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The UAE may be built on profits reaped from its oil-rich sands, but out of the region’s vast deserts rises a new vision for a solar farm unlike any we have seen before. Conceived by Martina Decker and Peter Yeadon, the Light Sanctuary is an elegantly unfurling ribbon of solar thin-film panels designed to take advantage of Dubai’s immense solar resources. The project is composed of a new type of thin-film dye-sensitized solar cells with suspended walls that curl and undulate across the desert landscape, mimicking a mirage from afar and creating an immersive and sensual experience up close. The project is much more than a standard solar farm — it is an art installation that sparks a conversation on the topics of renewable technologies, site-specific installation and audience immersion. While the solar cells would capture more energy in a different configuration, the sensual and contemplative environment captures not only usable solar energy but the human imagination and spirit. The installation is suspended in the air to reduce its impact on the natural environment and settle it in a space between the land and sky. The unique vertical orientation of the solar ribbons capitalizes on the ability of the semi-translucent thin film panels to produce useful energy at a steep angle of solar exposure. This allows for energy production over a longer period throughout the day, and the panels also get a boost from reflected light off the high-albedo landscape. The thin film solar cells perform much better in the high-temperature conditions than silicone solar panels. The total estimated power production of the project is 4592 megawatts. |
Lord knows I could do with shedding a pound or 50, but it never occurred to me that WiFi could help me do that. However, according to a press release that arrived today it would appear to be the case. Some French technology outfit has launched a set of WiFi enabled weight scales which uses an iPhone app that enables users to monitor body weight as well as lean and fat mass (whatever they may be) on their smartphone. Withings claims that the WiFi Body Scale is a world first and transforms a regular bathroom scale into a connected health monitoring system allowing anyone access to a range of secure online service to automatically record their body weight, lean & fat mass, and calculated body mass index. "We strive to bring innovation, design and technology to everyday objects through a wireless connection to the internet and we feel the WiFi Body Scale truly delivers on all fronts" said Cedric Hutchings, Withings General Manager. Uhuh. Trouble is, it is a rather expensive set of scales at UKP £119 and to be honest you can buy an awful lot of cakes for the same money. Seriously though, you could also spend a little extra and buy a Nintendo Wii with the Wii Fit stuff and maybe get into shape using technology (although this is not without some risk itself) rather than just get depressed watching how little weight you are losing by sitting looking at a web page. |
Black Friday 2010's dirty little secrets On Black Friday stores have a few tricks up their sleeve to make it tougher for shoppers to score the goods. NEW YORK (CNNMoney.com) -- Black Friday bargain hunters beware. There's a good chance you won't score that doorbuster deal you've set your heart on. Retail experts say the annual hype and hoopla that surrounds Black Friday also masks some nasty surprises. The most painful: The crushed hopes of hundreds of midnight shoppers, who camped outside for hours in the cold hoping to score a 40-inch LCD HDTV for under $500, only to later learn that the store had four in stock. That's one harsh -- but all too common -- example of a Black Friday reality that shoppers need to know about before they map out their shopping warplan, said Edgar Dworsky, consumer advocate and editor of Consumer World. But there are many more. Here's a sampling of Black Friday secrets that CNNMoney.com has flagged for deal hunters: Limited supplies: Read the fine print on the Black Friday circulars. Most doorbuster deals -- especially those on big-ticket items like HDTVs and washer-dryer combos -- are in very limited supplies, often only four to six units per store. So unless you are among the first six on line before stores open on Black Friday for those deals, you're pretty much out of luck. Retailers use these juicy deals to entice shoppers into their store, that's when the switcheroo happens. Even if you didn't score the bargain you wanted, sellers hope that since you are already there, you'll probably grab some other deals instead. HDTV deals. Is it the standard model, or a 'derivative?' Some of the holiday electronics with those low sale prices are products with fewer features than a standard model in that product line. The difference can be subtle and most consumers probably won't even notice, said Dworsky. Dworsky points out a Samsung 40-inch LCD HDTV for under $500 that has appeared as a doorbuster deal on several retailers' Black Friday circular. "That model doesn't appear on Samsung's web site. Maybe it was made just for Black Friday," he said. Another red flag, the deal on that TV just lists the deal price and not the regular price of the model. The lesson for shoppers: Do your own research and check the specifications on those discounted HDTVs. A Samsung spokesperson was not immediately available to comment for this story. Avoid bad bling. Jewelry is always a sought-after deal on Black Friday. But experts say consumers should keep some tips in mind before buying their bling this year. Because of surging gold commodity prices, jewelry manufacturers are paying much more for the precious metal than last year. So one way that jewelers are keeping their own costs, and retail prices down reasonable for consumers, is by selling more gold-plated or gold-filled jewelry. Many advertised deals on gold jewelry will use phrased such as "gold-filled" or "gold-overlay." This is not the same as solid gold, said Kevin Adkins, a graduate gemologist. "When you see those terms, know that you're buying silver with a plate of gold coating over it," said Adkins. If the price is too good to be true on that diamond set, then it probably is. "I saw an online deal for a 1-carat diamond cocktail ring for $431.40. A 1-carat ring sells at least for $1,000," he said. His advice: Ask about the four C's -- cut, clarity, carat and color -- before buying diamond jewelry and always check return and refund policies on Black Friday deals. Which Black Friday deals are online? Many retailers will say that their Black Friday in-store deals are available online but they won't tell you which ones, said Dworsky. "So do I run out and stand on line all night or gamble on the computer all night?" said Dworsky. The other annoyance with retailers' Black Friday online deals, he said, is that many sellers don't tell you what time the web deals kick in. "Is it just before midnight, at midnight or at the same time that the stores open?" he said. Don't assume a "price match" policy. Many retailers who typically follow a price-match policy during the year may drop it for the Black Friday shopping weekend. Again, carefully read fine print on the Black Friday circulars to see which retailers will match the lowest prices on an identical product and which sellers explicitly say the policy will not be in effect. |
Rating: 9.5. 1. Introduction 2. MSI GTX980 Gaming 4G 3. MSI GTX980 Gaming 4G (High Res Gallery) 4. Testing Methodology 5. 3DMark Vantage 6. 3DMark 11 7. 3DMark 8. Unigine Heaven Benchmark 9. Unigine Valley Benchmark 10. Grid AutoSport (1080p and 1600p) 11. Grid AutoSport (4k) 12. Thief (1080p and 1600p) 13. Thief (4k) 14. Tomb Raider (1080p and 1600p) 15. Tomb Raider (4k) 16. Metro Last Light Redux (1080p and 1600p) 17. Metro Last Light Redux (4k) 18. Thermal Dynamics 19. Acoustics Performance 20. Power Consumption 21. Overclocking 22. Closing Thoughts 23. View All Pages Since the Nvidia GTX970 and GTX980 launch last month, we have looked at a wide cross section of partner solutions. Today we review the MSI GTX980 Gaming 4G – the big brother of the formidable MSI GTX970 Gaming 4G, which we reviewed back on September 19th. Should you be treating yourself to an MSI GTX980 upgrade before the end of the year? The MSI GTX980 Gaming 4G is a stunning looking product, the Cameron Diaz of graphics cards. The two tone red and black colour scheme is eye catching, and we love the red vertical ‘flashes’ over the black section of the cooler. The attention to detail is commendable. A quick recap over the Maxwell architecture, in case you have missed all the details of the GTX970 and GTX980 in the last month. You may already have studied our multiple analysis of the lower level GTX750Ti solution throughout the year however. The GTX750ti has been one of the most exciting cards that Nvidia have released in recent years – performance is close to the HD7850 while consuming half the power at the socket – and all without the need for a PCIe power cable. It produces such a modest heat emission that the Asus GTX750Ti Strix OC we reviewed recently didn’t need to spin the fans most of the time, even when gaming. AMD really are so far behind now when it comes to power consumption that they will need to release a new architecture to compete. Not an easy thing to do overnight, but we hope they can become competitive again in the coming months. Competition is good for us – the consumer. The Maxwell architecture has been designed to deliver twice the performance per watt of previous generation Geforce hardware. It sounds easy enough on paper to achieve, but the real world challenges for Nvidia have been complex. GPU GeForce GTX 680 (Kepler) GeForce GTX 980 (Maxwell) Geforce GTX 970 (Maxwell) Streaming Multiprocessors 8 16 13 CUDA Cores 1536 2048 1664 Base Clock 1006 mhz 1126 mhz 1050 mhz GPU Boost Clock 1058 mhz 1216 mhz 1178 mhz Total Video memory 2GB 4GB 4GB Texel fill-rate 129 Gigatexels/Sec 144.1 Gigatexels/Sec 109.2 Gigatexels/Sec Memory Clock 6000 mhz 7000 mhz 7000 mhz Memory Bandwidth 192 GB/sec 224 GB/sec 224 GB/s ROPs 32 64 64 Manufacturing Process 28nm 28nm 28nm TDP 195 watts 165 watts 145 watts The new GM204 GPU is very efficient. The Maxwell SM has been rebalanced so that the CUDA cores are fully utilised more often. Doing so saves power and enhances overall performance. The L2 cache size in the GM204 is 2MB, or four times larger than the GK104. The addition of extra cache means that fewer requests to the GPU memory are needed – again reducing power consumption and pushing more performance. The Geforce GTX 980 is equipped with 7Gbps memory. Those of you with higher resolution monitors, or running in a multi screen configuration will also be pleased to hear that there is 4GB of GDDR5 memory on the card, not 3GB – this memory will push 224 GB/s sec. Nvidia have added a new compression engine to reduce the demand on DRAM bandwidth. The MSI GTX980 Gaming 4G has received a core clock enhancement to 1,216mhz, from 1,126mhz on the reference design. The GDDR5 memory is running at the default clock speeds of 1,753mhz (7Gbps effective). |
May 7, 2012 Featured Stories On April 13, 1984, a 15-year-old boy with a slashed throat struggled to climb up the concrete banks of the San Gabriel River. It was about 10 p.m. when Eddie Kaster emerged and headed toward Golf N’ Stuff in Norwalk. He couldn’t talk, so he waved his hands and motioned toward the river bed. Then he collapsed on the sidewalk. Down in the San Gabriel’s concrete bottom on the border of Norwalk and Downey lay the bodies of Eddie’s 18-year-old sister Rachel Kaster and the Kasters’ 16-year-old friend Veronica Flores. Rachel was badly slashed. Veronica had one stab wound to the back. Before midnight, all three teenagers had died. The friends from South Gate had been dropped off for a night of fun at the miniature golf course. Despite an initial intense media spotlight and the emergence of DNA-matching technology, the case remains unsolved to this day. “The media were around for about three or four months,” said Sandy Elicker, Veronica’s older sister. “Then nobody cared about it.” In 2009 on the 25th anniversary of the murders , Elicker wrote letters to newspapers all over the county in hopes that editors would run the letters and jog decades-old memories. “I don’t think any of them were published,” Elicker said. — Sheriff’s Homicide Bureau Lt. Dave Coleman grew up in Norwalk. He was a young deputy working out of the Lakewood Station when he heard about the Kaster/Flores murders. People were saying it involved the occult. Pentagrams were painted in the riverbed nearby. There were rumors of frogs being impaled on a nearby chain link fence, according to accounts from the time. It was Friday the 13th. “There was a lot of curiosity about it,” he said. “A lot of theories floating around.” Coleman is now in charge of the sheriff’s unsolved murder detail. He still wants to know what happened to the three South Gate teenagers, he said. He plans to assign a new detective to the case. “We’re taking a fresh look at everything,” he said. — To Elicker, Veronica’s older sister, the memories of the weeks before and after the killings are vivid. Her sister was 4-and-half months pregnant, and she had some sort of beef with other kids from South Gate. During one fight between Veronica and another girl, a boy jumped in and kicked Veronica in the face. She still had the marks the day she died. Veronica had a learning disability that made it difficult for her to read, and teachers were cruel to her, Elicker said. Tired of dealing with a group of students who seemed intent on making her miserable, Veronica had transferred from South Gate High School to Odyssey, the local continuation school. She was about to get married to her boyfriend and move to a nearby apartment. Elicker, who was seven years older than her little sister, didn’t understand exactly what the animosity was about, but she knew people had it in for her sister. Veronica was an emotional wreck in the days leading up to the killing. “She had a nightmare two nights before she died,”Elicker said. “She was screaming about how someone was in the alleyway where we lived. She said somebody was bleeding.” — Debbie Woodruff, who lives in Downey and runs a cleaning service, wasn’t around when her little brother and sister were killed. She had moved to Texas. Eddie was handsome. Rachel was a good girl. They were the fourth and fifth of the six children in her family. They weren’t in gangs. They had no enemies. “I was the worst one in the family,” Woodruff said. “I don’t know why anybody would want to take three lives like that.” The Kasters’ father, who has since died, dropped the three children off that night at Golf N’ Stuff with strict orders to be picked up at a pre-arranged time, Woodruff said. For a reason that nobody knows, the trio went down into the concrete river bed, she said. — After the killings, rumors swirled. Detectives at the time hinted that the three teenagers were drunk or had done drugs, Elicker said. Now detectives do not believe the three teens were drunk or high. At a church service following the deaths, a carload of teenagers went by with the windows open. The kids inside were laughing and said Veronica deserved to die. Elicker wanted to get in her car and chase them. “I was thinking, ‘Can you just back off for a little bit, please? Just back off,’” Elicker said. “My sister is dead.” She was the one who did the talking to outsiders. Her parents clammed up. They were overwhelmed. Sometimes Elicker wished her family would have been more outgoing with the media those first few days. She remembered telling the detectives about all the mean things kids had been doing to her sister. The detectives told her to go away. “I think, at that time, it was unthinkable that kids could do this to another kid,” she said. “These days, I don’t think detectives would be surprised if something like that happened.” The deaths touched off community meetings with Downey and Norwalk officials. Capt. Lee Baca of the sheriff’s Norwalk Station met with members of the community, who called for fencing off the river and for increased patrols. But when it came down to it, the river wasn’t a high-crime area. Neither was Golf N’ Stuff. The public’s cathartic demands for the authorities to do something subsided. And the murders were mostly forgotten. — A year passed, and the public learned about the Night Stalker, who had been breaking into homes and killing people. The first confirmed killing by Richard Ramirez was June 28, 1984. But it wasn’t until 1985 that the Night Stalker came to the public’s attention. He attacked or killed 25 people from March to August. He was caught by an angry mob in East Los Angeles on Aug. 31, 1985. In 2009 detectives linked Ramirez to the killing of Mei Leung in San Francisco on April 10, 1984, three days before the Kaster/Flores killings. Ramirez was known to travel all over the state looking for people to kill. Elicker has wondered if it was Richard Ramirez who killed her sister. Woodruff said she had never thought of Ramirez, but she said it was worth looking into. Detectives have considered the idea, but, as far as Coleman knew, they have never carefully checked to see if Ramirez was involved. “The M.O. is a little different because he liked to break into houses,” Coleman said of Ramirez. But detectives were willing to look at the case with open minds, he said. The detective who has been handling the case, Paul Mondry, has been actively following up on leads. On April 19, he posted a message on a facebook page dedicated to solving the murders. “I see so many caring people posting here, it is an incredible tragedy,” he wrote. “Even more tragic is the fact that with all the people present that night, not one, even with the passage of time, has been touched by their Maker to come forward and tell the story of what they saw. Their silence, tragically, is evil as well.” Elicker always wondered if it was the neighborhood kids who killed her sister. Woodruff said she had no idea what happened. “Did it have to do anything with a Satan thing or Friday the 13th, or was it just a psycho?” she wondered. — Detectives took a hard look at the case in 2009. They collected DNA from evidence, which they believe belonged to someone other than the three teenagers. They ran the DNA through a database of criminals, but they got no “hits,” meaning the samples didn’t correspond to any criminals from whom DNA had been collected. The detectives around that time met with Elicker and her sister, who pointed out several people from the South Gate High School yearbook they suspected would have hurt their sister. Coleman said detectives are still talking to people and following up on leads. But, more than anything, investigators need someone to talk, he said. “The biggest thing we need is to jostle somebody’s memory,” he said. — Elicker wishes she and her family were pushier with detectives those first few weeks and months after the killing. “To tell you the truth, we still don’t know that much about the case,” she said. “The detectives don’t tell us much.” She wondered what would have happened if the Kasters and her family were rich or famous. “We just figured we were middle class families and that the kids that died didn’t really matter to anybody,” she said. Elicker’s parents call the detectives from time to time to make sure they are still working on the case. They still live in the same apartment they lived in back in 1984. “They can’t leave because it’s the last time they had Veronica,” she said. “It’s the last time we had our whole family.” Share this: Tweet Email Like this: Like Loading... Related Comments |
Samsung Galaxy Tab A 10.1, Samsung’s latest 10 inch tablet is now up for preorder in USA, where it can be purchased straight from the South Korean manufacturer. We’re talking about the 16 GB WiFi only model, that sets you back $299.99. Shipping comes for free and the device will arrive in 7 to 10 business days on the customer’s doorstep. Samsung Galaxy Tab A 10.1 packs a 10.1 inch LCD display (yes, not Super AMOLED strangely) and relies on an Exynos 7870 processor, an octa core 1.6 GHz unit, with a Mali T830 MP2 GPU in the mix. There’s also 2 GB of RAM on offer, as well as 16 GB of storage. Plus, we get a microSD card slot and a 7300 mAh battery. Galaxy Tab A 10.1 has an 8 megapixel main camera with F/1.9 aperture, while upfront there’s a 2 MP shooter. The OS of choice is Android 6.0 Marshmallow and there are also 20 apps for kids preinstalled. You can buy one such device here. |
The Wikimedia Foundation, the nonprofit organization behind Wikipedia, has recently announced its decision to sue the National Security Agency (NSA) and the Department of Justice (DOJ) over the mass surveillance program run by the NSA. Wikimedia joins forces with eight other organizations, including the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers, the Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International USA. The aim of the lawsuit is to challenge the "large-scale search and seizure of internet communications — frequently referred to as “upstream” surveillance," and put an end on it. The organization says that the NSA is using questionable methods for acquiring the data, and that the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act Amendments Act allows it to collect any communications that can be categorized as “foreign intelligence information”. This is a broad term that gives the NSA the ability to include pretty much anything, suggesting that there's a lot of potential for abuse. The program casts a vast net, and as a result, captures communications that are not connected to any “target,” or may be entirely domestic. This includes communications by our users and staff.By tapping the backbone of the internet, the NSA is straining the backbone of democracy. Wikipedia is founded on the freedoms of expression, inquiry, and information. By violating our users’ privacy, the NSA is threatening the intellectual freedom that is central to people’s ability to create and understand knowledge. Wikimedia believes that by doing this, the NSA is violating the U.S. Constitution’s First and Fourth Amendment, which protect the freedom of speech and association, and against unreasonable search and seizure, respectively. Its proof is based on leaks made by Edward Snowden, which include a slide from a classified NSA presentation that features the Wikimedia trademark in it, and revealed that its users were also targeted by the surveillance program. The organization believes that this will help establish a strong case. Source: Wikimedia Foundation Blog | Lady Justice image via Shutterstock |
Note: the Whitehat withdraw contract is only available on the Classic chain of Ethereum and will allow DTH to receive ETC (not ETH). This is NOT related to the extra balance, or the DAO Withdraw contract. The withdraw contract has been reviewed by the community and a lot of the feedback has been incorporated into the contract. We would like to thank the community for the time they took to audit and review the contract. Community Feedback Acting on feedback from the community we have: Made various changes to the contract for readability and security purposes. Removed the botWithdraw() option. It was an option meant to ease user experience for people who did not want to sync the ETC chain but could also be seen as a potential security risk. Added more events and made sure all events contain the withdrawal type for easier auditing of the contract’s activity in the blockchain. Next Steps Escape hatch Multisig The contract has an escape hatch which can be used if a terrible security risk is found that neither our tests or the audit by the community has seen. In such an event we can call the escape hatch and send all remaining funds of the contract to a multisig wallet managed by us. Authorizeaddress By removing botWithdraw() we are only left with the proxyWithdraw() option if users want to withdraw without syncing the ETC chain. proxyWithdraw() requires the user to sign his withdrawal intent in the ETH chain using web3.eth.sign() . This can not be done by contract accounts such as multisig wallets. That is another reason why botWithdraw() was designed the way it was. In order to allow people who held DAO tokens at the HF in a multisig wallet to also be able to withdraw using proxyWithdraw() we have deployed the whauthorizeaddres.sol at address (0xd4fb7fd0c254a8c6211e441f7236fa9479708a99) in the ETH chain. This contract can be used in the aforementioned situations to have multisig wallets (or other contracts) authorize an end-user-account address to sign for them. The contract ABI is the following: [{"constant":true,"inputs":[],"name":"getIsClosed","outputs":[{"name":"","type":"bool"}],"type":"function"},{"constant":false,"inputs":[],"name":"close","outputs":[],"type":"function"},{"constant":false,"inputs":[{"name":"_authorizedAddress","type":"address"}],"name":"authorizeAddress","outputs":[],"type":"function"},{"constant":true,"inputs":[],"name":"getOwner","outputs":[{"name":"","type":"address"}],"type":"function"},{"constant":false,"inputs":[{"name":"_newOwner","type":"address"}],"name":"changeOwner","outputs":[],"type":"function"},{"inputs":[],"type":"constructor"},{"anonymous":false,"inputs":[{"indexed":true,"name":"dthContract","type":"address"},{"indexed":true,"name":"authorizedAddress","type":"address"}],"name":"Authorize","type":"event"}] The way to use it is rather simple. Make a call to authorizeAddress(address _authorizedAddress) from your contract with a regular address as a parameter that will be used to sign petitions for withdrawal in ETC chain. You can find the verification of the contract here: http://etherscan.io/address/0xd4fb7fd0c254a8c6211e441f7236fa9479708a99#code Some time before the deployment of the actual withdrawal contract, whauthorizeaddress.sol will be closed and a ledger of authorized accounts will be created, combined with the current HF snapshot and used as the ledger of user balances. The relevant code for the authorization ledger can be seen here. In the actual withdrawal contract it’s used in the proxyWithdraw() function. Deployment of the withdrawal Contract If there are no major objections or exploits found, the withdrawal contract will be deployed on Aug, 30th, 2016 at 17:00 CET. All the users will have 6 months from that day on to claim their refund. The withdraw contract will probably be topped up multiple times, since there is still another small DAO we are waiting to come out of its creation period and also some funds are held by exchanges. So people would need to claim the remaining of their portion each time funds are sent to the contract. We are also actively working with exchanges to resolve the issue of frozen funds and will post an update as soon as there is new information so these funds can be added to the withdraw contract as well. After 6 months, all remaining funds will be sent to a multisig controlled by the whitehat group and will either be kept as donation for the efforts they have done to bring this value back to the token holders or donated to community developments. Discussion channel A dedicated channel has been created on the DAO Slack in order for users to help each other with problems or questions regarding the withdrawal contract and the process around it. Donation You can donate to the WHG at these following addresses: |
MOSCOW (Reuters) - The owners of Russia’s largest toy retailer Detsky Mir raised $355 million in an initial public offering (IPO) of shares priced at the bottom of the expected range, in a sign investors are making a cautious return to Russian assets. The IPO was the highest-profile share sale by a Russian company since 2014, when Western sanctions over Russia’s annexation of Ukraine’s Crimea region combined with a slump in oil prices to bring most deal-making to a standstill. Detsky Mir sold shares at 85 rubles apiece, the bottom of the planned 85-87 rouble range, and the book was covered 1.5 times, marking cautious interest in Russia despite western sanctions. “Investors are not feeling that sure yet and want to have an iron guarantee they will make money on a deal,” a source with one of the banks organizing the IPO said, when asked why the offering priced at the bottom of the range. The company said the sale raised 21.1 billion rubles ($355 million) for the selling shareholders - Russian conglomerate Sistema (SSAq.L), which will retain a majority stake, and the Russia-China Investment Fund (RCIF). The deal valued Detsky Mir, which is Russian for “Children’s World,” at 62.8 billion rubles. The stock will begin trading on the Moscow Exchange on Feb. 10. “That’s a sign that investors are ready to look at Russia and buy. We hope that the market is reopening,” another investment banker who requested anonymity told Reuters. The Russian economy returned to growth late last year after seven quarters of contraction, helped by a recovery in oil prices. However, private consumption - the biggest driver of Russia’s economy in the past - has yet to pick up before it starts contributing to the wider recovery. “The economy is of course recovering. But is it going to be a massive recovery? No. Moreover, the recovery is dissymmetric, it’s only seen in the top quarter of the population, I think it’s a problem,” said Jacob Grapengiesser, a partner at investment fund East Capital Group. FILE PHOTO: Traders work on the floor of the Moscow Exchange in the capital Moscow, Russia August 24, 2015. REUTERS/Sergei Karpukhin/File Photo LACKLUSTER DEMAND Andrey Shemetov, the head of the global markets department at Sberbank CIB, which is arranging the IPO, said investors spanned the globe. Around 25 percent were from the United States, around 35 percent from the UK, 20 percent from Europe, and the remaining 20 percent split between the Middle East and Asia, and Russia. “An investor should be offered the future of a company, there is a growth potential. To push the price up, for it to fall by 30 percent later, is not acceptable for us,” Shemetov told Reuters. A source close to the placement said there were “hedge funds, long-only investors including sovereign wealth funds” among the buyers and no single investor would take a dominant position. Alexander Golovtsov, head of investment research at Uralsib asset management, said one could have expected a stronger demand, after Russia’s MICEX stock index .MCX added 27 percent in 2016. “The placement did not seem expensive to me... It’s possible that underneath, a not very high demand is behind the current levels of the (stock market) indexes),” Golovtsov told Reuters. The deal could however encourage other Russian companies looking to tap equity capital markets. Sources have said fertilizer producer Phosagro (PHOR.MM) is considering a secondary share issue this week, while Sistema has said it may list its agriculture business this year. “Overall, appetite for Russia is changing for the better,” a source with a Western investment bank said. RCIF, set up by sovereign wealth fund the Russian Direct Investment Fund and China Investment Corp, bought into Detsky Mir slightly more than a year ago and its internal rate of return on the investment exceeded 90 percent, it said. FILE PHOTO: A board, showing the logo of Russian children's goods retailer Detsky Mir, is on display outside its store in Moscow, Russia, January 16, 2017. REUTERS/Sergei Karpukhin/File Photo RCIF sold a 10 percent stake, keeping a 13 percent holding, while Sistema (AFKS.MM) cut its stake to 50 percent plus one share from 72.57 percent. Sales at Detsky Mir, a 70-year-old brand set up under Soviet rule, rose 30 percent last year against a fall of 5 percent in overall retail sales in Russia. It plans to open around 250 stores through 2020, including 70 in 2017. “It’s a good company: people will always buy toys and Detsky Mir is a price leader,” said a Moscow-based fund manager who asked not be named. |
Submitted to It’s Going Down I’m a Pacific Northwest-based anarchist who recently visited my partner’s family in a small inland city in the People’s Republic of China. While there, I had a handful of truly striking encounters with labor militancy, a phenomenon that has only received a small trickle of coverage in the West. While IGD usually keeps its coverage limited to North America, I figured that a look at resistance to the world’s largest ongoing capitalist transformation would be worth sharing. China is currently the site of tremendous contradictions, with the coastal regions home to both a fabulously wealthy bourgeoisie and a massive migrant urban working class. Worker resistance in coastal factories has received some attention in the west, most notably in the book China on Strike. What has received even less attention both in China and in North America, and what I hope to shed a bit of light on, is the rising militancy of China’s massive rural peasantry. Facing issues endemic to capitalist development such as the breaking up of and theft of common lands, confronting intense repression from the Chinese state, and complicated in the particular region I visited by the fact that numerous rural areas are populated by non-Han Chinese ethnic minorities, there is undoubtedly a sense that something big is brewing in the world’s largest country, and what happens there will undoubtedly have global repercussions. Yangshuo County, China On its face this region of China has prospered from a tremendous tourism boom. The stunning natural beauty of the surrounding forests, rivers, and mountains draw countless tourists from around China and the world. The central town of Yangshuo is crossed by streets with flashing neon lights, lined with dozens of hotels and restaurants both Chinese and Western. Among the most popular attractions in the surrounding area are river rides where a single boatsman gently maneuvers a couple up and down the Yulong river on a small bamboo raft. Beneath the calm surface of the water, though, lies a tale of exploitation characteristic of China’s transition to capitalism. My partner and I visited Yangshuo amidst a larger trip to their hometown a few hours away. Early in the morning we drove out to the river and, after purchasing tickets from a booth, headed to the bank and met the pilot. Once on the slowly rolling water we quickly sank into relaxation. Flanked by lush green mountains and blessed by a sunny day, I made an idle comment on the beauty of the surroundings. The pilot’s response quickly broke the spell. “What does all the beauty really do for us?” Seven or eight years ago, the pilot’s village, Xinglong, came together to collectively build a dock of the same name in order to develop a means of benefiting from the fast-rising tourism industry in Yangshuo and nearby Guilin. Jobs in Yangshuo itself could only be had through family connections, while the young people from the village were leaving to big cities in droves to find factory work, an option unavailable to their elders. From the outset there were issues around money flowing in, with the government demanding a large cut in taxes, but the pilots’ share of a fare and the number of trips available in a day were more than enough to make a living. All of this changed three years ago when those in power realized the lucrative potential in controlling the dock and similar ones built by other villages. The county government stepped in and ordered the village to give them control of the dock for a price far less than its value. The villagers believe that the government did not intend to actively manage it, but instead acted as a front for various moneyed interests or organized crime. Whatever the case, the price itself was never actually paid but the village still lost control of the dock and a wide swath of surrounding communal land. As the pilots’ share of the boat fare continued to decrease, villagers turned to collective strike actions. Such measures have become increasingly common throughout China, in spite of their illegality, as abuse and exploitation have grown along with the economy. The largest strike took place two years ago. For five days surrounding the National Holiday in October, hundreds of boat pilots withheld their labor and congregated on the banks of the river in protest. Their demands were not entirely specified but revolved around better pay and treatment. Early in the strike the local police chief arrived with a camera, presumably to photograph strikers for future identification and retaliation. In response the striking pilots pushed him into the river to get rid of the camera. Later on, around a hundred riot police arrived but took no action. They were armed with batons and shields. The strike was ultimately ended not through violence but the use of scabs. With poverty rampant among strikers and no formal organizations to help keep their needs met through the strike, some of the pilots were bribed to resume work. With some of their coworkers back on the river, the remainder were ultimately forced to give in. The resumption of work, though, did not mean the government had forgotten what took place. Some of the scabs had been coerced to give the names of pilots central to organizing the strike. A few weeks after work resumed, dozens of police entered the village by night, broke into the homes of the organizers, and arrested them. One was the head of the village, who was sentenced to three years in prison and remains there. The rest of those arrested are also still imprisoned with even longer sentences. Other strikes have followed, but the brutal crackdown by the government has had a chilling effect on the workers’ willingness to continue fighting. While searching for ways to eke out more of a living, the pilots at Xinglong pooled their money to buy cameras and build a small building to take pictures of boat riders. In response to a recent protest police burned the building down. The pilots have also tried to work within the system, but have been ignored. They pooled their money and were able to send two hundred of their number to Beijing to petition the central government, but their petition fell on deaf ears. They have also failed to attract any media attention, perhaps due to the fact that they are standing against the local government in a country with tight media censorship. As the situation stands, many pilots see little hope. Both collective direct action and the use of official channels to protest the theft of their village’s common land and their own livelihoods have failed to produce any results and have instead resulted in severe repression. Pilots are currently only given 35 yuan out of a ticket that costs 180, and are frequently allowed only one or even no fares per day. Yet they have few other options. Jobs in the local urban areas are virtually impossible to find without connections, while work in the factories in coastal provinces almost always goes to younger laborers. Despite all of this, and with great fear, the pilots fight on. They are not alone. Workers in many of the other tourist industries throughout Yangshuo County, from pilots at many river docks to vendors and laborers in the numerous indigenous minority villages frequented by tourists, continue to strike in the face of repression. Workers at one popular tourist attraction recently went on strike only to have all three hundred of them arrested. Chinese worker militancy in industrialized coastal-provinces has received some attention in the West. Clearly labor unrest is not confined their. With little international, or even domestic, attention, worker resistance to China’s ongoing capitalist transformation has become endemic in rural areas. A tide is rising, and the only question is how high it will surge. Support our work! Please donate: |
Every week of the 2016 season, CFL.ca columnists Pat Steinberg and Marshall Ferguson debate over one of the league’s most contentious storylines. In Week 16, we ask the question: Have the Montreal Alouettes run out of time? They might finally have a spark, but is it too late for the Alouettes to make a run? That’s one of the questions as Week 16 arrives with all nine Canadian Football League teams still in the playoff picture. The Riders, Alouettes and Argos are on the outside of it all looking in, but some teams have better odds than others. The three-win Riders are eight points back of a playoff spot and could be eliminated with a loss this weekend — only a minor miracle would see them make the post-season. Toronto just released three of its top receivers and is going through a change at quarterback while losing seven of its last eight games. The Alouettes? Maybe they have the best odds of any of the outsiders, entering Week 15 play with five games remaining — a game in hand on Toronto, Hamilton and Edmonton — and only four points back of the Ticats for a playoff spot. It won’t be easy and the odds are against them, but the Alouettes have life. Jacques Chapdelaine has brought changes to la belle province and the team was dominant on both sides of the ball in his debut on the sidelines. With a young Rakeem Cato, an aggressive defence and an ‘us against the world’ mentality, is it too late for the Alouettes to make some noise and jump back into the East Division playoff picture? Pat Steinberg and Marshall Ferguson debate in the latest Berg vs. Ferg. BERG VS. FERG: WEEK 15 RESULTS Last week, Berg and Ferg debated over best QB-coach duos ever. » View Week 15 Berg vs. Ferg CFL.ca Twitter TOTAL Ferguson – 269 (79%) Steinberg – 72 (21%) Steinberg – 115 (51%) Ferguson – 111(49%) Ferguson – 380 (67%) Steinberg – 187 (33%) FERG (6-5): THERE’S AN OPENING IN THE EAST Listen, I wrote off the Montreal Alouettes just like the rest of you. I thought the CFL’s East Division had way too much fire power to keep Montreal in the conversation for a playoff spot. The Argonauts traded for their future franchise quarterback; the Ticats were getting their star pivot back from a major knee injury and the REDBLACKS are defending East Division champions with a great amount of continuity and offensive fire power. Something strange happened over the last month or so though. The Argos struggled to assimilate Drew Willy; the Tiger-Cats didn’t run away from the pack when Zach Collaros returned; and the REDBLACKS fumbled around searching for an identity while Ottawa football fans fear Trevor Harris might have hit the wall in the same way he did as the Argos’ starter by fall of 2015. The Alouettes’ improved chances have quite honestly relied on the dominance of the West Division over the East and East Division teams’ back and forth squabbling where no team runs away with the crown. The Alouettes play the Stampeders twice still this season which should be a daunting task, but we aren’t sure when the historic Stamps will start to take their foot off the gas in hopes of lining up playoff excellence. If Calgary backs off and the Alouettes can take a game from the Stampeders they will have achieved something no other team has been able to in the East this season which would lend a major upper hand in becoming a playoff team. The Alouettes also play a struggling Tiger-Cats team and a defunct yet reborn Riders roster to finish the season – both winnable games – but the true caveat to the Alouettes somehow scrounging together a playoff appearance in 2016 will come this weekend. Edmonton appears to be in line for the crossover spot by taking away third place from the East. Montreal must handle Edmonton at home in order to keep hope alive. With a passionate fan base reignited by Jacque Chapdelaine’s appointment as head coach, anything is possible. BERG (5-6): TOO LITTLE, TOO LATE Too little, too late…but that’s okay There should be renewed excitement surrounding the Montreal Alouettes right now. In their first game with a new coach and a new offence, the Als crushed the Toronto Argonauts 38-11 to finish off Week 15 of the season. Unfortunately, I just can’t see that excitement translating into post-season football in 2016; Montreal has too steep a hill to climb with added obstacles in its way. The sheer math of the situation is daunting to begin with. At 4-9 and with five games to go, the Alouettes need to close a three-game gap to the 7-7 Edmonton Eskimos who, thanks to the crossover, currently hold down an East Division playoff spot. That means the absolute worst Montreal can do down the stretch is 3-2 while hoping the Eskimos lose their final four games. That in and of itself is pretty unrealistic and that’s before we analyze schedules. At first blush, you might like the way Montreal’s remaining five games fall. Week 16 sees the Als go head to head with the team they’re chasing in a home date against Edmonton on Monday afternoon. The problem is, Montreal’s remaining schedule from there is about as tough as it gets. The Alouettes finish their season with two games against the powerhouse Calgary Stampeders and finish their year against an always-dangerous Hamilton team. Knowing that final game against the Tiger-Cats is likely going to mean a ton to the opposition, that game becomes even more difficult. Just meeting the bare minimum requirement of three wins down the stretch is going to be tough for Montreal. Edmonton’s schedule isn’t easy down the stretch, either. Following Monday’s game against the Als, the Eskimos finish with the Lions, Ticats, and Argos. Knowing the makeup of the defending champs, and knowing how they’ve played the last couple of weeks, going 0-4 to close out the season just doesn’t seem in the cards. As much as I don’t see the Alouettes doing what they’d need to to punch their post-season ticket, there’s no harm in finishing the season strong. Jacques Chapdelaine is in as head coach and the Als can put their final five games to good use regardless of their playoff fate. Montreal has a chance to get Chapdelaine’s offence down pat while also building up a much-needed new identity. If Montreal ends up playoff bound then great. By finishing the season strong, though, at the very least the Alouettes will put themselves in a much better post-season spot for 2017. DON’T SIT ON THE FENCE! While both sides are pretty convincing, someone’s got to take it. Whose argument convinced you the most? You can vote for this week’s winner both on CFL.ca and Twitter. Meanwhile, continue the conversation by tweeting @Fan960Steinberg and @TSN_Marsh. While the discussion never ends, polls close on Sunday night at 11:59 p.m ET. The winner will be revealed in the following week’s Berg vs. Ferg. |
David sent me a note and a pic: Claire and I have been “happy mutants” for several years; and so our 10 year-old son, Joseph, has often seen us chuckle at a Boing Boing posting, marvel at some piece of LEGO engineering or share a piece of Whoviana. I’ve read a few of your books, and I have recently tried to introduce some of your YA fiction to him (without success, so far). Our son enjoys manga, anime and comics. He occasionally will create his own comic for our amusement. The other day, he created this comic based upon his noticing a certain hidden connection between your last name and a certain character with a blue box we know and love. Maybe it’s not too late to substitute you for Peter Capaldi? While we haven’t yet gotten into discussions with him about copyleft, Creative Commons and the like, he has obviously picked up from somewhere that rights are an important thing to assert. |
Caterpillar prepares confrontation with South Milwaukee workers By Niles Williamson 29 March 2013 Contract talks are scheduled to begin April 2 between Caterpillar Inc. and the United Steelworkers Union (USW) for a new contract covering 800 workers in South Milwaukee, Wisconsin. These are the first negotiations since the South Milwaukee plant was acquired in 2011 by Caterpillar as part of its $8.8 billion takeover of mining equipment giant Bucyrus. The last contract was negotiated in 2008, under the previous ownership. In a move to intimidate the workforce into accepting major concessions the company announced the layoff of up to 40 percent of unionized workers at the South Milwaukee plant. As many as 300 factory workers face what the company described as short term layoffs. Caterpillar blamed the layoffs on slowing global demand for mining equipment. The announcement was made late on March 28 ahead of the long Easter weekend, avoiding an immediate confrontation between management and workers and also giving time for workers to blow off steam. The contract talks begin as the company is in the midst of carrying out a global campaign to slash wages under conditions of the world economic slowdown and pit workers against each other in a competitive race to the bottom. This has been facilitated by the complicity and betrayals of the official trade unions. This campaign has been seen most recently in the mass layoff of workers in Gosselies, Belgium, and Northern Ireland, the shuttering of the London, Ontario, Electromotive Diesel plant, and enforcement of major concessions in Joliet, Illinois. More than 100 workers also lost their jobs in Australia, when the company shifted production of mining trucks from Victoria to Mexico. South Milwaukee Caterpillar workers last summer Caterpillar, the world’s largest manufacturer of construction and mining equipment, made a record $5.68 billion in profits on $65.87 billion in revenue in 2012. Chairman and CEO Douglas Oberhelman pulled in a total compensation of $16.9 million in 2011, a 60 percent increase over his income in 2010. Despite the claims that it hopes to avoid a work stoppage, Caterpillar has been preparing for just such an event. Non-unionized managerial and support staff at the South Milwaukee plant are being trained to operate as strikebreakers. At the same time, lead production workers have been compelled to develop standard operating procedures making it possible for less-skilled replacements to quickly take over production work. While Caterpillar is preparing for a confrontation, the response of the USW is to do everything to sow complacency, disarm workers and pave the way for the slashing of wages and benefits at the South Milwaukee plant. Behind the scenes, the USW is working to convince the company not to take aggressive action by offering its collaboration. In response to questions about a potential strike at the South Milwaukee plant, national USW spokesman Gary Hubbard stated, “We can help Caterpillar succeed,” making clear the union’s desire to function as an arm of Caterpillar’s labor management if only it were allowed to. USW Local 1343 has appealed to the Milwaukee Area Technical College (MATC) to stop training 25 non-union Caterpillar workers who could be used as strikebreakers. A MATC spokeswoman responded by saying the school must honor its contract with Caterpillar as part of its mission of “being responsive to the needs of businesses in our district.” Caterpillar, for its part, claims the training program at the school is part of its standard contingency planning and not part of a strikebreaking plan. USW Local 1343 has sought to convince workers that the wage and benefit cuts forced upon Caterpillar workers throughout the world will not happen to them. When asked last summer if Caterpillar would attack the South Milwaukee workers’ wages and benefits, Local vice-president Barry Lewis responded, “if they want to tear that down—I don’t know that they do—but if they want to, that’s not going to behoove them at all. It would amaze me if they tried to.” Lewis attempted to downplay the implications of the concessions contract at Caterpillar’s Joliet, Illinois, plant, saying, “Some people are very worried. We’re not sure how it equates to us, I mean, we’re aware that they’re United Auto Workers [the workers in Joliet are, in fact represented by the IAM, not UAW], we’re Steel Workers. The product lines are completely different.” In light of developments over the last two years, it is evident Caterpillar plans to slash wages and benefits at the plant. The UAW’s betrayal of Caterpillar workers in the 1990s set the tone for the ensuing two decades of concessions and givebacks. Each union betrayal has only encouraged the company to press ahead with further attacks. Most recently, the UAW’s 2011 contract set the tone for Caterpillar’s negotiations with the International Association of Machinists (IAM) and the USW: lower wages, increased contributions to pensions and health insurance, and more “flexibility” in the workforce—i.e., destruction of job classifications, work rules and protections against speed-up. The USW will do nothing more than the UAW and IAM, in regard to waging a genuine struggle. Tied to the Obama administration—whose manufacturing policy is known as “in-sourcing”—the unions are committed to undercutting labor costs in other countries and convincing global companies like Caterpillar that they need not go outside the US to find cheap labor. They are opposed to any struggle that would unite workers plant by plant, let alone country by country. During the machinists’ strike last year, tens of thousands of Caterpillar workers represented by the UAW and USW were compelled to use parts made by scab workers in Joliet. The IAM discouraged expanded industrial action by workers; it instead promoted feeble protests outside of Caterpillar shareholder meetings and the reelection of President Obama. USW bureaucrats are concerned most with maintaining dues pay, of which a significant portion goes to pay their handsome salaries. They are more than willing to work with the company to push through wages and benefit cuts in order to maintain their institutional interests. Including benefits and other compensation, USW president Leo Girard earned $195,565 in 2011. More than 470 USW bureaucrats had a total compensation exceeding $100,000 in 2011. The official unions, in the United States, Canada, and internationally, have long ceased to function as organizations that defend the interests of the working class. The only force strong enough to counter the offensive by Caterpillar is the international working class mobilized on the basis of a socialist program. The USW, IAM, UAW and other unions, which are based on nationalism and the defense of the profit system, are incapable of waging such a struggle. The only way forward for South Milwaukee Caterpillar workers is a decisive break, organizationally and politically from the USW. An independent rank-and-file committee must be formed to organize militant industrial action, including plant occupations and strikes, against the attacks on living standards. A wide appeal must be made to mobilize workers throughout the United States and internationally to fend off further attacks on wages, benefits, and working conditions. |
NEW YORK -- A coalition of advocacy groups and political leaders held a rally on Tuesday linking the subway pushing death of a South Asian man to a broader anti-Muslim environment in New York City -- inflamed, they said, by the Metropolitan Transportation Authority and the New York City Police Department. "When our own government, our own police, our own institutions, our own media continue to engage in racial profiling or painting communities as suspect, we cannot expect the results to be any different than what they are right now," said Fahd Ahmed, legal and policy director for the South Asian advocacy group Desis Rising Up and Moving. The Queens rally centered around the death of Sunando Sen, a Hindu immigrant from India who was crushed to his death by a subway train after 31-year-old Erika Menendez allegedly pushed him on Dec. 27. Menendez, who has a history of mental problems, told investigators she shoved Sen because she thought he was Muslim and "I hate Hindus and Muslims ever since 2001 when they put down the twin towers," police said. As deranged as his killer may have been, Ahmed said, Sen's death was not an isolated incident. In November a devout Muslim was stabbed outside a Queens mosque because of his religion. The same month, police arrested a man they accused of the serial killings of three Brooklyn shopkeepers with Middle Eastern backgrounds. In Wisconsin, in August, a white supremacist killed six Sikhs in a temple. New York City Council members Daniel Dromm and Jimmy Van Bramer, both gay Democrats from Queens, spoke at the rally, saying their own experiences fighting hate crimes made them take a stand against anti-Muslim and anti-South Asian violence. Ranjit De Roy, who has lived in Sen's apartment building in Elmhurst, Queens, for the last four years and counted him as a friend, also spoke. Sen, he said, was a kind man who often said that "religion makes the division of the human beings … humanity is the good thing." De Roy said he is haunted by his last image of Sen leaving his apartment, giving a cheerful greeting as he went off to a shift at work. These days, De Roy said, he can't get on the train without feeling scared and looking around to see if anyone is following him. "We are feeling insecure from that day," De Roy said. A general "climate of hostility" against Muslims, Arabs, and South Asians is to blame for that fear, said Muneer Awad, executive director of the New York Chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations. He pointed to the anti-Islam subway ads the MTA allowed to run underground, along with the NYPD's controversial surveillance of Muslim communities in and around New York, as "reinforcing" that climate. "Our elected officials and NYPD come out and say, 'Well, we are not for demonizing American Muslims, or demonizing these communities,'" said Awad. "We're trying to help them acknowledge that their policies are actually reinforcing that hostility." |
Updated June 29, 2016 - 6:09PM ET Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell says he has reservations about the candidate at the top the 2016 Republican ticket: Donald Trump. McConnell made headlines earlier this week for declining to say whether Trump is qualified for the presidency. In an interview with Washington, D.C. bureau reporter Geoff Bennett, McConnell said Trump is not yet a credible presidential candidate. Sen. Mitch McConnell: "Trump clearly needs to change, in my opinion, to win the general election. What I’ve said to him both publicly and privately: 'You’re a great entertainer. You turn on audiences. You’re good before a crowd. You have a lot of Twitter followers. That worked fine for you in the primaries. But now that you are in the general, people are looking for a level of seriousness that is typically conveyed by having a prepared text and Teleprompter and staying on message.' So my hope is that he is beginning to pivot and become what I would call a more serious and credible candidate for the highest office in the land." Geoff Bennett: "At the moment, though, I hear you saying he does not meet that threshold of credibility?" McConnell: "He’s getting closer. Getting closer." During the interview, the Kentucky Republican complimented his former Senate colleague -- now Trump’s Democratic opponent -- Hillary Clinton. Geoff Bennett: What was your working relationship like with Hillary Clinton when she was in the Senate? Sen. Mitch McConnell: Fine. Yeah. She’s an intelligent and capable person, no question about it. Bennett: If she happens to win in November and Republicans keep control of the Senate, do you think she’s someone you could work with? McConnell: Well, I’m hoping that doesn’t happen. But we'll work with whoever's elected president. That could include filling the vacancy on the Supreme Court. McConnell says he will not under any circumstances consider President Obama's nomination of Merrick Garland to replace the late conservative justice Antonin Scalia. "I don't think the seat would have been filled with a vacancy created in a presidential year no matter who was in the White House," McConnell said. "And for those who argue that this is a disadvantage to the Supreme Court, I would remind them that only four cases this whole term since Scalia passed away were deadlocked. Only four." In a Twitter post Wednesday afternoon, Trump disagreed with McConnell's characterization of Clinton as "capable." ISIS exploded on Hillary Clinton's watch- she's done nothing about it and never will. Not capable! — Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) June 29, 2016 McConnell spoke with Time Warner Cable News, in part, to promote his new memoir, "The Long Game." The full interview is airing on Time Warner Cable News' Kentucky station, CN2. |
This morning it was announced that Finland is to pilot a Basic Income as part of a far-reaching reform of tax and benefits. During the 2015 election, the Green Party of England and Wales were widely ridiculed for their policy of a ‘Citizens Income’ – more commonly known as a Basic Income. Their ridicule was, in large part, deserved primarily owing to their own obfuscation on the matter and basic failure to mount any defence of it. However, the Basic Income isn’t as absurd an idea as it first appears – which might be why the Finns (not renowned for their radical Communism) – are seriously considering its implementation. A Basic Income is essentially money given by the state to everyone, regardless of means or need. This was ridiculed as outlandishly expensive in the run up to the 2015 election, however some back-of-the-envelope calculations demonstrate that it could actually be implemented as a relatively modest reallocation, but radical simplification, of the existing tax and benefits systems. A basic income would simplify the tax and welfare systems, remove the stigma attached to benefits, incentivise work, and redistribute wealth (even if only modestly). It is a reasonable surmise that most people resident in the United Kingdom will either pay income tax, or else will be living on benefits. Very few people live off savings alone – and you would expect those with sufficient resources to be able to do so to have structured their considerable finances in such away that it generates income. The purpose of both the personal allowance for Income Tax, as well as of benefits, is to provide people with the basic means of subsistence. This is reflected in their levels. Standard Jobseekers’ Allowance + the average Housing Benefit payment = approximately £8,500, which, when you consider that Council Tax Reduction would also likely be applied, isn’t that far removed from the £10,295 someone earning exactly the personal allowance would take home. The level at which it was proposed by the Greens – £72 a week – is approximate to Jobseekers’ Allowance. A basic income set at the level of Jobseekers’ Allowance would amount to £3,800. Abolishing the personal allowance and paying everyone, instead, this Basic Income would be equivalent to increasing the personal allowance to £19,000. This, of course, would need to be off-set by a re-calibration of rates and bands. For example – assuming that National Insurance Contributions remain constant – in order to ensure that someone earning the average salary of £26,000 takes home the same amount of money after scrapping the personal allowance and paying him or her a Basic Income of £3,800 on top of their present net salary, a rate of income tax of 26% would have to be applied to their income. Given that the present basic rate of income tax is 20%, this represents a relatively minor shift, approximate to the 25% level that existed in the 90s. In any event, they would still be taking home the exact same amount of money. Someone earning less – for example £20,000 per year, would be £480 a year better off; someone earning slightly more, for example £30,000 per year, would be £120 a year worse off. Someone earning £7 an hour working 30 hours a week would be about £1,000 better off. This might seem like a lot, but given that that person presently pays almost no tax and is entitled to receive about £2,800 a year in working tax credit – a Basic Income actually looks quite miserly by comparison. Expressed in these terms, a Basic Income begins to look less like an incredibly generous giveaway, and more like the sort of tinkering with rates and bands that is commonplace in every budget – and exactly the sort of shift in the burden of taxation that you would hope that a Labour Government would pursue. A basic income could remove benefits as a social wedge. Rather than being something that only certain kinds of people get, it would be something that everyone gets. While, of course, there would remain the usual grumblings about people who aren’t working, it is arguable that the basic income would greatly incentivise work. David Cameron, arguably rightly, identified the “benefits merry-go-round” – whereby people are taxed on their income and then handed it back in the form of benefits. This is certainly the case, as someone earning above the personal allowance but still on a relatively low income will pay tax on their income and then potentially be entitled to a litany of in-work benefits: income support; working tax credits; Local Area Housing Allowance; Council Tax Reduction. Many of these benefits are designed to ensure that working is financially more attractive than not working – however knowing whether or not you will actually be entitled to them feels like guess-work to most of us. The certain knowledge that your basic income continues whether you work or not would greatly incentivise work. No longer would people fear that by going to work they’d be no better off. Obviously costing such a reorganisation would be a considerable undertaking – and the levels at which a Basic Income would become revenue neutral might vary wildly from those discussed above. But considering that a litany of benefits could either be substantially reduced in scope, or else scrapped altogether – and the associated costs of administering such benefits (we spend £8bn a year simply administering benefits) – it may well transpire that a Basic Income of £72 a week was actually pitched much lower than necessary. |
Vladimir Putin has contested David Cameron’s claim that he supports the UK’s exit from the EU - saying the Prime Minister's statements were a ploy to influence the public vote. Speaking at the World Economic Forum prior to the referendum, Mr Cameron said “friends” of the UK would like the country to stay in the EU, but suggested the Russian President - along with Isis - “would be happy” if Britain voted to leave. “It is worth asking the question: who would be happy if we left? Putin might be happy. I suspect [Isis leader] al-Baghdadi would be happy," the PM said. 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. “But our friends around the world are giving us a very clear message: it’s all up to you, it is your sovereign choice … but we’d like you to stay. We think it’s good for us and it’s good for you.” But Mr Putin dismissed the claims, saying: "Statements by the UK Prime Minister, Mr Cameron before this plebiscite where he stated Russia's position, have no basis and never did. “I believe that this is nothing more than a flawed attempt to influence the public opinion in his own country. “As we can see, even this did not bring the right result for those who did it … after the vote, no one has the right to make statements about some position of Russia. “This is nothing more than a demonstration of the low-level of political culture.” Speaking to reporters on a visit to Uzbekistan, Mr Putin also said the outcome of the EU referendum reflected Britain’s concerns over migration and security, as well as a dissatisfaction with EU bureaucracy. The week before the vote, the Russian president said that Mr Cameron had initiated the referendum in order to blackmail the rest of Europe, or as a scare tactic. Speaking in St Petersberg, he said: "There is a great problem with Brexit, why did he initiate this vote in the first place? Why did he do that? So he wanted to blackmail Europe to scare someone, what was the goal if he was against [Brexit]?" He added that Brexit was "none of our business", and that he did not have his own opinion on the matter. 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 |
Welp, Kim Jong Un is fucked. North Korean Cartman unveiled his “special forces” squad last weekend – trained to defend him to the death in the event of attempted regime change. Marching along in matching camo face paint, truckstop sunglasses, press-fit grenadier rifles, and ‘Johnny 5’ night-vision binoculars – N. Korea’s best of the best looks like a bunch of extras from the next Expendables. ‘Once Supreme Commander Kim Jong-un issues an order they will charge with resolve to thrust a sword through the enemy’s heart like lightning over Mount Paektu [the country’s highest peak],’ a broadcaster announced on North Korean state TV. –Daily Mail Quick observation – look at those chest-holstered pistols. Imagine yourself reaching for that weapon in combat; arm all high, elbow out awkwardly, grip at armpit level. Does that seem well thought out? If anything, this would be where you’d want a chest mounted pistol – center of mass or cross-draw. And where do US Special forces holster their sidearms? ON THEIR FUCKING SIDES! I don’t think these guys are too worried about Kim’s elite forces: ‘Murica bitches… If you enjoy the content at iBankCoin, please follow us on Twitter |
Your first name The Department of Health and Human Services has crowned a YouTube video entitled “Forget About The Price Tag” as the grand prize winner in a contest meant to encourage young people to sign up for Obamacare. The video contest, announced in August — in partnership with a group called Young Invincibles — encouraged participants to produce clips filled with pro-Obamacare messaging. HHS’s grand prize-winning video, announced Monday by the White House, features a young woman named Erin McDonald singing an Obamacare-loving version of Jessie J’s hit single, “Price Tag.” Without a hint of irony, McDonald sings her chorus: “Ain’t about the, uh, cha-ching cha-ching. Ain’t about the, yeah, bla-bling bla-bling. Affordable Care Act. Don’t worry ’bout the price tag.” McDonald, of course, is referring to the reasons young people should buy health insurance without worrying “’bout the price tag.” But critics of Obamacare regularly note that the law could amount to a government takeover of approximately one-sixth of the U.S. economy. McDonald won $2,000 for her efforts, according to the contest’s website. Watch: Follow Vince on Twitter |
President Trump is in hot water for supposedly disrespecting the family of a slain U.S. soldier. Earlier this month, four U.S. soldiers were killed in an ambush by Islamic extremists/militants/terrorists/bad guys in the African country of Niger during a joint patrol by American and Niger forces. At a press conference over a week later, a reporter asked the president: “Why haven’t we heard anything from you so far about the soldiers that were killed in Niger? And what do you have to say about that?” The next day Trump called Myeshia Johnson, the widow of Sgt. La David Johnson, one of the soldiers who had been killed in Niger, while she was on the way to the Miami airport to receive his body. According to Rep. Frederica Wilson (D-Fla.), who was in the car when Trump made the call, the president told the grieving widow that her husband “knew what he signed up for.” She claimed that Trump’s call was “horrible” and “insensitive,” and that the president couldn’t remember the dead soldier’s name. Trump then tweeted: “Democrat Congresswoman totally fabricated what I said to the wife of a soldier who died in action (and I have proof). Sad!” Later, before a White House meeting with senators, Trump remarked: “I didn’t say what that congresswoman said. Didn’t say it at all, she knows it.” White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders claims that several senior officials witnessed the call and described Trump’s manner as “respectful” and “very sympathetic.” He said; she said. Time to buy old US gold coins Missing in most all of the news stories about this event are two things that are much more important than whether President Trump was insensitive and disrespectful. Gun Control and the Se... Laurence M. Vance Buy New $5.95 (as of 07:05 EST - Details) What are U.S. troops doing in Niger? What do U.S. soldiers actually sign up for? The United States actually has almost 1,000 troops in Niger. It is not surprising that most Americans didn’t know this since even Lindsey Graham, the Republican warmonger on the Senate Armed Services Committee said that he had no idea. Some alternative news sources (here and here, for example) are asking what U.S. troops are doing in Niger so I will refer you to them. And, of course, it is not just Niger. Even the New York Times is reporting that the United States “now has just over 240,000 active-duty and reserve troops in at least 172 countries and territories,” plus an additional 37,813 troops on assignments that have not been made public. I want to take a serious look at what U.S. soldiers actually sign up for. What is a young man (or woman) actually getting into when he signs on the dotted line? What does it actually mean to wear a U.S. military uniform? There are a number of things that U.S. soldiers certainly don’t sign up for. No matter what they think, their family thinks, or what Americans in general think, U.S. soldiers don’t sign up to: defend the country fight for our freedoms keep Americans safe from terrorists support and defend the Constitution against all enemies, foreign and domestic protect Americans from credible threats serve the country secure American borders patrol American coasts guard American shores watch over American skies fight “over there” so we don’t have to fight “over here” So, what is it that U.S. soldiers actually sign up for? Truth be told, they sign up to: boldly go where no American soldier has any place going obey orders unconditionally die in vain, for a lie, or for a mistake die for empire be a pawn in the hands of Uncle Sam to be moved around as he sees fit serve the state help unleash sectarian violence invade other countries occupy other countries fight foreign wars maintain U.S. hegemony make widows and orphans launch preemptive strikes spread democracy at the point of a gun be the world’s policeman, fireman, bully, and social worker be part of the president’s personal attack force King James, His Bible,... Laurence M. Vance Best Price: $14.36 Buy New $14.95 (as of 07:30 EST - Details ) enforce UN resolutions die a senseless death fight unjust wars kill and maim foreigners kill civilians die for imperialism destroy foreign industry, culture, and infrastructure change regimes nation build fight immoral wars defend other countries fight unnecessary wars carry out a reckless, belligerent, and deeply flawed U.S. foreign policy neglect their families intervene in other countries create terrorists, insurgents, and militants because of foreign interventions enforce no-fly zones in other countries fight undeclared wars take sides in civil wars engage in offense instead of defense get PTSD or a traumatic brain injury have their limbs or genitals blown off die for the military/industrial complex be a global force for evil These are the things that U.S. soldier actually sign up for. Joining the U.S. military is not patriotic. It is a bad decision. It is a foolish choice. It is, in fact, downright idiotic. The Best of Laurence M. Vance |
Added to the schedule in the coming weeks will be Sweden, Denmark, the Netherlands, Belgium, France and Italy. For the first time the company will offer completely foreign connections, initially between Amsterdam, Brussels and Paris. "We think Europe is awesome," Managing Director André Schwämmlein said. Long-distance bus travel suppliers such as MeinFernbus/Flixbus offers competition to low-cost air carriers. They generally target young, flexible customers who travel spontaneously. Someone who, in two weeks’ time, wants to fly Paris to Berlin return must fork out 100 euro, or sometimes double that. In comparison, a bus ticket is 50 euro return - however the overnight journey is 15-20 hours. Other German bus companies also offer international services, including German Touring with their Euro Lines brand. But with the union of MeinFernbus/Flixbus comes an ambitious competitor. "If we do this, we do it to become the market leader," Managing Director Schwämmlein added. Cross-boarder sales will quadruple, he predicted, or even raise five fold. There is also more competition on the horizon. This coming Wednesday British rival Megabus is promoting one euro tickets between Cologne and Barcelona, and Germany’s Postbus has partnered with Euro Lines offering services to cities such as Paris, Copenhagen, Zurich and Vienna. at/bf (dpa) |
Just dopey! As police celebrate £300,000 cannabis bust... thieves steal plants out the back door AFTER seizing a bumper crop of cannabis, detectives were making the most of their triumph. They boasted about the £300,000 capture in a blaze of publicity and posed for photos with some of the 1,000 plants in the haul. However, while police were relishing the moment at the front of the drugs factory, thieves were busy at the back. An officer from South Wales Police poses with the £300,000 cannabis haul. As police stood guard at the front of the cannabis factory, thieves broke in through the back and stole some of the drugs They broke in and started stuffing the cannabis into black bin bags to be loaded into a waiting van. A neighbour, who was clearly somewhat more vigilant than the officers on the scene, noticed what was happening and raised the alarm. But, by then, an estimated £15,000 of cannabis plants had been stolen. An insider at South Wales Police said: ‘There are a few red faces around. ‘Everyone was chuffed with busting the huge factory and there was a blaze of publicity about it. ‘There was such a lot of cannabis inside we had to bring in council experts to dispose of it. ‘While we were waiting for that to happen, the thieves broke in through the back.’ |
U.S. corporate bond issuance was $106.2 billion in June, comprising $83.1 billion in investment-grade (IG) and $23.1 billion in high-yield (HY). This puts the first-half total at $868.1 billion, of which $714.1 billion is in IG and $154 billion in HY. At this pace, 2017 is on pace for $1.74 trillion, a new record and versus $1.52 trillion in 2016. That said, it is probably too soon to reach that conclusion. To reach the annualized $1.74 trillion this year, second-half issuance needs to maintain the tempo of the first half – in other words, issue another $868.1 billion. At least going by what transpired last year, this looks unlikely. In 2016, second-half issuance declined 17.7 percent over the first to $688.1 billion. Simplistically, if 2H this year follows the same pattern, issuance would be $714.4 billion. This would still amount to $1.58 trillion – a new record. One crucial difference this year is how HY is behaving, which jumped 26.5 percent in 1H over last year. Last year was the third consecutive year HY shrunk (Chart 1). This year, if the 1H momentum carries into the second, this trend will be broken. More important, regardless 2017 sets a new record or not, U.S. corporations once again are set to issue boatloads of debt. Since the end of 2008 through last year, bond issuance totaled $10.2 trillion. In 1Q17, non-financial corporate debt stood at $8.6 trillion, up $2.1 trillion since Great Recession ended in June 2009. How should we view this debt load? Is it too much, too little, just about right? Chart 2 shows a share of non-financial corporate debt in national income. In 1Q17, this was 52.5 percent. The all-time high of 54.5 percent was posted in 1Q09. So things are indeed in stretched territory. Incidentally, the red line in Chart 2 has shown a tendency to peak once a bear market in U.S. stocks is already underway. As things stand, it can continue to inch higher – or we may find out it already has once we learn 2Q17 numbers. There is a similar message coming from Chart 3, which pits NYSE margin debt with U.S. banks’ commercial & industrial loans. A 12-month rolling average is used. On this basis, both were at new highs in May. On an absolute basis, C&I loans peaked last November at $2.1 trillion, and has gone flat to ever so slightly down since. Margin debt reached an all-time high of $549.2 billion in April this year, with May down $9.3 billion month-over-month. Even if April marks the peak in margin debt, it will take time for the red line in Chart 3 to roll over, which, if past is precedent, then gets reflected in the green line. In 2000 and 2007, the latter lagged by about a year. That said, by the time it rolled over, the economy was already in recession. Hence the significance of Chart 2. As noted earlier, there is room for the red line to continue inching higher, but with each push higher, risk of a reversal would have grown. Thanks for reading! Please share. |
Causing a major hindrance to commuters who chose to fly from Lucknow, 16 flights have been affected due to radar failure and have been diverted to a nearby airport. Following this, all flight services to and from Lucknow have been suspended till further order. The radar failure was reported earlier in the day at 4.30 pm. #FLASH: Lucknow airport Radar BOR not in service. Radar failure reported at 4.30pm. 16 flights affected as of now. pic.twitter.com/mz1pR7Wapr January 14, 2017 16 flights affected due to Radar failure at Lucknow airport, diverted to a nearby airport. — ANI (@ANI_news) January 14, 2017 Jet Airways flight 9W 755 Delhi - Lucknow and 9W 756 Lucknow - Delhi cancelled due to technical issues at the Lucknow airport. — ANI (@ANI_news) January 14, 2017 |
The U.S. military has been equipping police departments across the country with surplus armored vehicles left over from the Middle Eastern conflicts. Local law enforcement agencies have exuded a vast transformation from public servants to a brutish, quasi-military force. Originally worth half a million dollars, local law enforcement agencies have been getting these vehicles at a massive discount to bolster an overkill attempt at shock and awe. Law enforcement agencies have been receiving mine-resistant ambush-protected vehicles (MRAPs) for about $2,500, if they are not outright donated. Despite the bargain, the vehicles are still a huge expense. “It’s armored. It’s heavy. It’s intimidating. And it’s free,” said Albany, New York County Sheriff Craig Apple. Local law enforcement receive the MRAPs as is, therefore the vehicles have to be retrofitted to compliment civilian use. This retrofit, which includes painting, emergency lights, seating, and loudspeakers, could cost $70,000 per unit. The size of the vehicles makes it difficult to negotiate some roads and bridges, and they have very poor fuel economy at five miles per gallon. In many instances, supplies and heavy military equipment have been distributed poorly, as much of the $4.2 billion surplus inventory has gone to low-crime areas since 1990. The University of Ohio State even received a MRAP, but it’s being used more for visually-affected crowd control at football games, rather than actual police operations. Kara Dansky, American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) Center for Justice Senior counsel, said that police militarization has the potential to “escalate violence.” But law enforcement agencies are pleased about the receipt of these vehicles; however, the use of military-grade equipment has not boded well for law enforcement in the past. In 2010, Detroit police raided a home where seven-year old Aiyana Mo’nay Stanley-Jones was asleep on the couch next to her grandmother. Police threw a flashbang grenade into the home, and the weapon landed and discharged on Jones’ blanket. The blanket caught fire, then police rushed inside the house, and, in the chaos, accidentally shot Jones in the neck. Two years prior, the Richland County Sheriff’s Department in South Carolina invested in a small, armored tank that Sheriff Leon Pitt dubbed “The Peacemaker.” “The Peacemaker” is equipped with a belt-fed, .50 caliber machine gun. Fifty-caliber rounds are so destructive that even the military avoids using that caliber on human targets, but instead concentrates it on heavily-armored, enemy vehicles. Richland County’s most common crimes are non-violent drug and gambling crimes. However, Pitt believes such overkilled firepower will actually “save lives.” But instances of innocent death at the hands of police overexertion illustrates the opposite. “Traditionally, the roles of police and the roles of military have been very different — and for good reason,” said Shakyra Diaz, policy director of Ohio’s ACLU chapter. “We cannot have our police looking at members of the community as military combatants.” Josh is a writer and researcher with Ring of Fire. Follow him on Twitter @dnJdeli. |
Cattle mutilation (also known as bovine excision[1] and unexplained livestock death[2]) is the killing and mutilation of cattle under unusual, usually bloodless and anomalous circumstances. Worldwide, sheep, horses, goats, pigs, rabbits, cats, dogs, bison, deer and elk have been reported mutilated with similar bloodless excisions; often an ear, eyeball, jaw flesh, tongue, lymph nodes, genitals and rectum are removed. Since the first reports of animal mutilations, various explanations have been offered, ranging from natural decomposition and normal predation to cults and secretive governmental and military agencies, to a range of speculations, including cryptid predators (like the Chupacabra) and extraterrestrials. Mutilations have been the subject of two independent federal investigations in the United States.[3] History [ edit ] The earliest known documented outbreak of unexplained livestock deaths occurred in early 1606 "...about the city of London and some of the shires adjoining. Whole slaughters of sheep have been made, in some places to number 100, in others less, where nothing is taken from the sheep but their tallow and some inward parts, the whole carcasses, and fleece remaining still behind. Of this sundry conjectures, but most agree that it tendeth towards some fireworks." The outbreak was noted in the official records of the Court of James I of England.[4] Charles Fort collected many accounts of cattle mutilations that occurred in England in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. John Keel mentioned investigating animal mutilation cases in 1966 (while with Ivan T. Sanderson) that were being reported in the Upper Ohio River Valley, around Gallipolis, Ohio.[5] The phenomenon remained largely unknown outside cattle-raising communities until 1967, when the Pueblo Chieftain in Pueblo, Colorado, published a story about a horse named Lady near Alamosa, Colorado, that was mysteriously killed and mutilated. The story was republished by the wider press and distributed nationwide; this case was the first to feature speculation that extraterrestrial beings and unidentified flying objects were associated with mutilation.[6] The Snippy (Lady) mutilation [ edit ] On September 9, 1967, Agnes King and her son Harry found the dead body of their three-year-old horse, Lady. Lady's head and neck had been skinned and defleshed, and the body displayed cuts that, to King, looked very precise. No blood was at the scene, according to Harry, and a strong medicinal odor was in the air. A subsequent investigation concluded there were "No unearthly causes" of the death.[citation needed] When the Lewis' called Alamosa County Sheriff Ben Phillips he told them that the death was probably due to "a lightning strike," and never bothered to visit the site.[4] Early press coverage of the case misnamed Lady as Snippy. Snippy was Lady's sire and belonged to Nellie's husband, Berle Lewis.[4] Later press coverage mentions that the horse had been shot in the behind.[7] Later developments [ edit ] Democratic senator Floyd K. Haskell contacted the FBI asking for help in 1975 due to public concern regarding the issue. He claimed there had been 130 mutilations in Colorado alone, and further reports across nine states.[8] A 1979 FBI report indicated that, according to investigations by the New Mexico State Police, there had been an estimated 8,000 mutilations in Colorado, causing approximately $1,000,000 damage.[9] In May 2001, 200 goats were mutilated in Panggang District of Gunung Kidul Regency, Yogyakarta, Indonesia.[10] Characteristics [ edit ] Physical characteristics [ edit ] In most cases, mutilation wounds appear to be clean and carried out surgically. Mutilated animals are sometimes, though not always,[11] reported to have been drained of blood and show no sign of blood in the immediate area or around their wounds. George E. Onet, a doctor of veterinary microbiology and cattle mutilation investigator, claims that mutilated cattle are avoided by large scavengers "such as coyotes, wolves, foxes, dogs, skunks, badgers, and bobcats" for several days after their death. Similarly, domestic animals are also reported to be "visibly agitated" and "fearful" of the carcasses.[12] According to a survey taken by the National Institute for Discovery Science (NIDS), mutilation of the eye occurred in 59 percent of cases, mutilation of the tongue in 42 percent of cases, the genitals in 85 percent of cases, and the rectum in 76 percent of cases.[13] According to Dr. Howard Burgess, nearly 90 percent of mutilated cattle are between four and five years old.[14] Some mutilations are said to occur in very brief periods. A 2002 NIDS report[15] relates a 1997 case from Utah. Two ranchers tagged a specific calf, then continued tagging other animals in the same pasture. The ranchers were, at the most, about 300 yards (275 m) from the calf. Less than an hour later, the first calf was discovered completely eviscerated—most muscle and all internal organs were missing. There was no blood, entrails, or apparent disturbance at the scene. Independent analysts both uncovered marks on the calf's remains consistent with two different types of tools: a large, machete-type blade, and smaller, more delicate scissors. The absence of tracks or footprints around the site of the mutilated carcass is often considered a hallmark of cattle mutilation.[citation needed] However, in some cases, strange marks or imprints near the site have been found. In the famous "Snippy" case, there was an absolute absence of tracks in a 100 ft (30 m) radius of the carcass (even the horse's own tracks disappeared within 100 ft (30 m) of the body.) But within this radius, several small holes were found seemingly "punched" in the ground and two bushes were absolutely flattened.[16] In Rio Arriba County, New Mexico, June 1976, a "trail of suction cup-like impressions" was found leading from a mutilated three-year-old cow. The indentations were in a tripod form, 4 inches (10 cm) in diameter, 28 inches (70 cm) apart, and disappeared 500 feet (150 m) from the dead cow. Similar incidents were reported in the area in 1978.[17][18] Laboratory reports [ edit ] Laboratory reports carried out on some mutilated animals have shown unusually high or low levels of vitamins or minerals in tissue samples, and the presence of chemicals not normally found in animals. However, not all mutilated animals display these anomalies, and those that do have slightly different anomalies from one another. On account of the time between death and necropsy, and a lack of background information on specific cattle, investigators have often found it impossible to determine if these variations are connected to the animals' deaths or not.[9] In one case documented by New Mexico police and the FBI,[9] an 11-month-old cross Hereford-Charolais bull, belonging to a Mr. Manuel Gomez of Dulce, New Mexico, was found mutilated on March 24, 1978. It displayed "classic" mutilation signs, including the removal of the rectum and sex organs with what appeared to be “a sharp and precise instrument” and its internal organs were found to be inconsistent with a normal case of death followed by predation. "Both the liver and the heart were white and mushy. Both organs had the texture and consistency of peanut butter" Gabriel L Veldez, New Mexico Police The animal's heart as well as bone and muscle samples were sent to the Los Alamos Scientific Laboratory for microscopic and bacteriological studies, while samples from the animal's liver were sent to two separate private laboratories. Los Alamos detected the presence of naturally occurring Clostridium bacteria in the heart, but was unable to reach any conclusions because of the possibility that the bacteria represented postmortem contamination. They did not directly investigate the heart's unusual color or texture.[9] Samples from the animal's liver were found to be completely devoid of copper and to contain 4 times the normal level of zinc, potassium and phosphorus. The scientists performing the analysis were unable to explain these anomalies.[9] Blood samples taken at the scene were reported to be "light pink in color" and “Did not clot after several days” while the animal's hide was found to be unusually brittle for a fresh death (the animal was estimated to have been dead for 5 hours) and the flesh underneath was found to be discolored.[9] None of the laboratories were able to report any firm conclusions on the cause of the blood or tissue damage. At the time, it was suggested that a burst of radiation may have been used to kill the animal, blowing apart its red blood cells in the process. This hypothesis was later discarded as subsequent reports from the Los Alamos Scientific Laboratory later confirmed the presence of anti-coagulants in samples[9] taken from other cows mutilated in the region. Conventional explanations [ edit ] As with most disputed phenomena, there are a number of potential explanations to cattle mutilations, ranging from death by natural causes to purposeful acts by unknown individuals. U.S. governmental explanation [ edit ] After coming under increasing public pressure, Federal authorities launched a comprehensive investigation of the mutilation phenomenon.[19] In May 1979, the case was passed on to the FBI, which granted jurisdiction under Title 18 (codes 1152 and 1153). The investigation was dubbed "Operation Animal Mutilation". The investigation was funded by a US$44,170 grant from the Law Enforcement Assistance Administration, and was headed by FBI agent Kenneth Rommel. It had five key objectives: To determine the reliability of the information on which the grant was based, which entailed gathering as much information as possible about the cases reported in New Mexico prior to May 1979 To determine the cause of as many mutilations as possible, especially those reported in New Mexico To determine if livestock mutilations as described constitute a major law enforcement problem If these mutilations do constitute a major law enforcement problem, to determine the scope of the problem and to offer recommendations on how to deal with it If it is shown that the mutilation phenomenon is not a law enforcement problem, to recommend that no further law enforcement investigations be funded. Rommel's final report was 297 pages long and cost approximately US$45,000. It concluded that mutilations were predominantly the result of natural predation, but that some contained anomalies that could not be accounted for by conventional wisdom. The FBI was unable to identify any individuals responsible for the mutilations. Details of the investigation are now available under the Freedom of Information Act. The released material includes correspondence from Rommel where he states that "most credible sources have attributed this damage to normal predator and scavenger activity".[20] Prior to the involvement of the FBI, the ATF launched their own investigation of the phenomenon.[21] Both federal investigations were preceded (and followed, to some extent) by a state level investigation carried out by enforcement officials in New Mexico. This investigation reported finding evidence that some mutilated animals had been tranquilized and treated with an anti-coagulant prior to their mutilation.[9]:13 It also contended that alleged surgical techniques performed during mutilations had become "more professional" over time.[9]:13 However, officers in charge were unable to determine responsibility or motive. The ATF investigation was headed by ATF Agent Donald Flickinger. The New Mexico investigation was headed by Officer Gabriel L Veldez of the New Mexico Police, with the assistance of Cattle Inspector Jim Dyad and Officer Howard Johnston of the New Mexico Department of Game and Fish. Natural causes [ edit ] Blowflies have been implicated as possible scavengers involved in making livestock carcasses look "mutilated." While many unconventional explanations have been put forward to explain cattle mutilations, a variety of scientists, veterinary workers, and knowledgeable observers (including farmers and other agricultural workers) have suggested more conventional ideas, most of which revolve around the hypothesis that "mutilated" animals died of natural causes and were subjected to known terrestrial phenomena – including the action of predators, parasites, and scavengers.[22] Missing or mutilated mouth, lips, anus, and genitalia are explained as: Contraction of missing/damaged areas due to dehydration. The actions of small scavengers and burrowing parasites seeking to enter or consume the body in areas where skin is at its thinnest. Missing/mutilated eyes and soft internal organs are explained as: The action of carrion feeding insects such as blowflies, and opportunistic or carrion birds such as vultures, which are known to direct themselves toward an animal's eyes, and to enter the body through the openings of the mouth and anus in order to feed on soft internal organs. Absence of blood is explained as: Blood pooling in the lowest points in the body where it will break down into its basic organic components. Blood that is external to the body, or in the area of a wound being consumed by insects or reduced by solar desiccation. Surgical incisions in the skin are explained as: Tears in the skin created when it is stretched by postmortem bloat and/or as dehydration causes the animal's hide to shrink and split, often in linear cuts. Incisions caused by scavengers or predators, possibly exacerbated by the above. The hypothesis that natural phenomena account for most mutilation characteristics has been validated by a number of experiments, including one cited by long-time scientific skeptic Robert T. Carroll, conducted by Washington County (Arkansas) Sheriff's Department. In the experiment, the body of a recently deceased cow was left in a field and observed for 48 hours. During the 48 hours, postmortem bloating was reported to have caused incision-like tears in the cow's skin that matched the "surgical" cuts reported on mutilated cows, while the action of blowflies and maggots reportedly matched the soft tissue damage observed on mutilated cows. No explanation was made however, for the entire absence of any blood. Experiments have also been conducted to compare the different reactions of surgically cut hide/flesh and predated hide/flesh to natural exposure.[23] They demonstrated pronounced differences between surgical cut and non surgical cuts over time. This article does not address tearing due to bloating. Some ranchers have disputed the more scientifically mainstream "natural causes hypothesis" on the grounds that the mutilated animals often fall outside of the normal categories of natural deaths by predation or disease. One reason cited is that the animals were healthy and showed no sign of disease prior to death, and were large and strong enough not to be a likely target for a predator. In some cases, ranchers have reported that the mutilated cattle were among the healthiest and strongest animals in their herd.[24] Other critics of the accepted position include investigators involved in paranormal and UFO research organizations, such as National Institute for Discovery Science which report the discovery of anomalies in necropsies which, they claim, cannot be explained by natural processes. Human intervention [ edit ] Animal cruelty and human activity [ edit ] It is alternatively hypothesised that cattle mutilations are the result of two unrelated deviant phenomena. The bulk of mutilations are the result of predation and other natural processes, and those with anomalies that cannot be explained in this way are the work of humans who derive pleasure or sexual stimulation from mutilating animals. Attacks against animals are a recognized phenomenon. There have been many recorded cases around the world, and many convictions. Typically the victims of such attacks are cats, dogs, and other family pets,[25] and the actions of humans are usually limited to acts of cruelty such as striking, burning, or beating animals. However, attacks have also been recorded against larger animals, including sheep, cows, and horses.[26] Humans, particularly those with sociopathic disorders, have been found to have mutilated animals in elaborate ways[25] using knives or surgical instruments. On April 20, 1979, Dr. C Hibbs of the New Mexico State Veterinary diagnostics Laboratory spoke before a hearing chaired by Senator Harrison Schmitt. Dr. Hibbs testified that mutilation fell into three categories, one of which was animals mutilated by humans[9] (page 25). FBI records did not record the percentage of mutilated animals that fell into this category. The standard criminal charge for mutilating an animal, including cattle, is animal cruelty. Cults [ edit ] Closely related to the deviant hypothesis is the hypothesis that cattle mutilations are the result of cult activity.[27] However, contrary to the deviancy hypothesis, which holds that cattle are mutilated at random by individual deviants, the cult hypothesis holds that cattle mutilations are coordinated acts of ritual sacrifice carried out by organized groups. Beliefs held by proponents of the cult hypothesis vary, but may include: That the apparent absence of blood at mutilation sites may indicate cult members harvest it [28] That organs have been removed from cattle for use in rituals [22] That unborn calves have been harvested from mutilated cattle. The hypothesis that cults were responsible for cattle mutilation was developed in the U.S. during the 1970s and 1980s, a time of growing national concern over cults (such as the Peoples Temple and Jonestown) and ritual satanic abuse ("Satanic panic").[29][30] In 1975, the US Treasury Department assigned Donald Flickinger to investigate the existence of connections between cults and the mutilation of cattle.[21][31]:23 The operation came under the jurisdiction of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms. Flickinger recorded a number of 'unusual' incidents and circumstantial evidence, but was unable to find sufficient evidence of cult involvement for the ATF to take further action.[21][31] Media reports of the time reported his investigation was dropped when it was determined cattle deaths were not a prelude to a co-ordinated campaign against elected officials by cult members.[31]:23 However, there were various reports during the time of menacing groups prowling around mutilation sites. In September 1975, a forestry service employee in Blaine County, Idaho, reported seeing a group of people in black hooded robes. Several cattle were found mutilated in the area the following day. On October 9, 1975, a motorist on U.S Highway 95 in northern Idaho, in an area of frequent cattle mutilation, reported to police that some 15 masked individuals formed a roadblock with linked arms, forcing him to turn around.[32] Public interest in the cult hypothesis waned during the 1980s, but interest was maintained by proponents such as the Colorado based television evangelist Bob Larson, who campaigned to raise public awareness of links between cattle mutilations and cult activity through his ministry and radio shows. Another proponent of the cult hypothesis is Montana author Roberta Donovan. In her 1976 publication Mystery Stalks the Prairie she documents the experiences of Deputy Sheriff Keith Wolverton of Great Falls, Cascade County, investigating cattle mutilations with suspected cult involvement. Since the beginning of the cult hypothesis, law enforcement agents in several states and provinces, including Alberta, Idaho, Montana, and Iowa have reported evidence implicating cults in several instances of cattle mutilations.[33] During their investigations, the FBI and the ATF were unable to find appropriate evidence, including signs of consistency between mutilations, to substantiate that the animals had been the victims of any form of ritual sacrifice or organized mutilation effort. They were also unable to determine how or why a cult would perform procedures that would result in the anomalies reported in some necropsies,[9]:3 or to verify that the anomalies were 1) connected to the mutilations themselves 2) the result of human intervention.[19] In most cases, mutilations were either ruled due to natural causes, or the cattle were too far decayed for any useful conclusions to be drawn. Some cases of cult hysteria were traced back to fabrication by individuals unrelated to the incident. In one case it was concluded that claims had been falsified by a convict seeking favorable terms on his sentence in exchange for information.[28]:14–15[31]:23–24 In another case, claims were traced back to local high school students who had circulated rumors as a joke.[28]:21 Government or military experimentation [ edit ] In his 1997 article “Dead Cows I've Known”,[34] cattle mutilation researcher Charles T. Oliphant speculates cattle mutilation to be the result of covert research into emerging cattle diseases, and the possibility they could be transmitted to humans. Oliphant posits the NIH, CDC, or other federally funded bodies, may be involved, and they are supported by the US military. Part of his hypothesis is based on allegations that human pharmaceuticals have been found in mutilated cattle, and on the necropsies that show cattle mutilations commonly involve areas of the animal that relate to “input, output and reproduction”. To support his hypothesis, Oliphant cites the Reston ebolavirus case in which plain clothes military officers, traveling in unmarked vehicles, entered a research facility in Reston, Virginia, to secretly retrieve and destroy animals that were contaminated with a highly infectious disease. Additionally, a 2002 NIDS report[35] relates the eyewitness testimony of two Cache County, Utah, police officers. The area had seen many unusual cattle deaths, and ranchers had organized armed patrols to surveil the unmarked aircraft which they claimed were associated with the livestock deaths. The police witnesses claim to have encountered several men in an unmarked U.S. Army helicopter in 1976 at a small community airport in Cache County. The witnesses asserted that after this heated encounter, cattle mutilations in the region ceased for about five years. Biochemist Colm Kelleher,[36] who has investigated several purported mutilations first-hand, argues that the mutilations are most likely a clandestine U.S. Government effort to track the spread of Bovine spongiform encephalopathy ("mad cow disease") and related diseases, such as scrapie. Theories of government involvement in cattle mutilation have been further fueled by "black helicopter" sightings near mutilation sites. On April 8, 1979, three police officers in Dulce, New Mexico, reported a mysterious aircraft which resembled a U.S. military helicopter hovering around a site following a wave of mutilation which claimed 16 cows. On July 15, 1974, two unregistered helicopters, a white helicopter and a black twin-engine aircraft, opened fire on Robert Smith Jr. while he was driving his tractor on his farm in Honey Creek, Iowa. This attack followed a rash of mutilations in the area and across the nearby border in Nebraska.[37][38][39] The reports of "helicopter" involvement have been used to explain why some cattle appear to have been "dropped" from considerable heights. Other explanations [ edit ] Aliens and UFOs [ edit ] In 1974, a few months after the first spate of alleged mutilations in the US, multiple farmers in Nebraska claimed to witness UFOs on the nights their cattle were harmed. One claimed he saw an object which “looked as if it had a little bluish-green light on each side with a glow surrounding it.” The sightings were hailed by UFO researchers as the first physical evidence of extraterrestrial life.[40] Government Interference [ edit ] At the same time that UFO reports were being filed with law enforcement and larger number of ranchers claimed to see black helicopters around their fields, coinciding with the cattle mutilations. Although some initially thought these were used by cattle rustlers, suspicion soon pointed toward a military operation running out of Fort Riley, Kansas. Reporter Dane Edwards spread the theory that the government was testing cattle parts to develop biological weapons to use in Vietnam, going so far as to write to Floyd K. Haskell during his investigation to accuse agents of threatening him into silence. Vigilante groups were formed.[40] Unknown creatures explanation [ edit ] Local folklore has attributed the mutilations to chupacabras or similar creatures.[41] |
CLOSE Briana Sandy, a transgender woman, talks about making the transition and her encounter with discrimination at a Tempe bar. Briana Sandy gets a manicure and pedicure at White Spa in Mesa. (Photo: Cheryl Evans/The Republic) A transgender woman blasted a Tempe Diversity Office ruling that she was not discriminated against when she was asked to leave a bar and vowed to file an appeal on Monday. Briana Sandy condemned the process used by the Diversity Office in investigating her complaint as "terribly flawed'' and said the ruling assassinated her character by including that she had been a customer at Modern World, an adult bookstore located next to the Tempe Tavern. "I'm going to be clearing my name, and I'm going to be clearing the air,'' Sandy said Friday afternoon. "I was totally hung out to dry.'' Nikki Ripley, a Tempe spokeswoman, said either party has a right to appeal rulings by the Diversity Office on discrimination complaints. "The city stands by the investigation and findings,'' Ripley said. Officials said they found no evidence that Sandy was asked to leave Tempe Tavern, 1810 E. Apache Blvd., on June 6 because she is transgender, as Sandy alleged in her complaint against the bar. Bar employees told investigators that they thought they recognized Sandy as a prostitute who operated out of Modern World, according to the investigation. The investigative summary released Friday by the city said the bartender told the cook, "I think that is one of the people that hooks at the bookstore.'' The cook then told Sandy she had to leave. Sandy told officials she had ordered a soda and had wanted to watch the Belmont Stakes horse race while her car was being fixed nearby. "The investigation revealed that Ms. Sandy was asked to leave Tempe Tavern based on her assumed connection to Modern World and not because she is transgender woman,'' the summary said. "All witnesses consistently reported that Ms. Sandy was told, 'I am sorry, we cannot serve you,' as opposed to 'we don't serve your kind,' " as Sandy alleged. The investigation said that Rob Tasso, owner of Tempe Tavern, has a practice of not serving patrons of Modern World and that Sandy confirmed she patronized the book store within the past year. "A refusal of service for this reason does not constitute a violation'' of Tempe's discrimination ordinance, according to the summary. NEWSLETTERS Get the AZ Memo newsletter delivered to your inbox We're sorry, but something went wrong Get the pulse of Arizona -- Local news, in-depth state coverage and what it all means for you Please try again soon, or contact Customer Service at 1-800-332-6733. Delivery: Mon-Fri Invalid email address Thank you! You're almost signed up for AZ Memo Keep an eye out for an email to confirm your newsletter registration. More newsletters Sandy's complaint was the first to be filed since the Tempe City Council approved and adopted an anti-discrimination ordinance in February 2014. The ordinance makes it illegal to discriminate against a person based on their gender, gender identity or sexual orientation, among several other characteristics. Sandy said she has visited the bookstore as a man and a woman. She also insists she never prostituted herself in any manner and is upset with the report's depiction of her character. "It was offensive. There was no reason to include that information,'' Sandy said. She said it appeared to her that the Tavern's employees had no problem with her until she opened her mouth, and that her voice gave away that she is transgender. "I can guarantee you this: I will use 100 percent of my efforts to dissuade anyone from the LGBT community from filing a complaint with the city of Tempe Diversity Office,'' Sandy said. Earlier this year, Sandy told a reporter for The Arizona Republic that she was previously known as Brian Theodore Sandy until she realized nearly two years ago that she was a woman. She had been a son, father, a husband and an ex-husband during earlier stages of her life. At that point, she began the process of medical transition to create a body to match the woman inside. Read or Share this story: http://azc.cc/1JbsuNt |
The farce that has been Sony Ericsson's bungled, delayed , and deservedly maligned Android upgrade story for the Xperia X10 family is coming to a fittingly silly end. Questioned by Android Community on the possibility of a Froyo (Android 2.2) upgrade for its initial set of Android handsets, the SE team has just come out and admitted that there'll be no future OS upgrades, at least in terms of Android iterations. The X10, X10 Mini and X10 Mini Pro are not being abandoned, not at all, but the only software enhancements you can look forward to will come directly from Sony Ericsson. The company hardly sees that as a bad thing, however, judging by a recent tweet announcing its belief that an SE-customized Eclair tastes better than Google's untouched Froyo . We'd protest, but what's the use? |
An online petition demanding YouTube to allow access for third party recording tools has topped 1.1 million signatures, and shows no signs of stopping. The petition, created by 21-year-old Philip Matesanz, asks Google to “break their silence and participate in an open and fair discussion” regarding the practice of translating YouTube videos into MP3 files. Matesanz is the creator of one of the most popular third-party recording sites, YouTube-MP3.org. Last month, Google targeted the site by threatening Matesanz with a lawsuit unless he voluntarily took down his conversion site. To be perfectly clear what we’re talking about here, this is exactly what YouTube-MP3.org does: YouTube-mp3.org is the easiest online service for converting videos to mp3. You do not need an account, the only thing you need is a YouTube URL. We will start to convert the audiotrack of your videofile to mp3 as soon as you have submitted it and you will be able to download it. A couple of weeks after the threat, Matesanz created the petition on Change.org. Within three days, it already has over 180,000 signatures. Here’s some of it: For decades people were allowed to take a private copy of a public broadcast. You could record the radio program with a cassette recorder or make a copy of your favorite movie by using a video recorder. All these techniques have been opposed heavily in its early years by the big media companies who didn’t want the public to have such technology. They did describe such technology as criminal and as a threat to their business e.g. the 1980s campaign Home Taping Is Killing Music. Several years later history is about to repeat: Google has teamed up with the RIAA to make the same claims against all sorts of online recording tools for their 21th century broadcasting service: YouTube (“Broadcast yourself”). Google is taking action against nearly every service that enables its users to create a private copy of a public YouTube broadcast while the RIAA is threatening news media like CNet for promoting such a software. Now, after only existing for a few weeks, the petition has over 1.1 million signatures, with only about 400,000 needed to reach the next petition level. “In the past, people have been able to record TV shows and CDs using home recording equipment,” Matesanz said. “Now, YouTube wants to block users doing the same from its site. I launched this petition to make the point that changing technology should not affect peoples’ rights as consumers.” “I have been amazed at the response to my petition but surprised that the company has not responded. I would very much like to sit down with them and discuss this issue.” As of right now, Matesanz’s site is up and running smoothly. |
Blairite coup to continue despite UK Labour leadership vote outcome By Julie Hyland 23 September 2016 Balloting in the Labour Party leadership contest closed Wednesday. The victor will be announced at Labour’s special conference tomorrow. Jeremy Corbyn is expected to win comfortably against his challenger, Owen Smith. This is despite the vicious campaign, initiated by the Blairite right wing, to depose the Labour leader. The vote in favour of the UK quitting the European Union in June was the trigger for the long-planned coup. There followed a wave of resignations from the shadow cabinet and a no-confidence motion signed by 172 members of the Parliamentary Labour Party (PLP) in an attempt to force Corbyn to resign. When that was unsuccessful, the right wing barred 130,000 members from voting under a spurious time rule. Just how much of an impact this will have on the size of Corbyn’s expected majority—he won with 59.5 percent last year—is unclear. The failure of the attempted putsch necessitated a meeting of the National Executive Committee on Tuesday. Presented as an attempt to agree a “truce” and unify the party, the proposals—drawn up by the PLP—show that the right wing are preparing a war of attrition until their aims are realised. Deputy Labour leader Tom Watson, a key player in the coup, proposed a return to the electoral college system—abolished in 2011 under Ed Miliband—whereby members of the shadow cabinet are elected by the PLP. He claimed this would enable Labour to “put the band back together” in time for a possible early election. In reality, it would guarantee a Blairite majority on the shadow cabinet. Watson also proposed that party leadership voting rules be reversed, with the decision being made one-third by the PLP, a third by the unions and the remaining third by party members. This would exclude registered supporters who pay a one-off fee to vote, 84 percent of whom backed Corbyn last September. That is why the right wing hiked the fee up from £3 to £25 in the latest contest. Nonetheless, almost 130,000 people successfully signed up. Watson’s efforts to secure agreement on the proposals before the conference were defeated by 16 to 15, with Corbyn voting against. Nevertheless Corbyn has agreed to talks on the measures on Saturday evening and to report back to the NEC. As far as he is concerned, “the slate will be wiped clean this weekend,” he said. Details of the additional 22 changes to party rules agreed by the NEC are sketchy, but they include expanding the NEC to include representatives from the Scottish and Welsh Labour parties. These will be nominated by the Scottish and Welsh Labour leaders—Kezia Dugdale and Carwyn Jones—both Corbyn opponents. Several Corbyn supporters successfully won elections to the NEC last month and, effective from October, this would have overturned the right-wing majority on the NEC. The inclusion of Scottish and Welsh representatives will enable the right wing to regain the initiative. All members are to be required to sign a pledge “to act within the spirit and rules of the Labour party in my conduct both on and offline, with members and non-members.” Failure to do so will result in disciplinary action. This will be used to legitimise the draconian methods used to bar anyone suspected of left-wing sympathies from party membership. Using overwhelmingly trumped-up charges of anti-Semitism, misogyny and intimidation, 3,107 people have been suspended from membership as Labour’s Orwellian Compliance Unit has trawled through Internet postings to target anyone critical of the Blairites. Stoke-on-Trent Labour MP Ruth Smeeth welcomed the move. Smeeth, who is Jewish, has been at the centre of the witch-hunt alleging rampant anti-Semitism in the Labour Party. She announced she would be taking a “minder” with her as a “security precaution” to the special conference. Smeeth cited as proof of the unwarranted abusive messages she received, those denouncing her as a “CIA/MI5/Mossad informant”. But the lady doth protest too much. Smeeth, one of the 60 plus anti-Corbyn resignations from the shadow cabinet, formerly held a post with the lobby group, Britain Israel Communications and Research Centre (BICOM). In 2009, WikiLeaks released a US embassy diplomatic cable identifying her as a “strictly protect” US informant. She is married to Michael Smeeth, a member of the executive of the British-American Project (BAP)—an outpost of the US/UK military intelligence apparatus that grooms political figures. The coup has not ended, only moved to a different stage. Several MPs have already said they intend to form an alternative shadow cabinet on the backbenches if Corbyn is returned, while former Home Secretary Alan Johnson urged a relentless campaign to undermine Corbyn’s leadership “year after year.” Others, such as former party leader Neil Kinnock, have made no secret of their satisfaction that the party crisis will hit Labour at the polls, which will in turn be used to justify further moves against Corbyn. On Tuesday, the Liberal Democrats gained a seat on Cardiff council from Labour, following a Liberal Democrat gain at Labour’s expense earlier this month in the Mosborough ward of Sheffield. In Bristol, the suspension of three pro-Corbyn councillors by the NEC has seen Labour lose overall control of the local authority. Writing in the Telegraph, John McTernan, former political adviser to Tony Blair, set out the right wing’s strategy. Significantly, he pinned his hopes for overturning Corbyn’s stated opposition to austerity and war on the trade unions. McTernan derided Corbyn as a “pacifist on [Britain’s nuclear weapons programme] Trident, soft on [Russian President Vladimir] Putin, opposed to business, growth and wealth, committed to tax and spend.” “The affiliated trade unions are central to how the next year unfolds for Labour,” he wrote, arguing that the trade unions would veto Corbyn’s opposition to renewing Trident. “Central to Labour’s recovery as a viable political party in Britain is back to the future,” he continued. Labour’s great successes were achieved in its early days, before 1918, when it consisted solely of “affiliated unions and the PLP.” The rot had set in when it decided to open the door to individual members “who had to be brought back in line by the unions. That was what happened in the 1980s [at the time of the witch-hunt against the Militant tendency] and it will be necessary again.” McTernan noted that this is why Blair had protected the role of the unions in party policy making. “The moves that are most likely to succeed in isolating Corbyn are ones which involve the trade unions,” he stressed—hence the proposed return to the electoral college system. “It is important to remember that Labour is not now and has never been a socialist party… The virus of socialism is alien to the Labour Party—it is killing the party now, but the cure will be, as always, the unions,” he wrote. It should be recalled that it was the trade unions that forced the resignation of George Lansbury, Labour leader between 1932 and 1935. A Christian pacifist, it was under his office that the 1933 Labour conference supported unilateral disarmament and pledged not to participate in any wars. For this he was denounced by the Trades Union Congress, which used its weight to overturn the policy in 1935—with Transport and General Workers’ Union leader, Ernest Bevin, leading the attack. Bevin went on to become Minister of Labour in the wartime national unity government—1940-1945—and a prime mover in the creation of NATO as a military alliance against the Soviet Union after the war. Today, the world again stands on the brink of a military catastrophe—this time fought with nuclear weapons. Britain is playing an active role in US military provocations against Russia, including participating in last weekend’s deliberate bombing of the Syrian army near Deir ez-Zor. McTernan’s comments give added importance to events at last week’s TUC conference. Corbyn was not invited to address the gathering, while TUC General Secretary Frances O’Grady made no mention of the crisis in the Labour Party in her opening remarks. The TUC is split over the Corbyn leadership, with the Unite union, led by Len McCluskey, acting as the Labour leader’s key supporter. But McTernan noted that McCluskey is up for election next year. Given the centrality of Unite’s role in the defence industry, he suggested, this could change. Please enable JavaScript to view the comments powered by Disqus. |
A few years ago, in an effort to relieve the financial pressure, Rutgers accepted an invitation to join the Big Ten, perhaps the wealthiest conference in the country. With football powers like Ohio State and Michigan, the Big Ten not only has lucrative deals with ABC and ESPN, it also has its own TV network. Thanks to those TV deals, last year the Big Ten paid out some $27 million to its 11 qualifying universities. Yet even with the Big Ten’s money (and to be fair, as a new member, Rutgers won’t reap the full rewards for six years), the Rutgers athletic department is projecting deficits at least through the 2021-22. Indeed, according to figures compiled by a faculty committee, Rutgers athletics is projecting a total deficit of $183 million between now and 2022. You can see, of course, why this would infuriate faculty members — or, for that matter, anyone who cares about academics. Like most state schools, Rutgers has seen its state financing shrink drastically over the last decade, while tuition and fees have been going up. Academic departments have had multiple rounds of belt-tightening. “At the school of arts and sciences,” said Mark Killingsworth, a Rutgers economics professor who has been a leading voice against the athletic department’s costs, “we have been told that we can hire one person for every two who leave.” The library, he noted, recently had its budget cut by more than $500,000. Meanwhile, Kyle Flood, the football coach, is getting a $200,000 raise next year, taking his salary to $1.25 million. In late March, the Rutgers university senate approved, by a wide margin, a report written by its Budget and Finance Committee that called on the athletic department to eliminate its losses within five years; to end the use of student fees to cover the athletic budget; and to treat the use of discretionary funds as loans. Almost immediately afterward, a powerful Rutgers alumnus, State Senator Raymond Lesniak, commissioned a study aimed at showing that Rutgers needed to invest more in athletics, not less. Why? One reason is the supposed economic benefits that come with a successful sports program. Another rationale is that now that Rutgers is in the Big Ten, it will have to step up its game to compete — which, of course, would require lavish facilities, just like those at Ohio State and Michigan. |
Thanks to a deal done with landfill operators, the environment minister is set to receive a ‘free’ gift of at least 16m tonnes of greenhouse emissions cuts The environment minister, Greg Hunt, is set to receive a free “gift” of at least 16m tonnes of greenhouse emission cuts, bringing him closer to Australia’s 2020 emissions reduction target and helping to explain his supreme confidence that Australia can meet it. In August Hunt announced a deal he had done with landfill operators who had charged upfront gate fees for their expected liability under the former government’s carbon tax and were left with a windfall gain upon its repeal. The announcement concentrated on promises by landfill operators to refund some of their $100m windfall to local councils (the local government association was also part of the deal) and to invest some of it in greenhouse reducing activities. Questions over Direct Action as Greg Hunt reveals Paris target needs industrial emissions cut Read more But the landfill operators also promised to buy “high quality units” with a portion of the money – estimated by Australian Landfill Owners Association chief executive Max Spedding to be somewhere between $10m and $20m. These units would be given to the federal government to help meet Australia’s greenhouse targets. In its fine print, the deal said landfill operators could “purchase high quality abatement credits – to be determined by agreement with the minister for the environment.” While the former Abbott government was reluctant to allow international permits to be used towards Australia’s emission reduction targets, the deal did not spell out that the purchased permits would be international units. Most assumed they would have to be, but interviewed by Guardian Australia on Wednesday Hunt was still refusing to confirm this. “Landfill will be a matter for the individual companies involved, it is a matter for them what high quality units they will buy,” he said. He confirmed the government would determine what “high quality” meant but said “I am not going to speculate about it in any way shape or form.” But Spedding was clear the companies only ever intended to buy international permits – certified emission reductions or CERs, generated under the international clean development mechanism. Coalition’s climate policy 'best and most efficient' in the world, says Greg Hunt Read more “It was always intended that we would buy international units. That was always the plan. None have been transferred yet but some companies have already bought and others are in the market.” Transpacific Cleanaway has announced it bought $3m worth of permits for 80 euro cents each. CERs sell for about 30 to 40 cents, if issued during the Kyoto Protocol period up to 2012, or about 80 cents if issued in the current commitment period. Even if all the landfill operators bought permits at 80 cents, the government could receive around 16m units, saving it from finding 16m tonnes of greenhouse gas abatement. This is a significant amount. The first auction under the $2.5bn emissions reduction fund paid $660m for 47m tonnes of abatement at an average of $14 a tonne. Adding to the government’s confidence that the 2020 target can be met is the constant downward revision in projected greenhouse emissions, reducing the quantity of abatement they are required to buy. In 2012 the promise to reduce emissions by 5% of 2000 levels by 2020 was calculated to require the cumulative reduction of 755m tonnes of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. In 2014 new government calculations reduced that figure to 421m tonnes. In March that figure was revised again, to 236m tonnes. But according to energy market analysts Reputex, even the 236m tonnes is a huge overstatement, and the actual greenhouse gas reductions that have to be achieved by government policy could be just 50m tonnes or even less. Reputex has predicted the second emissions reduction fund auction, to be held on 4 and 5 November, might see up to $1bn worth of contracts entered into for the delivery of emissions reductions from land-use and high emitting companies. |
Sahar Biniaz (26) from Vancouver, B C has been crowned the 2012 Miss Universe Canada during the finale of the annual pageant held in Toronto on 19 May, 2012. Born in India and raised in Iran, Sahar later became a Canadian citizen living in Vancouver. She graduated with honours from Stella Adler Academy in Los Angeles in performing arts. Currently she is working as an actress in film and television. Sahar will now represent Canada at the 2012 Miss Universe competition to be held in mid-December. Transgendered contestant, Jenna Talackova, on the other hand, loses the competition but became the first transgendered title holder as she was awarded the Miss Congeniality title. The 23-year-old blond from Vancouver was one of the final 12 contestants, but failed to make the final five at the pageant, held in Toronto. CBC News reported that Talackova's lawyer Gloria Allred mentioned during Saturday's pageant that Talackova should not feel too disappointed. "She's still a winner as far as I'm concerned," Allred said during an intermission. "She won an 'herstoric' civil rights victory and that I think is frankly more important than anything, any victory she would win, even representing Miss Canada." Talackova was earlier disqualified from the annual pageant as she was not a "naturally-born female". Talackova, who underwent gender reassignment surgery when she was 19, was then reinstated to the Canadian competition last by businessman Donald Trump, who owns the Miss Universe organisation. Vying with 62 other contenders from other parts of the country, she participated in all the pageant rounds including the swimwear and evening gown contest. Among the 12 semi-finalists selected during the event, Adwoa Yamoah from Calgary was the 1st runner-up while Majd Soudi from Ottawa was the 2nd runner-up. Apart from this, the Miss Photogenic award was given to Ela Mino, Revlon Professional Best Hair was given to Sahar Biniaz while the Miss Congeniality award was a 4-way tie given to Jenna Talackova, Kylee Apers, Maria Julia Nahri and Maria Cecilia Nicolas. Catch a glimpse of the crowning of Sahar Biniaz during the 2012 Miss Universe Canada beauty pageant: |
TV journalists sure scored some big exclusives this week. First a South Carolina station interviewed a fictional cartoon character for a “news” story — and now CNN‘s Don Lemon has interviewed a llama. In case you were completely oblivious yesterday (not that we would blame you), the Internet freaked out about two big “stories” Thursday — the color of a dress and a llama chase in Phoenix. So, naturally, CNN thought it would make perfect sense to do an in-studio interview with a llama to get his (insightful, we’re sure) opinion on the events of the day on “CNN Tonight.” So, CNN brought in Pierre the llama, who has also appeared on “Saturday Night Live” (just like you’d expect of any guest of his caliber). The show even proudly tweeted out a photo of Lemon and the Pierre. If that wasn’t enough, the network also branded the camera shot as “Llama Cam” (as shown in this screen grab tweeted by ESPN writer Don Van Natta Jr.): Indeed, “Llama Cam” was all over CNN’s social networking sites as well: From Instagram: That time 'Pierre the #Llama' came to #CNNTonight and everyone's night was that much better. @donlemoncnn @juliezann @murphy_paulp @melanielefkowitz A video posted by CNN Tonight (@cnntonight) on Feb 26, 2015 at 8:15pm PST And Vine: And watch the video here: |
B2B Lead Generation Service Reach key decision makers with sales-ready leads that shorten your sales process. Move the needle by delivering funnel qualified leads to your sales team. Learn more. Motorola, on Tuesday launched three new handsets -- Moto X Style, Moto X Play and a refreshed Moto G -- designed to end the "one-sided relationships" between smartphones and consumers. People have been living with phones that nag during drives, make outbursts during meetings, and run out of juice just when they're most needed, the company said. Adding insult to injury, they are often mismatched with their owners' style and character. Motorola promised its newly introduced suitors will change all that. Moto's Upgraded Fleet The Moto X Style (pictured above) isn't exactly a cheap date, but at US$399 without a contract and compatible with all major wireless carriers in the U.S., it's well positioned to compete in the middle and high-end markets. The 5.7-inch QuadHD Moto X Style has a 21-MP rear-facing camera partnered with a 5-MP selfie camera. It's kitted out with specs of flagship caliber, including a 1.8-GHz hexa-core Snapdragon processor. It can deliver 10 hours of service on a 15-minute charge, making it the world's fastest-charging smartphone, according to Motorola. Flanking the flagship, the Moto X Play, a gunship of sorts, has a smaller 5.5-inch display. It doesn't have quite the Style's might, but it does have a 3600 mAh battery, which allows two days away from a charger, the company said. The work-ready refresh of the Moto G sails right through the center of the mid-range market for smartphones, offering a 5-inch display that has an IPX7 water-resistant rating that means it can survive a fall overboard into the drink. The $180 Moto G has a 13-MP rear shooter that captures 720p video, and it sports an all-day battery. A Sea of Voices While the highlights and talking points are there in Motorola's refreshed lineup, the company is still fighting to be heard above the sea of voices in the increasingly crowded Android market. This latest refresh may be more about establishing harmonies than standing out. "One of the concerns about the Android OS is the disconnect between the OS and the hardware manufacturers," noted Michael B. Spring, associate professor of information science and technology at the University of Pittsburgh. "The recent Stagefright vulnerability was recognized and patched by Google, but it is not clear when manufacturers will push it out," he told TechNewsWorld. Android Losing Cachet? Motorola may be taking the appropriate steps to make Android devices more appealing to customers shopping in every tier, but to compete at the high and low ends, the hour might be too late. Android's developer ecosystem has been getting weaker, and more codies invest their resources in iOS, noted Trip Chowdhry, managing director, Global Equities Research. "In the premium segment, Android customers are switching to become Apple iPhone customers," he told TechNewsWorld. "At the low end, Xiaomi, Micromax and others are taking the marketshare away." Google has encouraged its Android community to "be together, not the same." Still, with the market demanding a unified experience across all mobile devices, Android may have to become more like iOS to stay in the game, according to Chowdhry. "I wouldn't say there will be a consolidation in the space, as in someone buying someone else. I don't think that will happen," he said, "but I think there will be a weeding-out process, and only the low end of the Android market will be attractive." On the other hand, the strength of the Motorola brand should not be discounted, according to Spring. "Smartphone purchases are almost religious," he said. "Apple and Samsung have devoted followers, but so do LG and Motorola. The only one who appears to be destined to lose is Microsoft." Quinten Plummer is a longtime technology reporter and an avid PC gamer who explored local news for a few years, covering law enforcement and government beats, before returning to writing about things run by ones and zeros and the people who make them. If it pushes pixels or improves lives, he wants to learn all he can about it. |
The City and The City is an extraordinarily original novel which through Tony Grissoni's wonderful adaptation, promises to be a truly distinct, surprising and compelling drama for BBC Two The series has been commissioned by Kim Shillinglaw, Controller BBC Two and Polly Hill, Controller BBC Drama Commissioning and is produced by Mammoth Screen (Poldark, Parade's End). In a departure for science fantasy that will bend the mind as well as the senses, the four-part serial follows Inspector Tyador Borlú of the Extreme Crime Squad, resident of the crumbling city of Besźel. The mutilated body of a foreign student is found dumped on some wasteland and Borlú is assigned to the case. Borlu is unfazed until he uncovers evidence that the dead girl had been involved in the political turmoil between Besźel and its prosperous twin city of Ul Qoma, which occupies the same physical space. Citizens of each city are forbidden from seeing each other, and the frontier between the cities is policed by 'Breach' which punishes all transgressions. Despite the violent deaths of those around him, and a growing realisation that he is personally implicated in the crimes, Borlú doggedly chases the truth. To solve the case he will have to embark on an odyssey of the mind, a journey across the border from one reality to another. Kim Shillinglaw, Controller BBC Two says: “I want BBC Two to give writers and directors the space to do their most creative, signature work and I’m thrilled to be announcing an adaptation of China Miéville's novel, The City and the City. Miéville is one of the country’s most popular fantasy writers and I’m really pleased that we are bringing his highly original voice to the screen, adapted by acclaimed writer, Tony Grisoni.” Mammoth's Managing Director Damien Timmer adds: “We are thrilled to be bringing China's dazzlingly inventive novel to BBC Two. It's a 21st Century classic - a truly thrilling and imaginative work which asks big questions about how we perceive the world and how we interact with each other.” Rebecca Keane, Preethi Mavahalli and Damien Timmer from Mammoth Screen developed the project with producer Robyn Slovo (Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy) and Tony Grisoni. Polly Hill, Controller BBC Drama Commissioning says: “The City and The City is an extraordinarily original novel which through Tony Grissoni's wonderful adaptation, promises to be a truly distinct, surprising and compelling drama for BBC Two.” The Executive Producers are Tony Grisoni, Damien Timmer and Preethi Mavahalli for Mammoth Screen and Matthew Read for the BBC. CI2 |
Education Series Number 5.3 February 2001 (Revised) Joycelyn Woods has a graduate degree in neuroscience and psychopharmacology. She has published in neuroscience journals and is recognized internationally for her methadone advocacy work. She is a recipient of the “Richard Lane Methadone Advocacy Award.” Methadone Metabolism Methadone was once considered to be pretty much the same for every patient. Thus, it was believed that narcotic blockade began at 60 mg/day for about 90% of the patients an adequate dose occurred at 80 mg/day. The measuring of serum methadone levels have shown that metabolism can vary significantly for many patients. In addition to methadone metabolism there are a variety of conditions and medications that can impact on the effectiveness of methadone (Leavitt, Shinderman, Maxwell, Eap, and Paris, 2000). Antagonists and Agonist-Antagonists Drugs An important property of all narcotic antagonists is that anyone dependent on any opiate, including methadone patients will be extremely sensitive to them (Cooper, Bloom and Roth, 1991; Gilman, Rail, Niles and Taylor, 1990). These actions occur directly at the opiate receptor. Some of the new analgesics are mixed agonist-antagonists drugs which have been developed to reduce their addiction potential. For a non dependent person these medications are pain killers, however for methadone patients, or anyone dependent on an opioid such as pain patients the result can be uncomfortable at the least and could in rare instances be life threatening. Aberrant Metabolizers, Alcoholism and Liver Disease It is estimated that about 5% of methadone patients are what is called aberrant metabolizers (Payte and Khuri, 1992). Each time methadone passes through the liver some is lost. For the average metabolizer the loss is minimal but for fast metabolizers the loss can be immense. Liver disease and alcoholism can cause a reduction of the liver's ability to perform normal metabolic functions, resulting in aberrant metabolism. This condition is very difficult to correct and the only way to help the liver would be to eat a low fat diet to allow the liver to rest while increasing the dosage of methadone. Split dosing can also help to correct aberrant metabolism. Medications that Impact on Methadone Various drugs can cause the liver to speed up metabolism. When this occurs most of the methadone is excreted before it can be used. Drugs that cause an increase in metabolism are rifampin for tuberculosis (Kreek, Gutjahr, Garfield, Bowen and Field, 1976), dilantin for epilepsy (Payte and Khuri, 1992) , carbamazepine (Payte and Khuri, 1992) and more recently St. John’s Wort (Shinderman, 2001). Again the best way to correct the problem is to raise the dose and/or break the dose down into several doses throughout a 24 hour period (Payte and Khuri, 1992). For example, a patient on 120 mgs/day might break their dose into thirds taking one third in the morning, one third at dinner time and one third before going to bed. In a sense this helps to maintain the long half life of methadone. Unfortunately, most programs do not utilize this later procedure because of over concern about diversion. CYP-450 is a liver enzyme and drugs that speed up metabolic rate do so through this enzyme. This is how Tegretol (carbamazepine) and other siezure disorder medications effect methadone, by inducing CYP-450 which them speed up liver metabolism. Tegretol is a strong inducer of hepatic CYP-450 enzyme activity in the liver. The accelerated metabolism may eliminate methadone entirely within 24 hours causing the abstinence syndrome. For most patients raising the dose will work, however in a few cases patients will continue to experience the abstinence syndrome. One procedure to handle this is to rise the dose and split it and finally adding cimetidine (Tagamet) to inhibit liver enzyme activity. The antibiotic, Nafcillin has the same effect as rifampin (a known methadone villain) and carbamazepine (Taylor, Pritchard, Goldstein and Fletcher, 1994; Wells, Holbrook, Crowther and Hirsh, 1994). So it seems Nafcillin is an inducer of the same CYP-450 enzymes that accelerate metabolism of methadone. Cocaine Use and Opiate Receptors A recent discovery is that cocaine use can cause an increase in the number of brain opiate receptors (Unterwald, Horne-King and Kreek, 1992). Brain receptors are not static, rather they are chemical bonds floating along the surface of the membrane. The number of receptors for any natural ligand can change dependent of various conditions. As expected an increase in the number of opiate receptors would reduce the action of methadone. For example, lets say a patient is on 100 mgs/day. Lets use small round numbers to demonstrate this, normally there are hundreds of thousands of opiate receptors in the human brain. For this example when the patient is on a stable dose the number of opiate receptors in the brain averages around 100. And 75 percent of the 100 opiate receptors, or 75 receptors remained filled throughout a 24 hour period. Now this patient begins to use cocaine which causes an increase in the number of opiate receptors to 150. However, only 75 receptors remain filled and active. Now instead of 75 percent of the receptors being filled now only 50 percent are filled. The patient complains that the cocaine is eating up their methadone and asks for a raise. And probably the patient will need their dose to be increased at least 20-30 mgs/day to feel the same. Barbiturates There has been one or two reports of a barbiturate causing abstinence in a methadone patient. While this is a rare occurrence and the causes have not been determined all methadone patients should be aware of it (Tong et al, 1981). Plasma Concentrations Some drugs can interact with methadone when it is bound to plasma proteins. As was mentioned above most binding of methadone to plasma proteins is non specific, and this means that many drugs with similar shapes can bind to the same area of the blood protein and knock the methadone molecule out. This can cause a much higher effective blood methadone level, which can be a problem for someone who does not have tolerance or even someone on a low dose of methadone without much of an initial tolerance. Some drugs can knock methadone away from the blood proteins that they are bound to causing a sudden release of methadone to them interact with the opiate receptor. Drugs that can do this are erythromycin, clarithromycin, Vitamin E and many of the NSAIDS (Ibuprofen and Ketoprofen). While the danger is obvious for the individual with a low tolerance these drugs can also have an effect on patients taking a blockade dose with a high tolerance by causing the release of their stored methadone (or buffer) ;and thus destabilizing them. It would probably take a few days to build up the methadone plasma to its initial level. The antidepressant fluvoxamine (Luvox), used for depression and obsessive compulsive disorder, can reduce the metabolism of methadone significantly, raising blood levels (Bertschy, Baumann, Eap and Buettig, 1994). One asthmatic patient almost died after a doctor prescribed the drug without knowing that the patient was on methadone from elsewhere (Alderman and Frith, 1999). It has also been found that fluoxetine (Prozac) also raises methadone levels, but only of a slight order, perhaps 10% whereas fluvoxamine may do so by 50% or more. It is possible that this effect could be used 'therapeutically' when higher methadone levels are desired, but it could also be very dangerous. Drugs that Impact on Bioavailability: Vitamin C Reports have surfaced about patients afraid to take Vitamin C because it would block methadone. Vitamin C does not block methadone but it can change the pH and thus influence the bioavailability. In an acidic environment methadone is not absorbed well and the methadone will be excreted unused. This only occurs at extremely high doses of Vitamin C, like 4 grams a day. All the vitamin C myth does is to cause fear, apprehension and raise suspicions about methadone. Whoever has promoted this myth is anti-methadone and therefore anti-methadone patient. Why? Because when methadone patients are frightened and suspicious of the very medication that has saved their lives they can not concentrate on the important tasks at hand -- that of changing their lives! Summary As more is learned about methadone metabolism the greater clinical knowledge about the many factors can impact on its effectiveness. Unfortunately since many medical professionals are not aware of these recent findings it will be up to patients to insure that they are being prescribed an adequate dose. NAMA will continue to report on new findings and the factors that can interfere with adequate methadone dose. References Alderman, C.P. and Frith, P.A. (1999). Fluvoxamine - methadone interaction. Australia New Zealand Journal of Psychiatry 33:99-101. Bertschy, G., Baumann, P., Eap, C.B. and Buettig, D. (1994) Probable metabolic interaction between methadone and fluvoxamine in addict patients. Therapeutic Drug Monitoring 16: 42-45. Cooper, J.R., Bloom, F.E. and Roth, R.H. (1991). The Biochemical Basis of Neuropharmacology (6th Edition). New York: Oxford University Press. Gilman, A.G., Rail, T.W., Niles, A.S. and Taylor, P. (eds) (1990). Goodman and Gilman's The Pharmacological Basis of Therapeutics (8th Edition). New York: Pergamon Press. Kreek, M.J., Garfield, J.W., Gutjahr, C.L. et al (1976). Rifampin-induced methadone withdrawal. New England Journal of Medicine 294: 1104-1106. Leavitt, S.B., Shinderman, M., Maxwell, S., Eap, C.B. and Paris, P. (2000). When “enough” is not enough: New Perspectives on optimum methadone maintenance dose. Mt. Sinai Journal of Medicine 67(5&6): 404-411. Payte, J.T. and Khuri, E. (1992). Principles of methadone dose determination. In: Parrino, M.W. (Chair & Editor). State Methadone Treatment Guidelines. Rockville, MD: U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, Center for Substance Abuse Treatment. Shinderman, M. (2001). Warning: St. John’s Wort Reduces Methadone. NAMA Talk (February). Taylor, A.T., Pritchard, D.C., Goldstein, A. O. and Fletcher, J.L. Jr. (1994). Continuation of warfarin-nafcillin interaction during dicolxacillin therapy. Journal of Family Practice August 39(2): 182-185. Tong, T.G., Pond, D.M., Kreek, M.J. et al. (1981). Phenytoin-induced methadone withdrawal. Annals of Internal Medicine 94: 349-351. Unterwald, E.M.; Horne-King, J. and Kreek, M.J. Chronic cocaine alters brain mu opioid receptors. Brain Research 1992 584: 314-318. Wells, P.S., Holbrook, A.M., Crother, N.R. and Hirsh, J. (1994). Interactions of warfarin with drugs and food. Annalsof Internal Medicine (November 1) 121(9): 676-83. Download PDF Next Education Series Index Education Series |
Station at Columbus Circle, in course of construction. The steel work is here shown in place, and the concrete roof, floor, and walls are finished. The walls are not yet faced with glazed tiles, and the station work is unfinished. Drawn by C.A. Vanderhoof. Century Magazine · October, 1902 · pp. 894-907. By Arthur Ruhl. With Pictures By Fernand Lungren And C. A. Vanderhoof. Daylight was half a mile or more behind. In front a narrow arched passage, so low that the jagged roof just grazed one's head, followed a thin vista of hazy electric lamps farther into the solid rock. The heavy air was chilled with the breath of the under earth, and every now and then from under the tramway ties, or out of the indefinite darkness, came the drip-drip-drip and gurgle of water. A thudding murmur in the distance suddenly grew more insistent and distinct. The shapes of men, of a swinging crane, of a tram-car mule, appeared under the flare of torches. The reverberations, locked between the narrow walls of rock, swelled into the deafening pounding of a steam-drill. Then a glimmer of daylight revealed the mouth of the shaft, and a moment later, clambering up into the open, I found myself in the lazy warmth of a summer afternoon and blinking at the velvet verdure of Central Park. Now, the designers of that great underground railroad which is to bring Harlem within fourteen minutes of the City Hall and to extend for more than twenty-one miles just beneath the upper cuticle of New York City proper and the borough of the Bronx-- not to speak of the extensions which are yet to be built to Brooklyn-- would very earnestly explain at this point that tunneling, in the strict interpretation of the word, forms so small a part in the construction of the road that one may rightly speak of it only as a covered way. The motive for this distinction of terms is that those who know all about the new subway do not want those who know nothing about it to get creepy notions of dampness and "cellar air" and such lugubrious things, when some of the most characteristic features of New York's underground road, as compared, for example, with London's "Tuppenny Tube," are its nearness to the surface, its dryness, its airiness, and its light. Left: Plan and profile of Rapid Transit Subway. Also available as PDF. Right: At the foot of the shaft, One Hundred and Fourth Street. Drawn by Fernand Lungren. Half-tone plate engraved by F.H. Wellington. I have chosen to begin a visit to the subway in the branch that leads away from One Hundred and Fourth street and the Boulevard, and actually does tunnel under Central Park, to point out a bit more easily than could be done in some other places the contrast between the upper and the under cuticle of Manhattan, and the ignorance which the average uninquiring citizen of this town is likely to be in of all the hidden toil and turmoil that is constantly going on to provide for his comfort. He is accustomed to take most things for granted and to neglect to accord wonder to the material achievements of his town, except to enlighten the mind of an occasional country relative. This is an attitude which he would find more difficult to maintain if he understood the personal, almost human, quality which these big things possess for many of those who know them only as among the facial characteristics of the great city they have never seen, or if he felt the personal quality which they equally possess, for many of those who live beside them. In the imagination of the average untraveled son of the prairies who has never seen the skyline of Manhattan, it is much to be doubted if the Brooklyn Bridge or the elevated railroad is not quite as vital and human as, let us say, the Few Hundred or the Hon. Richard Croker. Many a prose vignette of Manhattan would have done just as well for Boston or Philadelphia had it not been for the presence of the "L" trains and their squealing brakes, while one's fancy can scarcely conjure up a printed picture of wintry New York which did not have its trail of steam from an L locomotive swirling about the heads of Christmas shoppers. And here is this great new hole-in-the-ground, stuffed with one knows not how many potential reactions on the life and the look of the town, and yet every day we ride over miles and miles of it with scarcely more than a languid musing as to the likelihood of dynamite explosions, or a peevish interest in magic devices by which contractors manage safely to support the pavement over which we ride, the L structure, or whole sheaves of underground pipes. This Rapid Transit Subway, to give it its official name, is an underground railway running along the backbone of the narrow island of Manhattan, and, as now being built, extending on into the borough of the Bronx: From its southern terminus to the branch at One Hundred and Fourth street it will consist of four tracks, the outer two of which will be used for local trains, the inner two for expresses. From One Hundred and Fourth street, which is seven miles from the southern terminus, the main line with three tracks, of which the middle one will be used for express-trains, continues northward seven miles more to Kingsbridge, while a branch line of two tracks will swing off to the right, pass under the Harlem River at Bronx Avenue and One Hundred and Forty-fifth street, and thence on to Bronx Park and the Zoo, also a distance of seven miles. The local trains will be run at an average speed of fourteen miles an hour, stopping at stations one quarter of a mile apart, just about as the present elevated trains are operated; while the express-trains will have stations only about every mile and a half and be capable of attaining a speed of at least thirty miles an hour. It is now fourteen years since the first bill providing for this underground railroad was sent to the New York legislature. In this time, so amazingly have the needs of the Greater City expanded that even with the Brooklyn extension, which was added to the original plan, the new subway, far from solving the problem, is only the first of many other similar systems which must be built in order even tolerably to dispose of the abnormal passenger traffic which at certain hours and at certain points on the narrow island reaches an excess of congestion to be met with in no other city in the world. Left: The water-pipes in service under heavy pressure are temporarily suspended from beams at the street level. After the subway is completed, masonry piers will be built on its roof to support them. Drawn by Fernand Lungren. Half-tone plate engraved by George M. Lewis. Right: This view shows the narrow trench under the sidewalk excavated through twenty feet of earth to rock and lined with heavy timber; steam-drilling and blasting of the rock bottom, and tunneling laterally under the surface tracks. The materials are handled by cableway over the open trench. Drawn by Fernand Lungren. Half-tone plate engraved by William Miller. The great subway begins down by the City Hall, and it was into the plaza in front of that beautiful old building that the Hon. Robert A. Van Wyck, mayor of the city, inserted the official pickax in March, 1900, and thereby began the work of excavation. The bronze tablet which was immediately placed over the spot used to be surrounded morning and night by patriotic citizens who gazed down at it as though they were looking at Niagara, until it was presently removed to a contractor's shed, where it spent last summer waiting for the City Hall station to be done. The plaza itself has endured equal vicissitudes, now looking like a mining-camp, now roofed smoothly over, as when Prince Henry came and the escorting cavalry clattered gaily over the planking. Although the City Hall station is intended to be rather the show station of the line, with its symphonic curves of roof and platforms and track,-"not a straight line in it," as one admirer has observed,-the main terminus and down-town station is a stone's throw away, over by the old Hall of Records and in front of the entrance to the Brooklyn Bridge. Both local and express trains will run to and from this station, and down its stairways late in the afternoon and early in the evening will pour part of the thousands who block the Third and Sixth Avenue L trains and the surface lines on their way up-town and to Harlem and the Bronx. Eventually the four-track route will extend straight on down to South Ferry and the end of the island, and thence by tunnel to Brooklyn, but at present the southern terminus is the City Hall. Curving out to the right from the four-track line, under the mayor's office in the City Hall, under the Post Office and some of the buildings of Newspaper Row, and thence back to the up-town track, is a single-track loop which is one of the most interesting engineering devices of the subway. This loop is designed to receive the down-town trains as fast as they come in from the north, and to bring them around to the up-town tracks without the delay of switching. When the line is completed through to South Ferry, a train may be run off the main track and around the loop, or it may be continued straight on, and as the loop is made to pass beneath the down-town track as it curves around, a grade-crossing is avoided and one of the more important tasks of constructive engineering which the subway presented is solved. Morning and night the hordes of clerks and stenographers and business men who fill the offices of down-town New York have poured across Newspaper Row and City Hall Park with scarcely a glance at the labor progressing underfoot that is going to bring them so many minutes nearer their work in the morning, and at night so many minutes nearer their play. I recall one day, however, when several hundred of them, with equal enthusiasm, gave up almost all of the precious noon hour to tell the subway men just what to do and how. A team of white horses had been drawing a load of green bananas across the chute which had hemmed in the car tracks along Park Row. A wheel slued, the fence gave way, and a second or two later one of the big white horses was lying on his side across a gas-pipe over the subway ditch, like a sack of oats flung over a rail fence. With rare equanimity of temper and only an occasional kick the animal allowed his legs to be tied together and the canvas sling to be put about his belly, and presently, after three or four men had worked for an hour, and some hundreds had shrieked advice, a derrick which happened to be near was brought into requisition, and, with everybody cheering, the animal was hoisted up bodily and set on his feet on the pavement. Horses have fallen clear to the bottom of the subway ditch and have been hoisted out unhurt; others have not been so lucky. People have fallen in many times, and burglars have jumped in and escaped their pursuers. A rather suggestive comment on the liveliness of existence in New York's streets during the building of the subway was the remark of one of the workmen who officiated at this episode that in every section-shed such a sling or else one of the mats used to hold down flying rock in blasting was kept in readiness for just such emergencies. From the City Hall up to Thirty-fourth street, where real tunneling began, the excavation has all been done from the surface, and any citizen who took the trouble during the last summer to step from his car and peer over the subway fence along this part of the route could grasp the salient features of, the subway construction. Left: Descending the shaft to the tunnel level. Showing the platform of the steam elevator used to raise excavated rock, and miners waiting in the tunnel to ascend for dinner. Drawn by Fernand Lungren. Half-tone in plate engraved by J. Tinkey. Right: In the tunnel under Fort George. Miners at work in the heading; muckers wheeling spoil to cars on tracks in finished excavation. Temporary timbering to support dangerous roof until concrete arch can be built. Drawn by Fernand Lungren. Half-tone plate engraved by C.W. Chadwick. On account of the abnormal pressure of traffic at certain places in certain hours, a maximum of speed and a maximum of facility in operation were the first essentials. For this reason anything like London's Tuppenny Tube, with its slow-moving elevators carrying passengers far below the street-level, was out of the question. The road was therefore planned to run just beneath the surface of the streets, and as the stations are now built, it is decidedly nearer from the sidewalk to the subway platforms than to the platforms of the elevated road. If the disturbance of street traffic and pipe-lines which this scheme involved meant a maximum of inconvenience in construction, it also meant a maximum of convenience and cheapness in operation when the work was completed. Another marked characteristic of the Rapid Transit Subway, as distinguished from most other underground railroads, is that the principles of the modern sky-scraper are applied in its construction, the roof and sides being supported by steel frames composed of transverse steel beams and light steel columns. With a cement floor and the sides and roof made waterproof and even damp-proof, and then lined with cement, the interior of the tube when completed will, as a matter of fact, look like solid whitewashed stone, but, as in the case of the sheathing of the sky-scraper, this will be only a shell. The elimination of grade-crossings and the insertion of "islands" between the tracks at the various express stations, so that by the means of raised passages passengers may transfer from local to express trains, and vice versa, at will, are other noticeable features of the design. It is by such a scheme that the engineers hope to attain a maximum of speed and carrying capacity. Neither the plan nor the carrying of it out in steel and blasted rock could be spectacular. It is rather a task requiring vast patience and the ability to simplify a mass of intricate details. The work of steam-drills and traveling dumping-cars and the methods of supporting myriads of undermined pipes, all of which has been visible for a couple of years to every one who rode up-town from the Brooklyn Bridge in a Fourth Avenue car, have been about what most people have noticed in the construction of these lower and more prosaic parts of the subway. Few know that in order to cross Canal street, which at the subway grade is below the tide-level, a sewer which drained a greater part of the lower East Side into the North River had to be carried clear across the island in the opposite direction and into the East River. Quite as few ever heard of Aaron Burr's waterpipes, which were unearthed as the excavations proceeded up Elm street near Reade. These pipes, which were laid in 1799, to supply "the city of New York with pure and wholesome water," were merely logs with a longitudinal hole bored through the center of each and hollowed at one end and sharpened at the other, so that they could be fitted one into the other, just as glass tumblers may be piled. The story goes that the wily Burr inserted a "joker" in the act providing for his water company, by which he was able to break the monopoly then held by the Bank of New York and the New York branch of the United States Bank, and found a bank for himself and his friends. The bank thus organized is one of the well-known city banks to-day, and Burr's water-pipes, as dry as bones these many years, were tight and seemingly as good as new when they were uncovered. The unearthing of "Cat Alley" recalled, to those who remembered, the time when the sidewalk rendezvous of actors, called "the Rialto," was along Houston street, a day no less interesting than Aaron Burr's, if less classic. Though solid rock is found at Union Square, where it is worked from the surface, real tunneling, through darkness and solid rock, begins farther up-town, at Thirty-fourth street. The short section of eight blocks from Thirty-fourth street under Park Avenue to the Grand Central Station has not shared that happiness which comes to tunnels as well as nations that have no history. It will remain long in the minds of the generation who saw it built as the "hoodoo" part of the tunnel. So persistently did a perverse fate follow the footsteps of the contractor who had this section in charge, even to his death from a fall of stone, that the happenings in these short blocks passed from tragedy almost to the point of burlesque, and I recall a paragraph printed in one of the papers in which a woman who happened to be present during a trolley-car smash-up in the depths of Harlem, one evening, was made to say, as she pulled the conductor by the arm: "I am a stranger in this dreadful city. Tell me, Mr. Conductor-oh, do tell me-are we now on Park Avenue?" Left: Exploring the bottom of the East River with soundings for the Brooklyn tunnel. The working platform built on a cluster of piles in deep, swift water was many times swept away. A large steel pipe was sunk by a powerful water jet through mud and clay to rock, and the diamond drill was lowered inside it, and the hole extended many feet into the rock, bringing up solid cylindrical cores. Drawn by Fernand Lungren. Half-tone plate engraved by R.C. Collins. Right: The foundations of the monument are supported on temporary steel girders and wooden posts while undermined for subway excavation under the monument and over sloping rock surface. The concrete door of subway is shown finished and ready to receive the steel columns which will support its roof and the overhanging monument. The steel buckets containing excavated rock are hoisted by steam-derricks and damped into wagons. Drawn by Fernand Lungren. Half-tone plate engraved by R.C. Collins. Of the explosion of blasting-powder at Forty-first street by which eight were killed and hundreds endangered, about the only thing that can be said is that it might easily have been vastly more horrible. The carrying away of the subway roof, however, and the consequent fall of the fronts of several of the brownstone houses on the avenue just above Thirty-seventh street, was an episode which, were it not for one's sympathy for the ill-starred contractor, might well conduce to the gaiety of nations. The tunnel here burrows under the existing subway used by the Fourth Avenue surface-cars, and its floor is about sixty feet below the surface. It had been carried about half-way between Thirty-seventh and Thirty-eighth streets, at what was thought to be a safe distance from the stoop-line of the row of houses above. But the rock, apparently as solid as Gibraltar, lay in slanting strata, and one day, almost without warning, a huge section of one of these slanting strata simply slid diagonally from the easterly roof as a card slips out of a loosely shuffled pack. Every workman on the section was rushed to the spot in the hope that the damage could be repaired before it became apparent on the surface; but before the break could be properly shored, the areaways and front steps of the houses came tumbling down into the chasm. Parts of the front walls soon followed, and the crowd of idlers and nurse-maids and delivery-boys who gathered a few minutes after the first cave-in enjoyed the delectable experience of gazing into the very heart of each house, just as you look at an interior on the stage. One gentleman was in his bath-tub at the time. His valet burst into the room. "Quick! quick! You must get out of here, Sir!" cried that worthy. "There's been an earthquake, Sir, and the house is falling in!" "Indeed!" observed the gentleman with interest, and he finished his bath. He dressed himself, and loading his film camera and lighting a brier-wood pipe, he sallied forth, and when his wife's mother arrived on the scene from a distant part of town, whence she had driven at breakneck speed to save her child, she found her son-in-law standing on the brink of the chasm in front of his door-step, pointing down into it a film camera, the shutter of which he was working with the liveliest enthusiasm and delight. This teaches us that a bucolic equanimity may be preserved even on a metropolitan street beneath which a tunnel is building, and that nerves may be suppressed even in New York and in a somewhat neurotic age. When the walls ceased to crumble away and the people had moved out of that block,-some of them, it was said at the time, demurely demanding both that the contractor buy their houses outright and that he pay their rent in new ones,- pipes were sunk from the surface, and watery cement was pumped down them to harden until the fallen rock was virtually restored. But fire and falling ruins were yet to descend on that unhappy section, and so timid was its contractor forced to become that when you visited it during the last summer, and saw the workmen pegging away under the acetylene lamps in the "waist" of the tunnel heading, you were likely to be reminded not so much of the strenuosities of engineering as of an operation in dental surgery. From the Grand Central Station, where, of course, one of the main subway stations will be built, the road proceeds again by surface excavation west on Forty-second street to Broadway, and thence northward to One Hundred and Fourth street, where comes the parting of the ways. No one who has seen the subway pass beneath Forty-second street, the monument at the Circle, the elevated structure at Sixty-sixth street, and the surface car-tracks to the northward toward the Boulevard, needs to be told of the complex difficulties which have been met and solved along almost every yard of this part of the underground road. The first of the subway stations to be finished was that under the Circle, at the southwest corner of Central Park. At the time these lines were written it was the only one completed, and from it visitors to the subway gathered their impressions of that lightness and general cheerfulness which it was one of the main desires of the engineers to provide in planning the work. Not only light, but sunlight, pours into the place from the ground-glass sidewalk overhead, and with its walls lined in enameled brick and tiles, and the white cement tube of its subway stretching north and south ablaze with electric lights, this station illustrates how successfully this desire has been achieved. As it is not an express station, there are only the two long and spacious platforms next to the outside, or local, tracks, and the express-trains will whisk by on the two inner tracks without a stop. When I visited the station they were experimenting with enameled bricks and tiles of various colors to see which were most likely to arouse enthusiasm in the esthetic sense of the traveling public. "It reminds me," observed a foreman of that section, "of a cheap-lunch restaurant." The imagination staggers at the thought of higher praise than this. To those who are not familiar with the "unsurpassed coffee" refectories of the metropolis, it may be as well to explain that in these resorts survives for a modern age an oppressive cleanliness and a riot of onyx, glittering tiles, and enameled brick, which one is wont to associate with the baths of Pompeii and ancient Rome. In the Circle, just below this station, rises the tall column on the top of which stands the statue of Cristoforo Colombo, given to New York by its residents of Italian birth. The subway passes directly under this column, and the difficulties and delicacies of the task of shoring up this monument while the excavation was going on were not lightened by the fact that the foundation of the column rested partly on rock and partly on sand. "His head is just one hundred feet above yours," said the foreman, as we stood on the tunnel floor. The embarrassments which such landmarks as these have suffered in preserving their dignity during the exigencies of subway construction were plain to any one who saw the statue of Samuel S. Cox, "the letter-carriers' friend," in Astor Place, or who crossed Union Square, where the Father of his Country spent the summer pointing majestically to a tool-shanty and a pile of steel columns, while the rear legs of his horse were standing on the brink of a forty-foot chasm. From the dividing-line at One Hundred and Fourth street a two-track branch, tunneling some sixty feet below the surface through solid rock, swings off to the right, to dip beneath Central Park, emerge at One Hundred and Tenth street and Lenox Avenue, and proceed thence to the Bronx. The problem that met the contractors in this part of the work was to pass under Central Park without disturbing a tree or a blade of grass on the surface, and the way in which they have succeeded is suggested by the opening paragraphs of this article. Tunnels were started at each end and worked inward, and when the last wall was broken down, the plumb-lines of the two headings showed only a quarter of an inch divergence. The conservative citizen who ventured into this section during the summer was lowered in a bucket into the sixty-foot pit at One Hundred and Fourth street, and the donkey-engine man had a way of letting this bucket drop like a plummet to within a few feet of the tunnel floor in a manner calculated to accelerate the pulses of the rider. From the bottom of this until one emerged, half a mile or more away, just outside the greenery of the Park, one was stumbling through nothing more or less than a narrow mine. But when this is completed, and the walls are arched smooth with concrete and are painted white, the subway passenger of the future, returning to his Harlem home of an evening, will probably never remember that sixty feet of solid rock are between him and daylight, unless he chances to look up from his paper as his train swings round the curve at One Hundred and Fourth street. The main line, which, from One Hundred and Fourth street, consists of three tracks, proceeds by surface excavation to One Hundred and Twenty-second street, where a viaduct leads it for half a mile across the sudden depression of Manhattan valley, to plunge underground again at One Hundred and Thirty-third street. The contract as first let for this part of the subway called for a two-track road, but after the excavations had been partly made in some places, the concrete bed and steel superstructure had been built, and all was ready for the roof, it was decided to have a three-track road. The resulting labor and vexatious complications were almost as great as though the work had never been started. One of the contractors moved the walls of his tunnel back bodily. Another moved the walls and some two hundred feet of steel superstructure weighing over two thousand tons. Between One Hundred and Fourteenth and One Hundred and Twenty-first streets the deepest surface excavation had to be made. There is an average depth of about forty feet down to the tunnel grade there. The material removed was solid rock lying in slanting strata, and overhead was a trolley-car line, the time-schedule of which could not be interfered with. Such are a few of the things that had to be reckoned with and overcome in a part of the subway which the ordinary down-town New-Yorker knows nothing about. It is a strange land north of Manhattan valley and west of Washington Heights- quite another country from the Harlem over the hill. Trinity Cemetery, smothered in verdure, rises on each side of the street beneath which the subway is laid, and the superstructure is set up where, only a few years ago, before the cut was made through the cemetery grounds, lay the graves of the dead. Here, too, was the fighting of Washington Heights, and the bronze memorial tablet marking the spot where breastworks were thrown up is not more than thirty feet from the tunnel walls. Everywhere are trees, -elms and soft maples,-arching in some places over the street, as they do over the main street of many an inland town. The coming of rapid transit will doubtless change all this, but if you should visit it now of a foggy afternoon when all out of sight is shrouded in mystery, it will give you a most extraordinary sensation of being in Manhattan and yet out of it -of being in dreamland or abroad. The tunnel which dives into the solid rock at One Hundred and Twenty-eighth street is the longest on the line. At an average depth of one hundred feet below the surface it burrows through blackness for a distance of two miles with an unbroken roof, except at One Hundred and Sixty-ninth and One Hundred and Eighty-first streets, where elevators will carry passengers to and from the tracks. Except for the Hoosac Tunnel, there is no single tunnel so long in America. When I went down into the shaft at One Hundred and Sixty-ninth street it was difficult to fancy it looking as it will look, like the white and marbled station beneath the Circle, nearly six miles away. At the surface was a landing-stage from which every now and then emerged cars of broken rock. You stepped on the elevator platform, and down, down you went into the darkness and dampness of the pit, until, one hundred feet below, you struck bottom in a big cave with a few electric lamps glimmering against the walls and an air-pump forcing fresh air into the heavy atmosphere with slow, spasmodic coughs. Along the tramway leading into the heading ambled the self-centered subterranean mule. When I ventured to make friendly overtures, he promptly swung about and decamped with all the adroitness which he would have used had he been nibbling thistles in the middle of a sunny meadow, and later, when the driver, in hitching him to the tram-car, gave the somewhat untechnical command, "Get in line, there!" he hopped to his place between the rails with just as much cheerfulness as though the command referred to a company drill and he had half a dozen team-mules to keep him from being lonesome. It was in the tunnel just below One Hundred and Sixty-ninth street that another of those accidents occurred which is the price of every great achievement of engineering construction. Here again a slanting stratum became loosened, and slipping down, killed five of the men who were working beneath. I asked one of the workmen from just what part of the heading the rock had fallen. "That chunk of work," said he, cheerfully, pointing straight at the roof above us, "fell out just over where you're standing now." From the end of the long tunnel to Fort George on the western line, and from the tunnel beneath the waters of the Harlem to Bronx Park on the eastern branch, the Rapid Transit road, as a railway, is scarcely enough advanced at this writing to require detailed description. These extreme northern sections are to be elevated structures, and passing as they do through what is now a comparatively sparsely settled part of the Greater City and not subject to the embarrassments of excavation through rock or beneath crowded streets, they can be, when once fairly started, rapidly pushed to completion. As yet little more than the foundations for the elevated pillars are laid. Already, however, the engines and generators, which will supply electric power for the vast traffic of the whole underground system, are being constructed, hundreds of cars similar to those used on the existing elevated, but heavier and of superior running qualities, have been ordered, and the general manager of the road is planning the automatic-signal system and arranging his time-schedules. There are almost numberless details in this huge piece of work which cannot be touched on here. If you tell your friend Robinson that such-and-such a number of cigars are manufactured every year, he will forthwith begin to calculate how near they would reach to the planet Mars if they were placed end to end. You yourself, on the other hand, may be concerned more over the fact that, with a supply so great, the price is not cheaper, or that you do not get more of them. The opportunities for the Robinson point of view are quite unlimited in making a mental circuit from the City Hall to Fort George and the Bronx. The essential things for most of us to know, however, are what is going on to-day beneath our feet, and what, when the work is done, will be the result. Of the first of these we have here bad a few glimpses. The other, the builders say, the town will know, by next Christmas, almost a year ahead of contract time. A still more interesting question, perhaps,-that of the effect of this sudden increase in the ease and rapidity of transportation on the country at the city's edge, and of the other, paths of rapid travel which are destined to honeycomb the underworld of our narrow Babylon,-the morrow, our all too precipitate to-morrow, will answer. |
The production line of a lamp factory in Suining, China. Despite efforts to revive manufacturing in the United States, economists say the chances of a recovery are slim, and developing countries face extra challenges as industry fades. Half a century ago, harvesting California’s 2.2 million tons of tomatoes for ketchup required as many as 45,000 workers. In the 1960s, though, scientists and engineers at the University of California, Davis, developed an oblong tomato that lent itself to being machine-picked and an efficient mechanical harvester to do the job in one pass through a field. The battle to save jobs was on. How could a publicly funded university invest in research that cut farmworker jobs only to help large-scale growers? That was the question raised in a lawsuit filed by a farmworker advocacy group against U.C. Davis in 1979. César Chavez’s United Farm Workers union made stopping mechanization its No. 1 legislative priority. In 1980, President Jimmy Carter’s agriculture secretary, Robert Bergland, declared that the federal government would no longer finance research that could lead to the “replacing of an adequate and willing work force with machines.” ADVERTISEMENT These days, the battle to save American jobs has a different flavor. It echoes in Hillary Clinton’s promise “to win the global competition for manufacturing jobs and production.” It lives in Donald Trump’s call to break Nafta and impose a 45 percent tariff against Chinese imports, and in Bernie Sanders’s rallying cry against trade agreements. View more Its outcome, however, will probably be similar. The freeze on research may have slowed the mechanization of California’s harvests, but by the year 2000, only 5,000 harvest workers were employed in California to pick and sort what was by then a 12-million-ton crop of tomatoes. In America’s factories, jobs are inevitably disappearing, too. But despite the political rhetoric, the problem is not mainly globalization. Manufacturing jobs are on the decline in factories around the world. “The observation is uncontroversial,” said Joseph Stiglitz, the Nobel-winning economist at Columbia University. “Global employment in manufacturing is going down because productivity increases are exceeding increases in demand for manufactured products by a significant amount.” The consequences of this dynamic are often misunderstood, not least by politicians offering slogans to fix them. ADVERTISEMENT No matter how high the tariffs Mr. Trump wants to raise to encircle the American economy, he will not be able to produce a manufacturing renaissance at home. Neither would changing tax rules to limit corporate flight from the United States, as Mrs. Clinton proposes. Image Assembling televisions at Element Electronics in Winnsboro, S.C. Credit Chris Keane/Reuters “The likelihood that we will get a manufacturing recovery is close to nil,” Professor Stiglitz said. “We are more likely to have a smaller share of a shrinking pie.” Look at it this way: Over the course of the 20th century, farm employment in the United States dropped to 2 percent of the work force from 41 percent, even as output soared. Since 1950, manufacturing’s share has shrunk to 8.5 percent of nonfarm jobs, from 24 percent. It still has a ways to go. The shrinking of manufacturing employment is global. In other words, strategies to restore manufacturing jobs in one country will amount to destroying them in another, in a worldwide zero-sum game. ADVERTISEMENT The loss of such jobs has created plenty of problems in the United States. For the countless workers living in less developed reaches of the world, though, it adds up to a potential disaster. Japan’s long stagnation can be read as a consequence of a decades-long development strategy that left the nation overly dependent on manufacturing. “They are focused on a dead-end business,” said Bruce Greenwald, an expert on investment strategy at Columbia Business School. “They are not eliminating hours of work in manufacturing fast enough to keep pace with the reduction in work needed.” Image A lighting and vacuum flask plant in Hanoi, Vietnam. Credit Duc Thanh/European Pressphoto Agency The richest countries today started deindustrializing when they were already well off and benefited from fairly skilled and productive work forces that could make the transition into well-paid service jobs, as increasingly affluent consumers devoted less of their incomes to physical goods and more to leisure, advanced health care and other services. Poorer countries have more limited options. If the demise of manufacturing jobs in the United States forced many workers into low-paid retail jobs and the like, imagine the challenge in a country like India, where factory employment has already topped out, yet income per person is only one twenty-fifth of what it was in the United States at its peak. ADVERTISEMENT “Developing countries are suffering premature deindustrialization,” said Dani Rodrik, a leading expert on the international economy who teaches at Harvard’s Kennedy School. “Both employment and output deindustrialization is setting in at much lower levels of income.” This is even happening in a manufacturing behemoth like China — which appears to have maxed out the industrial export strategy at a much lower income level than its successful Asian predecessors, like Japan and Taiwan. For poorer countries in Asia, Africa and Latin America, the decline of manufacturing as a bountiful source of jobs puts an end to the prime path to riches that the modern world has followed. Image A textile factory in Ahmedabad, India. Credit Amit Dave/Reuters Manufacturing, Professor Rodrik points out, has unique advantages. For one thing, it can quickly employ lots of unskilled workers. “Setting up a factory to make toys puts you on a productivity escalator in a way that traditional agriculture and services didn’t do,” he said. ADVERTISEMENT Moreover, production isn’t constrained by a small domestic market: Exports of goods can easily flow around the world, allowing industry room to grow and giving developing countries time to ride up the ladder of income, skills and sophistication. The natural resources that dominate the exports of many poor countries don’t have these features. They employ few workers and offer little added value. They do not encourage acquiring skills, and they expose countries to violent swings in commodity prices. High-end services such as finance and programming do pay well. But these aren’t the service sectors most poor countries build. A majority of service jobs in most poor countries are generally limited to housework, mom and pop retail and the like. Since these sectors offer little productivity growth and are generally isolated from foreign competition, they cannot pull a nation out of poverty. The first large transition from agriculture to industry in the early 20th century — well lubricated by public spending on world wars — liberated workers from their chains far more effectively than Karl Marx’s revolution ever did. ADVERTISEMENT Image A lighting factory in Zouping, China. Developing countries face extra challenges as industry fades. Credit Agence France-Presse — Getty Images The current transition, from manufacturing to services, is more problematic. In poor countries, Mr. Rodrik says, workers may have to pare back their aspirations of development. Who knows “how will political systems manage?” he asks. In the United States, the political challenge is no less daunting. Low pay married to high profits in much of the service economy are contributing to a widening income chasm that is rending society in all sorts of ways. Used to the prosperity once delivered by manufacturing, American workers are rebelling against the changing tide. Note to Mrs. Clinton, Mr. Sanders and Mr. Trump: A grab at the world’s manufacturing jobs is the wrong answer. Walls will damage prosperity, not enhance it. Promises to recapture industrial-era greatness ring hollow. The United States, though, does have options: health care, education and clean energy, just to name a few. They present big economic and political challenges, of course — not least the enormous inefficiency of private American medicine and Republicans’ blanket opposition to more public spending. Yet just as the federal government once provided a critical push to move the economy from its agricultural past into its industrial future, so, too, could it help build a postindustrial tomorrow. Subscribe to With Interest Catch up and prep for the week ahead with this newsletter of the most important business insights, delivered Sundays. Sign Up |
The worst-case scenario used to be that online ads are pesky, memory-draining distractions. But a new batch of banner ads is much more sinister: They hijack personal computers and bully users until they agree to buy antivirus software. And the ads do their dirty work even if you don't click on them. The malware-spiked ads have been spotted on various legitimate websites, ranging from the British magazine The Economist to baseball's MLB.com to the Canada.com news portal. Hackers are using deceptive practices and tricky Flash programming to get their ads onto legitimate sites by way of DoubleClick's DART program. Web publishers use the DoubleClick-hosted platform to manage advertising inventory. If you've seen any of the ads, you may have experienced something like this: You're on a legitimate site. Your browser window closes down. A new browser window comes up, redirecting you to an antivirus site, while a dialog box comes up telling you that your computer is infected and that your hard drive is being scanned. The malware tries to download software to your computer and scans your hard drive again. (Here's a – video demonstration of the rogue ads.) The malware looks like a ordinary Flash file, with its redirect function encrypted, so that when publishers upload it, the malware is not detectable. Once deployed on a site, the Flash file launches the malicious redirects, which appear to be triggered at preset times or at selected Web domains. John Mark Schofield, a Los Angeles IT director, encountered the ads on Canada.com. He thinks that because he was on a Mac OS computer, the damage wasn't so severe. "My feeling is that it would have caused me a lot more grief if I had been on a Windows computer: It may have installed the malware. Instead, it took over my browser, which I just fixed by exiting Firefox," Schofield says. DoubleClick acknowledges the malware is out there, and says it has implemented a new security-monitoring system that has thus far captured and disabled a hundred ads. "This is an industry-wide challenge. Unfortunately, there are bad actors who misrepresent themselves and purchase advertising as an avenue to distribute malware. This has the potential to affect all businesses and consumers in the online environment," says Sean Harvey, senior product manager at DoubleClick DART. Publishers may be somewhat culpable, too. The distributor of the malware-infected ads is believed to be AdTraff, an online-marketing company with reported ties to the Russian Business Network, a secretive internet service provider that, security firms say, hosts some of the internet's most egregious scams. AdTraff is believed to have posed as a legitimate advertiser, using its partners as references. The ads were almost always paid for with credit cards or wire transfers, according to Alex Eckelberry, CEO of Sunbelt Software, a provider of security software. "The AdTraff guys probably register at a bunch of sites – maybe more than 300. They say they're advertisers. They get the sales guys at the end of the quarter when they're anxious to take the deal. (AdTraff) wires the cash, and they buy the inventory on the site," Eckelberry says. AdTraff could not be reached for comment. The company lists a phone number in Germany which leads to a generic voicemail box. |
Samsung Electronics (005930.SE), the world's largest technology firm by revenue, raised the price of mobile processor supplied to Apple Inc. AAPL, +0.06% by 20% recently, Chosun Ilbo reported Monday, citing a person familiar with negotiations between the two tech giants. "Samsung Electronics recently asked Apple for a significant price raise in (the mobile processor known as) application processor," the person was quoted as saying in the report. "Apple first disapproved it, but finding no replacement supplier, it accepted the (increase.)" The two firms have started to reflect the new supply price recently, the report added, citing the same person. According to the report, Apple buys all APs used for production of iPhone and iPad from Samsung Electronics with the volume estimated to be 130 million units last year and more than 200 million units this year. Samsung Electronics has a long-term contract to supply APs to Apple until 2014, the report added. Samsung Electronics and Apple's South Korea office declined to comment on the report. Subscribe to WSJ: http://online.wsj.com?mod=djnwires |
A 44-year-old Squamish man died after being caught in a large avalanche south of Whistler this afternoon. A group of five men were snowmobiling in the Grizzly Lake area on Powder Mountain when two of the men attempted to climb a steep, snow-laden slope, said Whistler RCMP Staff Sgt. Steve LeClair in a press release. The two sledders triggered the avalanche at about 3:30 p.m. and it buried one of the two men. Police were notified and search and rescue, ski patrol and two avalanche dog teams were deployed to the area by helicopter. The victim's friends managed to dig him out after about 20 minutes, but he was unconscious, unresponsive and had no pulse. His friends started CPR and continued until search and rescue arrived and took over, the release said. CPR continued as the snowmobiler was transferred by helicopter and ambulance to the Whistler Health Care Centre, but he did not survive and was pronounced dead. "The investigation into this tragic incident continues and highlights the dangers that exist in the backcountry," LeClair said. "People traveling in the backcountry must ensure that they exercise sound judgment when selecting their routes of travel and are properly trained and equipped for companion rescue." There has been significant avalanche activity in the Whistler and Pemberton areas in recent days, with slides in the Duffey Lake area reported on Saturday and Sunday (March 3 and 4). There were slides today in the Spearhead and Rutherford areas as well, said Wayne Flann of Whistler Search and Rescue. article continues below |
Mohamed O. Mohamud appeared to have discovered an unusually compassionate pair of terrorists. They told him he did not have to kill to be a good Muslim. He could just pray. A bomb was a very serious matter, they said. Kids might be killed. Time and again, they offered a way out. At a hotel in downtown Portland, Oregon, in July, the two undercover FBI agents listened as Mohamud explained his dream of detonating a car bomb during the city's Christmas celebration. They offered to help, if Mohamud was sure he wanted to go through with it. "You always have a choice," one of the agents said, according to court documents. "You understand? With us, you always have a choice." It was not an offhand remark. It was part of a carefully scripted routine the FBI has been perfecting since the September 2001 terror attacks. Sting operations, choreographed by FBI and Justice Department officials in Washington, have included plots against skyscrapers in Dallas, Texas, Washington subways, a Chicago nightclub and New York's John F. Kennedy International Airport. All the plots have been fictional. The intent, the FBI says, has been real. And the government has a string of convictions to back that up, a track record that has made undercover stings one of the government's go-to strategies in terrorism cases. But the tactic is not without its critics. Each arrest has been followed by allegations of entrapment and claims that the government is enticing Muslims to become terrorists, selling them phony explosives, then arresting them. Special Section: Terrorism in the U.S. Arson at Oregon Plot Suspect's Mosque Homegrown Terrorism a Growing Threat in U.S. FBI Sting Foils Portland Terror Plot Motive Behind Portland Bomb Attempt Oregon Bomber Suspect Wanted "Spectacular Show" Feds Arrest Somali Teen in Portland Bomb Plot As Mohamud appeared in court on a terrorism charge Monday, friends accused the FBI of luring him into a plot the government had concocted. "If you talk with someone enough, they'll be convinced they need to do something," said 20-year-old Muhahid el-Naser. He was among a small number of people gathered outside a federal court building about a five-block walk from what the government alleges was the target of the bomb plot last week, Portland's Pioneer Courthouse Square. No terrorism case since Sept. 11, 2001, has been thrown out because of entrapment. Just last month, the tactic passed its latest test when a New York jury convicted four men of trying to blow up synagogues. Jurors rejected the argument that the FBI enticed the men into a plot they never would have come up with otherwise. "When the government supplies a fake bomb and then thwarts the plot, this is insanity. This is grandstanding," Susanne Brody, one of the defense attorneys in that case, said Monday when asked about the FBI's use of undercover stings. Brody said the tactic requires extraordinary amounts of time and money and can ensnare hapless people, not hardened terrorists. "The people they repeatedly come up with continue to be people who have no ability to do something on their own," said Samuel Braverman, another defense attorney in the New York case who said he is skeptical of a strategy that amounts to "picking off the dumbest we have to offer." In the Oregon case, even the government's own documents paint Mohamud as something of a piddling terrorist: He tried to connect with an Islamic extremist in Pakistan, but kept mistyping the e-mail address. He claimed that, because he had been a rapper, he could get an AK-47 assault rifle. While his online writing suggested exercise routines for would-be terrorists - jump rope, run in the sand, jog before dawn so you are not afraid of the dark - he confided to undercover FBI agents that he did not know how to be a terrorist and needed training. Counterterrorism officials do not buy the argument that a wannabe terrorist is less of a concern. They say the only difference between someone like Mohamud and someone like Faisal Shahzad, who admitted trying to set off a bomb in Times Square this spring, is that the FBI got to Mohamud before he could be trained to pull off an attack. After all, Mohamud also made it clear he wanted to carry out an attack and rejected every opportunity to change his mind, officials said. "He was told that children - children - were potentially going to be harmed," Attorney General Eric Holder said Monday, rejecting the notion that FBI agents entrapped Mohamud. In Oregon, the FBI went so far as to load a van full of phony explosives and let Mohamud try to activate them during the Christmas tree lighting celebration, according to court documents. That tactic, along with the repeated offers to let Mohamud walk away, reflect how far the FBI's role-playing has come since an early, high-profile sting operation in Miami, Florida, almost fell apart. When federal authorities unveiled that case in 2006, they said seven men from Miami's impoverished Liberty City neighborhood had planned to destroy the Sears Tower in Chicago. But the plot never got past the discussion stage and the group never had the means to carry out the attack. The case suffered two mistrials and two men were acquitted before prosecutors finally won the case and five men were sent to prison last year. Today, authorities are more likely to carry their ruses further, give suspects more opportunities to clearly state their intentions for FBI microphones and even let them light a fuse to a fake bomb. "Particularly in light of cases like Liberty City, everybody at Justice and the FBI is predisposed to taking it as far as they can," said Patrick Rowan, the Justice Department's former top counterterrorism official. Jeffrey H. Sloman, a former federal prosecutor in Miami who supervised the Liberty City case, said people caught up in stings tend to be people who have the desire to kill but are still looking for ways to pull it off. He acknowledged that leaves prosecutors open to claims that such cases are just boasts and bluster. "It's ripe for criticism, second-guessing and Monday-morning quarterbacking, but when you're talking about people who express a desire to murder and maim large numbers of people," he said, "you have to explore that." |
Hello Gentlemen, Today we are going to talk about how a woman flirts and if she’s into you, and the reasons why she isn’t into you. Let’s be pretty clear from the get-go, if a girl you meet at a house party, social event, twitter, etc. is talking to you, it doesn’t automatically mean she loves you and wants to have your babies. Case in point: One time I was at a friend’s house party, where I met a guy for the first time. He was nice enough, we talked about movies or something, I have no idea, and other people were talking to us. This guy and I weren’t alone together, I wasn’t even standing close to him and we were in an open space talking to other people. He was asking about my music career and I gave him my card. Just friendly chatting. He then later added me on Facebook, and chatted with me then proceeded to ask me for dinner. I declined, as nicely as I could, and it all ended there. I see how it can be hard for guys to see what went wrong here, but just to clarify, just because someone of the opposite sex is talking to you, doesn’t mean she likes you. Here’s how he could have seen I was not interested. The Ways a Girl Flirts 1) Touch – When a girl is interested, she usually gravitates toward a guy. She’ll stand closer to him, she’ll laugh and touch his shoulder, she’ll do what she can to be in his bubble. She’ll touch his knee, etc. If a girl is standing far away from you, and not even attempting to touch you and looks like her body is positioned away from you while she’s talking, see where her body is positioned, because that’s what’s she’s more interested in (i.e. the fruit punch or the lesbian chick on the other side of the room). 2) Teasing – What a great way to flirt. When you engage in teasing of the opposite sex, it’s a safe way to test the waters and see how someone is attracted to you. If you’re laughing, teasing and you two grativate closer, it’s a very easy way to see how someone reacts to you. If the girl isn’t too interested, she probably won’t tease too much back, and won’t draw in closer to you. 3) Compliments – A girl will start complimenting a guy or show interest in what he does. Although, showing interest can be VERY tricky. Asking someone about their job and where they live is very platonic, and even though a girl can ask about these things, it can go both ways, she can very well be acting friendly and interested. How do you know she’s INTERESTED? She’ll probably start asking about your hobbies, what you do in your spare time. She’ll also engage in talking about other subjects: dating, what she’s doing on the weekend, movies, etc. The conversation can be a tricky place to gauge how much a girl likes you, so you have to look into Rules 1 and 2, if the conversation turns into teasing, and light touching, flirting is definitely in effect and the girl is interested in you. 4) Body Language – How the girl carries herself is telling as well. Is she touching her hair? Is her body facing yours? Is she smiling? Are her palms facing up? Is her head off to one side? To show interest, cocking your head to the side is a common signal. If a girl also lifts her arm, say to scratch the back of her head and exposes the underarm, this is a vunerable sign, meaning she is able to be vunerable around you. If she is standing with arms crossed, several feet away from you and her body is positioned to somewhere else in the room, I’d say it’s a fair guess she is not interested in you. Grooming is a typical sign a girl is interested, playing with hair, smoothing out clothes are common flirting signals. So, what did we learn today, Gentlemen? Now you can refer to the previous example and see how I was NOT interested in the guy. I didn’t tease or compliment the guy. I didn’t get closer to him or show any flirting signals. I was just being polite and chatty. Girls talk, they’re polite and we’re brought up to be that way. Don’t get mad at us if you can’t read the signals. Just learn for next time, and it’ll be so clear when a girl IS into you. Girls also like to have male friendships. If she’s not really showing signs of attraction, she probably just wants to be a friend. And there is the wild card… *when a girl doesn’t want you to know she likes you. Those situations, tread lightly and with more friendship and time, you will be able to see her true colors. And hey, great relationships take time, so take your time too when it comes to flirting. 🙂 *A lot of you guys have been commenting on the Wild Card, when a girl likes you but doesn’t want to show it, check out this post to find out more. Advertisements |
If you haven't already seen it, please take a moment to check out Puck Rakers and the comments from former Jacket Kristian Huselius about his medical issues. To put it lightly, his remarks don't paint the organization in a good light, and it makes you wonder about the treatment being provided to other players by the Blue Jackets and their medical staff. How many players with repeated health issues during their time here (Mike Commodore, Derick Brassard, even Jeff Carter or Mark Dekanich) were in a position where they felt "rushed" to get back into a game - and then over-worked by the team once they did return? Once, these concerns would have been pushed away under "toughness" because it was expected that players would go back out as quickly as possible, just like in other pro sports. But we're also seeing a generation of players from every major sport who have suffered increasing amounts of major medical issues and side effects later in life because of this attitude. Couple that to hockey's ongoing concerns over concussions and post-concussion recovery, and you have a conflict between the traditions and ideals of the past and the stark realities of now. It's tempting to push the team under the bus here, but how many players have been minimizing or "pushing through" injuries for most of their careers, Juice included? How much was he actually talking to the coaches and training staff about his actual status, versus what he was "expected" to say? Even though Huselius says he didn't take part in full practices before going back in, it's worth pointing out that Huselius had been skating with the team since early November, and working out on his own with training staff before that. Saying that he was not allowed to practice is, at best, somewhat misleading. When you consider the many injuries Huselius suffered while in Columbus, it's worth pointing out that he was, essentially, paid $9.5 million dollars for 41 games over the last two years of his contract. He suffered a wrist injury, a high ankle sprain, the aforementioned pec tear (incurred while working out on his own, and not while playing), and finally the groin. The team shut him down for nearly a year, paid his salary, and are on the hook for his medical costs until such time as he's medically cleared to play hockey again. It's easy to see that they'd want to start seeing some production for that investment, but it's equally hard to imagine them deliberately pushing him back out early knowing that re-injury was a real possibility. Also, let's not forget that while Huselius seems to be blaming the team for overstressing his groin, the injury he was recovering from was a shoulder injury - and one that did NOT prevent him from doing lower body workouts or continuing to skate before that point. (For details on what he couldn't do, I refer you back to Jo Innes' excellent writeup.) If Huselius wasn't in 100% shape for game action, there's a point where we need to ask how much of that was his responsibility. Did then head coach Scott Arniel truly overplay Huselius in his first game back? Yeah, it's hard to say no when the evidence shows he saw more ice time than almost every other forward, and he has his own share of the blame for that. On the other hand, what kind of feedback did Juice give the medical staff when he was finally cleared to play? How much of the plan to get him back into the game that night was based on an evaluation that might have been flawed? If Arniel and the club's medical staff weren't being given honest feedback by the player about his readiness to go, that's part of the problem. If Huselius wasn't maintaining himself properly, that's part of the problem. And if Huselius was on the bench and being asked by a trainer or coach if he's ready to go on the ice for a shift during that fist game back and he said "Yes, OK" instead of "No, wait" because he was afraid of a backlash in the locker room, that's part of the problem, too. This is a messy, complex, literally painful issue, but I find it hard to put all of the blame on just one party, particularly when the team has continued to hold up their end of the responsibility towards Juice's medical treatment even while he has apparently decided to cut off as much communication as possible towards them. |
The National Football League is easing its television blackout policy, but Chargers fans likely won’t see a change this season. By July 15, teams can reduce the number of general tickets that need to be sold in order for a game to be locally televised, lowering the threshold by as much as 15 percent. In the past, a team was required to sell all its general admission tickets (about 56,500 in the Chargers’ case) within 72 hours before kickoff, or the game wouldn’t be televised within a 75-mile radius. There is a catch, however. If a team lowers the bar for blackouts, the number is fixed for the season. Whenever the team clears the mark, it will be required to share more ticket revenue than usual with other teams in the league. It’s that part of the new rules that the Chargers believe would be too high a price to pay, said A.G. Spanos, the team’s executive vice president and chief executive officer. "And even if you went to 15 percent lower, hypothetically an 85 percent manifest, that doesn't necessarily guarantee you a lift of the blackout for every game," Spanos said Monday. “It's also important to understand that the manifest is set for the year for every game, whether it's a big game for us or a game with a less attractive opponent. "It's not a flexible policy. It's not a flexible manifest." Ticket sales can be a franchise’s life blood. Spanos said the Chargers rely heavily on season-ticket revenue because Qualcomm Stadium is an older facility; it opened in 1967. “We don't have as many opportunities to get revenue from other places like naming rights, signage and other sponsorship opportunities,” Spanos said. Of the NFL’s 256 regular-season games in 2011, there were 16 blackouts. San Diego had two of them, one against the Miami Dolphins in October and the other against the Buffalo Bills in December. Four games in 2010 were blacked out, snapping a franchise-record sellout streak of 48 games, playoffs included, dating back to 2004. Blackouts don’t help a team from a financial or public-relations standpoint, and the Chargers hope to further reduce the number this year. The team hasn't raised ticket prices for five seasons, and in 2011, it lowered the cost of 6,500 View Level seats from $63 to $54. Spanos, naturally a salesman, says season tickets have more yearlong value in the past, given perks like contests, Chargers Park tours, and conference calls with different Chargers personnel, including players and coaches. When the team opens training camp this month, some practices will be open exclusively to season-ticket holders. The number of season-ticket payment installments has also increased to five. According to the Wall Street Journal, which first reported the news, owners voted to add high-speed wireless Internet to all stadiums in an effort to add home-like services to the game-day experience. The league also will begin showing the same replays in stadiums that game officials see when reviewing plays, the Journal report said. Still, for 2012, work remains. Season-ticket sales are trailing where last year's numbers were at this time, Spanos said. He didn't express concern, saying they can catch up and avoid blackouts without needing a lowered benchmark to do it. Brian McCarthy, the NFL's vice president of communications, said Monday that teams must submit their stadium's base capacity mid-month and their target benchmark with it. It won't be less than 100 percent for San Diego. "For all these reasons, the Chargers are not going to reduce our manifest this year," Spanos said. "We're optimistic we can get to a (season ticket) base that is very comparable to last year, if not surpass it. ... Our market has shown that we can support this team and sell out our stadium." |
[Burns, OR] Signs of disunity within the armed militia occupying the Malheur Widllife Refuge in Oregon have emerged in recent days, with one militiaman taking off with the petty cash to get drunk in a nearly motel. In an effort to bring their stand to a conclusion that they can still call a victory, they have reportedly modified their demands from relinquishing control of vast tracts of federally owned land to one large cheese pizza and a multipack of Charmin Ultra Soft toilet paper. “If the government accedes to these demands, we promise to leave once we’ve finished chowing down and each had a bowel movement.” They wanted pepperoni, but didn’t want to be too pushy on the issue of toppings, given their determination to hold out for multi-ply toilet paper. The militia insist their demands still send a strong message, and are non-negotiable. Secretly, however, they admit that they would probably settle for any paper that is better than what they currently have. “Bundy only brought this raspy institutional single-ply paper that’s making our asses raw. The fact that the bucket toilet is almost full doesn’t help.” Off the record, they admit they knew the game was up when they caught one of their number on the phone with the NBC network about filming a primetime special “I’m An Oregon Militant…Get Me Out Of Here!’ Sitting down has become very difficult for these patriots. |
Oxford, United Kingdom - In the middle of the Indian Ocean, a thousand miles south of India, the nearest landmass, about halfway between Africa and Indonesia and far away from everywhere, is a small group of coral islands called the Chagos Archipelago. Forty years ago, its people, the Chagossians, were unceremoniously removed from their homeland by a joint operation of the United Kingdom and the United States, and essentially left beached in Mauritius as human detritus. The reason for their expulsion was that the US and the UK had decided to use the islands as a joint military facility in the post-colonial world, as they feared being booted out or needing to repeatedly re-negotiate base facilities with non-Western governments coming to power in newly independent countries across Asia and Africa. Technically a joint US-UK venture, Chagos now houses a massive US military base at Diego Garcia. It was used for reconnaissance in the 1973 Arab-Israeli war and saw wartime use in the first Gulf War. After 9/11 it was key to the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. It may house nuclear weapons and may be a "black site" for detaining prisoners. It is more secretive than Guantanamo Bay - which is probably why most people have never heard of it. 101 East - Okinawa: The future of US military bases Now an impressively researched book that details its secret history goes even further and argues that Diego Garcia, and what happened in the Chagos Islands, lies at the heart of a global American empire that employs some 1,000 bases outside the United States. Their purpose: To ensure that no matter who governs in Asia, Africa or around the world, the US military would be in a position to "run the planet" from its chain of strategic island bases. For several decades, the shadowy presence of Diego Garcia and a whiff of its disreputable acquisition lurked in the misty fringes of Western security studies. David Vine's meticulously researched Island of Shame: the Secret History of the US Military Base on Diego Garcia (Princeton University Press, 2011) enables us to engage with the "strategic islands concept" and its consequences for the Chagossians and others. It provides a level of information about both the US and British policymakers and the human beings at the receiving end of their global power ambitions that had not been accessible before. Coincidentally, a stage production in London, A Few Man Fridays, directed by Adrian Jackson, charts the story of the Chagossians' expulsion, destitution and desperation through the fictional character of an abandoned Chagos Islander child who washes up as a homeless man in Britain and "hears voices" from his past. I saw the production this week, it is a hard-hitting dramatisation of the duplicity, hypocrisy and complete callousness of the empire-builders - old and new - who thought nothing of breaking international laws and UN rules to stamp out a few indigenous people standing in the way of their militaristic fantasies. In context The Island of Shame is particularly interesting as it does not stop at merely charting in painful detail the forcible and duplicitous expulsion of the Chagossians by the British in order to provide the US with the "sanitised" islands they sought. It places the story of the couple of thousand Chagos Islanders in the context of larger global events: the expulsion of indigenous populations in many other places by the United States or other aggressive imperial forces; the worldwide chain of "strategic" bases built and maintained by the US; and addresses not just whether the US is an empire, but also what kind of empire it is when compared to those of bygone eras. The people of the Chagos Islands are the descendants of enslaved Africans and indentured labour from south India brought to work on the coconut plantations in the 18th century. With the emergence of newly independent countries in Asia, Africa and the Middle East, the US, which was allied to the former colonial powers, was thought by some of its security analysts to be in need of an alternate strategy to be able to combat the Soviet Union's reach around the world. The idea of a "strategic islands concept" was apparently dreamed up by Stuart Barber, in which American military bases would be located in remote islands under direct US or continuing Western colonial control. Inside Story - Okinawa: Finding a compromise The role of key figures such as Paul Nitze, who towered over American strategic analysis for several decades, in successfully pushing for a hyper-military version of global dominance and a ruthless approach to Diego Garcia, is a fascinating tale in itself. Barber himself later recanted and repented: In an unpublished letter to the Washington Post in 1991, he wrote of "the inexcusably inhuman wrongs inflicted by the British at our insistence on the former inhabitants of Diego Garcia and other Chagos group islands". He supported the Chagossians' right to return and compensation for their decades of suffering. Indeed, he did not think their eviction from the islands was necessary for having a base there. What actually happened, as detailed in Vine's book, is that the British and the US made secret agreements in the 1960s to deliver the islands "swept" of any people. The policy was pursued through means such as exchange of notes (rather than treaties), or Orders in Council, to avoid parliamentary and congressional scrutiny. The islands were detached by the British from Mauritius prior to its independence to form the "British Indian Ocean Territory", using the archaic procedure of royal decree and violating UN rules on decolonisation. Supply of provisions was cut and Chagossians visiting Mauritius on vacation or for medical treatment suddenly started to be told they could no longer return home. Each island family used to have a number of dogs as pets, who would go fishing. In the final forcible expulsion, hundreds of these pet dogs were shut in a shed and gassed. Their owners were then herded into cargo boats and ditched in Mauritius and Seychelles. Other aspects Several other aspects of the mindset of the empire-builders emerge now and then in the story of the Chagos Islands. For instance, the plans for strategic island bases had included Diego Garcia (then part of British-controlled Mauritius), Aldabra in the Seychelles and Cocos/Keeling Islands of Australia. While US officials wanted the post-colonial (non-white) governments of Mauritius and Seychelles to give up sovereignty over Diego Garcia and Aldabra, they were willing to continue to have Australian sovereignty over the Cocos/Keeling Islands. Australia's own notorious history with regard to indigenous peoples is well-known. Vine terms this Anglo-American-Australian alliance "the coalition of the pale" and points out that it endures to the present day. Another curious fact is that while the US and UK authorities do not allow journalists or independent observers to visit Diego Garcia, two other groups of outsiders are allowed. Dozens of people sailing in yachts are allowed to visit the other islands of Chagos, far away from the military base. Several thousand workers from other countries such as the Philippines and Sri Lanka are also employed on the base. Chagossians could have been so employed instead of being expelled, but it appears "locals" are not favoured, in case they start demanding "self-determination" and "democracy". It is important not to think of the Chagossians' fate solely as an exceptional tragedy that befell a small number of people. As Vine points out, powerful groups or states have displaced "native" peoples elsewhere for a variety of reasons. The US itself is built through a process of displacing and impoverishing its indigenous peoples. The Bikini Atoll was "cleansed" of its people in order to be used for nuclear testing. Vine argues that Diego Garcia belongs to another larger phenomenon as well: It sits at the heart of a system of strategic bases which serve as the instruments to project US military power. Guantanamo detention centre is 10 years old This in turn illuminates what kind of imperial power the US actually is. As he correctly points out, most Americans do not think of themselves as having an "empire" and indeed, the US is not a traditional territorially based empire. It emerged in the post-colonial age as an economic superpower and the world's most successful "soft" power, with unparalleled intellectual and cultural hegemony. But its vast global base network, mapped by Vine with caveats about the uncertainties surrounding exact numbers and locations, may well beg the question: Who needs this and for what? Reflection of today The Island of Shame is a discomforting read, especially for British and American readers who will probably find themselves cringing at the well-documented account of the deceit and inhumanity, not only of their forbears in the past, but also of policymakers today. For many years, now the Chagossians have been fighting an uphill battle to obtain justice through the courts. Verdicts in the English courts had gone in favour of the Chagossians in 2000, 2006 and 2007 until the House of Lords overturned them all and ruled in favour of the British government. The Chagossians have now petitioned the European Court of Human Rights. Possibly as a pre-emptive action in case they win at the European Court, the last Labour government declared the Chagos Archipelago a "marine protection area", which would restrict fishing and therefore human re-settlement. The Chagossians have had to take legal action against this "green" initiative as well. The "government" is not a monolithic entity, however. Robin Cook, the former British Foreign Secretary, apparently had been in favour of the Chagossians' right of return, but his successor reversed the policy. There is also the usual tendency of politicians to say one thing before an election and do something else later. Before the last British general elections leading Conservative and Liberal Democrat politicians in the UK had acknowledged that the Chagos Islanders' case was a moral issue, but once in government they continued to fight the case in the European Court and support the "marine protection area". David Vine describes the Obama administration's response to the Chagos Island case as "silence", though many former members of the US government have expressed to him their personal embarrassment over Diego Garcia. The story of what happened to the Chagos Islands and the long struggle of its displaced people is more than a calamity that struck a small group of people who happened to be in the wrong place (their own homes) at the wrong time (the era of decolonisation and the Cold War). It is a documentation of how the long tentacles of slavery and colonialism endure and flourish in our times, in new avatars, amidst the distractions of the supposed global triumph of democracy and self-determination. Sarmila Bose is Senior Research Fellow in the Politics of South Asia at the University of Oxford. For more information: www.chagossupport.org.uk |
The Atlanta Falcons appear to be very committed to building the most batshit insane football stadium in American history. They already went and approved a design that will make the stadium resemble a robot’s anus, and now they are going to grace the grounds with what is purported to be the largest bird statue in the world. This news comes to us from For The Win, which talked to Hungarian artist Gábor Miklós Szőke, who is currently designing the big stupid bird. Look at this dumbass bird: Advertisement Szőke claims that the large idiot bird will stand 41.5 feet high and have a wingspan of 64 feet. Atlanta taxpayers are forking over $200 million to help build a stadium that looks like a metal sphincter and a statue that looks like World Of Warcraft concept art. What a great deal for everyone involved. [FTW] |
Senate Republicans Up Against Sept. 30 Deadline For Last Effort To Replace Obamacare Senate Republicans may vote next week — again — on repealing the Affordable Care Act. The latest bill is sponsored by Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina and Senator Bill Cassidy of Louisiana. ARI SHAPIRO, HOST: Senate Republicans may vote next week again on repealing the Affordable Care Act, or Obamacare. This latest bill is sponsored by senators Lindsey Graham of South Carolina and Bill Cassidy of Louisiana. Republicans are up against a deadline of September 30. The rules say any bill that comes after that will need the support of more than 51 senators, which would mean Democratic support. Joining us now to talk about what this latest Republican health care bill would do is NPR health policy correspondent Alison Kodjak. Hi, Alison. ALISON KODJAK, BYLINE: Hi, Ari. SHAPIRO: How does this bill compare to the other three that we've seen this year from Republicans? KODJAK: Well, this one most people will say is the most radical bill in that it makes the most drastic changes. It dismantles the major parts of the Affordable Care Act, including the subsidies that help people buy insurance, the expansion of Medicaid, the individual mandate that requires people to buy insurance and even gets rid of the health care exchange. And then it takes all the money from those programs and rolls it all up and turns it over to the states so that they can set up their own health care programs. And then the states can use the money for any number of things. They can help people buy insurance. They could set up what's called a high-risk pool to cover the people who are the sickest and most expensive. Or they could just expand access to Medicaid. But it doesn't really require them to do anything specific. SHAPIRO: Now, one big question is, would more or fewer people be covered under this plan? This was the bill's sponsor, Senator Cassidy, on CNN this morning. (SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING) BILL CASSIDY: There are more people who will be covered through this bill than under the status quo. SHAPIRO: More people - is he right? KODJAK: It's really unclear. Right now most private experts say that fewer people would end up covered under this. But we don't have an official analysis from the Congressional Budget Office, and we won't before they vote on this bill if they do so next week. SHAPIRO: There were two big things that worried people in the last vote. One was people with Medicaid - what would happen to them? And the other was people with pre-existing conditions. Let's take Medicaid first. What would this bill do for people who get coverage under Medicaid? KODJAK: Yeah, and that's a big deal because Medicaid covers about 70 million people. Under the expansion, about 10 million people got insurance, and that's going to be rolled back. But the basic Medicaid program will change as well. It's similar to earlier versions where right now Medicaid pays for whatever health care that people in the program need. There's no limit. And Republicans see that as a huge problem because it's a growing part of the federal budget. But this bill caps Medicaid spending a specific amount per person in the program and then it grows it more slowly. Most people say that over time, the program's going to shrink by about 25 percent. SHAPIRO: And as to pre-existing conditions, let's listen to what Senator Cassidy said on CNN about coverage for people with ongoing health problems. (SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING) CASSIDY: The protection is absolutely the same. There's a specific provision that says that if a state applies for a waiver, it must ensure that those with pre-existing conditions have affordable and adequate coverage. SHAPIRO: Affordable and adequate seem like important words there. Is this a guarantee for people with pre-existing conditions? KODJAK: It's not exactly a guarantee. And the issue is that this bill allows states to get those waivers. And that would get them out of the rules imposed by Obamacare. Those rules define what has to be included in a health insurance policy, things like mental health care, prescription drug coverage, hospitalization coverage. Under this bill, states can get out of those requirements. So an insurance policy in a certain state doesn't have to necessarily have, say, prescription drug coverage. So if you're a person with diabetes or arthritis and you buy insurance in that state, you might be able to get coverage, but it won't necessarily pay for all the care you need. SHAPIRO: NPR's Alison Kodjak. Thanks a lot. KODJAK: Thanks, Ari. Copyright © 2017 NPR. All rights reserved. Visit our website terms of use and permissions pages at www.npr.org for further information. NPR transcripts are created on a rush deadline by Verb8tm, Inc., an NPR contractor, and produced using a proprietary transcription process developed with NPR. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of NPR’s programming is the audio record. |
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