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The U.S. senator met with a group of Jewish donors to the Republican Party before introducing his bill, according to the National Journal. HAARETZ United States Senator Rand Paul has introduced a Congressional bill that would cut off assistance to the Palestinian Authority so long as it seeks admission to the International Criminal Court. The so-called “Defend Israel by Defunding Palestinian Foreign Aid Act of 2015” was the second anti-Palestinian bill introduced by Paul in as many years, according to the National Journal. Last year, he introduced the “Stand with Israel Act,” which would have terminated U.S. aid until the Palestinians agreed to a cease-fire and recognized the state of Israel. The PA submitted the necessary documentation to become a member of the world’s permanent war crimes tribunal last week. United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon said on Tuesday its the member ship would become official on April 1. As a member of the court, the PA will be able to pursue war crimes charges against Israel. Hours before introducing the bill, Rand met with a group leading Jewish donors to the Republican Party, including casino mogul Sheldon Adelson, the Journal reported. Paul’s bill would eliminate all U.S. foreign assistance, loan guarantees, and general aid to the Palestine Authority so long as it seeks to join the international court, according to an aide to the senator. Interviewed by Fox News, Paul argued that it “hardly seems to me a good idea to give American taxpayer money to a country or an entity that is now saying that an ally of ours—that their soldiers need to be investigated for war crimes.” The junior Republican senator from Kentucky is openly exploring a run for the White House in 2016. Observers see his bill as being part of a bid to win the support of Republican pro-Israel hawks, who tend to regard the libertarian Paul with skepticism, if not outright hostility. Share this: Facebook Email Google Twitter More Tumblr Print Pinterest LinkedIn Reddit Like this: Like Loading... Related This entry was posted on 01/07/2015, 9:34 and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through RSS 2.0. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed. |
One person every three seconds is developing dementia globally, and according to The Global Impact of Dementia report, it will affect 135 million people worldwide by 2050. Experts agree that early detection of this disease is essential, which is where new free mobile app Sea Hero Quest comes in. Launched on May 4, Sea Hero Quest sees gamers take on the role of the son of an explorer, navigating seas to find mysterious monsters and recapture your father's lost memories. As you make your way up the levels, you are anonymously providing data about how people navigate spaces, how they use landmarks, how they get lost and find their way again. This is vital to dementia research, as the disease is often characterised by difficulty understanding and navigating environments. The game therefore creates a database of what navigation looks like for a sample on population level; this is unprecedented in dementia research. If 100,000 people play Sea Hero Quest for just two minutes, according to Alzheimer's Research UK, this would equate to more than 50 years of traditional lab-based dementia research. The largest spatial navigation study done previously had 599 participants and Hugo Spiers, a researcher from UCL involved in Sea Hero Quest, claims the game collects valuable data 150 times faster than traditional lab work. Sea Hero Quest has both navigational levels and 'flare' levels. Navigational levels test players' ability to find their way from A to B, while 'flare' levels ask users to find their way back the way they came. And, just for fun, there's some sea creatures to battle along the way. The data gathered by Sea Hero Quest has the potential to be used in the development of early diagnostic tests for dementia. The data has the best chance of setting a benchmark of 'normal' spatial navigation if as wide a range of people as possible play the game, so, why not download it today and contribute towards dementia research. Sea Hero Quest was created by Deutsche Telekom, Alzheimer's Research UK, Glitchers, UCL and the University of East Anglia. |
Three months ago, the premiere of HBO's "Westworld" was followed by a slew of articles comparing it to HBO's biggest show: Is it the new "Game of Thrones"? Is it better or worse? Is it more or less lucrative? The comparison stuck. As recently as mid-November, The New Yorker of all places published an article titled, "The Latest 'Westworld' Reveal Shows It's No 'Game of Thrones.'" What is wrong with how we watch TV? Of course "Game of Thrones" has more complex settings, character arcs and narratives than "Westworld" -- it's been on the air for six seasons! And of course HBO's newly minted series will never replicate the fantasy sprawl of "Game of Thrones" -- it's not trying to. The problem is, when the critics' first impulse is to compare every new ambitious show to whatever seems popular, they miss the point. No matter what you think of "Game of Thrones," "Westworld" is doing something special: It's changing viewer expectations for TV quality. It's a show everyone should watch, a show you should watch, for the magnificent cinematography, the spring-loaded story, the editorial wizardry. You should watch for stars Anthony Hopkins, Thandie Newton, Jeffrey Wright and Evan Rachel Wood. You should watch to introduce your brain to its own limits. "Westworld" holds fire in its belly, and by some magic, it blows no smoke. A story deconstructed "Game of Thrones" has some spectacular moments, but the core experience it offers isn't game-changing. The story moves forward at a predictable pace, the world is believable, the characters feel real -- it meets all the standards we expect out of contemporary stories. "Westworld" bends the rules. Watching it is totally different from almost any other television show available now. Its editing keeps viewers on their toes, surprising us with revelations from the past when we thought we were watching the present. The cinematography constantly pulls us back and forth from stunning Western vistas to steel-and-glass sci-fi offices. The visual effects are brutal, and would feel at home in any summer flick at the theater. The mind-bending, effects-driven story of "Westworld" isn't just the product of a higher budget, it shows creative intention by the showrunners to challenge how we understand any story we watch. An actor's paradise Award-caliber performances aren't new to HBO, but much of its best acting has been in less popular fare, such as "Show Me a Hero" or "The Night Of." "Game of Thrones" is a different beast, with a massive yet surprisingly consistent cast. But that leaves only a few standouts (namely: Lena Headey, Peter Dinklage and Jonathan Pryce). And even the best performances take time to really connect: Headey and Dinklage (as Cersei and Tyrion Lannister, respectively) don't get a chance to show real complexity for a few seasons, and other great actors don't show up till later in the series. But practically any performance in "Westworld" would steal a season on "Game of Thrones." Hopkins (as the park's creator and mastermind, Dr. Robert Ford) is simply transcendent, even with meager screen time; Newton (as brothel owner Maeve Millay) sells a perilously complicated character arc in a matter of episodes; Jeffrey Wright (as the park's head programmer Bernard Lowe) folds subtlety into a role that could've easily been overplayed; and Ed Harris is irresistible as the Man in Black. The rest of the cast, especially those who show up for half an episode like Dolores' dad in the first episode, surprise and delight viewers with pathos punctuated by the whirs and stutters of their malfunctioning operating systems. "Game of Thrones" has good acting, but the performances in "Westworld" are next level. Video screenshot by Anthony Domanico/CNET Wild, wild West(eros) The world of Westeros in "Game of Thrones" is a fascinating setting, full of intrigue and secrets. But within the first few episodes, the most critical of these secrets are revealed. We know the White Walkers are coming (very, very slowly); we know who killed the King's Hand and Robert Baratheon. We understand the basic rules of this show because we've seen worlds like Westeros before. It's another fantasy world based on late Medieval European history -- not bad, but not new or particularly distinctive. "Westworld," by contrast, takes a unique idea, a futuristic Wild West theme park, inspired by Michael Crichton's '70s flick, and spends 10 episodes spinning out its mysteries for viewers. Sure, any character could die just like in "GoT," but any of them could be human or robot, hero or villain, future or past. What you get with "Westworld," much like the special effects these puzzles depend on, is an enigma that unfolds to reveal further mystery. And unlike past shows based in such continually unfolding worlds ("Lost" for example), there's a singular end in mind the whole time -- a beating heart in the chest. HBO 'These violent delights' During the sixth season of "Game of Thrones," I placed bets with friends and family on characters' mortality -- how and when they'll die. It was one of the most enjoyable seasons of TV I've experienced. But aside from predicting plot lines and the demise of characters, conversations about "Game of Thrones" rarely transitioned to anything more substantive. Why? Because it is so predictable: The universe is brutal, and people are brutish. Thematically, "Game of Thrones" is a Thomas Hobbes wet dream, set in the Dark Ages with dragons. Conversations about "Westworld," however, quickly turn to its deeper themes: violence and sexual exploitation in the stories we tell and what those stories say about us; our commoditization of the human experience, and what experience truly makes one human. Dive a little deeper and you find nuanced commentary on gender, sex and race, and how they all shape the roles we're given. Suddenly, after rejecting her role as a prostitute and unshackling her mind from the code that limits her intellect, Maeve's rebellion is all the more powerful. The questions "Westworld" asks viewers don't just matter inside its own universe, they matter deeply to us. 'Now entering...' "Westworld" might just keel over after season one, like "True Detective" did, or it might turn into a massively successful super-series. But debating its future as a show, or how it compares to other shows, kind of kills the magic. So when the "Westworld" finale airs this Sunday on HBO, I won't be thinking about "Game of Thrones," I'll enjoy an hour and a half of TV that's like no other show I've watched before. |
Given last year's revelations about the National Security Agency's (NSA) massive surveillance and data analytics conducted on Americans, along with continuing stories about local police scanning thousands of license plates per day, it might sound absurd to say that government lags behind the private sector in the use of Big Data analytics. But those examples tend to be outliers among the nation's sprawling bureaucracies, especially at the state and local levels. In general, the private sector is well ahead of the public sector in the use of Big Data analytics, according to a recent report titled "Realizing the promise of Big Data," sponsored by the IBM Center for the Business of Government. While the report's author, Kevin Desouza, an associate dean for research at Arizona State University, cited multiple examples of it being used in government, he found that the overall promise of Big Data analytics is largely unrealized so far in the public sector. He called it, "a new frontier" for government at all levels. There are multiple reasons for that, Desouza concluded, after interviewing 22 federal, state and local chief information officers (CIO). One of the most significant is that those outside of IT don't yet understand the concept, or are fearful that the public will perceive Big Data as Big Brother. "Outside of IT no one gets the term," one CIO told Desouza. "The few (managers) that do have some views on it have been put off due to the privacy concerns because of the NSA's surveillance program." Those concerns are legitimate, but lack some context. Kelly Stirman, director of product marketing at MongoDB, said what many other experts say: "The private sector knows much more about you than government ever will. But people have been willing to trade their information for convenience." That is what Desouza found — that the private sector has been able, through things like terms-of-service agreements for mobile apps, "to collect immense amounts of information on individuals with limited pushback." With government, it is different. There were ferocious protests last year after revelations from former NSA contractor Edward Snowden about the extent of the agency's surveillance of U.S. citizens, including reports that on a single day the NSA had collected hundreds of thousands of email address books from vendors including Yahoo, Microsoft's Hotmail, Facebook, Google's Gmail service and others. Beyond that is the reality that the private sector tends to be more nimble than government and is better able to attract top talent. Government is more likely to be constrained by both political pressure and bureaucracy. Kimberley Williams, chief strategist, public sector, at Informatica, said none of this should be a surprise, since the roles and motives of the private and public sector are different. While government has been using Big Data for years in areas like intelligence, the census, taxes and Social Security, "what is new to government is the realization that Big Data can and should be used to drive, reform and refine public policy, as well as defend and protect," she said. A.J. Clark, president of Thermopylae said that investments in counter-terrorism after 9/11 meant that, "certain elements of the public sector led the Big Data movement. Statistics from agencies involved with Remote Sensing – satellite imaging, full motion video collection, aerial imaging such as Light Detection and Ranging (LiDAR) – show that there has been a watershed of big data growing in their environments," he said. But, "many of the advances in big data did not transcend the agencies they originated in and the public sector as a whole did not benefit," he said. Williams said another factor is that the private sector's use of Big Data is driven by the profit motive and competition, while, "government is not profit-driven and maintains a captive audience. So, the drivers of Big Data projects in government are inherently different and frankly not as urgent, except for intelligence and law enforcement." She estimates that most of the public sector is about five years behind the private, "with no imperative to catch up and the reality that Big Data projects may remain an unfunded mandate or underfunded project/program." Other experts agree, although there are mixed opinions on how far behind. Clark estimates it to be 18 months, while Chris Petersen, CTO and cofounder of LogRhythm, said he thinks it amounts to "years," but that the gap is less in the area of cyber security. CIOs admit that they are behind. They told Desouza that they simply don't have the technical capability or staff with enough expertise to conduct Big Data analytics. Not one had made use of unstructured data. "Isn't that a critical element of Big Data? If so, then we are not doing anything in the Big Data space, as we have not touched unstructured data. All of our data has some structure, and most of it is highly structured," one of them said. But it has exploded in the private sector. The Boston Globe reported more than two years ago that Massachusetts alone is home to more than 100 companies focused on Big Data. Pam Dixon, executive director of the World Privacy Forum (WPF), estimated last fall that there were about 4,000 data brokers in the U.S., all of them collecting and selling data on people's activities, both online and off — license plate scanning is not confined to law enforcement departments. And there are hundreds of stories of private firms using Big Data to gain market share, improve their bottom line, curb fraud and theft and become more efficient. Compass Group Canada, which operates more than 2,000 food service locations in that country, recently began using software from Boston-based Lavastorm Analytics to analyze data on money or merchandise either being misplaced or stolen by employees or customers. They found the analysis much more efficient than analyzing thousands of hours of video footage. Desouza also cited Merck's use of weather data in July 2012 to anticipate greater demand for its allergy pill, Claritin, in May 2013, and Google's early detection model of flu outbreaks, called Google Flu Trends that, in 2009, was able to track trends in the H1N1 flu epidemic "days faster" than the federal Centers for Disease Control. That doesn't mean there is no progress in the public sector. Boston's former police commissioner, Edward Davis, recently joined the board of Mark43, a tech startup founded by three Harvard graduates that makes software to analyze data on crime and gangs, and improves management of police records on suspects. The good news for the fledgling company – but not so good for the reputation of government services – is that the field is relatively wide open. The class project that led to the founding of Mark43 was to come up with a program that could use analytics to track gang relationships in Springfield, Mass. "We didn't know much about law enforcement," said CEO and cofounder Scott Crouch. But, "the first thing we noticed was that their law enforcement software was awful." Improving the technology and the productive analysis of data by government clearly could make government more efficient and offers the hope of curbing the classic bugaboos of "waste, fraud and abuse." "Analytics now holds great promise for increasing the efficiency of operations, mitigating risks, and increasing citizen engagement and public value," Desouza wrote in his report. But it will take some changes, experts say. "Human capital is clearly a major problem," Williams said. "Government has a serious lack of scientists, an aging workforce, ongoing budget and pension challenges and an inability to attract technology-savvy employees." Government is also hamstrung by long-term contracts with vendors supplying proprietary technology, Stirman said. "Because government agencies are so large, they get into contracts worth hundreds of millions, and they can't easily untangle themselves even if there are problems." The hope for change, he said, lies in the fact that, "most of the (Big Data) technologies are open-source, which means you don't have to get locked in with a vendor with proprietary technology. Anyone can learn it — you can become an expert without going through a big certification process. It's really important that government take advantage of it," he said. It will also take more cooperation, according to Clark. "Data sharing is critical for Big Data analytics, and I see that the private sector as a whole is able to share their data more easily with one another than the public sector has been able to over the last decade" he said. And it will take investment. Petersen said he thinks the "overall impediment to use of Big Data in the public sector is cost. Big Data projects are expensive, very similar to home-grown application development." But, done right, they could, "likely enable the delivery of higher quality services at a lower overall cost," he said. Clark said it is important for the public sector to make that investment to avoid a widening "technology gap. If the approximate 18-month gap grows to over 36 months, which is two technology cycles based on Moore's Law, it will be very difficult for the public sector to leverage the cost efficiencies of private commercial technology solutions," he said. But Gary King, director of the Institute for Quantitative Social Science at Harvard University, said things can change quickly in both the private and public sector. "Large parts of the commercial sector are also far behind what could be done," he said. "This is a dynamic field with fast progress." |
By Dr. Amy L. Beam: Ferhat Encu is a Kurdish political prisoner and human rights activist from Roboski, Turkey. First the government killed his brother, then they killed their mules, then they killed their horses, then they put Ferhat Encu in prison. But the Turkish government will never succeed in killing 20 million Kurds or their determination for full human rights. Five years ago, on December 28, 2011, Turkey flew two F-16s for 47 minutes and one-by-one killed 34 innocent Kurds with missile strikes. Most of them were teenagers doing cross-border trading. Nineteen men and boys from the Encu families were killed in the Roboski massacre, including Ferhat Encu’s 17-year-old brother, Serhat. They were returning over the mountain ridge on their mules with gasoline. Each boy earns about $50 for his family on each overnight trip. This trade was conducted in front of the eyes of the Turkish soldiers and commanders. No government officials ever showed up in Roboski to interview any of the bereaved families. The U.S. flew a drone and passed the coordinates to the Turkish Air Force. No apology has ever been offered to the 34 families who lost a loved one. The government said it was targeting a PKK leader, Bahoz Erdal, but U.S. drone video clearly shows there were no PKK among the civilians. Turkey called it an operational mistake. In 2012, Ferhat became the spokesperson for the victims’ families, pressing the government in court for answers. This led to Encu’s election to parliament from Şırnak on June 7, 2015. He took his seat in parliament as MP from the HDP party on November 1, 2015. On February 25, 2014, once again, there was military action at the Turkey-Iraq border near Roboski. The Turkish government built a “security road” and erected a wire fence to block the cross-border trading. This drew local protests which resulted in military bombing, shooting and tear gassing of civilians. Ferhat Encu was among 1000 local villagers who walked to the border to intervene as human shields between the Turkish army and HPG (People’s Defense Units) to prevent bloodshed. Both sides retreated. If the border had been permanently closed, these villagers would have lost their main source of economic survival. Yezidis owe a debt of gratitude to Ferhat Encu. After ISIS (Daesh) attacked the Yezidis in Shengal, Iraq, on August 3, 2014, Ferhat Encu organized the residents of Roboski to shelter and feed 20,000 Yazidis who fled from Iraq over the mountain border to Roboski, Turkey. He coordinated city buses from all the towns and cities in southeast Turkey and dispersed the Yezidis to a dozen refugee camps. This was achieved with volunteers and donations. The Turkish government, in spite of legal requirements, refused to give any humanitarian aid to these camps run by Kurds. On April 28, 2016, MP Encu told parliament “I remember the civilians recently massacred by shelling in Silopi. I remember the 34 people, including children, who were brutally bombed by Turkish war planes in Roboski four years ago.” A brawl broke out as AKP members of parliaments shouted insults at Encu for daring to speak the truth. On November 4, 2016, MP Ferhat Encu was arrested and now remains in prison with hundreds, or possibly thousands, of other political prisoners in Turkey. Since November, the Turkish government has imprisoned 12 members of parliament from the HDP party after parliament removed political immunity for parliament members. Encu was accused of “alienating the public from military service, terrorist propaganda, incitement to animosity, entering military prohibited zones, attempted murder of a public official for their duty”. Ferhat Encu was sent to the Kandira F-type closed prison for women where he was kept alone. Ferhat Encu is a great humanitarian with courage to stand up for truth and justice. The Turkish government should release him immediately. NATO should examine its relationship with Turkey as Turkey defiles the rule of law with wholesale arrests of politicians, Kurdish elected leaders, journalists, academics, and generals. Dr. Amy L. Beam is Executive Director of “Amy, Azadi and Jiyan” (AAJ) humanitarian organization registered in Kurdistan. She is a researcher, writer, and human rights activist for Yezidis and Kurds in the Middle East. Follow her on her public Facebook at https://www.facebook.com/AmyLBeam . Contact: amybeam@yahoo.com |
An undocumented immigrant makes the dangerous trek across the desert. She makes it into the U.S., but is hopelessly lost. She calls for help. But it never arrives. Years later, her skeletal remains are found by a team of forensic scientists. And that's how it starts: it's a movie called "Juana Doe," the work of local filmmaker Ramon Villa. “In the last ten years, the way migration trails have been showing themselves is through the collection of bones,” said Villa. The premise of the movie centers around the actual work being done by forensic anthropologists along the U.S.-Mexico border. “Along the border fence, many counties rely on the medical examiner to declare an immigrants death," Villa said. "Unfortunately, some counties are underfunded and can only bury immigrants in trash bags inside mass graves.” He goes on to say, “I’m fascinated by forensic anthropology, I’m fascinated by immigration, I’m fascinated by how people treat the dead.” The script focuses on a forensic anthropologist named Malena, who is part of a team working to identify the migrant remains and return them to their grieving families. “What happens to those beings once they’re gone and who comes to help if there’s an angel for example," Villa said. At one point, Malena awakens a supernatural ability to communicate with the dead. And it's her job to help cross the lost souls into the next plane of existence. “These spirits that keep popping up, in and out of her life, because they don’t have closure," Villa said. "Because their bones aren’t buried correctly or because their bones haven’t had any kind of sacrament.” Villa said he wants to steer clear of the political debate over immigration policy. He says the film is about giving a voice to the dead. “That’s the thing about my movie. I don’t want to make it a one-sided perspective," he said. "I want to know what these individuals in these underfunded communities are having to deal with. Especially when it comes to someone’s death.” Villa, who also teaches film production at UTEP, has been making independent cinema for more than 20 years. He has shot a "visual storyboard" as part of a campaign to raise money for the project. Villa is hoping to raise $12,000 to shoot the movie on 16mm film. “It’s a complex story and I wish I had 12 hours of a Netflix series to tell it, which I do have written," Villa said. "But I can only afford what I’m trying to campaign for right now.” To take part in the fundraising campaign, click here. |
In April 2015 I’d never driven a motorcycle, had little experience camping, and was told by experts near and far my plan was sure to fail. In May 2015 I bought an old motorcycle and even older sidecar, got my motorcycle license, learned to weld, built a subframe and attached the sidecar to the motorcycle. In June 2015 I loaded my best friend, Baylor the Dog, into the sidecar and hit the road for Alaska. 400 days , and more than 40,000 miles later, we made it from Alaska to Florida and roundabouts in-between, spent more than 340 nights under the stars and learned that success isn’t about a flawless run, rather defined by the act of trying. Most of all I want you to know your wild goals are indeed achievable. Just because you don’t know how, doesn’t mean you can’t learn. Just because it seems impossible now doesn’t mean it is. No matter your age, your dreams can become a reality. It won’t always be easy and oftentimes it won’t even be fun, but it will be a hundred percent worth it. Trust me. |
Isoamyl acetate, also known as isopentyl acetate, is an organic compound that is the ester formed from isoamyl alcohol and acetic acid. It is a colorless liquid that is only slightly soluble in water, but very soluble in most organic solvents. Isoamyl acetate has a strong odor which is also described as similar to both banana and pear.[3] Pure isoamyl acetate, or mixtures of isoamyl acetate, amyl acetate, and other flavors may be referred to as Banana oil.[4] Production [ edit ] Isoamyl acetate is prepared by the acid catalyzed reaction (Fischer esterification) between isoamyl alcohol and glacial acetic acid as shown in the reaction equation below. Typically, sulfuric acid is used as the catalyst. Alternatively, p-toluenesulfonic acid or an acidic ion exchange resin can be used as the catalyst. Applications [ edit ] Isoamyl acetate is used to confer banana flavor in foods. Banana oil commonly refers to a solution of isoamyl acetate in ethanol that is used as an artificial flavor. It is also used as a solvent for some varnishes and nitrocellulose lacquers. As a solvent and carrier for materials such as nitrocellulose, it was extensively used in the aircraft industry for stiffening and wind-proofing fabric flying surfaces, where it and its derivatives were generally known as 'aircraft dope'. Now that most aircraft are all-metal, such use is now mostly limited to historically accurate reproductions and scale models. Because of its intense, pleasant odor and its low toxicity, isoamyl acetate is used to test the effectiveness of respirators or gas masks. It is also used in thermometers.[citation needed] Occurrence in nature [ edit ] Isoamyl acetate occurs naturally in the banana plant[5] and it is also produced synthetically.[6] Isoamyl acetate is released by a honey bee's sting apparatus where it serves as a pheromone beacon to attract other bees and provoke them to sting.[7] |
‘How do you tell your friends Armageddon is coming?’ – one man’s story of leaving his religion behind Jordan Carter and Tracey Bell. Archant A Weston-super-Mare man who was forced to choose between living life as a lie as a Jehovah’s Witness or never speaking to his friends and family again has spoken out about his experience. Share Email this article to a friend To send a link to this page you must be logged in. Jordan Canter, aged 34, was born and raised as a Jehovah’s Witness. Jordan said: “It meant no to everything – no Christmas, no birthdays, no blood transfusions, no sex before marriage, no gays, no nothing. “Growing up, you are expected to be perfect, and I was nowhere near.” Jordan said life became difficult when he went to secondary school as he could not go to birthday parties or spend time with school friends who did not share his religion. He said: “I felt like I was really living two lives and not fitting into either of them. “My GCSEs were even worse – how do you tell people you’re not going to college or university because you’re going to go door-knocking because Armageddon is coming.” When he was 20 years old Jordan’s mum left his dad, turning her back on the religion which meant Jordan was no longer allowed to have a relationship with her. He said: “She worked in the shop next to where I worked, so I would walk past five or six times a day and see her – but I didn’t speak to her.” At the age of 27 Jordan began questioning the world around him. He said: “I started thinking about all those things I was not allowed to do and it was like a house of cards falling down – my whole life had been a complete lie. “At that point I had a decision to make. I had to leave my whole life behind. “I left, knowing I was going to become a stranger to all my friends and my family. I moved in with my mum, which was lovely, because I got to get that relationship back.” Seven years later Jordan is planning a wedding with his fiancée Tracey Bell and is sharing his story with others, most recently at a story-telling event at Loves Café. Jordan told the Mercury he hosted the evening – called Beyond Words – in the hope of creating a safe space for people to open up and share their life stories, hopes and ambitions. He added: “Whatever type of story you hear or have there will be people who may have gone or going through the same thing who will not have told anyone. “If I can leave and build a new life, then anyone else in a similar situation can as well.” For more information on Jordan’s storytelling project and future Beyond Words events visit www.facebook.com/beyondwordsstorytelling |
Shibu B S By Express News Service KOCHI: E Sreedharan has given wings to Malayalees’ dreams for better infrastructure, playing a pivotal role in making Kochi Metro a reality. But this could only be a beginning. While touching base with the Express, the ‘Metro Man’ said he wanted to involve in more projects in Kerala. Read: Stung by slight to Metro Man Sreedharan, Malayalees troll State BJP president Kummanam Sreedharan said Keralites would wholeheartedly support ventures which are essential for the state provided they are handled professionally and transparently. Sreedharan, however, did not hide his disappointment on the delay in land acquisition which had affected the progress of the Metro Rail works between Maharaja’s College to Tripunithura-Petta. Hinting that DMRC may not bid for Metro Rail’s expansion plans to Kakkanad, he said KMRL has the experience and capability to take it up. Excerpts: A lot of people, especially Malayalees, were skeptical when you got involved in the Metro Rail project. After the experience, what are the key takeaways from implementing a big project in Kerala? Will you undertake another project in the state? I am now convinced that people in Kerala will wholeheartedly support the projects which are essential for the state and handled in a very professional way with transparency. I would certainly love to take up more projects in Kerala. Can we expect DMRC’s collaboration with KMRL in future expansion plans? We never intended to get involved in the Kakkanad extension. KMRL has now acquired experience and the capability to take up the Kakkanad extension. This is the first time you have undertaken a metro project in your home state. How was the experience? During my stint as Chief Engineer (Construction) with the Southern Railway from 1981 to 1986, I had undertaken the doubling projects between Podanur and Shoranur and from Shoranur to Ernakulam. The Ernakulam-Alleppey railway line work was implemented back then. But, this is the first Metro project I have taken up in Kerala. I am happy the Aluva-Palarivattom stretch is the fastest and longest first section to be ever completed in the country. This is the first Metro in India to be launched with the Communication Based Train Control (CBTC) System. For DMRC, this is the first time the third rail 750v DC traction has been successfully implemented on a stretch. The Muttom yard was successfully constructed in a waterlogged fallow land without causing any trouble to the local residents. We developed it into a modern car depot, right in the heart of the city. However, I am disappointed over the fact that despite giving high hopes that the first leg of the Metro work would be completed in three years, it unfortunately took us four years. I am also unhappy that only half of the Metro has been completed so far. The other half - from Maharaja’s College to Pettah - was hampered due to want of land. The stretch will not be ready for another two-and-a-half years. What were the major challenges that you overcame during the construction phase? Delay in land acquisition, frequent disruption of the work due to strikes and hartals and shortage of construction materials owing to quarry strike were some of the major challenges. The working area was severely restricted due to narrow roads and over 90 per cent of the work was carried out during night - between 10 pm and 4 am. This affected the progress of the work to a large extent. How satisfied are you with the progress of the civil work in tandem with your vision? The performance of civil contractors was not up to our expectations. Though we had selected some of the best contractors in the country for this project, they failed miserably to keep up with the time schedule, mainly because they failed to anticipate the peculiar problems associated with Kerala. I am happy we could complete the project up to Palarivattom well within the sanctioned cost. Can we term Kochi Metro as the most technologically advanced rail project in India? With the latest cutting-edge technologies, particularly with regard to signalling, Kochi Metro is certainly as good as any metro rail in advanced countries. What are your views on high-speed rail corridor and the light metro rail projects mooted for Thiruvananthapuram? A high-speed rail corridor between Thiruvananthapuram and Kannur is inevitable in a state like Kerala. Roads are congested and widening of roads is almost impossible due to large built-up structures on either sides. The monorail project for Thiruvananthapuram was dropped and in its place, a Light Metro project has been proposed. Thiruvananthapuram, the capital city, needs a rail-based rapid transit system at the earliest. |
Queensland fancies itself as a coal state, and the Labor government’s support of the huge mega coal projects in the Galilee Basin has attracted widespread criticism from environmental groups. But it has done a fantastic service to Australia’s clean energy debate with the release of the draft report into its planned 50 per cent renewable energy target. The report – prepared by an independent panel drawn mostly from the banking and energy industries – smashes so many renewable energy myths it is difficult to know where to start. But broadly speaking, it attacks the underlining assumption that renewables are expensive, unreliable, require huge subsidies and threaten the stability of the electricity system. The Queensland report says this is simply not true: it says the state can reach what the Coalition (and many in the mainstream media) dismiss as an expensive and reckless target with little subsidy, and no impact on reliability. At the same time, renewables can reduce costs to consumers, create jobs, add new industries and add to economic growth. Here are some of the major myths the report tackles. Myth No 1: The costs of large scale targets. The federal government has been running a campaign for months about the cost of the renewable energy targets in Queensland and Victoria. Last week, it put pressure on state governments to abandon their targets in the wake of the South Australia blackout, and claimed (with no evidence) that the cost of those targets would be $41 billion and that this would be carried by consumers. Of that $41 billion, $27 billion was attributed to Queensland. But the Queensland panel found the cost of extra large-scale renewables investment would be around $6 billion, less than one quarter of that suggested by the federal government. Even if you add in the cost of rooftop solar on households and businesses, this would take the figure to no more than $10 billion. But those adding solar are reducing their bills and getting a quick payback on their investment, so it hardly counts as a burden on consumers. It might be worth noting that one of the panellists is Paul Hyslop of ACIL Allen, whose firm was hired by utilities to fight against renewable energy targets and was the first choice of the Warburton Review into the RET. Myth No 2: The 50% RET will require huge subsidies Earlier this year, the Queensland Productivity Commission issued a report claiming that the target would require total subsidies of more than $10 billion. The panel’s finding? Less than $1 billion, and possibly as low as $500 million. The reason for this? The cost of technology is falling quickly, and the state will likely offer little more than a “contract for difference” – making up the difference between the wholesale price of electricity, and a long-term contract for the developer of the wind or solar farm, if it is higher. Auctions will be used to find the lowest contract, a mechanism used with great success in the ACT and overseas, where it has driven the cost of wind energy and solar to record lows. (One irony about this subsidy is that ACIL Allen was the author of much of the QPC modelling, and for the Warburton RET review before that, and for some serious RET opponents before that). Myth No 3: The 50% target will push up costs to consumers This is the common scare campaign, but it was rejected outright by the panel. It estimates that prices for consumers will actually fall just over 1.2 per cent, although it is happy to describe this as “cost neutral”. The reason for this outcome is that the cost of any subsidy (quite minimal anyway) will be more than offset by an expected fall in wholesale prices. This should be no surprise, because every other investigation of renewable energy targets, including the modelling by ACIL Allen for the Warburton Review, found pretty much the same thing. But as we noted yesterday, mainstream media doesn’t want to know. “I just don’t buy it,” declared the Nine Network’s correspondent at the media briefing. The panel also looked at the situation in South Australia, which is top of mind at the moment considering the recent price spikes and the blackout, all of which have been blamed, without merit, on the prevalence of wind energy. South Australia Myth No 1: Renewables have increased prices in the state As the panel notes: The average wholesale price in South Australia has consistently been higher than in other regions, independent of the growth in renewable generation over time. That’s because of its high reliance on gas, which is an expensive source of generation. Historically, the state has relied on gas for 40-50 per cent of its supply, and while that fell when wind and solar were built it is now back up to 45 per cent following the closure of the more polluting coal plant. The problem now is that gas prices are even more expensive, the panel notes, and the South Australia market is dominated by a limited number of participants, who have been able to exploit the market and have been behind many of the biggest price spikes, as we have reported here, here and here. South Australia Myth No 2: High renewables threaten system reliability This has been the biggest scare campaign against renewables, along with energy “security” – see below. The panel says: “AEMO has not identified any impact on system reliability as a result of the high penetration of renewable generation to date.” It does say that AEMO has identified issues in certain circumstances and its worst case scenario, such as the closure of coal generators in Victoria, and times of high demand, low solar and wind generation and network issues. But as we pointed out at the time, this still leaves the system within the design reliability parameters, and the state most affected by these changes will be coal-dependent NSW, not South Australia. And, as the panel notes, these issues can be address by developments in storage and demand-side management opportunities. South Australia Myth No 3: High renewable penetrations will affect system security The panel notes that on the issue of energy security, AEMO has “not identified any system security challenges that cannot be managed through existing processes and procedures.” Which is not to say that there are no challenges, simply that these can be dealt with. It quotes ERM Power, one of the bigger generation companies, as saying: “The NEM is currently providing adequate investment signals that will allow markets to continue to operate efficiently under higher propositions of non-synchronous renewable energy generation. As such, no change is needed in the short term.” Not everyone would agree with that last sentence. Some suggest that the market for FCAS, or frequency and ancillary services, should be broadened beyond the handful of providers – to providers of battery storage, or even the renewable energy generators themselves – to ensure that the market is not controlled , and exploited, by a handful of players. |
A woman who had come to meet Congress vice president Rahul Gandhi during his Assam tour Wednesday, but stayed outside the venue, was burnt to death by her husband, police said Saturday. Police said they were investigating the reason behind the incident, which took place in Jorhat district. Superintendent of Police Amanjeet Kaur said a case of unnatural death had been registered. She said the victim, Bonti Chutia, died of burn injuries, while her husband, Someswar Chutia, had also sustained 35 percent burn injuries. Kaur clarified that the victim was not the who was shown on television kissing Congress vice president Rahul Gandhi. "We have talked to people and came to know that although she (the victim) came to the venue Wednesday to interact with the Congress leader, she stayed outside the programme for some reasons," Kaur said. "We also came to know from the neighbours that both the husband and wife had a strained relationship for a long time and that could be one of the reasons for the incident," she said. *An earlier version of the story had reported that the victim was one of those who had kissed Rahul Gandhi at a Congress event. The mix-up was clarified by others who attended the event who said the victim was at the event but was not among those who kissed Rahul. We regret the error. |
ES FOOD newsletter Enter your email address Please enter an email address Email address is invalid Fill out this field Email address is invalid You already have an account. Please log in or register with your social account A sushi bar off Regent Street has become the fifth restaurant in the UK to win the top accolade of three Michelin stars — joining the ranks of Heston Blumenthal, Gordon Ramsay, Alain Ducasse and the Roux family. The result means that The Araki, where a meal costs around £300 a person, has now equalled the achievement of Japanese chef Mitsuhiro Araki’s original restaurant in Tokyo, which closed ahead of his relocation to London back in 2014. It is the first Japanese restaurant to receive the honour in the UK and sits alongside Gordon Ramsay’s Royal Hospital Road restaurant in Chelsea and Alain Ducasse at The Dorchester as the capital’s only three star restaurants. The guide’s other big winner was Claude Bosi, who took the helm at South Kensington’s iconic Bibendum restaurant earlier this year. He won two Michelin stars for the site, entering it into an exclusive club of just 9 restaurants in the capital. Six more London restaurants gained one star in the guide. This included two Indian restaurants, Mayfair’s Jamavar and Chelsea’s recently revamped Vineet Bhatia, along with modern Chinese restaurant A Wong in Victoria, St James’s Nordic restaurant Aquavit, City restaurant Le Dame de Pic from French chef Sophie Pic, and Kensington’s Elystan Street from former The Square chef Phil Howard. The 55 must-try dishes in London 55 show all The 55 must-try dishes in London 1/55 1. Bone marrow on toast with parsley salad at St John Neither restaurants or dishes get more iconic than this. Fergus Henderson’s best-known creation has been much emulated over the years, but never bettered. 2/55 2. Polenta at The Palomar There’s a high chance that there’s more butter in this than polenta, along with plenty of mushrooms, truffle and parmesan. This is the highlight dish on a menu of highlights. 3/55 3. Croquetas at Barrafina When the original Barrafina launched in Soho in 2007 — modelled on Barcelona tapas bar Cal Pep — it helped introduce the city to both Spanish food and counter dining. Croquetas are among the most popular items on the menu at all three Barrafina restaurants, with different signature serves at each. They might just be the best in town. 4/55 4. Anchovies and lardo at Sabor Sabor, the Spanish powerhouse from former Barrafina chef Nieves Barragán Mohacho, has lots to offer across its tapas bar, restaurant and upstairs asador. This simple plate of salty, oil-rich anchovies laid on bright white sheets of shaved lardo is as simple as it comes, but all the better for it. Best eaten counterside with a sherry in hand and southern Spain in mind. 5/55 5. Chorizo roll at Brindisa Prepare to wait in line for this Borough Market classic: a ciabatta roll stuffed to bursting with smoky chorizo fresh from the grill, roasted red peppers and rocket. It’s a good to start the day as it is to soak up a few pints later on. 6/55 6. Al pastor tacos at El Pastor These soft corn tortillas filled with cured pork that’s been cooked doner kebab-style are the salty, saliva-inducing highlight at this Borough Market taco joint. 7/55 7. Meat Fruit at Dinner This canny creation from Heston Blumenthal takes inspiration from c1500. It combines mandarin, chicken liver and foie gras in a pâté, and resembles a mandarin. 8/55 8. San Daniele at Santa Maria For pizza traditionalists, Santa Maria do it like in old Napoli. The San Daniele doesn’t have any tomato sauce, but is topped instead with cherry tomatoes, rocket, parmesan shavings and generous amounts of excellent quality San Daniele Parma ham. See more of the best pizzas in London. 9/55 9. Brick Lane bagel at Beigel Bake People have been known to fall out arguing which of Brick Lane’s two neighbouring all-night bagel shops is best, but we have no definitive answer. Both offer superbly moist salt beef and sweet, chewy bagel perfection. Have one of each. Getty Images 10/55 10. Lamb chops at Lahore Kebab House Leave your airs and graces at the door at Lahore, where it’s all about you and the amazing things they do with that grill. Lamb chops is the star dish at the worthy cult favourite. 11/55 11. Spiced lamb, savoy cabbage and sumac yoghurt pizza at Homeslice Once you get over the fact that the pizzas are a whopping 20 inches, Homeslice’s exciting toppings get their own gawping rights. This middle eastern creation is fresh, crunchy and served on their wonderful garlic base. Purists need not apply. 12/55 12. Ari Gold at Patty & Bun There’s plenty of cheeseburgers in London, but there’s also the Ari Gold: a 35 day aged Aberdeen Angus patty dripping with gooey American cheese and smokey P&B mayo, topped with salad and home-pickled red onion rings. 13/55 13. Venison Scotch Egg at The Harwood Arms The British beauty that is the scotch egg has to be the ultimate pub snack. And this well seasoned, gamey, reliably runny-yolked version served at London’s only Michelin-starred gastropub is the leader of its kind. 14/55 14. Steak at Hawksmoor When it comes to steak, Hawksmoor is the daddy. It doesn’t matter what cut you go for or which accompaniments you choose, it’s almost impossible to go wrong. Oh, but do get some bone marrow. 15/55 15. Bacon naan at Dishoom A bacon sarnie, Indian style. A London breakfast classic, especially well-received when a hangover lurks. 16/55 16. Beef brisket at Smokestak The fat strips of tender, slow-cooked beef are a highlight among many high points at the smoke-filled Shoreditch base of David Carter’s Smokestak. They come either straight-up, with a punchy homemade ketchup, or crammed into a bun. 17/55 17. Oysters at Wright Brothers Seafood supremos Wright Brothers are all about the oysters. Think this snack is only for the fanciest of folks? Head there between 3pm and 6pm, Monday to Friday to pick them up for just £1 a go. 18/55 18. Mushroom, pearl barley and truffle risotto at Pollen Street Social Yes, vegan food can be high end. Jason Atherton proves this with gusto at his flagship Mayfair restaurant, where this autumnal dish is the star of his Michelin-starred all-vegan tasting menu. 19/55 19. Jackfruit Taco at Club Mexicana Vegan food can, however, get down and dirty with the best of them. This punchy, spicy jackfruit taco from Club Mexicana gives pulled pork a serious run for its money. 20/55 20. Cauliflower shawarma at Berber & Q Vegetable dishes don’t come much more thrilling than this smoky, richly-spiced whole cauliflower charred on the grill and adorned with tahini, pomegranate seeds and pine nuts. A match for any meat dish. 21/55 21. Lamb offal flatbread at Black Axe Mangal Spicy, rich and intense, the lamb offal flatbread created by Lee Tiernan at haute kebab spot Black Axe Mangal in Islington is as fabulously full-on as the heavy metal-playing restaurant itself. 22/55 22. Pies at Holborn Dining Room You can take your pick from Calum Franklin’s pies at Holborn Dining Room, because they are all outstanding. The chef is pastry wizard, who works his magic across a range that includes an anything but humble pork pie, and seasonal specials such as curried mutton pie with mango chutney. 23/55 23. Fried courgette flowers at Salt Yard These picture-perfect deep-fried courgette flowers stuffed with goat’s cheese and drizzled in honey are full of Mediterranean splendour. 24/55 24. Sausage roll at The Blue Posts When pub food comes from the team behind The Palomar and The Barbary, then you know you’re going to order more than a bag of nuts. This roll is robustly meaty, with fabulously flakey pastry – served with a dollop of Colman’s, naturally. 25/55 25. Lamb shish kebab at Tarshish Tarshish recently won a particularly well-coveted gong. The reigning champion of the British Kebab Awards fine dining accolade serves up marinated lamb shish, available with a side of mac and cheese. 26/55 26. Sloppy Joe at Jikoni Delicious fatty juices add unctuous backbone to a richly spiced mutton keema which can barely be contained within a toasted brioche bun in this clever take on British-meets-Indian-meets-wherever from Ravinder Bhogal. 27/55 27. Beef fat tacos at Temper There’s a translucent glisten to these indulgent tacos at Neil Rankin’s Temper, where a zero-waste policy means that its tortillas are made with leftover beef fat from the grill - a move which isn’t just good for the environment, but for flavour too. 28/55 28. Pressed duck at Otto’s The pressed duck at this Clerkenwell institution isn’t for the faint-hearted. The multi-course canard fest involves the duck first being brought to the table for inspection complete with its head, while the bones are later crushed to produce an epic-tasting jus. Breast meat, chopped liver and grilled legs all feature in what is a delicious if deathly dish. 29/55 29. The English at The Wolseley This grand Piccadilly Brasserie from Chris Corbin and Jeremy King not only does the best breakfast in town, it pretty much invented the notion of breakfasting out. The English features a choice of fried, poached or scrambled eggs with bacon, sausage, baked beans, tomato, black pudding and mushroom. It’s the quality of ingredients - plus the atmosphere - which makes it really special. 30/55 30. Shakshuka at Ottolenghi and Nopi A bright, North African breakfast staple mastered and popularised by Yotam Ottolenghi. 31/55 31. Cacio e pepe at Padella Few dishes are as splendidly simple as this one from the London Bridge pasta gurus. It is simply spaghetti with parmesan and black pepper. But oh boy, is it good. Find more of the best Italian restaurants in London. 32/55 32. Beef dripping candle at Restaurant Story As it melts, the dripping is collected in the candle holder’s base ready to dip your bread in. It’s been on the menu since the restaurant opened in 2013 and is still one of London’s cleverest dishes. 33/55 33. Duck and waffle at Duck & Waffle A warm, chewy waffle topped with crisp-skinned confit duck and a runny egg, drizzled in maple syrup. Convinced yet? Naturally there are some pretty impressive views, too... 34/55 34. Shepherd’s Pie at The Ivy This Shepherd’s Pie has been a favourite at The Ivy since virtually the beginning, and thanks to the continued roll-out of Ivy brasseries just about everywhere across town, it’s now more accessible than ever. 35/55 35. Whole fried sea bass (nam dtok pla thort) at Som Saa This fiery, aromatic dish became a favourite at Som Saa’s early residencies and pop-ups, and is now a highlight of the menu at its Spitalfields restaurant. 36/55 36. The classic bao at Bao For steamed buns, you can’t beat Bao. Their classic sees a pillowy-soft bun filled with slow-braised pork belly, coarse peanut powder and shredded coriander. Worth queuing for. 37/55 37. Zucchini fritte at Sartoria On the addiction scale, these crispy strands of fried courgette are class A. They come overflowing in a large bowl at Sartoria as well as Francesco Mazzei’s other two restaurants Radici in Islington and Fiume in Battersea. When at any, they should be ordered on the side of absolutely anything. 38/55 38. Buttermilk fried chicken at The Clove Club This fried chicken dusted with pine salt is a well-deserved classic, and not just because of its interesting, pine-flanked presentation. 39/55 39. The Dead Hippie burger at MeatLiquor This well-known burger is the signature serve across Yianni Papoutsis’ burger empire. It’s dirty and drippy, featuring two beef patties fried in mustard and slathered in melted American-style cheese adorned with pickles and minced raw onions. The creamy, mustardy secret-recipe Dead Hippie Sauce seals the deal. 40/55 40. Egg hopper at Hoppers This Sri Lankan sensation which made its name in Soho and has since expanded to Marylebone isn’t just named after the hopper, it does them very well indeed. Pair an egg hopper with the restaurant’s intricately spiced curries. 41/55 41. Hiramasa Tiradito at Coya London has gone loco for ceviche in recent years, but what about its sashimi-like cousin. Coya serves up silky slithers of kingfish come swimming in dashi, chives and an elegant dollop of truffle. 42/55 42. Bhel puri at Kricket Now settled in Soho after outgrowing the Brixton shipping container they started out in, Kricket offers more dishes than ever to please spice fans. This light and bright exemplary version of bhel puri is still top of the pile. 43/55 43. All In at Blacklock Chops, glorious chops. That’s what Blacklock does and it does them very well indeed. Don’t choose between them, opt for the All In option and enjoy a mixed grill of varying beef, lamb and pork chops. 44/55 44. Miso aubergine at Chicama This is as close to a pudding that a vegetable gets. Aubergines lathered in miso sauce and topped with sweet, crunchy pecans. Sweet and savoury, you’ll want to order it again for dessert. 45/55 45. Ham Egg and Chips at Max’s Sandwich Shop A legend of the sandwich scene, Crouch Hill’s lunchtime lot are in luck with Max’s Ham Egg and Chips. Slow cooked ham hock is topped with oozing fried egg, matchstick fries, piccalilli and malt vinegar mayonnaise. Our own Fay Maschler can’t resist this place. Matt Writtle 46/55 46. Red Lantern soft shell crab at Hutong For somewhere so high up, Hutong is pretty warm. Looking down from the 33rd floor of the Shard, this dish of fried soft shell crab is left warm in a bowlful of dried Sichuan chillies, soaking up their smokey spice. 47/55 47. Cronut at Dominique Ansel Bakery When New York master baker Dominique Ansel opened his first European site in Victoria, this hybrid Franken Pastry that merges a croissant and a doughnut led to queues of several hours. Bite into its fluffy, buttery, flaky goodness and you’ll instantly understand the appeal. 48/55 48. Sugar-cured prawn omelette at The Modern Pantry Anna Hansen’s Asian-influenced signature dish, served at The Modern Pantry restaurant in Clerkenwell. 49/55 49. Venison puffs at Yauatcha Flaky buttery pastry encasing tender venison, a highlight of the dim sum at Alan Yau’s Soho restaurant. 50/55 50. Deep-fried olives at Mele e Pere These plump green olives stuffed with chilli and deep fried might just be London’s most noshable nibble. They are juicy, spicy, slightly salty and endlessly addictive. Wash them down with some of Mele e Pere’s homemade vermouth. 51/55 51. Galician beef at Lurra The beef at this Marylebone Basque restaurant is something special. It comes from cows which live until they are at least eight, often 10 and sometimes 14. These cows are fatter, which leads to more marbling in the meat and a lot more flavour. 52/55 52. Chicken Kiev at The Game Bird Playful takes on British classics are a signature of this restaurant set in Mayfair’s The Stafford hotel. Top of the pile is this retro Kiev of tender chicken that oozes with ultra-garlicky, truffle-laced butter. The accompanying mash is dreamily creamy, too. 53/55 53. Jamon at Bar Tozino More a ham cave than a bar, Maltby Street’s Bar Tozino is so full of hanging hams that you’ll likely smell the ageing meat even before walking through the door. Settle in and gorge your way through slice after slice of the varying options, washing it all down with sherry ideally. 54/55 54. Kid goat methi keema at Gymkhana A deep, smoky mince curry served with bread rolls — an example of less is more at this Mayfair Michelin-starred Indian. 55/55 55. Mince and potatoes at Dean Street Townhouse Iconic in its defiant simplicity, this signature dish is ultimate comfort food. Comfort food made with A-listers in mind, naturally. 1/55 1. Bone marrow on toast with parsley salad at St John Neither restaurants or dishes get more iconic than this. Fergus Henderson’s best-known creation has been much emulated over the years, but never bettered. 2/55 2. Polenta at The Palomar There’s a high chance that there’s more butter in this than polenta, along with plenty of mushrooms, truffle and parmesan. This is the highlight dish on a menu of highlights. 3/55 3. Croquetas at Barrafina When the original Barrafina launched in Soho in 2007 — modelled on Barcelona tapas bar Cal Pep — it helped introduce the city to both Spanish food and counter dining. Croquetas are among the most popular items on the menu at all three Barrafina restaurants, with different signature serves at each. They might just be the best in town. 4/55 4. Anchovies and lardo at Sabor Sabor, the Spanish powerhouse from former Barrafina chef Nieves Barragán Mohacho, has lots to offer across its tapas bar, restaurant and upstairs asador. This simple plate of salty, oil-rich anchovies laid on bright white sheets of shaved lardo is as simple as it comes, but all the better for it. Best eaten counterside with a sherry in hand and southern Spain in mind. 5/55 5. Chorizo roll at Brindisa Prepare to wait in line for this Borough Market classic: a ciabatta roll stuffed to bursting with smoky chorizo fresh from the grill, roasted red peppers and rocket. It’s a good to start the day as it is to soak up a few pints later on. 6/55 6. Al pastor tacos at El Pastor These soft corn tortillas filled with cured pork that’s been cooked doner kebab-style are the salty, saliva-inducing highlight at this Borough Market taco joint. 7/55 7. Meat Fruit at Dinner This canny creation from Heston Blumenthal takes inspiration from c1500. It combines mandarin, chicken liver and foie gras in a pâté, and resembles a mandarin. 8/55 8. San Daniele at Santa Maria For pizza traditionalists, Santa Maria do it like in old Napoli. The San Daniele doesn’t have any tomato sauce, but is topped instead with cherry tomatoes, rocket, parmesan shavings and generous amounts of excellent quality San Daniele Parma ham. See more of the best pizzas in London. 9/55 9. Brick Lane bagel at Beigel Bake People have been known to fall out arguing which of Brick Lane’s two neighbouring all-night bagel shops is best, but we have no definitive answer. Both offer superbly moist salt beef and sweet, chewy bagel perfection. Have one of each. Getty Images 10/55 10. Lamb chops at Lahore Kebab House Leave your airs and graces at the door at Lahore, where it’s all about you and the amazing things they do with that grill. Lamb chops is the star dish at the worthy cult favourite. 11/55 11. Spiced lamb, savoy cabbage and sumac yoghurt pizza at Homeslice Once you get over the fact that the pizzas are a whopping 20 inches, Homeslice’s exciting toppings get their own gawping rights. This middle eastern creation is fresh, crunchy and served on their wonderful garlic base. Purists need not apply. 12/55 12. Ari Gold at Patty & Bun There’s plenty of cheeseburgers in London, but there’s also the Ari Gold: a 35 day aged Aberdeen Angus patty dripping with gooey American cheese and smokey P&B mayo, topped with salad and home-pickled red onion rings. 13/55 13. Venison Scotch Egg at The Harwood Arms The British beauty that is the scotch egg has to be the ultimate pub snack. And this well seasoned, gamey, reliably runny-yolked version served at London’s only Michelin-starred gastropub is the leader of its kind. 14/55 14. Steak at Hawksmoor When it comes to steak, Hawksmoor is the daddy. It doesn’t matter what cut you go for or which accompaniments you choose, it’s almost impossible to go wrong. Oh, but do get some bone marrow. 15/55 15. Bacon naan at Dishoom A bacon sarnie, Indian style. A London breakfast classic, especially well-received when a hangover lurks. 16/55 16. Beef brisket at Smokestak The fat strips of tender, slow-cooked beef are a highlight among many high points at the smoke-filled Shoreditch base of David Carter’s Smokestak. They come either straight-up, with a punchy homemade ketchup, or crammed into a bun. 17/55 17. Oysters at Wright Brothers Seafood supremos Wright Brothers are all about the oysters. Think this snack is only for the fanciest of folks? Head there between 3pm and 6pm, Monday to Friday to pick them up for just £1 a go. 18/55 18. Mushroom, pearl barley and truffle risotto at Pollen Street Social Yes, vegan food can be high end. Jason Atherton proves this with gusto at his flagship Mayfair restaurant, where this autumnal dish is the star of his Michelin-starred all-vegan tasting menu. 19/55 19. Jackfruit Taco at Club Mexicana Vegan food can, however, get down and dirty with the best of them. This punchy, spicy jackfruit taco from Club Mexicana gives pulled pork a serious run for its money. 20/55 20. Cauliflower shawarma at Berber & Q Vegetable dishes don’t come much more thrilling than this smoky, richly-spiced whole cauliflower charred on the grill and adorned with tahini, pomegranate seeds and pine nuts. A match for any meat dish. 21/55 21. Lamb offal flatbread at Black Axe Mangal Spicy, rich and intense, the lamb offal flatbread created by Lee Tiernan at haute kebab spot Black Axe Mangal in Islington is as fabulously full-on as the heavy metal-playing restaurant itself. 22/55 22. Pies at Holborn Dining Room You can take your pick from Calum Franklin’s pies at Holborn Dining Room, because they are all outstanding. The chef is pastry wizard, who works his magic across a range that includes an anything but humble pork pie, and seasonal specials such as curried mutton pie with mango chutney. 23/55 23. Fried courgette flowers at Salt Yard These picture-perfect deep-fried courgette flowers stuffed with goat’s cheese and drizzled in honey are full of Mediterranean splendour. 24/55 24. Sausage roll at The Blue Posts When pub food comes from the team behind The Palomar and The Barbary, then you know you’re going to order more than a bag of nuts. This roll is robustly meaty, with fabulously flakey pastry – served with a dollop of Colman’s, naturally. 25/55 25. Lamb shish kebab at Tarshish Tarshish recently won a particularly well-coveted gong. The reigning champion of the British Kebab Awards fine dining accolade serves up marinated lamb shish, available with a side of mac and cheese. 26/55 26. Sloppy Joe at Jikoni Delicious fatty juices add unctuous backbone to a richly spiced mutton keema which can barely be contained within a toasted brioche bun in this clever take on British-meets-Indian-meets-wherever from Ravinder Bhogal. 27/55 27. Beef fat tacos at Temper There’s a translucent glisten to these indulgent tacos at Neil Rankin’s Temper, where a zero-waste policy means that its tortillas are made with leftover beef fat from the grill - a move which isn’t just good for the environment, but for flavour too. 28/55 28. Pressed duck at Otto’s The pressed duck at this Clerkenwell institution isn’t for the faint-hearted. The multi-course canard fest involves the duck first being brought to the table for inspection complete with its head, while the bones are later crushed to produce an epic-tasting jus. Breast meat, chopped liver and grilled legs all feature in what is a delicious if deathly dish. 29/55 29. The English at The Wolseley This grand Piccadilly Brasserie from Chris Corbin and Jeremy King not only does the best breakfast in town, it pretty much invented the notion of breakfasting out. The English features a choice of fried, poached or scrambled eggs with bacon, sausage, baked beans, tomato, black pudding and mushroom. It’s the quality of ingredients - plus the atmosphere - which makes it really special. 30/55 30. Shakshuka at Ottolenghi and Nopi A bright, North African breakfast staple mastered and popularised by Yotam Ottolenghi. 31/55 31. Cacio e pepe at Padella Few dishes are as splendidly simple as this one from the London Bridge pasta gurus. It is simply spaghetti with parmesan and black pepper. But oh boy, is it good. Find more of the best Italian restaurants in London. 32/55 32. Beef dripping candle at Restaurant Story As it melts, the dripping is collected in the candle holder’s base ready to dip your bread in. It’s been on the menu since the restaurant opened in 2013 and is still one of London’s cleverest dishes. 33/55 33. Duck and waffle at Duck & Waffle A warm, chewy waffle topped with crisp-skinned confit duck and a runny egg, drizzled in maple syrup. Convinced yet? Naturally there are some pretty impressive views, too... 34/55 34. Shepherd’s Pie at The Ivy This Shepherd’s Pie has been a favourite at The Ivy since virtually the beginning, and thanks to the continued roll-out of Ivy brasseries just about everywhere across town, it’s now more accessible than ever. 35/55 35. Whole fried sea bass (nam dtok pla thort) at Som Saa This fiery, aromatic dish became a favourite at Som Saa’s early residencies and pop-ups, and is now a highlight of the menu at its Spitalfields restaurant. 36/55 36. The classic bao at Bao For steamed buns, you can’t beat Bao. Their classic sees a pillowy-soft bun filled with slow-braised pork belly, coarse peanut powder and shredded coriander. Worth queuing for. 37/55 37. Zucchini fritte at Sartoria On the addiction scale, these crispy strands of fried courgette are class A. They come overflowing in a large bowl at Sartoria as well as Francesco Mazzei’s other two restaurants Radici in Islington and Fiume in Battersea. When at any, they should be ordered on the side of absolutely anything. 38/55 38. Buttermilk fried chicken at The Clove Club This fried chicken dusted with pine salt is a well-deserved classic, and not just because of its interesting, pine-flanked presentation. 39/55 39. The Dead Hippie burger at MeatLiquor This well-known burger is the signature serve across Yianni Papoutsis’ burger empire. It’s dirty and drippy, featuring two beef patties fried in mustard and slathered in melted American-style cheese adorned with pickles and minced raw onions. The creamy, mustardy secret-recipe Dead Hippie Sauce seals the deal. 40/55 40. Egg hopper at Hoppers This Sri Lankan sensation which made its name in Soho and has since expanded to Marylebone isn’t just named after the hopper, it does them very well indeed. Pair an egg hopper with the restaurant’s intricately spiced curries. 41/55 41. Hiramasa Tiradito at Coya London has gone loco for ceviche in recent years, but what about its sashimi-like cousin. Coya serves up silky slithers of kingfish come swimming in dashi, chives and an elegant dollop of truffle. 42/55 42. Bhel puri at Kricket Now settled in Soho after outgrowing the Brixton shipping container they started out in, Kricket offers more dishes than ever to please spice fans. This light and bright exemplary version of bhel puri is still top of the pile. 43/55 43. All In at Blacklock Chops, glorious chops. That’s what Blacklock does and it does them very well indeed. Don’t choose between them, opt for the All In option and enjoy a mixed grill of varying beef, lamb and pork chops. 44/55 44. Miso aubergine at Chicama This is as close to a pudding that a vegetable gets. Aubergines lathered in miso sauce and topped with sweet, crunchy pecans. Sweet and savoury, you’ll want to order it again for dessert. 45/55 45. Ham Egg and Chips at Max’s Sandwich Shop A legend of the sandwich scene, Crouch Hill’s lunchtime lot are in luck with Max’s Ham Egg and Chips. Slow cooked ham hock is topped with oozing fried egg, matchstick fries, piccalilli and malt vinegar mayonnaise. Our own Fay Maschler can’t resist this place. Matt Writtle 46/55 46. Red Lantern soft shell crab at Hutong For somewhere so high up, Hutong is pretty warm. Looking down from the 33rd floor of the Shard, this dish of fried soft shell crab is left warm in a bowlful of dried Sichuan chillies, soaking up their smokey spice. 47/55 47. Cronut at Dominique Ansel Bakery When New York master baker Dominique Ansel opened his first European site in Victoria, this hybrid Franken Pastry that merges a croissant and a doughnut led to queues of several hours. Bite into its fluffy, buttery, flaky goodness and you’ll instantly understand the appeal. 48/55 48. Sugar-cured prawn omelette at The Modern Pantry Anna Hansen’s Asian-influenced signature dish, served at The Modern Pantry restaurant in Clerkenwell. 49/55 49. Venison puffs at Yauatcha Flaky buttery pastry encasing tender venison, a highlight of the dim sum at Alan Yau’s Soho restaurant. 50/55 50. Deep-fried olives at Mele e Pere These plump green olives stuffed with chilli and deep fried might just be London’s most noshable nibble. They are juicy, spicy, slightly salty and endlessly addictive. Wash them down with some of Mele e Pere’s homemade vermouth. 51/55 51. Galician beef at Lurra The beef at this Marylebone Basque restaurant is something special. It comes from cows which live until they are at least eight, often 10 and sometimes 14. These cows are fatter, which leads to more marbling in the meat and a lot more flavour. 52/55 52. Chicken Kiev at The Game Bird Playful takes on British classics are a signature of this restaurant set in Mayfair’s The Stafford hotel. Top of the pile is this retro Kiev of tender chicken that oozes with ultra-garlicky, truffle-laced butter. The accompanying mash is dreamily creamy, too. 53/55 53. Jamon at Bar Tozino More a ham cave than a bar, Maltby Street’s Bar Tozino is so full of hanging hams that you’ll likely smell the ageing meat even before walking through the door. Settle in and gorge your way through slice after slice of the varying options, washing it all down with sherry ideally. 54/55 54. Kid goat methi keema at Gymkhana A deep, smoky mince curry served with bread rolls — an example of less is more at this Mayfair Michelin-starred Indian. 55/55 55. Mince and potatoes at Dean Street Townhouse Iconic in its defiant simplicity, this signature dish is ultimate comfort food. Comfort food made with A-listers in mind, naturally. The new additions bring the total number of Michelin star restaurants in the capital to an impressive 70. This comprises 58 restaurants with one Michelin star, 9 restaurants with two Michelin stars and three restaurants with an almighty three stars. See the full list of all London's Michelin starred restaurants. No London restaurants lost stars this year, with the only restaurant dropping off the list being Dabbous which has shut. Across the UK there are now 20 restaurants with two stars following Bibendum’s new entry. 17 restaurants gained one star bringing the total to 150. Among the new entries outside London were Tom Kerridge's pub The Coach in Marlow, Michael Caines' Lympstone Manor in Devon, and Wild Honey Inn in Lisdoonvarna in County Clare which became the first pub in Ireland to win a Michelin star. London restaurants with 2 and 3 Michelin stars 12 show all London restaurants with 2 and 3 Michelin stars 1/12 The Araki, Mayfair ** 3 Michelin stars 2/12 Restaurant Gordon Ramsay, Chelsea *** 3 Michelin stars 3/12 Alain Ducasse at The Dorchester, Mayfair *** 3 Michelin stars 4/12 Claude Bosi at Bibendum, Chelsea ** 2 Michelin stars Patricia Niven 5/12 Dinner by Heston Blumenthal, Knightsbridge, London ** 2 Michelin stars 6/12 Le Gavroche, Mayfair ** 2 Michelin stars 7/12 Greenhouse, Mayfair ** 2 Michelin stars 8/12 Hélène Darroze at The Connaught, Mayfair ** 2 Michelin stars 9/12 The Ledbury, Notting Hill ** 2 Michelin stars 10/12 Marcus, Belgravia ** 2 Michelin stars 11/12 Sketch (The Lecture Room & Library), Mayfair ** 2 Michelin stars 12/12 Umu, Mayfair ** 2 Michelin stars 1/12 The Araki, Mayfair ** 3 Michelin stars 2/12 Restaurant Gordon Ramsay, Chelsea *** 3 Michelin stars 3/12 Alain Ducasse at The Dorchester, Mayfair *** 3 Michelin stars 4/12 Claude Bosi at Bibendum, Chelsea ** 2 Michelin stars Patricia Niven 5/12 Dinner by Heston Blumenthal, Knightsbridge, London ** 2 Michelin stars 6/12 Le Gavroche, Mayfair ** 2 Michelin stars 7/12 Greenhouse, Mayfair ** 2 Michelin stars 8/12 Hélène Darroze at The Connaught, Mayfair ** 2 Michelin stars 9/12 The Ledbury, Notting Hill ** 2 Michelin stars 10/12 Marcus, Belgravia ** 2 Michelin stars 11/12 Sketch (The Lecture Room & Library), Mayfair ** 2 Michelin stars 12/12 Umu, Mayfair ** 2 Michelin stars Ahead of the guide's launch, Michelin also awarded 10 London restaurants Bib Gourmands to restaurants that offer both high-quality food and good value for money. |
House Demolitions Doubled in 2016 A report, issued by the national office for the defense of land and resistance of settlement, has revealed that the number of Palestinian homes razed by Israeli occupation forces jumped to two times since the beginning of 2016, in comparison to 2015.The office, which is affiliated with the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), said that Israel pursues the policy of home demolition as a collective punishment against the families of Palestinians who choose to resist Israeli occupation, under pretexts such as construction without a permit. According to the PNN, the report quoted the coordinator for Humanitarian and UN Development Activities for the occupied Palestinian territories, Robert Piper, as saying that Israel gives construction permits to 1.5% of the applications made by Palestinians. Also of interest: 03/23/16 Israeli Regional Construction Committee Approves “Kedem” Colonialist Project In Jerusalem |
Researchers in Chicago have isolated the genetic defect that causes leukemia to occur more often in children with Down syndrome than in other children. The findings are detailed in a study conducted by the Ben May Institute for Cancer Research at the University of Chicago and appear in the Aug. 12 issue of Nature Genetics. The scientific discovery centres on a gene called GATA1, mutations of which, researchers say, lead to the development of acute megakaryoblstic leukemia (AMLK), a form of bone-marrow cancer almost exclusive to Down children. Story continues below advertisement Scientists have long been aware that those children are 10 to 20 times as likely to develop leukemia as children without Down syndrome, but the reason had always been a mystery, a co-author of the study said. "AMLK is a rare malignancy," Dr. Michelle Le Beau said. "Our finding pinpoints a specific pathway that leads to this kind of cancer, offers a method for rapid and precise diagnosis, and suggests more focused ways to treat this disease." The hope, Dr. Le Beau said, is that additional research on GATA1 mutations will result in a more effective treatment for leukemia in Down children, that work too often hamstrung by the absence of compatible bone-marrow donors. Down children have three copies of chromosome 21 instead of the usual two, and that abnormality is what puts them at greater risk of developing mutations on those genes. Under normal functioning, GATA1 controls the characteristics of the genes responsible for the production of red blood cells and platelets. Previous studies indicated that the absence of GATA1 caused platelets to divide excessively, said another of the report's authors, Dr. John Crispino. A mutated GATA1 gene - the kind found in Down children with leukemia - causes the same proliferation of platelets and so opens the door to leukemia, he said. By a simple screening for GATA1 mutations, said Dr. Crispino, doctors will now be able to identify more quickly those Down babies likely to develop leukemia. That early diagnosis will in turn allow them to begin treatment sooner and to extend the lives of children. |
Disney’s Live-Action Aladdin Casts Jafar and Reveals New Character The remake will feature original songs by Alan Menken and Dear Evan Hansen songwriters Benj Pasek and Justin Paul. Dutch actor Marwan Kenzari, who is set to appear in the upcoming Murder on the Orient Express, will take on the role of villainous sorcerer Jafar in Disney’s live-action remake of its 1992 animated musical Aladdin, according to the Hollywood Reporter. It was also announced that former SNL cast member Nasim Pedrad will portray a new character that has been added especially for this all-new Aladdin. Disney’s new Aladdin, directed by Guy Ritchie (Snatch, Sherlock Holmes), will star Mena Massoud as the title street urchin-turned-prince, Naomi Scott as Princess Jasmine, and Will Smith as the Genie. The film will incorporate original songs from the film by Oscar winners Alan Menken, Tim Rice, and the late Howard Ashman, as well as new songs with music by Menken and lyrics by by Tony- and Academy Award-winning Dear Evan Hansen and La La Land songwriters Benj Pasek and Justin Paul. |
Oracle‘s deal machine has come to life once more, as the enterprise software giant agreed on Monday to buy Acme Packet for $2.1 billion to bolster its communications product offerings. Under the terms of the deal, Oracle will pay $29.25 a share, 22 percent above Acme Packet’s closing price on Friday. Excluding cash, the target company is valued at about $1.7 billion. The purchase is Oracle’s first deal of the year, and its biggest since the takeover of the Taleo Corporation last February for $1.9 billion. Related Links Document: Acme Packet news release Buying Acme Packet, which is based in Bedford, Mass., is intended to give Oracle tools that allow companies to send data securely across the Internet. Acme Packet’s Net-Net products allow customers to use data, voice and video applications across a variety of connections. “The addition of Acme Packet to Oracle’s leading communications portfolio will enable service providers and enterprises to deliver innovative solutions that will change the way we interact, conduct commerce, deliver health care, secure our homes and much more,” Mark V. Hurd, Oracle’s president, said in a statement. Separately on Monday, Acme Packet said that it had swung to a $6.5 million loss for its fourth quarter, as revenue fell from both the previous quarter and the period a year earlier. The deal is expected to close by June 30, pending approval from regulators and Acme Packet’s shareholders. Oracle received legal counsel from Weil, Gotshal & Manges, while Acme Packet was advised by the law firm Bingham McCutchen. |
Flies that display courtship behaviour at the press of a button, worms made to wriggle by remote control: since the dawn of optogenetics, scientists can turn nerve cells on and off using pulses of light. A research team at the Max Planck Institute of Biophysics in Frankfurt am Main has developed a molecular light switch that makes it possible to control cells more accurately than ever before. The combination switch consists of two different light-sensitive membrane proteins – one for on, the other for off. The method used by the scientists to connect the two components can be used with different protein variants, making it highly versatile. Optogenetics is a new field of research that aims to control cells using light. To this end, scientists avail of light-sensitive proteins that occur naturally in the cell walls of certain algae and bacteria. They introduce genes with the building instructions for these membrane proteins into the DNA of target cells. Depending on which proteins they use, they can fit cells with on and off switches that react to light of different wavelengths. Molecular combination switch: two light-sensitive membrane proteins - here red and purple - are linked via a connecting piece (green) and anchored into the cell wall (left). When the cell is illuminated with blue light, it allows positively charged ions in. Orange light has the opposite effect, allowing negatively charged ions into the cell. The cell is activated or deactivated, respectively (right). © MPI of Biophysics For accurate control, it is important that the cell function can be switched off and on equally well. This was exactly the problem until now: when the genes are introduced separately, the cell produces different numbers of copies of each protein and one type ends up dominating. A group of scientists headed by Ernst Bamberg at the Max Planck Institute of Biophysics has now developed a solution that is both elegant and versatile: they have located the genes for the on and off proteins on the same portion of DNA, along with an additional gene containing the assembly instructions for a connection piece. This interposed protein links the two switch proteins and anchors them firmly in the cell membrane. “In this way, we can ensure that the on and off switches are built into the cell wall side by side, and always in a ratio of 1:1. This allows us to control the cell with great accuracy”, explains Ernst Bamberg. The combination light switch conceived by the researchers consists of the membrane proteins channelrhodopsin-2 and halorhodopsin. Channelrhodopsin-2 originally comes from the single-celled green alga Chlamydomonas reinhardtii. It reacts to blue light by making the cell wall permeable to positively charged ions. The resulting influx of ions triggers a nerve impulse that activates the cell. Halorhodopsin, isolated by scientists from the bacterium Natromonas pharaonis, has the opposite effect: when the cell is illuminated with orange light, it allows negatively charged ions in, suppressing nerve impulses. Since channelrhodopsin-2 and halorhodopsin react to light of different wavelengths, together they comprise a useful tool for switching cells on and off at will. The scientists have shown that the method they used to connect the two molecules is also suitable for use with other proteins. “By linking different proteins as required, we will be able to control cells with much greater accuracy in future”, affirms Bamberg. |
Large numbers of US households to be denied heating assistance this winter By James Brewer 7 November 2011 The ongoing economic crisis has driven up the number of American households applying for home heating assistance this winter. Federal funds, however, are likely to be slashed virtually in half from last year. Funding for the Low Income Home Energy Assistance Program (LIHEAP) for fiscal year 2012, which began October 1, is expected to total $3.5 billion—over $1.5 billion less than last year. The amount has not been agreed upon due to political wrangling in Congress. Obama’s standing proposal for the full 2012 LIHEAP budget is only $2.5 billion. The administration has released only $1.7 billion of the LIHEAP funds pending congressional action on the official budget. The funds are distributed on a state-by-state basis. Each state is allocated a certain share of the total LIHEAP funds and handles the applications and disbursement of funds. States agencies are dealing with a substantial increase in the number of households applying for heating assistance. The anticipated shortfall means that tens or even hundreds of thousands of households applying for aid throughout the country are being put on waiting lists. Some states have tightened eligibility for assistance. For example, Pennsylvania has reduced eligibility to households at 150 percent of the federal poverty level or less. (The official poverty line is set at just over $20,000 a year for a family of four.) Last year, the state’s requirement was 160 percent of the poverty level. In virtually every state, successful applicants will receive less cash this year to pay utility bills. According to a report by the National Energy Assistance Directors’ Association (www.neada.org), entitled the National Energy Assistance Survey, approximately 10 million households are expected to apply for LIHEAP assistance this year—up from 8.9 million who received assistance last year. The report is based on a survey of 1,768 families. The findings indicate that nearly 90 percent of the households that received LIHEAP funds last winter had “at least one vulnerable member—defined as someone who is age 60 or older, age 18 or younger, or disabled—for whom a loss of heat in the winter or cooling in the summer could have serious health and safety implications. “Because of the difficulty they faced in paying their utility bills, these vulnerable households were forced to make choices that carry serious health risks. As many as 37 percent went without medical or dental care, and 34 percent did not fill a prescription or took less than their full dose of prescribed medication. In addition, 19 percent became sick because the home was too cold.” The survey reports that nearly two-thirds of the recipient households said that even though the LIHEAP benefits were low (averaging $417 per year), they would have kept their homes at temperatures too low to be healthy if they hadn’t received assistance. The state of Connecticut is receiving only $46.4 million this year as compared to $115 million last year. Agencies are preparing to distribute their drastically reduced LIHEAP funds to 20,000 more households than in 2010-11. Dr. James H. Gatling, president of New Opportunities Inc, in Waterbury, Connecticut, one of the 12 nonprofit agencies that process LIHEAP applications in the state, said at a recent press conference, “We're seeing people we have never seen before come through our doors. We don't have enough shelters or school buildings to put people in if they can't heat their homes.” He added: “If we don't provide for this program, there are people in this state who are going to die this year.” The Obama administration's plan would provide $81 million for Massachusetts, compared with $183 million last winter. John J. Drew, President/CEO of Action for Boston Community Development (ABCD) described the situation faced by the poor this winter as “a natural disaster equal to or worse than any we have experienced.” He said, “The funding under consideration in Washington, D.C. right now is totally inadequate. We are on the cusp of frigid weather in the cold, northern states and they are talking about funding that will provide only a half tank of oil for the seniors and low-income families we serve. Most oil companies won’t even deliver that small an amount. At that level, we will have all of our 24,000-plus client-families out of benefits before Thanksgiving.” With the cost of fuel oil going up to almost $4 per gallon, the cost of heating an average New England home this year is estimated at $3000—$650 more than last winter. Approximately 65,000 people in the northeastern state of Maine, one of the poorest in the country, are expected to apply for home heating benefits. Dale McCormick, director of the Maine State Housing Authority, the agency that administers LIHEAP in Maine, said “This is a double whammy and we are going to have families in dire straits.” Maine’s share of Obama’s LIHEAP disbursement is under $24 million—less than half the $58 million allotted last year. The state of New York has been allocated $235.5 million in LIHEAP funds from the disbursement, but depending on the outcome of the debates in Washington, the state is poised to lose as much as $152.3 million from last year’s funding. By far, the most populous of the Eastern seaboard states, New York’s LIHEAP funding has become a point of contention between the Senate and the House of Representatives, each body wanting to fund the state on a different percentage of the total disbursement. The Senate bill would keep the state at 12 percent, still meaning a huge cut in funds, while the House bill would lower funding to 10 percent. Other cold-weather states LIHEAP allocations are in limbo as the Senate and House bills are debated. Ohio, Michigan and Wisconsin are affected by the uncertainty. In the face of the across-the-board cuts in federal home heating aid, residents of Southeast Michigan face $175 million in rate increases just granted by the Michigan Public Service Commission (MPSC) to DTE Energy. This increase was granted despite the conglomerate’s record profits in 2011 of $202 million. The rate increase will be reflected immediately in customers’ bills this month. The MPSC also announced that in the first eight months of 2011, DTE shut off utilities to 138,629 homes. Adding insult to injury, the Detroit Free Press recently revealed that low-income Detroit residents who had applied for the federal home weatherization program were abandoned when the city’s Human Services Department became ensnared in a corruption scandal and had to return $9.2 million in economic stimulus money. |
Infielder Reid Brignac told Marc Topkin of the Tampa Bay Times that he has been traded to the Rockies (Twitter link). The Rockies announced the deal, which sends cash consideration and a player to be named later to Tampa Bay (Twitter link). The Rays had designated Brignac for assignment last week to create roster space for Kyle Farnsworth and Kelly Johnson. Brignac appeared in 16 games for the Rays last year, playing second base, third base, shortstop and left field. The 27-year-old spent most of the season at Triple-A, where he posted a .231/.323/.353 batting line in 400 plate appearances as a middle infielder. Brignac, who is not yet arbitration eligible, has a .227/.268/.317 batting line in parts of five MLB seasons. Brignac joins a middle infield mix that includes starters Troy Tulowitzki and Josh Rutledge and reserves Jonathan Herrera and D.J. LeMahieu. |
Despite its widespread use, the artificial sweetener aspartame remains one of the most controversial food additives, due to mixed evidence on its neurobehavioral effects. Healthy adults who consumed a study-prepared high-aspartame diet (25 mg/kg body weight/day) for 8 days and a low-aspartame diet (10 mg/kg body weight/day) for 8 days, with a 2-week washout between the diets, were examined for within-subject differences in cognition, depression, mood, and headache. Measures included weight of foods consumed containing aspartame, mood and depression scales, and cognitive tests for working memory and spatial orientation. When consuming high-aspartame diets, participants had more irritable mood, exhibited more depression, and performed worse on spatial orientation tests. Aspartame consumption did not influence working memory. Given that the higher intake level tested here was well below the maximum acceptable daily intake level of 40-50 mg/kg body weight/day, careful consideration is warranted when consuming food products that may affect neurobehavioral health. © 2014 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. |
Azealia Banks has been dropped from the lineup for Rinse FM's Born & Bred Festival, taking place June 4 and 5 in London, after she directed a series of racist tweets at Zayn Malik last night, according to a statement from the festival. The social media storm began when Banks, on Instagram, claimed Zayn was "mood boarding the fuck" out of her look. (She added, "I'm not mad about this though. Zayn is a cutie pie.") Later that day, Zayn posted a pair of dismissive tweets, which Banks took as a response to her post. She replied with several racist tweets, including an accusation of tokenism against his former band, One Direction. When Zayn responded, saying his tweets were not directed at Banks, she continued to send racial slurs. (She also claims Zayn gave her phone number to his fans.) In a statement, Rinse FM, said, “We have decided to cancel Azealia Banks' headline appearance at Rinse Born & Bred. Rinse Born & Bred is a celebration of rave culture and has been created for EVERYONE. We celebrate inclusivity and equality.” Banks is due in court today in New York for allegedly attacking a nightclub security guard last winter. She says she'll have a "special surprise for the paparazzi." Update (11:14 a.m. ET): Banks has offered an apology to those offended by her remarks ("except the targets of [her] tirades," she adds). While the musician refused to take back the controversial tweets, she apologized for the way people felt in response to them. Find her Tweets below. Update (1:31 p.m. ET): Banks has commented on the situation further, tweeting several screencaps from a conversation conducted over Twitter direct messages. The musician says her tweets to Zayn were sent "because [she] was angry" that "he felt as if he was too good to acknowledge [her.]" She adds: "I had to remind him that were [sic] both in the same boat in this industry and people of color." Scroll down to read her comments. Loading Loading Update (11:14 a.m. ET): Banks' apology Tweets: Update (1:37 p.m. ET): Banks' DMs: |
The Norwegian Lundehund is a small rectangular and agile Spitz breed with unique characteristics not found in any other breed. Originating on remote islands of arctic Norway, the dog was used to wrestle and retrieve live puffin birds from the crevices of steep vertical cliffs. To enable the dog to climb, descend, and brake on these cliffs, unique structural characteristics have evolved and must be present as they define this breed: a minimum of six toes on each foot and elongated rear foot pads; an elastic neck that allows the head to bend backward to touch the spine, letting the dog turn around in narrow puffin bird caves; and shoulders flexible enough to allow the front legs to extend flat to the side in order to hug the cliffs. This shoulder structure produces a peculiar rotary movement. Finally, the ears close and fold forward or backward to protect from debris. The temperament is alert but not expected to be outgoing toward strangers. |
Based on some of the employers' comments in the article, there seems to be a widespread belief that a tarnished credit report necessarily results from "bad decision making" and that it is evidence that an employee is "unreliable, unwise or too susceptible to temptation to steal." Last week, the NYT ran a piece describing how common it has become for employers to use the credit report as a screen device for job applicants (" Another Hurdle for the Jobless: Credit Inquiries "). In a nutshell, if your credit report shows too much debt, a bankruptcy, or a low credit score, employers don't want you. Where the heck is the evidence for these assumptions? Just because someone has a low credit score or has filed for bankruptcy does not make him or her a shady untrustworthy character. It's much more likely that the person has experienced a job loss, medical expenses, break up of a family, over-the-top credit card fees and interest, or an attempt to avoid home foreclosure. A quick read of the bankruptcy literature will show that. A couple years ago (2007), I published an article in Journal of Poverty using the CBP data describing the ways in which a bankruptcy on the credit report undermines the fresh start ("Personal Bankruptcy and the Credit Report: Conflicting Mechanisms of Social Mobility"). Over half of the respondents reported that they had been denied housing, transportation, credit, or employment explicitly because of the bankruptcy on their credit report. Respondents were denied jobs in accounting, mortgage lending, and even the moving and packing industry. Others were fired when their employers learned of the bankruptcy: one worked for the Traffic Safety Administration, one as a construction worker, and another as a clerk. I know that some people are arguing that if the job is not tied to money and finances, the information in the credit report should not be used in hiring decisions. For example, in Hawaii, it is now apparently illegal to pull the credit report until after the job offer has been made, and then the credit check has to be directly related to the job qualifications. I would push further--even if the job has to do with money, the credit report should have no bearing. The fact is, just because someone's credit report is blemished does not mean they can't handle or be trusted with money. Consider the folks on Wall Street or people in the mortgage lending industry or even bank tellers and lenders at your local bank who, because of the shrinking economy, have lost their jobs--and then probably fallen behind on their bills, thus damaging their credit report. How much sense does it make to deny them jobs in the financial world? Not much. I want to share one CBP interview that I will never forget--and which illustrates my point beautifully. The guy had been in college earning a B.A. in accounting when he and his wife divorced. He got the kids, who were quite young at the time. He worked part time, but of course, there were no medical benefits. His son had some stomach issues and he had to go to the emergency room a couple times. The result was large medical bills that Dad could not repay. Eventually, because of the mounting medical debts, he filed for bankruptcy. Fast forward to college graduation. He's on the job market as an accountant. He lands several interviews with good firms--and the initial interviews go very well. Before the second interviews, all request his permission to pull a credit report. Of course, he agrees. Once they learn of the bankruptcy, he's dropped like a hot potato--no more interest in hiring him. One of the HR folks actually told him that given his bankruptcy, they didn't feel that he could be trusted. Baloney. This guy was working hard to pull himself up by his all-American bootstraps and instead he got slapped down. I'm going to have to side with Representative Jon Switalski from Michigan on this one: Using the credit report as a screening device in hiring decisions is discrimination and is a practice that should be illegal. Moreover, from the point of the employer, it simply isn't a wise business practice--many smart and qualified folks are going to be overlooked just because of the economic downturn or someone in their family had the misfortune of getting ill. |
: Outdoor practice fields: Full padsAfter practice Monday, UO coachencouraged his team to get its mind right for what he said would be their toughest practice yet of preseason camp, Tuesday morning.From the get-go, it was clear the Oregon offense got the message. They set the tone in the tempo period to start the day, and as they came off the fieldwas clapping his hands and encouraging them to keep it up. They did, throughout what was the Ducks' third competition day of preseason camp.The final score ended up 121-116 offense, as the defense tightened things up in the 11-on-11 periods later in practice. Their efforts weren't enough to make up a big gap the offense opened up in the early periods, with the quarterbacks and receivers capitalizing on the chemistry they've been building the last couple weeks.The first major scored period was 1-on-1s. There weren't a ton of highlight-reel efforts, just a bunch of plays like thisreception in which a guy gets off the line, creates some separation in his route and benefits from great timing with the quarterback to haul in a reception:It was more of the same in 7-on-7. Prukop connected withon a beautiful deep ball andgot a safety to overplay a route while completing a touchdown pass to. The score was 80-45, offense, at the end of that period."The offense came out with a lot of intensity," junior defensive backsaid. "They wanted to shove it down our throats from the jump. As a defense we've got to come out with a strong mentality, and be ready to compete."The defense found its footing the first time the units went 11-on-11, perhaps not coincidentally.had a couple great runs to help the offense hold onto its lead, but the defense chipped into it thanks in part to a coupletackles for loss.Another 7-on-7 period was run under "clutch" conditions. Prukop connected on another deep ball to Brown, setting up a TD reception for. Then Herbert completed 6-of-7 passes, the last a TD pass to, Herbert's fifth different receiver on the drive.The defense really started to rally at that point, though. Withat QB, a drive stalled and the offense needed to attempt a Hail Mary, whichastutely batted down in the end zone. Then, with Prukop back behind center,plucked a ball out of the air at the line and ran it back for a pick-six.The score continued to tighten in the last team period, asmade a couple plays, breaking up a pass intended fora few plays after depositing a receiver who attempted to block him on his back. But the offense held on, for its second victory in three competition days this preseason.The Ducks will be in shells Wednesday, before holding a scrimmage Thursday that serves as the de facto end of preseason camp.: Wallace got the offense some points in the first 11-on-11 period when he went over the middle, leaped and reached back for a pass thrown just behind him, hauling it in for the reception. …broke up a couple different plays in the 7-on-7 clutch period, including one in the end zone on the final rep of the drill. Herbert had put the offense into position to score with a great throw while rolling out to his right, whichhauled in. The play before, Herbert fired a laser to Nelson streaking up the field, which seemed to catch the receiver off-guard; he wasn't able to haul it in, though Herbert put it right on his hands.Robinson played cornerback quite a bit Tuesday. He started there the latter half of 2015, and is staying ready in case the Ducks' depth becomes an issue.got some run with the No. 1 defense while Robinson was at corner, a day after secondary coachcited McGraw andas guys who have made progress this month to solidify the depth at safety. … Speaking of McGraw, the Louisiana native was no doubt thrilled when a New Orleans Saints scout spent some time during position drills watching the defensive backs. …A week ago I wouldn't have thought so, but it seems like(above) could be on track to play as a true freshman. The SAM linebacker can really run, and looks like he could be an asset on the kickoff teams. Robinson said the Ducks might look to play more young guys situationally this season. "This year we're focusing on having a lot of depth," he said. "Young guys, even though you might not see a lot of snaps playing on defense or offense, you've got to help us any way you can. … If the younger guys can help us out on special teams, give the veterans a break, that will help us out, make us a better team." … I mentioned yesterday thatalways has the quarterbacks doing something new, and today was no different; here he puts them through a drill that emphasizes their shoulder turn: |
Well what do you know? It’s a three-bedroom home in LA for under $400,000. Sure, it’s right next to a freeway entrance, but the 1908 Craftsman looks to have been recently remodeled without sacrificing its charming older features. The 1,354-square-foot home now offers refinished hardwood floors, coffered ceilings, a fireplace-equipped dining room, and original built-in shelving. The kitchen is outfitted with new countertops and stainless steel appliances. The two bathrooms have also been recently updated, and, per the listing, the home has been outfitted with a new cooling system, new electrical wiring, new windows, and a host of other recent upgrades. On a 5,508-square-foot lot along the Harbor Freeway in South LA, the home has a good-sized backyard with a concrete patio and a detached one-car garage. The wraparound front porch also offers plenty of seating space. Asking price is $395,000. |
We all played games when we were kids and we all loved it. If you were like me, you wouldn’t care about where these games were developed. If someone would ask me, I would probably answer United States by default. But is it really true? During this year I attended some events for gamers and game developers. From small meetups to big conferences. They allowed me to be blown away with the number of game studios in Portugal, Portuguese games in the market and new startups joining the game industry. The event that impressed me the most was the Game Dev Camp Portugal, an initiative from Microsoft Portugal done in partnership with the Game Developer community, including studios such as Biodroid, Bica Studios and Nerd Monkeys. Miguel Vicente, Audience Marketing Manager at Microsoft Portugal, about the event: Portugal has everything to become a case study in the gaming industry. A proof of this is the excellent work done by the whole community with projects recognized, already today, on a global scale, in a highly competitive industry that is always evolving. (…) This event, was the result of an extraordinary teamwork among the various studios in our country; the community shares this ambition and believes that this path is made with all and for all. Besides all the amazing content, one of the best outputs of this big event, was the “Portugal Game Studios Spotlight 2014”, a booklet they built and delivered to everyone. It is definitely helpful to provide an overview on the size of the community and to write this piece :). And what is the community saying about all of this? We are witnessing a turning point in the Portuguese videogame development community. In the last 2 years the amount of people producing videogames in Portugal have doubled or even tripled. The quality of the titles produced has also increased and the bonds between all these companies have been strengthened. If there ever was a time to invest in all of us, that time is now. – Filipe Duarte Pina, Nerd Monkeys Something BIG is starting on the Portuguese game development scene. More than ever we are seeing the developers united, working passionately and being quite ambitious to strive on this entertainment industry. – Nuno Folhadela, Bica Studios We have many creative people with skills on several crucial areas in the development of videogames. I’m quite optimistic as I see teams of young people believing and pushing their projects into the market and some international competitions – Rui Prada, Professor at IST and President at SPCV But where can you find the list of Game Studios? Right here! List of major Portuguese Game Studios - Listed alphabetically 1 of 22 If you want to know more about each one of these studios, consult the Microsoft’s booklet – Portugal Game Studios Spotlight 2014 – or visit their websites, that you can find on page 2. |
JavaScript.tmLanguage Better JavaScript language definition for TextMate and SublimeText. This builds on the language files commonly used and adds more fine grained matching and also includes new features from ECMAScript 6 like modules, succinct methods, arrow functions, classes, generators, and accessors (ES5). Installation and Use If you haven't already, install Package Control, then select JavaScript Next from the Package Control: Install Package dropdown list in the Command Palette. To set this as your default JavaScript syntax, open a javascript file, then select View -> Syntax -> Open all with current extension as... -> JavascriptNext . You may also need to change the ColorScheme. Pick one from Preferences -> Color Scheme -> JavaScriptNext . Screenshots Contributing Edit the yaml files with the YAML-XXX extensions, convert them to plist xml files, and send in a pull request. The easiest way to do this is by using AAAPackageDev. You can do all of the above without leaving sublime text. YAML is used since it's a lot more compact and easier to edit than xml. |
New Yorkers breathed a collective sigh of relief around 1:20 p.m. on Thursday when a seriously foul sculpture of Donald Trump with his junk out was removed from Union Square by the NYC Parks Department. Still, they managed to deliver one last sick burn toward the Republican presidential candidate. As tweeted by Wall Street Journal reporter Josh Dawsey: NYC parks department on naked Trump statue: "NYC Parks stands firmly against any unpermitted erection in city parks, no matter how small.” — Josh Dawsey (@jdawsey1) August 18, 2016 Yup, that’s a real quote. It seems even Trump’s tiny penis, devoid of any testicles whatsoever, still went against official NYC park policy. Oh well, probably for the best. That thing was straight-up ghastly. And the Twitter responses roll in ... Rough day: Gawker's dead, private prisons aren't, Uber phasing out jobs. But then, a twinkle of hope... https://t.co/QUDWOn9pPT — Alexander C. Kaufman (@AlexCKaufman) August 18, 2016 New York, I love you. 2016, I hate you. https://t.co/Fi9oBjwT8H — Chloe Angyal (@ChloeAngyal) August 18, 2016 It’s been a bad day for Donald Trump. And maybe the best day for Josh Dawsey. Nothing I ever tweet will get as many retweets and responses as a phallic joke from the NYC parks department on a naked Trump statue. — Josh Dawsey (@jdawsey1) August 18, 2016 Here’s the Trump statue while it was still standing (NSFW, obviously). Katherine Brooks/ The Huffington Post Katherine Brooks/ The Huffington Post Katherine Brooks/ The Huffington Post Katherine Brooks/ The Huffington Post Katherine Brooks/ The Huffington Post |
Media playback is unsupported on your device Media caption BBC London's Political Correspondent Karl Mercer reports Spending on private ambulances in London grew by 1,000% between 2011 and 2013, the Labour party has claimed. The NHS spent £8.84m on private ambulances in the capital last year compared to £795,000 in 2011, according to Freedom of Information data. The London Ambulance Service (LAS) conceded it was losing staff due to "pressure on the organisation". But LAS denied claims it had employed private staff previously sacked by the NHS. 'Longer response times' Heidi Alexander, Labour MP for Lewisham East, claimed London ambulances were taking "on average two minutes longer than three years ago" to respond to the most serious call-outs. Labour said its research discovered private ambulance usage by ambulance trusts across the country grew by 82% between financial years 2011/12 and 2013/14, from £37m to £67.5m last year. Private ambulance spending In Yorkshire and the North East more than quadrupled to hit £3.56m and £2.9m respectively, said Labour, although other ambulance services maintained low spending during the two years, while one trust reduced its reliance on private vehicles. Shadow health minister Jamie Reed raised concerns over the figures and the "increasing use" of private ambulances during health questions in the House of Commons. Image caption London Ambulance Service said it had lost some staff because of "pressure on the organisation" But his comments were branded "absolute nonsense" by public health minister Jane Ellison, who said that previous Labour government "occasionally deployed private ambulances too". 'Adding pressure' Brendan Kemp, regional organiser for the GMB union, questioned the hiring practices of ambulance trusts and their ability to keep staff. "Who's checking the qualifications of the staff that man these vehicles?" he said on BBC London 94.9. "Often staff that have been dismissed by London Ambulance Service for something, often they'll reappear working for a private contractor." But Jason Killens, director of operations for the LAS, said every private contractor "is checked by us before we use them". "Staff that leave the LAS for reasons of clinical safety would not be redeployed on those private contracts with us," he told BBC London 94.9. Mr Killens said increasing demand each year "is adding pressure in the organisation" and conceded that "some staff leave" as a result, with about 500 vacancies currently unfilled. He added: "There is a small number that leave us and go and work in the private sector, but the vast majority of people that leave the ambulance service in London go to work elsewhere in the NHS." |
Emmanuel Macron spent €26,000 (£24,000) on makeup during his first three months as president of France, it has emerged. In potentially damaging news for the 39-year old centrist leader, whose popularity is waning, Le Point reported that his personal makeup artist - referred to only as Natacha M - put in two bills, one for €10,000 and another for €16,000. The Elysee Palace defended the high fee saying: “We called in a contracter as a matter of urgency”. The same makeup artist also applied foundation to Mr Macron during his presidential campaign. Aides said that spending on makeup would be “significantly reduced”. It may seem like a stratospheric sum for a president who has described his style as “Jupiterian” - lofty in the spirit of the God of Roman gods. The gross figure is higher than the €6,000 euro salary Mr Hollande paid his staff makeup artist, but it is less when social charges are added. Le Point put the overall figure for Mr Hollande's makeup at €30,000 per quarter. Nicolas Sarkozy, meanwhile, paid a whopping €8,000 per month for his, according to Vanity Fair. Carla Bruni-Sarkozy caresses the brow of her husband, the former French President, Nicolas Sarkozy Credit: Claude Paris/AP But all these sums pale into comparison with the £99,000 Mr Hollande paid his personal barber. The huge amount sparked accusations of "shampoo Socialism". The disclosure caused particular shock because Mr Hollande came to power on a Left-wing platform, promising to be a “normal president” who would mark a break with the “extravagance” of his conservative predecessor, Nicolas Sarkozy, and his model wife, Carla Bruni. The hairdresser, Olivier Benhamou, was hired to work at the Elysée Palace in 2012 for the duration of Mr Hollande’s five-year term. Mr Benhamou also reportedly enjoyed a housing allowance and family benefits. French President Emmanuel Macron Credit: BERTRAND GUAY/AFP Le Point made no mention of Mr Macron’s spending on his hair. |
Democratic senator Heidi Heitkamp of North Dakota (Chip Somodevilla/Getty) It’s heartening when mainstream Democrats remind us that they don’t always march to the beat of MoveOn.org’s drum circles. A number of Senate Democrats clearly disapprove of Senator Tom Cotton’s decision to tell Iran that Republicans won’t consider themselves bound by President Obama’s deal with it. But they have been reasonable enough to refrain from calling it treason (as some lefties alleged), and from letting it scare them off measures that Cotton and other Republicans support. Advertisement That is because, thankfully, they seem to agree with Cotton’s premise: Only a deal that can be ratified by Congress is a deal worth reaching. This is for reasons both of permanence — the freshman senator was correct in his reading of the Constitution — and prudence — Congress has shown that it understands Iran’s nature much better than this White House does. Democratic senator Heidi Heitkamp of North Dakota, for instance, called Cotton’s letter “incredibly unfortunate and inappropriate” but said it “doesn’t diminish my support” for legislation that would allow Congress to disapprove of a deal. The day after Cotton released his letter, Senator Michael Bennet, a Colorado Democrat, signed onto that legislation, too. Said bill was introduced this year by Republican senators Bob Corker and Lindsey Graham. Another bill, put forth by Republican senator Mark Kirk, would reapply sanctions in the event that a deal is not reached between the two parties by the negotiations’ current deadline. Both bills are intended to increase the West’s leverage and demonstrate that Congress will not support a dangerous outcome for the negotiations. (They make sense alongside each other, since they apply to different outcomes.) Advertisement Advertisement A veto-proof congressional majority will be necessary for each bill to become law. Kirk claims he already has those numbers, saying his bill has the support of 68 senators. We hope he’s right, and we hope Graham and Corker’s bill gets there, too. But even in the event Congress passes a bill over the president’s veto, he may have some practical wiggle room to loosen sanctions on his own. And there is no easy way to prevent him from seeking the U.N. Security Council’s blessing for an agreement. Given these limits, the main point of Congress’s efforts is to show that it strongly opposes a weak, giveaway deal. The bigger the majority, the merrier, so it was heartening to see Senator Rand Paul, who has at times been reticent on this issue, sign onto Corker’s bill. If he wants the Obama administration to reach a good, durable deal, he should support the added leverage the Kirk deal provides, too. Republican senator Jeff Flake of Arizona, who has not publicly signed onto either bill, should support them, too, as should any Democrat serious about this crucial national-security question. Advertisement Some worry that, since such congressional efforts cannot definitively stop the president, passing them could allow him to claim tacit approval for his future actions. But, by broadcasting Congress’s unease now, they seem more likely to do the opposite. Senator Cotton was right that an agreement without Congress’s approval can be constitutionally revoked by a future executive. Passing Corker-Graham and the Kirk bill would make Congress’s dissent clear in the event that President Obama draws out negotiations again or agrees to an unsound deal. Bipartisan support for the bills would show that some Democrats disapprove of those outcomes, too. In this situation, under this president, Congress cannot do much more than prepare for the worst. |
Electricity intensity of U.S. homes and commercial buildings decreases in coming decades February 13, 2019 Regional variations in household lighting consumption driven by bulb choice and bulb count February 25, 2019 Extreme cold in the Midwest led to high power demand and record natural gas demand February 26, 2019 State fact sheets on household energy use RECS 2009 — Release date: August 13, 2013 (Correction) The RECS gathers information through personal interviews with a nationwide sample of homes and energy suppliers. The 2009 survey was the largest RECS to date and the larger sample size allowed for the release of data for 16 individual states, in addition to national, regional, and division-level estimates. See a closer look at residential energy consumption in a two-page format with graphs and text for these 16 states: Detailed information on the fact sheets cover many areas of interest: Overall energy use, electricity use, and expenditures Residential consumption by end use (air conditioning, heating, appliances) Main heating fuel Use of cooling equipment Housing types and year of construction Numbers of TVs and refrigerators See part of sample fact sheet below... |
One of the biggest advantages of using a content management system (CMS) is that it allows developers to empower site owners with unprecedented control of their website. Giving website owners the ability to create, edit and manage their web property has many benefits. However, having too many features and site-management capabilities can burden the client and can wreak havoc on a website. Read on for the five most common mistakes web developers make in an effort to empower their clients. Mistake #1: WYSIWYG Editor Overload What You See Is What You Get (WYSIYWG) editors (or rich-text editors) are great features to install in content management systems because they allow content creators the ability to create, edit and manage web pages without the need to know HTML. WYSIYWG editors are so useful to end-users that you’d find most open source content management systems with it enabled by default. For example, WordPress has the Visual Editor and it’s the default content-editing view. But is it really a good idea to let your client center text and turn it purple? Probably not. Ever been to a site with blue underlined text that wasn’t clickable? How about a company website that have hyperlinks in bolded, black text? These probably happened because they had out-of-the-box, un-customized WYSIWYG editors, which usually comes with everything but the kitchen sink. In fact, the first thing most of our clients ask about is if they can limit how much their editors can use formatting. Consider customizing WYSIWYG editors to only have the following: Text Formatting Heading 1 Heading 2 Heading 3 Heading 4 (if needed) Blockquote Ordered and unordered lists Italics Bold One or two special CSS classes for emphasizing or de-emphasizing text Web Content Elements Links File upload/attach Images Tables (with instructions to use properly on tabular data only) Get Rid of Underlining (because the industry best practice is to use underlines only for hyperlinks) Direct font controls (such being able to change the color) Emoticons Below, see an example of a rich-text editor with too many options and features. It burdens the user interface and, when used improperly, can make web pages look like a Myspace page. By configuring the CMS’s rich-text editor, content creators can have a less intimidating time composing content. Of course, this is just a general guideline. Some project might need more and some might need less. A good practice would be to determine what’s needed and what’s not for each project instead of shortcutting the process and simply just providing the client with everything. Mistake #2: Clients Editing CSS or HTML A reasonably astute person with a desire to learn can edit HTML and CSS. But that’s true about anything. Just as car manufacturers don’t expect us to understand the inner workings of a car to be able to operate it, we shouldn’t expect our clients to know CSS and HTML to be able to run their website. Like many design agencies, we tried to train our clients and their staff with HTML and CSS so that they could be fully empowered to make changes to their site. But every time, typically within a year or so, the client was so sick of it and had wasted so much time and money doing something they hated that they had us take back control of their websites. When deploying content management systems, consider limiting access to the style sheets only to experienced professionals. Mistake #3: Confusing "Empowered" with "Expert" There was a recent Harvard Business Review report that talked about a number of studies that have shown that in order to be an expert at something, you need to have 10,000 hours of experience at it. It applies to chess, and music and business. It could also apply to web design and web development. While you might have been in this industry for 5 or 10 years, your clients might only have a few hours experience as an operator of a site. Don’t just turn over a CMS and hope that your client has enough experience to be an expert at usability and web design. Make sure you’re available for when they’re stuck. Mistake #4: Giving Them More Than They Ask For We’ve had a couple of clients come to us and tell us that their last web developer created a site that doesn’t do what they need it to do. When we looked closer, we discovered that it did, in fact, do everything they needed it to do. And a lot more. By going in, modifying the interface and removing and renaming things, we were able to create a much easier UI to use. We know too many developers who create too many features for a project. Of course, when they put the product in front of real users, it becomes quickly obvious that it’s not user-friendly. Mistake #5: Thinking That the Default CMS Settings Is Good Today’s content management systems are so robust that you can pick any of the top five systems and 99% of your clients will have more features than they need. What clients need is the ability to get their job done, and as web developers, it’s our responsibility to facilitate that. We need to make educated, experienced decisions so that our clients don’t have to. We need to help clients focus on what makes them awesome (as a person and as a company) and give them tools to leverage that. Conclusion As developers, we need to step up to the plate and make sure that our clients have tools that not only empower them in being able to manage the content on their site, but also empowers them to make the best use of their time. Giving clients more choices and abilities to mess around with their website isn’t the same thing as empowering them. We might really just be hampering them and slowing them down with too many options, features and doodads. Related Content |
Here's the message we sent to our members. After you've read it, please add your voice. Teen killed for writing this: Hold the police accountable Dear Friend, A letter R scribbled on the side of an abandoned McDonald’s. That’s all it took for Miami Beach police officers to chase down teenage art student Israel Hernandez Llach, tasing him repeatedly, until he lay dead on the ground. A friend watched in horror as cops high-fived each other.1 And now, a Florida community is once again searching for answers about the brutal death of one of its teenagers. Tell the Miami Beach Police Department (MBPD) to hold the officers who killed an unarmed teen accountable. Israel may have been running from police because he was an immigrant from Colombia, who had just recently received his papers, and he feared deportation. He was an art student who won awards for his paintings and had two sculptures displayed at the Miami Art Museum. His business designing skateboards had just started taking off. Had the police followed protocol, Israel would have been charged with a misdemeanor of criminal mischief for scribbling on a wall. It’s highly unlikely he would have even faced jail time. Instead, the unarmed teen lost his life due to unnecessary force.2 And the cop responsible for Israel’s death had already been the subject of six previous complaints of battery, excessive force, and courtesy and respect violations. Two years ago, he’d been suspended for violating the department’s drug testing policies. Yet, MBPD allowed him to continue working as a police officer.3 Tell the Miami Beach Police Department to hold the officers who killed an unarmed teen accountable. This isn’t the first time a brutal incident like this happens in Miami Beach. Just 2 years ago, eight Miami Beach Police officers fired 100 shots at an intoxicated motorist, killing him and wounding four innocent bystanders. Those officers have yet to face charges. And there are many more stories like that one.2 Israel Hernandez Llach's death won't be the last unless we hold the Miami Beach Police Department accountable. And the best way to do that is by blowing this story up so that the department and attorneys general can’t ignore it and hope it goes away. If thousands of us sign this petition and raise our voices, the media will take notice and the pressure on the police department will multiply. Can you add your name and share this petition? Tell the Miami Beach Police Department to hold the officers who killed an unarmed teen accountable. As classmates begin to plan out the next stage of their lives, Israel’s parents, sister, and friends are left with a gaping hole. And the worst part is, it could happen to any teenager, scribbling on an abandoned wall or jay-walking in the middle of the street or driving with a broken taillight. Until we speak up, there will be no justice. Thanks for speaking up, Gabriela, Arturo, Jesus, and the rest of the Presente.org team P.S. Can you donate $5 to support our work? We rely on contributions from people like you to see campaigns like this through. Sources: 1. "Friends and family mourn teen who died after tasering by police," Miami Herald, Aug 8, 2013. 2. "Seeking Answers After Youth's Death in Police Stop," NY Times, Aug 8, 2013. 3. "Israel Hernandez Killing: Officer Who Tasered Teen Put on Leave, Family Ask Feds for Probe," Miami New Times, Aug 9, 2013. |
Donkey Kong’s best mate Diddy Kong has become a Nintendo amiibo figure! He appears as lively as ever, just as seen in Super Smash Bros. and many other classic Nintendo video games! He is wearing his familiar red outfit and even has his Rocketbarrel Pack (of course!). This figure is perfect for display, but amiibo figures are meant for much for than just display! You can also use this Diddy Kong amiibo figure to add a ton of fun to your Nintendo gaming experience through using it with compatible video games! What is amiibo? amiibo are fun, high-quality Near Field Communication (NFC) figures to collect that also unlock special in-game extras for Nintendo Wii U and 3DS games. Your amiibo can be trained, boost your powers, unlock new Mii outfits, and much more in a variety of games! Enjoy the newest way to play with amiibo! |
The dark night of Saturday, September 11, 1976 was the decidedly ill-fated evening upon which the Orchard Beach, Maine, USA home of a certain Dr. Herbert Hopkins was darkened by a nightmarish MIB. Vampire-like scarcely begins to describe the terrible thing that descended on Hopkins’ home. When Hopkins opened the front door, he was confronted by a pale-faced, skinny, ghoul; one that was dressed in black, had dark and hostility-filled eyes, and sported the de rigueur Fedora hat. The MIB made it very clear, and extremely quickly, that if Hopkins knew what was good for him he would immediately cease all of his then-current research into the life and experiences of a reported alien abductee: David Stephens, who lived in nearby Oxford. Hopkins, chilled to the bone, didn’t need telling twice. Just for good measure, the undeniably malevolent MIB – in monotone fashion – told Hopkins to take out of the right pocket of his trousers one of the two coins that was in there and hold it in the open palm of his hand. Hopkins didn’t even think to wonder how the MIB knew the coins were there; he just did as he was told. With a detectable threat in his robotic voice, the MIB ordered Hopkins to keep his eyes locked on the coin, which he did. To Hopkins’ amazement and horror, something terrifying happened: the coin transmuted. It turned blue in color; it shimmered slightly – as if in a mini heat-haze – and then, in a second or so, became 100 percent vaporous. After a few moments the vapor was gone. The MIB implied that he could do exactly the same thing to Hopkins’ heart. Hopkins got the message. The MIB shuffled his curious way to the door and vanished – as in literally vanished – into the chilled night. The strange and enigmatic alchemists of old had the ability to morph metals, and regularly demonstrated such skills to amazed individuals. We would be hard pressed to deny they sound amazingly like centuries-old equivalents of Dr. Herbert Hopkins’ very own manipulator, or in this case destroyer, of metal. And, on this very point, there is one important thing I have left until last, something which further amplifies the connection between Herbert Hopkins’ MIB and the alchemists of times long gone. According to Hopkins, at one point the MIB touched his finger to his lips – deliberately, for effect, it seems. Although the man’s face and hands were utterly white, his lips were bright red. When the MIB removed his finger from his lips, it was stained red. This led Hopkins to suspect that the man, rather oddly and unsettlingly, was wearing lipstick. On the other hand, it’s worth noting that, way back in the 17th century, one Wenzel Seiler’s exposure to the domain of alchemy occurred when he ran his finger across a large, oak table in the monastery in which he worked, and found it coated in a bright red substance. It was, supposedly, the enigmatic Philosopher’s Stone (none other than the mysterious red substance that could supposedly allow for the priceless alchemical transformation to take place). It was almost as if Herbert Hopkins’ MIB was playing some strange, trickster-like mind-game with Hopkins, one in which he dropped a few, significant clues and hints to his – the MIB’s – linkage to alchemy… |
Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton Hillary Diane Rodham ClintonREAD: Cohen testimony alleges Trump knew Stone talked with WikiLeaks about DNC emails County GOP in Minnesota shares image comparing Sanders to Hitler Holder: 'Time to make the Electoral College a vestige of the past' MORE's campaign released a video on Monday that warns about dangers in Republican Donald Trump Donald John TrumpREAD: Cohen testimony alleges Trump knew Stone talked with WikiLeaks about DNC emails Trump urges North Korea to denuclearize ahead of summit Venezuela's Maduro says he fears 'bad' people around Trump MORE's economic plans. The video comes hours before Trump is scheduled to present his economic plan and is a direct shot at the GOP nominee on an issue that polls have suggested is a strong one for him. ADVERTISEMENT The video, titled "What you need to know about Trumponomics," highlights an analysis from Moody's Analytics in June that said Trump's economic proposals would cause a "lengthy recession." The analysis says the economy would be "significantly weaker" if the businessman's proposals were adopted and predicts a loss of close to 3.5 million jobs by the end of his presidency. It also showed the candidate's proposals would benefit the nation's wealthiest and hurt poorer Americans the most. The video also seeks to use Trump's comments against him. "Wages too high. We're not going to be able to compete against the world," Trump says in one clip. In another, he calls himself the "king of debt." "I would borrow knowing that if the economy crashed, you could make a deal," Trump says in another clip. Trump has won support from blue-collar workers in swing states such as Ohio and Pennsylvania with an economic message focused on renegotiating trade deals. In his speech, the GOP nominee is expected to call for a moratorium on new financial regulations and to announce that child care payments will be fully tax deducible under a Trump administration. His economic address will focus on energy, tax, regulation and trade. A number of polls have shown the economy is a policy area where voters prefer Trump to over the Democratic nominee, although a Washington Post/ABC News survey released over the weekend showed the two running neck and neck on the issue. |
A pair of fishermen were shocked to catch a different kind of catfish when they came across two kittens swimming towards their boat. The footage, which was later posted to the Alabama Adventures YouTube channel, featured the two men sailing through the Warrior River near Bluff Creek while on a fishing trip. In the video, one of the fishermen, Jason Frost, records himself saying: 'You are not going to believe what is swimming towards our boat, a kitten.' Jason Frost got himself into position as the kitten swam towards the front of the boat looking to be rescued He then films the river and a tiny speck of ginger is just about visible paddling through the murky water, hoping to be rescued. Getting himself into position, the man crouches down at the front of the boat and waits for the little creature to get within range before pulling it out of the river. At that very moment, his friend, Brandon Key, spots another cat struggling in the water and the duo begin sailing towards it. Meanwhile, the first cat shakes itself dry and meows in appreciation as it receives a little stroke from its rescuer. The little creature got itself within distance of being rescued and the fisherman scooped it from the river The kitten responded by meowing its gratitude and shaking itself dry while on board the boat After swimming a long distance towards the boat, the second kitten is then rescued from the river - the first cat comes over to greet its sibling. The two men comment on the fact that the creatures are twins before speculating that someone probably attempted to dispose of them in the river. The video concludes with the two cats safely on board the boat, shaking themselves dry. After rescuing the first kitten, the two fishermen spotted a second one in the water and repeated the process The first cat walked over to greet its sibling being pulled from the water by the fisherman Since emerging online, the clip has received a number of comments from appreciative YouTube users. Tami F Berrios wrote: 'You guys ROCK!!! Thank you for saving them!!!! God Bless y'all from Mississippi.' |
Breaking News Emails Get breaking news alerts and special reports. The news and stories that matter, delivered weekday mornings. April 30, 2014, 11:47 AM GMT Ukraine's armed forces are on full combat alert due to the "real danger" that war will break out with Russia, Kiev's acting president said Wednesday. Oleksandr Turchynov added that his security forces were "helpless" to control unrest in the east of the country, where armed separatists are protesting against the Kiev government and agitating to join Russia. "I am once again addressing the real danger of the start of a continental war against Ukraine by the Russian Federation," Interfax Ukraine quoted Turchynov as telling a meeting of regional leaders. "Our armed forces have been put on full combat alert." Pro-Russian groups have for weeks been occupying government buildings across the east, demanding a referendum similar to the one held in Crimea last month. The city of Luhansk saw several more government offices seized Tuesday, and Horlivka, in the separatist-controlled Donetsk region, had its city council building and police station overrun on Wednesday. Hours later, Turchynov told the meeting his forces were powerless to stop the uprisings. "I will be frank: Today, security forces are unable to quickly take the situation in the Donetsk and Luhansk regions under control," Turchynov told the meeting, according to The Associated Press. "The security bodies...are unable to carry out their duties of protecting citizens. They are helpless in those matters. Moreover, some of those units are either helping or cooperating with terrorist organizations." Turchynov instructed the regional governors at the meeting to try to prevent the threat from overtaking more central and southern regions. The Associated Press contributed to this report. |
You may have overlooked this tiny organism until now, but 2017 might very well be the year of algae. Don’t believe it? It’s already in baking mixes, cookies, milk, nondairy creamers, vegan eggs, salad dressing, ice-cream, smoothies, and protein powders, to name a few. Soon, the extract from spirulina––a form of microalgae––will provide the color for blue M&Ms. Prefer the green ones? It can do that, too. advertisement advertisement Algae have been floating around in research and development labs for decades, but, until recently, no one could make it taste good or, really, answer questions of what to do with it. Solazyme, a San Francisco Bay Area company, has been growing algae for well over a decade and is still betting big that its oils and powders will be what food manufacturers reach for when reformulating their products for fewer calories, lower fat, and less cholesterol. The company is so sure that it’s on the right path that it has abandoned a significant portion of its original business––biofuels made from algae––refined its focus to humans, pets, and personal-care products and changed its name to TerraVia. The Age Of Algae Approaches So, why is this tiny plant–something that’s been in our diets and our fishes’ diets for centuries–finally gaining traction? “We are seeing massive shifts in the marketplace to plant-based nutrition,” says Apu Mody, former president of Mars Food Americas and newly named CEO of TerraVia. Mody, a lifelong vegetarian, is more than happy to see the world shift to a healthier and more sustainable diet and has witnessed firsthand the evolution to cleaner and more sustainable ingredients. “In the last five years we’ve seen real breakthroughs,” he says. Industry experts echo Mody’s words. SPINS, a Chicago-based industry tracker, reports that plant-based foods outpaced the growth of the whole food and beverage industry last year by 3.5% and that it now exceeds $4.9 billion in sales in the U.S. Mintel, the global market research firm, reports that the rapidly growing vegetarian market is a $2.8 billion-a-year industry. While the health benefits and lab studies are varied, algae wouldn’t be anywhere without its great nutritional profile. Spirulina, for example, is about 65% protein. Beef, by comparison, is about 20% protein (at least protein that your body can functionally use). Conversely, because of the inputs it needs and the space it requires to grow, its environmental footprint is significantly less than a cow. Algae also deliver an impressive amount of vitamin A, vitamin B-12 , B complex, iron, and other essential trace minerals. When processed into oil, algae are an omega-3 powerhouse. “vegetable-like flavor, resembling that of raw lima beans” Catharine Arnston, founder of EnergyBits, maker of spirulina and chlorella supplements, says, “In 10 years [algae] is going to be in everything.” But there are still disbelievers. Arnston was recently featured on an episode of Shark Tank. The “sharks” ate her product, grimaced, and told her they weren’t ready to invest. Arnston recommends you swallow her supplements, but when I munched on one of the tablets, I made a face too. (Imagine a spoonful of dried kale, and then imagine an aftertaste that is worse.) advertisement The path to bring algae to the supermarket is paved with research that has attempted to elevate algae, and failed. The Carnegie Institution of Washington collaborated on pilot plants in the early ’50s that could grow chlorella––another form of microalgae––at optimal levels for food production. They described the taste as a “vegetable-like flavor, resembling that of raw lima beans or raw pumpkin.” The institute scrapped the idea as too involved and expensive despite a “need for additional sources of high-protein food, especially in overpopulated areas, that serious effort in tracking down every promising lead is certainly warranted.” Even NASA couldn’t get algae to work. The space agency contracted food scientist Marcus Karel to investigate how it might include algae in its food supply. At the time, the strains available were deemed too strongly flavored and nutritionally unbalanced. In 1998, NASA tried again, but the researchers struggled with how to turn algae into food that a space crew might actually eat over a long period of time. While it’s been successful at growing lettuce in space, NASA is slowly inching its way toward using cyanobacteria to support a manned base on Mars in a project dubbed CyBLiSS. The UN also supports growing algae to feed our soaring populations and stated that spirulina should be used to fight hunger and nutrition problems and urged the world to “mainstream” the organism to supply the “daily nutritional requirements of humankind.” A Protein For All Dietary Restrictions Money is being poured into algae from every country and dozens of companies are betting on it to deliver. Owned since the seventies by DIC, a Japanese company, Earthrise Nutritionals recently announced plans to expand its central California plant in order to ramp up production of Linablue, a blue food-coloring extract derived from spirulina and the first of its kind to win FDA approval. (It’s what M&Ms is using.) Earthrise claims to have the largest outdoor algae farm in the world, but its giant 5,000-square-meter ponds are open to the air and thus upon weather to function. This is both good and bad: Algae need sun but they need to be protected in order for nutrients like carbon dioxide to remain high enough to promote maximum growth. They also need to be grown far from pollutants, which means far away from big cities. Earthrise may have the lock on using algae for food coloring and supplements, but TerraVia has moved perhaps the furthest toward monetizing the ingredient from a food formulation standpoint. The company has spent years choosing the right strains of algae to grow, engineering it to remove the plant flavor and developing ways to grow it so that it’s no longer green. The algal powder now comes in two colors: yellow or beige. At its small facility in Peoria, Illinois (in a former Pabst Blue Ribbon factory), TerraVia produces its lipid and protein powders, but the bulk of its production comes from a large plant built beside a sugar mill in Brazil. Unlike Earthrise, which uses sunlight to produce growth, TerraVia grows its algae in the dark inside large fermentation tanks. Without sunlight, the algae need nutrients to grow and TerraVia has tried several different sources of plant-based cellulose: switch grass, sorghum, wood pulp, and good old-fashioned city waste, but for now it’s using cane sugar from the mill next door. The Brazil plant isn’t at capacity yet, but when it is, it can produce 100,000 metric tons of food-grade oil annually. In South America, Unilever is already using TerraVia’s algal oil in place of palm oil in its personal-care products. Besides being bad for you, harvesting palm oil destroys large swaths of tropical forests that are home to endangered animals and so is being targeted by both nutrition advocates and environmentalists; TerraVia is hoping to be the company that replaces it. Creating an entirely new manufacturing process is complicated, and TerraVia has yet to turn a profit, racking up tens of millions of debt annually. The stock price is hovering in the one-dollar range. It has also had legal battles, notably the sudden end to a short-lived partnership with Roquette, a French algae maker. The goal was to build a third algae plant, but the relationship ended due to “divergent” views. TerraVia was also hit with bad press this past October when Soylent meal-replacement shakes and bars, which used TerraVia aglae, caused many of its customers to get violently ill. At a loss for which of its more than 40 ingredients was the culprit for reported digestive issues, Soylent pointed the finger at TerraVia algae. In an attempt to distance itself from further damaging news, TerraVia put out a press release stating it will no longer supply ingredients to Soylent. (Soylent declined to comment for this story.) advertisement But for other partners, algae is working. Enjoy Life Foods, maker of allergy-friendly foods including vegan and gluten-free baking mixes, began using TerraVia’s algal powder because it was looking for a sustainable, plant-based protein source that wasn’t rice or soy. It took a mind shift for the company to embrace it, says Joel Warady, Enjoy Life’s chief sales and marketing officer. “The initial reaction was, ‘Who would want algae in our pancakes?'” Enjoy Life also embraced algae because it is allergen-free. As we are now a universally picky population of eaters––vegan, gluten-free, lactose intolerant, celiac––one of the primary reasons to produce with algae is that it’s free of all known dietary allergens. While TerraVia works almost exclusively on the commercial side, they do produce a home cooking oil called Thrive. “Five years ago consumer perception on algae would have been a question mark. One of the reasons we did Thrive was to get consumer acceptance,” says Mody. Thrive sales have tripled quarter over quarter through word of mouth alone, and the company just announced it’s been adopted by Bon Appétit Management Company, a food service company that operates more than 650 cafés including the ones at Google. Fish Food And More And algae isn’t just a replacement for human cuisine. TerraVia recently began producing AlgaPrimeDHA, an omega-3-rich product for commercial fisheries. Because our oceans are depleted and overfished, fish farms are being forced to feed fewer anchovies–small fish that are high in omega-3s–to their fish. The TerraVia product replaces those nutrients without the need to catch more anchovies. To bring it to market, it partnered with BioMar––a leading supplier in the aquaculture industry. Vidar Gundersen, BioMar’s global sustainability director, says that customers are already harvesting salmon raised solely on AlgaPrimeDHA. And there’s more to come. Big names (Nestlé, Unilever) are developing algae into pet food and functional drinks, and your favorite appetizer may soon go “green.” New Wave Foods, a Bay Area startup committed to sustainable seafood, is crafting shrimp made from algae and will have it on the market this year; and Algama, a well-funded French startup, is working on a mayo spread and a sports drink. In fact, the drinks aisle is a good place to watch for innovation, and that’s where Elliot Roth, founder of Spira, a live-algae drink, is starting. Roth’s vibrant green drink was at first flavorless, a hard-to-achieve win that the company achieved while part of a synthetic biology accelerator in Cork, Ireland. When they tested the drink with consumers, they were confused. It tasted like nothing, but it was dark green, which was unsettling. Now it tastes like watermelon. Creating algae-based products for fickle and unadventurous shoppers is complicated, but the now booming algae industry is confidant it can succeed. “It won’t become mainstream until we figure out the flavor, but I see [algae] as a staple crop like kale was in the early 2000s,” says Roth. Now a commonplace ingredient found everywhere, kale can’t hold a candle to the potential of algae as a crop, an ingredient, and a business. Larissa Zimberoff has written for Forbes, Mashable, Lucky Peach, and many other publications. |
0 CMPD officer travels 4,700 miles, risks life for better one in US CHARLOTTE, N.C. - Charlotte-Mecklenburg police Officer Yency Contreras was 17 years old and living in Honduras when he decided he was going to change his life. He was the oldest of seven children, all living with their parents in a shack with dirt floors, no bathroom and a leaky makeshift roof. “I saw violence happening, and I saw poverty, and I saw this crime happening, and nothing was being done, so I realized this is not the place where I want to be,” Contreras said. (Officer Contreras, in the purple shirt, with his family in Honduras) Without telling his mother where he was headed, he left home for the United States. Contreras didn’t speak English, and he only had a sixth grade education He climbed onto the roof of a freight train, which was frequently referred to as the “Death Train,” because countless immigrants died or lost limbs trying to hop on or off. He rode atop of the train for 18 days. He would only get off when he felt safe enough at stops and would sneak off and beg for food and water. He reached the border of the United States. He was dehydrated, sick and hungry. Contreras went into a Catholic church where he was given food, medicine for his fever and a few dollars, which he used to buy a calling card. He met up with a smuggler to help him cross into the United States. Contreras and a group of people walked for days until they reached Tuscon, Arizona. His main destination was Georgia, where some of his family lived. During his journey to Georgia, he was robbed and went days without food. He said he kept going, until eventually, his body gave up and he passed out. He was caught by border patrol. At 17, Yency Contreras took a dangerous and illegal journey from Honduras to the US. Now, he's an @CMPD officer. https://t.co/VX1cHTJKMJ — CMPD News (@CMPD) June 21, 2017 He was sent to a juvenile detention center in El Paso, Texas, where he was told he’d be held until he turned 18 and then he would be returned to Honduras. But while he was at the detention center, his ability to play the guitar caught the eye of a missionary couple who visited inmates. “A few days later, I asked them if there was a way to get me out, and they said, yes. I went home with them, and I basically had a new family in the U.S.,” Contreras said. With his American family’s help, he became a U.S. citizen, earned his GED diploma and earned a bachelor’s degree in criminal justice from the University of Central Florida. Contreras decided to move to Charlotte, because he had cousins who lived in the city. He said he wanted to join the police force because of the violence he saw in Honduras. Contreras joined the Charlotte-Mecklenburg Police Department in 2014 as a volunteer, and then moved through the ranks. He is assigned to the overnight shift in the Metro Division. He is also certified to translate or write statements for people who don’t know English. “You see people, you can tell there’s a need, and I, kind of, relate to that,” Contreras said. He’s working to land a spot on the CMPD unit that’s trying to stop human trafficking. “I grew up seeing injustice. I grew up seeing crime, and people just getting away with things,” Contreras said. Contreras said he sends money to his family in Honduras, who now lives in a real house. He wanted to share his story, because he wanted Americans to understand why so many people will do anything to come to the United States. He also wanted young people to strive for their dreams even though they may seem impossible. Read more top trending stories on wsoctv.com: © 2019 Cox Media Group. |
by Andrew Thompson Last week, H.F. Lenfest, the owner of Philadelphia’s daily newspapers, the Inquirer and Daily News, donated the parent company of the papers and their website, philly.com, to a local philanthropic foundation. He included $20 million to support their operations. For the past decade, the papers’ turmoil has tracked with the dailies of other cities: In 2009, they filed for bankruptcy, and have undergone multiple rounds of layoffs since, most recently in November, when forty-six staff members were let go. This move relieves them of the seemingly unattainable goal of profitability. Lenfest was the last among of a series of owners, all of whom had believed either that the market would change, or that they could somehow change it; his donation seems to mark the end of that belief in Philadelphia. The transfer of the city’s dailies to a nonprofit comes just months after another defeat for local print media. In September, the long-struggling alt-weekly Philadelphia City Paper closed. Over the last decade, somewhat in lockstep with the dailies’ degeneration, issues of City Paper had shrunk to a gaunt thirty-or-so pages, while the masthead slowly withered. After years of appearing terminal, everything ended all at once: It was bought by a competitor — the owner of Philadelphia Weekly, a shell publication of events listings — and closed in a single motion. “This was supposed to be a Music issue,” a longtime editor began an article in the final issue. A going-away party was thrown at the city’s press club, attended by hundreds of former staffers and contributors who, like myself, began their careers at the paper. By the end of the night, most of the orange honor boxes that had occupied small posts on the city streets since the nineteen eighties were collected and thrown into a warehouse. The last issue of City Paper included a meditation on the state of the alt-weekly, executed as a brilliant conceit: a play starring two anthropomorphic issues of the paper talking over drinks at a local bar, one named CITY PAPER, the other CP. The fictional bar contained people actually interviewed by reporters, who were cast as characters in bar scene. “CITY PAPER notices a woman across the room at a table by herself, reading a novel and sipping chardonnay. It is magazine writer SUSAN ORLEAN.” The papers invite Orlean over to the table, and a bit later invite Mike Newall, a writer brought up at City Paper and now a reporter for the Philadelphia Inquirer, who “comes over with a tray of shots.” NEWALL: It hurts, it hurts a lot. There are so many great voices on all these platforms, but are we still getting those 3,000-word take-outs on those platforms? Is there a place where people are letting it rip? A city without a weekly — it’s a sad thing. CP: Well, it’s not like there’s not going to be an alt-weekly — CITY PAPER, interrupting: But how the hell did this happen? Was it us? Is it alt-weeklies in general? Everything was so clear in the ’90s. Do we even make sense in 2015? ORLEAN: Each time the technology for delivering information changes, there’s a huge change. I think back in the day advertisers were drawn to alt-weeklies because they had a younger demographic, but I’m just not sure younger people read newspapers anymore. Only one longstanding Philadelphia print publication has experienced a largely upward trajectory in recent years. Over the past three years, Philadelphia, a glossy magazine aimed at an affluent and overwhelmingly white audience in a city that is forty-four percent black and has a poverty rate of more than twenty-five percent, has more than tripled its web traffic from six hundred thousand visitors per month to nearly two-and-a-half million, and increased its digital revenue by fifty percent. Tim Haas, the magazine’s director of digital operations, showed me a graph of Facebook engagements-per-week with Philly media: Philly.com received about twenty-six thousand, with phillymag.com close behind, at twenty-one thousand. (The next highest site received about five thousand.) In other words, the print media market, occupied by multiple dailies and weeklies, has been supplanted online by a duopoly played out between the assets of a non-profit and a glossy magazine. Earlier this summer, I met Tom McGrath, the magazine’s editor until his recent promotion to Chief Content and Strategy Officer of its parent company, Metro Corp., in his thirty-sixth floor corner office downtown. “I think daily newspapers have looked at the rise of the internet and understandably seen a threat,” he said. “And I think if you’re a monthly magazine, you look at the internet and see a lot of opportunity. And in the first roughly hundred years of the magazine, we’ve had a once-a-month relationship with our audience, and the web now lets us have a daily relationship with our audience. From our standpoint, that’s a really good thing.” In an ad last May to find an editor to helm its business blog, BizPhilly, its thirteenth and most recent vertical, Philadelphia invited the applicant to join the city’s “dominant media brand,” a claim that once upon a time would have sounded inflated. (I should note here that I contributed to the magazine’s website in 2013.) “I take my hat off to them,” Mike Schaeffer, the editor of Washingtonian, Washington DC’s urban glossy, told me. “In a city where the media has really taken an enormous hit, where the big wonderful leading dailies have been in terrible financial straits and have suffered from changing management, I think they’ve had this — there’s been this big empty space in the middle of the conversation and they have really smartly stepped into it.” As a magazine, Philadelphia would be formally recognizable to residents of pretty much any city with a namesake urban glossy, from Los Angeles to St. Louis to Atlanta. Urban glossies came of age in the nineteen sixties and developed a fairly standard template — service packages, gastrophilia, power profiles and generalized urbanity — across the country during a publishing heyday that had yet to introduce general interest magazines focused on a local audience. Some of the similarities within the genre are surely teleological (which city has wealthy residents that don’t like eating out?), but the familiar urban glossy model was also developed by regional editors working in concert. “There was a little, almost a fraternity, although it included some women editors, the top city mag editors, and we would sort of trade trade-secrets and such,” Richard Babcock, who ran Chicago for eleven years, told me. “You could shamelessly rip off a colleague basically because you weren’t direct competitors; they might be on the other side of the country.” Philadelphia has standing to the claim of the country’s first urban glossy. In 1908, the Philadelphia Trades Council, a precursor to the Chamber of Commerce, published the first issue of “The Philadelphia Magazine, A Quarterly Business Magazine.” After a few pages of ads, the new publication introduced itself: “The purpose of this Magazine is to exploit the business interests of Philadelphia; to set forth the advantages of the City as an industrial, trade and commercial centre. In its pages will appear the announcements of representative manufacturers, wholesalers, and reliable business houses.” The introduction was followed by an essay by the mayor’s statistician, and small, charming pieces of mercantile propaganda rattling off Philadelphia’s output in rugs, millinery, silk, and so on, every issue bellowing the city’s industrial dominance. For the next forty years, Philadelphia took stock of the state of trade and manufacturing, railed against the Sherman Antitrust Act, and published the notes of Chamber affairs. It wasn’t until 1947, with the post-war era’s increase in leisure time and discretionary income, that Philadelphia began to resemble a modern magazine — prosaic reports on shoe production began to be replaced with featurettes on model homes in Gladwyne, embryonic versions of service pieces appeared on where to vacation on the newly popular airplane, and articles on the miracles of asbestos that could be appreciated by a generally optimistic middle class, developer or otherwise. Pre-war, the Chamber publication was written by executives and city officials; post-war, it was written about them. Pre-war, it was about commodity production; post-war, it was increasingly about consumption. But despite the somewhat sudden change in tone, the magazine didn’t lose its focus on business, and a condensed and updated version of the 1908 manifesto was published for a decade under the masthead beginning in the late forties: “Philadelphia Magazine is a business magazine serving ‘The Workshop of The World’ and is dedicated to the interests of those who manage the many and varied commercial and industrial enterprises in the Greater Philadelphia Area. It is devoted, in cooperation with the Chamber of Commerce, to promoting, for the Area, an over-all development of business, civic and cultural progress.” Over time, the publication became a financial liability to the Chamber, which sold it in 1951 to Municipal Publications, an outfit owned by the newspaper owner Arthur Lipson — and which would become Metro Corp., the magazine’s present owner. Arthur functioned as the magazine’s publisher until the late fifties, at which point his son, Herb, took over as editor, and then publisher. Herb hired Alan Halpern, the editor-in-chief who steered the magazine until the nineteen eighties, and when Halpern died in 2005, Philadelphia memorialized him by writing, “He made this magazine America’s most honored regional publication and, along the way, created the city magazine genre.” I met the eighty-six-year-old Herb Lipson in July in his office at Philadelphia, which doubles as the headquarters of Metro Corp. He wore a brown dogtooth suit, and the combination of his own diminutiveness and his circular, black horn-rimmed glasses inevitably gave him the likeness of the character from the Six Flags commercials. His desk, a gold-fabricked antique upon which sat more antiques next to a south wall lined with framed nineteenth-century hunt scenes, was littered with scraps of paper. I assumed they were drafts of his column, which appears on the first page of every issue of Philadelphia. “It’s not always focused on Philly the way it used to be,” he said of the column, typically a brand of provocative conservatism that, over the past sixty years, has targeted desegregation, plaintiffs in the Bhopal disaster, and what he deemed excessive coverage of the events in Ferguson. “It’s things that bother me. Things like political correctness and hypocrisy. I’m trying to figure what I’m going to do next month.” “Is that what that is?” I asked about a yellow sheet torn from a legal pad. “No, this is a letter from someone who loves my column. I haven’t read it yet.” “Do you want to read it now?” “’Dear Mr. Lipson, I have been threatening to put pen to paper in observance of your monthly opinion pieces for some time and now is the time’ — I haven’t read this yet, it could be horrible — ‘I look forward to your comments and must admit that I cannot remember disagreeing with any of them.’ Gotta be an insane person. ‘Maybe it’s because of our age’ — I think he was born in ’34, whoever this is — ’and our upbringing is different than it is today. Values and tradition mean something to us. The beginning of our corrupt culture occurred in the ‘sixties and some of those characters ended up in D.C. government.’” And so on. When he finished, he reached for a manila folder buried under more notes and pulled out a printed copy of a 1968 story in the magazine. “I have here the root cause, I don’t know what the date is — ‘Pray for Barbara’s Baby,’” he said. “It talks about Barbara and her baby and how in those days it was the beginning of the Great Society and they were rewarded financially for having babies, and she was having a baby and all her friends had babies, and she was sixteen or so. And because, I would say most of our problems today are the lack of fathers — I don’t want to get into that, but that’s what gets me crazy, the hypocrisy and PC shit, that drives me crazy.” When his father bought Philadelphia, in 1951, Herb Lipson had recently graduated from Lafayette College, and he moved to the city to work on the magazine. He was slightly less button-down than his father; ultimately, his magazine would craft the bulk of its contents from the primary colors of power, capital and sex, only two of which sat well with the Chamber. “If we ever did something a Chamber member objected to, the shit would hit the fan,” he said. “We’d hear from the Chamber, ‘you shouldn’t be doing these articles, this that and the other thing.’” Philadelphia semi-officially remained a business publication after Arthur’s company took over, subtitled “The Magazine for Executives.” In 1960, a reader wrote a letter to the editor asking, “I wonder why you refer to the Magazine as being ‘for executives.’ Does that limit your readership?” The staffer assigned to respond wrote, “We’re in agreement with your objection. Of late, the magazine has been transcending its executive audience and building up additional circulation on the professional and governmental levels. We’ve kicked around alternative slogans and toyed with substitute words like ‘leaders’ and ‘influentials’ but have not come up with any that rang the bell.” Philadelphia still published corporate board photospreads well into the sixties, but its birth as a consumer magazine occurred with “Lurid Locust Street: A shocking report on Philadelphia’s sin center,” written in October 1961 by Gaeton Fonzi. Alternating between descriptions of Locust Street and The Way It Used To Be, Fonzi wrote in sixties magazine jazz with vignettes of rich downtowners buying champagne for high-class hookers soliciting prospective johns: “A husky redhead who had stepped from the stage after rasping through a series of old standards approached the man. ‘Waiting for someone?’ she asked. Disillusionment had begun to set in.” Afterward, the magazine began to assume a role as a white-collar version of Rolling Stone, chronicling a loosening of morals and rising of counterculture and the civil rights movement with something between fascination and worry. Fonzi became the closest thing the region’s leaders and influencers had to Hunter S. Thompson, his stories about politics and the newfangled Playboy clubs sandwiched between articles like “You Can Still Make a Million” and exposés of sly tactics of life insurance salesmen. In 1966, Fonzi wrote “The Marijuana Thing,” Philadelphia’s version of the then-nationally ubiquitous weed article and the magazine’s first acknowledgement of counterculture’s existence. He interviewed college students who got high and wrote in the language of a detached, scouting anthropologist letting parents know what their kids were up to. “We did stuff that was outrageous. Even I was scared to death,” Lipson said, mentioning an article about group sex on the Main Line. Like Lipson’s knowingly egging columns, it often became difficult to tell if the magazine was being satirical or serious or both at once. Fonzi’s epic stories on the Warren Commission and Walter Annenberg were serious; “Ripping Off The Welfare State,” a step-by-step guide “for the gainfully unemployed who have managed to shuck the Puritan Ethic and are oblivious to the social stigma of having someone else earn your living for you,” was satire pointed in a weird direction. Others were unclear. “A Millionaire’s Guide to Christmas Shopping,” with its recommendations for where to buy cigars for your banker and which safari your nephew might like, could as soon be read as a jab at the super-rich or a useful buyers’ guide, or both. Over the following decade, Philadelphia got enough attention that by the seventies, issues ran upwards of two hundred pages a month and continued to grow in circulation. “No other advertising medium in this region has a greater concentration of affluent and influential readers,” Lipson would later write in a letter to readers, ultimately settling on the “influencer” title. In 1971, propelled by the success of Philadelphia, Lipson purchased another chamber publication in Boston and created Boston magazine, which is also still run by Metro Corp. Lipson and Halpern spent the seventies publishing screeds against Mayor Frank Rizzo, whose villainy reached comic-book stature, and fretting over increasingly brutal trades unions and the ever-relaxing mores of the day’s youth. Meanwhile, the service packages that have since become the cornerstones of most urban glossies began to appear: “The Best and Worst of Philly” was first published in 1974, adopted from Boston, while the first version of the Top Docs feature was introduced in 1977. Within a couple of years, service pieces — ”How to Be Single, with 10 Great Pickup Lines”; “The Ten Safest Suburbs”; “20 Great Summer Vacations” — began gracing the cover of nearly every issue. The seventies ended with the greatest population loss in the city’s history: Suburbanization reached a peak; the good jobs finished leaving; crack arrived; and the unwinding began. But the worse it got in Philadelphia — aside from the occasional eruption of racial anxiety, like a piece published that same year, “Is Philadelphia Going Black?,” which grimly predicted the growing black population of the city over the coming decade — the better it was in Philadelphia. In 1979, the magazine published one of the first of many packages on home buying, called “The New Philadelphia: Get it While it’s Hot!,” a prospectus for and about young home buyers moving into West Philly and Center City. “What was a well-kept secret has blossomed into a renaissance,’” it said. A few years later, in 1982, it prophesied “18 Ways You Can Profit From the Coming Boom,” reporting that “builders, investors and businessmen are convinced that a vital, new Philadelphia will reposition itself as the primary metropolis of the Middle Atlantic and discard its reputation as just another secondary or tertiary city in the Northeast.” Who were the inhabitants of this new Philadelphia? They were, according to one piece titled “The New Philadelphians,” a suited neo-Organization Man with a Burberry scarf draped on one arm and a girlfriend draped on the other, looking down at a geezer in his armchair reading the defunct Bulletin. “Something exciting is happening in Philadelphia,” the article began. “Over the last ten — and particularly the last five — years, New Philadelphians have been arriving in record numbers. These talented newcomers are the sort who view the world as a horse race and themselves as leaders of the pack.” By this time, the magazine’s audience of upper-crust readers increasingly lived outside of the city and in the suburbs. But the steady suburbanization of the city’s white population and the magazine’s focus on that demographic created a dissonance between the name Philadelphia and its suburban, expatriated audience. In another 1982 piece, titled “Bury My Heart at the Tacony-Palmyra Bridge” (and subtitled, “You can take the lady out of Philly, but you can’t take Philly out of the lady”), Pamela Erbe, a suburban-born writer, recalls her childhood of molting her Philly-region accent — one that is as elusive to transliterate as it is to impersonate — and she reminisces on Philadelphia’s essence after her departure from a brief time living here in her twenties. Her essay is one of the clearest expressions of tension between suburbanite-cum-urbanites’ desire for deluxe amenities while maintaining a nebulous notion of urban identity I’ve ever read: Some people used to say that what was uniquely Philadelphia was its image of itself as a loser. They said the city’s character developed out of lousy athletic teams, lousy restaurants and a lack of any culture…Nobody wants to return to the days when the only decent food in town was served at home. The boom in entertainment is nothing but a plus. And it’s great to have the Phillies, Eagles and Sixers recognized as good teams…But neither do I want Philly to become so homogenized that it’s nothing more than New York South or Washington North, and ‘Philadelphia Style’ is just recycled Soho Chic or Georgetown Panache. When I miss Philadelphia, I, like every other expatriate I’ve ever talked to, miss those things that make Philly Philly. Erbe’s essay is something of a rough prototype of every identity story the magazine would go on to publish over the next thirty years: To affluent and aspirational whites, Philadelphia was the accent, it was the Mummers (a local Mardi Gras-on-New-Year’s parade), the Italians (for their food), the “Stores with Funny Names,” Connie Mack Stadium (now demolished). “Most of the stories [today] are the stories we created years ago,” Ron Javers, who was editor at that time, told me. He was referring specifically to the service pieces, but Philadelphia began to reiterate not just restaurant guides, and not just stories about singles, children, developer profiles and true crime, but a particular narrative of the city, one of young pioneers rediscovering the allure of urban charm. Throughout the eighties, alongside features on careers and the social scene, the magazine published a monthly one-page featurette called “The Real Philadelphia,” the words backgrounded by a silhouette of the then-dwarfed skyline. The Real Philadelphia was the city of Erbe’s memories, nostalgic for the present — corner stores, the Ben Franklin Bridge, Rittenhouse Square, and other miscellanies from the mise en scene of urban life. Over the next two decades, the Philly explosion continued in the pages of the magazine. “Philadelphia’s High Renaissance is upon us, a flowering seeded in but far surpassing the proto-renaissaince of the ‘70s,” a food package said in January 2000. There were booms in tech, the magazine telling readers how to “GET RICH QUICK!” There was talk of “prices gone wild” in the housing market and “teens gone wild” in the suburbs. The New Philadelphians brought capital to a new kind of skyline: “Those moving into apartments are the first generation of outsiders lured by reporters of renaissance.” The magazine profiled the developers of the high-rises as the New Philadelphians began scouting Fishtown as the “Philly ‘hood that promises to be the next Northern Liberties” and the restaurateur Stephen Starr built cafeteria after luxe cafeteria to feed them all. If one had read nothing but Philadelphia, they would be forgiven for not knowing that somewhere in all this — after the bond market crashed and the rate of incarceration grew so wildly that local prisons overflowed and the plan to GET RICH QUICK burst with the rest of the first internet bubble — that the prices gone wild in the housing market beckoned the global financial system to a state of near collapse, causing a diffuse local mayhem and whisking away the lives of large numbers of Philadelphians. In 1975, Lipson started a weekly paper called the new paper, the magazine’s answer to the idea of an alt-weekly. It lasted only a few issues before it folded; in 1991, Javers recalled its brief life, writing, “I’ve always thought the problem with the new paper was that it was ahead of its time. It was designed to attract Center City yuppies. Trouble was, there were no yuppies in 1975, only a few handfuls of urban pioneers slowly seeking to regentrify (hate that word!) city neighborhoods that had fallen on hard times.” Philadelphia’s sprawling web operation is something of a delayed fulfillment of the new paper’s attempts to create a media space specifically for these so-called urban pioneers of New Philadelphia — essentially the magazine minus the suburban coverage and on a non-monthly timeframe. Between the beginning of the “High Renaissance” in 2000 and when the magazine’s internet and social media strategy launched in earnest in 2013, Center City and “up-and-coming” neighborhoods from river to river were filled with the contemporary equivalent of the yuppie, the Young Person in an Ethically Produced Hoodie, providing the long-awaited audience for thirteen different verticals. Each one reads like a streaming extract of standard Philadelphia topics, distilled on their own blogs, and all of it written in the crisp, irresistible language of the internet — the dialect of “here’s why” and “X Things To Know About Subject” and so on. “What we’ve done is try to do a real mix on Facebook,” Haas, Philadelphia’s director of digital operations, told me. “We’re like half news there and half service from the other channels. Certain things, like a lot of in depth and political type reporting and that sort of stuff, doesn’t travel very well.” What does work, though, “is a lot of identity stuff, like what we call Philadelphia identity.” Haas pointed to a few pieces, including “The 25 Most Beautiful Philly Streets” (a list of streets); a piece about the imminent renovation of the Gallery, a lower income mall in Center City that other writers on the website had been clamoring to close for some time (“One hailed as a cornerstone of a Philadelphia renaissance…” the dek began); and a piece about a cookie factory in the Northeast closing, taking with it the smell of sweet gingersnaps. “What we try to figure out is, How do we make this snappy and worth clicking on but also giving it enough context,” Haas said. “Ithink the overall strategy is trying to put out the stuff that draws the community together, and by that I mean, through this identity stuff.” The specter of Erbe’s essay floats throughout the site–in a piece about how far Rocky would have actually run had his iconic last scene been transposed onto an actual map of the city; in a humor piece about using different Philadelphia landmarks, like the sports stadium, to house the papal pilgrims. In 2014, “Why the Philadelphia Accent Is So Fascinating” looked at recent national press about the Philadelphia accent and a Penn study of its gradual disappearance. “The findings, which only apply to white Philadelphians ‘with deep ties to the city,’ are interesting: The change in accent is happening among Philadelphians regardless of background or education level, language change is primarily driven by women, and the Philadelphia accent — once the ‘northern-most southern city’ — is shifting to be more like Northern U.S. cities.” “Yes, Philly, we’re starting to sound more like New York and Boston,” it read, Erbe’s fear of the city’s homogenization finally realized. “I know. It’s enough to make you want to get off the pavement and run screaming through the shtreets.” The question that loomed for more than a decade over Philadelphia media was perhaps definitively answered when Lenfest handed his dailies over to nonprofit and City Paper died. That the dailies are now a non-profit is perhaps a technicality after having operated like one for some time. They will continue to struggle while trying to cover the city, the alt-weeklies will rest in peace, and Philadelphia will chronicle the city less as a place than as an idea. “Who reads Philadelphia Magazine, and why?” an editor wrote in 2000. He offered a profile: “Power players, suburban moms and dads, hip Old City types, opera buffs, Flyers fans, fashion victims, Philadelphians in exile (a surprising chunk of our subscriber base), and anyone else who cares about our city and region. This magazine is for you. And about you.” In my interview with McGrath, I had asked him if he felt Philadelphia had new obligations with its newfound prevalence in our daily stream of local information. “We’ve always as a publication tried to be relevant to what’s happening in the city and what’s happening in our readers’ lives, and that mandate remains exactly the same. Does it mean that now that we’re covering things daily that we’re going to cover, I don’t know, a neighborhood meeting, well, anywhere?” he said. “I think the DNA of the brand is unlikely to change.” Photo by Pat Belanger |
We previewed the NFC North on our latest "Around The League Podcast." Some big-picture thoughts are below. We've already previewed the AFC East, AFC North, AFC South, AFC West and NFC East. Green Bay Packers not unanimous choice but ... The Packers have won the division in two consecutive years and made the playoffs in four consecutive years. There's no reason to believe that streak will change while Aaron Rodgers and Clay Matthews are in their primes. Three of the four Around The League writers picked the Packers to win the division, with Marc Sessler taking the Chicago Bears. Two of us have the Packers at 12-4, which would be good enough for a playoff bye. Spoiler alert for our season preview: I have the Packers going to the Super Bowl. Mike McCarthy and Aaron Rodgers are the best offensive coach-QB combination in the NFL until proven otherwise. Eddie Lacy adds a new dimension to the running game. But I like them to rebound as a team this season because of defensive improvement. The secondary has enviable depth at cornerback and safety. The defensive line is deeper than it has been during McCarthy's run, with a promising first-round draft pick in Datone Jones. A healthy Matthews changes this team; he still should have one or two Defensive Player of the Year-caliber seasons left in him. Lot of love for Chicago Bears coach Marc Trestman Division previews Around the League previews the key topics for the 2013 season in each division, including predicting final records for each team. AFC » East | North | South | West NFC » East | North | South | West I was the only writer to have the Bears under .500, with two of us putting Chicago at 10-6. Lovie Smith never had a top-20 offense during his long run in Chicago, and Trestman should change that. The right side of the offensive line looks improved, and Jay Cutler has his best quarterback tutor since Mike Shanahan in Denver. Along with Matt Forte, the pieces are in place to improve. Chicago's defense has been so good for so long that it's taken for granted. New defensive coordinator Mel Tucker has a lot of talent to play with, especially on the line. Nothing would surprise us with this team. The roster is good enough to make a playoff run, with an improvement in offense possibly countered by a decline in turnovers on defense. We like everything we hear from (and about) Trestman, but he's still an unknown. Detroit Lions no longer are trendy Detroit was a trendy team following its 2011 playoff appearance. Then a slew of arrests and a ridiculously unlucky 4-12 season cooled things. Many of the aspects that made the Lions a popular sleeper pick to begin with still are in place. Their vertical offense is very difficult to deal with. More importantly, their defensive tackle duo of Ndamukong Suh and Nick Fairley should be the best in the entire league. Defensive ends (and linebackers) will look better just playing with Suh/Fairley. There is not a lot separating a 4-12 team from a 10-6 playoff appearance. I was the only writer to put the Lions above .500, and Sessler was the only writer to put them back in the basement. The maturation of Matthew Stafford is the key. He's an average NFL starting quarterback who should be at the stage of his career where he pushes to another level. Minnesota Vikings set up for a fall The Vikings rode a historic season from Adrian Peterson and an improved defense to a 10-6 record last year. They are unlikely to repeat a 5-1 record in one-score games and need QB Christian Ponder to improve rapidly just to get to average. It's hard to teach pocket presence, and Ponder hasn't displayed the trait as a pro. There are plenty of solid aspects to this Vikings team, but you need to be outstanding in all facets to make up for a lackluster passing game. We just don't trust Ponder, Greg Jennings, rookie wide receiver Cordarrelle Patterson and tight end Kyle Rudolph to cobble together enough production. Listen to our entire NFC North preview right here. The " Around The League Podcast" is now available on iTunes! Click here to listen and subscribe. |
For decades, South Koreans have lived in a technical state of war with a hostile brother country that considers them traitors and imperialist lackeys. Throughout verbal attacks and periodic military ones, this nation of 50 million people has brushed off tensions, much as one might ignore a combative uncle at Thanksgiving. It’s similar this time around, as North Korea launches missiles and fires off increasingly incendiary threats, and as the United States responds with stark warnings and the strategic placement of an aircraft carrier. But now, there is one new wild card that South Koreans haven’t had to factor in before: President Trump. “I think I’ve become desensitized because North Korea’s nuclear threats have been going on for such a long time, and even though North Korea is a rogue state, they have to think about their survival,” said Kim Jin-young, a 20-year-old political science student at Yonsei University in Seoul. For this reason, she doesn’t worry much about what Kim Jong Un might do. (Reuters) “But Trump is capable of a lot of things, and his words have a huge impact on the economy and defense policy of South Korea,” she said while studying in the campus cafeteria on a rainy Monday. “I hope he doesn’t make decisions by himself and that he doesn’t abuse his power.” [ Pence tells North Korea not to test American resolve ] In the three months he has been president, Trump has proved himself quick to hit the send button on his early- morning tweets and willing, in Syria and Afghanistan, to order surprise airstrikes. Vice President Pence said in Seoul on Monday that North Korea should take note of Trump’s decisiveness in those cases and warned Pyongyang “not to test his resolve.” Kim Min-seob, an IT worker stopping for a coffee break with his colleague, said this concerned him. “Both Trump and Kim Jong Un are escalating the tensions by speaking about a possible war,” he said. “So the situation has become more serious under Trump. We know he does not stop at talking,” said Kim, 53. “He showed that by bombing Syria for using chemical weapons.” The Internet has delighted in comparing Kim Jong Un and Trump, as off-base as that might be. But both leaders have a decidedly blunt way of putting things. South Koreans stage a rally welcoming the visit of U.S. Vice President Mike Pence to Seoul. Pence declared Monday the "era of strategic patience is over" with North Korea, expressing impatience with the unwillingness of the regime to move toward ridding itself of nuclear weapons and ballistic missiles. But some South Koreans worry about the Trump administration’s seeming impulsiveness. (AP Photo/Ahn Young-joon) (Ahn Young-Joon/AP) “Trump speaks very aggressively, but I think it’s because of his lack of diplomatic experience,” said Song Baek-beom, a 26-year-old senior at Yonsei University. “He talked loudly during the campaign about prosecuting Hillary [Clinton], but he chose not to press charges against her. I don’t think Trump will turn all of his aggressive remarks into actions.” [ N. Korea didn’t test a nuclear weapon, but it did try to launch another missile ] The fact that South Korea hasn’t even had a president since Trump took office — the previous one, Park Geun-hye, was busy getting impeached, and the next one won’t be elected until May 9 — hasn’t helped. Although the leaders of Japan and China have been to Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort in Palm Beach, Fla., South Korea’s acting president has had only a few phone calls with Trump. South Koreans noticed when the president didn’t even mention them during a hasty news conference with Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe on the night in February when North Korea launched the first ballistic missile of his administration. But for every South Korean who’s worried about the uncertainty that Trump injects into this equation, there’s another who knows that the American president is surrounded by generals to whom he actually listens. “I heard Trump is a hard-liner, but would he take actions that would put South Korea in danger?” asked Kim Yoo-hwan, 60, who runs a printing store. “If the U.S. attacks North Korea, the North will hit South Korea in return, and then we’re in a war situation. So I don’t think Trump would start a war that easily.” [ A timeline of North Korea’s five nuclear tests and how the U.S. has responded ] And what about Kim Jong Un, who has shown himself to be hotheaded and ruthless? South Koreans are not so sure what the 33-year-old might do. “I worry more about Kim Jong Un than Trump, as it seems he’s willing to risk a war if attacked,” said Lee Ji-hoon, the manager of a dog cafe and hotel. “The recent assassination of Kim Jong Nam shows what Kim Jong Un is capable of,” Lee said. “I really hope it doesn’t happen, but I’m worried that Kim Jong Un might start a war if he comes under an attack.” But despite the new questions Trump has introduced, it’s business as usual in Seoul right now. The cars are caught in their regular traffic jams, the sidewalks are full of people staring into their cellphones, and the barbecue restaurants suffer their normal 6:30 p.m. rush of office workers. “We’re safe here!” Lee Ok-soo, who runs a dry-cleaning store with her husband, said, and laughed when asked whether she is concerned about the tension on the Korean Peninsula. “I support what Trump is doing now,” the 58-year-old said. “I hope he ties up the hands of North Korea so they can’t develop nuclear weapons anymore.” Fifield reported from Tokyo. Read more As tensions with North Korea flare, Trump spends quiet weekend at Mar-a-Lago Trump’s national security aide won’t say if she’s being redeployed to Singapore China’s Korea policy ‘in tatters’ as both North and South defy sanctions Today’s coverage from Post correspondents around the world Like Washington Post World on Facebook and stay updated on foreign news |
“Jurassic World” now holds the record for the biggest opening in movie history. After the final numbers were tallied, the dinosaur thriller inched past “Marvel’s the Avengers” to become top dog on the all-time list, with a U.S. debut of $208.8 million. The superhero blockbuster was the previous record holder with a $207.4 million bow. It also topped “Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows – Part 2” and its $314 million opening to set a new benchmark for an overseas launch with $315.6 million. Universal, the studio behind the film, initially estimated that “Jurassic World” would open to $204.6 million domestically, but the blockbuster had a stronger than anticipated Sunday. It had some stiff competition for audience attention on Sunday night — both Game 5 of the NBA Finals and the season finale of HBO’s “Game of Thrones” generated a great deal of buzz that could have cut into ticket sales. Box office analysts say that moviegoers may have opted to check out the film on Sunday after hearing about its monster opening in order to be part of the conversation. “It inspires people to go to the movie theater,” said Paul Dergarabedian, senior media analyst at Rentrak. “Everybody gets caught up in it.” Related 'Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom' Team on Expanding the Dino Universe China Box Office: ‘Wandering Earth’ Reaches $557 Million in Second Week Legendary co-financed the sequel, which cost $150 million to produce. Colin Trevorrow directed “Jurassic World,” with Chris Pratt and Bryce Dallas Howard playing the leads. Universal debuted the film in 4,274 theaters, the widest release in studio history. Heading into the weekend most analysts predicted that “Jurassic World” would kick off with between $125 million and $135 million. BoxOffice.com Chief Analyst Phil Contrino said that “Jurassic World’s” over-performance is analogous the recent monster openings of “Guardians of the Galaxy” and “American Sniper” that dwarfed estimates on the strength of audiences’ reactions. “This was off the charts big in terms of how it broke out and became must see really fast,” said Contrino. “This is a movie that benefited from a new era of Thursday evening shows, which helped spread a very enthusiastic word of mouth.” Globally, “Jurassic World” became the first movie to cross $500 million in a single weekend. It debuted to a massive $100 million in China and opened in first place in all 66 international territories where the film was released. Based on that performance, Contrino said the film will cross the $1 billion mark “without even blinking.” Universal crossed the $1 billion mark at the domestic box office, beating Paramount’s record achieved on June 22, 2008. It has also gone past $3 billion worldwide, passing Fox’s record of $3 billion on June 30, 2010. UPDATE, 10:15 a.m. PDT |
Posted on by denverabc 17 Dec 2010 – Even before the bodies of the prisoners of San Miguel have gone cold the show by the guardians of order to hide what happened has already begun. More prisons seems to be the most feasible solution for those who profit by imprisonment. How many lives have the prisons taken away, how many dead stain the uniform of the guards? The deaths of the 81 prisoners add themselves to a long list of crimes that have gone unpunished, which the State is solely responsible for. Inside many prisons, many have decided to face the torturers and take action. Here, in the women’s detention centre, every day the number of women who join the Hunger Strike of thousands of prisoners is increasing in all the territory dominated by the Chilean State. Many have also stitched their mouths and are isolated in the punishment sections. If anyone who dares to put the laws of the powerful in question is a criminal, then I assume that denomination. As I finish writing these words, they are searching the former Penitenciario. The news reports that there are 1,500 prisoners on hunger strike, the revolt must be punished. The fire made its presence both inside the Extermination Centre and outside, by their families. You don’t embellish cages, you destroy them! For the end of this and any other society. No more Anti-terror Laws. Mónika Caballero, Anarchist Prisoner, Special High Security Section Female Extermination Centre, Santiago, Chile Advertisements Share this: Share Print Twitter Facebook Reddit Email Like this: Like Loading... Related Filed under: Prisoner Writings | Tagged: Anarchists in Trouble, Chile, Mónika Caballero, Prison | |
most While the probability that the LHC will see any BSM physics (supersymmetric or not) has plunged dramatically, the conditional probability that if the LHC were to see BSM physics, then said new physics would turn out to be supersymmetry, has gone up. ----- Jacques Distler is a Professor of Physics at the University of Texas at Austin, and a distinguished theorist, as well as a physics blogger. Along with experimentalist Gordon Watts (who covered $250) he took my $1000 bet that the LHC would not discover new physics in its first 10/fb of proton-proton collision data. I discussed my take on the bet in a previous post; here Jacques explains his point of view, why he took the bet, and what he thinks of the present situation with new physics searches at the high-energy frontier.The article below has appeared today at Distler's blog , and I reproduce it here with his permission.* * *It’s been 20 years since I had the surreal experience of turning on C-Span late at night to see my future boss, Steve Weinberg, testify before Congress on behalf of the SSC.Steve, alas, was unsuccessful; the SSC was cancelled, and the High Energy Physics community threw our collective eggs in the basket of the LHC. The SSC, at sqrt(s)=40TeV, was designed as a discovery machine for TeV-scale physics. The LHC, with a design energy of sqrt(s)=14TeV, is the best one could do, using the existing LEP tunnel. It was guaranteed to discover the Higgs. But for new physics, one would have to be somewhat lucky.14 TeV sounds like more than enough energy, to hunt for new particles with masses of a few TeV. But that appearance is deceptive. The protons circulating in a hadron collider are like sacks of marbles, and each marble (“parton”, if you want to sound sophisticated) carries only a fraction of the total kinetic energy of the proton. At the energies we are talking about, the collisions are actually parton-parton collisions. So it’s the energy of the pair of partons undergoing the actual collision that matters. And that energy is typically far less than the nominal sqrt(s). In fact, things are slightly worse than the metaphor implies. Each sack contains a variable number of marbles, and the mean number of marbles (sharing, between them, the total kinetic energy of the proton) increases with increasing sqrt(s).The upshot is that, at a hadron collider, the “interesting” collisions — the ones where, by chance, the colliding partons happen to carry a large-enough fraction of the proton’s total energy — are few and far between. To some extent, you can compensate for their rarity by increasing the total number of collisions (running the machine at higher luminosity). That introduces its own difficulties, but it’s the tradeoff that the designers of the LHC needed to make.Still, there are (or were) lots of scenarios with new physics, accessible to the LHC. And theorists, being perennial optimists, put a lot of effort into exploring those scenarios. Moreover, I think we’d have to go back to Isabelle to find an example of an accelerator which opened up a new range of energies and didn’t find anything new. So, back in 2006, when Tommaso Dorigo proposed a bet , I was willing to take the position that the LHC would discover new physics.I didn’t, however, like Tommaso’s original terms (a new particle discovery, announced before the end of 2010).Experience with previous machines, like the Tevatron, is that startup dates tend to slip, and that it can often take years to ramp up to the full design luminosity. As it turns out, the LHC had barely begun to collect data by then, and the very first trickle of physics results started coming out in October of 2010. So I had wisely insisted that, rather than fixing a date, we agree on a fixed amount of data collected (10fb^−1), plus a suitable period (12 months) for the analyses to be done.Moreover (for reasons that I will recall, below), I thought the “new particle” criterion too narrow, and substituted “a 5σ discrepancy with the Standard Model.”Those terms seemed pretty solid to me, and I agreed to put $750 behind them.One thing which I didn’t count on was the 2008 quench incident , which led to the aforementioned delay in starting up the LHC and (more important for the bet, at hand), to its operation at about half of the design energy (sqrt(s)=7–8 TeV) up through 2013.Historically, the ramp-up in energy tends to be much easier and (since it drastically improves the “reach” for new physics) tends to be accomplished much more quickly than the ramp-up in luminosity. So I fully expected thatof that first 10 fb^−1 would be collected at sqrt(s)=14TeV. Alas, none of it was (and, foolish me for not insisting on a provision about sqrt(s) of the data).What about the “new particle” criterion?There are lots of scenarios where you would see a stark deviation from SM expectations at the LHC, but still be unable to ascribe that deviation to a new particle of a particular mass, etc. For example, much excitement was generated by the initial measurements of the H→γγ branching ratio, which were higher than the SM prediction by 2–3σ. With more data, that discrepancy seems to have gone away, but imagine if it had persisted. We would now find ourselves with a 5σ deviation from the SM — clear indication of the existence of new heavy charged particle(s) which couple strongly to the Higgs. But, since they only contribute to H→γγ via a loop, we would have almost no handle on their mass or other quantum numbers.Well, it’s been a little over a year since we reached the 10fb^−1 mark. The Lepton-Photon Conference seemed like a natural end-point for the wager. If there had been a discovery to announce, that would have been the natural venue.Needless to say, there were no big announcements at the Lepton-Photon Conference. And, since the LHC is shut down for an upgrade until 2015, there won’t be any forthcoming. So Tommaso is $750 richer Would the outcome (aside from being delayed for another ~3 years) have been any different had I been smart enough to add a stipulation about sqrt(s)? Put differently, would I be willing to bet on the 2015 LHC run uncovering new BSM physics?The answer, I think, is: not unless you were willing to give me some substantial odds (at least 5–1; if I think about it, maybe even higher).Knowing the mass of the Higgs (∼125GeV) rules out huge swaths of BSM ideas. Seeing absolutely nothing in the 7 and 8 TeV data (not even the sort of 2–3σ deviations that, while not sufficient to claim a “discovery,” might at least serve as tantalizing hints of things to come) disfavours even more.The probability (in my Bayesian estimation) that the LHC will discover BSM physics has gone from fairly likely (as witnessed by my previous willingness to take even-odds) to rather unlikely. N.B.: that’s not quite the same thing as saying that there’s no BSM physics at these energies; rather that, if it’s there, the LHC won’t be able to see it (at least, not without accumulating many years worth of data).Ironically, a better bet for discovering new physics in this energy range might be on an ILC , running as a precision Higgs factory. I’ll leave it to you to calculate the odds that such a machine gets built.Rereading the comments on Tommaso’s post (and other things he’s written), you might well think this discussion is a proxy for a narrower one, about the status of supersymmetry. The 7– and 8–TeV runs at the LHC have, indeed, been very unkind to the MSSM. But they have been even more unkind to other BSM ideas. SoThat may be of little immediate consolation (and not an obviously-exploitable vehicle for making back some of the money I lost), but it is motivation for my experimental colleagues to spend the next couple of years thinking about how to optimize their searches to tease the maximum amount of information out of the post-upgrade LHC data. Tommaso Dorigo is an experimental particle physicist, who works for the INFN at the University of Padova, and collaborates with the CMS experiment at the CERN LHC. He coordinates the European network AMVA4NewPhysics as well as research in accelerator-based physics for INFN-Padova, and is an editor of the journal Reviews in Physics. In 2016 Dorigo published the book “Anomaly! Collider physics and the quest for new phenomena at Fermilab”. You can purchase a copy of the book by clicking on the book cover in the column on the right. |
Designer and architect Neri Oxman and the Mediated Matter group have announced their latest design project: the Synthetic Apiary. Aimed at combating the massive bee colony losses that have occurred in recent years, the Synthetic Apiary explores the possibility of constructing controlled, indoor environments that would allow honeybee populations to thrive year-round. On Friday, September 30, 2016, the US Fish and Wildlife Service added seven species of bees to the Federal Endangered Species list, after a UN-sponsored report released in February found that nearly 40 percent of invertebrate pollinator species (which includes bees and butterflies) are now facing extinction. Bees play a vital role in the reproductive cycle of many plants, including those used for human food production, and according Mediated Matter, losses continuing at these rates could have dire impacts for both human and environmental well-being. + 11 Save this picture! Hive construction within the Synthetic Apiary environment. Image © The Mediated Matter Group “It is time that the inclusion of apiaries—natural or synthetic—for this “keystone species” be considered a basic requirement of any sustainability program,” says Oxman. In developing the Synthetic Apiary, Mediated Matter studied the habits and needs of honeybees, determining the precise amounts of light, humidity and temperature required to simulate a perpetual spring environment. They then engineered an undisturbed space where bees are provided with synthetic pollen and sugared water and could be evaluated regularly for health. Save this picture! Honeybee hive installation in the Synthetic Apiary environment. Image © The Mediated Matter Group Save this picture! Honeybee hive installation and monitoring in the Synthetic Apiary environment. Image © The Mediated Matter Group In the initial experiment, the honeybees’ natural cycle proved to adapt to the new environment, as the Queen was able to successfully lay eggs in the apiary. The bees showed the ability to function normally in the environment, suggesting that natural cultivation in artificial spaces may be possible across scales, “from organism- to building-scale.” “At the core of this project is the creation of an entirely synthetic environment enabling controlled, large-scale investigations of hives,” explain the designers. “As shown in the video at time 2:33, eggs are laid in the apiary, indicating a successful combination of temperature, humidity, light, and nutrition for queens. This proves the ability to shift the entire cycle of bee behavior, out of winter mode and into spring mode, and is a first demonstration of sustainable life in a completely synthetic apiary. The long-term goal is to integrate biology into a new kind of architectural environment, and thereby the city, for the benefit of humans and eusocial organisms.” Save this picture! Optical microscope image of beeswax. Image © The Mediated Matter Group Save this picture! Optical microscope image of a honeybee wing. Image © The Mediated Matter Group Save this picture! Optical microscope image of honey. Image © The Mediated Matter Group Mediated Matter chose to research into honeybees not just because of their recent loss of habitat, but also because of their ability to work together to create their own architecture, a topic the group has explored in their ongoing research on biologically augmented digital fabrication, including employing silkworms to create objects and environments at product, architectural, and possibly urban, scales. “The Synthetic Apiary bridges the organism- and building-scale by exploring a “keystone species": bees. Many insect communities present collective behavior known as “swarming,” prioritizing group over individual survival, while constantly working to achieve common goals. Often, groups of these eusocial organisms leverage collaborative behavior for relatively large-scale construction. For example, ants create extremely complex networks by tunneling, wasps generate intricate paper nests with materials sourced from local areas, and bees deposit wax to build intricate hive structures.” “Honeybees are ideal model organisms because of the historical interplay between their communities and humans.” Save this picture! Hive frame with visible honey and wax construction in the Synthetic Apiary environment. Image © The Mediated Matter Group Save this picture! Honeybee hive installation and monitoring in the Synthetic Apiary environment. Image © The Mediated Matter Group With the success of the initial Synthetic Apiary program, Mediated Matter hopes that biological environments will begin to be regularly integrated into architectural and urban settings, for the benefit of both humans and eusocial organisms such as bees. Save this picture! Scanning electron microscope images of the honey bee, Apis mellifera. Image © Dr. James Weaver (Wyss Institute, Harvard University) Credits Research and Design: Mediated Matter Group at the MIT Media Lab Lead researchers: Markus Kayser, Sunanda Sharma, Jorge Duro-Royo, Christoph Bader, Dominik Kolb, and Prof. Neri Oxman (Group Director) Collaborators: The Best Bees Company: Dr. Noah Wilson-Rich, Philip Norwood, Jessica O’Keefe, Rachel Diaz-Granados; Dr. James Weaver (Wyss Institute); Dr. Anne Madden (North Carolina State University); Space Managers Andy and Susan Magdanz; and Daniel Maher Videographers: James Day and the Mediated Matter group Media Lab Facilities: Jessica Tsymbal and Kevin Davis MIT EHS: Lorena Altamirano The Synthetic Apiary team wishes to convey gratitude to Mori Building Company for their generous sponsorship of this project, as well as acknowledge the Mori Art Museum and Loftworks for their support. News via Neri Oxman and Mediated Matter. |
Image copyright AP Entertainer Rolf Harris has been interviewed under caution by police investigating sex offences. Scotland Yard did not name him, but said an 84-year-old was questioned at a police station in Stafford. He was questioned by detectives from Operation Yewtree, the investigation into sexual abuse allegations that have arisen since Jimmy Savile was accused. Mr Harris was jailed in July for nearly six years for 12 indecent assaults against four girls. He was interviewed under caution on Tuesday and Wednesday. Operation Yewtree has three strands. One concerns Savile's crimes, whilst another relates to allegations against Savile and others. The third strand, under which Mr Harris was questioned, concentrates on accusations unconnected to the Savile investigations but which emerged as a result of the publicity surrounding the late DJ. Several well-known public figures have been jailed following trials brought under the Yewtree investigations. Gary Glitter was found guilty of historical sex abuse on Thursday, while PR figure Max Clifford and former BBC radio presenter Chris Denning were both successfully prosecuted. Ex-BBC Radio One host Dave Lee Travis was given a suspended sentence for indecent assault following a similar investigation. Mr Harris has appeared on TV screens as a children's entertainer, songwriter and entertainer. He is also an artist and painted a portrait of the Queen to mark her 80th birthday in 2006. During his career he was made an OBE, MBE and CBE. |
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