text stringlengths 0 100k |
|---|
Private landlords who provide lower-rent, longer-term tenancies for young people and families should get tax breaks to help avert a looming “homelessness disaster”, a thinktank says. The Joseph Rowntree Foundation predicted 1.5 million extra 18- to 30-year-olds will be priced out of buying their own homes within eight years, flooding the rental market. Homelessness among the under-25s will rise to 81,000 it calculated – with an extra 500,000 young people also forced to live with their parents well into their 30s. Without urgent action to improve the rental market and build more properties, up to 400,000 risked being “excluded completely” – mainly less well off families, it warned in a report. The foundation said international experience showed financial incentives through the tax system were effective in encouraging landlords to offer cheaper rents and more stable tenancy terms. They could also overcome obstacles placed by lenders on buy-to-let mortgages, it suggested. The expansion of local letting agencies dedicated to working with vulnerable young people, could also ease the crisis. The report’s lead author David Clapham said: “With 1.5 million more young people no longer able to become home-owners by 2020, it’s vital we take the opportunity to make renting work better. “To do this we need strong political leadership that is willing to work with both landlords and tenants to make it more affordable and stable for ‘generation rent’. “Young people are at a double disadvantage: it takes longer to raise enough for a deposit and their wages are generally lower. “But there are simply not enough homes and those we do have cost too much to rent or buy. “While more housing would help address this, it may not come quick enough for young people forced into renting in eight years’ time.” JRF programme manager Kathleen Kelly said: “Renting is likely to be the only game in town and young people are facing fierce competition to secure a home in what is an already diminished supply. We need to avoid turning a housing crisis into a homelessness disaster.” |
NEW YORK (JTA) — First there was the Conservative movement’s October biennial conference, billed as “The conversation of the century” and opened up to presenters from outside the movement. Then came the November General Assembly of the Jewish Federations of North America, which featured a “Global Jewish shuk: a marketplace of dialogue and debate” led by young Israelis and Americans from outside the federation world. Now comes the biennial conference of the Union for Reform Judaism, which will be distinguished from past years by — you guessed it — opening up to outsiders. For the first time, the conference, which will be held Dec. 11-15 in San Diego, Calif.,will be open to participants who are not members of Reform congregations. Learning sessions, which in past years were run almost exclusively by Reform staff, will be led in many cases by presenters from outside the movement. The Friday night prayer service will be open to all, not just conference registrants. And the night before the service, performers from the conference — from musicians to comedians — will go out to venues in the surrounding neighborhood to share Reform Judaism’s good cheer with greater San Diego. Reform leaders say they’re not trying to be trendy; they want to bring the conference in line with the movement’s philosophy. “We have opened the biennial as a symbol of where we are as the Reform movement,” Rabbi Rick Jacobs, the union’s president, told JTA in an interview in his New York office. “Openness is our practice. It is not just a technique, a thing to do. It is who we are. It is theology. It is commitment.” Jacobs said he wants visitors from outside the movement to “experience the incredible vitality and depth and openness of Reform Judaism in the 21st century.” For Jacobs, the biennial will be the first he is running. The last one, held near Washington and featuring President Obama as a speaker, was the movement’s largest conference ever and marked the transition from the leadership of Rabbi Eric Yoffie, Jacobs’ predecessor. This year, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is slated to address the conference — a first for a sitting Israeli prime minister, though he’ll probably deliver the address via video rather than in person. Other presenters include New York Times food writer Mark Bittman; Donniel Hartman, an Orthodox rabbi who heads the Shalom Hartman Institute; Ron Wolfson, a star of the Conservative movement and a professor at the American Jewish University; Israeli Knesset member Ruth Calderon; and Sharon Brous, a Conservative-ordained rabbi who leads the popular IKAR community in Los Angeles. For the Reform movement, the question isn’t so much whether the four-day conference is a success but whether Reform Judaism can tackle the growing disaffiliation and disengagement in its ranks. The recent Pew Research Center survey of U.S. Jews found that while Reform remains the largest American Jewish denomination, with 35 percent of American Jews, it ranks lowest of the three major movements on some key metrics of Jewish engagement. Reform Jews are the most likely of the denominations to leave the Jewish fold. According to Pew, 28 percent of Jews born Reform no longer consider themselves Jewish by religion, compared to 17 percent of Conservative and 11 percent of Orthodox. Half of married Reform Jews have a non-Jewish spouse. Just 43 percent of Reform Jews say being Jewish is very important to them, and only 16 percent say religion is very important in their lives. At 1.7 children per couple, the birth rate of Reform Jews is the lowest of the three major U.S. Jewish denominations and well below the replacement rate. Fewer than half of those children are enrolled in any kind of formal Jewish educational or youth program. The median age of Reform Jews is 54. It is in this context, Jacobs said, that he was brought on a year-and-a-half ago as president to re-examine everything the movement does. He has articulated three strategic priorities for the movement: catalyze congregational change, engage young Jews and expand the movement’s reach beyond synagogue walls. Some programmatic changes along those lines are underway. Next summer, the movement will open two new summer camps. The 6 Points Sci-Tech Academy, a science and technology camp outside of Boston, will be its 14th overnight camp, and the movement’s first summer day camp, Camp Harlam, will open near Philadelphia. Since May 2012, a pilot group of more than a dozen synagogues has been working to overhaul the movement’s approach to bar mitzvahs as part of a program called the B’nai Mitzvah Revolution. The effort, the movement says, is intended “to reduce the staggering rates of post-b’nai mitzvah dropout.” On the table is everything from how to make bar mitzvah preparation more engaging to making the celebrations themselves more traditional and meaningful. Dozens more synagogues are in the process of joining the program and adopting some of the more successful efforts. Like its counterpart in the Conservative movement, the Union for Reform Judaism also is under pressure to demonstrate to its 871 member congregations that they are getting their money’s worth for the dues they pay. The union now has a resource desk and hosts an online forum for congregational leaders to share ideas and resources. Consultants are available to provide congregations with strategic expertise. Congregational “network teams” work with synagogue leaders to figure out ways the union can be more helpful. An initiative called Communities of Practice brings together like-minded congregations to work on strategies for programming for young adults, engaging young families, improving early childhood offerings and figuring out how to stabilize synagogue finances. The union itself has shrunk slightly since Jacobs took over. Thirty employees were laid off in May 2012 as part of a general restructuring; the union now has about 350 employees. (Because it is a religious organization, the union is exempt from filing the 990 IRS tax forms that disclose detailed financial information, including Jacobs’ salary.) For Reform Judaism to thrive, Jacobs says, everything needs to be reconsidered. “When I was hired, that was the job description: Challenge everything, question everything, and make us stronger, make us more effective, make us more filled with the core meaning of the Jewish tradition,” Jacobs said. “It’s not enough just to keep doing the same things with more vigor. You have to say: Is it effective? That’s exactly what is needed in every part of Jewish life. This is not a business-as-usual kind of moment.” |
A recent study suggests a plausible mechanism to explain why observers sometimes hear superbright meteors at the same time that they see them. Having a bad hair day? This might at least give you the temporary "superpower" of hearing meteors. The astronomical literature is dotted with reports of observers hearing bright meteors that seem to hiss, pop, or ping. Now, a recent study in Nature: Scientific Reports out of Sandia National Laboratories suggests a possible cause. Most of the meteors you see at night are tiny dust grains, burning up as they streak through Earth's upper atmosphere at speeds up to 43 miles (70 km) per second. Once in a great while, something really big, say, golf-ball-size or larger comes in, burning up in a brilliant fireball display. (A fireball is a meteor brighter than –4 magnitude (as bright as Venus), and a bolide is a fireball with a bright terminal flash at the end of its trail. Sometimes observers report hearing a distinct hiss or crackle accompanying many bright fireballs simultaneously with the bright flash. But the trouble with hearing concurrent sounds with meteors has always been the distance involved. Not only do meteors occur in the tenuous upper atmosphere, which is a poor propagator of sound, but they're also distant, occurring in the mesosphere about 47 to 62 miles up. Sound at sea level travels at 767 mph. Think of lightning on a summer's day, and how you always see the flash several seconds before the booming thunder arrives. And yet, reports of audible meteors persist. The Sandia study proposes that strong millisecond-long flashes recorded in bright fireballs are intense enough to induce radiative heating in dielectric materials such as dry leaves, clothing, or even hair in the vicinity of the observer, via what's called the photoacoustic effect. The irradiated surfaces heat the air next to them, producing tiny pressure oscillations — in other words, sound. The study shows that a bolide around –12 in magnitude (about as bright as a full Moon) can induce an audible sound in dielectric material of around 25 decibels, loud enough to be heard. For context, a whisper is 10 to 20 decibels, on the lower threshold of what is barely audible. The study even suggests frizzy hair (!) might be an even more effective transducer of the photoacoustic effect. "It seems significant that people with frizzy hair are reported to be more likely to hear concurrent sound from meteors," the study notes. "Intuitively, frizzy hair should be a good transducer for two reasons. Hair near the ears will create localized sound pressure, so it is likely to be heard. Also, hair has a large surface-to-volume ratio, which maximizes sound creation. The photoacoustic effect is the generation of sound following light absorption by a given material. Inventor Alexander Graham Bell first noted the photoacoustic effect in 1880. His invention, known as a photophone, worked using the photoacoustic effect. You can witness this strange effect in action as a pair of flashlights use it to play The Imperial March theme from Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back: The study notes that strong millisecond flashes were seen in virtually all of the bright bolide meteors documented by the Czech Fireball Network. One particularly brilliant –15-magnitude fireball named EN091214 was recorded by the network in the early evening of December 9, 2014. Careful analysis of its rapidly changing intensity showed brief flares occurring dozens of times per second, and several witnesses in the vicinity heard sound at the same time. Calculations in the study suggest that the fireball's intense, rapidly varying light should have produced a sound level of 27 ± 3 decibels, consistent with ear-witness accounts. The Photoacoustic Effect versus Electrophonic Sound Over the years, audible meteors have been explained as simply a psychological phenomenon, or perhaps a locally produced effect set up by low-frequency waves and a phenomenon known as electrophonic sound. Edmond Halley collected eyewitness accounts of a bright fireball seen over England on the night of March 19, 1718, which many witnessed claimed “hiss(ed) as it went along, as if it had been very near at hand,” a claim dismissed by Halley himself. Meteoriticist Harvey Nininger chronicled the phenomenon of audible meteors in his 1952 book Out of the Sky. Low-frequency electrophonic sound induction from VLF radio emissions would run in the range of 1 to 10 Hertz and perhaps produce sound from nearby conductors such as telephone wires, trees or grass. A study led by a Japanese team in 1988 observing the Perseid meteors seemed to confirm this theory. But this explanation had a problem: fireballs don't generate very much energy at radio wavelengths. We once "heard" a distinct hiss from a bright Perseid as it sliced through the hot summer night's sky over northern Maine. Such reports are anecdotal for sure, and the effect is subtle at best. Conversely, we watched a brilliant display of the 1998 Leonids from the deserts of Kuwait which produced a fireball every few seconds, without a sound. Why aren't there more recorded instances, or perhaps group occurrences of hearing the same phenomenon? Well, the sound usually described is a subtle and fleeting one, barely above a whisper at best. A similar crackling or hissing sound is said to sometimes accompany brilliant aurora displays as well. Finally, there's another way of “hearing meteors” ping on the FM dial. Simply tune your FM radio to an unused frequency and listen for an accompanying crackle or ping of a meteor, similar to the radio outbursts occasionally scattered across the FM dial by lightning. Occasionally, the ionized trail in the wake of a bright meteor will even bring a distant radio station into brief audibility. Be sure to not only watch, but also listen for those bright meteors on your next early morning vigil. |
Mauro Icardi has stated his intent to stay with Inter Milan for as long as possible as the club aim for Champions League qualification in the final stage of the season. The Nerazzurri captain spoke to the club's official video channel (via Calciomercato) about his hopes and dreams now that he was staying at the San Siro, and insisted that he planned on staying 'forever' if the opportunity arose to do so. Icardi came in for fierce criticism from the club's fan base earlier in the season for comments he made in his autobiography about the way Inter are supported but, after now putting those problems behind him and signing a new contract, the striker wants to stay in Milan. He said: “I am the captain of this big club, my family and I are happy in Milan, I hope I’m going to have a long career at Inter. “I expect a lot from this team, we have the qualities to achieve big results. The club is very organized, new owners have settled in well and that’s a good news for us because they are helping us all. They want to take Inter back to the top of Italian and European football.” Inter have undergone a revival under manager Stefano Piolo ever since he replaced the sacked Frank de Boer in November, and the Italian giants currently sit fifth in the Serie A table, 10 points off second-placed Roma. Inter forward Mauro Icardi: "I'm a huge fan of this club and I'm really happy in Milan so I hope to stay at Inter forever." #ForzaInter pic.twitter.com/wtTnG7Nnqd — SBOBET (@SBOBET) March 29, 2017 A late push for a Champions League qualification spot through the league is not out of the realms of possibility for Inter, and Icardi said that the club would do all it could to dine at the table of UEFA's cash-rich club tournament next term. He continued: “Our main objective for this season is to qualify for the Champions League. I want to play at the highest levels with this team.” Teams standing between Inter and their top three hopes are sides such as Napoli and bitter city rivals AC Milan - the latter of whom Icardi has never netted against. The 23-year-old added that he would love to open his account against Inter's rivals before the season is out, before revealing that he loves notching goals against the runaway league leaders for the past few seasons. He said: “I love scoring against Juventus and I would be happy to net one against AC Milan because I’ve never scored one against them.” Read more from Tom Power by following him on Twitter! |
He’s a little more than six months away from passing the “Tonight Show” baton — again — but Jay Leno is very much still on his game ratings-wise. In Nielsen numbers for the second quarter of this year, NBC’s “Tonight Show With Jay Leno” was easily the top-rated hour in latenight. ABC’s “Jimmy Kimmel Live” ranked second in key demos for a second straight quarter in its new, earlier timeslot and remains the youngest-skewing of the 11:35 p.m. talkshows. Letterman‘s “Late Show” on CBS, meanwhile, continues to head in the opposite direction and logged one of its weakest quarterly performances on record. The program was down from last year in virtually every category except adults 50 and older. Overall, NBC remains dominant in latenight, with “Tonight Show” and “Late Night With Jimmy Fallon” winning all four half-hours from 11:30 p.m. to 1:30 a.m. in all 18-34, 18-49 and 25-54 demos as well as total viewers. Leno and Fallon beat their CBS competition head to head by their largest margins in four years. Nielsen estimates that Leno, who will wrap his second stint as host of “The Tonight Show” in mid-winter, averaged 1.08 million adults 18-49 for the April 1-June 30 second quarter — up 8% from last year. “Jimmy Kimmel Live” (885,000 viewers in the demo) ranked second and was up 25% from its average in a later timeslot last year, while “Late Show with David Letterman” slid 13% to 777,000. Related Mindy Kaling on How Writers' Rooms Have Changed Since 'The Office' Amazon's New Film Strategy: Straight-to-Service Titles and Starry Sundance Buys In total viewers, Leno’s 3.575 million (up 2% from last year) was well out in front of Letterman (2.767 million) and Kimmel (2.490 million). For ABC, Kimmel has now beaten Letterman in both quarters in which they have competed head to head. His advantage over Letterman was 24% in adults 18-34 and 7% in adults 35-49. SEE ALSO: “Duck Dynasty” Ratings Provide Ammo for A&E “Nightline” continues to look bad in comparisons to 2012, when the show aired from 11:35 p.m. to midnight. It was off more than 50% in adults 18-49 (543,000), adults 25-54 (707,000) and total viewers (1.614 million). But the show has gotten younger since shifting to a 12:35 a.m. start time and airing behind Kimmel; its median age for the quarter (54.2) was a full three years lower than last year. NBC’s “Late Night With Jimmy Fallon” was up pretty much across the board for the quarter, averaging 1.78 million viewers, including 701,000 adults 18-49. Fallon was up 16% from last year in adults 18-34 — a good sign as he prepares to take over the “Tonight Show” reins from Leno following NBC’s coverage of the Winter Olympics last next February. Airing in the same 12:35 a.m. hour, CBS’ “Late, Late Show With Craig Ferguson” averaged 1.391 million viewers (up 1% from last year) and 491,000 adults 18-49 (off 6%). In adults 18-49, the top-rated post-primetime program for the second quarter was Comedy Central’s “The Daily Show” (1.114 million), which finished a bit ahead of Leno and benefits from ending about an hour earlier than the NBC program. “Daily Show,” which was hosted in the final three weeks of the quarter by John Oliver, dipped 6% in adults 18-49 and 8% in total viewers compared with a year ago. Comedy Central skedmate “The Colbert Report” was down a smidge from last year. TOP POST-PRIMETIME WEEKNIGHT SHOWS (April 1-June 30, 2013)* ADULTS 18-49 Daily Show (Comedy) 1.114 million Tonight Show (NBC) 1.080 million Jimmy Kimmel Live (ABC) 885,000 Colbert Report (Comedy) 876,000 Late Show … Letterman (CBS) 777,000 Latenight … Fallon (NBC) 701,000 Nightline (ABC) 543,000 Conan (TBS) 532,000 Late, Late … Ferguson (CBS) 491,000 TOTAL VIEWERS Tonight Show (NBC) 3.575 million Late Show … Letterman (CBS) 2.767 million Jimmy Kimmel Live (ABC) 2.490 million Daily Show (Comedy) 1.987 million Latenight … Fallon (NBC) 1.780 million Late, Late … Ferguson (CBS) 1.391 million Nightline (ABC) 1.614 million Colbert Report (Comedy) 1.521 million Last Call … Daly (NBC) 899,000 *Most current data (does not include 7-day DVR playback for the last two weeks) |
You wouldn’t swallow a spoonful of toxic cosmetic ingredients. But in some ways, smearing them under your arms in the form of deodorant or antiperspirant may be worse. “When you eat something, it’s broken down by your liver and digestive system,” says Heather Patisaul, Ph.D., an associate professor of biology at North Carolina State University. “But when you put something on your skin, there are times when it can enter your bloodstream without being metabolized.” Patisaul spends most of her time studying known and potential endocrine disruptors—chemicals that may mess with the function of your body’s reproductive and developmental hormones. She says rubbing something on your skin doesn’t mean all—or even any—of it will make its way into your bloodstream; it depends on the chemical. But blood tests show that many of the substances commonly included in deodorant products can, in fact, worm their way past the epidermis and into the body. Research also shows that some compounds used in deodorant are absorbed and stored in fat cells, which are prevalent in the underarm area, says Philip Harvey, Ph.D., editor in chief of the Journal of Applied Toxicology. Your underarm tissue also contains hormone receptors, which could react to some of those same deodorant ingredients, Harvey says. The Brief Newsletter Sign up to receive the top stories you need to know right now. View Sample Sign Up Now For all these reasons, experts like Harvey and Patisaul are worried certain compounds in antiperspirant and deodorant could cause or contribute to developmental or reproductive issues, as well as cancer. (Other research shows some of these substances can mess with the microorganisms—many of them beneficial—that live on and in your body.) Here are 5 deodorant ingredients of concern. Parabens There are many different parabens, which are used as preservatives in deodorant and other personal care products. Research suggests some parabens may interfere with the way your body produces and regulates estrogen and other hormones, Patisaul says. “There’s estrogen-sensitive tissue in the breast, so the worry is that if you put parabens close to this tissue every day, they may promote the growth of cancer cells,” she explains. That goes for men as well as women. That said, both the American Cancer Society and the National Cancer Institute say there’s not “conclusive evidence” linking deodorant chemicals to cancer. But there’s lab evidence to back up Patisaul’s concerns. Research from Philippa Darbre, an oncologist at the University of Reading in the U.K., has shown that mixing different parabens can strengthen their “estrogenic” effects. But proving that this mixture could cause or contribute to cancer is nearly impossible. “Cancer is a complex multistage process, and its development can take many years,” Darbre says. Much more research is needed, she adds. But in her view, the existing evidence suggests that long-term, low-dose mixtures of environmental chemicals—including parabens—“could cause cancer.” (See another piece, “Can Deodorant Give You Cancer?” here.) Aluminum Typically found only in antiperspirants, this metal can cause “gene instability” in breast tissue, Darbre’s research shows. This instability can cause changes than may promote the growth of tumors or cancer cells, she explains. “Over 50% of breast cancers start in the upper outer quadrant of the breast local to the underarm region,” Darbre says. While that’s not proof aluminum is to blame, breast cancer incidence tends to align with use of products that contain the metal. Especially if you shave under your arms, applying a product containing aluminum to that broken skin could be bad news, Darbre says. Still, as TIME has reported: According to the American Cancer Society’s website, there is no “clear” or “direct” link between aluminum and cancer. The National Cancer Institute site says “more research is needed.” Triclosan Cosmetic manufacturers add this chemical to many products in order to prevent bacterial contamination, and to kill bacteria on the surface of the skin, as in anti-acne products, some deodorants and antiperspirants, and in sanitizing hand soaps. Triclosan is so common that 75% of Americans have detectable levels of the stuff in their urine. The FDA says there are no known hazards associated with triclosan. But the agency also acknowledges that the research has evolved since it ussued that designation, and the agency could soon change its stance. Some animal studies have linked triclosan to unusual hormone activity. More research suggests triclosan could mess with your microbiome or the day-to-day operations of your genes. “There’s evidence from amphibians and fish is that triclosan impairs thyroid function, which is crucial for brain development,” Patisaul adds. She says blood tests show triclosan is “at the high end” when it comes to chemicals that swish around in our bodies. “To my knowledge, there aren’t any clear benefits associated with it when used in underarm products.” Phthalates These compounds help deodorant and other cosmetics—such as fragrance—stick to your skin. They also appear to disrupt “androgen function,” or the way your body produces and uses the hormone testosterone, Patisaul says. While you may think of testosterone as a strictly male hormone, women also produce the stuff, and it plays a role in energy and muscle maintenance. “The greatest concern when it comes to phthalates is that they could impair reproductive ability in men, or that they could impact fetal development in pregnant women,” Patisaul says. Research has also linked phthalates to lower IQs and higher rates of asthma. Phthalates are typically present in any product with a fragrance that lingers after it’s been used or applied; phthalates are partly what makes smells stick. That means that everything from body wash to shampoo to lotion to hairspray to soap. Fragrance Almost every scented product has “fragrance” or “perfume” listed among its ingredients. And it’s impossible to know just what chemicals are concealed by those seemingly benign terms because scents are protected under trade law. “It could be phthalates, or it could be substances that cause allergies or skin irritation,” Patisaul says. Even smelling scented products on other people can cause an allergic reaction. How to protect yourself: If these compounds are of concern to you, Darbre says ditching all underarm deodorant products is the only way to ensure you’re not exposing yourself to potentially toxic chemicals. Short of that, Patisaul recommends shopping for fragrance-free natural deodorant. Finally, shop for products labeled paraben-, fragrance- andfree, and check the ingredients list to make sure triclosan isn’t included. “The more people spend their money on products that don’t contain these chemicals, the more manufacturers will move away from using them,” she adds. Contact us at editors@time.com. |
Ho liday Advisory: We are closed on November 1, 2017 . We will open on November 2, 2017 . PRODUCT SEARCH ONLINE STOCK INQUIRY Available from Monday to Saturday 10:30am to 6:30pm GOOD NEWS! 1. We ship anywhere in the Philippines via LBC ! 2. Customers can now pay for their purchases by: a. using Globe G-Cash . Our Globe Cell Phone No. is 0917 844 5941 b. using SMART Money . Our SMART Money Card No. is 5299 6700 8269 9116 or c. bank deposit to our BDO or BPI or Chinabank or Metrob ank Account Accepted Payment Methods Credit and Debit cards All Visa and MasterCard credit cards issued locally and internationally BPI Express Credit (credit card) 3-24 months Installment Plan available through BPI Express Credit Cards Only Minimum Transaction Amount P3,000.00 Accepted Payment Methods: Over the Counter Bank deposit or Online Banking Accepted Payment Methods: Mobile Phone Payments Money Transfer |
About 2-1/2 years ago I wrote an essay for TNR in which I criticized the so-called new atheists (primarily Sam Harris, Daniel Dennett, Richard Dawkins, and Christopher Hitchens). A few months later, I followed up with a critical take on Bill Maher’s Religulous. In both cases, my focus was politics. There was, I argued, something deeply illiberal about the new atheists’ intolerant hostility to the spiritual beliefs of their fellow citizens. I still believe that, as readers of my forthcoming book will discover. But the more I read and ponder the writings of the new atheists, the more I find myself rejecting them for more fundamental reasons. To explain why, let me direct your attention to a recent post by Kevin Drum in response to a powerful essay by theologian David B. Hart. (For a note on my complicated history with Hart, see here.) Hart’s essay irritatedly dismissed the new atheists for two defects: First, they show no sign of confronting and wrestling with (or even understanding) the most serious philosophical arguments of the Christian theological tradition; second, they show an almost complete lack of awareness of all that was gained (culturally and morally) by the advent of Christianity and seem blithely unconcerned about what would be lost (again, culturally and morally) were it to vanish from the world. In response, Drum dismisses, and mocks, Hart’s own attempt to sketch a more philosophically adequate and rigorous account of God than the new atheists typically engage with. And that leads to the core of my problem with Drum and the rest of the new atheists. Toward the end of his post, Drum responds to Hart’s efforts to highlight the positive influence of Christianity by writing that “to say merely that Christianity is comforting or practical—assuming you believe that—is hardly enough. You need to show that it's true.” Now, this seems to be exactly what Hart was attempting to do in the very passages of his essay that Drum dismissed and mocked. But let’s leave that aside. What’s most disappointing is Drum’s failure to grasp the culminating point of Hart’s essay, which, as I take it, is this: the statements “godlessness is true” and “godlessness is good” are distinct propositions. And yet the new atheists invariably conflate them. But a different kind of atheism is possible, legitimate, and (in Hart’s view) more admirable. Let’s call it catastrophic atheism, in tribute to its first and greatest champion, Friedrich Nietzsche, who wrote in a head-spinning passage of the Genealogy of Morals that “unconditional, honest atheism is ... the awe-inspiring catastrophe of two-thousand years of training in truthfulness that finally forbids itself the lie involved in belief in God.” For the catastrophic atheist, godlessness is both true and terrible. |
Getty Images A central Pennsylvania man is under arrest after police say he brought a gun to a snowball fight. York police say Jerquan Shaquille Dickson shot a 15-year-old boy in the right arm and left thigh Saturday after the teenager allegedly threw snowballs at his car. The 15-year-old was hospitalized with non-life threatening injuries. Dickson is charged with felony aggravated assault and recklessly endangering another person. The 22-year-old is free on $150,000 bail. Information on his lawyer wasn't immediately available. Dramatic Images: Blizzard of 2015 Witnesses told police they saw Dickson follow the boy until they were out of sight and then heard seven gunshots. Police say Dickson claimed he fired a warning shot into the air and then several more shots into the snow toward the teenager and his friends. Copyright Associated Press |
Key documents relating to the lucrative casino licence awarded to billionaire James Packer at Barangaroo have been stamped secret by the NSW gambling regulator, which argues their commercial sensitivity trumps the public's right to know. Documents outlining how the so-called "restricted gaming facility" will operate from November 2019 have been released by the Independent Liquor and Gaming Authority following its decision to issue Mr Packer a VIP-only casino licence. Documents relating to the casino licence awarded to James Packer have been stamped secret by the NSW gambling regulator. Credit:Reuters Included in the documents is a list of agreements struck between Mr Packer's company Crown Resorts, its related entities and the NSW government, the gaming authority and the Minister for Hospitality, Troy Grant. The agreements set out the rules for the casino including who may enter, the types of games which may be played, minimum bet limits and tax rates. |
The original Rocksmith guitar video game sold 1.5 million copies when it debuted in 2011. But for its sequel, Rocksmith 2014, French video game publisher Ubisoft wanted to reach a much larger audience of people who want to learn to play the guitar. It turned to Nomadic, a digital creative agency that helped with the marketing of Ubisoft’s phenomenally successful Just Dance game series. The work they did together is a textbook case on how to broaden the audience for what could be a narrow-interest entertainment product. The campaign came about by looking at the market in a different way. If the marketers succeed, they’ll convert the market from fans who played Guitar Hero-style games with faux guitars to fans of Rocksmith, which works with real guitars. The Nomadic team in Scottsdale, Ariz., unearthed a telling statistic: People search the YouTube video site 20 million times a month for the keywords “how to guitar.” That led to a campaign to market Rocksmith 2014 as the “fastest way to learn guitar” and a collection of YouTube videos that showed how real people learned to play the guitar with Rocksmith in just 60 days. Sales for the game, which launched in October, aren’t in yet, but Ubisoft is pleased with the results. “I can say that what we are doing is working,” said Shane Bierwith, the senior brand manager at Ubisoft, in an interview with GamesBeat. “You can see it from the sentiment on the forums, YouTube, Facebook comments, and other social media. We have done a good job repositioning our brand as the fastest way to learn guitar, and we have shown a video game can serve as an educational device. That was very difficult to do the first time around.” Bringing in the marketers Ubisoft got help from a team that included Tim Washburn, the executive creative director at Nomadic; and Dawn Bates, vice president of strategy at Nomadic. They saw the need to evolve Rocksmith from a game (which promised the fantasy of pretending to be a rock star) to a tool that “gamified” the learning of guitar. If it were positioned as an easy learning tool, it could attract people who were intimidated by video games. The development team designed Rocksmith 2014 as a learning tool from the outset. “The reason we got into Rocksmith to begin with was because, seeing all of these instruments made of plastic being played, and having a few guitar players among us, we were thinking about the power of this,” said Laurent DeToc, the head of Ubisoft North America, in an interview. “What if you could just hook up a real guitar and have people make better use of their time? Not that having fun with a plastic guitar isn’t a good use of your time, but you can make better use of it if you can have a fun product that also leaves you with a real-life benefit. You’ve learned how to play guitar or improved the skills you already have.” “With the first game, Ubisoft had captured the gamers already. It would continue to market to them, but it needed to go further, moving from gaming into learning,” Bates said. “They asked us how to market this,” Washburn said in an interview with GamesBeat. “Rocksmith already had the gamers. To expand its reach, it was important to broaden it. We needed to figure out where people were engaging with guitars and how to learn it. We needed somethin g more tactical and detailed.” A new kind of engagement marketing Ubisoft already knew that it had a good learning tool. An independent national study by Research Strategy Group found that Rocksmith was the “fastest way to learn guitar,” partly because the game tells you what you did wrong in a song and helps you to learn the way you want to learn. One of the reasons for that, Ubisoft believes, is because games can offer “adaptive learning,” where they can test your skill and then adapt the difficulty to fit your proficiency. The study helped legitimize the claims that were previously only qualitative. Part of the challenge was convincing people that they can learn something from a video game. “There’s an inherent disconnect between video games and learning,” Bierwith said. “Once you break down the science of it, it makes sense. But these guitar learners are not our core demographic. Our goal was to break the stigma of video games with them. This is a legitimate way to learn guitar.” One similar success in the market are fitness games such as Nintendo’s Wii Fit fitness game for the Wii console. Ubisoft has had its own success in that market with Your Shape, which uses Microsoft’s Kinect motion-sensing system to monitor your exercise movements. Bierwith said that Ubisoft saw parallels in other markets, such as language learning. Rosetta Stone built learning software that made it easier to learn a foreign language. Through clever marketing, it rose to the top of the heap and is now the undisputed leader in recommendations for how to learn a new language, beyond learning it in a classroom. “We looked at self-improvement products, because that’s what learning guitar is at the end of the day,” Bierwith said. Of those who played the original Rocksmith game, 95 percent said they learned to play guitar with it, Bates said. Bierwith said that research showed that 12 million people own both electric guitars and game consoles. Ubisoft was only beginning to break into that audience. Guitar teachers are certainly the best way to learn guitar, but they’re expensive and few can afford to go to them every day. Through Google search analytics, Nomadic found the popularity of guitar searches on YouTube. In that sense, Rocksmith’s primary competition wasn’t paid guitar lessons. It was free content on YouTube, Washburn said. “That’s intuitive,” he said. “But it was a paradigm shift to think of free content as a real competitor. We realized that free wasn’t going to get them through that window of really learning how to play the guitar. We had to engage people first.” Rocksmith debuted in time for the holiday season. That was important because it coincided with the time when people had spare moments to learn new things. Searches for guitar lessons spiked four or five times during the holiday season. But by tapping into the learning market, Rocksmith would be able to tap into a perpetual audience. Washburn noted that 2.5 million guitars were sold in the U.S. in 2012. That was an important market of new learners. |
During the premiere of The Lunchbox at the Festival de Cannes in May, I was introduced as the "modern-day Charulata". Though I liked the tag, I wondered whether it would stay on. Today, I am not afraid of being typecast because the six scripts I have read after The Lunchbox offer me roles that are diametrically opposite to Ila, from a romantic film to an action drama to a thriller. This, for me, is a sign of changing times. So is the release of a movie like Ship of Theseus in 35 Indian cities. Not once have I been asked if The Lunchbox is an art or a commercial movie. People have talked about my deglamourised appearance in the film, but it's a perception. What's deglamourised ? Not putting on make-up? That seemed normal as I had to fit into Ila's character. I let go of a few things. I stopped threading my eyebrows, bleaching and taking care of myself about four months before the shoot began. I come from a completely non-film background. My father was an army officer. He was posted in Kashmir when terrorists took him hostage and killed him in January 1994. Following his death, my mother, sister and I moved to Delhi where my nana-nani lived. I went to DPS, Noida, for five years and later graduated from Shri Ram College of Commerce. My family was not much into movies, but I remember watching films featuring Madhuri Dixit, Sridevi and Anil Kapoor. I also enjoyed movies like Masoom, Mirch Masala and other Smita Patil films. In my school and college days, I often found myself on stage during debates or cultural shows. After graduation, I figured that nothing resonated with me as much as performing arts. When I came to Mumbai, I did lots of commercials, even music videos, as I knew theatre did not pay. I met people for roles in films too, but I was wise enough to realise that I can't live with the hope of being spotted at a coffee shop by a filmmaker. So I chose to learn. When I came here in 2004, I did not even know how to read a script. ... contd. ALSO READ Light as Air, Just as Fast Please read our terms of use before posting comments |
Whether you already follow a plant-based diet and are starting your journey to parenthood or you’re interested in going plant-strong for pregnancy health, it’s important to make sure that you’re doing it right. During pregnancy your need for nutrients increases. You will require more calcium, more protein, and more folic acid, although your calorie needs increase only modestly. It is important to have a healthy diet during pregnancy, but not high in fat or sugar or excessive in calories. Is It Safe? Just like anything else in life, there are more and less healthful ways to be vegan, just as there are more and less healthful ways to eat a diet that includes meat or fish. Doctors recommend not starting a meat-free diet for pregnancy, but if you are already accustomed to a vegan or vegetarian diet, it can be just as healthy and easy as any other. The key, of course, is to make sure you are getting the appropriate amount of nutrients — whether you are vegan or not. Well-meaning friends and family will try to tell you otherwise, but the truth is that you can easily get huge amounts of baby-boosting protein, iron and calcium from your plant-strong choices. What nutrients will I need? To make certain that you are getting adequate nutrition, pay particular attention to these nutrients: Calcium: All of the food groups include foods that are rich in calcium. You’ll need plenty of calcium-rich foods in your diet. These include tofu, dark green leafy vegetables, kale, broccoli, beans, figs, sunflower seeds, tahini, almond butter, calcium-fortified nut milks, and calcium-fortified cereals and juices. Vitamin D: The normal source of vitamin D is sunlight. You’ll want to get at least 20 to 30 minutes of direct sunlight on your hands and face two to three times weekly. If you do not get regular sunlight, vitamin D is also available in multiple vitamins and in fortified foods. Many brands of ready-to-eat cereals and nut milks are fortified with vitamin D. Vitamin B 12 : Vitamin B 12 is not found in most plant foods. To get enough of this important nutrient, be certain to include vitamin B 12 -fortified foods in your daily routine. These foods include many breakfast cereals, Vegetarian Support Formula nutritional yeast, and some brands of nut milk, Be certain to check the ingredient label for cyanocobalamin, the most absorbable form of vitamin B 12 . Seaweed and products like tempeh are generally not reliable sources of vitamin B 12 . Vitamin B 12 is also in all standard multivitamins and in vegetarian supplements Iron: Your blood volume increases by almost 50% during pregnancy to support mama and growing baby — and iron is required to produce more red blood cells. Iron is hugely abundant in plant-based diets. Beans, dark green vegetables, dried fruits, blackstrap molasses, nuts and seeds, and whole grain or fortified breads and cereals all contain plenty of iron. However, women in the second half of pregnancy sometimes need to take a supplement regardless of the type of diet they follow. Your healthcare provider will discuss iron supplements with you. A Word about Protein: The amino acids in protein are busy building your baby’s beautiful face and every single cell below it! Your baby’s brain, especially, needs protein to transform itself into the wondrous, amazing child who will be the light of your life. During pregnancy, you need three servings of protein every day (the equivalent of about 75 grams). You can easily reach this goal on a plant-strong diet, as long as you are consuming ample amounts of protein-rich foods such as legumes, nuts, seeds, vegetables, and whole grains. Plant-strong Pregnancy Benefits A varied plant-based diet usually features a large number of fruits and vegetables, which so many people struggle to include in their diets. This means the baby will have a good supply of vitamins. A study of vegans for a few decades concluded that their pregnancies had a lower rate of cesaerian sections and preeclampsia. Whole food plant-based diets are less likely to cause a lot of pregnancy weight, which reduces complication risks and might have an effect on rates of gestational diabetes, though doctors still aren’t sure of the main risk factors of it. The foods that are not recommended for pregnant women, i.e. cold cuts, sushi and certain cheeses, are already not part of a vegan diet, so that lowers a risk of food poisoning considerably. Sample Pregnancy Meal Plan Medical experts, including the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists and the American Dietetic Association (ADA), all support a vegan pregnancy— as long as it’s well-planned. Pregnancy is a time to make sure you’re getting enough food, so don’t worry about following a strict eating plan as long as you’re within your diet and getting your nutrients in. Use this chart below for some examples of what you want to eat on a daily basis: Whole Grains, Breads, Cereals 9 or more servings Serving = 1 slice of sprouted grain or whole grain bread, 1/2 cup cooked whole grain cereal, brown rice, or pasta, 3/4–1 cup ready-to-eat cereal Vegetables 4 or more servings Serving = 1/2 cup cooked or 1 cup raw vegetables Choose at least one dark green vegetable daily. You can steam, sauté, roast, or mix into salads for lots of variety. Fruits 4 or more servings Serving = 1/2 cup cooked, 1 cup raw, dirty dozen list. Just watch the fruit sugars, and make sure you are eating organic, especially for the ones on thelist. Legumes, Nut Milks 5–6 servings Serving = 1/2 cup cooked beans, tofu, or tempeh; 8 ounces fortified nondairy nut milk; Nuts and Seeds 1–2 servings Serving = 2 tablespoons nuts or seeds, 2 tablespoons nut butter, 2 tablespoons ground flax seeds, walnuts, sunflower seeds Being pregnant is a beautiful, transformational time in your life. Being plant-strong is a healthy way to support your body and mind. Having a healthy diet during pregnancy is a deliciously delightful way to bring a beautiful, healthy baby into the world…! SaveSave SaveSave SaveSave |
In the spirit of New Year we thought it was a good idea to give a little insight into how hubski works and what our plans for the technical future of hubski are. First a little history of hubski's codebase. As mk said in his State Of Hubski we started out as a clone of Hacker News which is written in Arc Lisp, Paul Graham's experimental lisp dialect. HN is a rather focused side-project with design and code decisions made for specific ends for the hacker community pg wants to see: from the text-centric, process-list-esque design to a highly simplified markdown implementation. This is the what hubski has been built on, or hacked on in some cases. One of the main issues that comes from this is that very few other people actively work on or with Arc. There are very few libraries written in arc so that means if we want to interface with most other software we need to write our own client library. The other option is to just code it ourselves, but most of what we write would pale in comparison to other software which have had a ton of time put into them by brilliant communities. How things work currently When you first connect to hubski you hit nginx which handles much of our static content as well as cached content. If you aren't logged in nginx will check a redis server to see if that url has been cached, otherwise it passes it on to the application which is a monolithic app which handles everything. All of our data is stored in files each of which is just an s-expressions What the app does is it loads some to all of the posts and comments into memory in a hashtable. At the point we're at now we can't load the entirety of our data into memory due to issues with RAM size and expensive function calls. A lot of functions - such as detecting duplicate posts when submitting, searching, or retrieving feeds - are basically map calls across this entire working set. In addition to this our working set is a bit of a memory leak because it doesn't have a way to manage its size so it just keeps growing until the we reset the app (which we do fairly often). Plans for the future There are a lot of things that we would like to do - things that have been asked for by the community. Ideally we would have a system setup that automatically scales to deal with traffic and that makes adding services and features in any language relatively simple. One of the first steps is going to be to give hubski a proper database. Separating the database from the hubski app will be a big step towards being able to add other services. As an example this will allow us to more easily integrate mature search solutions to hubski such as Elasticsearch or Solr Right now every post has a list of words which search as its search text and we map through our working set. This of course limits us to search through only what we can store in memory which is unfortunate. The next step will be to make hubski horizontally scalable, i.e. allow us to run multiple copies of hubski and load balance between them. One of the things that this will allow us to do is run different versions of hubski at the same (like have a beta version that beta testers can use). What this all means Hopefully this will give some idea of the hurdles we face when developing hubski. The ultimate goal of our work will be to make hubski's code into as much of a fertile soil as hubski is. My dream is this: 1. Have hubski run and scale on its own while having the ability to add functions and services on the fly with a plug-and-play simplicity. 2. Have a development environment which can be set up in a short amount of time so open source developers can help develop hubski or just hack away on their own. 3. Have an nice RESTful API for people who want to build things with and for hubski. There will be a lot of questions to answer along the way such as what is an appropriate API policy to allow people to be creative (and we have a very creative community) while maintaining a long-term healthy relationship with people who choose to use it and what parts of hubski would we want to open source with what license. At the end of it all I do think that we will be in a much better place. Even for those of you who have no interest in the technical details behind hubski we will, for instance, be able to better respond to your feedback. I'm excited for the future of hubski and I keep this goal in mind whenever I'm working. We have a lot of potential as a community and I firmly believe this will give us a firm foundation. |
Timothy D. Lytton is the author of the recently published “Kosher: Private Regulation in the Age of Industrial Food” (Harvard University Press). His blog posts are featured on The Arty Semite courtesy of the Jewish Book Council and My Jewish Learning’s Author Blog Series. For more information on the series, please visit: The Toronto Star recently reported that several firebombings of kosher restaurants in Quebec may not be the work of anti-Semites but rather part of “a kosher restaurant war in the predominantly Jewish west-end neighborhood of Hampstead.” The Star described the latest bombing in a June 15 article: Around closing time last weekend two men walked into Montreal’s Chops Resto-Bar, tossed a flaming Molotov cocktail toward the bar and escaped on foot, though not before a security camera picked them up. The damage was limited to a scorched section of the restaurant’s wall and shock among the 20-odd diners wrapping up their meal shortly after midnight Saturday. But there was clearly something nefarious at play. This was the third time since 2011 that Chops, a kosher establishment that serves Asian fusion cuisine, had been targeted with a flaming bottle. Share Pinterest Email While shocking, this kind of violence is not new in the kosher world. In one of the most notorious cases, in 1906, a group of New York City poultry distributors organized the Live Poultry Commission Merchants’ Protective Association, which fixed wholesale prices for kosher poultry and forced poultry retailers to buy exclusively from the association. The association punished retailers who refused to cooperate by establishing competing stores that sold at lower prices. Thirteen association members were ultimately convicted of illegal price-fixing in 1911 based on the testimony of Bernard (Baruch) Baff, a poultry retailer. Baff’s horse and chickens were subsequently poisoned, his summer cottage and one of his stores were bombed, and he was gunned down in 1914 in the Washington Market by unknown assailants, who fled in a getaway car. The Baff murder remained unsolved for several years, during which time suspicions focused on the poultry distributors. As it turned out, the murder was paid for by a group of one hundred poultry retailers who resented Baff’s dominance in the retail poultry trade, which he achieved by dealing directly with poultry farmers, obtaining a fleet of trucks, and operating his own slaughtering operations — thereby cutting out middlemen and allowing him to charge lower prices than his competitors. While kosher food certification today is hardly a hotbed of extortion rackets and drive-by shootings, recent events in Quebec hark back to a darker era in the history of kosher corruption. Timothy D. Lytton is the Albert & Angela Farone Distinguished Professor of Law at Albany Law School. He holds B.A. and J.D. degrees from Yale University and has served as a fellow in the Harvard University Program in Ethics and the Professions as well as the Hartman Institute for Advanced Jewish Studies in Jerusalem. He is the author of “Kosher: Private Regulation in the Age of Industrial Food,” recently published by Harvard University Press (2013) and“Holding Bishops Accountable: How Lawsuits Helped the Catholic Church Confront Clergy Sexual Abuse,” also published by Harvard University Press (2008). In addition, he has published book chapters and articles on the roots of law and jurisprudence in biblical and rabbinic texts. The Jewish Book Council is a not-for-profit organization devoted to the reading, writing and publishing of Jewish literature. For more Jewish literary blog posts, reviews of Jewish books and book club resources, and to learn about awards and conferences, please visit www.jewishbookcouncil.org. MyJewishLearning.com is the leading transdenominational website of Jewish information and education. Visit My Jewish Learning for thousands of articles on Judaism, Jewish holidays, Jewish history and more. |
The president’s intervention came at a time when his White House has been racked by turmoil and turnover. The abrupt departures of his chief of staff, press secretary and communications director, coupled with Mr. Trump’s own criticism of Attorney General Jeff Sessions, have left the president’s team deeply unsettled. But the president seemed intent on calming the waters, at least momentarily. That does not mean General McMaster’s job is secure in the long run, but White House officials said no one should expect him to leave anytime soon, especially now that his position has been fortified by the arrival of John F. Kelly, a retired four-star Marine general who took over as chief of staff. Mr. Trump and General McMaster have been something of an odd couple since the president tapped him in February after pushing out Michael T. Flynn, his first national security adviser, for not being forthright about a conversation with Russia’s ambassador. Mr. Trump did not know General McMaster before interviewing him and they have not always had good chemistry, according to White House officials. General McMaster is a serious, somber briefer who prefers an orderly process and does not respond particularly well to Mr. Trump’s looser style. Some advisers to Mr. Trump had floated a scenario in which Mr. Trump might assign General McMaster to take over as commander in Afghanistan, presumably giving him a fourth star and replacing him with Mike Pompeo, the C.I.A. director. Speculation was fueled by an NBC News report that Mr. Trump last month broached firing Gen. John W. Nicholson Jr., the current commander in Afghanistan. But White House officials said it was just a thought expressed out loud and the president backed off after Defense Secretary Jim Mattis and Gen. Joseph F. Dunford Jr., chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, defended General Nicholson. The two agreed that the United States is losing the low-grade war in Afghanistan but said the fault was the poor strategy they inherited, not the commander in the field. |
Pacific Whale Foundation (PWF) is pleased to offer this website as a means of documenting the activities of Migaloo, the only documented albino humpback whale in the world. Migaloo is perhaps the most famous humpback whale in the world. His distinctive absence of pigmentation due to albinism allows people to easily identify him and report sightings. He was first spotted in 1991 off Byron Bay, Queensland by a group of volunteers conducting a whale count. The first photograph of Migaloo was taken through a telescope from a distance of over 5km away. It was blurry and unclear if he was all white. In 1993 PWF researchers encountered this amazing white whale in Hervey Bay, Queensland. During our first encountered we were able confirm the whale was all white, and in 1998 PWF recorded the whale singing, a trait distinct to male humpback whales. Read our research paper on Migaloo > After sharing our remarkable discovery with the public, there was an outcry to ‘name the whale’. Dr. Paul Forestell (then PWF Research Director now Board Member) and PWF Founder and Executive Director Greg Kaufman decided the naming of the whale should be done by the elders of the local aboriginal collective in Hervey Bay. After conferring with Dr. Forestell and examining images of the white whale, they asked to have a few days to consider a name. Ultimately they named the white whale “Migaloo” or “white fella”. The elders further explained their connection to all white or albino animals and that they appear on earth to be respected and revered, that their unique color demonstrates the need to respect all forms of life even if they appear different than ‘normal’. They should be honored with reverence and respect not discrimination and shame. Since this initial encounter Migaloo has been seen dozens of times. PWF researchers estimated he was 8 – 10 years at time of initial sighting making him approximately 32-36 years old in 2015. He has been observed in New Zealand waters but primarily off east Australia migrating as far north as Cooktown and south past Sydney. Migaloo is a member of the east Australian population of humpback whales. Migaloo’s population of humpback whales feed in Antarctica from November to April and migrates along the east coast of Australia to breed near the Great Barrier Reef from May to October. Scientists were initially skeptical to state Migaloo has albinism because his eyes are brown, rather than the typical red or pink. In the past he has been called the more conservative terms “all-white”, or “hypo-pigmented”. However, a 2011 study of his DNA by researchers at the Australian Marine Mammal Centre found a genetic variation leading to albinism. Genetic testing confirmed another fact about Migaloo: he is a male. Scientists already knew this to be the case because of his song. While both male and female humpback whales can produce sounds, only the males sing songs. In 1998 researchers first recorded Migaloo singing, thus indicating he is a male. This was confirmed by genetic testing in 2004. Are there other predominately white humpback whales in the world’s oceans? Yes, PWF researchers have observed whales that are over 90% white off east Australia, and in 2011 observed a newborn nearly all white male calf in the Whitsundays. This whale was named Chalkie and some have called him Migaloo Junior, however is not known to be the offspring of Migaloo – they may or may not be related. Chalkie does have one small black dot on the dorsal surface of his left fluke making him not quite all white meaning he does not have albinism. Recently a video of what appears to be an all white humpback whale feeding in waters off Norway was released on the internet which depicts a whale that looks like Migaloo, until the whale lifts its tail to dive and its fluke pattern is 75% black! There have also been sightings of white orcas, a white right whale and a bottlenose dolphin with albinism throughout the years. If you would like to support Pacific Whale Foundation by “adopting” Migaloo, visit the Adopt-A-Whale program. Send us your Migaloo sightings and photos – we'll post them here! All photographs copyright Pacific Whale Foundation. By Jenni Ryall Australia August 16, 2015 "It is Migaloo." Those are the words of a leading scientist who is 100% convinced the white whale spotted off the coast of Australia on Aug. 10 is the world famous albino humpback, Migaloo. Executive director and chief scientist at the Pacific Whale Foundation, Greg Kaufman, who has been studying Migaloo for decades, confirmed to Mashable Australia that the whale spotted off the Gold Coast, Australia earlier this week is the beloved creature. This claim has been disputed by other whale experts — and only a DNA test, taken in July and with results expected shortly, will conclusively prove it. Continue reading this article from Mashable here: http://mashable.com/2015/08/16/migaloo-the-mystery-whale/ NICHOLAS MCELROY GOLD COAST BULLETIN August 11, 2015 A MAJESTIC white whale swam past the Gold Coast yesterday but marine experts can’t agree on whether it was the famed Migaloo or an upstart challenger to his title. The experts spent much of yesterday studying the physical features of the giant marine mammal which appeared to glow as it swam about three nautical miles off Coast beaches. Despite detailed images of the creature’s colouring, dorsal fin and tail flukes and notches, scientists and whale enthusiasts could only agree to disagree. Continue reading this article here: http://www.goldcoastbulletin.com.au/lifestyle/pets-and-wildlife/whale-debate-was-it-migaloo-or-not/story-fnk74alk-1227477966061 Boaties treated to spectacular sight as southbound Migaloo waves goodbye to Far North MIGALOO looks to have made his farewell breach for another year after he was ... Hamilton Island boat skipper Jack Sprouster, 27, spotted Migaloo on ... Migaloo the major drawcard on the Coffs Coast NOT only the spectacular sea conditions attracted boat users to the water this weekend but also the chance to see the famous white whale Migaloo. Migaloo slips past Gold Coast Famous white whale Migaloo has reportedly slipped past the Gold Coast undetected on his annual migration to the Great Barrier Reef. Migaloo slips past Gold Coast - Gold Coast Bulletin MIGALOO, the world-famous white humpback whale, has reportedly slipped past the Gold Coast on his annual migration to the Great Barrier Reef. www.goldcoast.com.au/article/.../453574_gold-coast-news.ht... Rare white whale Migaloo and another white whale migrate north ... Known by the aboriginal word Migaloo, or "white fella", the acrobatic animal is believed to have spawned at least one all-white offspring after a white ... Rare white whale Migaloo and another white whale migrate north ... Migaloo, the world-famous white humpback whale, has reportedly been spotted on the annual mass whale migration to the Great Barrier Reef. Rare white whale Migaloo and another white whale migrate north ... Migaloo, the world-famous white humpback whale, has reportedly been spotted on the annual mass whale migration to the Great Barrier Reef. Migaloo Sighted near Port Douglas(Friday, August 10, 2012) Migaloo was sighted between Tongue Reef & Low Isles (near Port Douglas) Far North Queensland. Migaloo spent about 30 minutes around Wavelength (a dive boat) & came within 50 meters of the boat. Migaloo was alone, though a mother & calf were sighted in the vicinity later in the day. Migaloo – the White Whale | Xanthe Rivett One of the most famous (if not THE most famous) humpback whales is Migaloo – the White Whale. Each year the first sighting of Migaloo is reported from NSW, 'Migaloo has been spotted off the coast' and we in Cairns know they are on the ... Xanthe Rivett - http://www.xantherivett.com/wordpress/ |
“By focusing on getting big legislative accomplishments, which was understandable, they necessarily gave up a larger image of him as president,” Mr. Podesta said, referring to White House advisers. “They cast him as the prime minister. They were kind of locked into the day-to-day workings on the Hill.” This was not a given. All presidents have laws they want to pass, but they have broader thematic priorities, too. Ronald Reagan saw a renewal of American optimism as a vital goal. Bill Clinton publicly hammered away at his ideas about economic transformation and “reinventing government.” Unlike his recent predecessors, however, Mr. Obama had spent his entire political career in legislative posts, and he seemed determined, above all else, to clear the Congressional hurdles that had thwarted the others. He chose a vice president and a chief of staff who were masters of the legislative arena, and he filled his most senior posts (aside from those occupied by longtime advisers) with former Congressional aides. Mr. Obama’s central strategy was to concentrate on cajoling Democratic lawmakers into passing a series of bills — the stimulus package, the health care overhaul, a new set of financial regulations. Rather than spend a lot of time rallying public support for the agenda, Mr. Podesta said, the administration expected to get an “updraft” from an improving economy; the bet was that, as unemployment came down and consumer confidence rose, public opinion would more or less take care of itself. Photo “That strategy was built on the no-economic-stall option,” Mr. Podesta said. “In other words, the idea was that you didn’t have to get the unemployment rate to a certain number, but you had to get unemployment going in the right direction, and people would feel that, and it would be palpable.” The problem, as Mr. Podesta says, is that “we’re all still waiting for that.” And so, without the modest economic revival Mr. Obama and his aides expected, voters saw trillions of dollars being spent and wondered whether there was a coherent strategy for growth. Mr. Obama, whose skills as an explainer were so instrumental in winning the office, did little sustained explaining of the crisis outside Washington. Newsletter Sign Up Continue reading the main story Please verify you're not a robot by clicking the box. Invalid email address. Please re-enter. You must select a newsletter to subscribe to. Sign Up You will receive emails containing news content , updates and promotions from The New York Times. You may opt-out at any time. You agree to receive occasional updates and special offers for The New York Times's products and services. Thank you for subscribing. An error has occurred. Please try again later. View all New York Times newsletters. The strategy had other implications for Mr. Obama’s image. As Mr. Podesta points out, part of the president’s significant appeal to voters — “a big part of the secret sauce of getting him elected” — was his promise to transcend perennial partisanship. A more national, outward-looking strategy for creating a “postpartisan” dynamic might have included White House partnerships with Republican governors or even with conservative foundations or industry groups. Because the president effectively boxed himself in to a Capitol-Hill-only strategy, though, he handed the Republican minorities in Congress the power to sabotage his goal. Advertisement Continue reading the main story “Once you became a legislative president, which is arguably what you needed to do, you couldn’t deliver on the nonpartisanship promise,” Mr. Podesta said. “And it’s something people wanted.” It’s not hard to extend Mr. Podesta’s theory about the legislative box to other areas in which the administration has faltered. One of the real surprises of the Obama era, for instance, has been the president’s sharp break with the business community. Perhaps it shouldn’t be so surprising, though, when you consider that Mr. Obama’s focus on legislation has forced him to be responsive, above all else, to the shifting tides of populist sentiment in Congress. Think of it this way: if your singular goal is to pass bills, and Democratic lawmakers are in a frenzy this week over A.I.G.’s bonuses or Goldman Sachs’s investments, then you might feel forced to castigate big business, too. Much of Mr. Obama’s anticorporate rhetoric was probably calibrated more to lawmakers than to business leaders, but what the executives heard were declarations of war against American industry. Perhaps the most damaging consequence of the legislative box is that it left Mr. Obama, who still regards himself as an outsider and a reformer, looking like a Congressional insider — which is about the last thing voters, and independent voters in particular, wanted him to be. “At the end of the day, they set out to do a lot, and got a lot done,” Mr. Podesta said. “If the unemployment rate were at 8.5 percent and we were creating 250,000 or 300,000 jobs right now, it would feel a lot different.” But that hasn’t happened, and if Mr. Podesta is right, panicky voters wanted a president, rather than a legislator in chief, to make sure they understood why. |
Previous Next I exited the bathroom, a towel wrapped around me, a bag of the more expensive products in one hand. I was scrubbed pink, my hair was oiled back and away from my face, left unparted, though the ends of my hair were already pricking up and curling away. Any adolescent boy given access to the products that smelled ‘manly’ tended to overdo it, much as the girls went over the top with makeup, but I knew enough to go light. It was a good smell, and one that would complement the smell of shoe polish. The hand that wasn’t holding the bag held a fresh bandage over the ruin of my eye. It put me in an awkward spot when it came to the towel around my middle. “I’m guessing you don’t need to borrow any clothes?” Jamie asked me. He was lying in his bed, reading by the dim light that came through the window. That, or he’d been napping. I wasn’t sure which. I shook my head. “I’m still waiting on the big growth spurt that’s supposed to come. I could complain all day about it, honest, but for right now, I’m not complaining. If I’m not growing, then that’s one less person to buy a wardrobe for, more money for the Lambs.” I regretted the line as soon as it was out of my mouth, for my sake as well as Jamie’s. The ‘one less person’ thing stung on too many levels. Losing Gordon, for one thing. His room, next to ours, now had a vacant bed. There were other rooms with three or four boys crammed in them, but nobody had yet raised the subject of who would use the bed and stay with Ashton. That, in turn, led to my other source of guilt. I knew I was leaving, and saying what I’d said had left Jamie an awkward sort of opening. I jumped to thinking about how to respond to him, and about the things I needed to say and do to manage this whole situation, but those thoughts were obstructed by a complicated tangle of thinking and emotion. Ashton would move into this room with Jamie, wouldn’t he? But that was only if they both stayed. Did that mean I would be alone? Why did I tell myself that Jamie wouldn’t come with? Was it because I’d noticed some clue and hadn’t fully processed it, or because I didn’t want him to? Jamie was putting his book aside. I pretended not to notice him as I took care to set the bag of oils, soap and scents in my closet, out of reach of the littler Lambsbridge kids who would wreak mad havoc with the little glass bottles. I fixed my gaze on the mirror that hung on the inside of the closet door. “Sy,” he said. “Earlier, when the others were out of earshot-” I looked over at him, shooting him a look. “We need to talk about it,” he said, in response to everything I’d attempted to convey with the look. “I need to get ready,” I said. “Do you mind? A little privacy?” It was his turn to shoot me a look, irritated, even disappointed. He raised his feet and spun himself around. Now sitting with his back to me, he pulled his legs into a cross-legged position. Putting all of the repressed frustration into the tone of his voice, he repeated himself, “We need to talk about it.” “It’s a dangerous mission, but it’s doable, especially if I have Helen, you, or Mary with me. I’m going to leave out Ashton and Lillian for obvious reasons.” “I’m not concerned with the mission. I’m concerned with what you’re doing and what you told Duncan.” “Are you going to tell on me?” I asked. Silence. “Let me know sooner than later. It’ll change how I interact with the others.” “Do you really see me doing that, Sy?” “I don’t know what anyone is going to do,” I said. I peeled the bandage away from my eye. I blinked a few times. The orb was gone, a placeholder was set into the ruin, but the flesh around it was swollen, ragged, and red, with a cut at one eyelid stitched up where the sword’s edge had parted flesh. “And it’s not knowing what anyone is going to do that really eats me up inside.” “Yet you don’t want to talk about it, clearly.” “Right now, I want to have a nice night with Lillian,” I said. “I wanted the whole Lugh thing to be a nice thing we did for her, and I wasn’t able to give her that. It became something bad, and taking the Baron down, rescuing Emily, that’s how I’m going to make up for that. But I still want to do something nice for her. That’s what tonight is.” “And tomorrow?” Jamie asked. “Or the day after? Whenever you decide you’re going on the mission? How do you see that unfolding, Sy?” “I don’t know, Jamie.” “You said ‘I don’t have another mission in me’. Your words. That wasn’t you laying groundwork for a scheme. You’re setting something up, getting ready to leave.” I pulled clothes on. Slacks, a belt. Every time I looked in the mirror, I saw the ruin of my eye. Beyond it, I saw the Lambs dead in their individual, detailed ways, Lambsbridge’s staff and occupants maimed or altered. I’d been thrust into the world of adults, out-thinking grown men and women, facing mortal peril in a way that even soldiers didn’t necessarily have to deal with. At least they had moments of rest and moments of peace. I’d been faced with being on call, dealing with things on the spur of the moment, with regular situations and simple jobs becoming nightmares. Even now, as I got dressed in a casual suit, like the preppier Mothmont or Academy kids might wear, all of the pressures and the confusion added up to make me feel far from ready to face the world of adults. I’d been given a set of tools to help me adjust, to put me in the right frame of mind and give me the flexibility to deal. It wasn’t the wyvern formula. It was the Lambs, first and foremost. Now I faced losing them. “Sy,” Jamie said, pulling me out of the deep well that was my thought process. “Are you still there?” “I’m here,” I said. “The others are dealing with their own issues. Mary’s still nursing the fresh wound that is losing Gordon, Lillian is preoccupied, Helen and Ashton are detached, though Helen is paying more attention than some, and Duncan, with all of his Academy know-how, can’t quite figure out how to extract his head from his own ass.” I smiled despite myself. “But I’m here, and I’m paying attention. I know you’re trying to make something happen, Sy, but as far as I can see the whole picture, it’s haphazard. I can’t figure out what you have going on in your head, and I’m scared things are going to move forward on this really unsteady foundation you’re building. What you said to Duncan, the timing, the high-risk mission, and the contingency plans you outlined to us.” “I’m still finding my way to the answer,” I said. “Figuring out the key points, figuring out the key players… The mission will come together.” “It’s not the damn miss-” he started. He stopped. “You’re doing that on purpose. Dodging me. Let’s talk about what happens if it doesn’t come together. What if your hand gets forced, or if you find compelling reasons to abort your plan and stay, Sy? You had a tone in your voice when you talked about wanting to make this mission against the Baron happen in the next few days. Knowing the patterns you fall into, I get the impression you’ve already started this ball rolling, probably to push yourself forward. Your desire to abort and return to the status quo is so strong you’re putting contingencies into place against yourself.” Couldn’t argue that. This Jamie was becoming so different from the Jamie I knew, and it was irritating that he was getting to be so good at picking me to pieces. All of the things in the world that he was capable of, and he chose to analyze me. I buttoned up my shirt, fixing the sleeves. I looked over to where he was sitting, his back to me. “Sy?” “Still here. Focused on getting ready. I did warn you.” “I’m worried,” he said. “This is major. There aren’t any second chances, and there’s a lot of room for collateral damage. I heard what the Baron said.” I looked at my eye again. “I’ll let you know what I’m doing as soon as I figure things out,” I said. “Is that a promise?” he asked. “Yeah,” I said. “I guess I should thank you for paying attention, for caring.” “I guess,” Jamie said, in a funny tone. I’m going to remember that promise, Sy. Don’t get slippery, don’t try to pull the wool over my eyes, alright? With something this risky, knowing how the cards are stacked against you, you can’t mess around.” If I did, what would happen? I wondered. I’d spent some time with Jamie, I’d learned how he operated and I’d learned to respect what he brought to the table, even if he wasn’t my Jamie. But there were so many question marks, blanks in my mental picture of who he was, that I couldn’t figure him out. I couldn’t ask the question I’d just mused on, about what Jamie would do if I crossed the line and broke the promise. Instead, I asked him, “What do you think you’re going to do?” “You’re worried I’m going to tell on you.” “As far as I can figure, you want to secure things, keep the Lambs safe. The deaths don’t weigh on you the way they weigh on me, though I imagine you mourn and remember your predecessor in your own way,” I said, as I fixed my tie. “But there’s clearly another side to you that’s more caring. The way people operate, they’re all the protagonists of their own story. Everyone wants to be the hero, and for that to happen, the story needs to be tellable in a way that puts them in a good light.” It was his turn to be silent. “So I can’t help but imagine a scenario where you tell yourself I’ve gone off rails, the horse is running away with the cart, and in that scenario, you make the decision to put the bystanders first, the wrecked train or the runaway horse second. If I don’t sell you on this, or if I break the promise, now that I think about it, maybe you tell, because that way, the Academy can’t justify hurting the Lambs.” He remained silent. “If you do decide to tell, whatever your reason, I won’t blame you,” I said. I pulled on the jacket. There was a dried drop of blood on the inside lining. I picked at it with my thumbnail until it came free. “I’ve blamed you for an awful lot of stuff that wasn’t your fault. It makes sense if, should you decide to go to Hayle and tell him I’ve gone rogue, that I can’t hold it against you. It might even be an optimal way to go. It would tell the Baron that you serve him, first and foremost.” “If you wanted to make amends, you could avoid putting me in that position entirely. That seems optimal.” Socks on, feet slipped into shoes, I stepped back from the mirror, doing my best to look myself over. It wasn’t me, but the suit had been bought with good money and tailored to fit my frame, the dark color intended to fit my complexion. It was as good as I was going to get when it came to ‘nice clothes’. I could have trimmed my hair where it was getting longer across the back, but beyond that, and the ruin that was my left eye, I was pretty presentable. I grabbed the eyepatch from my bedside table and pulled it on. “No need for privacy,” I said. Jamie turned around. He gave me a once-over. I spread my arms. “I think Lillian will be happy, seeing you put in the effort.” “Thank you,” I said. “I also think you’ve got too much going on in your head right now. I’m worried,” he said. “I don’t think you can just take it all and deliberately push it out of your head, and give Lillian the night you want to.” “It’s what I do,” I said. “And besides… I have to.” “You have to?” “For her.” “There are a lot of things I could say to that,” he said. “Points I could make. But I think I’ll settle with… have a good date, Sy.” “Thank you.” “I hope Lillian enjoys herself as well.” I gave him a mock salute, and then opened the bedroom door. Without Wyvern sharpening my wits and giving me an edge, I might have let one very muddy Kenneth run straight into my nice clothes. As it was, I stepped out of the way, letting him pass. I navigated the demented hordes of Lambsbridge orphans. I passed Gordon and Ashton’s room, where Ashton sat at the window, staring out over the backyard. He’d been at it since before I’d even started my bath. Jamie read, I tormented people, Gordon had played or ran errands to keep busy, if he wasn’t practicing something or other. Helen primped or wandered without any particular aim until Mrs. Earles gave her something to do, Mary altered her clothes, spent time with one of the other Lambs, or she left the house to practice with her knives and wire. And Ashton, in the idle hours, just sat. He liked to have a window, but he didn’t need one. Whatever went on in his head was more colorful than what the rest of the world was doing, apparently. Mary was coming up the stairs as I made my way down. It didn’t leave much room for us to squeeze past each other. She smiled as we both stopped, each figuring out how to navigate past the other. “You’re seeing Lillian?” she asked. “Yes.” “You look nice,” she said. “But you need to do something about that eye.” “Soon,” I said. I thought about the Baron. “Soon.” “In the meantime, can you do me a favor?” she asked, clasping her hands together. “It would simplify things.” “Simplifying isn’t my usual agenda,” I said, playing up the hemming and hawing. “What do you need?” “I’ve got a box of things. I’m going to be staying at Lillian’s, and instead of having to walk all the way back here, I was thinking… it would make things easier.” I could understand her thought process, on quite a few levels. It wasn’t just that being here sucked, that it reminded her of Gordon, but having a portable box of things and making herself scarce were ways to prepare for the job we were pulling, targeting the Baron. “I don’t know,” I said. “How big a box?” “Portable,” she said. “It’s already in the front hall.” I slid past her, walking down the stairs until I could look around the corner and see down the length of the front hall. A small luggage container sat by the chair in the entryway. “You wouldn’t have to carry it far,” she said. “Just from the carriage to the dorm.” Carriage? “Carriage?” I asked her. “They’re picking up Rick any minute now,” she said. “Oh,” I said. I made a face. “That would be awkward. I’d prefer to walk.” “Alright,” she said. “It’s not heavy, is it? Because I can carry it.” “Don’t,” she said. “You’ll get sweaty, and I don’t want to do that to my friend.” “That’s all I am to you?” I asked. “Not a colleague? Not ‘practically family’? A mere friend?” “I was thinking about Lillian,” Mary said, giving me a light smile. “But now that I think about you-” Ow, my heart. “-You could use a bit more muscle on those bones.” Ow, my pride. “But tonight isn’t the time to work on it. Leave the luggage. I’ll send it up with Rick, with instructions for them to leave it at the gate, I’ll pick it up as I arrive. That was the original plan, anyway.” I nodded. “I’ll see you later tonight?” she asked. “Or should I be scarce?” “Tonight is good,” I said. “Wouldn’t have it any other way.” She smiled, and it seemed more honest a smile than the ones she’d forced earlier. I had to check the time in the dining room, and immediately skipped to, grabbing my jacket and heading out the door at a good clip. The snow was falling more heavily, and the days were short enough that it was already getting dark, before dinner. There was some traffic to and from the Academy, and I walked well away from the road to avoid a stray wheel kicking up any mud or snow at me. Jamie was right. I wasn’t focusing enough. It was a chronic problem of mine, that I could convince myself of nearly anything. It was one of the problems I ran into in fights, where I saw a course of action, a way to get great results in a clear, concrete way, and I ended up wanting my opponent to set themselves up so badly that I believed it would happen on an instinctual level. Doing this, tonight, with Lillian, it was a mistake. I should have been showing off signs of instability, much as I’d done with Duncan, breaking further away from the team, so it would be easier for them to claim they had no connection to me, should I fail. I should have been picking my partner for the upcoming job, to give them a chance to do the same. As it was, I was paying mind to team bonds, to helping and supporting Lillian, to giving her attention and showing her that I cared. My legs were still sore from the incessant running around in Lugh, which felt like it had happened far longer ago than it had. Forcing a march-walk uphill on snow-layered, uneven ground was straining my legs and tiring me out with surprising speed. I passed through the gates and past the area where carriages and other vehicles were arriving, bringing students and the ailing in from the city, and headed around the back paths. I made my way around to the back of Lillian’s dorm, checked my surroundings, and then quickly climbed the outside of the building, careful to avoid getting my clothes dirty. I tapped on the window, keeping my head out of sight. Parents wouldn’t be allowed in the dorms, but I wasn’t ruling out the possibility that they could have been visiting the room that they paid for. The window slid open. Lillian, her hair styled, earrings in her ears, poked her head out. “There are people around,” she said. Her hand reached down for mine. I took it, and accepted her help in climbing through the window. She smelled like women did, like hair products and flowers. The dress she wore was one I’d seen her in before, but it was a nice one, dark green. It went well with the intensity of her eyes. “Remind me what our relationship is? I just want to make sure we have our stories straight,” I said. “We’ve talked about this,” Lillian said, still very stern. I could identify the attitude as a very mocking sternness, now that I was observing her while not clinging to the outside of a cold brick building. “You’re a liason with the Academy. Like me, you’re an advanced student working on special projects.” “Got it,” I said. “Well, I already had it. I just wanted an excuse to see you.” She smiled, and she gave me a playful slap on the cheek, so light a mosquito would survive it. “Button me up?” she asked, turning her back to me. I touched her bra strap, tracing my finger along it. I missed her so terribly already, and she was right here, in arm’s reach. “Sy.” I began doing the buttons. I stopped shy of doing the last one. I leaned down a bit and planted a kiss where the button was meant to meet the braided loop. That done, I slipped button through loop. She turned, and her face was so close to mine. Her hand touched my cheek, fingertip touching the eyepatch. “You’re quiet,” she said. “Are you okay? That thing you said earlier, to Duncan-” I laughed, one note, working to keep my voice down. Students were going to be gathering for dinner in the main dining hall soon. The hallways would be crowded. “I don’t think it’s funny,” Lillian said. “I’m worried.” “Jamie asked me the same thing,” I said. “I think Mary was wondering too, but she’s… subdued.” “Yeah,” Lillian said. She leaned close and gave me a kiss on the cheek, leaving her hand where it was until the last possible moment, as she stepped away to look for her shoes. “I know what you mean.” I approached her desk, pulled the chair away, and picked up the shoes, holding them out for her, while she continued to turn her eyes elsewhere, searching. My eye scanned her desk. Papers, files. There were numerous drawings, many looked like tracings. Notes appeared in the Wollstone shorthand, filling the empty space around the tracings, with lines pointing to parts. Lillian realized I had her shoes and plucked them from my hand. “For my senior project,” she explained the drawings. “They only choose a few students and projects to pass, in the first grading. Half of the students are dropped, and have to try again next year. By the second pass, only a third of the students will be confirmed for the implementation phase. That’s when they put their project to work, with up to two assistants-” “Chosen from the failures.” “Yes. And you have to have a working project by the end. After that is the jury, where you have to justify your work to a committee, and then there’s the break. Summer or winter, depending on the project, the school, and the timelines imposed. Your work has to survive and operate for the two month break. If it breaks down during the second month, you lose a letter grade. If it dies before then, you lose two. If your project is something that isn’t alive in that sense, then they find other ways to test you or stress test the project in the meantime. The ‘break’ is what breaks a lot of students, that’s the joke.” I looked over the papers and the sketches. A warbeast, bulky and stout, the measurements putting it at two feet at the shoulder, with organs on the outside. Another seemed reminiscent of the Twins, if rather bulkier and clumsy in shape. The skeletal structure was what made me think of the nobles. It was framed as if it was hollow inside. The third set of documents was more formula than sketch. A drug? “Your projects?” I asked. She approached me from behind, wrapping her arms around me, her chin on my shoulder. I could feel the heaviness of her sigh. “Proposals. I haven’t decided which one to go with. With all of the enemies we’ve fought with extraordinary senses, I thought Sparky there might work. Something like the stink-bomb I used against the Twins, but it also has the ability to produce explosive flashes of light. I don’t know if I can get it bright enough to blind or loud enough to deafen, but enhanced senses come with better sensitivity, so… I don’t know.” “I can see them really liking that.” “Mm hmm,” she said. “I figured most of it out on a purely theoretical, pen-on-paper level, and the smell is easy, but I can’t figure out the flash or the bang. I’m worried I’ll start this project, I’ll run into that dead end, and I’ll end up failing because of it.” I touched the paper with the crude humanoid. “I don’t think I can sell it to them,” she said. “So soon after wartime, with other wars possibly on the horizon… it’s not efficient for what they would want it to be efficient at.” “What is it?” “Dumb vessel for collecting the wounded. They get pulled inside, their legs inside its legs, their chest in its chest, their arms in its arms. It works as a weak exo-suit, added muscle, for when you need more heavy lifting, but the real purpose, what I’d really hope to pack it with, would be life support. Not a lot, but enough. Pressure on wounds, help with breathing, help with heart rate. If I did it in an advanced way, I’d have it recognize the need on its own. As it is, I think I’d have it respond to external cues. Taps.” Her hand rubbed up my stomach and chest and down, flicking each button on my jacket in passing. “I thought, what did I want most, back in Lugh? For myself, or for Gordon? Or when I was working on Mary, here in Radham, and Jamie had to remind me the steps for surgery? Support.” I stared at the page, trying to visualize it. “The third project is a drug. I… I don’t know, Sy. It’s not fully thought through. I’m sure it’s been done before, but I thought I should have a third project. I admit I’m selfish in wanting it. Something to help suppress fear, to clarify the mind. A low-impact combat drug for soldiers.” “Something you could take, so you didn’t need wyvern?” “I don’t want to use wyvern ever again, Sy,” she whispered. “I’m sorry, but-” “No,” I said. “I understand. Believe me.” “I don’t know how long the effects will last, so I’ve been working so hard, using all of the time I’m not spending consoling Mary, or with you. They said they would be lenient, knowing I was working with the Lambs project and helping the Gages, but I’ve been fretting. Even with wyvern to help focus me, I’m worried. This is sort of major, and I haven’t even had time to think about it.” “How long do you have to work it out?” “Tomorrow. Part of tomorrow.” I pulled my way out of her arms, turning around so I could face her. “What?” “Tonight, after dinner, they’re holding a meeting. They’ve been having them all day. All of my teachers, and my parents, looking over my academic performance and reviewing my records. With that meeting fresh in their minds, I have to bring a project proposal forward tomorrow morning. They’ll decide, based on the meeting with my parents and teachers, if I’m capable. I’m not sure how they’re going to explain things to my parents, but I’ve been told my parents won’t hear the whole story, so I think they’ll say their piece and then leave. Which should suit them fine.” “That’s why your parents are in town,” I said, speaking the realization aloud. Lillian nodded. Her eyes were filled with conflicting emotions. I could imagine her crying if she didn’t have the wyvern formula, and I really wished she would, so I could better know how to console her. As it was, I looked at the papers, then at Lillian. My thoughts were a jumble, chaos. Lillian was too important. She was the one person I could trust to remember the Lambs as we actually were. I’d been so preoccupied I hadn’t been able to see. I couldn’t abandon her, not at this critical juncture. I couldn’t stay, either. I would lose my mind and I would inevitably hurt her. There was a word for the bitter feeling I was experiencing: torn. Pulled in multiple directions, agonized, knowing I was going to fail her somehow, no matter what happened. Just leave, a little voice spoke in the back of my mind. Leave. Run away. Go, go, go. There are only bad things for you here. It was a little voice that had been with me for years. Since well before my last attempt at running away. Just leave. You know you have to. You’ll go mad if you don’t. But, like I’d told Mauer, my whole life was here. Lillian, and everything Lillian represented. Mary, Jamie, Helen, Ashton. The people I knew in the city. Pulling away meant putting every single one of those things in jeopardy. Reaching forward, I put my arms around Lillian. It wasn’t on purpose, but I ended up pinning her arms against her sides, my arms around her upper arms and back, hugging her so tight it had to hurt. Unable to hug me back, she planted a kiss on my ear. It was more on an already full plate, but I knew I had to listen in on that meeting. I had to know Lillian’s fate. I couldn’t make any decisions until I did. Dinner with her parents, and then finding a way into the meeting. “Not that this isn’t the nicest thing, Sy,” she murmured in my ear, “But my parents are waiting, and you need to step out that window and go wait outside with them.” I broke the hug. I couldn’t look at her smiling face, so I headed straight for the window. Let her think I was bashful or something. “See you in a minute,” she said, as the window scraped open. “Yeah,” I said, still thinking. “About the projects? I like the second one. The suit. I think it’s more ‘you’.” She smiled wide. “Thank you, Sy. I think I needed someone to tell me that, to make the decision.” I nodded, climbed out the window, and quickly made my way to the ground. Warring emotions plagued me as I took the long way around. I had to stop for a moment as tears filled my one good eye. I’d told Jamie that everyone needed to be the hero of their own story. That they needed a version of events that could paint them in the right. I didn’t have that. Never really had. She was the sweetest, bravest girl, and I couldn’t give her a happy ending. I was doomed to disappoint, no matter what I did. I wiped away the moisture that had collected in the eye with my handkerchief, took a deep breath while I straightened myself out, and then rounded the corner. A steady stream of girls departing the dormitory gave me a moment’s respite, as I had to wait for them to clear out of the way. Lillian’s father and mother were standing a short distance away from the gaggle of girls. Her father was a sturdy man, with brown and gray hair and permanent frown lines across his forehead. Her mother looked like a timid woman, her fashion and makeup aggressive to make up for what she lacked personally. They stood close together, and talked very easily with one another. As the path cleared, I made my approach. “Can I help you?” Lillian’s father asked me. “I’m Sylvester, a friend of Lillian’s,” I said. “I believe we’re having dinner at Claret Hall?” I extended my hand. The man shook it, his hand enveloping mine. “We expected her friend Mary,” her mother said. “Lillian wrote so much about her in the letters.” I’m so sorry to disappoint, I thought. Lil’s father, meanwhile, released my hand. The frown lines in his forehead deepened. “I believe you have lipstick on your ear,” he told me, staring me down. “Ah,” I said. I pulled the handkerchief from my pocket, and rubbed at my ear. “And you smell like perfume,” he added. I didn’t even get a chance to get a word out before the door opened. Lillian must have run to get downstairs as fast as she did. She skipped down the path until she was at my side. She hugged my arm, smiling up at two very disapproving parents. Previous Next |
Austria's elections on Sunday could see Norbert Hofer chosen as the country's first far-right leader since World War II. Austrians will head to the polls following a victory this week by Francois Fillon, the more right-leaning of two candidates in France's conservative primary. Analysts say voters in both countries are being heavily influenced by Brexit and the election of Donald Trump in the United States. Fillon, a former prime minister under President Nicolas Sarkozy, was the more conservative of two top candidates running for president in France's Republican Party primary elections Sunday. He has been compared to the late British conservative Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher for his calls to slash government spending, cut taxes for the wealthy, boost defense and get rid of France's 35-hour work week. Analysts say his victory points to a clear swing to the right among French voters, a trend that was already visible in the rise of Marine Le Pen's far-right, anti-immigrant National Front, whose popularity ratings soared after a series of terrorist attacks shook France last summer. Fillon's victory heading into the French general elections next year is also a further sign that anti-establishment sentiments are brewing in France much in the same way as they have been in the United States and elsewhere in Europe. Another outsider Many voters consider Fillon, a lawyer-turned-politician, an outsider like Trump and think he could bring a set of fresh ideas in the wake of an administration led by Socialist President Francois Hollande, whom newspapers have depicted in cartoons and commentaries as comatose. Hollande's approval ratings slipped to 4 percent in November. This Sunday's presidential elections in Austria could reflect a similar trend and serve as a test for the strength of populist movements in Europe. The Austrian poll is a rerun of elections held in May, when results showed the Freedom Party's Hofer, a former aeronautical engineer, lost by 31,000 votes to Alexander Van der Bellen, a Green Party member who ran as an independent. Austria's constitutional court overturned the results after an investigation found irregularities in the counting of mailed-in ballots. Analysts attribute the rise of populist, right-wing movements in Europe to anger over a system that voters see as corrupt and rigged against the common person. "You find that governments and lawmakers are losing the trust of their citizens," said Maggie Murphy, senior global advocacy manager at Transparency International. The group recently released a study that found one in three citizens polled in Europe and Central Asia considered corruption a big problem in their countries. That was the case not only in former Eastern Bloc countries and Central Asia, but in highly developed Western European democracies like Britain, France, Germany, Italy and Spain. 'Elites not listening' "Nearly one-third of people found their governments and their lawmakers were highly corrupt — not just a little bit corrupt, but highly corrupt," she said. "People felt that the wealthy were playing a bigger role in the government decision-making than they should be." There was a link, she said, between people's frustration and what they see as "elites not listening to them." That sentiment partly explains the rise of right-wing movements in Germany, where Chancellor Angela Merkel will seek a fourth term next year despite signs of a deteriorating base. Merkel's Christian Democrats came in third in regional elections in her home district in September, beaten by the new Alternative for Germany party, AfD. "It's a pretty amazing thing when you think a party only formed three years ago can end up defeating Angela Merkel's party," said Douglas Murray, a commentator and associate director of the Henry Jackson Society in London. He said the losses reflected anger among voters who feel they have been ignored or written off for complaining about things like Merkel's policy of accepting refugees in large numbers. "People who vote for AfD will be smeared by a lot of people at the moment as far right, racists, xenophobes and so on, whereas in actual fact a more sensible thing to do, it would seem to me, would be to listen to the serious concerns that a lot of people have, wonder how it is that an only three-year-old party of any political stripe could emerge and whether or not it doesn't indeed have some legitimate concerns. I would argue that it does," he said. Mistrust of the media is another concern, one that has been seized by anti-establishment politicians who accuse news outlets of downplaying terrorist attacks and problems related to immigration. Cautious approach "A lot of the media believe they have to tread very carefully, and they may not be entirely wrong. If we were to have terrorist attacks at the rate that they were going in July in Europe, you would see serious civil unrest in Europe," Murray said. But he said the age of the internet has brought other dangers. "If a lot of the media continue to do that, they will simply push people further away from reputable mainstream media resources and into the arms of less reputable media," he said, referring to the emergence of fake news sites and portals that promote hatred and misinformation. Many Europeans watched the U.S. elections closely, and leaders of right-wing movements in France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands and other European nations holding elections in the coming months hope to get a boost from Trump's victory. Among those politicians is Geert Wilders, a controversial member of the Dutch parliament known for his criticism of Islam and immigration. Wilders is awaiting a verdict after being tried on charges of inciting hatred after leading a chant at a rally calling for the Netherlands to accept fewer Moroccan immigrants. Wilders' Freedom Party is topping the polls ahead of the Netherlands' parliamentary elections in March, and the momentum of his movement is evident. Dutch members of parliament on Tuesday voted to ban the burqa, an Islamic face covering, from public places including schools, hospitals and public transportation. In an interview with the Russian network Russia Today, he cited Trump's election as an example for Europe. "The lesson for Europeans is look at America. What America can do, we can do as well," Wilders said. |
Bearded drag queen Conchita Wurst has made a triumphant return to Austria after winning the Eurovision Song Contest in Copenhagen. (AP Photo/Ronald Zak) To the limited extent they actually do, have you ever wondered how so-called “progressives” think? The progressive mind – let’s call it, “Progressy” – collectively hovers, like the Hindenburg, in that fantastical realm, that manmade utopia in waiting, that “fundamentally transformed” world that might only be, if … Hitler got it mostly wrong, Stalin, somewhat right, and Mao, with his “Great Leap Forward,” warmer still. Marx and Engels were red-hot-close, but they, too, missed the mark, if only by an inch. Today’s hipper, gentler, more progressivish progressives are confident that, if we’d only give them another shot, they’d finally get right what the others got wrong. Pinky swear. Then again, à la Barack Obama and true to form, since there’s no way in hot hell any rational person will give them that shot, they’ll just take it anyway. I recently caught up with Progressy, iPhone in hand and sipping a Cinnamon Dolce Latte at a packed SoHo Starbucks between angry and aimlessly incoherent protests against the evil corporatocracy. He/she/ze/it graciously agreed to sit down and give me a brief, though refreshingly unguarded, interview. MB: The Declaration of Independence is America’s founding document. Tell me what you think of it. Progressy: It’s crap. It’s not worth the parchment it’s written on. Selfish nonsense about “unalienable rights” given by some “creator” who fashioned “mankind” in “his own image” is the stuff of grand superstition. “Life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness?” Try choice, equality and the pursuit of pleasure. Rights come from government, not some imaginary god. Ideas about pre-eminent worth of the individual have, over the years, simply proven too harmful in efforts to advance the greater good of the collective in all its identifiable, divisible and perpetually put-upon subgroups. The Declaration’s sister document, the U.S. Constitution, has to go as well. They’re both outdated and completely at odds with progressive thought. As such, they must be circumvented, if not completely ignored, at every opportunity. MB: The term “gender neutrality” is in the news a lot lately. Care to comment? Progressy: Is a wild bear Catholic? Antiquated notions of “traditional marriage” and the “nuclear family,” along with the biblical canard that children should “honor” their “father and mother,” are totally problematic on several counts. First, such binary and heterosexist expressions are offensive and discriminatory on their face. In a sexually androgynous world with manifold sexual orientations, gender identities and familial make-ups, exclusive language like “father” or “mother,” “husband” or “wife,” are an affront to overall inclusivity and gender neutrality. In an effort to ensure the genderless society that fairness demands, and to fully safeguard unconditional sexual equality, these terms, along with “mom” and “dad,” must be abolished. MB: The Supreme Court has opined that “gay marriage” is now a constitutional right. But studies show conclusively that kids do better with both, er, an, um – with a biologically male and a biologically female parent. Don’t kids deserve what’s best for them? (AP Photo/Annika AF Klercker) Progressy: No! This isn’t about kids and what’s “best” for them! This is about LGBTQQIAAP rights! It’s about fundamental fairness. The historical nuclear family structure supposes some sort of paternal hierarchy that belittles the child and violates its right to self-determination – particularly when it comes to matters of sex and sexuality. Christianist moralism and dogmatism have, for far too long, forced children to suppress their inborn polysexuality, discouraging childhood sexual experimentation and exploration with members of the vast rainbow of gender identities and sexual orientations – or, for that matter, all identities and orientations at once. Furthermore, such repressive parental constraints deter intergenerational intimacy. As firmly established by scientific and academic consensus, adult-child romance offers men, women and children alike a rich opportunity for sensual growth. After centuries of persecution and knee-jerk criminal prosecution of minor-attracted persons, such sexual relationships are being shown to both nurture and expand children’s physical and emotional horizons and, thusly, should be encouraged. Ultimately, religiously based patriarchy and parentally forced sexual repression and closed-minded moralizing and bigotry have proven responsible for a host of societal ails. Its draconian moralism versus gentle relativism; closed-minded intolerance versus tolerance and love. Quite naturally, and in the values-neutral world of the 21st century, love wins! MB: Wow. I’m just not really sure how to even respond to that. Moving on: What’s next for marriage equality? Progressy: Now that the same-sex marriage battle is ending and marriage equality is becoming recognized worldwide, we expect things to quickly change for the better. To ensure full marriage equality, it logically follows that all other arbitrary and discriminatory restrictions placed on marriage should be lifted and, believe me, they will. At long last we will one day soon have a world that fully recognizes civil rights for all sexual minorities. Polygamous, incestuous and intergenerational love will be legalized, even celebrated. LGBTQQIAAP people will finally achieve full sexual liberation at the global scale. MB: Some say that the main goal of progressives was never “marriage equality,” but, rather, to undermine the very institutions of marriage and family. How do you respond to them? Progressy: Well, duh. The very idea of marriage and family is offensive and obsolete. The whole point of marriage equality is to faze them out – to attack the patriarchy. You mentioned studies. Well, studies have shown that traditional marriage and the nuclear family structure have the harmful effect of both challenging and diminishing government authority. If anything and everything, any combination of people or peoples, young, old, male, female, related, unrelated, two to 100, can constitute marriage and family, then what need will there be for marriage and family at all? Since original marriage, “traditional marriage,” so clearly undermines progressive state authority, it stands to follow that the family must be rendered meaningless. The idea has always been for progressive government to replace family outright. Redefining the family into oblivion is just one means to establish widespread dependency on the government. We never gave two flips about “marriage equality.” It was never about having the white picket fence, it’s always been about burning down the white picket fence. Why honor one’s “father and mother,” after all, when one has the government? What need is there? Government merits both honor and respect. Not only does the traditional family provide little utility for the collective, it affirmatively undercuts respect for state authority. The government provides security. The government provides emotional stability. The government provides for each and every conceivable need. Therefore, the government is, effectively, both “father and mother.” The government is family. “Honor thy father and mother?” Ha! Forget it. One day soon the progressive slogan, “Children, honor thy government” will be found posted throughout the halls of every public school. We’ve already done a bang up job removing prayer and any reference to God. Now it’s time to replace them. Progressive government is god. MB: OK, Progressy, thanks for your time today. It’s been illuminating. Looking forward to the anarchy. Happy world domination. (Note: For the easily confused liberal reader, the preceding was, at least in part, satire.) Matt Barber is founder and editor-in-chief of BarbWire.com. He is an author, columnist, cultural analyst and an attorney concentrating in constitutional law. Having retired as an undefeated heavyweight professional boxer, Matt has taken his fight from the ring to the culture war. (Follow Matt on Twitter: @jmattbarber). |
An herbicide that contaminates the tap water consumed by millions of Americans has been found to produce gender-bending effects in male frogs, "chemically castrating" some and turning others into females, a study shows. Frogs in the experiment were exposed to amounts of the weedkiller atrazine that are comparable to the levels allowed in drinking water by the Environmental Protection Agency, says lead researcher Tyrone Hayes of the University of California-Berkeley. The study was released Monday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. In Hayes' earlier studies, atrazine caused male frogs to begin growing eggs in their testes. In this experiment, 10% of the males exposed to atrazine — one of the most commonly used herbicide in the world — actually changed sex; some were able to breed and lay eggs. Nearly all of the other males had low testosterone and sperm levels, which made them unable to reproduce, Hayes says. The experiment can't tell scientists whether atrazine affects humans in a similar way, Hayes says. But it does raise new questions about the safety of atrazine, which other studies have linked to human birth defects, low birth weight, prematurity and low sperm count. The EPA said in October that it planned to reassess atrazine's safety, including its cancer risk. The European Union has banned the chemical. About 75% of stream water samples and 40% of groundwater samples contain atrazine, according to the U.S. Geological Survey. The Natural Resources Defense Council, an environmental advocacy group, detected atrazine in 90% of tap water samples from 139 water systems. Inexpensive faucet-top water filters can remove the chemical, says Jennifer Sass, a scientist with the group. Several water systems in Illinois, where atrazine is commonly used on corn and other crops, are suing the chemical's manufacturers, asking them to pay the cost of taking the herbicide out of drinking water. The principal scientist for Syngenta Crop Protection, the leading manufacturer of atrazine, says the chemical is safe. Company-sponsored studies that met rigorous EPA standards found atrazine has "no effect on frog sexual development," Tim Pastoor says. He criticized the new study and notes that Hayes tested only one dose of atrazine. A stronger study would have exposed frogs to several doses and noted any trends, he says. Given that atrazine has survived years of scrutiny by the EPA, Pastoor says, he sees no reason to re-examine atrazine's safety now. "As far as we're concerned, it's unnecessary," he says. Although scientists still have many questions about atrazine, Sass says, the chemical should be phased out as a precaution. Guidelines: You share in the USA TODAY community, so please keep your comments smart and civil. Don't attack other readers personally, and keep your language decent. Use the "Report Abuse" button to make a difference. You share in the USA TODAY community, so please keep your comments smart and civil. Don't attack other readers personally, and keep your language decent. Use the "Report Abuse" button to make a difference. Read more |
25 – The University of Indiana: The Hoosiers are in the minority of the power five schools on this list who boast a lower than .500 all time record, which says something about the quality of sides that they’ve been able to produce through the years. Dwarfed as a programme by the Big 10 giants it is difficult for this programme to create a selling point, and the uniforms or stadium aren’t able to make up for an average on the field history in that regard. 24 – The University of Illinois: The second consecutive side to have a home named ‘Memorial Stadium’, the fighting Illini had their greatest years around the First World War, to which their stadium is a monument. They lay claim to five national championships which is a good number for a school of their stature, although like many on this list, they haven’t had one for half a century. The Illini are one of my favourite non ‘elite’ programmes on this list – there is something pleasing about the marriage of stylish, traditional, quirky, and on-the-field competence that is truly special. 23 – The University of Utah: The Utes are joined by only USC as a team whose home stadium has hosted the opening ceremony to an Olympic Games, and this quirky fact makes them a special programme to me. They can also claim a handy twenty-four conference titles and a couple of strong interstate rivalries with BYU and Utah State. What’s more, last year’s Utes’ dominance on the offensive line makes them stand out – they had four linemen selected in the 2017 NFL Draft. 22 – The University of Maryland: An all-around tribute to the eponymous state, the Big Ten’s Terrapins are another school falling short of the powerhouse status of conference rivals such as Michigan and Ohio State. Their uniform is designed around their state flag, and their team name represents a creature that is found throughout Maryland. The Terps can also boast several intense rivalries, my favourite being with Navy, delightfully named the Crab Bowl Classic. The rivalry was so strong that it was suspended for four decades after an obscene gesture from a Maryland player, which is the sort of intensity that a major college football programme needs. 21 – The University of Arizona: Some of the cleanest (not necessarily best) uniforms in the sport are donned by the Wildcats, who also are regular contenders in possibly the most fun group of five conference. While only being able to boast of six conference titles in their history (the current drought extends to twenty-four years) plenty of bowl appearances (and a serviceable record to boot) denotes the competitiveness of the programme. 20 – The University of West Virginia: The Mountaineers are a relatively recent joinee of the power five as a member of the Big 12 Conference, and haven’t made the breakthrough of a conference championship victory since making that step up. Off the field (or more accurately, at the field) their stadium has the charm of seating exactly sixty thousand people, and their logo is very nicely designed – the play on the field is, at least in an aesthetic sense, improved immeasurably by the nice colour scheme and sweet looking helmets. 19 – The University of Iowa: The Hawkeyes are one of the grand old programmes in college football. While not one of the schools that pile up conference and national championship rings, there is something about Iowa that oozes the sort of appeal that college ball is all about. A grand old stadium named after the team’s Heisman winner and a wonderful set of uniforms, the Hawkeyes’ golden era was in the 50s and 60s – but their consistency in reaching bowl games since then has been astonishing, with the team reaching twenty-eight bowls in the last thirty-five seasons. 18 – The University of North Carolina – The powder blue-d Tar Heels are an inconsistent programme that has the ability to mix it with the power houses. Rather than amass various titles UNC’s reputation rests largely on the calibre of NFL player they have been able to produce as well as a strong fan base and some of the best uniforms in the game. Carolina can also boast one of the most important landmarks in football as their own – UNC were the first team in recorded football to complete a forward pass. 17 – The University of South Carolina: The Gamecocks are a perennially good-but-not great team. After wandering through college football as an independent for two long spells of their history, they don’t have the titles to their name to show their dominance. This is exacerbated by playing in the SEC, the Granddaddy of all conferences, and means they can only claim one conference title since the Second World War, despite a number of very good seasons (they’ve been to twenty-one bowl games). They can also lay claim to my second favourite play in college football history – Jadeveon Clowney’s monstrous forced fumble against Michigan in the 2013 Outback Bowl. Also, home field points are awarded once again due to the gloriousness of SC’s Williams Brice Stadium. 16 – The University of Arkansas: The Razorbacks are the first team on this list to play in the SEC West, one of the two best divisions in College Football. Recently a purveyor of highlight plays (think Joe Adams’ punt return and a huge 4th and 25 conversion against Ole Miss), this team is one of the college football thoroughbreds. The dominating force in their state, the fact they use two home fields means a very wide range of support and is a nice quirk to allow a wider range of fans to see their team play. 15 – The University of Missouri: Missouri may be the closest thing to a footballing powerhouse that we’ve had on this list thus far. A perennial power five side they made the jump to the SEC in 2012 because winning their division (although admittedly not conference) was too damn easy in the Big 12. The Tigers’ field is exceptionally pretty too; its horseshoe shape is magnificent as is the imposing white ‘M’ painted behind one of the endzones. The diamond pattern of the endzone is mighty pretty too. The Tigers programme is as historic as it is well-designed, with three national championships (none of which, admittedly, achieved by consensus) including one only a decade ago, which truly marked Mizzou’s return to greatness after decades of struggles. Geographically, Missouri also probably marks the line where footballing emphasis shifts from the NFL to the NCAA. 14 – The University of California, (Berkeley): Berkeley may be better known for the academic side of things – but the Golden Bears are still a real force to be reckoned with on the collegiate football field. The only college with two alumni currently starting under centre on NFL teams, Cal is probably the closest thing to QBU at present (along with Aaron Rogers and Jared Goff, Davis Webb looks like a presumptive future starter when Eli Manning retires for the Giants). The Bears also play on a true college football field, that just happens to be right on top of a potentially dangerous geological fault. If not for the presence of USC being California’s biggest school, the Golden Bears could well be higher in this list. 13 – The University of Mississippi: Currently in huge turmoil, the Rebels’ history is dominated by events off the field. Possibly the only school in the top twenty where football is not the first thought when you hear it mentioned, Ole Miss is often snapping at the heels of Alabama, Auburn and LSU in the SEC East, which allows for some truly special victories in Oxford, but precious few rings – only six conference championships is miserly from a programme of this prestige. Sadly, given the current mess of the footballing administration and possible NCAA sanctions, this programme is more likely to fall than rise in the near future. 12 – The University of Colorado: The Buffaloes have one of the more enviable recent histories of any programme on this list. A relative football backwater until coach Bill McCartney took over in the ‘80s and won them a national championship, the programme sits at the foot of the Rocky Mountains in a classic horseshoe shaped stadium, and their regular competitiveness in the Pac 12 means they are always well-supported. They’re also one of only two schools to complete a fifth down conversion. Finally, the purity of a Colorado – Colorado State rivalry is not to be ignored – played at the Broncos’ stadium in Denver, Colorado leads comfortably over the series. 11 – University of Washington: The Washington Huskies have the immediate advantage of playing in Seattle, my favourite city in the world. The programme has a fair spread of success over its history, with two national championships and an appearance in last year’s College Football Playoff. In the perfect position to break through to national success in their conference (the Pac 12 is prestigious but there are enough easy games for a team of of 2016 Washington’s quality), this school could be heading into a golden era under coach Chris Petersen. If it weren’t for another school on this list down in Eugene, the Huskies could be the biggest college football programme in a quarter of the US. 10 – The University of Wisconsin: This is the point where I would start to refer to schools as ‘powerhouses’ of the college game. The Badgers are the epitome of a northern college team – rugged and tough to beat at their home (the gloriously traditional Camp Randall) while a constant threat in an elite conference. The Badgers have dominated the Big 10 West in recent years and look set to do so for a while as the Big 10’s currently elite schools mostly play in the East. Wisconsin is also the factory which produced three NFL playing brothers (you already know it’s JJ, Derek and TJ Watt) as well as QBs Russell Wilson and (admittedly fictional) Bo Callaghan (from the movie Draft Day). This programme is almost the definition of a competitor, able to run with the giants of the game on a yearly basis, although they only have two national championships, and the last was in 1928. 9 – The University of Oregon: The coolest team in college football, the Ducks are everything that is modern, crisp and desirable in a football team. A strong team that has twice recently come close to National Championships, Oregon has a special relationship with Nike that allows them to produce a wacky and wonderful combination of uniforms on a game by game basis in their futuristic home field in Eugene. One of the most recognisable teams in the game to a casual observer, the Ducks are highly marketable and a great way to appreciate the game in all its glory. 8 – The University of Florida: The Gators have a characteristic that is relatively rare on this list due to their programme only having been founded in the early twentieth century and not the late nineteenth, but they have certainly made up for lost time. The lone school of Florida football’s big three to play in the SEC (Florida State and Miami are in the ACC), the recent success of this programme has been staggering, with fifteen conference titles since 1992 to add to three claimed (and three ‘unclaimed’) national titles. The school that hosted the early glory years of Tim Tebow’s career plays at arguably (I use this word protectively) college football’s best stadium – ‘the Swamp’ in Gainesville. Also, as rivalries are important to this list – Florida and Florida State is up there with the best. 7 – The University of Georgia: As is the case with most of the teams at this end of the list the Bulldogs are very rarely bad. The team has played in a seriously impressive fifty-two bowl games and has won thirty of them – a testament to the quality of side that Sanford Stadium has been able to watch over the years. Geographically slap-bang in the middle of college football’s heartland, this team has a plethora of major rivalries – and they’ve dominated all bar one of them in terms of win percentage – only Tennessee of Georgia’s regular foes have bested them over all of their all-time games. Speaking of which… 6 – The University of Tennessee: The most wholesome team name on this list, the Volunteers are singled out by being the University which wasn’t Ole Miss that educated a Manning (and they were lucky enough to get Peyton). Tennesse’s Neyland Stadium is a college football cathedral, even more so than the NASCAR track in which the Vols played Virginia Tech last season. Tennessee has been to the third highest number of bowl games of any college football programme, and it is only they and THE Ohio State University who have never had a season in their history with more than seven losses. Extraordinary. 5 – University of Michigan: My head wanted to put Michigan higher than this, but hear me out. Forty-two conference titles and fifty-five bowl games is superb – so is, obviously, eleven national championships. However, up to a point Michigan have been living off their reputation. Only one national title has come since the 1940s, and their much publicised struggles against their deadliest of rivals from Columbus make ranking them higher problematic. These however are in spite of the largest football stadium in the US, a former US President as a player (Gerald Ford was a member of the Wolverines’ O-line) and a former player coach in Jim Harbaugh who is likely to bring back the good times. 4 – The University of Oklahoma: The Sooners constant placement around the national championship race is something special, as are the players they’ve produced. Five Heisman trophy winners is special, but even more so is seven national championships, which is the seventh best out of schools who are are currently in the power five, and the Sooners have spread out their success more than many of the other schools. They’re also the only Big 12 programme to have appeared in the College Football play off, without the advantage of a championship game. 3 – The University of Nebraska: The Cornhuskers aren’t ranked third because they have the third most wins of all time, but it certainly helps their cause. Lincoln being some distance from a pro sports franchise, Nebraska inspires loyalty like few other teams, with a streak of sold out home games that dates back to the early 1960s. The Huskers have a huge forty-six conference titles and that’s not the extent of their dominance – three national titles in four seasons in the nineties was a period of dominance not seen since Notre Dame in the forties. The simple N that adorns their helmet is a crisp, clean, classic sign of this team. 2 – The University of Texas – One of the clear top two in my mind, the Longhorns are going through a slight lull at the moment, but that doesn’t alter the nationwide perception of the programme as absolutely massive. Slap bang in the middle of the best region for high school football, Texas can always rely on a supreme selection of recruits to make their team competitive. Four national titles doesn’t seem like a lot, but Texas has produced some of the greatest college players and moments in the sports history. The alma mater of such players as Earl Campbell, Ricky Williams, Colt McCoy and Vince Young, and the victor of the greatest national championship game of all time over Pete Carroll’s USC juggernaut in 2005. The college sports at Texas are so big that the university has Longhorn Network, so fans can watch games exclusively on their own dedicated channel. 1 – The University of Alabama – Tuscaloosa’s finest is the not only number one on this list, but it is arguably the greatest programme in college football history. No team in college football has played more bowl games than the Crimson Tide, and they have won it all sixteen times. In Nick Saban they have possibly the greatest college coach of all time. Since Saban took over they have gone to the next level, with five Heisman Trophy finalists and an appearance in each of the three editions of the College Football playoff. It feels like this team are never bad nowadays, and they have dominated the SEC to an embarrassing extent in recent years: this does however make them more of a giant killing than any team is in any of the other power 5 conferences, and this leads to some special games. Their massive rivalry with Auburn led to one of these, with the famous Chris Davis kick-six in 2013. Alabama is good in various categories that I have used to rank these fifty (forty-eight) teams, with a wonderful stadium and support base, nice uniforms, and a plethora of excellent former players – but they finish on top simply due to the robotic, monotonous dominance on the college football field. Advertisements |
The recent change to Rule 41 of the Federal Rules of Criminal Procedure would allow a federal magistrate judge to issue a search and seizure warrant for electronic media if the location of the information is concealed through technological means or if it is a hacking case that involves computers in at least five judicial districts. The recent Rule 41 change does not affect the burden of proof requirement to establish probable cause to secure a search warrant under the Fourth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. Even if a warrant was issued to PIA about searching and seizing electronic media, because we do not log internet activity, there is no way to trace the activity to a specific user. Because this rule change allows the government to hack individuals outside of the United States, it is ever important that our subscribers remain vigilant and maintain best practices for protecting their privacy. That means not letting yourself be socially engineered and protecting your network against potentially malicious traffic. While a VPN can help protect your privacy, it is only one of several tools that when used together protects the privacy of you and your family. |
LSU did not win the EDSBS Charity Bowl, and that's fine. They have other things going on, like going bankrupt as an institution thanks to a heady blend of legislative incompetence and a sudden dive in gas and oil income. Y'all save up, and remember that tax cuts never generate income no matter how much money you think you're making. Consider going without a governor for a while; if LSU can go as far as they've gone without a quarterback, just imagine what that can do for the entire state.* *Another suggestion: PPV man vs. tiger fights. Just consider it. Mike's not busy, ever. The Charity Bowl closed this weekend, and the winners as always: Michigan. The Wolverines had 162 total donations for $14,109, a massive total earning them the spoils of victory. They get the Hatin' Ass Spurrier post, the tattoo on our precious unblemished body, the site re-skin in maize and blue, and our eternal gratitude for their generosity. Texas came in second, but Notre Dame, Georgia Tech, Georgia, and Auburn all made strong showings, as well. Make Spencer Eat Cheese University did not achieve their yearly goal, but you tried and that's what counts. Our largest single donor was a generous lunatic from Michigan who, when we tweeted out that we were about a grand short of the tattoo mark, just threw in another grand on top of their generous total to make it happen. We raised $11K on Friday alone. You are all insane and giving, and we thank you from the bottom of our hearts for that. The grand total for the week came to a whopping $38,706.78. That's a record for the fundraiser, something we don't take lightly. Not much we do matters, but this does, and it only happens because this community of people cares, and has for over ten years straight at this point. So if you gave, or even just told someone with money to give, thank you, thank you, thank you, you're far too kind. Hold your applause, and we mean it: this is your song, not mine. Final standings below. We have no clue on the tattoo, but something like this, but with a wolverine instead of a bear holding the bomb? That's the general direction so far. |
Hispalinux , an 8,000 strong Spanish association of Linux users and developers, has filed a complaint with the Madrid office of the European Commission claiming, according to a Reuters report, that Windows 8 contains an "obstruction mechanism" called UEFI Secure Boot. This mechanism, it says, controls the system boot up and means users must seek keys from Microsoft to install another operating system. Hispalinux head, lawyer Jose Maria Lancho, told the news agency that it was "absolutely anti-competitive" and a "de facto technological jail for computer booting systems". The complaint says that although Microsoft says UEFI Secure Boot is a security measure, its implementation would not mean the end of malware and viruses. The complaint comes just over three weeks after the EU Competition Chief Joaquin Almunia said, in a written answer to parliamentary questions, that the "Commission is monitoring the implementation of the Microsoft Windows 8 security requirements. The Commission is however currently not in possession of evidence suggesting that the Windows 8 security requirements would result in practices in violation of EU competition rules". UEFI Secure Boot is a mechanism that was added to the UEFI firmware and uses keys registered in firmware to check a digital signature on any operating system's bootloader and kernel to ensure that they have not been tampered with. The idea is to avoid situations where malware modifies the operating system or boot process itself as part of its camouflage mechanisms. Microsoft requires that machines sold with Windows 8 pre-installed are configured to use this mechanism to validate the operating system. This means that machines with Windows 8 have Microsoft's key registered in the firmware and, with no other operating system vendor offering a similar key, it is the only key that comes on most of these machines. Booting another operating system on these machines would, therefore, mean disabling secure boot, adding a key for validation of the other operating system to the firmware, or getting the bootloader for the operating system signed by Microsoft. The first two options are paths that Microsoft requires vendors implement on x86-based systems, although there are no common or standard ways of implementing the features. Therefore, Linux vendors such as Red Hat, SUSE and Canonical, and the Linux Foundation all looked at approaches where a bootloader or pre-bootloader was signed by Microsoft and would go on to load Linux once booted and verified. This would, the vendors believed, give users an easier way to install Linux on any arbitrary Windows 8 pre-installed PC system. These solutions require Microsoft to sign the bootloader and have reinforced the Free Software Foundation's objections to what it has dubbed "Restricted Boot". The Hispalinux complaint appears to follow the FSF's reasoning and seems to request a simple way for consumers to disable or override Secure Boot. But, as the Commissioner notes: "In particular, on the basis of the information currently available to the Commission it appears that the OEMs are required to give end users the option to disable the UEFI secure boot". It may be that this case will hinge on whether the Commission continues to feel that this is sufficient. (djwm) |
The nation's top point guard--Katy (Tex.) Cypress Lakes' De'Aaron Fox--will announce his college decision live Thursday on ESPNU at 6 PM ET. Fox (6-4, 170), who is ranked as the No. 3 overall prospect in the 2016 class by the industry-average 247Sports Composite. Fox cut hist list to seven in August and has taken official visits to LSU (Sept. 19), Louisville (Sept. 26), Kansas (Oct. 9) and Kentucky (Oct. 16). The Wildcats, who offered Fox at the end of the evaluation period in July, are the unanimous pick in his 247Sports Crystal Ball, representing all 23 predictions: De'Aaron Fox PG | 6-4 | 170 Cypress Lakes (Katy, TX) Class of 16 247Sports Composite 0.9986 Natl 3 Pos 1 State1 100% Playing in the Nike EYBL last travel season, Fox averaged 17.5 points, 4.8 rebounds and 5.4 assists in 23 games for Houston Hoops, where he helped solidify himself as the premier point guard in the 2016 class. Should John Calipari add Fox to his 2016 class, which also includes 5-stars Sacha Killeya-Jones and Wenyen Gabriel, the Wildcats would tie Michigan State for the No. 2 spot behind Duke in the 247Sports Composite Team Rankings. Cypress Lakes opens its season vs. Yates at 8:30 PM CT in the last of a five-game slate of high school hoops Nov. 16. |
A Taliban suicide assault team struck in the heart of Afghanistan’s capital, killing 17 people. Several suicide bombers began their attack in the early morning at a guesthouse used by Indian nationals that is located close to the Kabul City Center, a shopping mall, and the Safi Landmark hotel. One of the suicide bombers is said to have detonated outside a guesthouse used by Indian nationals, which is thought to have been the main target of the attack. Five Indian nationals are among those confirmed to have been killed, Quqnoos reported. Another suicide bomber detonated outside the Safi Landmark. The building was damaged in the attack. Other members of the suicide assault team then entered the shopping center and were engaged by Afghan police. Fighting was reported for more than two hours after the attack began; two Afghan policemen were killed in the gunfight. The Taliban took credit for the attack. Today’s attack closely follows the pattern of a series of Taliban and Haqqani Network strikes in Afghanistan’s cities since January 2008. The Taliban have been targeting ministry buildings, security installations, the Indian Embassy, hotels, guesthouses, and shopping centers. The last such attack, on Jan. 18, took place at a central square where the presidential palace, the Justice Ministry, and the Central Bank are located. Fighting spread to the Serena Hotel, the Grand Afghan shopping center, and a movie theater. Seven Taliban fighters, three soldiers, and two civilians were killed in the fighting. Another attack, on Oct. 24, 2009, targeted a UN guesthouse in Kabul. The assault team killed five foreign UN workers and three Afghans before Afghan police killed the attackers. Similar attacks have taken place in Pakistan’s major cities, as well as in Mumbai, India. The Mumbai attack was the most deadly, with more than 170 people killed as the Lashkar-e-Taiba assault teams were able to shut down the city for more than 60 hours. Today’s terror assault took place as India and Pakistan conducted the first high-level talks since the Mumbai assault, which was carried out by the Pakistan-based Lashkar-e-Taiba. India has insisted that Pakistan rein in terrorist groups operating on its soil. “We have suffered many, many hundreds of Mumbais,” Pakistani Foreign Minister Salman Bashir said after the meeting. “We have lost a great number of civilians. Pakistan does not believe that India should lecture us and demand Pakistan does this or that. That is not how inter-state relations are conducted.” List of major complex and suicide attacks in Afghanistan since January 2008: Feb. 26, 2010: A Taliban assault team killed 17 people in an attack on an Indian guesthouse in Kabul. Jan. 18, 2010: A Taliban assault team struck at the presidential palace, the Justice Ministry, and the Central Bank. Seven Taliban fighters, three policemen, and two civilians were killed. Oct. 24, 2009: An al Qaeda and Haqqani Network suicide assault team killed five foreign UN workers and three Afghans in an attack on a UN guesthouse in Kabul. Oct. 8, 2009: A Taliban suicide bomber killed 17 civilians and wounded more than 80 in an attack outside the Indian embassy in Kabul. Sept. 2, 2009: A Taliban suicide bomber assassinated the deputy chief of Afghanistan’s intelligence service and the leader of the provincial council during an attack at a mosque in Laghman province. The two Afghan leaders were among 23 people killed in the deadly attack. July 24, 2009: Police in Khost City killed seven Taliban fighters as they attempted to assault the provincial police headquarters and a bank. July 21, 2009: Suicide bombers armed with rocket-propelled grenades and assault rifles attacked government installations and a US base in the cities of Gardez and Jalalabad. Eight Taliban fighters and six Afghan security personnel were reported killed in the failed attacks. May 12, 2009: The Taliban launched a multi-pronged suicide attack against government and security installations in Khost province, a stronghold of the deadly Haqqani Network. Eleven Taliban fighters and nine civilians were killed in the daylong assault. April 1, 2009: Four Taliban suicide bombers disguised as Afghan soldiers attempted to kill the Kandahar provincial council after entering the compound. Security forces foiled the attack but seven civilians and six policemen were killed during the fighting. March 30, 2009: A suicide bomber wearing a police uniform penetrated security at a police compound in Kandahar’s Andar district and killed five policemen and four civilians after detonating his vest. Feb. 11, 2009 The Taliban conducted a multi-pronged assault on two Afghan ministries and a prison headquarters in the capital of Kabul that resulted in 19 people killed and more than 50 wounded. Feb. 2, 2009: A suicide bomber detonated his vest inside a training center for police reservists in the town of Tarin Kot in Uruzgan province. Twenty-one Afghan police were killed and seven more were wounded in the suicide attack. Dec. 4, 2008: A three-man suicide team stormed the headquarters of Afghanistan’s intelligence service in Khost province. Six intelligence and police officials were killed and another seven were wounded. Sept. 7, 2008: Two Taliban suicide bombers entered a police headquarters in Kandahar province and searched for a senior police general in charge of border security at the Spin Boldak crossing point. Six policemen were killed and 37 were wounded, including the general, in the bombings. Sept. 6, 2008: A Taliban suicide bomber penetrated a secure government building in the southwestern province of Nimroz and detonated his vest. The attack killed six people, including Nimroz province’s intelligence chief and his 20-year-old son. July 7, 2009: A suicide car bomber hit the outside wall of the Indian embassy in a crowded neighborhood in Kabul on Monday, killing 54 people and wounding more than 140. On April 27, 2008: A Taliban assault team attempted to assassinate President Karzai during a military parade outside Kabul. Two members of parliament were killed and 11 others were wounded during the barrage of automatic gunfire and mortar shells. Jan. 14, 2008: A suicide assault team from the al Qaeda-linked Haqqani Network raided the heavily secured Serena Hotel. Terrorists wearing suicide vests breached the front gate with a suicide attack and then entered the hotel and began shooting civilians. A Norwegian journalist, an American aid worker, and at least five security guards were killed in the assault. Additional sources: “At least 12 killed in attack in Afghan capital Kabul”, Xinhuanet “Afghan police: 7 die in series of blasts in Kabul”, The Associated Press “India focus on Mumbai ‘unfair’: Salman Bashir”, Dawn Bill Roggio is a Senior Fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies and the Editor of FDD's Long War Journal. Are you a dedicated reader of FDD's Long War Journal? Has our research benefitted you or your team over the years? Support our independent reporting and analysis today by considering a one-time or monthly donation. Thanks for reading! You can make a tax-deductible donation here. |
I hopped in the back of my first Uber car almost two years ago. Before Uber, I'd done just about everything in my power to avoid taking a traditional taxi. Those avoidance techniques included walking, biking, staying at home and even hitching the occasional ride from my mom. Needless to say, I despised the taxi experience and clearly I wasn't the only one who felt this way. Today, Uber does over 1 million trips a day and their growth war path shows no signs of stopping. A big key to that success though, has been Uber's ability to differentiate themselves from taxis. In essence, Uber does a really good job at everything that taxis do poorly: calling for a ride, paying with a credit card, rating your driver, clean and comfortable cars, etc. Looking back, this strategy might not seem like the most ingenious but it has worked really really well (see $40 billion valuation). I was reminded of the stark contrast between Uber and taxis on a recent trip to Las Vegas, which is still one of the only US cities that has yet to allow Uber. My Vegas taxi driver was great but the first thing I noticed when I sat down was the blaring video monitor right in front of my face. No I did not want to watch Rod Stewart sing Maggie May to strangers on the Las Vegas strip! But there wasn't a whole lot I could do about the situation. At the end of the ride, I paid the fare (plus a $3 credit card surcharge) and hopped out. Why Video and Display Ads Are Coming To Ubers Everywhere I've known that ads were coming to the back of Uber cars for some time now. When Uber cut fares for a third time in early January, the company was basically asking the free market to come up with a solution that would allow drivers to recoup their lost pay. Not many people realize it but as an Uber driver, you are now a business owner, a mobile logistical entrepreneur with the ability to sell, network and recommend products/services (if you so choose). So imagine for a second that you're a business owner or even an employee going into work and your boss tells you that you will now be doing the exact same job but for 30% less pay. Most people would be pretty upset by that and drivers are no different. That's why entrepreneurs like this one have turned to Fiverr to sell their own ads: Savvy Uber drivers like this guy have realized that when a passenger gets into your car they might as well get into a relationship accelerator. Maybe it has something to do with the driver's rating, their picture on the screen or the safety associated behind the Uber brand. Whatever it is, passengers trust their drivers and accordingly, they also trust the products and services that those drivers recommend. This guy is obviously doing something right with advertisers because according to his Fiverr profile, he has 39 reviews and a 5 star average. Another driver I found with a similar Fiverr gig listed in his description that he constantly drives around Century City, Beverly Hills, Santa Monica, Westwood and Brentwood. His 'clients' include doctors, lawyers, celebrities, business executives and partiers. These two entrepreneurs have clearly discovered that they are transporting an elite demographic that advertisers have been trying to reach for years. Imagine Budweiser being able to put up an ad for Bud Light 30 seconds before you walk into a bar. That sounds like some pretty effective marketing to me. Drivers aren't the only ones to make this discovery though. Viewswagen, a Minnesota based start-up, is a few weeks away from launching the first ever national rideshare display ad network. Their co-founder, James Bellefeuille says, "Viewswagen Rideshare Advertising displays ads in real time, based on a passenger's trip intent. Viewswagen Trip Intent is determined by analyzing environmental signals to display ads relevant to the passenger's trip, which in turn increases the likelihood that they will find them valuable and thus less likely to be view the advertisements as intrusive, or spammy." Services like Viewswagen will obviously be very popular with drivers and advertisers but they may not sit as well with passengers. Justin Gordon, a frequent Uber passenger from Santa Monica, CA said that, "I wouldn't want to see an ad but if there was a way to make it more relevant or user-friendly it wouldn't be the worst thing in the world." Most passengers that I talked to seem to share Gordon's sentiments but Bellefeuille's company is trying to walk the fine line between being obtrusive and providing actual value. "We make the passenger experience a priority and are aware that when presented with the notion of rideshare advertising, most people think it will ruin their experience. We have chosen to focus on display advertising over video advertising because of this. We also dedicate a portion of our inventory to genuinely interesting content, news, and public service messages to keep passengers entertained, interested and engaged in both their trip and community." It will be interesting to see how passengers and Uber themselves react to impending video ads. When I contacted Uber about displaying ads in cars, their response was, "Vehicles on the Uber platform should not have any ads and should have a minimal number of bumper stickers." So it looks like for now Uber is anti-ads but they are currently facing lawsuits over their worker classification in California and imposing restrictions on drivers in regards to displaying ads could hurt their case. And when I pushed them on the subject they did finally say "it was up to driver discretion". I'm not the only who thinks ads are coming to your Uber in one form or another either. Silicon Valley expert, Andrew Chen, recently posted about all of the possibilities of mobile Uber ads. Ultimately, Uber may be forced to embrace this new age marketing and even partake in it themselves to make sure it gets done right. |
BitClave Announces Partnership with Bancor BitClave Blocked Unblock Follow Following Sep 12, 2017 BitClave is partnering with Bancor to use Smart Tokens across the BitClave Active Search Ecosystem (BASE). BitClave has joined the Bancor network and will become a member of its protocol family. The Consumer Activity Token (CAT) will be using the ERC-20 token standard, compatible with all supported exchanges and wallets, and will now also be automatically convertible to every token in the Bancor network in compliance with the Bancor protocol. BitClave is a startup company using blockchain to eliminate ad service middlemen and create a direct connection between businesses and customers. BitClave is building a decentralized search engine that helps its users truly find what they are looking for and get compensated every time they search privately for products and services from their favorite brands, making third-party advertising networks unnecessary and annoying ads a thing of the past. On the BitClave Active Search Ecosystem, customers exercise full control over their identity, deciding who has access to their data while earning CATs each time businesses use their data to make them offers. Through this platform, businesses can serve personalized, relevant offers directly to users who have already expressed interest in their products and services, significantly increasing their return on advertising spending. The initial vision for the BASE and CAT is based on Ethereum technology — an open source, blockchain-based, distributed computing platform which utilizes smart contracts. Bancor enables the easy creation of smart tokens, which allow for newly embedded functionality into cryptocurrencies. With the ability to hold other tokens in reserve and to be traded directly with their own smart contracts, as opposed to any counter-party or in exchanges, smart tokens can instantly be converted for tokens of all types on the network, enhancing liquidity and facilitating usage-driven and algorithmic price calculation. Smart tokens and their holders benefit from continuous liquidity and increased stability thanks to their automated, built in market maker and algorithmically calculated prices. “We are very proud to announce this cooperation with Bancor and become a part of its ecosystem. We believe the smart token standard will contribute to the future evolution of our BASE platform, benefiting businesses and consumers with the liquidity and stability that will allow this new ecosystem to flourish from day one,” said BitClave’s founder Alex Bessonov, the former chief security officer of LG Electronics. “We’re incredibly excited about the diversity we’re seeing in the adoption of the Bancor protocol by smart token creators including BitClave. A decentralized search platform with a distributed advertising model is an important application of blockchain technology for the benefit of society.” said Guy Benartzi, co-founder of Bancor. |
Update April 4, 2017: Bossland have lost their case in California. German-based hack-makers Bossland have been ordered to pay $8.6 million (that’s £6.8 million) to Blizzard, who alleged that each of the 42,818 hacks they sold in the USA constituted copyright infringement. Alternatively, use our Overwatch character guide to get good at the game the old fashioned way. The California District Court agreed that Bossland’s hacks effectively bypassed Blizzard’s anti-cheating software, violating the DMCA. In reverse-engineering the games to make their hacks, Bossland infringed Blizzard’s copyrights, the court ruled. Bossland declined to represent themselves, so Blizzard were awarded the judgement by default. On top of the $8.6 million in copyright damages, Bossland are banned from marketing or selling its cheats – for all Blizzard games – in the USA. “Bossland materially contributes to infringement by creating the Bossland Hacks, making the Bossland Hacks available to the public, instructing users how to install and operate the Bossland Hacks, and enabling users to use the software to create derivative works,” says the court order. This is just the latest victory for Blizzard in their war against Bossland, who have made bots and hacks for several of their games including World of Warcraft, Diablo 3, Heroes of the Storm and Hearthstone. Thanks, Torrentfreak. Update March 15, 2017:After winning a legal battle in the German courts, Blizzard are looking to sue Bossland, creators of cheats and hack for online games, to the tune of $8.5 million, this time in the US. The case began mid 2016, but Bossland stopped responding earlier this year, so Blizzard are looking for a default judgement. The Overwatch developers are requesting minimum statutory copyright damages of $200 per infringement. According to the complaint, 42,818 Bossland hacks were sold in the US. The complaint itself claims not only copyright infringement, but also loss of sales, with people put off playing Blizzard games because of online cheaters. “In this case, Blizzard is only seeking the minimum statutory damages of $200 per infringement, for a total of $8,563,600.00,” say the developers, via TorrentFreak. “While Blizzard would surely be entitled to seek a larger amount, Blizzard seeks only minimum statutory damages. “Blizzard does not seek such damages as a “punitive” measure against Bossland or to obtain an unjustified windfall.” Blizzard say that Bossland’s earnings from the cheats are likely higher than what they’re asking for, since one of Bossland’s hacks can cost around $200 for a year. Update February 1, 2017:Blizzard have won in their a legal battle with Bossland, creators of cheating programs – bots, wallhacks, and more – for World of Warcraft, Diablo, Heroes of the Storm, and Overwatch. The victory comes from the German Court of Justice (Bundesgerichtshof), who ruled that Bossland engaged in unfair and disruptive practises with their World of Warcraft bots. These bots imbalanced the game’s economy and provided unfair advantages to some players, while also flooding and depriving the in-game market of certain items. In a parallel case about copyright infringement from Bossland, Blizzard were also ruled in favour of. “We are committed to protecting our game experience for players, as well as our intellectual property, and are very happy with the court’s decision,” say Blizzard. “We don’t have any further details to provide at this time, other than to say that we will continue to defend all our games in the interest of maintaining a fair-play environment.” Original Story May 7, 2016: Bossland, the creators of various hacks for Blizzard games have been sued and counter-sued across the last half-decade. They developed the Buddy series of cheats for World of Warcraft, Diablo, Heroes of the Storm and more, and now Blizzard have decided to take them to court in California over their Overwatch ‘ESP’ tool – effectively a wallhack that also adds an all-seeing radar. In the suit, as detailed on TorrentFreak, Blizzard say that Bossland have authorised freelancers to break copyright to develop hacks for Overwatch. In doing so, Blizzard claim their business and customers have been directly harmed, not only because of the existence of the hack but how quickly it was released. Therefore they want damages to be paid. The hack itself isn’t currently active, as after Blizzard’s first Overwatch banwave it was taken offline in the hopes of developing more counter-measures to remain undetected. Since the start of June, those who have paid for the tool – at about $15 a month – have had no access to it. It’s not even Bossland’s only current legal battle with this developer, as CEO Zwetan Letschew tells TorrentFreak there are “over 10 ongoing legal battles in Germany already.” He says that a Californian court will have no jurisdiction over his company as they have no official business in the US, despite selling their product to customers there. Of those ongoing battles, Blizzard recently lost one regarding Heroes of the Storm, with two others reaching a critical point on October 6. |
We hate seeing things go to waste. Instead of letting an old single-speed rot in a landfill somewhere, why not deconstruct that thing and salvage some of it? We’re not saying you have to do it yourself, you could just open up your wallet (the one made from an old inner tube) and buy some stuff to support the people who do. Here’s some of the best upcycled cycle gear to get you started. 1. Hangers Made From Bike Wheel Rims – $25 2. Bicycle Clock – $36 3. Recycled Inner Tube Toiletry Kit – $33 4. Hipster Upcycled Bike Tube Keychain – $10 5. Rubber Bands Made From Bicycle Tires – $6 6. Upcycled Bike Fork Bottle Opener – $25 7. Antique Style Bicycle Chain Cufflinks – $82 8. Bike Valve Key Rack – $32 9. Bike Chain Bowl – $72 10. Recycled Inner Tube Wallet – $36 11. Recycled Bicycle Chain Bottle Opener – $11 |
Chinese consumers have flocked to Apple's contactless payment solution in the weeks since its debut, with one bank reporting that more than 3 million cards were activated on Apple Pay in the first 2 days of availability. The activation figures come via China Merchants Bank, one of the country's largest financial institutions. Its customers were responsible for approximately 1 million activations —around one third of the total."I would rate our first-day performance as 1,000, if the full score is 100," Apple Pay chief Jennifer Bailey told Chinese press, as noted by Internet Retailer.The biggest beneficiaries of Apple Pay's launch were said to be Groupon competitors Meituan and Dianping, Starbucks, convenience store chain FamilyMart, and McDonald's.On average, Apple Pay users in China spent just over $15 each during the launch period. One web-based retailer booked more than 10,000 Apple Pay orders.In all, nearly 20 banks representing 80 percent of UnionPay cards issued in China are on board with Apple Pay. |
What we are witnessing, in the broadest sense, is the bankruptcy of modern economics. Its conceit has been that we had solved the problem of stability. Oh, there would be periodic recessions, but the prospects of a major economic collapse were negligible because we knew how the system worked and could take steps to prevent it. What's been so unsettling about the present crisis is that it has not conformed to the standard model of business cycles and has not submitted to familiar textbook solutions. A hallmark of the crisis has been the stark contrast between the "real economy" of production and jobs and the tumultuous financial markets of stocks, bonds, banks, money funds and the like. Even with the 60 percent drop in housing construction since early 2006, the real economy has so far suffered only modest setbacks. Yes, there are 605,000 fewer payroll jobs than there were in December; still, 137.5 million jobs remain. Meanwhile, financial markets verge on hysteria. The question is whether this hysteria will drive the real economy into a deep recession or worse -- and what we can do to prevent that. The word that best epitomizes mainstream "macroeconomics" (the study of the entire economy, not individual markets) is demand. If weak demand left the economy in a slump, government could rectify the situation by stimulating more demand through tax cuts, higher spending or lower interest rates. If excess demand created inflation, government could suppress it by cutting demand through more taxes, less spending or higher interest rates. Economists of this tradition watch consumer and business behavior. Are car sales soft? How much are companies raising prices? What about profits? The $152 billion "stimulus" program earlier this year was a classic exercise in "demand management." It didn't work well mainly because this crisis originated in frightened financial markets. Massive losses on mortgage-related securities caused some financial institutions to fail. As fear spread, financial institutions grew wary of dealing with each other because no one knew who was solvent and who wasn't. To Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson and Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke, this financial breakdown now threatens the real economy. Companies depend on bank borrowings and sales of commercial paper (in effect, short-term bonds) to conduct everyday business -- to buy inventories, to pay suppliers and workers before cash arrives from sales. Credit markets were freezing, Paulson and Bernanke decided. Panicky investors were shifting from commercial paper to Treasury bills; banks weren't lending to each other. If it continued, consumers and firms wouldn't get essential credit. If you reject that conclusion, then the whole crisis has been a contrived farce. Some economists do; they note that downturns always involve losses and disruptions. This one isn't so different. But many economists agree with Paulson and Bernanke. "If we can't calm down short-term credit markets, we're looking at a pretty severe recession," says Michael Mussa of the Peterson Institute for International Economics. "If businesses can't roll over their short-term debt, [they] ask where can we cut back" -- firing workers, reducing spending -- "to avoid bankruptcy." Unfortunately, we lack experience with stabilizing financial markets, and the issue has been at the fringes of economics. Mostly, markets should operate freely. When is intervention justified? How? Of course, economists recognized that the Federal Reserve should act as a "lender of last resort" and that permitting two-fifths of banks to fail in the 1930s aggravated the Depression. But the creation in 1933 of deposit insurance (now up to $100,000) was thought to prevent most bank runs, and the "lender of last resort" role never anticipated a worldwide financial system that mediated credit not just through banks but also through hedge funds, private equity funds, investment banks and many other channels. In congressional testimony last week, Bernanke admitted the Fed has been "shocked" at how elastic the "lender of last resort" role has become. The resulting intellectual vacuum has spawned political chaos. Unpleasant and untested ideas invite opposition. Paulson's plan to buy up to $700 billion of impaired securities is wildly unpopular. It may not work and raises many problems. If the government pays too little for the securities, financial failures may mount; if it pays too much, it may create windfall profits for some investors and losses for taxpayers. But Paulson's plan has better prospects for restoring confidence by removing suspect securities from balance sheets than suggested alternatives would. Selective injections of capital into banks, for instance, might involve favoritism and operate too slowly to improve confidence. Psychology matters. The economy will get worse. Mussa thinks unemployment (now 6.1 percent) could peak near 7 percent; other projections are higher. The harder question is whether financial turmoil heralds an era of instability. Our leaders are making up their responses from day to day because old ideas of how the economy works have failed them. These ideas were not necessarily wrong, but they're grievously inadequate at the moment. |
A mob of mosquitoes is a “scourge.” And the cardboard tube Jodi Holeman holds in her hands buzzes with more than enough mosquitoes to fill a scourge’s ranks—a thousand, to be exact. She uncaps the cylinder and taps gently, encouraging the stragglers out. “Get to work, boys,” she says. On this Tuesday morning in July, Holeman and her colleagues at the Consolidated Mosquito Abatement District are releasing 20 tubes full of mosquitoes in Clovis, California, at the northern tip of Fresno County in the Central Valley. They do this twice weekly, bringing a scourge upon the same 20 spots in the same subdivision, where the two-car-garage houses range in color from beige to brown. By summer's end, they will have blanketed the subdivision with 400,000 mosquitoes. The point of this? To rid the neighborhood of mosquitoes. Counterintuitive, sure. But these are no ordinary mosquitoes. They’re not locals, for one: They were flown in that night from Kentucky, where the biotech startup MosquitoMate breeds mosquitoes carrying a bacterium called Wolbachia within their cells. And the mosquitoes in the tube are all male. Once Holeman sets them free, the idea is that they’ll mate with local females that don’t carry Wolbachia. And the offspring won’t be able to hatch. WIRED This is all a big experiment. The district hopes the Wolbachia-infected male mosquitoes will become a vital tool against Aedes aegypti, a mosquito species invading the US that can carry diseases like dengue, yellow fever, chikungunya, and Zika. As temperatures rise, Aedes aegypti could push further north, bringing these diseases to communities that have never experienced them. Like in Florida, where some travelers to Latin America have returned with Zika and mosquitoes are now—officials said this week—transmitting Zika to locals. In July, Fresno County saw its first case of travel-related Zika. The disease is generally mild, but can cause birth defects. Nobody wants Zika to keep spreading. To prevent an incursion, scientists have spent years—decades, even—exploring ways to kill mosquitoes and the diseases they carry. In Brazil, where the risk of Zika and other mosquito-borne diseases is high, scientists have tested genetically modified mosquitoes that are sterile. But in the US, a proposal to test the insects in Florida remains stuck within the gears of the Food and Drug Administration, which regulates genetically modified animals. Last year, the FDA approved its first genetically modified animal, a salmon. It took 20 years. The route MosquitoMate is following in Clovis is less fraught. And it involves a different agency. Earlier this summer, the company submitted data to the Environmental Protection Agency to get Wolbachia in a related mosquito, Aedes albopictus, approved as a pesticide—an easier process than the FDA's. Three states had already tested Aedes albopictus. If the Wolbachia-infected Aedes aegypti work in Clovis, approval for that species could follow. Together, they could herald a new wave of mosquito-control strategies. But will it work with this new mosquito? To get a brood of doomed eggs, you must get these males to mate. These bugs have spent their lives in a lab and the last 12 hours crowded in cardboard tubes—so they’re not exactly studs. “It’s a numbers game,” says Holeman. To increase the odds, the district will release orders of magnitude more males than there are females in the district. So: 400,000 male mosquitoes, released over 10 weeks and 120 acres of suburban landscape. That’s the plan. Hopefully, it will be enough. Consolidated Mosquito Abatement District An Obscure Bacteria Stephen Dobson has spent most of his life studying an obscure microbe that lives inside insects. His PhD: Wolbachia. Twenty years of lab work: Wolbachia. It’s not as unimaginative as it sounds. For evolutionary biologists, Wolbachia is the best kind of puzzle. It not only lives in insects; it lives inside their cells, passed down from mother to offspring. Humans have such bacteria, or remnants of them, inside their cells, too. Mitochondria were once free-living bacteria that found refuge inside animal cells, and they remain a key part of cells' energy-processing machinery. Studying Wolbachia offers a window into the symbiosis between bacteria and insects—a niche topic, sure, but exactly the kind of basic research question a scientist like Dobson can happily burrow into for decades. Scientists still aren’t exactly sure what Wolbachia does inside insect cells. Years into his research, Dobson noticed that when mosquitoes infected by different strains of Wolbachia—or one with Wolbachia and one without—mated, it interfered with how DNA duplicates. The eggs never hatched. This wasn’t just a niche research question anymore; this could be a new way to control mosquitoes. Stained light micrograph of a wasp egg infected with Wolbachia. Merijn Salverda and Richard Stouthamer/Science Source He began mixing and matching different strains of Wolbachia in different mosquito species. Aedes aegypti does not naturally carry the bacteria, so in 2005, his lab created the first line of Wolbachia-infected Aedes aegypti by injecting the bacteria into mosquito eggs. Once the bacteria is within the cells, it passes from mother to offspring. The mosquitoes Holeman is releasing descend from these original Wolbachia-infected ones. By 2013, Dobson had founded MosquitoMate. That year, at an Aedes aegypti conference in Panama City, he ran into Steve Mulligan, the longtime manager of the Consolidated Mosquito Abatement District. They’d long known each other from meetings like this. But this year, for the first time, Mulligan had an Aedes aegypti problem. Months before, Holeman received a call from a neighboring mosquito-control district office. Employees there had picked up an unusual bug in a trap, and they wanted her to confirm the species. Sure enough, she saw *Aedes aegypti'*s distinct black-and-white-striped legs. Consolidated Mosquito Abatement District Soon after Holeman identified that mosquito, her district started finding Aedes aegypti in its traps, too. Mulligan knew he had to act quickly, before Aedes aegypti made a home in Clovis. This species isn’t just a disease carrier: It’s also hardier and more aggressive than most other mosquitoes. Aedes aegypti bite during the day, not just at dusk and dawn. They love biting humans especially. And they need only the smallest amounts of water to lay their eggs—the water in the dish under a potted plant is sufficient. District employees went door to door in the neighborhood looking for water sources, emptying small ones and spraying bigger ones—abandoned swimming pools were common after foreclosures hit Clovis—with pesticides. “We basically threw everything we had at it, and it didn’t do anything,” says Holeman. Even the cold winter didn’t kill them. Aedes aegypti was in Clovis for good. When Mulligan and Dobson ran into each other in Panama City, each found the partner they were looking for. MosquitoMate needed someone to test the sterile Aedes aegypti; Clovis needed some way of eliminating Aedes aegypti. Before Mulligan started trying to eradicate mosquitos in Clovis a quarter-century ago, he studied pesticides at the University of California. The pesticides he tested are still being used today. “Sterile insects, I think they’re the way of the future,” says Mulligan. The district received an experimental use permit from the EPA and California’s department of pesticide regulation, and their study started in June. Versus GM Mosquitoes When Holeman and Mulligan go around releasing mosquitoes, they’re quick to greet passersby and explain what they’re doing. A person standing in the street letting out swarms of insects is a weird sight. A few residents have complained about the buzzing insects. Although the males don’t bite humans—only females need human blood to nourish their developing eggs—they like to follow people and buzz in their ears. Others complain about government meddling with the environment. Yet by and large, says Holeman, most people are happy somebody is doing something about the mosquito problem. Like one man who was out on a walk, pulling his toddler in a toy car. “Oh good, the mosquitoes are killing us,” he said, before moving on. Before the district started releasing mosquitoes, the team went door to door three times leaving flyers on doors explaining the project and announcing a community meeting to answer questions. One person showed up. Two others came only after Mulligan called them. He and Holeman are trying to get people on board with the Wolbachia mosquitoes. “Even if it’s very effective,” says Holeman, “if residents aren’t supportive, it’s going to be very difficult to implement.” WIRED Community support will be key as the EPA considers MosquitoMate’s applications for the use of Wolbachia-infected mosquitoes. The application has received 10 comments, at least three of them from people who confused the Wolbachia mosquitoes with genetically modified insects. For example: “I'm 100 percent against this plan to release GMO mosquitos in FL.” If Clovis were experimenting with genetically modified mosquitoes, the scene might look different. The plan that comment referred was in the Florida Keys, where the biotech company Oxitec is attempting to release its GM mosquitoes in a field trial—it would be the first in the US. An online petition against the release garnered over 150,000 signatures, and opponents swarmed community meetings carrying “No Consent” signs. Oxitec has received more than 1,200 public comments on the FDA’s assessment about mosquitoes’ environmental impact. (The FDA found no significant impact, but that hasn’t cleared the roadblocks.) “I’m an entomologist. I understand insects a lot better than I understand people,” says Dobson. “But it appears people are less resistant to the Wolbachia approach because it’s non-GMO, because it’s a naturally occurring bacterium.” It’s not just people that he needs to convince, though. The EPA has never dealt with a “pesticide” like this before. “We kind of blew their minds,” says Dobson, who has been working with the agency on the application since 2008. “This has been a long process, a lot of emails, a lot of flights, a lot of stacks of paper going back and forth.” Dobson says he expects approval in a few months, which would let mosquito-control districts in the US add the method to their arsenal against Aedes albopictus. As for the Wolbachia-infected Aedes aegypti in Clovis, MosquitoMate has sought permits for additional tests in California and Florida. If those go well, MosquitoMate will ask the EPA to approve its mosquitoes as a pesticide as well. WIRED Elsewhere in the world, China is releasing millions of Wolbachia-infected Aedes albopictus mosquitoes every week. And entomologists with the project Eliminate Dengue are taking advantage of another quirk of Wolbachia: its ability to prevent mosquitoes from passing the Zika, dengue, and yellow fever viruses onto humans. The downside is the number of mosquitoes remains unchanged, so they keep biting and biting. The upside is that this method is cheaper; a one-time release of female mosquitoes can infect an entire population with Wolbachia, whereas males must be continuously released. These projects all come back to the same goal: creating a new tool to control mosquitoes carrying diseases. So on a 105-degree day, Holeman’s team is out in the sun, releasing scourges and scourges of mosquitoes. |
If you’re wondering why Republicans in Congress seem disturbingly complacent about the unhinged President and the exploding Watergate-level (or worse) constitutional crises starting to brew, check out the February 15 Full Frontal show on TBS. As host Samantha Bee explains, while people focus their outrage on big ticket offenses like Russian interference with our elections, Congress is, as we speak, quietly destroying multiple Obama-era public protections. It’s a Koch-organized effort that has Republicans in Congress, as she puts it, going “hog wild” passing new laws to harm the public’s health, safety and economic security. For example, one new law allows “coal companies to dump debris into nearby streams. Who the f*%# asked for that?” No one. Nor did we send politicians to Washington to rig the civil courts against everyday Americans, or strip away legal rights guaranteed by state and local governments. Yet just a couple hours before Full Frontal aired, the House Judiciary Committee finished-up a day-long session, which it began and ended by voting out two bills that would do just that - demolish our legal rights. The Republican Chairman of the House Judiciary Committee – a committee which, in 1974, was a distinguished institution that protected the nation by impeaching Richard Nixon with a bi-partisan vote – spent most of yesterday swatting away Democrats’ attempts to refocus the committee on urgent issues under their jurisdiction. (Just watch for awhile.) Then, the Republican majority voted out two anti-civil justice bills that no voters asked them to pass. Even small businesses have made it repeatedly clear that these are non-issues for them. They appear to be important only to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and paid business lobbyists, and a small number of the Chamber’s super-rich industry members who have liability exposure for harming the public, and who pay the Chamber (in some cases) millions of dollars to lobby for them. Democrats on the committee, led by the indefatigable ranking member, Rep. John Conyers (D-MI), who is the last remaining member of the Nixon impeachment committee, voted “no” on each of these bills. They did so because each one would endanger the health, safety and economic security of hard-working Americans. One bill (H.R. 906) would present extreme hardship to asbestos victims and their families, violating their privacy and delaying or denying legitimate claims so that dying victims – many of whom are Navy vets exposed while working on ships – are never compensated. Indeed, this bill is strongly opposed by veterans groups, as well as consumer, privacy, occupational safety and health groups, and a huge list of actual victims (none of whom support this bill). You can find those substantial letters of opposition here. The second bill (H.R. 985) would, as over 70 consumer, labor, legal and environmental groups put it, [O]bliterate class actions in America. It was introduced less than a week ago. The fact that the Committee would even consider such sweeping, reckless legislation without holding a single hearing is an outrage.… Class action lawsuits are among the most important tools to enable harmed, cheated and violated individuals and small businesses to hold large corporations and institutions accountable and deter future misconduct. H.R. 985 would annihilate that tool. Strongly opposing this bill are over 120 civil rights organizations, as well as disability groups, legal scholars and small businesses. Incredibly, just two weeks ago this same committee voted out other harmful anti-civil justice measures, which again, no one asked for except gigantic business lobbies. So to parrot Sam Bee’s question, “Who the f*%# asked for all of these bills?,” I think we know. Big corporations that injure, cheat, defraud, violate and otherwise harm people, do not want to be held accountable in court. It’s pretty simple. But consumer, civil rights, environmental, labor, legal, and a range of other public interest organizations are pushing back. They represent the public’s strong belief that large companies would cut corner and risk the public’s safety and economic security if corporate liability and accountability were weakened, as each of these bill would do. |
SHANGHAI (Reuters) - As a flood of unregulated cash swirls through the Chinese economy, Beijing has been taking aim at the trust companies whose unrestrained lending practices are worrying regulators. FILE PHOTO: The company logo of China Cinda Asset Management Co Ltd is displayed at a news conference on the company's annual results in Hong Kong, China March 30, 2016. REUTERS/Bobby Yip/File Photo The trusts, at the heart of a vast shadow banking industry, are being pressured to step up compliance and background checks, and are being pushed towards greater transparency. But the fast-growing 20 trillion yuan ($3 trillion) industry, whose lending operations are cloaked behind opaque structures, will be tough to rein in, according to employees at some trusts. A regulatory sanction against one trust, Shanghai International Trust, and a legal case against another, National Trust, offer rare insights into the industry, and reveals just how hard it will be to police it. Shanghai Trust was fined 200,000 yuan for selling a product that violated leverage rules, according to a regulator’s notice in January. Regulators provided no further details about the case. Under these rules, property developers are only allowed to borrow up to three times their existing net assets. According to two people with direct knowledge of the case, an unknown sum was loaned by China Construction Bank (601939.SS) through Shanghai Trust to Cinda Asset Management Company. Cinda then invested the cash. One of the sources said Cinda used the cash to acquire land, a sector rife with speculation that regulators have singled out as a “risky” destination for trust company loans. The source provided no further details. Shanghai Trust, Cinda, CCB and the China Banking Regulatory Commission (CBRC) declined to comment for this story. STEEL LOANS The case against National Trust, which had revenue of 655 million yuan in 2016, involves wealth management products linked to the steel industry. The trust was sued in June this year by eight investors who allege it misrepresented the risks involved in products it sold them and failed to adequately assess the guarantor’s creditworthiness. The trust skirted restrictions on loans to the steel industry by using the products to raise money to lend to a subsidiary of Bohai Steel Group, according to Tang Chunlin, a lawyer at Yingke Law Firm, who is representing the investors. The plaintiffs invested different sums in the wealth management products, which National Trust promised would deliver an annual return of over 9 percent. National Trust lent the money collected to a Bohai subsidiary, Tianjin Iron and Steel Group Co, according to documents reviewed by Reuters. Bohai Steel Group, which is undergoing a state-financed restructuring, has liabilities of around 192 billion yuan. National Trust has now defaulted on the product, according to Tang and Gongyu Zhou, one of the eight investors, because Tianjin Iron and Steel is unable to pay back its loan.The products were also illegally sold via third-party non-financial institutions, Tang and Zhou said. Zhou said he invested one million yuan in the product over two years from 2015 through 360caifu.com, an online finance platform. Bohai Steel Group, Tianjin Iron and Steel and 360caifu.com did not respond to requests for comment. National Trust declined to comment. STRUCTURAL CONCERNS One of the biggest challenges facing regulators is that many trusts employ a baffling array of structures, and funnel money through complex webs of beneficiaries, which makes untangling transactions extremely difficult. Nine people working at trusts, including the two with knowledge of the Shanghai Trust case, said such complex structures were often deliberately used to sidestep lending restrictions on banks and borrowers. “Really, only the project manager knows exactly how the money flows,” said a senior employee at one trust firm. The source and others at the trust firms could not be named because they were not allowed to speak to the public. INSURANCE LINK The practices of the trusts, and the speed at which the industry is growing, have made them a target for Beijing as it tries to keep a lid on risky lending, cool overheated markets and control corporate debt. In April, Deng Zhiyi, head of the CBRC’s trust department, warned of “severe risks” from funds flowing into the real estate, coal and steel sectors through trusts. The industry is now roughly a tenth the size of China’s commercial banking sector. While the companies are overseen by the CBRC, they are not held to the same standards as banks. For example, they do not have to meet the same capital adequacy standards. However, the regulator set out in detail in April certain structures that the trusts should not use, such as money-pooling schemes and structuring products to avoid restrictions on leverage. That was “a signal for financial institutions that from a legal and enforcement perspective, we are entering a stricter period,” said Armstrong Chen, financial compliance partner at King & Wood Mallesons. Trust firms will also have to start registering the details of their products, identifying the ultimate borrower of funds, this year, said Chen, who is in regular contact with the regulators. Chen said the requirement would improve transparency, but people at trust firms say it will still be difficult to detect the use of the under-the-table agreements typical of the industry. The Shanghai Trust case also reflected the tougher line being taken by regulators. The fine would have been negligible for the state-owned company, one of the largest trusts with a total of 3.89 billion yuan in revenue at the end of 2016. But according to three different sources with direct knowledge, Shanghai Trust was also barred from selling products to insurers for three years, a blow to a company that had made considerable sums selling products to the sector in recent years. One insurer invested as much as 10 billion yuan in just one of its property projects, according to one of the sources. COMPLIANCE EFFORTS Some of the trusts are already responding to the government pressure. Anxin Trust (600816.SS) is increasing the number of onsite visits by staff and has doubled its compliance team, said a person with direct knowledge of the company’s activities. The trust is also looking at less risky deals – in healthcare, for example, rather than the more volatile property sector. A spokesman for Anxin said managing risk was a priority for the trust. China Industrial International Trust is requiring staff to include photos of site visits to prevent them from faking trips. Documents have to be signed by all participants face-to-face, said a person with direct knowledge of the company’s operations. The company declined to comment. Despite these changes, the government’s job managing the trusts keeps growing. In the first half of this year, trust loans increased by 1.31 trillion yuan, which compared with 279.2 billion in the period last year, according to central bank figures. That growth will be a challenge for the regulator, which is already facing staff shortages as it struggles to keep up with a broader official crackdown on financial risk. The trusts see more boom times ahead. “The demand for trust loans is increasing,” an internal report at a large trust firm in May said. “In the past, state-owned-enterprises would not consider such loans, but are now considering them,” said the report, adding that the trend started in March. A source made the report available to Reuters on the condition the name of the company was not disclosed. |
If Tim Ferriss wrote a chess improvement book, he might name it “The 4-Hour Chess Master” to match his other 4-Hour books that talk about doing a complete full-time job in just four hours a week. After befriending Josh Waitzkin (the subject of Searching For Bobby Fischer), and making two long-form podcast with him (along with doing it with other experts), he is converting the lessons from the podcasts into his just released book: Tools For Titans. For Josh Waitzkin chess fans, two recent promotional videos for the book may be of special interest to chess fans for how chess lessons (among other Josh experiences) apply to life. They’re linked here: The original two podcasts are here: Real chess game analysis (with Josh narrating) is also available on YouTube, like this first lesson, in a series: These videos seek to “maximize output by minimizing input”. Advertisements |
The boring stack, the fun architecture Philippe Lehoux Blocked Unblock Follow Following Jun 26, 2017 What stack are we using to power Missive? As an email/chat app where hundreds… thousands of events occur at any given time for a user… it must be crazy right? It must be magical. I wouldn’t go as far as saying that we have another dirty little secret, but we are as conservative on the back end as we are on the front end. The back end is mostly just plain Ruby workers and a RESTful Rails API. We’re managing emails, live chat, live read/archived status for each team member on all conversations with mostly GET requests. How can we not DD0S our own servers with hundreds of requests per second? Well, that’s the fun part: the architecture. Keeping things fresh One of the biggest challenge we encountered while building Missive was to find creative ways to keep the many front end clients up to date with our data store. When using a RESTful API, if your clients don’t keep an open connection to it, they need to poll for changes every x seconds. This strategy is good enough for a lot of use cases, but in ours, we wanted to offer a live interface. Polling did not cut it. To simulate that open connection and notify the clients of new content, we started using the Pusher platform. Every time a resource changes, we push a small message to each concerned client. We do so by doing a unique POST request to Pusher whenever a resource changes. Since each client has the responsibility to keep a persistent connection with Pusher, they can all receive that message instantly. Each client keeps an open connection to Pusher For example, when the name of a mailbox changes on IMAP, and the change is synced to our servers, we broadcast a mailboxes-updated Pusher message to the concerned clients. The clients react by issuing a GET /mailboxes request. The API serializes and returns all mailboxes the user has access to, thus updating the one that changed on IMAP. For resources that don’t change often, this simplistic approach is fun to work with. You just need to broadcast a generic message that describes the changed resource to have all clients update themselves. It’s not that simple As good as this strategy is for resources that don’t change often, it would be catastrophic for endpoints with continuous changes like marking an email as read, archiving, or posting chat comments. It would be unbearable if each of these POST actions from one user resulted in 20 GET requests when 20 of this user’s coworkers are online. Plus, if each of those 20 users read and mark that conversation as read, we are potentially looking at 20 read actions * 20 users = 400 GET ! We can’t really rate limit these GET requests. Remember, we want a live app. So to make things live without flooding our API with GET requests we extensively use another cool Pusher feature: peer-to-peer channels. Each client establishes a persistent connection with other online members of its organization through that organization’s P2P Pusher channel. Each member maintains a P2P connection with the other members of his Missive organization Every time a live action is triggered, like posting a comment, the client broadcasts the action to the related organization channel. Each listening client renders the new comment in the related conversation using just the P2P-broadcasted data. When user A posts a comment, user B instantly sees it without querying the API. The broadcasted message also contains the action_id . The action_id is unique to each action. They are stored by each client that successfully processes the action (e.g. the new comment). Now that all clients have instantly been updated, the comment needs to be persisted on the server. The client does a POST /comments request, appending the action_id to the payload. Then the API persists the comment and broadcasts a conversations-updated message also including the client-provided action_id . Thus, each client receiving the conversations-updated message can test if it needs to do a GET /conversations by looking at the given action_id . If they already have the action_id in their cache, bingo! They don’t have to because they already processed the action. There are few reasons why the API broadcasts a conversations-updated to everyone after the client has already broadcasted a peer-to-peer message. One of them being if a client has no access to the conversation yet, it needs to first fetch it from the API. Privacy Right now “some” of you might be thinking: Aren’t you broadcasting all comments in a single shared P2P channel, how do you manage privacy and accesses? Good question, it’s true that not everyone from an organization has access to all of the organization conversations. To provide that level of privacy while using the public organization channel, we encrypt the broadcasted data using a secret key unique to each conversation. Yellow user client discards the broadcasted message since it can’t decode it. |
1 year ago Can't wait for the new RT community site functionality to hit -- the tech team is really working hard on an amazing overhaul of everything. With the site update coming soon, now's a great time to get back into the swing o' things and start posting random little stuff again. So, in the spirit of that... There was a FastCo article recently about gen:LOCK that had some images, including the first character turnaround from the show. But they only went with the low-rez pictures. So here ya go, this is a higher-rez version of the show's first character sheet! This is Chase. He's a combat aviator before he joins the gL project, and this is him in his flight suit. We'll start making more noise about gL in the new year. But, y'know, mmmaybe we'll keep throwing a few breadcrumbs out here'n'there in the meantime. Like, oh, say, storyboards for ep1 started this week. More later, g. |
A decade after launching it, the EU is trying to bring new life to its Neighbourhood Policy (ENP), which has been rendered largely irrelevant by developments in Ukraine and around the Mediterranean. EU foreign affairs chief Federica Mogherini and neighbourhood commissioner Johannes Hahn launched Wednesday (4 March) an ideas paper on the EU strategy towards its neighbours in the east and south. "There is no way in which our partnership with Eastern countries can be perceived as confrontational", said Mogherini. (Photo: europarl.europa.eu) The EU member states, the 16 ENP partner countries and civil society in the East and South of Europe will be involved in the assessment of the actions undertaken so far. A first consultation with the southern neighbourhood will take place in Barcelona in April. The Eastern Parternship will be reviewed at a summit in Riga in May. A full proposal for a renewed strategy to spend will be presented next autumn. Over €15 billion have already been budgeted for the period 2014-2020. Region in flames "Our region is in flames", said Mogherini at a common press conference with Hahn, referring to the wars in Ukraine and Syria and the ongoing turmoil in Libya. In the aftermath of the Arab Spring, political instability in Egypt and Lebanon and the deadlock in the Israel-Palestine peace process are also indications that the EU failed to stabilised its neighbourhood. Even in Moldova, considered the best pupil so far of the Eastern class, the EU seems to be losing its touch. Two weeks ago, a controversial businessman formed a minority government with the help of the anti-European Communist party. "The ENP has not always been able to offer adequate responses to these recent developments, nor to the changing aspirations of our partners", says the paper launching the policy revision process. "Therefore, the EU’s own interests have not been fully served either". Mogherini and Hahn emphasized the need for dialogue with the ENP partner countries. "We have many very good reasons to maintain very good relations with our neighbours. The new ENP must reflect the views and experience of our partners. It must not be patronising and condescending", said Hahn. The commissioner added however that the EU must "stress its own interest when it discusses with its partners". Protecting Europe Whereas the Neighborhood Policy has until now mainly been about projecting EU soft power to help develop democratic standards and free trade, the focus now is set to be more on protecting Europe from the consequences of its neighbourhood instability. In future, the EU should put "a new emphasis on energy security and organised crime", as well as terrorism and the management of migration flows, said Hahn. The EU is also considering co-operating with "the neighbours of the neighbours". In a clear reference to energy issues, the consultation paper mentions "Russia and partners in Central Asia". The paper also suggests that the ENP could conduct "post-conflict actions as well as related state-and institution-building activities". In a neighbourhood which is "less stable than ten years ago", the EU will shift from generic policies to differentiated approaches with its Eastern and Southern neighbourhoods as well as between countries in these two regions. "In a number of areas, the reform agenda has stalled, in part due to competing interests, in part because not all partners seem equally interested in a special partnership with the EU under the model of pluralism and integration", says the paper. The EU "needs to move from an approach very much based on the evaluation of progress to a more political approach", said Mogherini. This assessment might particularly apply to the situation in Ukraine, where the negotiations for an association agreement were apparently conducted with little strategic anticipation. The EU’s foreign relations chief refused to say however that the bloc had been "naive or confrontational" in its dealing with Ukraine. "Self-criticism will be part of the assessment", she said. But "we also have to underline the strong points". Russia The elephant in the room in this assessment process will be Russia, which is not an ENP partner but is engaged in a strategic confrontation with the EU over the Eastern part of the programme. "There is no way in which our partnership with Eastern countries can be perceived as confrontational", said Mogherini. "This cannot be used as a pretext to violate international laws. The door of European cooperation is always open also for Russia. The principle is you have to show respect to international laws and principles to be perceived as a key player international and region player", she added. |
The first cards from BW5 Dragon Blade / Dragon Blast have been revealed! The card images below were collected by Viper.Fox from the official TCG site and translations are also below thanks to Dorian Black. The sets and their 30-card decks will be released in Japan on March 16th. Garchomp (#040/050), Altaria (#036), Emolga, Slaking, and their pre-evolutions will be in Dragon Blade while Hydreigon (#040/050), Ambipom, Durant, and Devolution Spray will be in Dragon Blast. Yes, it looks like Devolution Spray from Base Set is returning, though the text is too small to read to see if it is exactly the same card as before. Cards from the set’s two 30-card theme decks were also revealed: Hydreigon, Roserade, Devolution Spray, and Rare Candy will come in the Hydreigon deck while Garchomp, Gabite, and Rare Candy are confirmed in the Garchomp deck. If you buy a booster box of either set from stores, you can get a Ninetailes promo, which will also be in one of the sets but with different artwork. As usual, the Dragon Pokemon have completely random Energy costs. We’re supposed to get a new Energy in this set – if we get a Dragon Energy, who wants to bet it’ll be a sort of Rainbow Energy for Dragon-types? How else are these going to be viable? These cards reference the Dragon-type in their text for the first time. Since “D,” “R,” “G,” are all taken for Energy-types, we have decided to use “N” for these card spoilers. |
**View Top 50 Brewing Companies in 2017 Press Release** Boulder, CO • March 15, 2017—The Brewers Association (BA)—the not-for-profit trade group representing small and independent craft brewers—today released its annual lists of the top 50 craft and overall brewing companies in the U.S., based on beer sales volume. Of the top 50 overall brewing companies, 40 were craft brewing companies.1 “With such a broad range of brewers in today’s beer landscape, the leading small and independent producers have helped build the craft brewing industry to what it is today,” said Bart Watson, chief economist, Brewers Association. “Embracing their experience and ability to thrive and overcome challenges, the top producing craft brewers will continue to inspire, innovate and influence the future of beer.” View & Download Map of Top 50 Top 50 Craft Brewing Companies Rank Brewing Company City State 1 D. G. Yuengling & Son, Inc Pottsville PA 2 Boston Beer Co Boston MA 3 Sierra Nevada Brewing Co Chico CA 4 New Belgium Brewing Co Fort Collins CO 5 Gambrinus San Antonio TX 6 Duvel Moortgat Paso Robles/Kansas City/Cooperstown CA/MO/NY 7 Bell’s Brewery, Inc Comstock MI 8 Deschutes Brewery Bend OR 9 Stone Brewing Co Escondido CA 10 Oskar Blues Brewing Holding Co Longmont CO 11 Brooklyn Brewery Brooklyn NY 12 Minhas Craft Brewery Monroe WI 13 Artisanal Brewing Ventures Downingtown/Lakewood PA/NY 14 Dogfish Head Craft Brewery Milton DE 15 SweetWater Brewing Co Atlanta GA 16 New Glarus Brewing Co New Glarus WI 17 Matt Brewing Co Utica NY 18 Harpoon Brewery Boston MA 19 Alaskan Brewing Juneau AK 20 Abita Brewing Co Abita Springs LA 21 Great Lakes Brewing Co Cleveland OH 22 Anchor Brewing Co San Francisco CA 23 Stevens Point Brewery Stevens Point WI 24 August Schell Brewing Co New Ulm MN 24 Long Trail Brewing Co Bridgewater Corners VT 26 Summit Brewing Co Saint Paul MN 27 Odell Brewing Co Fort Collins CO 28 Shipyard Brewing Co Portland ME 29 Full Sail Brewing Co Hood River OR 30 Rogue Ales Newport OR 31 21st Amendment Brewery Bay Area CA 32 Flying Dog Brewery Frederick MD 33 Ninkasi Brewing Co Eugene OR 34 Gordon Biersch Brewing Co San Jose CA 35 Allagash Brewing Co Portland ME 36 Narragansett Brewing Co Providence RI 37 Green Flash Brewing Co San Diego CA 38 Tröegs Brewing Co Hershey PA 39 Uinta Brewing Co Salt Lake City UT 40 Bear Republic Brewing Co Cloverdale CA 41 Karl Strauss Brewing Co San Diego CA 42 Surly Brewing Co Minneapolis MN 43 Sixpoint Brewery Brooklyn NY 44 Left Hand Brewing Co Longmont CO 45 Lost Coast Brewery Eureka CA 46 Revolution Brewing Chicago IL 47 North Coast Brewing Co Fort Bragg CA 48 Avery Brewing Co Boulder CO 49 Real Ale Brewing Co Blanco TX 50 BJ’s Brewery Huntington Beach CA Top 50 Overall Brewing Companies Rank Brewing Company City State 1 Anheuser-Busch, Inc (a) Saint Louis MO 2 MillerCoors (b) Chicago IL 3 Pabst Brewing Co (c) Los Angeles CA 4 D. G. Yuengling & Son, Inc Pottsville PA 5 North American Breweries (d) Rochester NY 6 Boston Beer Co (e) Boston MA 7 Sierra Nevada Brewing Co Chico CA 8 New Belgium Brewing Co Fort Collins CO 9 Lagunitas Brewing Co (f) Petaluma CA 10 Craft Brew Alliance (g) Portland OR 11 Gambrinus (h) San Antonio TX 12 Duvel Moortgat (i) Paso Robles/Kansas City/Cooperstown CA/MO/NY 13 Ballast Point Brewing Co (j) San Diego CA 14 Bell’s Brewery, Inc (k) Comstock MI 15 Deschutes Brewery Bend OR 16 Founders Brewing Co (l) Grand Rapids MI 17 Stone Brewing Co Escondido CA 18 Oskar Blues Brewing Holding Co (m) Longmont CO 19 Sapporo USA (n) La Crosse WI 20 Brooklyn Brewery Brooklyn NY 21 Minhas Craft Brewery (o) Monroe WI 22 Artisanal Brewing Ventures (p) Downingtown/Lakewood PA/NY 23 Dogfish Head Craft Brewery Milton DE 24 SweetWater Brewing Co Atlanta GA 25 New Glarus Brewing Co New Glarus WI 26 Matt Brewing Co (q) Utica NY 27 Harpoon Brewery Boston MA 28 Alaskan Brewing Co Juneau AK 29 Abita Brewing Co Abita Springs LA 30 Great Lakes Brewing Co Cleveland OH 31 Anchor Brewing Co San Francisco CA 32 Stevens Point Brewery (r) Stevens Point WI 33 August Schell Brewing Co (s) New Ulm MN 33 Long Trail Brewing Co (t) Bridgewater Corners VT 35 Summit Brewing Co Saint Paul MN 36 Odell Brewing Co Fort Collins CO 37 Shipyard Brewing Co (u) Portland ME 38 Full Sail Brewing Co Hood River OR 39 Rogue Ales Newport OR 40 21st Amendment Brewery Bay Area CA 41 Flying Dog Brewery Frederick MD 42 Ninkasi Brewing Co Eugene OR 43 Gordon Biersch Brewing Co San Jose CA 44 Allagash Brewing Co Portland ME 45 Narragansett Brewing Co Providence RI 46 Green Flash Brewing Co (v) San Diego CA 47 Tröegs Brewing Co Hershey PA 48 Uinta Brewing Co Salt Lake City UT 49 Bear Republic Brewing Co Cloverdale CA 50 Pittsburgh Brewing Co (w) Pittsburgh PA Bolded = Small and independent craft brewer. View a complete list of brands in the overall brewing category. View Top 50 U.S. Craft Breweries on a Map Click on map to view. A comprehensive State of the Industry report will be delivered during the 2017 Craft Brewers Conference, held from April 10 -13, 2017 in Washington, D.C. The Association’s full 2016 industry analysis, which shows regional trends and sales by individual breweries, will be published in the May/June issue of The New Brewer, available in May 2017. Update: An earlier version of the graphic noted Long Trail Brewing Co as the number 25 brewery. Long Trail is tied with August Schell Brewing Co as the number 24 brewery. The graphic has been updated to reflect this. 1Figure based on companies that met craft brewer definition for all or part of 2016. An American craft brewer is small, independent and traditional. Small: Annual production of 6 million barrels of beer or less (approximately 3 percent of U.S. annual sales). Beer production is attributed to the rules of alternating proprietorships. Independent: Less than 25 percent of the craft brewery is owned or controlled (or equivalent economic interest) by an alcoholic beverage industry member that is not itself a craft brewer. Traditional: A brewer that has a majority of its total beverage alcohol volume in beers whose flavor derives from traditional or innovative brewing ingredients and their fermentation. Flavored malt beverages (FMBs) are not considered beers. Abby Berman (on behalf of the Brewer Association) (646) 695-7044 ### About the Brewers Association The Brewers Association is the not-for-profit trade association dedicated to small and independent American brewers, their beers and the community of brewing enthusiasts. The Brewers Association (BA) represents more than 70 percent of the brewing industry, and its members make more than 99 percent of the beer brewed in the U.S. The BA organizes events including the World Beer Cup℠, Great American Beer Festival®, Craft Brewers Conference & BrewExpo America®, SAVOR℠: An American Craft Beer & Food Experience, Homebrew Con, National Homebrew Competition and American Craft Beer Week®. The BA publishes The New Brewer magazine and its Brewers Publications division is the largest publisher of contemporary and relevant brewing literature for today’s craft brewers and homebrewers. Beer lovers are invited to learn more about the dynamic world of craft beer at CraftBeer.com and about homebrewing via the BA’s American Homebrewers Association and the free Brew Guru™ mobile app. Follow us on Facebook and Twitter. The Brewers Association is an equal opportunity employer and does not discriminate on the basis of race, color, national origin, gender, religion, age, disability, political beliefs, sexual orientation, or marital/familial status. The BA complies with provisions of Executive Order 11246 and the rules, regulations, and relevant orders of the Secretary of Labor. |
Good news everyone, part 2 for today: I’m happy to announce the immediate availability of KDevelop 4.2 RC1. This is a pure bug fix release over the last beta in the 4.2 branch. Anyone using the 4.2 branch is urged to upgrade to this new version as soon as possible. Furthermore any new testers are welcome and feedback appreciated. Report it on the bugtracker on bugs.kde.org. Keep in mind that if you are using KDE 4.6 or higher, you need this release, as 4.1 only works up to KDE 4.5. If all goes according to plan, there will be another RC soon and a final release together with KDE 4.6. Download You can grab the source tarballs at the usual location: http://download.kde.org/download.php?url=unstable/kdevelop/4.1.90/src/ Packagers will hopefully update the testing repositories of their distribution. Changelog ChangeLog for KDevPlatform v1.1.90 ============================= * Milian Wolff: fix compilation for some compilers * David Nolden: backport from master: Don't care about navigation tooltips when a context-browser view is visible, the view will handle this alone * David Nolden: backport from master: regression fixes to context browser plugin refactor * David Nolden: backport from master: Clear the file-modification cache instantly when the user has saved the file in the editor. * David Nolden: backport from master: Don't completely ignore the retrieved top-context if it is still flagged to require an update. Instead, simply show a warning message on the status bar. (TODO: Find out why the update flag is not correct) * David Nolden: backport from master: Exclude the "." when extracting the extension * David Nolden: backport from master: * Nicolás Alvarez: Move qHash of {Cursor,Range}InRevision into the KDevelop NS too. * Nicolás Alvarez: Move qHash overload for SimpleRange and SimpleCursor into the KDevelop NS. * Milian Wolff: make sure we generate colors in the ctor (undelayed) * Milian Wolff: Introduce a fallback cache based on the file extension for LanguageController::languagesForUrl * Milian Wolff: use full canonical file path for urls in duchainify, required for isLocalFile checks to succeed * Milian Wolff: append _STATIC to macros in appendedlist_static.h to prevent clash with appendedlist.h, should fix compilation in KDE4_ENABLE_FINAL=ON mode * Dmitry Risenberg: Do not mess with other active working sets when calling for a review. BUG: 260663 * Milian Wolff: properly emitResult when internal SVN job failed, prevents indefinite wait in isVersionControlled on invalid URLS * Nicolás Alvarez: Simplify code in DUContextDynamicData assertion. ChangeLog for KDevelop v4.1.90 ============================== * Dmitry Risenberg: Fix duplicate brackets insertion when executing completion for a function. * Nicolás Alvarez: CMakeDUChainTest: store ranges in QSet instead of std::set. * Milian Wolff: minor: fix style/indentation * Floris Ruijter: fixes the cmakeduchaintest: a list of uses is checked too see if they're all there, that's a set operation, the test failed, because the lists where in the `wrong' order * Floris Ruijter: this test contains a c++ error, it isn't too bad(the test passes with it), but it's probably not meant * Floris Ruijter: Fix token-names for GeneratorTest * Aleix Pol: Don't look for kdevelop in gitorious anymore. * Nicolás Alvarez: Ignore the 'build' directory. * Aleix Pol: Don't add to the tree unexisting directories. |
From November 2003 to April 2009, in a lonely area of the Iraqi desert approximately twenty miles north of Baghdad, the United States operated a military base called Camp Taji. The camp was located in what is known as the Sunni Triangle, which in the early days of the Iraq War was one of the most battle-torn areas in the country. In June 2004, Army Specialist Brian Thornhill was deployed to Camp Taji for a one-year tour of duty in support of Operation Iraqi Freedom. Brian was twenty-two years old when he left for Iraq. He was born and raised in the small town of Snyder, Texas. He came from a tight-knit Christian family. His parents were hardworking Americans; his father was a sheet metal worker at a local factory and his mother a part-time clerk at a local dollar store. He had two younger sisters, Emily and Amber, and a younger brother, Steven. Advertisement: Brian was a good-looking young man; cheerful, friendly, and quick with jokes, but serious when he needed to be. He had blond hair and blue eyes, stood six feet tall, and weighed in at a muscular one hundred and ninety pounds. Like so many other young men and women his age, the events of 9/11 affected him deeply. Shortly after the attacks, Brian made the decision to serve his country and joined the U.S. Army. He had been working part-time as an assistant coach for his local high school football team, and he thought the Army would provide him with opportunities as well as a personal sense of pride he would feel for serving his country. He figured that if he could stretch his enlistment to last for four years, he could save enough money, supplemented by GI Bill benefits, to pay for a bachelor’s degree. With the education he received courtesy of the Army, he hoped he could get a well-paying job and would be able to marry his high school sweetheart, Lisa. Brian enlisted on October 12, 2003, and was assigned to Fort Benning, Georgia, for basic training and infantry training school. After twelve weeks of combat training, he was stationed at Fort Gordon in Augusta, Georgia, and was assigned to the 3rd Infantry Division. Shortly after arriving at Fort Gordon, his unit received orders to ship out for Iraq. Brian’s infantry unit arrived at Camp Taji in the unbearable heat of the Iraqi summer and he soon learned that for the next year he would be working as a guard in one of the many tower posts that ringed the perimeter of the base. Camp Taji was often attacked by Iraqi insurgents and rebels with small arms fire and mortars. Brian’s responsibility was to continuously monitor a sector of the outer perimeter of the base from his tower, visually scanning his area with binoculars and reporting anything that looked suspicious. Nearly every minute of every day that Brian spent at Camp Taji was accounted for, and he had very little free time for himself. Every day he woke at 5:00 a.m. and got dressed for duty. He carried a fully loaded M-4 assault rifle and he wore a camouflaged Army combat uniform, a Kevlar helmet, and a Kevlar-plated vest that was stuffed with a first aid kit and five ammunition pouches holding one hundred and fifty additional rounds of ammunition already loaded in magazines. The combined weight of all this gear added an additional sixty pounds to his head and chest. After strapping on his gear, he reported for duty by 6:00 a.m. sharp, taking his position in the guard tower, where he would continue standing for twelve monotonous hours in the unforgiving Iraqi heat. It was stifling inside his guard post. The tower was made of wood and stood about fifty feet high. The perch at the top was surrounded by walls four feet high—just big enough to capture the desert heat inside the tower and obstruct air circulation. By seven in the morning on most days, the temperature outside was already a hundred degrees. The weight of Brian’s gear only added to the misery he already felt from the unbearable heat, and he seemed to sweat from every pore in his body. The swath of desert terrain he stared at each day was flat and dry, broken up by patches of high brush, as well as the occasional wilting tree. Day after day, for an entire year, he watched over the same boring landscape. Even though the base had been attacked several times by Iraqi insurgents, his particular sector had never come under fire. That fact only made it more difficult for Brian to remain vigilant in his job. He knew his duty was important, but the days were endless and miserable. He sometimes found his mind drifting. Alone in the tower, it was hard to stay focused; he would catch himself daydreaming about his hometown, his girlfriend, or his high school days when he played football and ran track. Brian knew that, just as sure as the day would bring boredom and heat, it would also bring a suffocating cloud of black smoke and white ash that would invade his tower. He had a good aerial view of the camp interior from up in his tower. About a half a mile away, he could see the flames dancing from the open-air pit where the base disposed of its trash. The inferno would roar to life each morning around 9:30. Thick, dark plumes would begin drifting toward him and then white ashes would float down from above, blanketing the ground like a Wisconsin snowfall. Inevitably, the smoke and ash would come swirling into his tower. His eyes and throat would burn first; then the sharp, chemical smell would make his stomach turn. He would choke and cough and eventually begin dry heaving from the smoke, all the while trying to catch his breath. The white ash would cover him from helmet to boots, and would carpet the floor of the tower. About thirty minutes after that, his head would begin to ache, a dull pain that built quickly, as if a little man were inside it chiseling away at his skull. But there wasn’t anything he could do about it. He had to remain at his post, squinting through his binoculars, doing his best to see through the haze created by the smoke and ash, ensuring that his sector remained secure. Advertisement: The smoke and ash that invaded his tower followed him home each night when he was finally done with his shift. It filled the air when he walked to the chow hall or the PX or his living quarters. He always tried to get indoors as quickly as he could, to alleviate the burning in his eyes and throat, but more often than not the cruddy air would follow him inside, flowing through open doors and into air conditioning systems. Sometimes, soldiers covered up their air conditioners with towels at night, to block the smell and soot, and by the morning the towels would be black with the stuff. One day Brian saw his commanding officer on his way to the chow hall, with the smoke and ash falling from the sky as usual. Brian had been having a lot of nasal congestion and seemed to be getting colds all the time, something he had rarely dealt with as an adult. He worked up his nerve to approach his CO, asking him about the constant fallout from the burn pits and if it was dangerous. His commander assured him that while the air pollution was annoying, it was not harmful. Brian accepted his CO’s answer—what other choice did he have? It was not a good idea for a low-ranking enlisted soldier like Brian to question the wisdom of his commander. The one-year tour felt like five years to Brian. War was not like the movies or television, at least not for him. Guts and glory were replaced with three hundred and sixty-five monotonous days in a place where his worst enemy was not a terrorist but the rancid smoke and ash that bedeviled his days and nights. After finally completing his time in Iraq, Brian returned to Fort Gordon in Georgia on June 29, 2005. He was thankful to be back in the States in one piece. But his health was worrisome. Though he was uninjured and whole, he was still plagued with nasal congestion and cold symptoms. Soon after coming back, his military contract came up for renewal. The Army asked Brian to reenlist, but he respectfully declined. All he wanted to do was go back to his hometown and start a new life with Lisa. Advertisement: On July 17, 2005, his enlistment was officially over. He boarded a Greyhound bus in Augusta and arrived back home in Snyder, Texas. Lisa and his family were waiting for him at the bus station. They celebrated his return by taking him out to dinner. The next day, he and Lisa flew to Disneyland for a one-week vacation. It was the best time he had in his life. They walked through the “happiest place on earth” handin-hand, unwilling to leave each other’s side for a minute. They talked endlessly about their future together and how they never wanted to be apart again. When they returned home from their vacation, Brian applied for a job at the local grocery store and was hired. He also enrolled part-time at the local community college. Lisa was working at a local bank as a teller. They were madly in love and saw each other every chance they could. In June 2006, they were married and they rented a house right outside of town. Life could not have been better for Brian and Lisa at that point. Brian felt like he was living the American dream. He had so many plans for himself, his wife, and their future. Though his life was great in many ways, his chronic health problems had started to become an annoyance. The nagging nasal congestion and other cold-like symptoms that began in Iraq would not go away and he began to notice other areas of his health change as well. He had been a very active person prior to his time in the Army. But after returning home, he noticed that whenever he went for a run—something that he routinely did in the past—he would experience shortness of breath and he was not nearly as fast as he was before he was deployed. Advertisement: By September 2006, three months after Brian and Lisa were married, his symptoms were no longer simply a minor annoyance. The nasal congestion was constant now and he felt short of breath throughout the day, not just when he exercised. His breathing difficulty became so severe that it began to affect his work performance. He often had to pause and take short breaks to catch his breath while he was unloading trucks of produce or stocking shelves in the store. He decided it was time to see his family doctor and get himself checked out. The doctor told him he had a severe sinus infection and prescribed antibiotics to take care of it. But after the two-week round of antibiotics, Brian’s symptoms remained unchanged. In fact, they seemed to be getting worse. He could not even go outside and walk to the end of his driveway to get his mail without feeling short-winded. He also started noticing a slight, constant, uncontrollable shake in his hands. Brian decided to go back to his family doctor. After examining him this time, Brian’s physician said he was concerned and he wanted some tests done right away, scheduling him for a workup at a Dallas hospital, 260 miles away, for 9:00 a.m. the following day. After making the long drive with Lisa, Brian underwent a battery of tests that lasted through most of the day. The doctors told him they would have the test results back in about a week and they would forward them to his family doctor. Despite their exhaustion from the trip, Brian and Lisa didn’t manage to sleep much that night or the rest of the week. They were too worried about what the tests would reveal. Advertisement: When the test results finally came in, Brian’s family doctor called him to his office. He told Brian he had a type of autoimmune disorder. The doctor explained to him that the antibodies his body produces, which normally fight off viruses and infections, were for some reason attacking the healthy cells and tissue in his body. Brian’s doctor had consulted with several other physicians regarding the test results, but none of them could explain why this was happening. Nevertheless, the doctor decided to move forward with treatment by prescribing Brian several different types of medications in an effort to prevent his body from destroying itself. Brian was scared and could not believe what was happening to him. He felt helpless; he was dependent upon doctors, people he barely knew, to come up with a way to heal him. By November 2006, about a month after being diagnosed with the autoimmune disorder, Brian was too sick to work and had to quit his job. He simply did not have the strength to perform even light physical duties any longer. He decided he was going to file a medical claim with the Veterans Health Administration, which runs the largest health-care network in the country, including 150 VA hospitals and 820 outpatient clinics, serving more than nine million of the nation’s twenty-two million veterans. Brian made an appointment at the VA Hospital in Dallas. He explained to the doctors there that his symptoms started when he was in Iraq and he thought they were caused by the air pollution from the burn pits to which he was constantly exposed. The VA staff took down his claim, conducted its own tests, and informed him that it could take a year or longer to render a decision. At this point, money was becoming an issue for Brian and Lisa. With Brian unable to work, their household budget was tight, so Lisa took on an extra job as a waitress at a local restaurant. As the weeks went by, Brian’s health began to spiral downward even further. In January 2007, Brian developed tumors on his chest and under his arm and they needed to be removed. He started having debilitating pains in his stomach and hips. With Lisa working two jobs, Brian found himself at home alone most of the time, unable to get up and walk into another room without pain or difficulty breathing. His deteriorating health began to take a toll on his emotional well-being. He was short-tempered and agitated. He slid into a deep depression and started to take his frustration and pain out on Lisa. He criticized her constantly for not cleaning the house, for not being sympathetic enough, or for not being around to take care of him. He was given antidepressants but they didn’t work. His failing health took over his whole life. Advertisement: In July 2007, just six months after the first tumors were discovered, he developed a tumor the size of a football on his left hip that needed to be surgically removed. That procedure left him unable to walk for months. In January 2008, he finally received the letter from the VA that he had been expecting for over a year, the official response to his disability claim. As he tore open the letter and read it, Brian was stunned. His claim was denied: the VA had determined that his illness was not caused by his military service. Brian was infuriated and his anger and frustration boiled over. He soon became impossible to live with and Lisa left him. She loved him but she could no longer withstand the verbal abuse and the burden of taking care of him and working two jobs. She moved into an apartment in town, avoiding his phone calls or any contact with him. It was hard for her; she remembered the man he used to be. It hurt her to see what he had become. Penniless and heartbroken, Brian moved back in with his parents and stayed in the bedroom he had as a child. He was extremely depressed and spent most of his time in bed, weeping. In September 2008, Brian was hit with another devastating blow. He was diagnosed with brain cancer. His mother took him for radiation treatments and chemotherapy daily. He lost his hair and a lot of weight. He was violently sick from the treatment and so weak he didn’t leave his bed anymore at all. Advertisement: At night, through his bedroom door, Brian could hear the muffled sounds of his mother weeping in the living room and his father doing his best to console her. He felt guilty for how much sadness and stress he had caused for all those around him. When he finally fell asleep at night, he would often dream he was healthy again, that Lisa was with him, they were in their home, happy and in love. In his dreams he was active, working, and going to college. When he woke up, reality slapped him in the face. He was sick and weak and in pain. He was alone and helpless. Brian wanted to die and was angry with himself for not having the courage to take his own life. He wanted death to come soon and take him. The same way the smoke and ash would enshroud him in the tower at Camp Taji. Brian died on January 29, 2014, in his bed at home. The official cause of death was brain cancer. * At the request of “Brian Thornhill’s” family, I have used a pseudonym instead of the late soldier’s real name. Excerpted from "The Burn Pits: The Poisoning of America's Soldiers" by Joseph Hickman. Copyright © 2016 by Joseph Hickman. Published by permission of Skyhorse Publishing/Hot Books. |
A pharmacy has sparked controversy by charging an extra 7 per cent to its male customers. Thompsons Chemists in Soho, New York, posted signs on its window stating “all female customers shop tax free“ and "all male customers are subject to a 7 per cent man tax". A photo of the signs sparked fierce debate on Reddit and Facebook and was shared hundreds of thousands of times. The chemist told the BBC that the move was intended to highlight the “pink tax”, after a recent study found female beauty products were 7 per cent more expensive than their male equivalents. The study found an even wider gap for adult clothes and personal care products. We’ll tell you what’s true. You can form your own view. From 15p €0.18 $0.18 $0.27 a day, more exclusives, analysis and extras. “We wanted to share that women deserve to get a break, and men deserve to be charged 7 per cent more. Women are spending more in general and we make less, so we deserve to have a break,” Alony told the Daily Dot. “We thought it’d be a great idea with all the political things going on—with Clinton being such a woman and the other guy and his womanizing,” Alony said. Online reaction to the “man tax” has been passionate, with many accusing the chemist of “reverse sexism”. One Imgur user said: “This is exactly why this new age feminism isn't liked. Feminism is about equality. This isn't.” Meanwhile others have supported the move. Thompson Chemists owner, Jolie Alony took to Facebook to point out that the sign is in fact misleading because she was actually charging normal rates to men but deducting sales tax for women and funding it from her own pocket. We’ll tell you what’s true. You can form your own view. At The Independent, no one tells us what to write. That’s why, in an era of political lies and Brexit bias, more readers are turning to an independent source. Subscribe from just 15p a day for extra exclusives, events and ebooks – all with no ads. Subscribe now |
MANCHESTER, N.H. – The issue of climate change seems to have followed Florida Sen. Marco Rubio outside of his home state. As the New Hampshire primary approaches, Rubio has made several appearances around the granite state. One stop was at the Manchester Town Hall meeting where a local man questioned Rubio about his climate change plans. “I am the proud father of three millennial Republican daughters and they have a major issue that is not often addressed by Republicans. Would you address climate change please?” he asked from the audience. The senator paused before answering the New Hampshire father. “OK, well the climate has always changed; I don’t mean that facetiously,” he responded. “There’s never been a time when the climate is identical; it’s always changing.” Listen to Florida Sen. Marco Rubio explain his views on climate change policy. Rubio said that when someone approaches him with legislation that attempts to tackle climate change he is very doubtful of its potential to help the environment. “I say, ‘OK, if we pass this bill how many feet of sea rise will it prevent?’ Well, it won’t prevent any sea rise. ‘OK, well how many degrees of temperature will it avoid going up?’ Well, it won’t do that either,” he said. Instead of prioritizing climate change legislation that he thinks hurts the economy and has no real impact on the environment, he said the better approach is to support innovators of American energy. “We have to fully utilize all of our energy resources and that includes biofuels, renewables, all of that stuff, but we can’t destroy our economy,” Rubio said. His answer wasn’t what another audience member, Miami Beach native Dan Kipnis, was hoping for. “You know in Miami Beach when we get high tides we walk around in knee-deep salt water. And I’m having to sell my house now in Miami Beach now to protect my investment,” he said. Kipnis is a retired fishing boat captain. He traveled to New Hampshire determined to ask Rubio directly about his climate change plans, but he hasn’t had the opportunity yet. He thinks the senator blew off the issue at the Manchester town hall meeting. “Marco, you want to be president? You gotta deal with this whether you like it or not? Climate change. It’s there, it’s real and it’s not going away,” Kipnis said. Kipnis is an independent voter and hasn’t decided who he will vote for, but says the candidate who prioritizes climate change will get his vote. Rubio will most likely face many more questions about his climate change policy when he begins the primary campaign in his home state. Just last week, 15 South Florida mayors signed a letter to Sen. Rubio calling on him to, "acknowledge the reality and urgency of climate change." The letter asks Rubio to meet with the mayors before Feb. 29, to talk about the issue. |
British Peculiarities I: The Virtual Absence of Mixed Taps Marte found this article on the issue. I’m not crazy! The issue is really alive! See, Churchill and Boris Johnson spent time pondering over it! Read for yourself. ==== Old-Fashioned Faucets: Unique British Standard By JAMES R. HAGERTY Staff Reporter of The Wall Street Journal From The Wall Street Journal Online LONDON (Oct. 31, 2002)—During a wartime visit to Moscow in 1942, Winston S. Churchill discovered a marvel of modern technology: hot and cold water flowing from the same faucet. The plumbing in the villa where he stayed as a guest of Stalin was unlike the primitive British standard of separate taps for hot and cold. Rather than having to fill up the sink to achieve the right blend, the British leader could wash his hands under gushing water “mingled to exactly the temperature one desired,” as he put it in his memoirs. From then on, he resolved to use this method whenever possible. His countrymen have been slow to take up the single-spigot cause. Most bathroom sinks in Britain still have separate hot and cold taps today, 60 years after Mr. Churchill’s conversion and decades after nearly all dual taps were scrapped in the U.S. and most vanished from continental Europe. For reasons of thrift, regulations and a stubborn attachment to tradition, the British have resisted the tide of plumbing history. Even when they renovate old homes, many choose two-tap systems, and builders often install them in new, low-end housing. Separate taps account for an estimated 40% of all bathroom-faucet sales in the U.K. “It’s very strange to me,” says Ayelet Langer, who moved to London from Israel last year and found two faucets mounted on the newly installed bathroom sink in her apartment. “I thought I couldn’t really cope with it at first, but now I do.” Worried that the water from the hot tap will scald the fingers of her one-year-old son, she washes his hands in the kitchen sink, which has a single spout. Britons don’t understand why foreigners raise a fuss over this issue. “The British are quite happy to wash their hands with cold water. Maybe it’s character-building,” says Simon Kirby, managing director of Thomas Crapper & Co., a maker of bathroom equipment in Stratford-on-Avon. Boris Johnson, a Conservative Party member of Parliament representing Henley, congratulates “the higher civilizations” that have adopted advanced plumbing technology. But he argues that having the choice of either hot or cold for washing hands “is an incentive to get it over and done with and not waste water.” Separate faucets are only one of the peculiarities of the British bathroom. Another is electricity—or rather the lack of it. Regulations aimed at preventing shocks forbid the installation in bathrooms of electrical outlets, except those designed for shavers. One more antishock measure bans standard on/off switches in bathrooms. The lights are controlled by pull cords hanging from the ceiling. None of these eccentricities causes as much annoyance among foreigners as separate taps. Renee Guinivan of Bath, N.C., a retired secretary whose daughter lives in London, finds them “unsanitary.” Ms. Guinivan could fill the sink with a mixture of hot and cold before washing. But what if the last person who used the sink brushed his teeth and spat? “I hate to be fussy,” she says, though she is tempted to tote around a small package of Ajax cleaning powder and a sponge when she visits Britain. “Perhaps it’s something Puritanical about the English” that inclines them to shun modern luxuries, says Pam Carter, a spokeswoman for the Savoy Hotel. In keeping with the grand style of a luxury hotel opened in 1889, the Savoy’s vast white-tile bathrooms retain a Victorian look. The huge shower heads, resembling upside-down pie tins, dump cascades of water on guests. Call buttons above the tubs read “valet” and “maid” (though the buttons no longer function and guests are expected to use the telephone if they want help). To appease its largely American clientele, the Savoy has converted many of its sinks to single hot-and-cold taps, but some of the sinks retain separate faucets. Ms. Carter points to a gleaming white double-tap sink from the 1950s, large enough to bathe a midsize dog. “It would be a crime to get rid of something like that,” she says. Many in Britain keep separate bathroom taps to preserve the authenticity of Victorian homes. The force of habit also plays a role. As the commercial director of the Bathroom Manufacturers Association, Yvonne Orgill might be expected to favor frequent renovations, yet she is completely satisfied with the separate taps on her bathtub and sees no reason to replace them. “I can turn them on and off with my toes, being a lazy person” she says. In their defense, some British cite red tape. Older British homes often have storage tanks in their attics that feed water heaters. Under certain conditions, those tanks could be contaminated – for instance, by the intrusion of a rat – and tainted hot water that flows into a mixer tap might get sucked into a cold-water pipe leading back to the public water supply, endangering the whole neighborhood. So regulations forbid mixing of hot and cold water streams inside a tap unless the tank meets strict standards or protective valves are installed. Separate taps are also a bit cheaper. A midprice pair of chrome bathroom-sink taps from Pegler Ltd. costs about $87, or half the price of a hot-and-cold “mixer” tap of similar quality. Even so, modernity is slowly imposing itself. British people who travel overseas often are impressed by single taps, not to mention the “lovely shower systems that blow your head off,” says Kevin Wellman, operations director at the British Institute of Plumbing. A U.S. company, American Standard Cos., is now the largest supplier of bathroom equipment in Britain and promotes modern fittings, including mixer taps. Martin Phillips, a Londoner who sells car-industry forecasts and is married to an American, says his wife has converted him. Now when he encounters a sink with separate taps, he says, “it drives me potty.” But there are many holdouts. One is Mr. Kirby, the managing director at Thomas Crapper. Of the mixer tap, he says, “I wouldn’t even consider it as a modernization—just a different way of doing it.” Of course, he has a professional interest in the matter. Founded in 1861 by Thomas Crapper, the firm he runs makes replicas of Victorian bathroom equipment, including bathroom “basins,” or sinks, ranging from about $1,320 to $1,875. In a rare compromise with authenticity, the company does provide some sinks with mixer taps, but those are sold mainly to overseas customers. Mr. Kirby says he doesn’t find separate taps inconvenient. He dunks his hands under the cold water tap when he wants a quick wash. “If I want to wash them properly, I put the plug in” and fill the basin, he says. Isn’t that less hygienic than washing under running water? “It’s a cultural difference,” Mr. Kirby says. “We’re less bothered about that.” Despite their clashing views on hand-washing, Mr. Kirby keeps portraits of Winston Churchill in his home and office. He isn’t surprised that the prime minister liked fancy plumbing. “You have to remember that Churchill was half-American,” Mr. Kirby says, “so he was probably a bit more open to some of these innovations.” |
The European Commission is scheduled on Wednesday to propose major changes to asylum rules in the 28 EU member states. The bloc's executive had originally planned to scrap a part of the so-called Dublin agreement, which insists that refugees claim asylum in the first EU country they enter. But despite long-time complaints by southern EU states that they are overburdened by the numbers of new arrivals, EU commissioners are expected to keep the controversial policy in place. Instead, two EU sources told the Reuters news agency that the Commission would now issue a legislative proposal retaining the "first country" principle while including a central scheme to spread claimants around Europe. The sources said that would give frontline states the chance to relocate asylum seekers to other EU countries if arrivals on their borders were too high. Sanctions for non-compliance Member states would face hefty fines if they refuse to take migrants. According to German daily "Die Welt," which reported that it had obtained the draft proposal, the penalties were envisioned at 250,000 euros ($287,000) per rejected applicant. Greece and Italy have struggled to register so many asylum claims Despite the current high levels of migration, some Central European countries have refused attempts to make them take in refugees. Ex-communist states in particular are unlikely to welcome the changes. They've long argued that their homogeneous societies are ill equipped to take in large numbers of migrants, especially from the Middle East or Africa. Meanwhile, a one-off scheme to redistribute 160,000 asylum seekers within the bloc has barely taken off. Any proposal will need to win the backing of a majority of the 28 EU states as well as the European Parliament for it to be enacted and EU officials and diplomats do not expect a swift agreement. |
You must enter the characters with black color that stand out from the other characters Message: * A friend wanted you to see this item from WRAL.com: http://wr.al/z0J5 — Joseph Malinowski told the House Judiciary I Committee on Wednesday that he doesn't want to be a lawbreaker, but neither does he want to suffer with the aftermath of cancer or the symptoms of multiple sclerosis when medical marijuana can ease the pain. "I spent 21 days in Harnett County jail, first time in my life I've ever been in any kind of trouble," Malinowski said. "But this helps me. I think it could help a lot more people." Despite pleas from a number of people who testified that medical cannabis has helped treat either themselves or loved ones, the committee rejected legislation that would have legalized marijuana use for certain patients. "That's ridiculous," the former network engineer said after he watched the committee quickly draw to a close. "Just for that, I'm willing to sell my house and move out of this state." Nationwide, 23 states and the District of Columbia have legalized marijuana use in some form. Many allow for medical use, as the North Carolina would contemplate. However, the drug remains illegal under federal law and is a still a hot-button issue for social conservatives. "Legalizing marijuana for medical purposes is both unnecessary and a slippery slope," said Tami Fitzgerald, executive director of the North Carolina Values Coalition. "We oppose House Bill 78. It could open the door to legalizing marijuana for recreational use." Fitzgerald was one of three speakers to urge rejection of the medical marijuana bill, all of them representing socially conservative groups that frequently lobby lawmakers on issues ranging from abortion to alcohol control to gay marriage. Issued killed for two years During most debates in state House committees, a bill either passes with a favorable report or fails to meet that test. Even if it fails that vote, the issue is alive and can arise at other times. The House Judiciary I Committee took the unusual step of issuing an "unfavorable report" on the bill. That has the effect of not only killing this particular piece of legislation but also blocking the House from considering any other measure that might carry a medical marijuana component. That motion passed on a voice vote. No member of the committee could be heard to vote against, and none challenged the ruling of the chairman, both indications that the vote was unanimous. Two years ago, the House Rules Committee issued a similar unfavorable report on a medical marijuana bill, killing the issue for the 2013-14 session. "They obviously don't represent us," said Jamie Hargitt, who spoke on behalf of her husband, a wounded Iraq veteran who suffers from Parkinson's disease as result of chemical exposure. "They wouldn't even consider it or listen to anything we said." Hargitt is an organizer of NC RAMP, North Carolina Republicans Against Marijuana Prohibition. Like many who spoke Wednesday, she appealed to committee members to support veterans suffering from brain injuries and appealed to their faith. "If it's a plant that grows naturally, God gave it to us. It's obviously not bad," she said. Bill sponsors tried to drive home that their bill was not about the stereotypical dope-smoking users featured in "Harold and Kumar" movies. "This is not about recreation. A lot of folks wave that red flag about recreation. This is about medicine. This is about doing things to help sick people get better. This is about improving the lives of 800,000 veterans in North Carolina right now," Rep. Kelly Alexander, D-Mecklenburg, told the committee. Both sides of the debate leaned on conflicting reports and scientific studies. "The concept of medical marijuana essentially violates every sensibility of the way people in our country believe medication ought to be approved and dispensed," said the Rev. Mark Creech, director of the Christian Action League. "Testimonials are not science. Emotions, or even compassion, don't trump wisdom." Passions high at the end of the meeting No lawmakers on the committee spoke for or against the bill during the meeting. Rather, they simply voted and quickly left the room. That sparked a rumble of discontent after the meeting and one of the bill's supporters was accused of punching Rep. Dean Arp, R-Union, in the back. According to General Assembly Police, that individual was briefly detained but no charges were filed. "There was a lot of passionate debate on the issue," Arp said when asked about the incident. The lawmakers said he had received a note of apology and considered the incident "resolved." It was Arp who made the motion for an unfavorable report. Hours after the meeting Arp said he had concerns about workplace safety for jobs like construction. "Obviously the stories are heart-wrenching," Arp said. But, he said, the stories didn't sway him. "I don't think it's appropriate," Arp said of the bill. |
Subsets and Splits
No community queries yet
The top public SQL queries from the community will appear here once available.