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Toronto Maple Leafs' new logo unveiled on centre ice at the ACC Share on Facebook Share on Twitter Share by Email The revamped look, marking the team's centenary season, is the first new design in 45 years New Toronto Maple Leafs logo on centre ice at the Air Canada Centre. (Toronto Maple Leafs) The Toronto Maple Leafs took to social media Friday afternoon to show the team's new logo being painted on centre ice at the Air Canada Centre. The design, commissioned to mark the team's centennial season, was revealed in February. It was the first time in 45 years the Leafs introduced a new logo. ADVERTISEMENT The new look is a fresh take on the classic Maple Leaf emblem that was used from the 1940s to the 1960s. It will serve as the team's primary crest beginning in the 2016-17 season. The logo, with some slight alterations, aligns most closely to a version used from 1963 to 1967, the most successful era in the team's history. |
Men's Rowing in the US The International Presence at U.S. Colleges (Part 1) The 2016 IRA Men's Eight final, in which only 19 of the 48 rowers were Americans For an intro to the series, see Editors Note: row2k Series on the Intersection of U.S. Men's Collegiate and Elite Rowing Nate Goodman had been a top scholastic rower with two stints on the US junior national team by the time he arrived at Yale University to find a boathouse full of many of the best collegiate athletes, not just from the U.S., but from around the world. The Yale roster that fall of 2013 included top athletes from at least six countries: 18 Americans, two from Germany, two from GB, four from Australia, three from France and two from New Zealand. "I was nervous," Goodman said. "Not in the sense that these guys are better than me, but in the sense of how can I compete. There were a few leaders on the team, some of whom were American, some of whom were European. I thought, how can I pull those erg scores? How can I row that well?" That would not be an unusual thought for any freshman in a top D1 rowing program in the U.S. If there are scholarships available, if the program is going to contend for a collegiate championship, if the school can guarantee a quality undergraduate education that sets the path to a successful future, then there is a world full of young international rowers who want to come to the U.S to row there. Recruiting international rowers to compete for spots in the top collegiate varsity eights has been a common practice that began with a handful in the late 1980s and early 1990s to the point that today, in just about any top collegiate program, internationals occupy a significant number of the available seats in the top men's eights. Nate Goodman stroking the Yale Varsity 8 in 2016 Consider the makeup of the IRA Grand Final in 2016, where of the 48 oarsmen (not including coxswains) in the race, only 19 were Americans (the breakdown in order of finish in the final: California 1, Yale 1, Princeton 4, Washington 3, Harvard 3, Brown 7). In 2015, the trend was underway, if to a lesser extent, with 27 Americans in the IRA Men's Eight Grand Final: Washington 4, Cal 3, Princeton 4, Brown 8, Harvard 5, Northeastern 3 (there were two Americans in the Yale crew that faltered in the semi and failed to make the A final). Over the past two Olympic cycles, as the United States men's senior and Olympic teams struggled to gain positions on international podiums, the idea has taken hold that part of the reason for a lack of performance by the U.S. on the world stage has been that Americans are not prepared to compete when they graduate and join the senior teams. Winning a seat in the top crews is difficult in the face of competition against hand-picked international recruits. And rowing in second and third varsity eights is not enough to develop an elite American senior team athlete, many in the U.S. rowing community believe. That shared view, in the opinion of the several top collegiate coaches interviewed by row2k.com, while understandable, is not necessarily true. "The two are not related," said Yale head coach Steve Gladstone who has been recruiting internationals to the collegiate programs he has coached for the at least the last 25 years, and might be said to have written the book on the practice. "If people are trying to make that case that we will never be able to compete successfully internationally because the D1 programs in the United States are predominately populated by foreigners, I don't agree," said Gladstone. "You get all these foreign kids that are highly developed in your program, and the American kids that are part of your program are going to benefit from being in the same boats and being in that environment in general. Having the internationals on your squad is not going to preclude their development to a senior team." New Scrutiny In the absence of a satisfactory performance by U.S. men's crews over the last eight years at the Olympic Games – one bronze medal in London, none in Rio – the system that guides men's rowing in the United States has come under the microscope. And a large part of the conversation has been the development of American athletes in the U.S. college system – or the perceived lack of it. There are many factors worth considering: Athletes who would have been in a varsity eight receiving the highest level of coaching and scrutiny might now be in second or third varsities, where the coaching may still be of very high quality, but perhaps not to the standard necessary to develop to an elite level Many international students are older than their counterparts from US schools, for varying reasons The disappearance of freshman racing, and frosh squads with a coach explicitly assigned to develop athletes, removed an avenue for athletes to develop without the pressures that come with racing in the varsity eight Rowing's longtime tradition of finding and developing walk-ons is fading U.S. men's coach Bryan Volpenhein outlined some of the arguments: "(American kids) get thrown right into the mix, or they get left out, and they don't develop fast enough," he said. "All the freshman their age that have rowed before in other countries become faster quicker, and move onto the varsity. "(The Americans) might get a shot if they are given enough time. They might end up being better in four years, and beat those kids from Europe, but some are never going to find out. They think 'Nah, this isn't a lot of fun to just come here every day and row in a four or erg by myself and not knowing if I'm ever going to go race.' The Europeans are producing better kids right now. And the crazy thing is they are not even the best European kids. The best ones stay home and go for their national teams." The Current Situation The contention that international recruits - in general - are better and more suited to push a college program to the top quickly is hard to dispute. They come to the U.S. from cultures where rowing has a higher place in the top sports landscape where they more likely trained in smaller programs, have had more personalized coaching, started younger and in smaller boats, and developed better overall boat skills. And, since 1956 when a Yale eight won Olympic gold one of eight collegiate crews that won at the Olympics the U.S. men's team, with the exception of 1964 and 2004, rowing has struggled to shine with the lights are brightest. There have been periods of glory, including four world championships in the eight - 1997, 1998, 1999 and 2005, and Olympic gold in 2004 – but since the 2008 Beijing bronze medal eight, the U.S. has been roughed up. There have been medals at world championships, but also two world championship qualifiers that resulted in upheaval and unqualified crews. In Rio, just one USRowing Training Center crew, the men's eight that finished fourth, reached an A final. And all that despite two full cycles of focusing on smaller boats, prioritizing the men's four and limiting resources to best serve a narrowed number of supported U.S. crews. An ensuing Task Force review created tumult in the ranks of the national governing body USRowing, ultimately resulting in the resignation of four board members and CEO Glenn Merry stepping down under fire. By The Numbers: International U.S. Collegiates in London and Rio What does not quite appear to be entirely true is the existence of a direct connection between the U.S. men's performance over the last eight years and the recruitment of internationals at top D1 schools. There may not be even a direct connection between the winning men's crews in Rio and international collegiate athletes moving from their schools to their respective national teams. Of the 2016 national championship Cal crew, only Polish single sculler and Natan Wegrzyki-Szymczyk rowed in Rio, where he finished seventh in the single. Of the British eight that won, all came from the British system; in fact, no US-educated British athlete has ever made the British senior men's team. The Canadian men's squad did include a few US-educated athletes, including Colin McCabe, Rob Gibson, Will Dean, and Will Crothers; Olivier Siegelaar from the Dutch team and Marko Marjonvic from the Serbian double rowed at Cal; and Princeton grad Tim Masters was in the Australian men's eight that missed qualifying for Rio at the Final Qualification Regatta. With 334 men competing in rowing in Rio, these numbers do not point to a large-scale domination of collegiate rowers in the international ranks. In 2012, there were about a dozen US-educated male athletes rowing for other countries, a very small percentage of the 353 men who competed. The ranks of many other sports are packed with internationals without a corresponding decline in improvement opportunities for US athletes; in just the Pac-12 for example, 55 athletes from the U.S. and around the world won a total of 55 Olympic medals in 12 different sports for five different countries. See this list of medals captured by Pac-12 athletes, which shows considerable representation across many sports, while this complete list of Pac-12 athletes in Rio shows a similar trend. Among those Pac-12 ranks are Rob Munn and Ambrose Puttmann, both of whom rowed in the Washington 2V at a time when the UW squad was tremendously deep, but who also went on to row on US teams, both at the U23 and senior level; both won gold in the U23 men's eight in 2012, and Munn rowed in the 2016 US men's Olympic eight. Also somewhat anecdotally, the presence of internationals in U.S. collegiate women's boats has not hurt the U.S. women's squad; in the 2015 NCAA Varsity 8 final, only four Americans were in the top two eights from Ohio State and Cal; third-place Virginia was an all-American crew. Furthermore, while internationals have been at U.S. colleges for some time, the powerful flood of internationals into the U.S. collegiate system is a relatively new phenomenon that arguably post-dates struggles at the elite level. While these observations and data are not proof that having internationals in the top eights is a root cause of, the case for causation is weaker than might be at first. For heaps more data and perhaps a contrasting view on the topic, see Carlo Zezza's book Boys in a Box: Why our top college crews are rowed by foreigners, Why our men won no medals at the Rio Olympics, and What we can do about it. The U.S. Collegiate View There is not a single collegiate coach – from a Division I, or club program – that does not see winning as their top priority. More to the point, it is not the job of the U.S. collegiate system to produce U.S. national oarsmen. Top international recruits, collegiate coaches argue, are better positioned because of the sports culture from their native countries and the programs and systems they train in to come to a program and have an immediate impact on a top varsity eight. A top collegiate program's main mission is winning, and in every sport recruiting foreign athletes to compete is something done across the board. Gregg Hartsuff, who coaches a top men's collegiate club program at the University of Michigan, would love to have to contend with this issue. "If I were the coach of a Division I program with scholarships, I would be hunting for talent and turning over every stone as well," said Hartsuff, who was a member of the USRowing study task force. "I don't have an issue with internationals competing in all of our varsity eights. I would be doing the same thing. I'm paid to win. So, I don't have an issue with it." The 2015 ACRA Men's eight final Gladstone, and Cal coach and former U.S. Olympic and national team men's coach Mike Teti, say the same thing. "Your objective is to win the races," Gladstone said. "And in the process of endeavoring to win the races, you have the parallel growth of the spirit of the person involved. But it has always been the objective to win the races; to be as good as you can be and to win the games." Teti put it this way: "If I don't produce, I get fired." Very few people in American rowing fault these coaches for recruiting internationals. "They all know they need to recruit internationals," said Volpenhein. "They all need the best rowers they can get. So they are doing what anyone would do. I do not blame them, or anyone, for doing that. "That's what they should do, go out and recruit the best athletes. In the end, those better athletes should push the American kids to a higher level. That's how it should work. So I don't see any sense in limiting recruiting or saying you can't do this, you can only recruit American kids." Collegiate coaches agree with Volpenhein's assessment that international recruits will push the American kids. It forces them to work and compete harder daily to contend for the top seats, which should make recruiting internationally a plus for the U.S. system, not a drain. The American Experience With all Goodman's early success in the U.S. system, the Montclair, N.J. native, was equipped to compete for the varsity eight in his first year, even if he was nervous in his first days as a freshman. But he was "a little too cocky for my own good," he recalls. "I got beaten in a lot of ways very quickly and I remember thinking to myself, how am I going to do what they are doing? I've got to be better." To be specific, Goodman was not just referring to the internationals in the program, but the top Americans as well. He rowed in the second varsity eight that year and then moved to the top varsity crew in his second year. He has been part of and stroked a very competitive and successful eight since. It could be argued that Goodman would have made that jump to the top crew anyway, but in his opinion, his overall development was moved forward, and faster, by having top international athletes to challenge and teach him. "I really like having internationals on the team," he said. "I think it raises the standard at Yale. I had to be better than I would have been if we were an all American team simply because there are more people, and a wider range of athletes to draw from. "I would argue that having teams pick up the best guys from around the world makes the Americans on the team more prepared. I certainly feel more prepared to compete for the U.S. as a virtue of having rowed with the guys that I rowed with at Yale. "We're exposed to more ideas. Every guy that comes into the program has an influence on how things happen, an influence on the team culture," he said. "We had a bunch of German guys and they left their mark and we tried to take the lessons from German rowing to help us improve. Right now, we have British guys and we're trying to take their experiences on the British team and learn from them. And the American guys, too. We try to take the lessons from what has gone well, and what has not gone well, rowing for the U.S." Last summer, Goodman earned a spot on the U.S. under 23 eight that finished 10th at the world championships. He has been communicating with the training center coaches and is hoping that, following this last year at Yale, he will be invited to be part of the U.S Princeton Training Center, and to find a way to row in Tokyo. He is not deterred, he said, by a collegiate system that recruits top internationals that row in the varsity eights at the IRAs and Goodman believes that he is in a good position and has the time to develop into a top, international level athlete. He also believes there are enough just like him in the U.S. Are the U.S. athletes out there? That ultimately seems to be the question. The answer, collegiate and U.S. coaches say, is yes - without question. Over the subsequent installments of this series, we will talk about who they are and where they row, and then outline where they believe we can find them, how to get them involved, and how to keep them interested in rowing for their country; stay tuned. |
RedZone – the rather contentious alt-account detector cum security-system – has been removed from the Second Life Marketplace for the second time by Linden Lab, and has had its in-world vendor removed (twice) by the Lab as well. ”Hey, all. I got the go-ahead to give an update on zF Red Zone specifically. Again, thank you for the ARs with specific info about violations. These have been very helpful for letting Lindens know what’s going on. Tuesday morning, we removed zF Red Zone from the Marketplace for a second time. We removed the in-world vendor distributing the item as well. We determined that zF Red Zone was still in violation of our Terms of Service and Community Standards. We asked for removal by no later than today of all zF Red Zone functionality that discloses any alternate account names. That is, even if consent is asked, the service may not act on the consent. In addition, we asked for removal by no later than Friday of the interface for and any remaining implementation of the zF Red Zone consent mechanism because it does not comply with our policies. If these updates are not made, we will take appropriate steps to remedy the violations. As before, we appreciate your help in keeping an eye on content. If you find that any merchant’s product is not in compliance with our TOS or our Community Standards, please file an abuse report about the product. Do this even if you filed against a previous version. Include a specific explanation of what you believe is a violation, and ideally select and report the in-world object at issue in case it behaves differently than what’s in the Marketplace. Before reporting, make sure you have first-hand knowledge of the issue. Support can best react if you explain specific steps to reproduce or confirm a violation.” – Soft Linden on VWR-24746 |
Jack Dorsey will drop the "interim CEO" title and become the permanent chief executive of Twitter. The company just announced the news and board members are placing their full support behind Dorsey, who will also remain CEO of Square. That double duty initially was seen as a strike against Dorsey remaining Twitter's top executive for the long term; at one point the board publicly stated it was searching for someone who could take on the role full time — as most CEOs do. An SEC filing reveals that Twitter formally made the decision on September 30th and also that "there are no plans to provide Mr. Dorsey with direct compensation" for his role as Twitter's chief executive. We are naming @adambain COO of Twitter, we're working to change the composition of our Board, and I will serve as CEO of Twitter and Square! — Jack (@jack) October 5, 2015 But influential Twitter investors have persisted in their calls for Dorsey to lead Twitter, arguing that there are few other individuals who possess his understanding of the service — and his vision for its future. Dorsey, who is one of Twitter's co-founders, has held the interim CEO position since June, when former chief Dick Costolo announced he would be stepping down. Recode first reported that Dorsey had locked down the permanent CEO position, though Twitter had other potential candidates including revenue chief Adam Bain — now appointed chief operating officer — and CFO Anthony Noto. Dorsey's official appointment to the top role also coincides with former CEO Dick Costolo's departure from Twitter's board. As for the new full-time chief's plan, Dorsey laid it all out in a tweet. "Our work forward is to make Twitter easy to understand by anyone in the world, and give more utility to the people who love to use it daily!" |
This post introduces a curated list of the most cited deep learning papers (since 2012), provides the inclusion criteria, shares a few entry examples, and points to the full listing for those interested in investigating further. By Terry Taewoong Um, University of Waterloo. We believe that there exist classic deep learning papers which are worth reading regardless of their application domain. Rather than providing overwhelming amount of papers, We would like to provide a curated list of the awesome deep learning papers which are considered as must-reads in certain research domains. Background Before this list, there exist other awesome deep learning lists, for example, Deep Vision and Awesome Recurrent Neural Networks. Also, after this list comes out, another awesome list for deep learning beginners, called Deep Learning Papers Reading Roadmap, has been created and loved by many deep learning researchers. Although the Roadmap List includes lots of important deep learning papers, it feels overwhelming for me to read them all. As I mentioned in the introduction, I believe that seminal works can give us lessons regardless of their application domain. Thus, I would like to introduce top 100 deep learning papers here as a good starting point of overviewing deep learning researches. To get the news for newly released papers everyday, follow my twitter or facebook page! Awesome list criteria A list of top 100 deep learning papers published from 2012 to 2016 is suggested. published from 2012 to 2016 is suggested. If a paper is added to the list, another paper (usually from *More Papers from 2016" section) should be removed to keep top 100 papers. (Thus, removing papers is also important contributions as well as adding papers) Papers that are important, but failed to be included in the list, will be listed in More than Top 100 section. Please refer to New Papers and Old Papers sections for the papers published in recent 6 months or before 2012. Citation criteria < 6 months : New Papers (by discussion) 2016 : +60 citations or "More Papers from 2016" 2015 : +200 citations 2014 : +400 citations 2013 : +600 citations 2012 : +800 citations ~2012 : Old Papers (by discussion) Please note that we prefer seminal deep learning papers that can be applied to various researches rather than application papers. For that reason, some papers that meet the criteria may not be accepted while others can be. It depends on the impact of the paper, applicability to other researches scarcity of the research domain, and so on. Editor: What follows is a selection of curated papers from this list, one from each category, as selected by the author. Please see the original for the full listing. 1. Understanding / Generalization / Transfer Distilling the knowledge in a neural network (2015), G. Hinton et al. [pdf] 2. Optimization / Training Techniques Batch normalization: Accelerating deep network training by reducing internal covariate shift (2015), S. Loffe and C. Szegedy [pdf] 3. Unsupervised / Generative Models Unsupervised representation learning with deep convolutional generative adversarial networks (2015), A. Radford et al. [pdf] 4. Convolutional Neural Network Models Deep residual learning for image recognition (2016), K. He et al. [pdf] 5. Image: Segmentation / Object Detection Fast R-CNN (2015), R. Girshick [pdf] 6. Image / Video / Etc. Show and tell: A neural image caption generator (2015), O. Vinyals et al. [pdf] 7. Natural Language Processing / RNNs Learning phrase representations using RNN encoder-decoder for statistical machine translation (2014), K. Cho et al. [pdf] 8. Speech / Other Domain Speech recognition with deep recurrent neural networks (2013), A. Graves [pdf] 9. Reinforcement Learning / Robotics Human-level control through deep reinforcement learning (2015), V. Mnih et al. [pdf] 10. More Papers from 2016 Domain-adversarial training of neural networks (2016), Y. Ganin et al. [pdf] Bio: Terry Taewoong Um is a PhD candidate at U. Waterloo. Terry completed his B.S and M.S. in Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering at the Seoul National University in 2008, 2010, respectively. He also worked at LIG Nex1 and Korea Institute of Science and Technology (KIST) until 2014. His previous research was on robot motion planning and power-assist exoskeleton. In his Ph.D. study, he is focusing on introducing Lie group geometry to deep learning techniques for learning human / robot motions. Original. Reposted with permission. Related: |
On Monday, October 9, a satirical video was released from The Daily Wire on its Facebook page and Twitter feed. While many people understood the video was satire (albeit not the best satire), others felt it was insensitive to Native Americans and some even called it racist. Ben Shapiro himself was on vacation at the time of the video’s posting, and had no input or sign off on said video, but he released the following statement moments ago: My statement on the Columbus Day video that went up on Daily Wire's Twitter and Facebook yesterday. It has now been justifiably removed. pic.twitter.com/ja6h8cW2af — Ben Shapiro (@benshapiro) October 10, 2017 Class act, all the way. This is the right decision. — Stephen Gutowski (@StephenGutowski) October 10, 2017 Good call. Keep up the good work. — Right Said Ed (@edalexport) October 10, 2017 Dealing in satire can be really tough (Twitchy editors KNOW), and it takes a lot of cojones to come out and admit something didn’t work and publicly apologize for it, like Ben has. Thanks Ben. Speaking as someone who is a fan, this was the right thing to do. — David Paul Jenner (@DavidPaulJenner) October 10, 2017 Indeed. Related: Twitchy coverage of Ben Shapiro |
Where to Stream: Megyn Kelly Today More Options As we predicted this morning, it was only a matter of time until viewers of Megyn Kelly Today were going to be exposed to another cringeworthy interview to suffer through. Like clockwork, the show experienced another headline-making moment mere hours later – but to Kelly‘s credit, this time wasn’t really her fault. During an interview with decorated American soccer player and Olympic gold medalist Carli Lloyd, a member of Kelly’s crew inadvertently stepped into frame while Lloyd discussed what had changed for her since scoring her famed game-winning goals. Lloyd began her answer to Kelly but was soon obscured by a cameraman stepping into frame. “It’s been a whirlwind, you know? But I think what’s been most fascinating is -” The crew member quickly noticed his mistake and loudly whispered “sh**!” before shifting back out, which was seemingly acknowledged by an eyebrow raise from Lloyd. Cameraman expletives aside, Kelly did dig some part of her own clumsy grave on this morning’s show. The beginning of the segment found the host looking into the wrong camera, which she then addressed wordlessly by turning to face the correct one. Between this, the Jane Fonda disaster, the Debra Messing disaster, the unexplained mystery of what happened to her scheduled interview with Edie Falco, and her weirdly noncommittal opinions on the NFL anthem protests, this has been a week to forget for the former Fox News star. And remember, it’s only Week 1, folks. Megyn Kelly Today airs weekdays at 9am EST on NBC. Where to Stream Megyn Kelly Today |
Last August, I wrote about Mike Tyson’s transformation to veganism. At the time, he had been vegan for 8 months. While he was very enthusiastic about the diet and said he felt great (“I get these explosions of energy. I don’t know how long they last, but they’re like explosions. So powerful.”), I’m sure I wasn’t the only one wondering if he would stick to it. Well, Greta Van Susteren of FOX News recently recorded an interview with him at his home in Arizona and it looks like he’s in it for the long haul. Here’s a little clip from that part of the interview (full video interview below): TYSON: I feel awesome. VAN SUSTEREN: Mentally feeling different as vegan? TYSON: Incredible. I wish I was born this way. When you find out about the processed stuff you have been eating. I wonder why I was crazy all those years. VAN SUSTEREN: The food TYSON: All that garbage I was eating running around,… the drugs didn’t help either. (LAUGHTER) We also got a little sneak peak into how Tyson became a vegan. It seems that his wife likes trying out different diet trends for the purpose of losing weight. When she tried out the vegan diet, apparently it really stuck with Tyson. As he said last year, he realized awhile back that he was done with meat: “I ate, like, the tiniest piece of meat, and I woke up violently sick. It was vicious pain. I was throwing up. And I realized meat’s become a poison for me now.” Tyson talked more about how his whole personality and life goals have changed in the interview, and he talked about and showed off some of his greatly-loved pigeons. The whole interview was pretty interesting to watch. He seemed like a whole different Mike to me. Watch it here: Watch the latest video at video.foxnews.com h/t TreeHugger Related Stories: Photo Credit: apbialek |
Mirage BHPian Join Date: Dec 2011 Location: Bombay Posts: 123 Thanked: 136 Times re: TopGear Season 21 - Now on Air Quote: Scorcher Originally Posted by Attachment 1121890 But from what we can see, the trio is adamant to lay the rumors of TG coming to an end to rest and has already commenced filming of the next season. Its still debated if its a special or one of their private DVDs, but the reports suggests it is indeed the new season and the trio is accompanied by the usual TG squadron in the usual RRs and an F-Type (new crew car!). Here are pictures of Jezza and Hamster busy filming in Monaco with a Bugatti Veyron GrandSport Vitesse WRC and a Lamborghini Aventador Roadster. Another pic shows Clarkson filming in an SLS Black, which is a different color to the one already featured on the show. . TopGear, as earlier announced, has gone into a hiatus after six episodes from Season 20,But from what we can see, the trio is adamant to lay the rumors of TG coming to an end to rest and has already commenced filming of the next season. Its still debated if its a special or one of their private DVDs, but the reports suggests it is indeed the new season and the trio is accompanied by the usual TG squadron in the usual RRs and an F-Type (new crew car!).Here are pictures of Jezza and Hamster busy filming in Monaco with a Bugatti Veyron GrandSport Vitesse WRC and a Lamborghini Aventador Roadster. Another pic shows Clarkson filming in an SLS Black, which is a different color to the one already featured on the show. The Perfect Road Trip, Not Season 21 They are for an upcoming Dvd, Not Season 21 |
thatbando: stopwhitepeopleforever: thatbando: blackberryshawty: stopwhitepeopleforever: A gay black man could be murdered in cold blood and nobody would give a fuck. But let a gay white boy not be able to take his boyfriend to prom and all hell will break loose on the “injustice” they’ve had to go through, with a spot on the 11:00 news. And Ellen giving them $10000 But at the same time, both issues need to be addressed. Both issues are valid. Just because a gay black man was murdered doesn’t mean that we should ignore the white gay boy not taking his bf to prom. Both are wrong. Both should be taken care of. Every case of homophobia is wrong, big or small. You’re saying murder and not being allowed to take your boyfriend to prom are on the same level. This is why I made the post, you’re disgusting. I’m saying that the gay white boy still has a struggle, not an equal struggle, but a struggle, and you’d be the person sitting at home, watching TV, not doing anything to help either side, see the story and get pissed because he’s white, and decide you’re going to rant about it on Tumblr. What have you done to actually help? White gays are the face of the LBTQIA movement and have the most power in this community out of ALL of us. If Bradley can’t take his boyfriend to Prom all he has to do is make a video on Youtube fake sobbing to Ellen and she’ll wave her magic white gay wand and get he and his boyfriend VIP treatment to the prom, $10,000 and make them both Prom King. I’m not interested in rallying for white cis gays because they have all the help they can get. Their struggle is irrelevant to me, as long as I’m breathing there will not be a day on this earth that I spend the time to make life easier for white gays. What am I doing you ask? I’m raising awareness to the gross injustice that gay PoC have to deal with as opposed to the minor inconveniences white gays have to deal with. To say I’m not actually helping gay PoC clearly shows how ignorant you are in regards to who I am and what I’ve done on and off Tumblr. Don’t check for me unless I send for you, and trust me it’ll be a cold day in hell when that happens. Conversation over. White gays are privileged; LGBTQ PoC are being murdered and have higher homeless rates, and less access to resources. Therefore they’re more important and will be receiving 110% of my attention and help. Now catch this block. |
Newcastle United's squad numbers for the 2014/15 season have been announced By Dan King - Newcastle United Digital Editor Newcastle United have announced their squad numbers for the 2014/15 season. Remy Cabella will wear number 20, Emmanuel Riviere has been given 29 and Siem de Jong has taken the number ten shirt. Jack Colback has opted for number 14, Daryl Janmaat is 22, Ayoze Perez has taken number 17 and season-long loan signing Facundo Ferreyra will wear number 15. Long-serving midfielder Ryan Taylor has taken the vacant number four, with Rolando Aarons being handed Taylor's old number 16. Haris Vuckic has taken Shola Ameobi's old number 23. Youngsters Olivier Kemen, Kevin Mbabu and Freddie Woodman have also been given squad numbers. The full list of squad numbers for 2014/15 is: 1 Tim Krul 2 Fabricio Coloccini 3 Davide Santon 4 Ryan Taylor 6 Mike Williamson 7 Moussa Sissoko 8 Vurnon Anita 9 Papiss Cisse 10 Siem de Jong 11 Yoan Gouffran 13 Mapou Yanga-Mbiwa 14 Jack Colback 15 Facundo Ferreyra 16 Rolando Aarons 17 Ayoze Perez 18 Jonas Gutierrez 19 Massadio Haidara 20 Remy Cabella 21 Rob Elliot 22 Daryl Janmaat 23 Haris Vuckic 24 Cheick Tiote 25 Gabriel Obertan 26 Hatem Ben Arfa 27 Steven Tayor 28 Sammy Ameobi 29 Emmanuel Riviere 30 Mehdi Abeid 31 Jak Alnwick 32 Adam Armstrong 33 Curtis Good 34 Remie Streete 35 Adam Campbell 36 Paul Dummett 37 Lubo Satka 38 Gael Bigirimana 39 Shane Ferguson 40 Olivier Kemen 41 Freddie Woodman 42 Kevin Mbabu Get your favourite players' name and number on the back of the new Newcastle United home shirt - available to pre-order here |
WASHINGTON (MarketWatch) - Despite a record drop in prices, sales of new homes fell 10.2% in January to a record-low seasonally adjusted annual rate of 309,000, the Commerce Department estimated Thursday. Sales were down 48.2% compared with a year earlier, the government reported, an indication that the downturn in the housing market was still accelerating as the recession headed into its second year. Sales were weaker than expected. Economists surveyed by MarketWatch were looking for a sales pace of about 320,000. See Economic Calendar. Builders cut their median sales prices by a record 9.9% in January compared with December in a bid to move unsold homes. Median sales prices are down 13.5% in the past year, the largest year-over-year decline in 38 years. The average sales price has fallen a record 17.6% in the past year. Builders are faced with intense competition from foreclosures and distressed sales of older homes. Buyers are faced with declining wealth and an uncertain labor market, offsetting lower mortgage rates that are improving affordability. Inventories of unsold homes fell by 3.1% to 342,000, the 13th consecutive decline. However, sales are falling even faster. The inventory at the end of January represented a record-high 13.3 month supply at the January sales pace. Nearly half the homes for sale have been completed. The builders' overstock "will keep prices falling for the rest of this year at least," wrote Ian Shepherdson, chief domestic economist for High Frequency Economics. On Wednesday, the National Association of Realtors said sales of existing homes fell to a 12-year low in January. See full story. Government statisticians have low confidence in the monthly report, which is subject to large revisions and large sampling and other statistical errors. In most months, the government isn't sure whether sales rose or fell. The standard error in January, for instance, was plus or minus 15.4%. Read the full government report. The government says it can take up to five months to establish a new trend in sales. Over the past five months, sales have been on a 374,000 annual pace, 42% slower than a year earlier. In all of 2008, 483,000 homes were sold down, from 776,000 in 2007 and 1.05 million in 2006. The release was the third economic report of the day that was weaker than expected. "It's getting uglier by the day," said Harm Bandholz, an economist for UniCredit Markets. In other reports, the Labor Department said initial jobless claims rose to a 27-year high of 667,000 while a record 5.1 million were collecting state unemployment checks. See full story. Also, the Commerce Department said orders for durable goods dropped 5.2% in January, a record sixth decline in a row as U.S. factories suffer from falling demand from consumers, businesses, and foreign markets. See full story. Details Sales fell in three of four regions, led by a 28% decline in the West to a record low 59,000. Sales fell 6.5% in the South and fell 5.6% in the Midwest. Sales rose 12.5% in the Northeast, plus or minus 93%. Inventories fell 3.1% overall. Inventories of completed homes dropped 4%, inventories of homes under construction fell 5%, and inventories of homes yet to be started were flat. Completed homes represented 49% of all homes for sale, up from 40% a year ago. |
(CNN) Investigators trying to piece together what caused EgyptAir Flight 804 to plunge into the Mediterranean Sea now have another clue. The plane's cockpit voice recorder indicates there was a fire on the aircraft before it crashed -- and an attempt to put it out, a senior source from the airline told CNN on Tuesday. The revelation adds another detail to a picture that's been slowly emerging since the May 19 crash. But investigators have said it's still too soon to say what happened aboard the flight. The cockpit voice recorder captures sounds from the flight deck, including crew conversation, alarms and background noise that can help investigators understand what the flight crew was doing. revealed details about what can be heard in the recording. French investigators were Authorities haven't released a transcript orrevealed details about what can be heard in the recording. French investigators were working to repair the voice recorder's damaged memory chip Read More |
By the time you read this, the Texas Legislature probably will be close to passing a bill banning abortions after the 20th week of pregnancy and including provisions that will cause most women’s health clinics that provide abortions to close their doors. An aside: Due to deadlines, the Independence Day holiday and the legislative process, this editorial went to “ether” prior to adoption of the bill. But this issue still matters because (a) lawmakers are all but certain to pass the abortion bill and (b) these proposals should become policy and/or practice, even if the “old” abortion laws still apply. Editor Marv KnoxWith new abortion laws in place, Texans can expect a significant increase in the number of babies born every year. That’s the whole point—to turn more pregnancies into live births. We can expect the mothers of a multitude of these “extra” babies to be teens, unwed and/or poor. Those are the demographics of a significant proportion of women who choose abortions. Since the moral impetus for reducing, if not eliminating, abortions is advocacy for life, then Texans should demonstrate our support for these babies. When you examine many of our current practices and policies, you understand why outsiders claim Texans are more concerned about fetuses than babies, children and teenagers. Texas is among the nation’s leaders in child poverty, teen pregnancy, dropout rates and illiteracy. We’re also among the nation’s lowest-spending states on child poverty, teen pregnancy, dropout rates and illiteracy. Some people attribute these maladies to dependence on government, the product of a so-called welfare state. If that were true, then their incidence would be higher in states that spend the most on child welfare, anti-poverty programs and education, not the least-spending small-government states, like Texas. A strange disparity Ironically, conservative states composed of higher percentages of Bible-believing Christians—from Texas across the South—suffer the blights of child poverty, teen pregnancy, dropout rates and illiteracy much more promiscuously than their more secular counterparts. Those are the states many Texans and Southerners call “pagan” and “dark.” This disparity is an affront to the name of Jesus. Small wonder unbelieving outsiders doubt the compassion of Christ and the credibility of Christians. We often treat people Jesus called “the least” worse than unbelievers do. If Texans’ conservative moral values prompt our state to implement one of the nation’s most stringent abortion codes, then we should accept the responsibility for all those babies we will bring into the world. We need to do right by them. Churches lagging behind That means both enacting better laws and public programs that protect women and children, make certain no child goes hungry and ensure our young people receive quality education. And don’t dare claim that’s the job of the church, and the state should butt out. The church has demonstrated its unwillingness to rise to the occasion, and the enormity of the task is about to multiply. Maybe less than 10 congregations in the entire state come anywhere near caring for all the poor people in their community. Others lag far behind. Most don’t try. Moreover, a central task of Christian citizenship is public advocacy for the weakest and most vulnerable and championing the common good. If we’re going to take care of babies spared from abortions, here’s where we start: • Adoption. Streamline laws and practices to make Texas adoptions simple and inexpensive. A mother who carries her baby to term should know without a doubt that child can be placed in a loving “forever” family who will treasure and nurture it as their own. Churches can support this by creating a culture of adoption—adoption as ministry—that provides a ready and willing supply of families who receive children. • Parenting. At-risk families of these children need the help of a variety of steps. They include … More classes and other learning opportunities to provide basic-parenting skills. Churches particularly can provide these. Changes in tax laws to benefit intact two-parent families. Stronger incentives, as well as financial requirements, for fathers to remain in homes with mothers and their children. Changes in the penal codes so nonviolent offenders of numerous crimes make appropriate restitution but are not locked up and removed from their homes. Research shows the No. 1 factor related to promiscuity of girls and violence of boys is absence of a father from their home. • Nutrition. Secure and strengthen public- and private-sector programs that ensure no child in Texas goes hungry. These changes need to accommodate programs for infants and preschoolers, as well as school-age children, not only during school sessions, but also holidays and summer. • Education. Multiple changes will be required, including … Expanded Head Start programs, to give young children in at-risk families greater opportunity to learn early and prepare for school. Parental training, so moms and dads understand the educational system, the requirements of schools and how they can help their children learn. For some, expanded adult literacy and remedial adult education is needed. Churches can play a huge role. Tutoring for children at all levels. Churches must provide the people-power to make this possible. Modification of middle school and high school curriculum to expand vocational training and broaden vocational options. Our state economy increasingly will depend upon well-trained workers who did not attend college. These are just a few ideas. If we all turn our hearts and minds toward unconditional compassion and care for the all the baby Texans, we will develop more and better responses. We must start now, before they are born. |
Dauvé traces the development of Lenin's ideas from Karl Kautsky and situates them within both the historical context and the Second International. Publication Details This article originally formed an afterword to an article by Karl Kautsky Les trois sources du Marxisme (The three sources of Marxism) which was reprinted in French in April 1977 by editions Spartacus. (serie B No.78). This was not the first Spartacus edition of this text by Kautsky – it had originally been published by them in 1947 with an introduction by the French social-democrat Lucien Laurat. In the seventies they reprinted a number of their older pamphlets with new afterwords, and this particular text had two – this one by Jean Barrot (the pen name in the 1970's of Gilles Dauvé), and a second, Idéologie et lutte de classes by Pierre Guillaume, better known these days for other reasons. Part of the interest in discussing Kautsky's article was the fact that Lenin's much better known article The Three Sources and Three Component Parts of Marxism was based on it, and it therefore illuminated the relationship between Kautsky's and Lenin's conceptions of marxism and socialism. As far as we can discover Kautsky's article has never been translated into English. This edited translation of Barrot's afterword was first published in the UK in 1987 as Leninism or Communism by the group Wildcat, which was succeeded by Subversion. The sub-headings were added by the translator. The original french language version can be found on the A.D.E.L website. The three sources of Marxism; the historic work of Marx is clearly of historical interest. Kautsky was unquestionably the major thinker of the Second International and his party, the German Social Democratic Party, the most powerful. Kautsky, the guardian of orthodoxy, was almost universally regarded as the most knowledgeable expert on the work of Marx and Engels and their privileged interpreter. Kautsky's positions therefore bear witness to a whole era of the working class movement and are worth knowing if only for this. We are concerned here with a central question for the proletarian movement: the relationship between the working class and revolutionary theory. Kautsky's reply to this question formed the theoretical foundation of the practice and organisation of all the parties which made up the Second International. This included the Russian Social Democratic Party, and its Bolshevik fraction, which was an orthodox member until 1914, that is until the collapse of the International in the face of the First World War. However, the theory expounded by Kautsky in that text did not collapse at the same time as the Second International. Quite the contrary, it survived and equally formed the basis of the Third International through the medium of "Leninism" and its Stalinist and Trotskyist avatars. Leninism, by-product of Kautskyism! This will startle those who only know Kautsky from the abuse hurled at him by Bolshevism, and in particular Lenin's pamphlet, The Bankruptcy of the Second International and the Renegade Kautsky,La faillite de la III Internationale et le renégat Kautsky and those who only know about Lenin what is considered good to know about him in the various churches and chapels they frequent. Yet the very title of Lenin's pamphlet very precisely defines his relationship with Kautsky. If Lenin calls Kautsky a renegade it's clear that he thinks Kautsky was previously a follower of the true faith, of which he now considers himself the only qualified defender. Far from criticising Kautskyism, which he shows himself unable to identify, Lenin is in fact content to reproach his former master-thinker for having betrayed his own teachings. From any point of view Lenin's break was at once late and superficial. Late because Lenin had entertained the deepest illusions about German Social Democracy, and had only understood after the betrayal was accomplished. Superficial because Lenin was content to break on the problems of imperialism and the war without going into the underlying causes of the social democratic betrayal of August 1914. These causes were linked to the very nature of those parties and their relations, with capitalist society as much as with the proletariat. These relations must themselves be brought back to the very movement of capital and of the working class. They must be understood as a phase of the development of the proletariat, and not as something open to being changed by the will of a minority, not even of a revolutionary leadership, however aware it might be. From this stems the present importance of the theory which Kautsky develops in a particularly coherent form in his pamphlet and which constituted the very fabric of his thought throughout his life. Lenin took up this theory and developed it as early as 1900 in The Immediate Objectives of our OrganisationLes objectifs immédiats de notre mouvement and then in What Is To Be Done? in 1902, in which moreover he quotes Kautsky at length and with great praise. In 1913 Lenin again took up these ideas in The Three Sources and the Three Component Parts of Marxism in which he develops the same themes and sometimes uses Kautsky's text word for word. These ideas rest on a scanty and superficial historical analysis of the relationships of Marx and Engels, to the intellectuals of their time as much as to the working class movement. They can be summarised in a few words, and a couple of quotations will be enough to reveal their substance: "A working class movement that is spontaneous and bereft of any theory rising in the labouring classes against ascendant capitalism, is incapable of accomplishing ... revolutionary work." It is also necessary to bring about what Kautsky calls the union of the working class movement and socialism. Now: "Socialist consciousness today (?!) can only arise on the basis of deep scientific knowledge (...) But the bearer of science is not the proletariat but the bourgeois intellectuals; (...) so then socialist consciousness is something brought into the class struggle of the proletariat from outside and not something that arises spontaneously within it." These words of Kautsky's are according to Lenin "profoundly true." It is clear that this much desired union of the working class movement and socialism could not be brought about in the same way in Germany as in Russia as the conditions were different. But it is important to see that the deep divergence's of Bolshevism in the organisational field did not result from different basic conceptions, but rather solely from the application of the same principles in different social, economic and political situations. In fact far from ending up in an ever greater union of the working class movement and socialism, social democracy would end up in an ever closer union with capital and the bourgeoisie. As for Bolshevism, after having been like a fish in water in the Russian Revolution ("revolutionaries are in the revolution like water in water") because of the revolution's defeat it would end in all but complete fusion with state capital, administered by a totalitarian bureaucracy. However Leninism continues to haunt the minds of many revolutionaries of more or less good will who are searching for a recipe capable of success. Persuaded that they are "of the vanguard" because they possess "consciousness", whereas they only possess a false theory, they struggle militantly for a union of those two metaphysical monstrosities, "a spontaneous working class movement, bereft of any theory" and a disembodied "socialist consciousness." This attitude is simply voluntarist. Now, if as Lenin said "irony and patience are the principal qualities of the revolutionary", "impatience is the principal source of opportunism (Trotsky)". The intellectual, the revolutionary theorist doesn't have to worry about linking up with the masses because if their theory is revolutionary they are already linked to the masses. They don't have to chose the "camp of the proletariat" (it is not Sartre using these terms, it is Lenin) because, properly speaking, they do not have the choice. The theoretical and practical criticism they bear is determined by the relationship they hold with society. They can only free themselves from this passion by surrendering to it (Marx). If they "have the choice" it's because they are no longer revolutionary, and their theoretical criticism is already rotten. The problem of the penetration of revolutionary ideas which they share in the working class milieu is entirely transformed through that milieu.... when the historical conditions, the balance of power between the warring classes, ( principally determined by the autonomised movement of capital) prevents any revolutionary eruption of the proletariat onto the scene of history the intellectual does the same as the worker: what they can. They study, write, make their works known as best as they can, usually quite badly. When he was studying at the British museum, Marx, a product of the historical movement of the proletariat, was linked, if not to the workers, at least to the historical movement of the proletariat. He was no more isolated from the workers than any worker is isolated from the rest. To an extent the conditions of the time limit such relationships to those which capitalism allows. On the other hand when proletarians form themselves as a class and in one way or another declare war on capital they have no need whatsoever for anyone to bring them KNOWLEDGE before they can do this. Being themselves, in capitalist production relations, nothing but variable capital, it is enough that they want to change their situation in however small a way for them to be directly at the heart of the problem which the intellectual will have some difficulty in reaching. In the class struggle the revolutionary is neither more nor less linked to the proletariat than they were before. But theoretical critique then fuses with practical critique, not because it has been brought in from outside but because they are one and the same thing. If in recent times the weakness of the intellectual has been to believe that proletarians remain passive because they lack "consciousness"; and if they have come to believe themselves to be "the vanguard" to the point of wanting to lead the proletariat, then they have some bitter disappointments in store. Yet it is this idea which constitutes the essence of Leninism, as is shown by the ambiguous history of Bolshevism. These ideas were in the end only able to survive because the Russian revolution failed, that is to say because the balance of power, on the international scale, between capital and proletariat, did not allow the latter to carry through its practical and theoretical critique. This is what we shall try to demonstrate by analysing, in summary, what happened in Russia and the true role of Bolshevism. In thinking that he saw in Russian revolutionary circles the fruit of "the union of the working class movement and socialism" Lenin was seriously mistaken. The revolutionaries organised in social-democratic groups did not bring any "consciousness" to the proletariat. Of course an exposition or a theoretical article on Marxism was very useful to the workers: its use however was not to give consciousness or the idea of class struggle, but simply to clarify things and provoke further thought. Lenin did not understand this reality. He not only wanted to bring to the working class consciousness of the necessity of socialism in general, he also wanted to give them imperative watchwords explaining what they must do at a specific time. And this was quite normal since Lenin's party alone (as the trustee of class consciousness) was fit to discern the general interest of the working class beyond all its divisions into various strata, to analyse the situation at all times and to formulate appropriate watchwords. Well, the 1905 revolution would have to show the practical inability of the Bolshevik party to direct the working class and reveal the "behindness" of the vanguard party. All historians, even those favourable to the Bolsheviks, recognised that in 1905 the Bolshevik party understood nothing about the Soviets. The appearance of new forms of organisation aroused the distrust of the Bolsheviks: Lenin stated that the Soviets were "neither a working class parliament nor an organ of self-government". The important thing is to see that the Russian workers did not know that they were going to form Soviets. Only a very small minority amongst them knew about the experience of the Paris commune and yet they created an embryonic worker's state, though no-one had educated them. The Kautskyist-Leninist thesis in fact denies the working class all power of original creation when not guided by the party, (as the fusion of the working class movement and socialism). Now you can see that in 1905, to take up a phrase from Theses on Feuerbach, "the educator himself needs educating". Yet Lenin did accomplish revolutionary work (his position on the war amongst others) as opposed to Kautsky. But in reality Lenin was only revolutionary when he went against his theory of class consciousness. Let's take the case of his activity between February and October 1917. Lenin had worked for more than 15 years (since 1900) to create a vanguard organisation which would realise the union of "socialism" and the "working class movement". He sought to regroup "political leaders" (the "representatives of the vanguard capable of organising and leading the movement".) In 1917, as in 1905, this political leadership, represented by the central committee of the Bolshevik party, showed itself beneath the tasks of the day, and behind the revolutionary activity of the proletariat. All historians, including the Stalinist and Trotskyist ones, show that Lenin had to fight a long and difficult battle against the current in his own organisation to make his ideas triumph. And he was only able to succeed by leaning on the workers of the party, on the true vanguard organised in the factories inside or around social-democratic circles. It will be said that all this would have been impossible without the activity put in over many years by the Bolsheviks, as much on the level of workers' everyday struggles as on that of the defence and propagation of revolutionary ideas. The' great majority of the Bolsheviks, with Lenin in the foreground, did indeed contribute through their unceasing propaganda and agitation to the insurrection of October 1917. As revolutionary militants, they played an effective role: but as the "leadership of the class" or the "conscious vanguard", they were behind the proletariat. The revolution took place against the ideas of What Is To Be Done? and to the extent that these ideas were applied (created by an organ directing the working class but separated from it) they showed themselves to be a check and obstacle to the revolution. In 1905 Lenin was behind history because he clung to the ideas of What Is To Be Done? In 1917 Lenin took part in the real movement of the Russian masses and in doing this rejected in his practice the concepts developed in What Is To Be Done? If we apply to Kautsky and Lenin the opposite treatment to that which they subjected Marx to, if we link their ideas to the class struggle instead of separating them from it, Kautskyism-Leninism emerges as characteristic of a whole period of the working class movement dominated from the start by the Second International. Having developed and organised as best they could, proletarians found themselves in a contradictory situation from the end of the 19th century. They possessed various organisations whose goal was to make the revolution and at the same time they were incapable of carrying it through because the conditions were not yet ripe. Kautskyism-Leninism was the expression of the solution of this contradiction. By postulating that the proletariat had to go through the detour of scientific consciousness in order to become revolutionary, it authorised the existence of organisations to enclose, direct and control the proletariat. As we pointed out, Lenin's case is more complex than Kautsky's, to the extent that Lenin was in one part of his life, a revolutionary as opposed to Kautskyism-Leninism. Moreover, the situation of Russia was totally different to that of Germany, which virtually possessed a bourgeois-democratic regime and in which a working class movement existed which was strongly developed and integrated into the system. It was quite the opposite in Russia, where everything was still to be built and there was no question of taking part in bourgeois parliamentary and reformist union activities as these didn't exist. In these conditions Lenin was able to adopt a revolutionary position despite his Kautskyist ideas. We must nevertheless point out that he considered German social-democracy a model until the world war. In their revised and corrected histories of Leninism, the Stalinists and Trotskyists show us a clear-sighted Lenin who understood and denounced the "betrayal" by social democracy and the International before 1914. This is pure myth and one would really have to study the true history of the International to show that not only did Lenin not denounce it but that before the war he understood nothing of the phenomenon of social democratic degeneracy. Before 1914 Lenin even praised the German Social-Democratic party (SPD) for having been able to unite the "working class movement" and "socialism"(cf. What Is To Be Done?). Let us just quote these lines taken from the obituary article "August Bebel" (which also contains several errors of detail and of substance concerning this model "working class leader", and concerning the history of the Second International). "The basis of the parliamentary tactics of German (and international) Social-democracy, which doesn't give an inch to the enemy, which doesn't miss the slightest opportunity to obtain some improvement, however small, for the workers, which at the same time shows itself uncompromising on its principles and always aims towards achieving its objectives, the basis of these tactics was established by Bebel..." Lenin addressed these words of praise to "the parliamentary tactics of German (and international) Social Democracy", "uncompromising its principles"(!) in August 1913! A year later he thought that the issue of Vorwärts (paper of the German Social-Democratic Party) which announced the vote for war credits by the Social-Democratic deputies, was a fake manufactured by the German High Command. This reveals the depth of the illusions he had held for a long time, in fact since 1900-1902, since What Is To Be Done?, in the Second International in general and German social-democracy in particular. (We won't examine the attitude of other revolutionaries, Rosa Luxemburg for example, to these questions. That question would require a detailed study in its own right.) We have seen how Lenin had in his practice abandoned the ideas of What Is To Be Done? in 1917. But the immaturity of the class struggle on a global level and in particular the absence of revolution in Europe, brought the defeat of the Russian Revolution. The Bolsheviks found themselves in power with the task of "governing Russia (Lenin)", of performing the task of the bourgeois revolution which hadn't occurred, that is to say, of actually securing the development of the Russian economy. This development could not be anything but capitalist. The bringing to heel of the working class – and of opposition in the party – became an essential objective. Lenin, who had not explicitly rejected What Is To Be Done? in 1917, immediately took up again the "Leninist" concepts which alone would allow the "necessary" enclosure of the working class. The Democratic Centralists, the Workers' Opposition, and the Workers' Group were crushed for having denied the "leading role of the party". The Leninist theory of the party was likewise imposed on the "International". After Lenin's death, Zinoviev, Stalin and so many others would have to develop it whilst insisting ever more strongly on "iron discipline" and "unity of thought and unity of action". The principle on which the Stalinist International rested was the same as that which formed the basis of the reformist socialist parties (the party separate from the workers, bringing them consciousness of themselves), whoever rejected the Lenino-Stalinist theory fell into "the morass of opportunism, social-democracy and Menshevism". For their part, the Trotskyists clung to Lenin's ideas and recited What Is To Be Done? Humanity's crisis, is nothing but the crisis of leadership, said Trotsky: so a leadership must be created at any cost. This is the ultimate idealism, the history of the world is explained as a crisis of consciousness. In the end, Stalinism would only triumph in countries where the development of capitalism could not be assured by the bourgeoisie unless conditions were created for the working class to destroy it. In Eastern Europe, China and Cuba, a new leading group was formed, composed of the high ranks of a bureaucratised working class movement, along with former bourgeois specialists or technicians, sometimes army cadres or former students who rallied to the new social order as in China. In the final analysis, such a process was only possible because of the weakness of the working class movement. In China for example the revolution's driving social stratum was the peasantry: incapable of directing it themselves, they could only be directed by "the party". Before the seizure of power the group organised in "the party" directs the masses and the "liberated zones" if there are any. Afterwards it takes in hand the totality of the country's social life. Everywhere Lenin's ideas have been a powerful bureaucratic factor. For Lenin the function of directing the working class movement was a specific function taken care of by "leaders" organised separately from the movement and with that as their role. To the extent that it sanctioned the establishment of a corps separated from revolution, professionals leading the masses, Leninism served as an ideological justification for the formation of leaderships separated from the workers. At this stage Leninism, taken out of its original context, is no more than a technique for enclosing the masses and an ideology justifying bureaucracy and maintaining capitalism: its recuperation was a historical necessity for the development of those new social structures which themselves represent a historical necessity for the development of capital. As capitalism expands and dominates the entire planet, so the conditions which make revolution possible become ripe. Leninist ideology is beginning to have had its day. It's impossible to examine the problem of the party without putting it in the context of the historical conditions in which the debate originated: in every case, though in different forms, the development of Leninist ideology was due to the impossibility of proletarian revolution. If history has sided with Kautskyism-Leninism, if its opponents have never been able either to organise themselves in a lasting way or even to put forward a coherent critique of it this is not by chance: the success of Kautskyism-Leninism is a product of our era and the first serious attacks – practical attacks – on it mark the end of an entire period of history. For this to happen it was necessary for the capitalist mode of production to fully develop over the whole world. The 1956 Hungarian revolution sounded the death knell of a whole period: of counter revolution, but also of revolutionary flowering. No-one knows when this period will be definitively obsolete but it is certain that the critique of the ideas of Kautsky and Lenin, products of that period, becomes possible and necessary from that time. That's why we recommend reading Kautsky's The Three Sources of Marxism, the Historic Work of Marx so that the dominant ideology of a whole era is more widely known and understood. Far from wanting to conceal the ideas which we condemn and oppose, we want to spread them widely so as to show both their necessity and their historical limits. The conditions which allowed the development and success of organisations of a social democratic or Bolshevik kind are today obsolete. As for Leninist ideology, besides its use by bureaucrats in power, far from being of use to revolutionary groups who crave the union of socialism with the working class movement it can from now on only serve to temporarily cement the union of passably revolutionary workers with mediocre intellectuals. |
Breaking News Emails Get breaking news alerts and special reports. The news and stories that matter, delivered weekday mornings. June 20, 2016, 4:05 PM GMT / Updated June 20, 2016, 4:05 PM GMT By Katie Little, CNBC and Denise Garcia, CNBC In the fierce battle for talent, we have a winner: Google. The search giant claimed the top spot in LinkedIn's first-ever release of its Top Attractors list, which includes a ranking of the 40 most sought-after employers in America. LinkedIn used its extensive data from more than 433 million members to craft the list, which was created using data on job applications, views on companies' career pages, member engagement and retention of new hires. Perhaps unsurprisingly, tech companies, known for high growth coupled with lucrative perks (hello, free food!), snagged 45 percent of the top spots in the U.S. REUTERS/Christian Hartmann REUTERS Google With millions of applications each year, Google can afford to be picky. For the lucky few who do make the cut, Google's perks are second to none. They include everything from on-site coding and cooking classes to massage services and death benefits. And there's even more good news for prospective applicants: Those infamous brainteaser interview questions have gone out the window. Salesforce The enterprise cloud computing company consistently ranks among the best places to work. It offers uncapped commissions, six days off per year to volunteer, $100 in monthly wellness reimbursements, dog-friendly offices and more. Facebook Facebook has come a long way from its Harvard dorm room roots and now employs more than 13,000 workers. Perks at its North American offices include cash to help with newborn expenses, transportation support and what seems like a start-up prerequisite — free meals and snacks. Apple Apple has a number of roles available at the company, including corporate, Apple Store and at-home advisor positions. CEO Tim Cook recently highlighted the company's 65 percent increase in female hires, a notable jump in the male-dominated tech world. Amazon Amazon has a reputation for being a demanding workplace with a heightened emphasis on efficiency and relentless focus on improving the customer experience. The e-commerce retailer recently committed to hiring 25,000 veterans and military spouses during the next five years. Click Here to Read the Complete List at CNBC.com |
The video will start in 8 Cancel Get the biggest daily news stories by email Subscribe Thank you for subscribing We have more newsletters Show me See our privacy notice Could not subscribe, try again later Invalid Email UFO hunters have captured a mysterious eerie orb creeping silently through a forest in Canada. Rob Freeman and Marcus McNabb went searching for extraterrestrial life around Squamish, British Colombia, after locals told them about weird goings-on in the area. Rob, a senior field researcher for the Centre for the Scientific Study of Atmospheric Anomalies, said the sighting is the best footage they’ve recorded to date . It shows a bright circular light darting above Stawamus Chief before seemingly shining through trees as if they were see-through. "Several locals said orbs have been spotted above 'The Chief' at Squamish, so we set up within view of the granite monolith, the second biggest of its kind in the world," Rob told Mirror Online. (Image: Rob Freeman/Atmospheric anomolies) (Image: Getty) "At 10.59pm, this huge yellowish white ball of light appeared out of nowhere and then proceeded to go into the woods. "Thanks to Breslin Martin of our group for spotting it so I could film it with my night vision scope. "It moved 100 per cent silently. "Note how any trees in front of the orb block the light, while trees behind the orb are lit up big time." (Image: Rob Freeman/Atmospheric anomolies) Rob and Marcus have travelled to 11 countries over three years in search for alien life after being inspired by a childhood experience, reports Squamish Chief . To collect data, the crew used night imaging technology, as well as a camera fondly called the “weapon of mass detection.” Rob said when they first spotted the orb on July 22 they thought it was an airplane. “The trees behind the orb were all lit up,” he explained. “That means it was in front of the trees.” |
Carmaker’s executives agree to pay cuts as VW doubles its provision for the diesel emissions scandal Volkswagen has slumped to its first annual loss in more than 20 years after setting aside €16.2bn (£12.6bn) to cover the cost of its diesel emissions scandal. The German carmaker plunged to a loss of €4.1bn for 2015, worse than analysts had expected and the company’s first annual loss since 1993. It follows a €12.7bn profit in 2014. The firm also revealed sizeable pay cuts for senior staff to reflect the impact of the scandal on its results, which it was due to report in early March but was forced to delay in light of the diesel affair. The company more than doubled its provision for fixing diesel cars to €16.2bn, a day after announcing plans for the biggest car buyback in history in the US, affecting potentially almost 500,000 vehicles, as part of a deal with the State Department to halt more than 600 class action civil suits. VW said the provision related to the emissions scandal was, “among other things, for pending technical modifications and customer-related measures as well as global legal risks”. The carmaker stunned the world when it admitted last September it had installed software in diesel vehicles to cheat emissions tests – potentially affecting 11m cars worldwide. Volkswagen also spent €400m during the year on restructuring its commercial vehicles and passenger car divisions. The chief executive, Matthias Müller, said: “The current crisis – as the figures presented today also reveal – is having a huge impact on Volkswagen’s financial position. Yet we have the firm intention and the means to handle the difficult situation we are in using our own resources.” Despite Müller’s confident prediction, the company fleshed out the details of voluntary pay cuts for the executive team. Volkswagen said its supervisory board had accepted a proposal from the board of management to reduce their contractual pay, meaning an “ordinary member” of the board will see their pay fall 39% from €5.3m in 2014 to €3.2m for 2015. It said the typical amount executives will actually take home will be closer to €2.2m, thanks to a plan to defer 30% of performance-related pay. This element will be converted into shares that won’t be handed over in full unless their price rises by 25% after three years. “In an intensive decision-making process over the past few weeks, justified public expectations and contractual conditions have been weighed up against each other,” the company said. “This arrangement expresses the commitment of the board of management to the company, its employees and its customers,” said Müller, who took over in September last year when his predecessor, Martin Winterkorn, resigned in the wake of the emissions scandal. While pay cuts will affect Volkswagen’s board of management, which includes Müller, the firm said members of its supervisory board would not be affected. German firms typically operate with a two-tier governance structure in which the supervisory board is responsible for oversight of executive decisions made by the board of management. But the supervisory board chairman, Hans Dieter Pötsch, said he would also accept a pay reduction that will see him forfeit €2.3m “at his own request”. Excluding the provision and other special items, the 12-brand group, whose marques include Audi, Bentley and Porsche, posted a €12.8bn operating profit. Pointing to this figure, Müller said the group’s operations “are in great shape”. “Were it not for the sizeable provisions we made for all repercussions of the emissions issue that are now quantifiable, we would be reporting on yet another successful year overall.” Shareholders were handed a dividend worth €0.11 per ordinary share, or €0.17 for holders of a different class of security known as preferred shares. |
FACEBOOK/GETTY Around 300 migrants are making a mass bid to reach Britain (file picture) French police battled around 300 migrants in the lawless port town this afternoon after huge mobs targeted England and Wales fans returning across the Channel after cheering on their teams at Euro 2016 and motoring enthusiasts driving back from the Le Mans rally event. Gangs of migrants ran out onto the motorway and brought traffic to a standstill outside the port, so that they could break into lorries and stow away in an attempt to sneak across the Channel. A British football fan caught up in the chaos reported that gangs of migrants were shouting "f*** the UK" as they hurled rocks at his car, posting photos on social media of clouds of tear gas fired by embattled police. One UK motorist warned on social media that cars were being "stoned" by migrants as they sat stationary in traffic, warning others to stay away from the town. Others claimed that the port had been "shut" by the authorities due to the chaos with "miles of stationary traffic" snaking back through the town, with one tweetlng: "UK Border control Calais side has stopped, we are all sat here waiting for cars to start flowing through? No toilets and water." Another added: "Migrants chucking stones at cars at Calais. All major routes are shut." Evacuation of Calais migrant camp Tue, June 21, 2016 A growing number of migrants seeking to reach Britain are trying to leave from the Belgium and France. Here are some of the scenes from the Calais migrant crisis in France... Play slideshow Photoshot 1 of 83 Mirants clash with police in Calais So just watched about 8 illegal immigrants climb into this Lorry at #Calais pic.twitter.com/0xwngZ229r — Ed Lowman (@steadyeddyed) June 20, 2016 Chaos erupted at around 3pm French time when the hundreds of migrants made an organised raid on the motorway linking the town to the port, which was closed by authorities for more than four hours, sparking traffic mayhem. It finally reopened at around 7pm after being left strewn with debris. Calais newspaper La Voix du Nord reported that gangs of migrants from the nearby Jungle camp attacked the ring road in waves, with police putting up barriers and firing tear gas grenades in a bid to hold them back. The orchestrated raid is being viewed as particularly brazen by the authorities, who observed that migrants usually attempted to board lorries under the cover of darkness. Photoshot Migrants broke through security fencing protecting the entry road to the port Photoshot Several police officers were injured during violent confontations It is thought the criminal gang lords who run the migrant smuggling operation in Calais have deliberately timed the mass attempt to reach Britain to coincide with traffic returning from Euro 2016 and the Le Mans 42-hour rally event. Police in Calais reported that several officers were injured during clashes with migrants while a number of people have been arrested, including two militants from the ultra left-wing anarchist group No Borders, for throwing stones. The chaos comes just three days before Britain votes on whether or not to leave the EU, with some migrants fearing border controls could be beefed up immediately in the event of a Brexit. Photoshot Migrants broke through security fencing protecting the road leading up to Calais port Due to an incident on the approach to Calais port French Police have temporarily closed the Motorway. *Tom — P&O Ferries Updates (@POferriesupdate) June 20, 2016 Economic migrants congregating in Calais know that if Britain votes to leave the EU we can take control of our borders Mike Hookem MEP A Calais police spokesman told TV channel France 3: "Police personnel have been deployed in numbers and had to use tear gas to evict migrants from the roadway. At the same time controls have been strengthened all across the port of Calais.” Meanwhile UKIP's defence spokesman Mike Hookem told Express.co.uk the situation showed "that immigration and the EU are inextricably linked". He said: "Economic migrants congregating in Calais know that if Britain votes to leave the EU we can take control of our borders. That is why they are so desperate to get to the UK should we vote to save our country on Thursday. "Both the Tories and Labour remainers have admitted that if we stay in the EU we can say goodbye to any chance of taking back control of our own country." #France #Calais Police have temporarily closed the motorway to the #CalaisPort due to clashes between migrants and Police. Vehicles stoned. — Genvisec Infomap (@GenvisecInfomap) June 20, 2016 Just came through Calais and look at the thousands trying to get in?????? frightening amount #Brexit #VoteLeave pic.twitter.com/eOg153IpGH — Craig (@hen5269) June 20, 2016 British motorists took to Twitter this afternoon to report huge delays in and around the port town amid the chaos, with P&O ferries waiving time restrictions to allow people with tickets to check onto any ferry today. The company tweeted: “We understand there are delays on the motorway to Calais Port rest assured we will check you onto the next available ferry at no extra cost.” And authorities in Calais tweeted that the “congestion level for drivers has changed from high to extreme” due to the chaotic scenes. One British driver posted a video on Twitter showing migrants by the roadside, adding: “Just came through Calais and look at the thousands trying to get in - frightening amount #Brexit #VoteLeave.” |
Show full PR text STANDING TALL: THE NOKIA LUMIA 1520 AND LUMIA 1320 Today, at Nokia World in Abu Dhabi, Nokia unveiled its two new large screen smartphones, the Nokia Lumia 1520 and Lumia 1320. Both devices feature 6-inch screens to make the most of the enhanced Windows Phone Start screen and three columns for Live tiles allowing you to see and do more on the larger screen. Bigger is better Lumia 1520 wireless charging_632 The Nokia Lumia 1520 features a 1080p full HD screen, 20MP PureView camera with optical image stabilization, enhanced sensor technology, oversampling and outstanding zoom capabilities, along with the latest imaging app called Nokia Camera. You will also enjoy the new Nokia Storyteller app to relive your memories in a new and dynamic way and truly share better stories with your friends and family. Nokia Storyteller automatically integrates the pictures from your phone with HERE location information and creates a chronological picture journey on a map. Look up points of interests, get contact information and check out user reviews all directly from Nokia Storyteller for an interactive experience. It also automatically plays back animated pictures, videos and smart photos so your stories truly come to life. Lumia 1520 yellow back_632 But the stories don't stop with the Nokia apps alone. With Twitter Vine soon available for the first time for Windows Phone 8, you can capture and tweet short looping videos to share more via social media. Or maybe you just want to share all of your new photos and quick video clips. Now you can with Instagram for Windows Phone 8. And to capture some stunning videos, the Lumia 1520 features Nokia Rich Recording with four microphones, providing directional stereo recording capability to capture distortion free audio from the preferred direction for clear, accurate sound. (We will have more information to share with you about the Lumia 1520's audio capabilities soon.) You will also find the new Nokia Beamer app to share content, like pictures, location on a map or even your camera viewfinder from your Lumia to any compatible screen – with people in the same room or even in another location by sending them a link via social media, email or SMS. Lumia 1520 red2-front Boost your daily productivity The Lumia 1520 is a genuine workhorse, too. It comes with Microsoft Office built in, so you can have the flexibility to work when you need to; and it includes a massive battery with integrated wireless charging (Qi compatible). This powerful combination means you can manage to easily log a whole day of work and enjoy entertainment like movies without worrying about finding a place to charge up. The ability to show a third column on the Start screen isn't just about scaling the experience of Windows Phone 8. It really is about getting to you favorite apps faster with less scrolling. For instance, the email app now shows one additional row of content in the Live tile, right on the Start screen. Do you do a lot of video conferencing? The front-facing camera on the Lumia 1520 offers 1.2 HD 720p wide angle video so you'll always look your best. And, with the new Papyrus app coming to Windows Phone for the first time, you can easily take handwritten notes on your Nokia Lumia 1520. Boost your high scores This phone will also please the gamer in all of us. With the Qualcomm Snapdragon 800 processor and full 1080p HD display, graphics-intensive Xbox games will explode with action. You will also find 2GB RAM built in, 32GB of storage, plus the option to add a microSD card (up to 64GB), as well as 7GB of free SkyDrive cloud-based storage. The Lumia 1520 features all the latest in display technology to make the beautiful six inch screen stand out, even in the brightest sunlight. With ClearBlack display technology, High Brightness Mode and assertive display technology by Apical, the screen offers a viewing experience to enjoy no matter what the light conditions are. And when winter rolls in, wearing gloves won't prevent you from using the screen just as easily as before thanks to the super sensitive touch screen with Gorilla Glass 2. Lumia 1520_red side_632 According to Ilkka Husgafvel, the lead industrial designer for the Lumia 1520, "Purity was one of the main drivers in the creation of this device, along with understanding the scale available in the large screen. We aimed to create a device that feels thin and comfortable in the hand: it's only 8.7mm deep." The phone features ceramic keys on the side, and subdued icons at the front. It will be available in four Lumia colors (white, yellow, red and black): the black phone is made of recycled materials. The Nokia Lumia 1320 – going large at a lower price Lumia 1320_632 Similar to the Lumia 1520 – and building on the affordability of the Lumia 520 – the new Nokia Lumia 1320 also features a 6-inch screen and a wealth of features at a lower price. But this does not mean that there was a compromise on quality. The phone boosts a 720p HD screen made with Gorilla Glass 3, and features a super sensitive touch screen. It includes Nokia Music and HERE Maps for great music and location experiences, and welcomes both Nokia Camera and Nokia Storyteller apps, available in the Windows Phone Store. With the latest apps, the best from Nokia, and the best from Microsoft supported by LTE connections you can make the most out of the bright large screen on the Lumia 1320. Sit back and relax while you play the latest Xbox games, read web content, or watch movies on the six inch screen. A wealth of content can be stored using the free 7GB of SkyDrive storage or with the addition of a micro SD card adding up to 64GB more space. When can I get it? The Nokia Lumia 1520 is expected to begin selling this quarter in Hong Kong, Singapore, the United States, China and Europe (including Finland, France, Germany, and the UK), followed by other markets; and it has an estimated price of around USD 749 before local taxes and subsidies. The Nokia Lumia 1320 will be available in a choice of orange, yellow, black, or white, and is planned to be available first in China and Vietnam in early 2014, followed by other Asian markets, India and European markets. It carries an estimated price of USD 339 before local taxes and subsidies. Many of the new features and imaging innovations found in the Nokia Lumia 1520 and Nokia Lumia 1320 will be coming to existing Nokia Lumia smartphones running on Windows Phone 8 aligned with the next software update called "Lumia Black". The update, including the latest Windows Phone update from Microsoft, is expected to begin rolling out in early 2014. Specifications for the Nokia Lumia 1520 Operating System: Windows Phone 8 with the latest updates Networks: GSM/EDGE: 850, 900, 1800, 1900 MHz; WCDMA: 850, 900, 1900, 2100 MHz; ROW LTE: 1, 3, 7, 8, 20; USA LTE: 2, 4, 5, 7, 17; HSPA+: DL 42 Mbps (Cat 24) / UL 11.5 Mbps (Cat 7) Speed: LTE 150/50 mbps, DC-HSPA 42mbps Memory: 2GB RAM, 32 GB internal user memory; 7 GB SkyDrive cloud storage, micro SD card support up to 64GB Display: 6-inch full HD 1080p LCD , ClearBlack, High Brightness Mode, Sunlight readability, Super sensitive touch for glove and nail usage, Gorilla Glass 2 Processor: 2.2GHz Quad Core Qualcomm Snapdragon 800 Primary camera: PureView 20-megapixel Auto Focus ZEISS optics with Optical Image Stabilization (OIS), 2x lossless zoom, oversampling technology, dual LED flash, 1080p @ 30 fps full HD video with optical image stabilization Secondary Camera: HD 1.2-megapixel wide angle Size & weight: 162.8 x 85.4 x 8.7mm (volumetric). Weight: 209g Connectivity: NFC, A-GPS+GLONASS, WLAN (2.4/5Ghz) a/b/g/n/ac, μUSB, BT 4.0 LE, Accelerometer, Proximity sensor, Magnetometer, Gyroscope, Ambient Light Sensor Battery: 3400 mAh (integrated) with built-in wireless charging (Qi compatible) Audio: Rich Recording with four microphones; Wideband Voice and multi-microphone noise reduction with four microphones; Dolby(R) Headphone, Graphic equalizer, Audio leveling; FM radio Specifications for the Nokia Lumia 1320 Operating System: Windows Phone 8 with the latest updates Networks: LTE-ROW: GSM 850, 900, 1800, 1900 MHz; WCDMA 850, 900, 2100 MHz; LTE 800, 1800, 2600; LTE-LTA: GSM 850, 900, 1800, 1900 MHz; WCDMA 850, 1700, 1900, 2100 MHz; LTE 700, 850, 1700, 1900 MHz; HSPA+: GSM 850, 900, 1800, 1900 MHz; WCDMA/HSPA + 900, 2100 MHz. Speed: LTE:3, 7, 20 bands – 100/50 Mbps (cat 3); DC-HSPA ROW: 42/5.76Mbps (cat 24 DL/Cat6 UL); HSPA+ CHINA: 21/5.76Mbps (Cat 14DL/Cat6 UL); GSM: EGPRS 236.8Kps Memory: 1GB RAM, 8GB internal user memory; 7GB SkyDrive cloud storage, micro SD card support up to 64GB Display: 6-inch HD LCD IPS (1280×720), Super sensitive touch support for glove and long nail use; Gorilla Glass 3 Processor: 1.7GHz Dual-Core Qualcomm Snapdragon 400 Primary camera: 5MP Auto Focus, flash. Video 1080p @ 30fps Secondary Camera: 0.3MP VGA. Size & weight: 164.25 x 85.9 x 9.79* mm (*volumetric). Weight: 220g Connectivity: BT 4.0 + LE, Micro-USB 2.0, 3.5mm AHJ, WIFI 802.11(2.4GHz b/g/n) Battery: 3400 mAh (integrated) Audio: 1 HAAC mic; 3.5mm AV connector, HD Voice; FM Radio |
Titans coach Neil Henry admits that he may not be able to select the best 17 players available to him this week as the fall-out from the club's horror injury toll earlier in the season threatens to derail their push for a top eight finish. On Tuesday Henry named his 21-man squad to face the Panthers at Pepper Stadium on Saturday afternoon with Kane Elgey and Morgan Boyle both named on the extended bench after missing last Saturday's 30-10 win over the Sharks. Although in their team announcement the Titans stated that Boyle had been "rested" from the win over Cronulla the real reason that the 21-year-old front-rower was unable to play was due to restrictions around Gold Coast's second-tier salary cap. Already this season the Titans have been forced to use 32 players and with a roster that is now nearing full health players on second-tier contracts such as Boyle cannot be granted special exemptions to play if there are members of the top 25 fit and available in the same position. Such has been Boyle's development this season that after making his NRL debut in Round 6 he has started in three of the nine games he has played to date but Henry acknowledges that his availability moving forward is now in question. "There are second tier issues around a few players so the make-up of our side, within the rules, becomes difficult each week and he's one of those players," Henry said of Boyle who played for Tweed Heads last Sunday in the Intrust super Cup. "It does restrict you picking your best side at times and it certainly restricts some young players being able to play football at the highest level when they possibly deserve it. "We had seven of our top 25 injured at one stage and we had to use second-tier players early in the season and that is an issue for us like other clubs. "That's the nature of the beast with other clubs too. It's a fairly archaic rule that we're now all under now and I think all clubs agree that the sooner it goes the better it will be." Given the extent of their injuries earlier in the season the Titans were granted some second-tier salary cap exemptions in order to pick a team on the park, exemptions that are now less available given the recent returns of Kevin Proctor, Agnatius Paasi and Leivaha Pulu from injury. "All caps are under the same rules at the moment and they review the exemptions on a week-to-week basis on the availability of your squad," Henry explained. "I can't argue that we haven't been able to get some because we have and [the NRL] have been very fair with the exemptions that we've had but as we get more players back and fit and ready to play then those exemptions are less and less because they're top-tier players." For the first time this season Henry has been able to name the same starting 13 for three weeks in succession as they seek a fourth consecutive win in what the coach acknowledges is effectively a 'four-point' game. With Penrith sitting one win ahead of the Titans and one win outside the top eight Gold Coast will be in danger of losing touch should they go down on Saturday against a Panthers team expecting to have Matt Moylan and Peter Wallace both back in the team. "We're coming up against a side that's got a bit of momentum after a good win last week," Henry said. "Trent Merrin is gone and a bit of a leader in their forwards but [Reagan] Campbell-Gillard, [James] Fisher-Harris, they've got a pretty potent pack as well. "Their outside backs do a good job for them as well so it's going to be a great battle down there. "They're looking to push towards the top eight and we're looking to hang on as well. "Parramatta have kicked ahead with that win and the bye so there's a little gap to the the top eight and we can only bridge it by winning games. "If we drop a couple of games the season won't be there for us." Pulu: 'The doctor said I could die' Gallen's warning: Remember the Titans NRL Power Rankings: Round 20 |
“With the same stroke you get more spin on the ball and therefore more control,” Navratilova said. “To me that made the biggest difference of all. Her technique didn’t really change. She cleaned it up a little bit but not that much. I think the biggest difference has been the string and then that again gives her confidence.” “I feel in the years past Serena talked a big game, but I don’t know how much she really believed it,” she added. “She had that confidence, and she had the swagger, and she backed it up sometimes, but a lot of times she didn’t. But now she’s backing it up every single time. It’s real, the confidence, not just imagined. It’s not a façade.” The string change has not affected her still-evident edge in power. “That’s where she’s 20 percent heads and shoulders better than anybody else, because of the power,” said Evert, who then compared eras. “That power would have been diffused with the wood rackets, so maybe I could have gotten a game from her.” In 2006, Evert wrote Williams an open letter in Tennis Magazine urging her to cut down on her extracurricular interests and do justice to her phenomenal tennis ability. “I re-read that letter actually this year because somebody brought it to my attention and I think there was one or two little-bit harsh statements in it, but all in all, I just couldn’t believe this woman had so much talent and wasn’t putting her nose to the grindstone a bit more,” Evert said. “And you know what? She has and she’s done it, and she’s getting the results and she’s the happiest she’s ever been. Maybe I kind of jumped the gun there and rushed her a bit, but she’s doing this in her own time.” Ten titles in a season is now a rarity. The only other woman to do it in the last 15 years was Justine Henin, who won her 10 in 2007. But it was routine for Navratilova and Evert. Navratilova won 10 or more titles in nine different seasons, with 16 in 1983. Evert won 10 or more six times, with 16 in both 1974 and 1975. The pool of talent on tour was shallower then, which Evert said made for easier early rounds. The game was less physically punishing, but both Navratilova and Evert had a heavy workload. Navratilova said she needed lots of tournament play because of her all-court style, which required constant buffing. Evert said she and Navratilova also played often because they were needed to promote and support the women’s tour in its early years. |
NEW DELHI: In an indication of its disinclination to support the passage of GST bill in its current shape, Congress on Saturday said there was no need to give over-importance to one GST legislation when there were many important bills pending in Parliament, adding to the suspense over the fate of the tax reform hanging fire.Anand Sharma, deputy leader of opposition in Rajya Sabha, said, “The bill has been pending for a long time and the charge against it was led by Prime Minister Narendra Modi in his capacity as the chief minister of Gujarat… It remains a work in progress.”The remark came a day before the Congress leadership reviews its strategy over parliamentary blockade and its stance on the GST on Sunday.“There have been informal contacts but the government has to give a structured response to Congress’s three demands on GST. There are many issues within GST which have to be brought to an acceptable closure. It is an important bill which requires a consensus. It should not be rushed through,” Sharma said.At a media event, Finance Minister Arun Jaitley ruled out including the GST rate in the Constitution Amendment Bill saying tariffs can't be cast in stone.He said the Congress, which has opposed the GST Bill over three main demands, should accept UPA Finance Minister P Chidambaram 's proposal for a GST Council or its appointed forum for resolving tax disputes, instead of its demand for a Supreme Court judge being the adjudicating authority.Jaitley said Congress was changing stance every day as it believes none other than persons from one family have the right to rule the country.“Are tariffs ever cast in stone. It happens nowhere in this world. You (Congress) are trying to impose an impossible condition,” he said.According to Congress leaders, the passage of the tax reform bill was an open issue. A senior MP said Congress could relent on its resistance to GST if the government accepted two of its three suggestions. But there is also a view to link the party support for legislations to “government’s policy of political vendetta”.Sharma criticized the government for its lack of consultations with the Opposition. “The engagement between government and the opposition cannot be restricted to the passage of one bill,” he said. |
Conservative Counter-Revolution and the Coming Violence Since the introduction of Sarah Palin into the 2008 election, the right wing has been on the warpath. The rhetoric and volume of their message has been taken to increasingly fanatical extremes in an attempt to derail the movement for change and reform in America. This has already resulted in many deaths, and the conflict is becoming more open with every passing day. Revolution The country has changed. The majority of the last 30 years was dominated by an increasingly conservative political philosophy. During the Bush years, the real world failures of these policies began to appear in undeniable forms. The prison industry continued to boom under increasingly harsh laws until one out of every thirty two Americans was either behind bars or on probation, the highest rate in the world. Borrow and spend economics to fuel tax cuts for the rich and the illusion of prosperity brought mounting deficits and debt. Much of this money went into a burgeoning military, and today we spend almost as much as the rest of the world combined. The gulf between rich and poor got much worse, especially with CEOs who now rake in 1/3rd of all the pay. Then came the domestic espionage, extraordinary rendition, torture, abandonment of diplomacy, massive foreign military aggression, and discarding of international treaties. The thing that really caused Americans to wake up was the culmination of turning a blind eye towards corporate mergers, spiraling foreclosures caused by catastrophic health care costs, and the loosening of regulations that led to the worst economic collapse since the Great Depression. This was the final straw, and there was a paradigm shift in the American electorate back towards a more centrist philosophy. The elections of 2006 brought a swing back to the Democrats, who regained tenuous control over the US House and Senate. In 2008, progressive voices swept into power in a movement for change that included a center-left reformer named Barack Obama, who became the nation’s first black president. The revolution had come. Counter-Revolution Fear leads to anger. The rhetoric during the election from the Republicans took a nasty turn as soon as Sarah Palin hit the scene. They amped up the negativity and scare tactics, insinuating Obama was in league with Islamists, terrorists, socialists, communists, Marxists, and various other ‘ists’. Many people argued that this was ‘just politics’, but after the election, and especially after the inauguration, the attacks didn’t go away. In fact, they were elevated to a whole new level. There were those who spread the conspiracy that Obama was foreign born, thereby ineligible to be president. More conspiracies circulated about Obama wanting to take people’s guns away, despite his expansion of the 2nd Amendment. Rumor persist about massive tax hikes, despite him actually delivering a few hundred billion in tax cuts for 95% of Americans as part of the stimulus package. Recently the paranoia has reached epic levels, with conspiracies about the health care reform bill being some secret plot to kill grandma. Many of these paranoid conspiracies and corporate disinformation talking points began to get traction in the media, especially the propaganda arm of the Republican Party: Fox News. They had begun to try to delegitimize the president and dehumanize opponents. The counter-revolution was taking form. Republican conservatives tried to avoid the blame for their failed policies by suddenly hiding behind the libertarian banner. They started taking over the Tea Parties and purging genuine libertarians from the leadership roles, leading to a growing rift between the two. The claim of non-partisanship has been rocked recently by open sponsorship of the Tea Party Express by a Republican PAC. Most importantly, libertarian social and foreign policy views such as getting the government out of marriage (in essence legalizing gay marriage), more open borders and free flowing immigration, separation of church and state, de-militarization, abortion rights, legalizing marijuana, and repealing the Patriot Act are being openly attacked and replaced by more traditional GOP messages. The same right wing voices that shouted the loudest in support of George W Bush, the more hard-line members of his administration, and the disastrous policies were bitter about losing power. They wanted their country back, and were determined to do nearly anything to regain it. The Rise of Right Wing Hate Anger leads to hate. All of this deliberate fear mongering has had a measurable effect. There has been a chilling rise in right wing hate around the country. President Obama receives an average of 30 death threats per day, a 400% increase over Bush. Conservative websites have called for a Honduran style military coup, offered a list of Democratic Senators to assassinate, and sold merchandise about Obama featuring Psalm 109:8 which reads: “Let his days be few; and let another take his office. Let his children be fatherless, and his wife a widow. The militias are back and recruiting like mad, one of them even demanded Obama leave the country. Hate groups are on the rise. The Oathkeepers are recruiting law enforcement and military members with a pledge that removes any loyalty to the president. Pastor Steven Anderson virtually issued a fatwa on Obama, and members of his flock arrived at a Phoenix rally with loaded assault rifles. Many have compared the current atmosphere to that which existed prior to the assassination of JFK. Others say it feels eerily similar to the way things were before Timothy McVeigh blew up the Oklahoma Federal Building, killing 168 people. Violence Erupting Hate leads to suffering. This conservative incitement is being used a political tool to try and energize the base while simultaneously creating apathy for everyone else to politics in the hopes that they can retake congress in 2010, thereby hamstringing Obama and killing any potential reforms. The conflict is spreading to more mainstream parts of America. The hijacked Tea Party movement is staying mobilized so they can keep boots on the ground and forcibly oppose any reforms that are in the works, from health care reform to immigration reform to worker’s rights to equal rights for LGBT folks. Where this gets very dangerous is this: although this is the exact same playbook the Republicans used in 1994, this time around progressive voices are not give up and going to stop seeking reform. The winds of change have happened, there has been a generational shift, and strong progressive groups are pushing back against this intimidation on the street and in town halls, mobilizing their own people to come out in support of reform. These confrontations on the street have already led to violence. In St. Louis, Missouri Kenneth Gladney was involved in a scuffle with SEIU members after allegedly punching Reverend Elston McCowan. Then there was a fight in Thousand Oaks, California where a mans finger was bitten off after punching a counter protester in the nose. Most recently, two members of the anti-racism group ANSWER were involved in an altercation with 2 Tea Partiers rallying against undocumented immigrants in Ft. Lauderdale, Florida. In each case, the conservative media quickly pounced on the stories before all the facts were in, and unjustly laid the blame entirely on pro-reformers, as if to use it as a rallying cry. This is powder keg waiting to go off, and short of a massive police presence at each demonstration, there will be potential for conflict every time. Beyond this, as a consequence of riling up their base in this counter-revolution, the Republicans are also fueling the violent extremists. By effectively dehumanizing the reformers, the conservative media is giving justification to those who have already let the hate in their hearts take over. For instance, the FBI reports a sharp increase in anti-gay hate crimes. This polarization and sharp division is not good for the country, and can best be summed up in the words of Jon Stewart, “conservatives hate Obama more than they love America.” This right wing hate has resulted in at least 8 acts of domestic terrorism in the US since Obama was sworn in, including the assassination of Dr. Tiller in his church by a man affiliated with Operation Rescue and the slayings at the Holocaust Memorial by the right wing racist James von Brunn. Add to this the census worker who was hanged in Kentucky, and had the word ‘FED’ carved into his chest, and a pattern begins to emerge that proves these are not isolated incidents, they are symptomatic of more dangerous condition that is being fed by hate speech. 2010 This situation is getting worse on all fronts, and all signs point to an increase in violence in the coming year. The instigation by various right wing elements continues to grow, as shown in the recent string of billboards going up. Fox News continues its campaign of fear mongering and disinformation. The voices for open revolt are growing on websites such as Stormfront and the FreeRepublic as well. One commentator on a digg thread wrote: “They dont have guns. They wont dare leave the safety of the big cities. The right will be able to starve them out by laying seige to the cities.” Firearms and ammunition sales have seen explosive growth as a result of this increasing paranoia which seems to seek an all out civil war, or at least an Operation Condor type of repression of reformers. Further Tea Parties are going to happen over more charged issues than health care reform, and counter demonstrations are going to be right there next to them. Due to the intolerance demonstrated by anti-reform forces, this could easily turn ugly fast. In addition to that, as long as the fear campaign and conspiracies continue to be propagated, right wing extremists are not going to stop anytime soon either, and there promises to be more mass shootings as the 2010 midterm election ramps up. Fear leads to anger. Anger leads to hate. Hate leads to suffering. |
Two years into the Obama presidency and the economic data is still looking grim. Don't be fooled by the gyrations of the stock market, where optimism is mostly a reflection of the ability of financial corporations -- thanks to massive government largesse -- to survive the mess they created. The basics are dismal: unemployment is unacceptably high, the December consumer confidence index is down, and housing prices have fallen for four months in a row. The number of Americans living in poverty has never been higher, and a majority in a Washington Post poll said they were worried about making their next mortgage or rent payment. In a parallel universe lives Peter Orszag, President Barack Obama's former budget director and key adviser, who even faster than his mentor, Robert Rubin, has passed through that revolving platinum door linking the White House with Wall Street. The goal is to use your government position to advance the interests of your future employer, and Orszag and Rubin's actions in the government and then at Citigroup provide stunning examples of the synergy between big government and high finance. As Bill Clinton's treasury secretary, Rubin presided over the dismantling of Glass-Steagall, the New Deal legislation that would have prohibited the creation of the too-big-to-fail Citigroup. He was rewarded with a $15-million-a-year job at Citigroup, where he became a leader in the bank's aggressive move into high-risk ventures. An SEC report in September claimed that Rubin as Citigroup chairman was aware that the bank failed to disclose $40 billion it held in subprime mortgages before the collapse. During those years at Citigroup, Rubin financed the Brookings Institution's Hamilton Project, an economic policy program, and named Orszag, a Clinton economic adviser, as its director. The Hamilton Project continued to celebrate Rubin's deregulation philosophy up to the point of utter embarrassment. Clearly, Orszag is not easily embarrassed, for upon taking his new job recently he boasted "I am pleased to be joining Citi, with its unmatched global platform and dedication to providing clients with service and advice." The most damning comment on this corrupt syndrome was offered by former Citigroup co-chief executive John Reed, who had worked with Rubin to get Glass-Steagall reversed and now is a sharp critic of the result. "We continue to listen to the same people whose errors in judgment were central to the problem," Reed told Bloomberg News. "I'm astounded because we basically dropped the world's biggest economy because of an error in bank management." Reed estimated that the financial deregulation proposals contained in the Dodd-Frank bill and other reforms of the Obama administration represent only 25 percent of the change needed. The failure to provide serious regulation of the financial industry to avoid future downturns is documented in devastating detail in that Dec. 28 Bloomberg report, written by Christine Harper: "The U.S. government, promising to make the system safer, buckled under many of the financial industry's protests. Lawmakers spurned changes that would wall off deposit-taking banks from riskier trading. They declined to limit the size of lenders or ban any form of derivatives." The reason for that failure is obvious from the president's choice of advisers featuring Rubin acolytes from the Clinton years. Harper writes: "While Obama vowed to change the system, he filled his economic team with people who helped create it," referring to, among others, Timothy F. Geithner, who had gone from the Clinton Treasury Department to head the New York Fed, where he presided over the salvaging of Citigroup and AIG. As Obama's treasury secretary he was quick to appoint a Goldman Sachs lobbyist as his chief of staff. Geithner's subservience to Wall Street was reinforced by White House top economic adviser Lawrence Summers, Rubin's deputy and then replacement in the Clinton administration who pushed through the repeal of Glass Steagall and fought against the regulation of derivatives. And with the decisive assistance from both a Republican and Democratic president, all has worked out just as planned for the banks. Harper reports: "The last two years have been the best ever for combined investment-banking and trading revenue at Bank of America Corp., JPMorgan Chase & Co., Citigroup, Goldman Sachs Group Inc., and Morgan Stanley, according to data compiled by Bloomberg." |
Troubled actor Tom Sizemore has reached a new low: In an embarrassing about-face, the drug-addicted Hollywood star now claims he made up the story of Elizabeth Hurley and Bill Clinton‘s love affair during a drug binge. Unreservedly apologizing to his one-time supermodel lover, Sizemore told HuffPost Live on Wednesday night: “I’m not denying that I said these things… I don’t remember saying them. They’re the rantings of a guy and it’s been well-chronicled, who had a very severe drug problem.” He added: “I’d like to apologize to her for any hurt or BS I called [Liz] or the Clintons or anybody else i may have mentioned… They were the rantings of a drug addicted actor.” PHOTOS: America’s Top 30 Political Sex Scandals In a shocking video recorded in January, Sizemore bragged about giving former President Clinton’s number, which allegedly sparked a year-long affair. Sizemore revealed his own three-year fling with Hurley in his tell-all book, By Some Miracle I Made it Out of There, last year. Now, the 52-year-old has backtracked. “No, it’s not true,” he said in the interview on HuffPost Live. “I was never at the White House and I never met Bill Clinton. I went to a screening of Black Hawk Down but it wasn’t in the White House. It was in a theater near the White House. But I’ve never been to the White House and met our president, any president.” But the The Saving Private Ryan star said the video was an “old tape” recorded “back before I went to Celebrity Rehab [in 2010] and started to straighten out my life” — even though RadarOnline.com has verified that it was recorded earlier this year when he was staying in Connecticut. PHOTOS: 25 Stars Who Have Been Brutally Busted In Big Lies Furthermore, though Sizemore claimed in the interview to have been sober for nearly five years, videos have emerged showing Sizemore smoking crystal meth just last month. He said that he regularly taped himself. Sizemore’s manager, Charles Lago, insisted the star is drug tested every two weeks. Unfortunately, Sizemore’s apparent vices, cocaine and methamphetamine, can be excreted by the body in less than 48 hours, as Radar previously reported. Watch the full interview, below. |
Media playback is unsupported on your device Media caption Migrants in Vienna who want to head further west are now stranded after Germany imposed border checks, as Bethany Bell reports More EU countries have said they are imposing border checks to deal with an influx of migrants. Austria, Slovakia and the Netherlands said they would tighten controls, hours after Germany imposed checks on its border with Austria. Hungary also completed a fence along its border with Serbia, and blocked a railway line used as a crossing point. Meanwhile in Brussels, EU interior ministers agreed in principle to relocate 120,000 asylum seekers. Luxembourg, which holds the EU presidency, said the decision was expected to be made law when ministers meet on 8 October. There were no details on how the asylum seekers would be shared out among EU states. Some countries have opposed plans for mandatory quotas. European states have been struggling to cope with a record influx of migrants, many aiming for Germany. Media playback is unsupported on your device Media caption Migrants are being stopped at the Hungary-Serbia border and directed to an official registration point In Hungary, a container wagon, with one end covered in razor wire, was rolled along the track to plug the gap in the fence near the town of Roszke. Migrants were directed to an official registration point. Hungary is due to enforce tougher measures from midnight, including arresting illegal immigrants, and Prime Minister Viktor Orban told Hungary's TV2 a state of emergency was "likely" to be introduced in the border area. The new border checks further north are a challenge to the EU's Schengen agreement on free movement, although the rules do allow for temporary controls in emergencies. Image copyright Reuters Image caption Hungary used a container wagon to block a well-used migrant route Media playback is unsupported on your device Media caption The BBC's Chris Morris explains how the Schengen area was created Austrian police said up to 7,000 people had arrived from Hungary on Monday, and 14,000 on Sunday. Chancellor Werner Faymann said troops were also being deployed, primarily to provide humanitarian help within Austria, but would be sent to the border if necessary. "If Germany carries out border controls, Austria must put strengthened border controls in place," Vice-Chancellor Reinhold Mitterlehner said. Schengen: EU free movement deal explained Media playback is unsupported on your device Media caption Tima Kurdi, the aunt of a Syrian boy whose body was photographed on a Turkish beach, is in Brussels campaigning for refugees Meanwhile the EU approved a plan for operation in the Mediterranean to conduct "search, seizure and diversion... of vessels suspected of being used for human smuggling". Most of the migrants who surged into Hungary in recent weeks fled conflict, oppression and poverty in Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan and Eritrea. Many have been refusing to register in Greece or Hungary, fearing it will stop them being granted asylum in Germany or other EU states. On Monday, Germany's new border controls were said to be causing traffic jams as long as 20km (12 miles) on motorways in Austria. Are you a refugee seeking asylum in Europe? Email haveyoursay@bbc.co.uk with your story or find out about other ways to contact BBC News Lyse Doucet: Where does this crisis end? Caring for solo child refugees Crisis explained in graphics What next for Germany's asylum seekers? The UN refugee agency has warned that refugees could find themselves "in legal limbo". It said announcements of different border control measures by European states "only underlines the urgency of establishing a comprehensive European response". Media playback is unsupported on your device Media caption How refugee parents explain to children why they have to leave home German Vice-Chancellor Sigmar Gabriel said border controls were a signal that Germany "cannot accommodate all of the refugees alone". It expects to receive one million migrants this year, he said, higher than an interior ministry estimate of 800,000. The UK has said it will take 20,000 people from refugee camps in the region over five years. UK Prime Minister David Cameron visited a refugee camp in Lebanon's Bekaa Valley on Monday. Are you a refugee seeking asylum in Europe? Email haveyoursay@bbc.co.uk with your story. Please include a contact number if you are willing to speak to a BBC journalist. You can contact us in the following ways: |
Richard Boll/Getty Do mobile phones increase the risk of cancer? An Italian court has ruled that heavy cellphone usage caused a man’s benign tumour, but there is still no convincing evidence that mobile phones increase the risk of cancer. The man, Robert Romeo, says he spoke on a mobile phone for around 3 hours a day for 15 years while working for a telecoms company. In 2010, he was diagnosed as having a benign tumour in his right ear, and he lost the hearing in that ear when the tumour was removed. It is understandable that if a person spends years with a cellphone pressed to their ear, they blame the phone if they get a tumour in that ear. But correlation is not causation. Advertisement Disappearing link The news reports do not name the type of tumour Romeo had, but based on the fact that it was benign and resulted in hearing loss, it is likely to have been an acoustic neuroma, also called a vestibular schwannoma. These tumours develop in the cells surrounding the ear nerve, and usually occur only on one side. What this means is that half of the people who get acoustic neuromas are going to get them in the ear they normally use for their phone. So why did the Italian court decide that Romeo’s cellphone usage was to blame? The court has not yet released its reasoning, but a similar ruling in Italy in 2012 was based on a couple of studies that found a link between heavy use of analogue cellphones and a few types of cancer, including acoustic neuromas. These were case-control studies, which involve asking people already diagnosed with cancer about their past phone use. But other case-control studies have failed to find a link, and this type of study is known to be a flawed way to identify risk factors for diseases. Cohort studies are more reliable. These involve asking people about their lifestyle first and then following them up to see who develops cancer. In 2013, the largest cohort study done so far did report a link between phones and acoustic neuromas, but not any other cancers. However, when data covering a longer period was added, the link disappeared. Preventing cancer This is not surprising, given that there is no obvious reason why mobile phones would cause cancer. High-energy electromagnetic radiation such as X-rays can directly damage DNA, but the low-energy radiation from phones does not. In theory, of course, there could be mechanisms we don’t yet know about. The World Health Organization’s International Agency for Research on Cancer is taking a cautious approach, listing mobiles phones as “possibly carcinogenic” in 2011. But perhaps the biggest reason not to worry is that if using mobile phones greatly increased the risk of cancer, we should already be seeing a huge jump in the incidence of cancer, and that simply does not seem to be happening. Some studies have reported a small increase in certain cancer types, including acoustic neuromas, but this is usually attributed to increased diagnosis rates thanks to MRI scanning. What’s more, brain tumours are thankfully rare. Fewer than 20 out of every million people will develop acoustic neuromas, for instance. Even if it was the case that heavy cellphone doubles the risk of tumours, the overall risk would still very low. So if you’re worried about cancer, focus on the big, known causes such as smoking, alcohol and viruses like HPV. Making sure your kids are vaccinated against these viruses, for instance, will do far more protect them than trying to limit their phone time. Read more: Relax – your phone probably isn’t going to give you cancer |
Benicio del Toro has been offered a villain role in Star Wars: Episode VIII due out in 2017. The 48-year-old actor was in the early stages of discussions over the role, according to an article on Monday by The Wrap. The eighth installment in the Star Wars franchise will be directed by Rian Johnson, 41, with filming expected to start in early 2016. Sci-fi role: Benicio del Toro, shown in June in Los Angeles, reportedly has been offered the role of a villain in Star Wars: Episode VIII Star Wars: The Force Awakens will lead off the new trilogy of films when it opens on December 18. The seventh installment was directed by JJ Abrams, 49, and will feature newcomers John Boyega, Daisy Ridley, Adam Driver and Oscar Issac. They will be joined by original Star Wars cast members Harrison Ford, Carrie Fisher and Mark Hamill. Major villain: Darth Vader is shown in a still from 1980's The Empire Strikes Back The franchise was rebooted after The Walt Disney Company in 2012 acquired Lucasfilm for $4billion. Benicio previously has worked with Disney as he played The Collector in the 2014 blockbuster Guardians Of The Galaxy. The film starring Chris Pratt was produced by Disney's subsidiary Marvel Studios. Busy actor: Benicio, shown earlier this month in Puerto Rico, currently has several films in post-production Benicio won the Oscar for Best Supporting Actor for his portrayal of Mexican police officer Javier Rodriguez in the 2000 Steven Soderbergh film Traffic. The actor can next be seen along with Emily Blunt in the crime thriller Sicario due out in September. He also has been cast in the Harmony Korine thriller The Trap due out in 2017 and also starring James Franco, Idris Elba and Al Pacino. |
Make sure to select the world type Garden of Glass Skyblock Info All The Sky is a still work-in-progress pack designed to give a thorough and complete skyblock experience with some changed recipes and a few quests to guide the player to explore mods/mechanics that might otherwise be ignored. We always appreciate more testing and feedback so please feel free to visit our github or come chat on Discord with us anytime. Just remember this Skyblock version is still "experimental!" About the Pack All The Mods ("ATM") by WhatTheDrunk started out as a private pack for just a few friends that turned into something others wanted to play. There are now multiple variations including this one as a Skyblock. ATM packs have all the basics that most "name brand" packs include but with a nice mix of newer mods. The packs are constantly being updated and has an active Discord and curse chat if you want to find out more. Does "All The Mods" really contain ALL THE MODS? No, of course not Full Modlist Performance Issues? Check this out! Server Files To install this on a server click here then click on the +1 to view Server Files. You may need to edit the start.bat to fit your needs. Subreddit All the Mods Subreddit is now open for everyone. |
Here’s a mind-blowing statistic: If the market is trading at the current level or higher at the end of the year, it will only be the fourth time in the past 100 years that the S&P 500 has enjoyed three consecutive years of double-digit percentage gains. This is according to Howard Silverblatt, the senior index analyst at S&P Dow Jones Indices, who analyzed data going back to the S&P 500’s founding in 1957, and then earlier historical data extrapolated from the earlier 90-stock S&P index. The last time the S&P 500 saw three straight years of double-digit returns was in the late 1990s. And, of course, we all know what happened next. So does that give investors a reason to worry about the recent rally? “I don’t think we’re in the same kind of bubble territory as we were in the beginning of ’99,” said Gina Sanchez, founder of Chantico Global. “However, we do have some bubbly elements happening within equities.” (Watch: Stocks little moved after Fed; Nasdaq ends lower) Still, Sanchez says that American stocks are still much more attractive than other investment opportunities around the globe. U.S. equities “are still a pretty good deal,” she said, especially when compared with stocks in developing countries. Meanwhile, the technicals also suggest further upside, according to Piper Jaffray senior technical analyst Craig Johnson. (Read: This nifty ETF maneuver is becoming more common) “The trend is our friend,” Johnson said. “And the trend is up.” Johnson, who is also the president of the Market Technicians Association, said investors should forget about the 1990s--today’s market is better compared with the 1950s. “From ’52 to the mid-1960s, you had a very strong secular bull market,” he said. “Threequarters of the monthly returns in the decade of the 1950s were positive. So I think we’re in the same kind of scenario where this secular bull market is going to continue to work its way higher.” For at least the next year, Johnson sees the S&P 500 continuing to hold its 40-week moving average, which has served as support for its uptrend. From Wednesday’s open of 2,051, “we still think 2,100 is a very achievable objective for this year and 2,350 for next year,” he predicted. “When you look back at the secular bull market that started in ’52, you made five times your money,” Johnson added. “When we also saw the other inflation inflection point in 1982, the market worked its way higher and you made 15 times your money from ’82 to ’99. So, until we see some longer-term secular break, I think that we’ve got to continue to play this market to the long side…. Stick with the trend.” |
The boss character contest (ボスキャラ募集, bosu kyara boshuu, roughly "boss character application") is a contest held by Capcom where fans send ideas for boss characters to appear in the game. Contents show] Contests and characters The first boss character contest, which had 8370 entries and decided the eight Robot Masters that appear in the game. 10 participants received a "staff only" blouson, 100 received a Rockman 2 Original Music tape, and 500 received seals.[1] Besides the eight winners, forty participants were listed in the game's Japanese manual.[2] The contest decided the eight Robot Masters. Had 50,000 entries. Some runner up entries received a pencil case and ID card as prize.[3] The eight Robot Masters. The winners from this game's contest received a golden Rockman 4 cartridge.[4] Everyone that participated received the booklet Rockman Character Collection. Had 70,000 entries. Like previous contests, it decided the eight Robot Masters. Had 130,000 entries. The only contest from the original series with non-Japanese winners, with a contest being held by Nintendo Power. Had 200,000 entries. One of the non-Japanese winners, Daniel Vallée, recalled that, besides his winning entry of Knight Man, he had submitted enough Robot Master designs to fill eight whole games, with names including Wave Man and Samurai Man (the former of whom had coincidentally had a shared name with an unrelated Robot Master in Mega Man 5).[5] The eight Robot Masters. Had 220,000 entries. Sword Man, Clown Man, Search Man, Frost Man, Grenade Man and Aqua Man. For this contest a template was given for three of them: one boss character with a sword (the winner being Sword Man), one with extendible arms (Clown Man), and one with two heads (Search Man). Besides the six winners, some submissions are displayed in the game's credits and the Sega Saturn's Bonus Mode.[6] Some participants won a Mega Man themed calculator.[7] Had 110,000 entries. Mega Man Legends series series Mega Man Battle Network series series Mega Man Star Force series series Two contests were held. In the first, the winner was Arcade Man, and besides him, three runner-ups (Tabletman, Zehr, and Daruman) were added as Battle Memory.[9][10] The second has a Japanese motif, with eleven characters being added as Battle Memory.[11] Gallery |
First minister says yes vote would boost economy, but Danny Alexander counters with promise of £1,400 'UK dividend' The Scottish government and the UK Treasury have set out rival visions of the costs and benefits of Scottish independence. Launching a report at St Andrews House in Edinburgh, the first minister, Alex Salmond, said an independent Scotland could generate more than £5bn a year of extra revenues within 15 years, equating to £1,000 per person, without having to raises taxes. The report details how a yes vote in September's referendum could help boost the Scottish economy by increasing productivity, boosting the working age population and increasing employment. Meanwhile, the chief secretary to the Treasury, Danny Alexander, projected that over the next 20 years Scots would benefit from a "UK dividend" of £1,400 per person per year from 2016-17 onwards. Publishing a paper outlining what the UK government sees as the challenges of independence, Alexander described the Scottish government's estimate as "a bogus bonus", adding that a separate Scotland could face higher interest payments on government debts at the same time as it had to deal with declining oil revenues and an ageing population. According to the Treasury analysis, the direct costs of independence would include higher borrowing rates for an independent Scottish state, the net costs of setting up new institutions, and the net costs of funding the policy commitments contained in the Scottish government's recent white paper. It suggested that if the UK debt was split according to population at the end of 2015-16, an independent Scotland would take on debt of about 74% of its GDP, which could reach "unsustainable levels without policy action". Speaking in Edinburgh, Alexander said: "Today we have shown that, by staying together, Scotland's future will be safer, with stronger finances and a more progressive society. Because as a United Kingdom we can pool resources and share risks. It means a UK dividend of £1,400 a year for every man, woman and child in Scotland. That dividend is our share of a more prosperous future. It is the money that will pay for better public services and a fairer society." He added that, working from OBR forecasts, an independent Scotland would begin with a budget deficit double that of the UK. The Scottish government paper says Scotland's finances in 2016-17 would be similar to, or stronger than, those of the UK and other G7 industrialised countries, with debt on a "downward trajectory", enabling future Scottish governments to start an oil savings fund. Salmond said the paper, Outlook for Scotland's Public Finances, "gives a very clear picture of what independence could deliver in economic terms for the people of Scotland". The paper suggests that an increase of 0.3 percentage points in the long-run productivity growth rate could raise an additional £2.4bn a year in revenues by 2029-30. Increasing the employment rate by 3.3 percentage points could provide additional revenues of £1.3bn a year, while a rise in the population, less than the UK as a whole is expected to see, could add a further £1.5bn a year to the total by 2029-30. Salmond said: "Scotland is one of the wealthiest countries in the world, more prosperous per head than the UK, France and Japan, but we need the powers of independence to ensure that that wealth properly benefits everyone in our society. That wealth means we will start life as an independent nation with strong finances and huge economic potential." |
Survey asks people if they would want neighbours of a different race U.S., Britain, Canada and South America are among the least racist Britain is one of the most racially tolerant countries on the planet, a survey claims. The global social attitudes study claims that the most racially intolerant populations are all in the developing world, with Jordan and India in the top five. By contrast, the study of 80 countries over three decades found Western countries were most accepting of other cultures with Britain, the U.S., Canada and Australia more tolerant than anywhere else. Racism: This map shows the nations of the world where people have the most and least tolerant attitudes The data came from the World Value Survey, which measured the social attitudes of people in different countries, as reported by the Washington Post . The survey asked individuals what types of people they would refuse to live next to, and counted how many chose the option 'people of a different race' as a percentage for each country. Researchers have suggested that societies where more people do not want neighbours from other races can be considered less racially tolerant. The country with the highest proportion of 'intolerant' people who wanted neighbours similar to them was Jordan, where 51.4 per cent of the population would refuse to live next to someone of a different race. Next was India with 43.5 per cent. R acist views are strikingly rare in the U.S., according to the survey, which claims that only 3.8 per cent of residents are reluctant to have a neighbour of another race. Diverse: The multicultural U.S. is among the least racially intolerant countries, according to the data Other English-speaking countries once part of the British Empire shared the same tolerant attitude - fewer than five per cent of Britons, Canadians, Australians and New Zealanders showed signs of racism. People in the UK are also tolerant of other differences such as speaking a foreign language or practising an alternative religion - for example, fewer than two per cent of Britons would object to having neighbours of a different faith to them. Similarly, fewer than one in 20 people in most South American countries admitted harbouring prejudice against other races. The Middle East, which is currently dealing with large numbers of low-skilled immigrants from south Asia, seems to be a hotbed of racial tension, however. Europe is remarkably split - the west of the continent is generally more tolerant than the east, but France is a striking outlier with 22.7 per cent of the French rejecting neighbourhood diversity. Some have pointed out problems in the survey data, claiming that because the polls span a long period of time they are an unreliable guide to current attitudes. However, a more serious flaw could be the fact that in most Western countries racism is so taboo than many people will hide their intolerant views and lie to the questioners. Max Fisher of the Washington Post suggested that maybe 'Americans are conditioned by their education and media to keep these sorts of racial preferences private, i.e. to lie about them on surveys, in a way that Indians might not be'. THE LEAST RACIALLY TOLERANT COUNTRIES 40% + (of individuals surveyed would not want a person of another race as a neighbour) India, Jordan 30 - 39.9% Egypt , Saudi Arabia , Iran , Vietnam , Indonesia , South Korea 20 - 39.9% France , Turkey , Bulgaria , Algeria , Morocco , Mali , Zambia , Thailand , Malaysia , The Philippines, Bangladesh, Hong Kong THE MOST TOLERANT COUNTRIES 0 to 4.9% United States, Canada, Brazil, Argentina, Colombia, Guatemala, Britain, Sweden, Norway, Latvia, Australia, New Zealand 5 - 9.9% Chile, Peru, Mexico, Spain, Germany, Belgium, Belarus, Croatia, Japan, Pakistan, South Africa 10 - 14.9%Finland, Poland, Ukraine, Italy, Greece, Czech Republic, Slovakia 15 - 19.9% Venezuela, Hungary, Serbia, Romania, Macedonia, Ethiopia, Uganda, Tanzania, Zimbabwe, Russia, China Source: World Values Survey |
Reddit says it's going to take a more active role in preventing harassment among its members. In a blog post entitled "Promote ideas, protect people," the site's administrators say that they will now be prohibiting "attacks and harassment of individuals" through the platform. Here's Reddit's definition of harassment: Systematic and/or continued actions to torment or demean someone in a way that would make a reasonable person (1) conclude that reddit is not a safe platform to express their ideas or participate in the conversation, or (2) fear for their safety or the safety of those around them. Reddit is known for laissez-faire administration that has allowed for a huge range of subject matter and tone on the site. While individual subreddits can be run however moderators like, the site-wide rules mostly only ban things that will interfere with the site's operations, including spamming and vote manipulation. Over the past few years, it's tweaked its policies amidst debate over where free speech crosses into abuse or illegality — it banned "sexually suggestive content featuring minors" three years ago after being taken to task by CNN and others, and more recently, it updated its privacy policy to address users posting nude pictures without the subject's consent. (Reddit has long banned posting "personal information" about private individuals.) But this is a broader move, and one that's taking place in a larger discussion of online harassment. "Instead of promoting free expression of ideas, we are seeing our open policies stifling free expression; people avoid participating for fear of their personal and family safety," the admins write. They cite a survey of 15,000 Reddit members that "showed negative responses to comments have made people uncomfortable contributing or even recommending Reddit to others." Women were particularly likely to report these worries. "It is specifically designed to prevent attacks against people, not ideas." Now, site-wide administrators will investigate complaints and potentially ban users over them. "When someone reports harassment we will investigate thoroughly rather that leaving it to moderators and respond based on the nature of the harassment," writes one administrator in a discussion thread. The blog post doesn't give specific examples of harassment, but admins have responded to some individual cases in the thread. "Someone threatened to 'stomp my dog to death' in a local sub-reddit, and then posted a picture of my dog, and told me to 'Imagine its guts on the sidewalk,'" one user wrote. "Feeling real life danger is definitely a reason to contact us," an administrator responded. Some users have complained that this move will be used to stifle debate or disagreement, something Reddit has positioned itself explicitly against. "This change will have no immediately noticeable impact on more than 99.99 percent of our users," reads the post. "It is specifically designed to prevent attacks against people, not ideas." Admins say that each case will be investigated on its own merits. The New York Times reports that according to Reddit interim CEO Ellen Pao, the new rules could "serve to prohibit harassment that originates on Reddit and spreads to other websites" as well. It's not always clear what it will mean in practice. The complaints about negative content often don't involve one user posting negative comments to another, but systemic campaigns or individual subreddits devoted to promoting things like racism or anti-semitism. In the discussion post, Reddit members point to subreddits like "FatPeopleHate" (which posts and mocks pictures of overweight people) or the anti-Black "CoonTown" as groups that could inherently tread the line between free speech and harassment. The Gamergate movement, which has largely organized on Reddit, is a political group that has also been tied strongly to individual harassment campaigns, and any investigation around it would almost certainly create an internet firestorm. "The problem with this rule's wording is that you can't maintain a 'safe platform' for both /r/judaism and /r/gasthekikes," writes one user, who finds the phrasing vague. Rhetorically, however, this is a big step for Reddit. (Disclosure: Reddit executive chair Alexis Ohanian was the host of our video series Small Empires.) |
Republicans have backed off their effort to redefine rape as “forcible rape,” after even some of their own members asked: Is there another kind of rape? But they have not given up their war on women’s reproductive rights. HR 3, the “No Taxpayer Funding for Abortion Act,” introduced Jan. 20 by Rep. Chris Smith, R-N.J., tried to further restrict federally funded abortion coverage (primarily Medicaid) by limiting it only to victims of what the law defined as “forcible rape.” This spurred a firestorm of outrage. Even some Republicans were taken aback. One GOP aide said removing the wording “would be a good idea, since last I checked, rape by definition is non-consensual,” Politico reported. Smith announced Jan. 27 that he was dropping the “forcible rape” wording and replacing it with language from the 1976 Hyde Amendment, which bans federal funding for abortions except for cases of rape, incest, or to save a mother’s life. But the essence of HR 3 remains the same: entrenching and expanding curbs on women’s right to make their own reproductive decisions. The Hyde Amendment is renewable every year and has been renewed annually since it was first passed. The original amendment flatly banned federal funding for any abortions After a wide outcry from women’s rights advocates, the exemption for rape, incest or life-threatening circumstances was added in 1977. Now Republicans, feeling empowered by their electoral gains last November, are trying to chip away at those exemptions, add further restrictions on abortion and make those restrictions permanent by adding them to the health reform law. They retreated on the “forcible rape” redefinition, but they are pressing ahead in other ways. Rep. Joe Pitts, a Pennsylvania Republican who is a cosponsor of HR 3, has added new language to his “Protect Life Act,” HR 358, amendment to the health reform law, that would allow hospitals or any health care provider to refuse to provide emergency abortion care, even if the woman’s life is at risk. HR 358 is similar to one Pitts cosponsored with Michigan Democrat Bart Stupak during last year’s health care debate, that would make it almost impossible for private health insurance to cover abortions. By adding the new language, Pitts’ amendment now also contravenes a 1986 law passed by Congress, the Emergency Medical Treatment and Labor Act, enacted to ensure public access to emergency care regardless of ability to pay. Under the 1986 law, a patient with an emergency medical condition who goes to a hospital participating in Medicare must be provided stabilizing treatment regardless of insurance coverage or ability to pay. That could include abortion care for pregnant women. The impetus for the law was to halt a practice known as “patient dumping” – hospitals or other health providers dumping onto the streets, or onto public facilities, patients too poor to pay. Evidently Pitts and his supporters are happy to dump low-income women in crisis pregnancies out onto the streets. Pitts, a prominent member of the House’s anti-choice Pro-Life Caucus, now heads a House subcommittee on health. Speaking at the National Organization for Women annual conference last summer, Lois Herr, who ran against Pitts in 2010, called him the “poster child for what the ultra-right is trying to do to us.” “They don’t want to control the rich,” she said, but they “want to control almost everything we do with our bodies.” Donna Crane, policy director at NARAL Pro-Choice America and a long-time activist for women’s reproductive rights, told talkingpointsmemo she has never seen anti-abortion bill as brazen as Pitts’ bill in attacking the requirement for treatment when the health of the mother is at stake. She called the bill “really out there.” Pitts and his supporters claim it’s all about protecting health care providers’ “conscience.” Sister Carol Keehan, president of the Catholic Health Association, which represents Catholic hospitals, sent a letter to Pitts backing his amendment. Catholic bishops are also supporting the measure. Another bill, the Title X Abortion Provider Prohibition Act, HR 217, introduced Jan. 7 by Rep. Mike Pence, R-Ind., would cut off federal funding to Planned Parenthood clinics and other health providers that offer abortions. Planned Parenthood, which provides family planning, birth control, and preventive care to millions of women, is specifically targeted in Pence’s bill. Perhaps not coincidentally, Planned Parenthood has also been targeted by a “sex trafficking” video hoax linked to the right-wing extremist group Live Action. NARAL, Planned Parenthood, NOW and other advocates for women’s reproductive rights are mobilizing to defeat the anti-choice bills. Many emphasize that the GOP measures particularly hurt low-income women who depend on federally funded programs to obtain health care and family planning assistance. Their view was summed up Erin Mattson, NOW’s vice president, at last year’s conference: “You cannot talk about women’s rights without the right to choose and access safe, legal, affordable abortion.” Photo: Fibonacci Blue CC 2.0 |
More than 1000 runners who competed in an gruelling endurance race in France have fallen ill from animal faeces thought to be in the mud. A record field of more than 8000 entrants celebrated at the finish line of the Côte d’Azur in Nice last week. However, the festivities were shortlived for some 30 participants who reported symptoms of diarrhoea, vomiting and fever the following day. In the days since, that figure has risen to more than 1000 people. The mystery illness, while still that, is thought to have been caused by harmful bacteria in the mud, with a number of people noting a smell of horse manure at various points in the race. According to the event's website, there has been no hospitalisations to date. Organisers have promised to do everything possible to determine the cause of the stomach upsets. A participant, pictured left, enjoys a cold beer following the race in France last week. (Source: Twitter/TheMudDay) () The celebrations were shortlived for many. (Source: Twitter/TheMudDay) () © Nine Digital Pty Ltd 2019 |
A viatical settlement (from the Latin "viaticum")[1] is the sale of a policy owner's existing life insurance policy to a third party for more than its cash surrender value, but less than its net death benefit.[2] Such a sale provides the policy owner with a lump sum.[3] The third party becomes the new owner of the policy, pays the monthly premiums, and receives the full benefit of the policy when the insured dies.[3] "Viatical settlement" typically is the term used for a settlement involving an insured who is terminally or chronically ill.[3] A person generally is chronically ill if the person (1) is unable to perform at least two activities of daily living, such as eating, using the toilet, bathing oneself, or dressing oneself; (2) requires substantial supervision to protect himself or herself from threats to health and safety due to severe cognitive impairment; or (3) has a level of disability similar to that described in (1) as determined by the U.S. Secretary of Health and Human Services.[1] A person generally is terminally ill if the person has an illness or sickness that can reasonably be expected to result in death within two years. As medical advancements improved the lives of those persons living with terminal or chronic illnesses, the life settlement industry emerged.[3] History [ edit ] Viatical settlements grew in popularity in the United States in the late 1980s, when the AIDS epidemic peaked.[3] The early victims of AIDS in the U.S. were largely gay men, typically relatively young and without wives or children (the traditional beneficiaries under a life insurance policy), but often covered by life insurance through employment or as a result of investments. The beneficiaries under the policies were often their parents who did not need the money. Viatical settlements offered a way to extract value from the policy while the policy owner was still alive. At the time, the AIDS mortality rate was very high, and life expectancy after diagnosis was typically short.[3] Investors were reasonably sure that they would collect in a relatively short time. This combination of events caused a surge in viatical settlements as both investors and viators saw an opportunity for mutual benefit. A U.S. Supreme Court decision from 1911 provides the legal basis for viatical settlements.[3] In Grigsby v. Russell, 222 U.S. 149 (1911), Dr. A. H. Grigsby treated a patient named John C. Burchard.[3] Mr. Burchard, being in need of a particular surgical operation, offered to sell Dr. Grigsby his life insurance policy in return for $100 and for agreeing to pay the remaining premiums.[3] Dr. Grigsby agreed and as a result, the first viatical settlement transaction was created.[3] When Mr. Burchard died, Dr. Grigsby attempted to collect the benefits.[3] An executor of Burchard’s estate challenged Dr. Grigsby in Appeals Court and won.[3] The case eventually reached the U.S. Supreme Court where Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. delivered the opinion of the court.[3] He stated in relevant part that “So far as reasonable safety permits, it is desirable to give to life policies the ordinary characteristics of property. To deny the right to sell except to persons having such an interest is to diminish appreciably the value of the contract in the owner’s hands.”[3] The Supreme Court's decision set forth the fundamental principle upon which the viatical settlement and later, the life settlement industry were based: a life insurance policy is private property, which can be assigned at the will of the owner.[3] Viatical settlements were rare for almost eight decades until the onset of the AIDS epidemic.[3] Early improper activities among a few bad actors produced a fear among consumers regarding viatical settlements.[3] Life insurers became concerned about individuals purchasing policies purely for speculative purposes.[3] Today, many states regulate viatical and life settlements and many more are developing legislation and regulations.[3] As of June 2011, the states that do not regulate viatical settlements are Wyoming, South Dakota, Missouri, Alabama, and South Carolina.[4] All other states regulate viatical settlements.[4] Despite the bad experience of some investors, viatical settlements remain an often valuable tool for the personal financial management of many ill people. A 2002 study showed that among hospice financial counselors who have had experience with viatical settlements, most report positive experiences.[5] Notable cases [ edit ] Mutual Benefits [ edit ] One of the most infamous viaticals cases involved the Mutual Benefits Corporation headed by Peter Lombardi in Florida, which had 28,000 investors and had focused on paying HIV clients. In 2004, the Securities Exchange Commission closed the firm saying it was involved in a $1 billion Ponzi scheme. Lombardi is now serving a 20-year prison sentence.[6] Kelco [ edit ] In August 2008, Stephen L. Keller, the former CEO of Kelco Inc., filed a motion in the United States District Court for the Eastern District of Kentucky, with Judge Karl S. Forester, to dismiss Keller’s convictions for conspiracy, fraud, and money laundering. Keller’s convictions resulted from Kelco selling life insurance policies by falsifying HIV/AIDS patients' applications, then buying the policies in a viatical settlement. Keller’s motion was denied on November 12, 2010. His appeal of that denial was also denied, on February 28, 2011.[7] References [ edit ] |
I will admit, making any homemade candy that requires me to drip or coat the entire thing of candy into chocolate gives me anxiety. I am just terrible at dipping or coating things in chocolate and making them look good. I always loose the candy into the chocolate, or it melts on my fork while I am taking my OCD sweet time trying to make it work. But alas, here I am a few days before Christmas, making chocolate dipped candies, cursing the Christmas candy Gods, and drinking all leftover chocolate. Today I tried my hand a vegan peppermint patties. This recipe require ingredients you probably already have in your pantry or fridge and is pretty darn simple. Unlike the store-bought version you avoid all scary fake processed sugars and corn syrups, and YOU get to choose an ethical chocolate source! It’s win-win for all! Let me know what treats you’re making for Christmas this year by leaving me a note in the comments below. Happy Holidays! 5.0 from 1 reviews Homemade Peppermint Patties Save Print Prep time 1 hour Cook time 15 mins Total time 1 hour 15 mins Peppermint patties are one of the easiest holiday candies to make. With just a few simple ingredients, you can make smooth, creamy vegan peppermint patties –just like the store-bought variety! Author: The Edgy Veg Recipe type: Dessert Cuisine: American Serves: 12 large 24 small Ingredients 3 cups powdered sugar, sifted 3 Tbsp evaporated coconut milk 3 Tbsp brown rice syrup 3 tsp coconut oil ½ teaspoons peppermint extract, to taste 2 cups dark chocolate, finely chopped, or you can use chips Instructions In a large bowl or stand mixer, beat together all ingredients except chocolate, until a sugary dough forms. If it's too sticky slowly add more sugar, until you get desired consistency. Form the dough into a disk and wrap in plastic wrap. Refrigerate for 30 mins to 1 hour. After 1 hour, roll out your dough between 2 pieces of parchment paper or plastic wrap, to a ¼-inch thickness. Using a small round cookie cutter of your desired size (you could also use a small drinking glass), cut out circles and place on a parchment paper lined-baking sheet. Gather extra and re-roll and cut until no more dough remains. Repeat until you run out of dough. Place the baking sheet in the freezer for a minimum of 30 minutes or until the disks are firm (overnight is best). When ready your disks are hard, melt the chocolate over a double boiler, stirring occasionally, until the chocolate is completely melted and smooth. Remove from the heat. Dip each mint disk into the chocolate using a fork and allow any excess chocolate to drip off before returning the patty to the parchment-lined baking sheet. Repeat with all of the disks and allow to set in the freezer for a minimum of 1 hour. Store in an airtight container. I like to keep mine in the fridge to avoid melting and keep them fresh. Nutrition Information Calories: 280 Fat: 9.7 Saturated fat: 6.7 Unsaturated fat: 1.8 Carbohydrates: 52.2 Sugar: 47 Sodium: 20.4 Fiber: 2.1 Protein: 1.4 Cholesterol: 3.6 3.5.3208 |
Maajid Nawaz, a former Islamist who is now working to reform the faith, will sue the Southern Poverty Law Center for defamation for putting him on a list of “anti-Muslim extremists.” He made the announcement during tonight’s episode of Real Time with Bill Maher. This saga began last October. The Southern Poverty Law Center, long known for its list of “hate” groups, published the list of “Anti-Muslim Extremists” in order to highlight people who had “shamelessly exploited terrorist attacks and the Syrian refugee crisis, among other things, to demonize the entire Islamic faith.” To the surprise of many atheists, the list included Ayaan Hirsi Ali along with Nawaz. Hirsi Ali, of course, is the Somali-born activist who was a victim of faith-based genital mutilation. Her friend, director Theo van Gogh, was murdered by a Muslim extremist who then stuck a knife in van Gogh’s body with a note that said Hirsi Ali was next. She has since written two memoirs and a book offering ways to reform the religion. She understands that there’s a direct connection between a literal interpretation of the Qur’an and the terror we’re seeing in parts of the world. She knows that a non-trivial percentage of believers feel that violence in the name of Islam is sometimes justified. Her foundation works to end faith-based “honor killings” and female genital mutilation. How does that make her the Worst Person Ever in the eyes of the SPLC? Nawaz, too, wants to reform the faith. He published a book (co-authored with Sam Harris) called Islam and the Future of Tolerance and began a non-profit, Qulliam International, which calls itself the “world’s first counter-extremism organisation.” Both of them believe — rightly, I would say — that Islam is uniquely problematic compared to other religions and moderate Muslims have a role to play in helping steer the ship in the right direction. They may be critical of Islam, but they are not suggesting violence against Muslims. The SPLC designation was problematic for other reasons. If criticizing religious beliefs made them extremists, then how long would it be before other vocal atheists ended up on that list, too? There’s a difference between being anti-Muslim and critical of the worst aspects of Islam. For goodness’ sake, it’s not like they were attacking Malala Yousafzai. So why were they added to SPLC’s list? For Hirsi Ali, they said this: … Although she now positions herself as an ex-Muslim champion of women’s rights, her anti-Muslim rhetoric is remarkably toxic. In 2007, she told Reason magazine that the West should “defeat” Islam and that “we are war with Islam.” The same year, she said that Islam was “the new fascism” and a “destructive, nihilistic cult of death” in an interview with The London Evening Standard. In 2014, Brandeis University withdrew its offer of an honorary degree for her, saying that it had been unaware of her vitriolic attacks on Islam. When Brandeis revoked the honorary degree, the reporter from Reason magazine wrote on this very site that their interview was often seen in an unfair light: There was certainly an illiberal aspect to it all. But again, context is everything. If you’ve read Infidel, you know that, in her native Somalia, Hirsi Ali was the victim of forced genital mutilation when she was five and was later almost married off to a distant cousin she despised. Those experiences equipped her with a rare determination to combat the deeply misogynistic “death cult” (her term) that is Islam, something she has done in an admirable way with the Ayaan Hirsi Ali Foundation, an organization that helps free women and girls from cultural and religious oppression. (If that isn’t Social Justice, I don’t know what is.) Essentially, while her words may have been harsh, they should be seen with the understanding that she has been personally affected by the worst aspects of the faith. It took a very uncharitable interpretation of Hirsi Ali’s words to think her goal of “defeating Islam” meant we should commit violence against peaceful law-abiding Muslims or descended into hate speech. Her goal was full-scale reform of Islam, not genocide against all Muslims. She has repeatedly said that her goal is to prevent the spread of Islamic radicalism, not to prevent peaceful Muslims from practicing their faith. What about Nawaz? The SPLC said he exaggerated or lied about aspects of his biography, but look at this example they cited as proof of his anti-Muslim bigotry: According to a Jan. 24, 2014, report in The Guardian, Nawaz tweeted out a cartoon of Jesus and Muhammad — despite the fact that many Muslims see it as blasphemous to draw Muhammad. He said that he wanted “to carve out a space to be heard without constantly fearing the blasphemy charge.” That would be this picture: That’s not anti-Muslim. That’s a statement of free speech. It’s something we’ve participated in on this site as part of Everybody Draw Muhammad Day. Those of us who are not Muslim are not bound by Islamic doctrine. Devout Muslims may not be allowed to draw Muhammad, but we sure as hell can, and they have no right to stop us. Posting a cartoon version of Muhammad is not hate speech. You can say it’s disrespectful (and I would disagree), but by no means is that bigotry. The SPLC also said Nawaz was spotted at a strip club once. As if that’s relevant. After the list came out, Nawaz wrote a piece for the Daily Beast calling out his fellow liberals at the SPLC for “Islamsplaining” and essentially putting a fatwa out on him: … liberal reform Muslims and ex-Muslims stepped up to this challenge [of calling out extremists], only to be labelled as “anti-Muslim” extremists by those we had hoped were our allies, and who we now call the regressive-left. They are those who talk of progressive values: feminism, gay rights and free speech, and who criticise Christian fundamentalists within their own communities. A long time ago, we liberal reform Muslims had high hopes for this group. Just as they challenge the conservatives of their own “Bible belt” we thought they would support our challenge against our very own “Qur’an Belt.” How wrong we were. … Nothing good ever comes from compiling lists. And so I say to the Southern Poverty Law Center: You were supposed to stand up for us, not intimidate us. Just imagine how ex-Muslim Islam-critic Ayaan Hirsi Ali must feel to be included in your list of “anti-Muslim” extremists. Her friend Theo Van Gogh was murdered on the streets of Amsterdam in 2004. And back then there was another list pinned to Theo’s corpse with a knife: it too named Ayaan Hirsi Ali. Criticism against the SPLC was also fierce after their article came out. A Change.org petition calling for the removal of Hirsi Ali and Nawaz from the list received more than 13,000 signatures. I know many atheists who refuse to donate another penny to the SPLC until they remove the names and apologize. Nawaz even told the New York Times Magazine that the SPLC’s hit list “compromised some funding” for his Qulliam organization. So he can make a solid argument that being put on the list affected him negatively. And that’s even before we talk about how Muslim terrorists could easily target every name on there as a way to eliminate enemies of the faith. That’s why he’s suing the SPLC. Speaking with Bill Maher tonight, he said he’s “sick to death” of the SPLC’s actions. He called the group “well-meaning” but completely wrong in this instance. He’s suing them for defamation and he’ll be crowd-funding money for his lawsuit. (A link to the lawsuit is not yet available.) Ayaan Hirsi Ali has not said if she’ll be part of the lawsuit. (Screenshot via YouTube. Large portions of this article were published earlier) |
Bill for abortive plan, described as 'the biggest IT failure ever seen', was originally estimated to be £6.4bn An abandoned NHS patient record system has so far cost the taxpayer nearly £10bn, with the final bill for what would have been the world's largest civilian computer system likely to be several hundreds of millions of pounds higher, according a highly critical report from parliament's public spending watchdog. MPs on the public accounts committee said final costs are expected to increase beyond the existing £9.8bn because new regional IT systems for the NHS, introduced to replace the National Programme for IT, are also being poorly managed and are riven with their own contractual wrangles. When the original plan was abandoned the total bill was expected to be £6.4bn. Richard Bacon, a Conservative member of the committee, said the report was further evidence of a "systemic failure" in the government's ability to draw up and manage large IT contracts. "This saga is one of the worst and most expensive contracting fiascos in the history of the public sector. "Yet, as the much more recent universal credit project shows, there is still a long way to go before government departments can honestly say that they have learned and properly applied the lessons from previous contracting failures." Previous IT-related government problems have included a breakdown of the child support agency, which left thousands of families without money; chaos within the passport agency; a tax credit system which was left vulnerable to fraud; late payments from the rural payments agency; and difficulties in tracking foreign national prisoners. A report last week by the National Audit Office estimated that in 2012 at least £480bn of the government's operating revenues and at least £210bn of non-staff expenditure such as pensions and entitlements were reliant to some extent on older IT systems. The PAC report highlighted a new NHS computer system called Lorenzo which was supposed to store data for 220 trusts in the north, eastern England and the Midlands at a cost of £3.1bn. But the final contract for that project alone is likely to cost the Department of Health £2.2bn and cover only 22 trusts, MPs said. Successive ministers and civil servants have been blamed by committee members for the NHS project, which has been described as the biggest IT failure ever seen. Bacon, who has co-written a book on failing government projects, said that the NHS's particular problems stem from the original contracts signed before 2002. "The department [of health]'s latest estimate of £9.8bn leaves out the future costs of Lorenzo or the potential large future costs arising from the department's termination of Fujitsu's contract for care records systems in the South of England. It is a pitiful waste," he said. The project was launched in 2002 but was beset by changing specifications, technical challenges and disputes with suppliers which left it years behind schedule and over budget. In September 2011 ministers announced they would dismantle the National Programme but in an effort to salvage something from the failure said they would keep the component parts in place with separate management and accountability structures. The committee's report, issued today, has examined the new structures and found a number of significant failures. They focused on the government's decision to renegotiate its original £3.1bn contract with the IT systems group Computer Science Corporation for care records systems across 220 trusts in the North, Midlands and East, following delays and problems. The government's negotiating position was weakened, the report claimed, by the Department of Health's failure to meet contractual obligations. CSC's contracts could not be cancelled because a legal challenge by the company may well have succeeded, the report claimed. However, 10 years on CSC has still not delivered the software and "not a single trust has a fully functioning Lorenzo care records system". This failure, the report said, was "extraordinary", while CSC was accused of a "failure to deliver" and "poor performance". MPs also expressed surprise that the government's estimates of future costs have not taken into account the termination of contracts with another major IT supplier, Fujitsu. That contract was dissolved in 2008, but the government and the Japanese firm are still in dispute over compensation. The government's legal costs have been £31.5m over the last four years, the report disclosed. A CSC spokesman claimed three hospitals were already using the Lorenzo system. "Services provided by CSC under the programme reach 500,000 registered NHS users and support 25 million patient records. Three hospital trusts are already successfully running their day-to-day operations using the Lorenzo electronic patient record system. A further six trusts so far have chosen to take the system under the interim agreement signed with the NHS in August 2012." The government was keen to distance itself from the problem. The health minister, Dan Poulter, said: "We can't let their [Labour's] failure hold patients back from seeing the benefits of the technology revolution that is transforming daily lives all around us. That's why we've set up a £1bn technology fund to help the NHS go paperless by 2018. This is the opposite to Labour's approach where a one-size fits all solution was clunkily imposed from Whitehall." |
Picture: Getty So we thought you might be interested in this snippet from Sweden: someone drew a huge penis on the surface of a frozen lake in Gothenberg this weekend. The problem is that since the ice doesn't seem thick enough to support an adult's weight, parks staff can't actually get onto the surface of the lake to wipe out the NSFW artwork, which was drawn in snow that fell on top of the ice. A spokesman told newspaper Aftonbladet (translated by The Local): They judged that the ice would not stay put. They did not dare to go out on to the moat and consequently the artwork is there until thawing weather returns. And the Scandinavian winter ice isn't likely to go anywhere until the spring. Åke Lindgren, 79, who lives across the road, has been documenting the parks staff's struggles with the giant penis, taking pictures that were picked up by Swedish media. He told The Local: I have explained the story many, many times now. But it's funny! The penis is still there, I can still see it. But it is still a bit dangerous right now. The city's mayor, for her part, isn't bothered, tweeting: |
Allergy Expert Says Peanut Bans Are An Overreaction To Food Allergies toggle caption iStockphoto.com Over the weekend, the nation's top allergy experts previewed some new guidelines that are intended to clear up confusion about the diagnosis and treatment of food allergies. And there's a lot of confusion out there. Sami Bahna, president of the American College of Allergy, Asthma and Immunology, tells Shots that the confusion has led to unnecessary public banishment of a frequent suspect - the peanut. "If we are going to eliminate peanuts, and another child is allergic to hazelnuts, and another child is allergic to milk, and another child to wheat -- there's no end to this," he says. Recently, the Department of Transportation, which had been considering a ban on peanuts on planes, reconsidered. The move was applauded, naturally, by the Georgia Peanut Commission, which says its products are unfairly singled out. While the National Institute for Allergy and Infectious Disease says food allergies occur in 6 to 8 percent of kids, and about 4 percent of adults, there's a lot of self-diagnosis, overdiagnosis, and just plain misdiagnosis Bahna says. "Many patients claim food allergy without having them," says Bahna, who helped develop the guidelines. This has people unnecessarily steering clear of shellfish and peanuts and milk. Eating peanuts or shellfish can trigger physical reactions in some people, but those reactions are not necessarily food allergies. For example, sometimes people suspect they are allergic when they are really intolerant. This happens a lot in the case of milk, he says, and requires different treatment. As NPR's Allison Aubrey has reported before, the common tests doctors perform when they suspect a food allergy aren't definitive. Those skin prick tests and blood tests can tell you if your body is developing antibodies to a particular food, but not whether you'll have symptoms. The real test is the food challenge. That's where a doctor observes a person eating the food and watches for reactions. In the case of a true food allergy, those might include tingling of the face, hives and swelling. A couple of years ago, researchers at National Jewish Health in Denver conducted "food challenge" tests on 125 children with allergies and eczema and found that more than 50 percent of the kids could actually tolerate foods they were told to avoid, Aubrey reports. In fact, only 1 percent of people allergic to peanuts have acute allergic reactions to being near the food or smelling the food, he says. So taking the peanut butter and jelly sandwich lunchbox option away from a school full of kids is an overreaction, Bahna says. "People have to get real," Bahna says. Parents and patients should take the initiative. Many food allergy sufferers can take precautions, like avoiding the foods, taking an antihistamine before potential exposure, controlling asthma and carrying an Epipen, he says. The forthcoming food allergy guidelines analyze the currently wide-ranging scientific literature on food allergies and are intended to help doctors determine whether a controlled food test is needed. Maybe someday scientists can figure out how to trick the body into not putting up its guard when it comes to food, but for now, the only way to avoid a food allergy is to avoid the food, Bahna says. |
Public Notice on Investments in Cryptocurrencies and other Virtual or Digital Currencies The attention of the Securities and Exchange Commission, (the Commission) has been drawn to radio advertisements and other modes of solicitations of the public to invest in cryptocurrencies such as Swisscoin, OneCoin, Bitcoin and such other virtual or digital currencies. The public is hereby advised to exercise extreme caution with regard to digital (crypto currencies) as a vehicle of investments. This warning is in consonance with similar warnings issued by capital market regulators and Central Banks across the world over the past few years. The Commission, wishes to alert the public that none of the persons, companies or entities promoting cryptocurrencies has been recognized or authorized by it or by other regulatory agencies in Nigeria to receive deposits from the public or to provide any investment or other financial services in or from Nigeria. The public should also be aware that any investment opportunities promoted by these persons, companies or entities are likely to be of a risky nature with a high risk of loss of money, whilst others may be outright fraudulent pyramid schemes. Given that these instruments and the persons, companies or entities that promote them have neither been authorized, nor any guidelines/regulations developed for them by any of the regulatory authorities in Nigeria, there is no protection available to users or investors in these virtual currencies from financial losses if the virtual currencies fail or the companies promoting them go out of business. The public and consumers of financial services are further advised that before making any investment or entering into any financial services transaction they should ascertain that the entity with whom the investment or transaction is being made is authorized by the Commission or other financial services regulatory authority as applicable to provide such services. Signed Management 12th January, 2017 |
Since the Black Sea and its littorals have become contested zones between Russia and the West, it behooves us to think cogently about U.S. interests in the equally important Caucasus and how to defend them. Our vital interests are the same as the 1990s, even taking into account major changes in the regional and global strategic environment. We want these states to remain independent, enjoy real sovereignty within their treaty-defined borders, remain at peace with each other and be open to international economic markets. Unfortunately, the current reality greatly differs. An honest assessment of recent U.S. policy must admit that Washington has neglected this region. Such neglect is misconceived and in no way benign. Instead it is malign neglect and contributes to the growing problems in the region, precisely because it leaves the field open to Russia to play its neo-imperial games. ADVERTISEMENT Russia incited war against Georgia, and, subsequently, used its gains to repeatedly encroach upon Georgia’s territorial integrity with impunity. It also deliberately perpetuates the Nagorno-Karabakh war between Armenia and Azerbaijan. Russia has used the war to acquire a large and permanent military presence in Armenia, along with its other bases in what was Georgia and Russia proper. Moscow uses its military not only to subjugate Armenia, but also to threaten Azerbaijan and Georgia; project power into the entire Middle East and Black Sea; and contribute to the aerial and naval encirclement of our NATO ally Turkey. Moscow also uses its considerable non-military powers to threaten Georgia’s and Azerbaijan’s sovereignty and the integrity of their political systems and exercises what amounts to economic hegemony over Armenia. Armenia’s sovereignty has been mortgaged to Moscow since it needs Russian support regarding Nagorno-Karabakh, an issue that has hijacked its politics and poisons regional security while giving Moscow entree into the region. Concurrently, Georgia works steadily, despite severe obstacles, toward becoming a democratic country worthy of membership in the EU and NATO. Nevertheless, it faces resolute and ongoing Russian efforts to subvert its economic and political independence by familiar means, namely corruption, media and information warfare, and energy blackmail. A key factor that prevents Georgia’s succumbing to such pressures is the subsidized energy it receives from staunchly pro-Western Azerbaijan. But Azerbaijan also faces Russian threats of ethno-religious and political incitement against the Aliyev administration in Baku, as well as Iranian threats and the ever-present possibility of Iran-Russia collaboration against them. Despite the fact that Azerbaijan is the only independent energy producer in the Caspian that Russia has not been able to constrain or coopt, its democratic deficits cannot be whitewashed. How then should we proceed? Clearly Georgia and especially Azerbaijan are the two key strategic assets for the West and they must be defended. While there is no short-term fix or miracle cure, there is an answer. U.S. leverage on Baku related to its continued democratization has weakened because we have neglected them, their territorial integrity and an equitable solution to the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict. Until the U.S. and Europe take that issue seriously, before it again explodes into war, it is unlikely that Baku will take seriously the criticisms of its road to democracy. By seriously addressing the war in Nagorno-Karabakh and launching a serious and credible mediation effort, we not only gain influence with Azerbaijan, we also, to the extent that we are successful, reduce Armenia’s need to for Russia, thus laying the foundation for a more peaceable, democratic and liberal Caucasus. In addition, by boosting our presence across the region, we also lessen Russia’s military threats to Georgia, creeping encroachment on its borders, and efforts to subvert it from within. Caspian energy is vital to Europe as an alternative to Russian energy, a primary instrument by which Moscow wins friends and corrupts governments abroad. Moreover, Russian generals and officials have repeatedly spoken overtly of their desire to suborn Azerbaijan’s independence and integrity. If we continue to neglect regional security there, the frozen conflict in Nagorno-Karabakh, which is already exhibiting visible signs of intensifying, will become much hotter and this can only lead to decisive Russian military moves against Azerbaijan and still more pressure by Russia against Turkey, the Black Sea and the Middle East, possibly in tandem with Iran. A cogent strategic analysis dictates that we think seriously as to how we may reverse those years of neglect and give the Caucasus the attention it deserves. For in doing so we not only benefit the residents of those countries, but also promote our own interests and values. Stephen Blank, Ph.D. is a senior fellow at the American Foreign Policy Council. He is the author of numerous foreign policy-related articles, white papers and monographs, specifically focused on the geopolitics and geostrategy of the former Soviet Union, Russia and Eurasia. He is a former MacArthur fellow at the U.S. Army War College. |
Konami plans to launch Metal Gear Online, the competitive multiplayer component for Metal Gear Solid 5: The Phantom Pain, for the Windows PC version of the game on Jan. 12 in open beta. Metal Gear Online community manager Robert Allen Peeler announced the beta launch for Metal Gear Online, which has been live for the console versions of the game since October, during a Twitch stream. Peeler said Konami is releasing MGO for The Phantom Pain in a "small beta" in order to "test out the game via Steam." Konami expects the online mode to go live around 10 p.m. PT on Tuesday, though Peeler warned that the launch may slip by a few hours. Players will need to opt in to the beta through Metal Gear Solid 5 in order to participate. Metal Gear Online brings three competitive multiplayer modes to The Phantom Pain: Bounty Hunter, Comms Control and Cloak and Dagger. You can read our impressions of MGO in Polygon's review update for The Phantom Pain. |
Well, let’s take a look at a typical day in Elon Musk’s life: Musk wakes up around 7AM. Sometimes , he has breakfast, but most times he does not have time for that. , he has breakfast, but most times he does not have time for that. At 10AM, he makes morning calls to journalists, job candidates, and conference calls regarding Tesla and SpaceX (he is at SpaceX on Mondays and Thursdays, at Tesla on Tuesdays and Wednesdays, and both on Fridays) Let’s assume he is at SpaceX today. After the morning calls, around 10.45AM, he has a meeting with his engineering team to make the weekly review of vehicle and launch operations. 12.30PM, he will have more meetings; perhaps some propulsion meeting to move things forward. Lunch time is around 1–2PM. Here, Musk uses batching (combining tasks) to stay productive, for an example by answering mails while eating, or having a lunch meeting. He is basically trying to bring the work to him. Then, he gets back to SpaceX for his daily walk (when he is at SpaceX) around the factory. Here, he also stops by SpaceX’s engineering group. Around 7PM, he will give interviews to journalists or participating in other types of events. He gets back home, and at 1AM, Musk initiates his 6 hours of sleep. Musk’s schedule consists of 5 minute slots to stay productive. So, there are several other daily happenings, which I haven’t covered, e.g. his daily workout routines. So to answer the question, it seems like the variety of daily tasks keeps him motivated and prevents boredom. Simultaneously, a very tight planning enables him to effectively carry out all of his daily tasks. Working 80 hours a week really requires a lot of effort to stay on top of the game, think ahead, be disciplined in time management, and HAVE FUN! Sources: How Billionaire Techpreneur Elon Musk Starts His Day A Day In The Life Of Elon Musk, The Most Inspiring Entrepreneur In The World How Richard Branson, Warren Buffett, Elon Musk and 13 other leaders start the day 6 ways Elon Musk manages to work up to 100 hours a week |
Happy New Year, people! Have you made any resolutions? Do you have any plans for 2017? January is traditionally the time when people book their holidays. Either some last-minute winter skiing, some winter sunshine or a far-flung city break. Whichever holiday you choose, you’ll need to pack your sunglasses in your hand luggage. Not got a pair? We can help you out of that situation! We’ve teamed up with Sunglasses Shop to offer one of our readers a pair of Ray-Ban sunglasses*. (Please see the note below for the few models not included!) To enter, visit the Ray-Ban page on the Sunglasses Shop website then return here to leave a comment below telling us which pair you’d like to win. It’s that simple! There are lots of other ways to increase your chances of winning – and this comp is open to our international readers too! A pair of Ray-Ban sunglasses from Sunglasses Shop *Excludes polarised and prescription lenses and titanium and aluminium frames Shared on: Superluckyme | The Prizefinder | Loquax | U Me and the Kids | Mom Does Reviews |
Advertisement Do you want to get more out of your favorite Twitch streams? There’s no denying that Twitch.TV is the place to go on the internet when it comes to entertaining yourself with live streams for speed runs 3 Sites To Find Awesome Gaming Speed Runs 3 Sites To Find Awesome Gaming Speed Runs If you're familiar with the "let's play" video format that gamers use as a visual way to hold your hand through a game, then understand that a speed run is one of those videos after... Read More , gaming marathons, LAN parties, huge competitive events, and just casual observing and chatting. Maybe every now and then you’re just feeling a little bored and nostalgic, and you want to watch someone play a bit of Mario Kart. Twitch.TV has you covered for everything, even those games that you’d never expect 4 Games You Might Not Expect To Find On Twitch.tv 4 Games You Might Not Expect To Find On Twitch.tv There are certain games that you'd imagine are watched the most on Twitch: League of Legends, StarCraft II, Dota 2, World of Warcraft, Call of Duty, etc. Though they may be the most popular, there... Read More . While Twitch does blow its competitors out of the water, you or I could see it as far from perfect. Sometimes the interface is a bit too much for those of us with smaller monitors (such as with a netbook). A lot of the time, I just want to watch a Twitch stream. I don’t want to open my browser. I don’t want to have an extra window open that’s hogging my resources just to watch someone play a video game. Twitch won’t let you do that. Still, that doesn’t mean it’s impossible. Let me introduce you to three third-party applications that make the Twitch.TV experience more pleasant for your desktop or laptop. Desktop Live Streamer takes an awesome method to watch streams through VLC using a command-line interface with Livestreamer [No Longer Available] and wraps a pretty little GUI around it. While Livestreamer is rather simple to use, Desktop Live Streamer makes the entire process even more of a cinch. The download for Desktop Live Streamer is hosted by MediaFire through links that are constantly swapped out and updated on the project’s GitHub page. All you need is Windows 7 or 8 and administrative rights, and you can run the application. You’ll also need VLC Media Player. The screenshot above shows how simple and effective Desktop Live Streamer is. It not only acts as an alternative way to view streams in a more standalone format, but it even lets you browse through who’s streaming on Twitch in a more compact and easier way. You can see every game that is currently being streamed, and then you’re shown every streamer that is live at that time. You simply select the appropriate game and streamer you’re interested in. You’re also able to select the quality of the stream (which will differ depending on the streamer). You can find that to the right of his or her name (“Source” is the current quality in my screenshot). You can also click the heart-shaped icon to add any streamer to a list of favorites (as you see Meteos is). Adding a stream to your favorites will associate it with the current quality that you’ve selected, so keep that in mind. From here, you can either open the stream in your browser or click to play the stream through VLC. To me, this is by far the best way to enjoy streams on Twitch. Chatty is one of the best-kept secrets when it comes to applications for Twitch. In the year 2013, the classic chat room model is nearly dead Are Chat Rooms Dead? 3 Web Apps for Chat Room Renaissance Are Chat Rooms Dead? 3 Web Apps for Chat Room Renaissance If you’re still interested in the wonderful world of chat rooms (or perhaps you just have a hankering to return to the days of IRC), then you might like these web apps that bring chat... Read More . It’s completely true until you venture to Twitch, where the chat is one of the most appreciated features of the entire website. Chatty takes the Twitch chat, pulls it off the web, and turns it into a standalone application. Chatty is coded in Java, so it’s completely cross-platform compatible. Chatty allows you to login using OAuth, meaning that you never have to enter your Twitch password into the application itself. It’s completely secure. To use your Twitch account with Chatty, you simply open the displayed URL in your browser, grant Chatty access, and verify your login. It’s that simple. From here, you just need to have a channel name ready that you want to connect to. The Twitch channel name associated to any streamer’s chat is simply that streamer’s Twitch username (which you can get from their Twitch URL). Enter it, and you’re free to connect. Chatty supports the feature to highlight by keywords or usernames (even in a separate window), the ability to change the title and game of your own stream, run commercials, shows the stream title and viewer count, includes a viewer history graph, allows you to customize all fonts and colors, and more. It’s really minimal and extremely clean, and it is a great way to enjoy any Twitch chat. Last but not least is the tiniest and simplest third-party Twitch application of them all: Twitch Notifier! Like Chatty, Twitch Notifier is a Java application. It runs in the background, is roughly 6kb in size, and uses absolutely zero processing power while waiting (which it what it ends up doing ~98% of the time). It’s sole function is simply to alert you when streamers that you’re following go live. The screenshot above is the only thing you ever have to configure to run Twitch Notifier. From there, it disappears. The only time you’ll ever see it again is if you receive a notification that a streamer has gone live, which will pop up in a window that looks very similar to this one. If you ever want to disable or quit using Twitch Notifier, you have to end its process using Windows’ Task Manager The Windows 8 Task Manager: A Gem Hidden In Plain Sight The Windows 8 Task Manager: A Gem Hidden In Plain Sight While many parts of Windows 8 are debatable (maybe Modern is the future; maybe it's not), one element of Windows 8 that has undergone a massive overhaul and made it unequivocally more awesome is the... Read More . Assuming that this is the only Java application you’ve got running (which is generally a pretty safe assumption), you can just end the process shown above. Having to constantly check your email or the Twitch Directory to see if your favorite streamers are live is pretty annoying. Twitch Notifier makes it much less painful. Conclusion As is similarly true with playing PC games themselves, enjoying watching others play games by your PC can be vastly improved if you’re shown the right enhancements and applications. Thanks to the developers of these three applications, we’ve got awesome alternative ways to watch streams, chat with stream viewers, and constantly know when our favorites are live. Enjoy watching and chatting, and if you’re ever interesting in streaming your own gaming adventures to Twitch then I’ve got a post that can help you How To Stream Live Video to Your Twitch.TV Channel How To Stream Live Video to Your Twitch.TV Channel Launched in June of last year, the world of online gaming needed a portal to livestream events and Justin.TV's secondary niche website, Twitch.TV, serves today as just that. What if you're just a guy sitting... Read More . Do you have any other Twitch desktop apps you’d like to recommend? Who are some of your favorite streamers? Use the comments below to let us know! |
A recent development in my tea consumption is the fact that I got a new credit card that allows me direct access to Taobao – whereas previously one needed a mainland bank account to pay for things on Taobao, which means dodgy bank transfers and annoying paperwork, with this card I can use it directly without any hindrance and get a bill at the end of the month. This, as you can imagine, is a very bad thing. Among the things I bought recently is a total surprise. It’s a surprise because I didn’t buy it – I was buying something else entirely, but somehow the vendor sent me the wrong thing – something he doesn’t even lists as being sold, but he obviously has. The cake in question is the Douji 2011 Yudou (jade dou). The dreaded sticker – which, I’m happy to report, is no longer as sticky as their 2006/2007 teas, which means less damage to the paper when you try to peel it off. And a complete surprise when I opened the wrapper – you can tell where a major market for Douji tea is, and it’s not China. The Yudou is a blend. Any of Douji’s “xdou” cakes are blends. Whereas prior to about 2008, they listed clearly what their teas were, starting around then they came out with a large series of “xdou” which were various blends of various things. I believe Yudou is one of the higher grade ones. I’ve never had any of these, mostly because ever since about 2007 Douji’s prices have slowly crept up as they got more famous, and also because there’s just such a dizzying array of them. I’d rather spend my time drinking some of their higher end products and so never actually tried these things. The cake, as I discovered, sells for $47 at eBay through China Chadao, which is about the same price as the Taobao prices. Douji is an outfit that has been able to maintain a fairly good grip on its secondary vendors, and keeps the prices of everyone’s teas about the same – if you go to Taobao and search, you’ll find that most of their products are sold in the same tight range of prices, as there’s a clear floor under which you’re not allowed to sell. I talked to one of these guys last year when I went to Beijing, and he said if they discover you’re selling under the floor, your franchise as a Douji distributor will be immediate revoked. So you don’t risk that. It’s not a bad looking cake, and it smells ok too. China Chadao claims it’s a blend of four teas – Mengku, Hekai, Mengsong, and Youle, probably in that order. The tea tasted that way – a lot of high notes that reminds me of Mengku tea, with some Menghai undertones and maybe just a hint of Youle. It has a decent throatiness, but somehow, at the end of the day, delivers a relatively unsatisfying cup – it’s nice and all, and has a lot of bells and whistles, but after a few infusions, it’s a bit thin and boring, and doesn’t leave me wanting more. This is quite unlike a lot of what I’ve been drinking recently, which are mostly supposed gushu samples from a few different Taobao vendors. Even the bad ones are interesting, at least. This tea checks the boxes, but isn’t that interesting. I was lucky, since I got this tea at 49 RMB – the cake I paid for was 98, and the seller gave me half refund for sending me the wrong thing. I only realized afterwards that he probably lost money on this trade. At the price I paid, this tea is quite fine. At $47 though, I’d have to think about it. That, unfortunately, is the larger story of a lot of newer teas these days – they are expensive, but often without anything to show for it. A friend recently bought a 2012 Douji “Banzhang” cake recently to try at a not-very-low price, and the tea is all Laoman’e – bitterness to infinity. That, unfortunately, is not really what you want in your tea, and certainly not if you’re paying good money for it. It’s hard committing to new productions of puerh this year. We can always hope that prices will come down again after a few years of nonstop rises, but hope, alas, does not make it happen. |
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