games
Discussion panels with Blizzard Entertainment developers
Competitive and casual tournaments for players to showcase their talents
Community contests with great prizes
Commemorative merchandise based on Blizzard Entertainment’s game universes
More activities and attractions to be announced.
I really hope that this is the year that Blizzard announces their new IP that they have been talking about for the last two years. I went to my first BlizzCon back in 2009 and I hope to go again this year. |
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Zara, with more than 2,200 stores worldwide, might be one of the world’s most successful fast-fashion companies, but it does not make its cash with clean hands. The Associated Press reports today that shoppers in Istanbul are finding unexpected tags inside Zara merchandise proclaiming, “I made this item you are going to buy, but I didn’t get paid for it.”
Turkish workers employed by third-party manufacturer Bravo say they’re owed three months’ pay after the company shut down overnight. They are walking into stores to manually attach these tags, hoping that customers who read their notes will help convince Zara, which did not respond to the AP, to pay them.
While nothing ever seems to impact its bottom line — Amancio Ortega, the owner of parent company Inditex, is the world’s richest man — Zara is consistently taken to task for causing colossal environmental damage, ripping off various fashion designers, and turning a blind eye to dismal factory conditions. The Spanish chain has been sued for poor working conditions and accused of both slave and child labor, as well as exploiting Syrian refugees as young as 15; there was also that one time a dead rat was found sewn into a seam of a dress bought in a Connecticut store. As labor and human rights site Equal Times writes, “Zara is a company that would rather pay fines than rectify its bad labor practices.”
Zara has previously promised to look into incidents without necessarily claiming responsibility for the actions of its third-party factories. This response isn’t unique to the fast-fashion retailer; it’s a defense regulary brands use to shirk liability. Why the company still won’t fix a corrupt system it pioneered is inexcusable. If small startups like Everlane can successfully navigate running a fashion brand with ethical work conditions and fair labor wages, surely a giant company like Inditex, which brings in about $27 billion annually, can figure it out. |
This evening, all eyes were on the special election in Georgia’s Sixth Congressional District as Democrats were hoping to flip the seat that has been held by Republicans for decades. The seat recently opened up after Republican Tom Price left to take over as Secretary of Health and Human Services.
Going into the night, Democratic candidate Jon Ossoff was way up in the polls as a number of GOP hopefuls threw their hats into the ring. However, despite the fact that he was polling in the mid-40s, roughly 30 points ahead of his nearest opponent, Ossoff and Democrats knew he needed to get more support in order to gain at least 50% and avoid a runoff.
In the end, Ossoff ended up pulling in less than 50%, with totals showing him at 48.6% after a huge dump of votes came in from Fulton County around midnight, leading to numerous outlets to project this as heading to a runoff. Republican Karen Handel was second at 19.5% and will be his opponent in a June runoff.
Hours after the polls closed and with nearly a third of precincts counted, the Democrat had over 53% of the votes. However, this dwindled down to just a shade over 50% with more ballots tallied, leading to Cook Political’s Dave Wasserman to state that it looked like it would be headed to a runoff in June between Ossoff and Republican Karen Handel.
BREAKING: Ossoff (D) down to 50.8% of the vote w/ 119k votes counted. He's not even close to where he needs to be for 50% overall. #GA06 — Dave Wasserman (@Redistrict) April 19, 2017
PROJECTION: #GA06 is headed to a 6/20 runoff between Jon Ossoff (D) & Karen Handel (R). @CookPolitical still rates race a Toss Up. — Dave Wasserman (@Redistrict) April 19, 2017
This has been a race that Democrats have been targeting since it opened up, as President Donald Trump won it by less than two points in November. Millions of dollars have been pumped into the Democratic campaign. Meanwhile, Trump has taken to Twitter to weigh in on the race in an effort to energize Republicans.
Republicans must get out today and VOTE in Georgia 6. Force runoff and easy win! Dem Ossoff will raise your taxes-very bad on crime & 2nd A. — Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) April 18, 2017
Just learned that Jon @Ossoff, who is running for Congress in Georgia, doesn't even live in the district. Republicans, get out and vote! — Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) April 18, 2017
As the evening wore on, results stopped coming in and everything hit a standstill. The culprit — technical problems in Fulton County.
One card out of hundreds created an error. They need to manually go through them and re-upload everything in #Fulton #GA06 — Decision Desk HQ (@DecisionDeskHQ) April 19, 2017
After manually going through the cards, they found the one with the error.
THEY FOUND THE CARD WITH THE ERROR #Fulton #GA06 — Decision Desk HQ (@DecisionDeskHQ) April 19, 2017
After that occurred, Decision Desk stated Ossoff finished the night below 50% and that a runoff with Handel would happen.
And that's that- Ossoff finishes below 50%, will face runoff against Karen Handel. Updating Fulton now. #GA06 https://t.co/C0HrRw3rO1 — Decision Desk HQ (@DecisionDeskHQ) April 19, 2017
[image via screengrab]
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i once spoke to a roomful of teenagers on priorities. i shared this story (which i believe originated with stephen covey):
a university professor was addressing his new group of business students and, to drive home a point, used an illustration those students will never forget. as he stood in front of the group of high-powered overachievers he said, “okay, time for a quiz” and he pulled out a one-gallon, mason jar and set it on the table in front of him. he also produced about a dozen fist-sized rocks and carefully placed them, one at a time, into the jar.
when the jar was filled to the top and no more rocks would fit inside, he asked, “is this jar full?”
everyone in the class yelled, “yes.”
the professor replied with a little smile, “really?”
he reached under the table and pulled out a bucket of gravel. he dumped some gravel in and shook the jar causing pieces of gravel to work themselves down into the spaces between the big rocks. then, he asked the group once more, “is the jar full?”
by this time the class was on to him. “probably not,” one of them answered.
“good!” he replied. he reached under the table and brought out a bucket of sand. he started dumping the sand in the jar and it went into all of the spaces left between the rocks and the gravel. once more he asked the question, “is this jar full?”
“no!” the class shouted. this time, he said, “well done.” then he grabbed a pitcher of water and began to pour it in until the jar was filled to the brim. then he looked at the class and asked, “can anyone tell me the point of this illustration?”
one student in the front row raised his hand and said, “the point is, no matter how full your schedule is, if you try really hard you can always fit some more things in it!”
“no,” the speaker replied, “that’s not the point.” the truth this illustration teaches us is: if you don’t put the big rocks in first, you’ll never get them in at all.
what then, are the ‘big rocks’ in your life? since becoming minimalist, we have been able to identify the big rocks in our lives — our kids, our friends, our faith, our goals, and our influence. becoming minimalist is about identifying the big rocks, putting them in the jar, and intentionally eliminating the little rocks.
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I missed reviewing The Drax Files Radio Hour #20 as real life has been keeping me rather busy of late. Hopefully, the transcript of the Creating the VR Metaverse panel at SVVR will go some way to making up for things (and even that was late in getting into print, courtesy of RL!).
Episode #21, the last of the “live” podcast for this series, continues in spirit with the last, the two major interviews – with Voidpointer and Catalyst Linden – having been recorded at the SVVR conference. As usual, and as well as being available on the show’s website and on Stitcher, episode #21 is also on YouTube, and it is to that recording (embedded at the end of this article) any timestamps given in the text refer.
The early part of the show re-visits SVVR and Leap Motion, who are in the process of adding on-screen rigged hands which move in accordance to the user’s hand movements / gestures, and have also creating a prototype cradle which allows the Leap unit to be attached to a Rift headset, allowing it to track hand movements, with the rigged hands appearing on the Rift’s screens.
The recent Designing Worlds show on the new user experience and user retention – on which Jo appeared – is discussed. Time hasn’t allowed me to watch the show as yet, but it is on my “to-do” list. I confess that I’m always leery of suggestions from users on what “needs” to be done or “should” be done with the whole new user experience. Yes, the Lab hasn’t done particularly well over the last 11 years – to a point – but that doesn’t actually mean that we, as users necessarily have any clearer idea of what needs to be done / should be done, simply because all too often our own views tend to be somewhat biased to some degree, or we simply fail to take into consideration was has actually been tried in the past and trot out ideas which have been shown to make very little difference in the scheme of things.
Which is not to say that ideas shouldn’t be discussed, but rather a broader forum should perhaps be established, where more in the manner of two-way discussions between Lab and users can take place, ideas more fully synthesised and options looked at.
The new mesh avatars also get a mention, and some of the problems of supplying mesh avatars to new users are highlighted. Leaving aside the valid problems mentioned in the show, What surprised me most about these avatars was that they appeared to have been released prematurely or at least without thorough testing. For example, they were promoted as using fitted mesh, yet the base shape was released as No Modify, thus nullifying the ability to customise them using the sliders without swapping the shape (something new users are hardly likely to know how to do).
To his credit, Ebbe Altberg took it on the chin when I Tweeted him about this, indicating that it and a number of other issues would be fixed. But really, so basic a mistake shouldn’t have occurred in the first place.
This episode features two interviews with Linden staffers. The first is with Voidpointer Linden, who is well-known to attendees of the Server Beta meetings, which he attends from time-to-time. He has worked on a number of SL projects, including pathfinding, and more recently, the Oculus Rift. The interview commences at the 24:10 mark. Catalyst Linden, the senior director of development at the Lab is interviewed at 37:27 into the recording.
Both Voidpointer and Catalyst point to themselves as being “gamers”, and both indicate that on first encountering Second Life as gamers, they simply didn’t get it – although they do now.
A major part of them getting it is clearly to do with the fact that they have joined the Lab, and so SL has become their paid job. However, there is also the fact that as former gamers, they are perhaps both well-placed to understand why and how SL’s appeal needs to be broadened in order to attract more users to it.
During his chat, Voidpointer’s comments on the Lab needing to appeal to as broad a span of potential users as possible, even going so far as to acknowledge that the company needs to address those who, like Pamela from segment #8 of The Drax Files Radio Hour, simply do not see virtual worlds or VR as something they need to embrace, because it has no relevance to them.
Attracting a broader audience is also a theme in Catalyst Linden’s comments, and he goes some way further towards demonstrating why the perception that Linden staffers “don’t get” Second Life really is in error. Even as someone who has only been at the Lab for around 12-15 months, it’s clearly evident that Catalyst does get Second Life and its potential appeal as well as any user who has given serious thought on this subject.
It’s interesting to note that in discussing the issues facing Second Life in terms of image, Catalyst offers what amounts to something of an insider’s reprobation of what might be taken as the previous CEO’s approach to the platform
Ebbe’s approach in general, that I’ve seen so far, is exactly the kind of thing that we need … and the thing that’s impressed me most about him is, he’s really diving into Second Life. He’s not turning up and saying, “Well, it’s this old crappy thing. Let’s do some new stuff!” He’s taking it really seriously, and he’s seeing the value, and that’s a really intelligent thing to be doing.
Catalyst has some pretty clear views on how to better present Second Life. Without wishing to inappropriately blow my own trumpet, some of what he suggests steers pretty close to more of a narrative marketing approach, which I’ve tended to harp on about a fair few times, starting in 2011, and have referred to on a number of occasions since, as well as on Twitter. He also points to the idea of having a “best of Second Life”, highlighting users and activities etc.
Interestingly, and prior to his departure from the Lab, this is the directly Viale Linden had actually been moving in. In 2012, he oversaw a re-vamp of the Second Life WhatIs page, which he asked me to preview, and which included videos by SL users showcasing builds, activities, etc., and saw an initial attempt to target activities and opportunities for incoming users. The first cut was very rough-and-ready, and Viale was the first to admit that more work was due in order to really make it work, but it was a start.
Sadly, the initiative didn’t progress much further. Viale was let go, and not long after, WhatIs more-or-less reverted to what it had previously been. Perhaps, if there are more in the Lab thinking along the same lines as Catalyst, the day may yet come when WhatIs can really showcase SL, and help deliver incoming users to the experiences they see and are wowed by.
Some valid points on the state VR is in at present are also made. I confess to loving Catalyst’s analogy of it being the primordial soup stage of evolution, so that right now predictions are hard to make as to what will happen. Evolution inevitably means that what is emerging from that soup today could expire tomorrow or go on to evolve into something quite different. Hence why Gartner (and others) consistently point to it being between 5-10 years before consumer-facing VR reaches a real form of maturity and adoption. The revolution isn’t here – but evolution has begun.
The point is also made that SL’s future success in some respects hinges on the platform overcoming its negative image, with Catalyst underscoring some of the problems in this area. The current image SL has – particularly among gamers – is why a part of me wonders if the Lab is perhaps in danger of looking desperate for relevance within the VR world.
Voidpointer’s interview, for example , focuses on the recently launched Oculus Rift project viewer. By the Lab’s own admission, this launch is aimed, in part, at trying to attract Oculus early adopters. but at the same time, they time emphasise the UI hasn’t been optimised for use with the Rift as yet. Voidpointer indicates why the latter is the case – the low-resolution of the DK1 (just 800×640 per eye) makes everything in the UI something of a compromise. There’s also the fact that while there may well be an Oculus Rift Destination guide category, it’s going to take time for experiences which truly leverage the headset to appear in-world.
Yet we know there is a much improved headset about to ship, and it seems likely that the Rift won’t be released as a consumer product until 2015. So why give the appearance of trying to push the viewer towards Oculus Rift users outside of SL? Were this to in fact happen at this point in time – a big if, I readily admit – then the chances are, given the overall state of things, there is a risk the current viewer will simply reinforce negative perceptions of SL.
Even if this doesn’t happen, there is still an underlying risk in pushing the SL / Oculus paradigm too far, too soon, one that Loki Eliot very accurately identifies in his comments on the podcast webpage:
It’s going to be a long, long while before Oculus experience in SL is good. So any championing of SL along side VR at this time will just be damaging … The potential of SL and VR is there, the reality though is that it’s not with the Oculus and if we are not careful, SL will end up being just a joke.
Once again, a lot of food for thought within the show, and plenty to discuss (including the seeds for several possible blog posts!).
While this is the last “live” podcast, the show will continue through the summer with a series of pre-recorded interviews, so the Radio hour won’t actually be going away. Those who wish to support the show can do so by donating L$100 a month. Simply IM Draxtor in-world for the “on air” donation box and microphone. When you have it, set it up in-world, make your donation, and the on air lit will turn on. At the end of a month, the light will go out, but will re-light on payment of a further L$100. nice one!
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Hamilton Tiger-Cat receiver Bakari Grant has always played the game of football with something resembling barely controlled fury, his emotions pouring out after every tough catch or touchdown grab.
It would have seemed impossible to motivate him any further.
The Ticats unwittingly found a way. They weren't willing to pay Grant top dollar when he was a free agent this winter. Sure, they wanted him back but at a team-friendly price, not in the pay band of top-tier guys like Montreal's S.J. Green or Saskatchewan's Weston Dressler.
He grudgingly signed a one-year deal in March — more than a month after free agency opened — and has spent the first six weeks of the season putting up big numbers.
"I think Bakari is on mission," says quarterback Zach Collaros. "We talked a lot in the off-season, especially when the contract negotiation was going on and I just told him how much I wanted him back."
Loyalty, however, is a rare commodity in football and from a pure numbers standpoint, it's not hard to see the Ticats' argument.
Over his first four seasons, Grant has been a consistent contributor with 207 receptions for 2,535 yards and 12 touchdowns. His best season came in 2013 when he led the team and set career highs in receptions (69) and receiving yards (947) and was named an East Division All-Star.
Still, that works out to a shade under 52 catches, 633 yards and three touchdowns a season. Green — who signed a lucrative contract extension in the off-season — has averaged 68 catches and 1,033 yards over the last five years. Dressler has five 1,000-yard seasons in his seven years in the league. And after four years, it was fair to wonder if Grant had hit his ceiling as a player.
It would appear not.
So far this season, Grant is sixth in the CFL in receiving with 389 yards and has four touchdown catches, good enough for second. He's on pace to set career highs in every statistical category that matters when it comes time to talk contract. |
More than anyone else in recent history, Robert Moses shaped the physical infrastructure of Brooklyn. We drive on his roads, stroll through his parks, live in his housing developments and are surrounded by his influence at every turn. From the 1920s through the late ’60s, Moses molded New York City like clay, creating a legacy of projects that are greatly used, while being loved, hated and controversial, even today.
Robert Moses was born in New Haven, Conn., in 1888 to wealthy German Jewish parents. When he was 11, the family moved to a townhouse on East 46th Street in Manhattan. Young Robert went back to New Haven to attend Yale, then studied at Oxford and returned to New York for his Ph.D. at Columbia.
After finishing school, he began working for the City. His head-butting with Tammany Hall brought him to the attention of Governor Al Smith, who made him Secretary of State of New York. Moses established and led various public authorities and parks and highway departments for the state — his first big impact on New York.
One of his first projects was Jones Beach, followed by the Northern, Southern, Wantagh and Meadowbrook parkways. The Taconic Parkway, Interstate 87 and others followed.
The public authorities he led were not subject to the same rules of legislation and spending as other agencies. He could draft plans, collect tolls, issue bonds, borrow money — all without the approval of elected officials or the public.
Robert Moses became the most powerful man in the state of New York.
In 1933, newly elected mayor Fiorello LaGuardia asked Moses to join his administration as head of a unified City Parks Department, and lead the new Triborough Bridge Authority. As he acquired new titles and responsibilities, he never gave up the old ones, although he was forced out of his Secretary of State job by FDR’s governorship in 1928.
In the ’30s, the Great Depression was in full swing, and lots of federal monies were available for public works projects. Moses repaired the city’s parks and established new ones. Inspired by his love of swimming, he built 11 massive public swimming pools scattered in poor neighborhoods across the city — including the one in McCarren Park.
He built bridges, housing projects and highways. He worked tirelessly, but with great power and a hand of iron. There’s not a piece of the city that escaped his influence. A catalogue of his individual accomplishments would take volumes.
Moses had an undeniable impact on Brooklyn.
Most people are aware that Robert Moses built the BQE, and chose to cut a trench through the working-class neighborhoods of what was then known as South Brooklyn, separating Red Hook from the rest of the borough and what later became Carroll Gardens.
He would have continued that trench straight through Hicks Street in Brooklyn Heights, destroying that neighborhood as well. But the people in the Heights had more political power than those in Red Hook, and the great compromise that created the Promenade saved the area — at least until Moses wanted to tear more of the neighborhood down for new apartment buildings. The result of that compromise is the high- and low-rise housing on Cadman Plaza and Henry Street. But those are not the only Moses touches in Brooklyn.
Here’s a partial listing:
Belt Parkway Brooklyn Battery Tunnel Brooklyn-Queens Expressway/Gowanus Expressway Brooklyn Heights Promenade and nearby playgrounds Prospect Expressway Cadman Plaza Verrazano-Narrows Bridge McCarren Recreation Center and Pool Betsy Head Recreation Center and Pool Sunset Park Recreation Center and Pool Red Hook Recreation Center and Pool Prospect Park Zoo, Bandshell, Wollman Rink, comfort stations and children’s playgrounds — but also the destruction of many important Olmsted & Vaux structures and vistas Fort Greene Park: improvements, playgrounds Owl’s Head Park in Bay Ridge: improvements, playgrounds Coney Island Aquarium Public Housing towers: Albany Houses, Walt Whitman Houses, Gowanus Houses, Williamsburg Houses, Red Hook Houses, towers in Coney Island, Brownsville and elsewhere
The “Power Broker” eventually lost his power.
Robert Moses’s influence and reputation waned in the 1960s. His destruction of neighborhoods for highways and housing projects started to alarm people. The idea of historic preservation was taking hold across the city. Neighborhoods began to fight back.
His plan to run a highway through the center of Greenwich Village was met by Jane Jacobs and a host of activists, and was defeated. He started to lose more than he won. His last big project, the 1964 World’s Fair, was not a financial success.
In 1968, the Triborough Bridge and Tunnel Authority, which Moses had headed since the ’30s, was folded into the MTA. The new chairman, as well as the governor, Nelson Rockefeller, froze him out. Robert Moses’s power was gone.
His public works and philosophies were a mass of contradictions. He looked down on poor and working-class communities and thought nothing of plowing them under for highways. Yet he built parks and pools in many of those same neighborhoods. He truly believed cars and highways were the future, and their needs superseded the general populace; he spurned most efforts to build up mass transit.
Although Moses loved parks, he wasn’t impressed by the park builders, specifically Olmsted & Vaux. He tore down beloved and important buildings within all of their parks, generally replacing them with banal and utilitarian concrete buildings and facilities. Today, Prospect Park has begun efforts to reverse some of those changes, including the new Lakeside center.
Like many of his contemporaries, Robert Moses operated with a casual racism: “That Moses was highhanded, racist and contemptuous of the poor draws no argument even from the most ardent revisionists,” the New York Times’ Michael Powell wrote in a 2007 story about Robert Caro, author of the iconic Moses biography The Power Broker.
Moses’s housing projects replaced 19th-century neighborhoods, not because of a great regard for the lives of the people in them, but as part of his desire to reshape the environment of the city, and make it look more orderly and modern.
Robert Moses retired to Long Island, and died in 1981 of heart disease, at the age of 92. He’s buried in Woodlawn Cemetery in the Bronx. Thirty-five years after his death, he is still one of the most talked-about figures in New York history.
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Buy Photo Chris Davis shoots cell phone pictures of the murals covering the walls of the railroad underpass near the intersection of Willett and Lamar where a few of the artworks, which are part of Paint Memphis' annual street and graffiti art project, are generating controversy and withering reviews from City Council members. (Photo: Jim Weber/The Commercial Appeal)Buy Photo
On Willett, just north of Lamar Avenue, a fangs-bared viper snakes through Elvis Presley's eye socket and mouth. Nearby, on the side of a boarded building, a gray, rotting, maggot-infested zombie groans "SPAGNOLA" in front of a bed of red roses.
The murals — two of the more unsettling works in this summer's colorful collaboration between more than 150 artists as part of Paint Memphis' annual street and graffiti art project — received withering reviews from City Council members on Nov. 21.
Council member Jamita Swearengen said her constituents have been calling her "totally petrified" by the zombie art of Dustin Spagnola, which she mistakenly said was a "mummy ... sucking someone's blood."
CLOSE A mural project in South Midtown Memphis is raising questions for City Council members about whether to tolerate public art some consider distasteful or offensive. Ryan Poe/The Commercial Appeal
"Well, it's a satanic mural," she said. "It's just terrible."
Council member Joe Brown added: "If it ain't painting Jesus, it's got to go."
Swearengen, who represents the area, said she wants the city to vet the artwork before it goes up on public property to weed out "despicable" artwork such as the murals, which she also called "totally distasteful."
"We should know what they're going to paint before they paint it," she said.
Spagnola, who hails from Asheville, North Carolina, said he opposes the idea of vetting public art — as well as any implication the mural is satanic.
“I think it’s pretty ridiculous,” Spagnola said. “I guess on some level I feel like the most important thing about it is I’m not a Satanist, and the mural is not intended to be satanic. I’ve just been drawing and painting pictures of zombies for a little bit because they’re fun.”
Council chairman Berlin Boyd, who has voiced opposition previously to a mural including a grim reaper on Chelsea, also part of a Paint Memphis collaborative, said he objects to images of death in black communities where death is already too prevalent — especially when the communities have no say in what murals are painted. The grim reaper was replaced by an angel about eight months ago following complaints.
"I think that's very insensitive," Boyd said of the zombie and similar murals. "That's just rude."
Paint Memphis, led by Karen Golightly, an assistant professor of English at Christian Brothers University, obtained city approval for the murals lining the walls of the Willett underpass but also painted two nearby private buildings and a skatepark. She said the artists abided by the rules: no gang symbols, drugs, nudity or obscenities.
Buy Photo Paint Memphis Director Karen Golightly (Photo: Jim Weber/The Commercial Appeal)
Golightly said vetting the 33,000 square feet of murals isn't "feasible" for the city or artists, who work on a volunteer basis and often decide impromptu on their designs. Asked whether some of the murals are too scary for young children, she said no.
"Being afraid of a cartoon zombie means you have to quit watching Scooby-Doo," she said.
As horrified as council members were, neighbors said the artwork was a big improvement over the previously colorless and run-down walls and buildings.
"Some people just complain about anything," said 73-year-old Lisa Farrell, a native of the Philippines who had lived in the house closest to the murals for 20 years. "We just thought it was nice. Even though Elvis had a snake in his mouth — it's just art."
Her neighbor across the street, 33-year-old Josh Breeden, a senior designer with local creative marketing firm Loaded for Bear and a freelance artist, was asked whether he was offended by the murals. "That seems silly," he replied.
Looking at the zombie mural while pumping gas across the street not far from where he lives, mechanic and part-time tattoo artist Adrion Stafford sarcastically wondered if council members were just jealous of the artistry. He said the mural expressed the artist's feelings and should be respected rather than denigrated.
"It's better than the two-tone, quadruple-tone building that it was before," he said.
The city reserved the right to remove any artwork that is offensive or unsatisfactory, and has the option of exercising that right, Public Works Director Robert Knecht said during the meeting. Brown said the city could also remove the artwork from the private buildings and charge their owners a fee under the city's graffiti ordinance, although Golightly says the city can only remove art that doesn't have the owner's blessing.
Buy Photo Gary Williams heads to the corner convenience store across the street from a creepy mural near the intersection of Willett and Lamar. A few of the murals lining the nearby street, which are part of Paint Memphis' annual street and graffiti art project, are generating controversy and withering reviews from City Council members. (Photo: Jim Weber/The Commercial Appeal)
"I am sick and tired of being sick and tired of these people coming into decent communities and doing the things they want to do for art's sake," Brown said.
At Knecht's recommendation, the council members agreed to invite Paint Memphis to a discussion about council members' expectations, although Boyd implied the city may not allow the group to use public property in the future.
"They need to call themselves Paint Collierville, Paint Germantown," Boyd said.
But for Spagnola, the controversy comes with the territory.
“In general, you know if you do anything that anyone’s paying attention to, there are going to be people opposed to what you’re doing,” he said. “That’s just the way the world works, and people want to be critics. And that’s OK with me. I kinda feel bad for people on the City Council, though. They sound incredibly closed-minded and very strange.”
Asheville Citizen-Times reporter Jennifer Bowman contributed to this story.
Reach Ryan Poe at poe@commercialappeal.com or on Twitter at @ryanpoe.
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Zimbabweans went to the polls on Wednesday to choose a winner between the southern African country' s two long-time political rivals -- President Robert Mugabe and Prime Minister Morgan Tsvangirai . The presidential poll showdown between the two is the third time in a decade. Mugabe, Africa's oldest head of state at the age of 89, won the previous two elections which were disputed by his rivals. Both leaders are hopeful that they will romp to victory in Wednesday's elections and are basing their confidence on the huge numbers that attended their campaign rallies. Asked at a press conference Tuesday what his chances of victory were, Mugabe said, "As good as the chances we had in 1980." Asked the same question at a previous interview, Tsvangirai said, "I am very bullish about the outcome of this election. It will indicate to you the resilience of the people." Some 6.4 million voters are also expected to vote for more than 200 members of parliament and 1,958 of local councillors. Eager to vote, some people lined up before the polling station as early as Wednesday mid-night. Early bird voters used quilts and thermos as they roughed out the chilly Harare winter night outside the polling stations. Angelica Mumba, 65, said she will vote for Mugabe's Zanu-PF party because it is the only party with a vision for Zimbabwe. "Zanu-PF has the future of the country. I want it to come back to power and rebuild the nation," Mumba said. Disputes and violence marred Zimbabwe's last elections in 2008. Mugabe, who won a disputed second round of presidential race, was forced into a coalition government with Tsvangirai, who won the first round. The coalition government, though shored up a near collapse economy, dragged on four years amid continuous bickering among its major political parties. Liu Guijin, head of the five-man Chinese observers' team, described the vote as a potential "milestone" in Zimbabwe's post- independence history. "If credible, it can end the transitional coalition government and poise the country towards new political and social developments," Liu told reporters "We believe Zimbabwe has every condition to be much better-off than what it is today". But this year's electoral process began with a chaotic start. An early voting arranged for police and polling officers was marred by delays in the delivery of ballot paper. About half of the more than 60,000 people who were supposed to vote on July 14 and July 15 failed to cast their votes. Police officers who were denied the right to vote were given priority on Wednesday when the polls started at 7:00 a.m. (0500 GMT) nationwide. At a polling station inside Alexandra Park Primary School in Harare's north suburb, hundred of policemen queued from 5 a.m. to vote. "The process goes on smoothly. I will soon go on duty," said a police woman who declined to be named. Tsvangirai, who cried foul of the chaotic electoral process, has openly questioned the Zimbabwe Electoral Commission's ability to conduct orderly votes. His party also raised concern Tuesday over the failure by authorities to avail them copies of the electronic voters'roll for inspection. Finance Minister Tendai Biti, the third-ranking official in Tsvangirai's MDC-T, said it would be difficult for Zimbabwe to have free, fair and credible elections in light of these discrepancies. Mugabe, in the rare group interview with foreign press on Tuesday, acknowledged "the hitches here and there" but denied that he systematically engineered these to rig the elections. "I don't have the power to manipulate the elections. I don't control the electoral process. I simply comply and obey the electoral law," he said. Mugabe is a key figure in Zimbabwe's struggle for independence in the 1960s and 1970s. He was elected prime minister in 1980 and the country's first executive president in 1987. Since then, Mugabe won presidential elections in 1990, 1996, 2002, and 2008. He has served one year less than Angola's Eduardo dos Santos and Equatorial Guinea's Teodoro Obiang Nguema, both of whom have been in office for the past 34 years. The country's new constitution, which was passed this year, stipulates that a president can only serve two five-year terms but it is not retroactive, meaning in theory Mugabe can rule until 2023. Asked whether it is his last election on Tuesday, Mugabe jokingly answered "why do you want to know my secrets?" John Campbell, U.S.-based Ralph Bunche Senior Fellow for Africa Policy Studies, said so long as Mugabe lives, ZANU-PF will likely win a national election. It benefits from the advantage of incumbency. Land is by far the most important domestic issue in the country and Mugabe has been on the side of justice from the point of view of black Zimbabweans, Campbell said in an analysis posted on the website of U.S. Council on Foreign Relations. According to the Zimbabwe Electoral Commission, a vote count will immediately commence after polls close. Results for the final presidential vote will be announced within five days. If no candidate wins 50 percent plus one vote, which is required for an outright win, a run-off will be held on Sept. 11. A Look at Zimbabwe's Elections The "harmonized elections" mean presidential, parliamentary, and local council elections will be held at the same time. A voter is expected to cast three votes, one for each category, at the polling stations... Zimbabwe's Five Presidential Candidates The presidential voting will largely be a showdown between veteran President Robert Mugabe, who has led the country for the past 33 years, and his long-time archrival, Prime Minister Morgan Tsvangirai. But three others were also qualified as candidates. Here are a brief look of the five contenders for the presidency. |
Claim: C++ designer Bjarne Stroustrup admitted in an interview that he developed the language solely to create high-paying jobs for programmers.
FALSE
Example: [Collected via e-mail, August 2009]
I just ran across a “leaked” interview with programming language C++ author Bjarne Stroustrup where he clames to have developed C++ for the express intent of creating a demand for programmers after IBM swamped the market with C programers in the 90’s. Basically I am asking if there is any truth to this. If so this guy duped an entire industry.
Origins: Many long-time Internet veterans recall that certain computer-related debates were practically guaranteed to overwhelm any discussion groups in which they arose. It didn’t matter if the setting was a newsgroup for Monty Python fans or a mailing list devoted to breeding cats — any mention or comparison of computer hardware (IBM vs. DEC vs. Sun), platforms (PC vs. Mac), or operating systems (Unix vs. VMS, Windows vs. Linux) was likely to trigger a frenzy of partisan assertions and rebuttals that could take weeks to play out.
Some of these topics are now a bit passé, but IT professionals have never been at a loss for contentious subjects to hash over. This predilection was
encapsulated in a transcript of a January 1998 interview with Dr. Bjarne
Stroustrup, the Danish-born computer scientist who was the designer and original implementer of the C++ programming language and is currently the College of Engineering Chair Professor in Computer Science at Texas A&M University. In that interview, purportedly given to a writer for IEEE’s Computer magazine, Dr. Stroustrup supposedly admitted his motive for designing C++ was to create “a language so complicated, so difficult to learn, that nobody would ever be able to swamp the market with programmers,” and that C++ was “only supposed to be a joke” which he “never thought people would take seriously.”
That shocking portion of the interview never saw the light of day (at least through regular channels) because, it was said, the magazine’s “editor decided to suppress its contents, ‘for the good of the industry'”:
On the 1st of January, 1998, Bjarne Stroustrup gave an interview to the IEEE’s ‘Computer’ magazine. On the 1st of January, 1998, Bjarne Stroustrup gave an interview to the IEEE’s ‘Computer’ magazine. Naturally, the editors thought he would be giving a retrospective view of seven years of object-oriented design, using the language he created. By the end of the interview, the interviewer got more than he had bargained for and, subsequently, the editor decided to suppress its contents, ‘for the good of the industry’ but, as with many of these things, there was a leak. Here is a complete transcript of what was was said, unedited, and unrehearsed, so it isn’t as neat as planned interviews.
Interviewer: Well, it’s been a few years since you changed the world of software design, how does it feel, looking back? Stroustrup: Actually, I was thinking about those days, just before you arrived. Do you remember? Everyone was writing ‘C’ and, the trouble was, they were pretty damn good at it.. Universities got pretty good at teaching it, too. They were turning out competent — I stress the word ‘competent’ — graduates at a phenomenal rate. That’s what caused the problem. Interviewer: Problem? Stroustrup: Yes, problem. Remember when everyone wrote COBOL? Interviewer: Of course. I did, too. Stroustrup: Well, in the beginning, these guys were like demi-gods. Their salaries were high, and they were treated like royalty. Interviewer: Those were the days, eh? Stroustrup: Right. So what happened? IBM got sick of it, and invested millions in training programmers, till they were a dime a dozen. Interviewer: That’s why I got out. Salaries dropped within a year, to the point where being a journalist actually paid better. Stroustrup: Exactly. Well, the same happened with ‘C’ programmers. Interviewer: I see, but what’s the point? Stroustrup: Well, one day, when I was sitting in my office, I thought of this little scheme, which would redress the balance a little. I thought ‘I wonder what would happen, if there were a language so complicated, so difficult to learn, that nobody would ever be able to swamp the market with programmers? Actually, I got some of the ideas from X10, you know, X windows. That was such a bitch of a graphics system, that it only just ran on those Sun 3/60 things.. They had all the ingredients for what I wanted. A really ridiculously complex syntax, obscure functions, and pseudo-OO structure. Even now, nobody writes raw X-windows code. Motif is the only way to go if you want to retain your sanity. Interviewer: You’re kidding? Stroustrup: Not a bit of it. In fact, there was another problem.. Unix was written in ‘C’, which meant that any ‘C’ programmer could very easily become a systems programmer. Remember what a mainframe systems programmer used to earn? Interviewer: You bet I do, that’s what I used to do. Stroustrup: OK, so this new language had to divorce itself from Unix, by hiding all the system calls that bound the two together so nicely. This would enable guys who only knew about DOS to earn a decent living too. Interviewer: I don’t believe you said that … Stroustrup: Well, it’s been long enough, now, and I believe most people have figured out for themselves that C++ is a waste of time but, I must say, it’s taken them a lot longer than I thought it would. Interviewer: So how exactly did you do it? Stroustrup: It was only supposed to be a joke, I never thought people would take the book seriously. Anyone with half a brain can see that object-oriented programming is counter-intuitive, illogical and inefficient. Interviewer: What? Stroustrup: And as for ‘re-useable code’ — when did you ever hear of a company re-using its code? Interviewer: Well, never, actually, but … Stroustrup: There you are then. Mind you, a few tried, in the early days. There was this Oregon company — Mentor Graphics, I think they were called — really caught a cold trying to rewrite everything in C++ in about ’90 or ’91. I felt sorry for them really, but I thought people would learn from their mistakes.. Interviewer: Obviously, they didn’t? Stroustrup: Not in the slightest. Trouble is, most companies hush-up all their major blunders, and explaining a $30 million loss to the shareholders would have been difficult.. Give them their due, though, they made it work in the end. Interviewer: They did? Well, there you are then, it proves O-O works. Stroustrup: Well, almost. The executable was so huge, it took five minutes to load, on an HP workstation, with 128MB of RAM. Then it ran like treacle. Actually, I thought this would be a major stumbling-block, and I’d get found out within a week, but nobody cared. Sun and HP were only too glad to sell enormously powerful boxes, with huge resources just to run trivial programs. You know, when we had our first C++ compiler, at AT&T, I compiled ‘Hello World’, and couldn’t believe the size of the executable. 2.1MB Interviewer: What? Well, compilers have come a long way, since then. Stroustrup: They have? Try it on the latest version of g++ — you won’t get much change out of half a megabyte. Also, there are several quite recent examples for you, from all over the world. British Telecom had a major disaster on their hands but, luckily, managed to scrap the whole thing and start again. They were luckier than Australian Telecom. Now I hear that Siemens is building a dinosaur, and getting more and more worried as the size of the hardware gets bigger, to accommodate the executables. Isn’t multiple inheritance a joy? Interviewer: Yes, but C++ is basically a sound language. Stroustrup: You really believe that, don’t you? Have you ever sat down and worked on a C++ project? Here’s what happens: First, I’ve put in enough pitfalls to make sure that only the most trivial projects will work first time. Take operator overloading. At the end of the project, almost every module has it, usually, because guys feel they really should do it, as it was in their training course. The same operator then means something totally different in every module. Try pulling that lot together, when you have a hundred or so modules. And as for data hiding. God, I sometimes can’t help laughing when I hear about the problems companies have making their modules talk to each other. I think the word ‘synergistic’ was specially invented to twist the knife in a project manager’s ribs. Interviewer: I have to say, I’m beginning to be quite appalled at all this. You say you did it to raise programmers’ salaries? That’s obscene. Stroustrup: Not really. Everyone has a choice. I didn’t expect the thing to get so much out of hand. Anyway, I basically succeeded. C++ is dying off now, but programmers still get high salaries — especially those poor devils who have to maintain all this crap. You do realise, it’s impossible to maintain a large C++ software module if you didn’t actually write it? Interviewer: How come? Stroustrup: You are out of touch, aren’t you? Remember the typedef? Interviewer: Yes, of course.. Stroustrup: Remember how long it took to grope through the header files only to find that ‘RoofRaised’ was a double precision number? Well, imagine how long it takes to find all the implicit typedefs in all the Classes in a major project. Interviewer: So how do you reckon you’ve succeeded? Stroustrup: Remember the length of the average-sized ‘C’ project? About 6 months. Not nearly long enough for a guy with a wife and kids to earn enough to have a decent standard of living. Take the same project, design it in C++ and what do you get? I’ll tell you. One to two years. Isn’t that great? All that job security, just through one mistake of judgment. And another thing. The universities haven’t been teaching ‘C’ for such a long time, there’s now a shortage of decent ‘C’ programmers. Especially those who know anything about Unix systems programming. How many guys would know what to do with ‘malloc’, when they’ve used ‘new’ all these years — and never bothered to check the return code. In fact, most C++ programmers throw away their return codes. Whatever happened to good ol’ ‘-1’? At least you knew you had an error, without bogging the thing down in all that ‘throw’ ‘catch’ ‘try’ stuff. Interviewer: But, surely, inheritance does save a lot of time? Stroustrup: Does it? Have you ever noticed the difference between a ‘C’ project plan, and a C++ project plan? The planning stage for a C++ project is three times as long. Precisely to make sure that everything which should be inherited is, and what shouldn’t isn’t. Then, they still get it wrong. Whoever heard of memory leaks in a ‘C’ program? Now finding them is a major industry. Most companies give up, and send the product out, knowing it leaks like a sieve, simply to avoid the expense of tracking them all down. Interviewer: There are tools … Stroustrup: Most of which were written in C++. Interviewer: If we publish this, you’ll probably get lynched, you do realise that? Stroustrup: I doubt it. As I said, C++ is way past its peak now, and no company in its right mind would start a C++ project without a pilot trial. That should convince them that it’s the road to disaster. If not, they deserve all they get.. You know, I tried to convince Dennis Ritchie to rewrite Unix in C++.. Interviewer: Oh my God. What did he say? Stroustrup: Well, luckily, he has a good sense of humor. I think both he and Brian figured out what I was doing, in the early days, but never let on. He said he’d help me write a C++ version of DOS, if I was interested.. Interviewer: Were you? Stroustrup: Actually, I did write DOS in C++, I’ll give you a demo when we’re through. I have it running on a Sparc 20 in the computer room. Goes like a rocket on 4 CPU’s, and only takes up 70 megs of disk. Interviewer: What’s it like on a PC? Stroustrup: Now you’re kidding. Haven’t you ever seen Windows ’95? I think of that as my biggest success. Nearly blew the game before I was ready, though.. Interviewer: You know, that idea of a Unix++ has really got me thinking. Somewhere out there, there’s a guy going to try it. Stroustrup: Not after they read this interview.. Interviewer: I’m sorry, but I don’t see us being able to publish any of this. Stroustrup: But it’s the story of the century. I only want to be remembered by my fellow programmers, for what I’ve done for them. You know how much a C++ guy can get these days? Interviewer: Last I heard, a really top guy is worth $70 – $80 an hour. Stroustrup: See? And I bet he earns it. Keeping track of all the gotchas I put into C++ is no easy job. And, as I said before, every C++ programmer feels bound by some mystic promise to use every damn element of the language on every project. Actually, that really annoys me sometimes, eve. I almost like the language after all this time. Interviewer: You mean you didn’t before? Stroustrup: Hated it. It even looks clumsy, don’t you agree? But when the book royalties started to come in … well, you get the picture. Interviewer: Just a minute. What about references? You must admit, you improved on ‘C’ pointers. Stroustrup: Hmm. I’ve always wondered about that. Originally, I thought I had. Then, one day I was discussing this with a guy who’d written C++ from the beginning. He said he could never remember whether his variables were referenced or dereferenced, so he always used pointers. He said the little asterisk always reminded him.. Interviewer: Well, at this point, I usually say ‘thank you very much’ but it hardly seems adequate. Stroustrup: Promise me you’ll publish this. My conscience is getting the better of me these days. Interviewer: I’ll let you know, but I think I know what my editor will say. Stroustrup: Who’d believe it anyway? Although, can you send me a copy of that tape? Interviewer: I can do that.
The “leaked” Stroustrup interview was just a bit of inventive fiction that satirized a number of topics familiar to programmers, but the parody hit so close to home that many readers did (and still do) mistake it as genuine. The faux interview gained such widespread currency, in fact, that it prompted Computer to conduct a real interview with Dr. Stroustrup, which it published in its June 1998 issue prefaced with the following statement:
In Design and Evolution of C++, Bjarne Stroustrup argued that “a programming language is really a very tiny part of the world, and as such, it ought not be taken too seriously. Keep a sense of proportion and most importantly keep a sense of humor. Among major programming languages, C++ is the richest source of puns and jokes. That is no accident.” In, Bjarne Stroustrup argued that “a programming language is really a very tiny part of the world, and as such, it ought not be taken too seriously. Keep a sense of proportion and most importantly keep a sense of humor. Among major programming languages, C++ is the richest source of puns and jokes. That is no accident.” For the past few months, a hoax interview between Stroustrup and Computer has been making the rounds in cyberspace. While we regret the incident, it offers us a welcome opportunity to have the father of C++ share his insights on Standard C++ and software development in general. We can also attest to his continued sense of proportion and humor — he suggests that the fictitious interview would have been a much funnier parody had he written it himself.
Last updated: 7 April 2014
Sources: |
The Mason County Republican Executive Committee hosted Mason County Sheriff Kim Cole on Tuesday night and with opioid abuse an epidemic across the nation, Cole shared his office’s numbers on the amount of drugged drivers, which has increased from past years. In 2016, the sheriff’s office made 41 arrests for marijuana possession and four arrests for heroin possession.
“We are now up to 20 drugged drivers in Mason County (in 2017),” he said. “We’ve had 51 drug arrests — 27 possession of marijuana and 10 heroin amongst the drug arrests.
“Look at the flip-flop. The marijuana arrests were high last year and the heroin arrests were low. That’s starting to take a reverse order,” he said.
Cole said the community has to recognize that there is a drug problem, but understand there is no way to completely stop it.
“There’s nothing we’re going to do to stop it,” he said. “There’s no magic wand. We’ve had a pill problem for 15 years in Mason County. Now we have a heroin problem.”
Cole said the best way to combat the drug issues is through education, treatment and analyzing the facts and data. Cole specifically mentioned his concern with the potential legalization of recreational marijuana throughout the state.
“You hear people talk, ‘Well, alcohol is legal, so why not legalize marijuana?’” he said. “Well last year was the first time in nine years Michigan had over a thousand residents killed (from drunk drivers.) What do you think legalizing another controlled substance will do when you put those people behind the wheel of a car?”
Cole said that drugs and alcohol have different “social circles,” and statistics have shown that drunken driving arrests occur at a different time of the day then drugged driving arrests.
“When do most of your drunk drivers kill themselves or somebody else? Weekend nights, right?” he said. “Marijuana fatalities, these crashes are occurring between three and six in the afternoon … the drugged drivers are killing family members when they’re coming home from school or coming home from work.”
Trying to keep up with treatment
Cole said that people suffering from addiction have treatment options once incarcerated.
“We have Dr. Kuster who comes in and she also runs the Suboxone program and a substance abuse program out of her office, so she’s doing that there and she is doing a program at our office too,” he said.
Suboxone is a prescription medicine that’s used to treat adults who are addicted to opioids.
Cole said incorporating faith into the treatment process has helped break the cycle of inmates choosing friendships that are not supportive for recovery. There’s now a livestream of a church service available for inmates at the jail.
“I do believe there needs to be a faith-based component to that to a certain degree,” he said. “Radiant Church came to me and said, ‘We would really like to live stream our church services if we could.’”
There’s also been a “sharp” increase in the number of calls to Community Mental Health to help with treatment, Cole said.
Although there are resources available, Cole said they’re not enough for those in the county that require help with addiction.
“I would certainly be interested in hearing any other services that may be out there that can help people struggling with addiction,” he said. “Because really the only time they have to get clean is while they’re in jail.”
Cole said more resources are needed, but the issue of some addicts not giving a full effort to participate in treatment has also proven to be a problem.
“Before they can get their body clean, they need to get their mind clean,” he said. “That’s through some really in-depth counseling that needs to be done.”
Clearing complaints
Cole discussed what his office is doing to serve the area, his concerns within the county and what needs to be done in the future to further carry out the mission of the sheriff’s office.
After giving a brief history of the Mason County Sheriff’s Office, Cole discussed the performance of his staff. Cole said the number of criminal complaints cleared, solved or having warrants requested for increased from 24 percent in 2012 to 65 percent in 2017.
“We’ve really made clearing criminal complaints a priority,” Cole said. “If it’s important enough for a citizen to call 911, (deputies) need to take that call and need to take it seriously.” |
If you haven’t heard by now, Tucker Carlson has replaced Megyn Kelly on FOX News and has evolved from a mainstream conservative into a borderline Alt-Lite personality:
“This shtick worked brilliantly for Carlson, catapulting him from a weekend hosting gig to the coveted 9 p.m. slot in Fox’s primetime lineup. He now regularly pulls in more than 3 million viewers a night—a marked improvement on the program he replaced—and he counts the commander in chief among his loyal fans. Just this past weekend, President Trump set off a minor international firestorm when he suggested Sweden was experiencing an immigrant-fueled spike in crime—a (dubious) claim he picked up by watching Tucker Carlson Tonight. …”
Case in point, the Sweden story.
It was all over sites like Infowars and Breitbart in the two weeks before Tucker Carlson picked it up. It went from there all the way up the rightwing media food chain to President Trump. We’ve become fans of the show in this household even though we consume far more more information from the internet than cable television. He’s reaching an audience which normally doesn’t watch FOX News. |
The UK's Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ) has created an account on the repository code hosting service GitHub and open-sourced its first project, Gaffer.
Written in Java, Gaffer is a "framework that makes it easy to store large-scale graphs in which the nodes and edges have statistics such as counts, histograms and sketches," GCHQ stated in the project description. Developed primarily as a graph database, the software is "optimised for retrieving data on nodes of interest."
It's obviously very hard to know what purpose Gaffer actually has within GCHQ, but graph databases are generally used for working out connections between various nodes. So, each node might be a surveilled terrorist or other source of data, and analysis of the graph might then show who or what is at the "centre" of that network. Perhaps there's a clue in the name of the software, too: "Gaffer" is British slang for "boss."
GCHQ explained the key benefits of Gaffer over the other similar solutions:
Gaffer is distinguished from other graph storage systems by its ability to update properties within the store itself. For example, if the edges in a graph have a count statistic, then when there is a new observation of an edge, the edge can simply be inserted into the graph with a count of 1. If this edge already exists in the graph then this count of 1 will be added onto the existing edge. The ability to do these updates without the need for query-update-put is key to the ability to ingest large volumes of data. Many types of statistics are available, including maps, sets, histograms, hyperloglog sketches and bitmaps used to store timestamps.
Gaffer is distributed under the Apache 2.0 licence, a permissive free-software licence that allows anyone to modify and distribute the code in any way they see fit, as long as the original copyright notice and disclaimer are preserved.
By default, Gaffer uses the Accumulo key/value store based on the BigTable technology developed by Google. It's worth mentioning that Accumulo itself was built by another intelligence body, the US National Security Agency (NSA), and contributed to the Apache Foundation in 2011. The general consensus on Hacker News is that Gaffer is actually rather neat, if you're looking for a mega-scale graph database.
GCHQ didn't give any particular reason for open-sourcing Gaffer now but mentioned that a project called Gaffer2 is already in the works. It's supposed to become "a more general framework" with a number of improvements. There's no word on whether Gaffer2 will be open-sourced under the same licence.
According to a special page on GitHub dedicated to the service's usage by governments, 70 official bodies in the UK are keeping some of their code there, including the Home Office and HMRC. |
Imagine there was one newspaper that landed all the scoops. Literally all of them. Big news, silly news, the lot. When those girlfriendless, finger-wagging freaks in Syria and Iraq opted to behead another aid worker, it would be reported here first. Likewise when nude photographs of a Hollywood actress were stolen by a different bunch of girlfriendless freaks. Hell of a newspaper, this one. Imagine it.
After a while, imagine that western governments began to realise that this newspaper had sources that their own security services just couldn’t rival. So imagine that the editors of this mighty, astonishing newspaper were summoned to Downing Street and told to hand it all over. Names, contact details, locations, known associates — the works. It wouldn’t be temperate, this meeting. In the aftermath, various sources would describe it as ‘a bollocking’. And they might protest, these various editors, that their job was only to report on the world, not to police it, and that if they began to hand over sources then their sources would merely go elsewhere, to rivals who would not. But the government wouldn’t care about that. ‘Do as we say,’ the politicians, mandarins and security chiefs would say. ‘Do as we say, or we’ll make your lives a bloody misery.’ And imagine how you’d feel about that.
Now call this newspaper ‘Google’, and watch your conceptual world swivel slightly. Of course, Google isn’t really a newspaper. In fact, it may be the greatest enemy that newspapers have; bastardising copy, mocking copy-right and gradually forcing a whole industry to swap editorial judgment for search engine optimisation. Yet in terms of pure news, Ofcom reports that Google’s news arm is read by more people than the Sky News website. Google also owns YouTube, which hosts so much online video that it virtually is online video. For almost all other internet news, meanwhile, it is the first port of call, via search. It is easy, sometimes, to forget that new media is media at all.
Last month the new head of GCHQ, Robert Hannigan, described US technology companies as ‘the command and control networks of choice’ for terrorists. This week, we found out more — one of the killers of Fusilier Lee Rigby had boasted on Facebook about his intent to murder a soldier, and his account was closed without anyone alerting the authorities. Just like everybody else, terrorists like to email, message, tweet and Facebook each other. They like to watch and upload videos and download documents, albeit of fairly niche bloodthirsty and bomb-making-ish sorts.
The revelations of the National Security Agency defector Edward Snowden had limited traction in this country, possibly because they were mainly in the Guardian and most people drifted off. In both liberty-loving America and surveillance-hating Germany, however, they hit like a bomb. Since then, pretty much all major internet outfits — Google, Apple, Microsoft and others — have begun to enable encryption of their services by default. This makes life hard for hackers, but also means that it’s no longer enough for security services just to intercept your communications if they reckon you’re a wrong ’un. Now they need to decode them, too. If they can. ‘What concerns me,’ said James Comey, the director of the FBI, ‘is companies marketing something expressly to allow people to place themselves above the law.’
In this country, when law enforcement wants information from technology companies, the process — at least officially — is cumbersome. Perhaps there’s an inbox they want a look at, or perhaps a video nasty has been uploaded and they want to know where from, or to have it taken down. Warrants and lawyers are required. For the most part, the companies are disinclined to be more proactive, not least because it’s a lot of work. By some calculations, 300 hours of video is uploaded to YouTube every minute. And, while YouTube certainly has algorithms that allow it immediately to identify, say, a samizdat copy of the new Taylor Swift song, identifying an amateurish video of a man in a desert on his knees is a bit more complicated. And at any rate, why should they, when the same stuff is being broadcast around the world?
David Cameron declared this week that companies ‘have a moral responsibility to act’ if they discover anything related to terrorism from any of their users. Probably they do, but generating only a few false positives — the celebrated case of Paul Chambers joking about blowing up Robin Hood airport is one example — would cause any company enormous reputational damage. Ultimately, there’s no means of monitoring terrorists that doesn’t leave every-body else thinking you’re monitoring them, too.
Think of Britain’s experience over the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act (Ripa), which was introduced to allow the surveillance of serious criminals, and expanded, chaotically, to enable councils to spy on people suspected of fiddling school places. Make it much, much easier for Special Branch to read Geoffrey Al-Wannabi-Jihadi’s email, in other words, and how long until the local council can read yours, and use the fact you booked a rafting holiday as an excuse to cancel your disabled badge?
Think of the Leveson recommendations about press regulation, rendered nonsensical because they couldn’t cope with the online world. To take a psychological view, perhaps many technology companies simply represent an existential affront to governments, because they embody that which cannot be controlled. It may be for this reason that, in every direction, here and abroad, you will find governments chivvying away at them.
Vast amounts of noise were made last year about David Cameron and Theresa May’s successful plan to make internet firms block searches for child abuse images. In truth, the proposals were almost meaningless; few paedophiles use Google, and if they did, they wouldn’t have to use British Google. Yet it functioned as a flex of muscle; a stamp of wishful authority by a government keen to pretend it has powers it does not. You could understand something similar by the EU’s absurd ‘right to be forgotten’, by which individuals can demand that embarrassing results are removed from search results. Again, the practical effects are negligible. It was a show of force.
Notably, when companies like Google and Facebook get beaten up over privacy in Germany, it happens for exactly the opposite reasons to over here — not for co-operating with governments too little, but for doing so too much. Angela Merkel has made noises about forcing such companies to store the data of European customers in Europe, precisely so that Snowden’s former employers can’t get hold of it.
Europe, however, has its own existential problems with Google. According to some in the European Parliament, the American company is a monopoly abusing its dominance of the marketplace, and should be broken up, thereby allowing all those Croatian email, German social media and Polish search industries to flourish, as all good Europeans should wish. A vote to this effect was being taken as The Spectator went to press. In truth, of course, the parliament has no power over this sort of thing whatsoever, and merely wants to give a nudge to a similar anti-trust investigation being undertaken by the European Commission. Again, this is an institution seeing something it cannot control, and minding.
If these vast new media empires were railroads, or sewage systems, or fibre-optic networks, then the clamour from governments would be to counter their own impotence by nationalising them. Yet this shows precisely why companies such as Google and Facebook are not utilities of any traditional sort. Whatever the EC’s investigation concludes, the broader truth will clearly be that these companies have thrived not primarily by hobbling the competition, but by diving into perhaps the fiercest and purest marketplace that there has ever been, and simply excelling at it. It’s a hassle to change your gas, or even your phone service. Changing your search engine takes seconds. But hardly anybody ever does.
Comprehending this tenuousness also helps you to comprehend quite how pointless it is for security services and technology companies to fight. If Google and the like cracked on encryption and rolled over for every state demand, would that make us safer? Perhaps, but only for a week or two. For as long as there are other services more secure, or even just more obscure, those who do not wish to be seen will use them. The security services must know this, and increasingly I struggle to comprehend why they pretend not to. Almost by reflex, government discusses digital surveillance from a starting point of whispered obscurity. If they want these companies to hand over stuff, then they should pass laws compelling them to. That’s what the rule of law means.
You can see why vast technology companies vex governments. They are mammon incarnate, pretending to be holistic yogurt stands; monoliths run by Silicon Valley billionaires who feign humility by occasionally wearing sandals. At least from a statist perspective, they are the triumph of corporatism; supra-national entities powerful enough to smirk at government fury, and brush it away as one might a flea.
Most of all, their services empower people, terrorists or not, to act in ways that the state finds hard to curb. One day, global politics will learn to deal with this, and accept it as a new given. Before then, though, expect a big old fight. |
Harrison Hagan "Jack" Schmitt (born July 3, 1935) is an American geologist, retired NASA astronaut, university professor, former U.S. senator from New Mexico, and, as a crew member of Apollo 17, the most recent living person to have walked on the Moon.
In December 1972, as one of the crew on board Apollo 17, Schmitt became the first member of NASA's first scientist-astronaut group to fly in space. As Apollo 17 was the last of the Apollo missions, he also became the twelfth and second-youngest person to set foot on the Moon, and the second-to-last person to step off of the Moon (he boarded the Lunar Module shortly before commander Eugene Cernan). Schmitt also remains the first and only professional scientist to have flown beyond low Earth orbit and to have visited the Moon.[3] He was influential within the community of geologists supporting the Apollo program and, before starting his own preparations for an Apollo mission, had been one of the scientists training those Apollo astronauts chosen to visit the lunar surface.
Schmitt resigned from NASA in August 1975 in order to run for election to the United States Senate as a member from New Mexico. As the Republican candidate in the 1976 election, he defeated the two-term Democratic incumbent Joseph Montoya. In 1982, Schmitt was defeated by Democrat Jeff Bingaman.
Biography [ edit ]
Early life and education [ edit ]
Born in Santa Rita, New Mexico, Schmitt grew up in nearby Silver City,[4] and is a graduate of the Western High School (class of 1953). He received a B.S. degree in geology from the California Institute of Technology in 1957 and then spent a year studying geology at the University of Oslo in Norway.[4][5][6] He received a Ph.D. in geology from Harvard University in 1964, based on his geological field studies in Norway.[4][7]
NASA career [ edit ]
Before joining NASA as a member of the first group of scientist-astronauts in June 1965,[8] he worked at the U.S. Geological Survey's Astrogeology Center at Flagstaff, Arizona,[9] developing geological field techniques that would be used by the Apollo crews. Following his selection, Schmitt spent his first year at Air Force UPT learning to become a jet pilot. Upon his return to the astronaut corps in Houston, he played a key role in training Apollo crews to be geologic observers when they were in lunar orbit and competent geologic field workers when they were on the lunar surface. After each of the landing missions, he participated in the examination and evaluation of the returned lunar samples and helped the crews with the scientific aspects of their mission reports.
Schmitt spent considerable time becoming proficient in the CSM and LM systems. In March 1970 he became the first of the scientist-astronauts to be assigned to space flight, joining Richard F. Gordon, Jr. (Commander) and Vance Brand (Command Module Pilot) on the Apollo 15 backup crew. The flight rotation put these three in line to fly as prime crew on the third following mission, Apollo 18. When Apollo flights 18 and 19 were cancelled in September 1970, the community of lunar geologists supporting Apollo felt so strongly about the need to land a professional geologist on the Moon, that they pressured NASA to reassign Schmitt to a remaining flight. As a result, Schmitt was assigned in August 1971 to fly on the last mission, Apollo 17, replacing Joe Engle as Lunar Module Pilot. Schmitt landed on the Moon with commander Gene Cernan in December 1972.[10]
Schmitt claims to have taken the photograph of the Earth known as The Blue Marble, possibly one of the most widely distributed photographic images in existence.[11] NASA officially credits the image to the entire Apollo 17 crew.
While on the Moon's surface, Schmitt — the only geologist in the astronaut corps — collected the rock sample designated Troctolite 76535, which has been called "without doubt the most interesting sample returned from the Moon".[12] Among other distinctions, it is the central piece of evidence suggesting that the Moon once possessed an active magnetic field.[13]
As he returned to the Lunar Module before Cernan, Schmitt is the next-to-last person to have walked on the Moon's surface.
After the completion of Apollo 17, Schmitt played an active role in documenting the Apollo geologic results and also took on the task of organizing NASA's Energy Program Office.
Schmitt poses by the American flag, with Earth in the background, during Apollo 17's first EVA.
Schmitt collects lunar specimens during the Apollo 17 mission.
Schmitt falls while on a Moonwalk.
1976 Senate campaign [ edit ]
Schmitt in 2009
On August 30, 1975, Schmitt resigned from NASA to seek election as a Republican to the United States Senate representing New Mexico in the 1976 election.[14][15] Schmitt campaigned for fourteen months, and his campaign focused on the future.[16]
In the Republican primary, held on June 1, 1976, Schmitt defeated Eugene Peirce.[17] In the election, Schmitt opposed two-term Democratic incumbent Joseph Montoya.[16] He defeated Montoya 57% to 42%.[18]
Senate career [ edit ]
He served one term and, notably, was the ranking Republican member of the Science, Technology, and Space Subcommittee.
1982 Senate campaign [ edit ]
He sought a second term in 1982, facing state Attorney General Jeff Bingaman. Bingaman attacked Schmitt for not paying enough attention to local matters; his campaign slogan asked, "What on Earth has he done for you lately?"[19] This, combined with the deep recession, proved too much for Schmitt to overcome; he was defeated, 54% to 46%.
Post-Senate career [ edit ]
Following his Senate term, Schmitt has been a consultant in business, geology, space, and public policy.
Schmitt is an adjunct professor of engineering physics at the University of Wisconsin–Madison,[20] and has long been a proponent of lunar resource utilization.[21][22] In 1997 he proposed the Interlune InterMars Initiative, listing among its goals the advancement of private-sector acquisition and use of lunar resources, particularly lunar helium-3 as a fuel for notional nuclear fusion reactors.[23]
Schmitt (second from right) attends President Donald Trump 's signing of Space Policy Directive-1, directing NASA to resume human flight to the Moon and beyond
Schmitt was chair of the NASA Advisory Council, whose mandate is to provide technical advice to the NASA Administrator, from November 2005 until his abrupt resignation on October 16, 2008.[24] In November 2008, he quit the Planetary Society over policy advocacy differences, citing the organization's statements on "focusing on Mars as the driving goal of human spaceflight" (Schmitt said that going back to the Moon would speed progress toward a manned Mars mission), on "accelerating research into global climate change through more comprehensive Earth observations" (Schmitt voiced objections to the notion of a present "scientific consensus" on climate change as any policy guide), and on international cooperation (which he felt would retard rather than accelerate progress), among other points of divergence.[25]
In January 2011, he was appointed as secretary of the New Mexico Energy, Minerals and Natural Resources Department in the cabinet of Governor Susana Martinez, but was forced to give up the appointment the following month after refusing to submit to a required background investigation.[26] El Paso Times called him the "most celebrated" candidate for New Mexico energy secretary.[27]
Schmitt wrote a book entitled Return to the Moon: Exploration, Enterprise, and Energy in the Human Settlement of Space in 2006.[28]
He lives in Silver City, New Mexico, and spends some of his summer at his northern Minnesota lake cabin.
Schmitt is also involved in several civic projects, including the improvement of the Senator Harrison H. Schmitt Big Sky Hang Glider Park in Albuquerque, New Mexico.[29]
Views on global warming [ edit ]
Schmitt's view on climate change diverges from the frequently reported scientific consensus, as he emphasizes natural over human factors as driving climate. Schmitt has expressed the view that the risks posed by climate change are overrated, and suggests instead that climate change is a tool for people who are trying to increase the size of government.[25] He resigned his membership in the Planetary Society primarily because of its Mars-first policy, but also because of its stance on global warming, writing in his resignation letter that the "global warming scare is being used as a political tool to increase government control over American lives, incomes and decision-making."[25] Schmitt spoke at the March 2009 International Conference on Climate Change sponsored by the Heartland Institute.[30] He appeared in December that year on the Fox Business Network, saying "[t]he CO 2 scare is a red herring".[31]
In a 2009 interview with conspiracy theorist and talk-radio host Alex Jones, Schmitt asserted a link between Soviet Communism and the American environmental movement: "I think the whole trend really began with the fall of the Soviet Union. Because the great champion of the opponents of liberty, namely communism, had to find some other place to go and they basically went into the environmental movement."[32] At the Heartland Institute's sixth International Conference on Climate Change Schmitt said that climate change was a stalking horse for National Socialism.[33]
Schmitt co-authored a May 8, 2013 Wall Street Journal opinion column with William Happer, contending that increasing levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere are not significantly correlated with global warming, attributing the "single-minded demonization of this natural and essential atmospheric gas" to advocates of government control of energy production. Noting a positive relationship between crop resistance to drought and increasing carbon dioxide levels, the authors argued, "Contrary to what some would have us believe, increased carbon dioxide in the atmosphere will benefit the increasing population on the planet by increasing agricultural productivity."[34]
In popular culture [ edit ]
Awards and honors [ edit ]
Schmitt was inducted into the International Space Hall of Fame in 1977.[43] He was one of 24 Apollo astronauts who were inducted into the U.S. Astronaut Hall of Fame in 1997.[44]
Media [ edit ]
Schmitt is one of the astronauts featured in the documentary In the Shadow of the Moon.[45] He also contributed to the book NASA's Scientist-Astronauts by David Shayler and Colin Burgess.
See also [ edit ] |
Story highlights Emails were released via a E&E News FOIA request
They reveal the National Park Service offering assistance to the White House
Washington (CNN) Who says crowd size doesn't matter? Certainly not the White House in the first days of the administration, as newly released Interior Department emails show.
They reveal the extent to which the National Park Service offered assistance to the White House, which was pushing a debunked claim that President Donald Trump had the largest inaugural crowd size ever.
The morning after Inauguration Day, National Park Service communications chief Mike Litterst emailed White House press secretary Sean Spicer offering "any corrective messaging" about the inauguration attendance size, on behalf of acting National Park Service Director Mike Reynolds.
JUST WATCHED Spicer: Inauguration had largest audience ever Replay More Videos ... MUST WATCH Spicer: Inauguration had largest audience ever 01:13
The previous day the National Park Service had retweeted (and later deleted) images that unfavorably compared President Obama's 2009 inauguration crowd to Trump's.
Read More |
A biofluorescent chain catshark (Scyliorhinus rotifer). (© J. Sparks, D. Gruber, and V. Pieribone)
Catsharks aren't harmful to humans, but they also aren't too much to look at — by the light of day, that is. In blue light, certain species give off a gorgeous glow. Now researchers have created a camera to simulate the way these sharks see one another deep under the sea. And through this lens, they say, the glow grows stronger and more distinct the deeper the sharks swim. Their results were published Monday in Scientific Reports.
"We've already shown that catsharks are brightly fluorescent, and this work takes that research a step further, making the case that biofluorescence makes them easier to see by members of the same species," John Sparks, a curator in the American Museum of Natural History's Department of Ichthyology and a co-author on the paper, said in a statement. "This is one of the first papers on biofluorescence to show a connection between visual capability and fluorescence emission, and a big step toward a functional explanation for fluorescence in fishes."
[This ‘glowing’ turtle may be the first biofluorescent reptile ever discovered]
The chain catshark (Scyliorhinus retifer) and the swell shark (Cephaloscyllium ventriosum) that Sparks and his colleagues studied spend most of their lives around 2,000 feet below the surface of the ocean, so they've been largely neglected by researchers.
At that depth, most wavelengths of visible light are absorbed by water, leaving animals bathed mostly in blue hues. But catsharks have molecules in their skin that allow them to absorb some of that blue and re-emit it as other colors, giving them what's called biofluourescence (as opposed to bioluminescence, where the light itself is produced by the organism, as it is via chemical reaction in fireflies).
Fluorescent (A) and white light (B) image of a female swell shark (© Gruber et al.)
But it's hard for humans to appreciate just what a biofluorescent deep-sea creature is supposed to look like. Their colorful displays aren't made for human eyes — which are able to pick up colors that aren't very useful in the ocean — but for the blue and green spectrums of the deep sea. So the researchers created a color filter to mimic fishy vision. With that in place, the fluorescence suddenly popped. And while the researchers could only dive to the most shallow regions of the sharks' habitat, mathematical modeling indicated that the contrast would increase as the water got deeper (and bluer).
[These deep sea ‘mushrooms’ don’t fit into any known category of life]
"Imagine being at a disco party with only blue lighting, so everything looks blue," lead study author David Gruber, a researcher at Baruch College, City University of New York and the American Museum of Natural History, told National Geographic. "Suddenly, someone jumps onto the dance floor with an outfit covered in patterned fluorescent paint that converts blue light into green. They would stand out like a sore thumb. That's what these sharks are doing."
A swell shark under white light (top), natural light (middle), and high-intensity blue light. (© Gruber et al.)
Gruber believes this shows that the sharks use their glowing patterns — which were distinct between species, and again between the two sexes — to communicate with one another.
"It reminds me of when researchers first tuned in to the high frequency of bat sounds, and they discovered all this hidden chatter. They had to then figure out what it meant," he added.
Indeed, there's more work to do before researchers can be sure that the sharks glow significantly under natural conditions. Georgia Southern University's Christine Bedore, who wasn't involved in the study, told the Atlantic she was “pretty doubtful that the fluorescence has any ecological relevance.”
But Gruber, who found evidence of the first biofluorescent reptile (a sea turtle) last year, is eager to study the phenomenon more — and to create more animal-eye cameras to help scientists understand how other creatures experience our world.
Correction: A previous version of this article mistakenly used the word "bioluminescent" in one instance. This has been corrected.
Read More:
There’s something fishy about that viral image of what dolphins ‘see’
Newly discovered deep-sea octopus looks like an adorable ghost
Here’s why mushrooms glow in the dark
A bunch of sharks surprised researchers by hanging out in an underwater volcano
This is a pocket shark
Scientists discover an unexpectedly beautiful rainbow of fluorescent corals in the Red Sea |
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This is ANOTHER meteor which exploded in the sky - just two hours before a space rock crash-landed in Russia injuring 1,000 people.
The fireball - reportedly followed by a loud explosion some minutes later - was spotted above Cuba at 1am GMT yesterday.
That's 6,000 miles away from Chelyabinsk where a meteor left a 20ft crater and caused a devastating sonic boom at 3.20am GMT.
China's Xinhua news agency reported the bright spot in the sky was spotted in the Cienfuegos area, in central Cuba.
One eyewitness said his house shook slightly in the blast and officials are scouring for any remnants of the object.
Some meteorites can be very valuable, selling for up to £433 per gram depending on their exact composition.
Scientists do not believe the space activity was linked to last night’s 150ft wide asteroid 2012 DA14, which passed within 17,000 miles last night.
The 10-tonne fireball in Russia entered the Earth’s atmosphere faster than the speed of sound.
It caused a devastating sonic boom that ripped through buildings and exploded windows, injuring 1,000 people including 82 children.
The immense pressure of the wave also tore the roof off a factory while some 170,000 square metres of shattered glass will need to be replaced.
Meteors are pieces of space rock, usually from larger comets or asteroids, that burn up on entering Earth’s atmosphere.
Bits that survive are called meteorites.
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The largest known meteorite to hit in recent times was the Tunguska event in 1908.
The blast levelled 2,000sq km of forest in Siberia but no one was hurt.
European Space Agency spokesman Bernhard von Weyhe said experts around the globe are looking at ways to spot potential space threats sooner.
He said: “It’s a global challenge and we need to find a solution.
"But one thing’s for sure, the Bruce Willis ‘Armageddon’ nuclear bomb method won’t work.” |
A trip to a fine arts museum can be painfully boring for some, but that’s nothing compared to the torture found at Spanish civil war jail cells.
In 2003, Spanish art historian Jose Milicua claimed he found evidence suggesting prisons during the civil war were inspired by modern art. This wasn’t to educate the prisoners on the humanities, but rather, used as a form of torture.
According to Milicua, the cells were built in 1938 to house republican forces fighting General Franco’s Fascist national Army. Court documents from French anarchist Alphonse Laurencic’s 1939 revealed the prisons were even inspired by the works of Salvador Dali and Wassily Kandinsky.
Reproduction of one of Alphonse Laurencic’s bizarre bauhaus/surrealist cells http://t.co/N4ngcxW7 pic.twitter.com/PJcgEzl3 — Thandi Loewenson (@ThandiLoewenson) January 8, 2013
So what does a modern art jail look like? The cells, which were constructed in Barcelona, featured 20-degree angle sloping beds that made it impossible to sleep on. The floor, meanwhile, had oddly-placed bricks that kept people from ever walking forwards or even backwards.
The trial papers added that the walls were painted with surrealist patterns illuminated by lighting effects to make prisoners dizzy and confused. Other fixtures included a stone seat that can never be sat on, and walls with tar that make it unbearably hot during summer.
And to top it off, the prisoners were also forced to watch Salvador Dali and Luis Bunuel’s surrealist film Un Chien Andalou, wherein one morbid scene depicts an eyeball being slashed open.
Ironically, the Nazi regime – the backers of General Franco – criticised modern art as ‘degenerative’.
Via Open Culture |
Generally, when a property is restricted from advance critical review, that’s a sure sign that there’s no confidence in its quality and every attempt is being made to dodge bad press.
Critics flinch when a film isn’t offered up for review, and these days, we’re often given earlier access to TV shows in order to prepare reviews, recaps, and the like. I had to sit on my hands about American Gods episodes for agonizing weeks while I waited for you all to catch up. This was an instance of Starz believing so strongly in American Gods‘ quality that they made many episodes available for critics ahead of time so that we could offer our opinions before the show aired.
This will not be the case with CBS’ upcoming and much-anticipated Star Trek: Discovery. Reviews are embargoed until after Discovery bows.
EMBARGO!! CBS is prohibiting publication of reviews of #StarTrekDiscovery prior to airing. — Hercules Strong (@hercAICN) September 14, 2017
There’s a hopeful side of me that hopes this may just be another ploy on CBS’ part to keep the show as secret as possible until the last moment—that they want to unveil Discovery in all its finery, no spoilers or hot takes. Successful shows like Game of Thrones do this now, but Game of Thrones also built on many seasons of fanatic reception before initiating this policy. Of Discovery, we know very little, and CBS will be trading entirely on the Star Trek name in expecting the fanbase to come out in force. As was evidenced with Enterprise‘s reception, branding something Star Trek isn’t always enough to ensure a show’s success.
And as my former colleague Katharine Trendacosta points out on io9, “A Star Trek show, done at all well, should review well. … Given all the problems Star Trek: Discovery has had since it was first announced, I don’t know whether if the show is actually bad or if this is just another misstep on the part of CBS.” But she’s afraid that this move means badness, and so am I.
Another potential problem on the horizon for Discovery: a Mary Sue reader, Alexandra, who is a lifelong Trek fan, sent us a message after investigating CBS’ All Access app, which provides access to watch Discovery. Alexandra is seriously worried about CBS’ ability to deliver the show to its audience. She writes:
… I went to the Google Play Store to look at the CBS app, its reviews, the permissions it requires, etc. And I was STUNNED to see the massive number of RECENT reviews from the last 4-5 weeks of users complaining about how the app was crap and didn’t work properly: tons of complaints about how users couldn’t get smooth streaming, that there was a lot of buffering and choking issues. Ignoring all the OTHER complaints about the app (very limited content/the $9.99 commercial-free version still inserts annoying CBS promos into content, etc), what struck me was how TECHNICALLY the app doesn’t seem to be working well right NOW. And this is before allegedly thousands of people are going to suddenly get the app as we get closer to “ST:D’s” premiere on September 24th. … I checked with friends who have iPhone/Apple devices and they screen captured for me recent reviews for the CBS app and I saw the exact SAME recent complaints! Tons of people complaining about streaming/choking/buffering issues. That the app just doesn’t work well. Here’s the thing: I could be totally wrong, but this sounds like a CBS server/infrastructure problem…. not the fact that the app for BOTH Android & Apple OSs may be badly written. And THAT’S something CBS is unlikely to be able to suddenly fix in the next three weeks. Which means… what happens when thousands (tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands?) of users try to stream, “ST:D,” on September 24th/25th and literally CAN’T because CBS doesn’t have the proper technical support in place to make it happen (after all, people are used to the “seamlessness,” of Netflix, Amazon Prime, etc). Can you imagine what would happen if CBS All Access streaming crashed on premiere night??
While I’d love to be confident that CBS has the resources to fix problems with its app prior to such a big release, I’ve also worked on the tech side, and as Alexandra points out, such issues with basic streaming functionality are worrisome and would be difficult to fix. The latest bad reviews I’m seeing on the Apple store are from just the last few days.
I don’t want to believe that CBS would go forward with a one-two punch of no reviews and the potential for technical problems when Discovery debuts. But considering that nothing with Discovery has been smooth sailing, I’m getting seriously concerned for the fate of our ship.
(via io9, image: CBS)
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A mile from daylight and 4,145 feet down... the deepest a British caver has ever been
More than a mile from daylight in an unexplored flooded tunnel, cave diver Chris Jewell cautiously finned ahead.
The passage was barely 3ft high and, as he dived, his movements filled the cold, clear water with silt.
When he was 50ft below the surface, it looked as if the cave was about to close up.
Instead, it widened and turned back uphill, towards air space. At last he surfaced in a turquoise pool in a huge, silent cavern – and by so doing, set a new record, completing the discovery of the deepest underground system yet explored by British cavers.
Rock Star: Chris Jewell, more than 4,000 feet underground and a mile from daylight
Jewell, 28, a computer software consultant from Manchester, had found the long-sought link between the Pozu del Xitu cave, whose entrance lies high in the 9,000ft Picos de Europa mountains in northern Spain, and Cueva Culiembro, a cave behind the huge spring where the Xitu underground river re-emerges, at the bottom of the Rio Cares Gorge – known as ‘Europe’s Grand Canyon’.
The connection meant he had discovered a combined cave system descending 4,145ft, so beating the previous British record, set in the Eighties, by around 300ft. The cave is also nine miles long.
Jewell, who made his dive as part of a ten-person team which returned to Britain last week, knew he had made the link because at the edge of the pool he found a sign on the wall, written in soot made by a calcium carbide lamp.
It said ‘OUCC [Oxford University Cave Club] 1979-81’ and was left by this reporter and friends 29 years ago when we found the pool from the other, Xitu end, at the climax of three expeditions over two years.
To get to the pool from above, we had to negotiate miles of tunnels, some of them vast, others highly constricted, descend 37 vertical shafts as much as 450ft deep, and spend days at a time camping underground.
But we had no diving gear, and as the cave roof dipped beneath the water, we could go no further. We had found one of the remoter spots on Earth: until Jewell, no one had been there since.
Labyrinth: The cave divers negotiate a flooded section of cave
Cave divers began to look for a link with Xitu from Culiembro soon afterwards. In the Eighties, they pushed through the first, 600ft flooded section or ‘sump’ to find new air space beneath a thundering waterfall.
But to make the connection, Jewell and his team-mates had not only to swim – there are six sumps in all – but to climb about 350ft, drilling steel expansion bolts into the rock to scale a series of overhanging shafts and cascades. ‘It’s not just the diving but the bits in between that make it so arduous,’ Jewell said.
‘Some of the trips underground lasted 15, even 18 hours. The water in the Picos caves is cold – about seven degrees above freezing. That gives you maybe 40 minutes until the temperature stops you functioning.’
After Jewell made the link, team members Jason Mallinson and Emma Heron followed the next day.
But the moment when he realised he was through to Xitu was unforgettable. ‘Before I saw the sign, I saw the footprints in the mud by the side of the pool left by the OUCC cavers’ wellies all those years earlier.
'I was on my own but I just started whooping, screaming, “Welcome to Xitu!” It was a dream come true, and the depth record makes it even better.’ |
Recently we’ve been writing a series of posts about different garage gym setups that you can buy from various Crossfit equipment vendors, but what about those of us who don’t have $1,000 to spare on some of these setups? What about the industrious folks out there who are willing to make their own equipment and train like Rocky in the middle of Soviet Russia? Let’s take a look at some DIY garage gym equipment that takes a pretty minimal investment in both time and money.
We’re starting out with a new series of posts focusing on Do It Yourself Garage Gym Equipment. In this post we’re focusing on weight. We’ll keep this post broad, if you can lift it, we’re going to count it as a weight. Ready? Let’s get started…
Make Your Own Kettlebells
Kettlebells are expensive, especially adjustable kettlebells, but Tim Ferriss has a simple approach to solving that for around $10.00 and a trip to your local home improvement store. He has instructions for making a simple “T Bar” out of metal pipe that allows you to change the weights as needed.
Check out the instructions for Tim’s adjustable kettlebell
*Safety note, probably not a good idea to swing these completely overhead, as the weights aren’t fully secured if they are inverted.
If you’re a little more skilled in the workshop and know how to weld you can construct your own kettlebells with the more familiar rounded kettlebell shape using some Rebar and concrete
Make Your Own Sandbags
Heres the easiest, cheapest way to make one of these. Go to your local home improvement store buy a bag of play sand (like you’d put in a sandbox). Wrap that in a trashbag (in case the orignal bag busts) and seal up the bag with duct-tape. Great for carries, sandbag cleans, etc…wouldn’t recommend slamming it on the ground.
If you need something a little more rugged and adjustable look at getting an old military issue duffel bag. I saw one in an antique store for $5.00. You could also snag one off of eBay. If you can’t find one of these, which are pretty rugged and durable, use an old gym bag. Do the above steps with a bag of playsand and then put it in the bag. The benefit here is that you can adjust the weight a little easier. 1 bag not heavy enough? Try adding another bag of sand to the duffel/gym bag.
Make Your Own Bulgarian Bag
A Bulgarian Bag is a twist on a standard sandbag. It’s setup to have places to grip it to give you more options while working out. We’ve never used one, but we’ll try anything once. 15minuteworkout has the instructions
You’ll need the inner tube from a car tire to make a Bulgarian Bag. Try visiting your local privately owned auto repair shop (corporate chains may have more rules) and ask if they have any old ones or if they can call you when they get one (It’s okay if it’s busted, you’ll have to cut it anyway)
Make Your Own Barbell
It’s probably not fair to call it a barbell, since you can’t put weight plates on it, but for lack of a better term that’s what we’re using.
The all natural way is to cut down a tree / old log to around the same length as a standard Olympic barbell and use that. It’s free if it’s in your backyard and you can store it outside. However, this will rot and decay over time and it’s probably not the most feasible way to do this (but it is a good place to start).
It you want to do it a better way, try filling a PVC pipe with water (sometimes referred to as a “Death Stick” or “Slosh Tube”). Don’t fill it all the way, but roughly 3/4s of the way. This will allow the water to slosh back and forth and create an unstable weight when you try and lift it (you’ll have to engage your muscles more to lift and your core more to stabilize). Mark’s Daily Apple has full instructions on building your own slosh tube
Make Your Own Medicine Ball
Take an old basketball and drill a small hole (large enough for a funnel spout) in one of the black stripes of the basketball. Stick in a funnel, fill with sand to your desired weight (might be handy to have a scale nearby). Once you’re done patch the hole with a bike tire patch kit or duct tape. Now, go do 150 wallballs to test it out.
Make Your Own Weighted Vest
The first idea we have here is pretty simple…start out with weights/sand/bricks/etc… in an old backpack and do pull-ups or pushups with it. You could potentially run in it as well, but since the weight isn’t distributed (ie: it’s mostly on the back) it’s better not a great idea for long runs.
If you want a vest that’s a little more conducive to running, head to a sporting goods store and pick up a fly fishing vest (around $15.00-$20.00). These vests have pockets everywhere. Fill ziplock bags with sand or hardened concrete to the desired weight making sure you spread it evenly around the vest. Put it on and work it out.
Other things we haven’t explored…
Some other avenues to explore include lengths of heavy chain. Wrap them around your neck/waist/shoulders and go for a long run. Also, filling up 5 gallon buckets with concrete will get you a block of concrete that ays about 85-100 pounds. You could use it like an atlas stone or clean it like you do with med ball cleans (just two of many options).
As always, with any of this homemade equipment, be safe and smart. We’re not responsible for you hurting yourself or any property damage you may cause using these home brew equipment methods. Catch up with us next time when we look at more DIY Garage Gym Equipment. |
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