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Bitcoin News for the week of 8/24/15 Welcome to our weekly bitcoin news recap, where we cover top headlines and stories in the world of bitcoin each week. Several of bitcoin industry leading companies including Blockchain came together this week in support of bigger blocks to help scale the blockchain. You can read our letter in the link below. Also this week, more news continued to pour in showing support from financial firms and banks testing out bitcoin and blockchain technology. Also a fun fact: Oxford Dictionaries added two new bitcoin terms to their dictionary. Read all about this and more in this weekly bitcoin rundown.  [Industry Endorses Bigger Blocks and BIP101](http://blog.blockchain.com/2015/08/24/industry-endorses-bigger-blocks-and-bip101/) Our community stands at a crossroads. The debate about which path to take has, by and large, been a healthy one, and we have not interposed our own positions or interfered in the discourse. Until today, our involvement has consisted of listening, researching and testing. We believe that work is complete, and it is time to communicate our view in a clear and transparent manner. MIT Course ‘to Inspire Next Generation of Bitcoin CEOs’ Not to be outdone by Stanford, MIT Media Lab has announced its own course to inspire the “next generation” of bitcoin talent. Thanks to a partnership between its Digital Currency Initiative (DCI) and Media Lab Entrepreneurship Program, MIT will join other universities, including Stanford, putting bitcoin into the classroom. Deutsche Bank mulls the potential of blockchain and the problem of legacy systems Big banks like Deutsche Bank are caught between the devil of their own antiquated IT systems, and a deep blue sea of disruptive technology, the like of which has never before been visited upon the financial sector. In order to compete, banks must first address what Deutsche Bank Research analyst Thomas F Dapp calls their “homework” – solving their legacy problem. Dapp recently authored a report for Deutsche Bank entitled “Blockchain – attack is probably the best form of defense.” UBS’ Alex Batlin on the Future of Blockchain Tech in Finance When it announced its blockchain innovation lab earlier this year, UBS caused a ripple of excitement and trepidation. It was a watershed moment: one of the world’s wealthiest investment banks was putting its money, and public image, behind blockchain technology. Not only that, but it would be experimenting deep in the financial heart of London. Bitcoin Technology Piques Interest on Wall St. Nowhere, though, are more money and resources being spent on the technology than on Wall Street — the very industry that bitcoin was created to circumvent. “There is so much pull and interest on this right now,” said Derek White, the chief digital officer at Barclays, the British global bank, which has a team of employees working on about 20 experiments that explore how the technology underlying Bitcoin might change finance. Bitcoin comes to Cuba. Could it help end the country’s crazy two-currency system? The first reported bitcoin transactions between the US and Cuba mark the latest innovation brought to the island’s complicated economy, as the two countries normalize relations. Fernando Villar, the Cuban-American founder of a group called BitcoinCuba, told CryptoCurrency News that he made the transaction this week using public wi-fi networks that Cuba’s socialist government has started installing in public parks. Iran’s first bitcoin exchange opens in effort to exploit ‘huge untapped market’ The first ever bitcoin exchange in Iran has opened, opening up the cryptocurrency to a previously untapped market. BTXCapital will offer instant deposits and real-time buy and sell orders to users in the country through Draglet’s exchange platform, though regulatory issues surrounding bitcoin in Iran remain unclear. Research Examines Blockchain Securities Under US Commercial Law Crypto-securities and blockchain record-keeping systems may not be subject to commercial transactions law under the US Uniform Commercial Code (UCC), according to new research from Cardozo Law. Blockchain As The Source-DNA For Content Attribution: A Conversation With Bill Tai – Part 1 My conversation with Mr. Tai was wide-ranging, and, at some point, we may offer the entire transcription as a free downloadable PDF. For now, below are excerpts related to bitcoin and blockchain, and, specifically, how blockchain technology could help solve what I believe to be the fundamental issue for today’s creator — be they a musician, writer, visual artist, etc. — attribution. Research aims for Bitcoin science to catch up with growth in usage A group of researchers at the University of Maryland, College Park are among a small number of scientists working to erase a lag between the growing adoption of bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies and the understanding of them. 7 Security Tips Bitcoin Startups Cannot Ignore More than just a steady flood of hacking, bitcoin hacking has become more of a culture within a subculture. As such their methods are ever evolving and they are extremely coordinated. Once a critical flaw is found it is exploited rapidly throughout the entire eco system. Conventional security guides cannot keep up with such a culture nor do they understand the unique terrain that bitcoin startups must deal with. CardCash Adds Bitcoin Payments for Gift Cards at Thousands of US Retail Stores CardCash, an American online company that buys and sells discounted gift cards from thousands of national retailers, has begun to accept bitcoin payments. CardCash joins companies like Gyft and Fold that provide ways for Bitcoin users to interact with the massive gift card industry. Bitcoin Micropayment Service Targets Global Freelancers A new bitcoin micropayments tool has launched to take aim at the global freelance and on-demand services market. Called Faradam (after inventor Michael Faraday), the service uses a simple timer to facilitate payment between two parties, with freelancers seeking to leverage the service only needing to provide their name, hourly work rate and bitcoin address. In turn, those looking to employ short-term services simply receive a link and connect a wallet. Meet the Team: Interview with Jaume Pernas, Developer Catalan-born Jaume is a developer whose focus has been primarily on our web wallet. His travel portfolio reminds me of another developer on the team, Sjors, who has also visited and lived in his fair share of places around the world. Currently Jaume is settled in Ottawa, Canada, which is a city I called home for most of my life. Oxford Dictionaries Adds New Definitions for ‘Blockchain’ and ‘Miner’ OxfordDictionaries.com, the online language resource owned by the Oxford University Press, has added new cryptocurrency-related definitions. A “blockchain”, according to the site, is a noun defined as: “A digital ledger in which transactions made in bitcoin or another cryptocurrency are recorded chronologically and publicly.”  [London’s Moniker Art Fair Banks on Bitcoin for 2015 Edition](http://uk.blouinartinfo.com/news/story/1225764/londons-moniker-art-fair-banks-on-bitcoin-for-2015-edition) London’s Moniker Art Fair has collaborated with bitcoin-based global art, music, and technology collective Fork The Banks for its 2015 edition to become the world’s first international art fair to accept Bitcoin payments. The Rise and Fall of a Bitcoin Kingpin How a bullied geek forged an empire out of digital currency, and became a suspect in a half-billion-dollar heist. Mark Karpeles was the accidental emperor of bitcoin. Then a half-billion dollars worth of bitcoins vanished from his exchange. |
Edward Snowden doesn't seem happy that Hillary Clinton might escape the same felony charges for exposing classified information that prosecutors have sought against him. Related Story: http://www.washingtonexaminer.com/article/2588319 "Espionage Act violations don't require intent to harm — exactly why the Obama's DOJ has gone after so many sources," the former NSA contractor and whistleblower said via a retweet on Twitter on Wednesday. The message included a link to a story quoting Obama's Sunday comment that Clinton "has not jeopardized America's national security," which many saw as a sign that Obama is looking for a reason not to prosecute Clinton. If only I had known. https://t.co/yrPg8uxiQO — Edward Snowden (@Snowden) April 10, 2016 Anyone have the number for the Attorney General? Asking for a friend. https://t.co/yrPg8uxiQO — Edward Snowden (@Snowden) April 10, 2016 It was his third message on the topic this week, apparently inspired by comments made by Obama. "There's classified, and then there's classified," Obama said on Sunday. "There's stuff that is really top-secret top-secret, and there's stuff that is being presented to the president or the secretary of state that you might not want on the transom, or going out over the wire, but is basically stuff that you could get in open-source." "If only I had known," Snowden said in an earlier Sunday tweet. "Anyone have the number for the Attorney General? Asking for a friend," he said in another message. Related Story: http://www.washingtonexaminer.com/article/2588258 Snowden faces at least three felony counts for exposing classified information that revealed the scope of the federal government's surveillance. Two of those counts fall under the same Espionage Act, the same law the FBI is using to examine whether Clinton violated any rules. Related Story: http://www.washingtonexaminer.com/article/2586466 Clinton, who has discounted the FBI's criminal investigation as a "security review," has also said that Snowden should be prosecuted. "He broke the laws of the United States," she said during an October debate. "In addition, he stole very important information that has unfortunately fallen into a lot of the wrong hands. So I don't think he should be brought home without facing the music." |
Hey everyone!So I'm been working on parallax and I started with the most simple one, parallax mapping. I understand unity already has one but to me it has a few problems with how it offsets the height texture and the way it does the parallax. The proper way should have the depth of the view direction into account and theirs doesn't. So I went and created a new parallax that has both the approximation that unity uses and an option for the other in case you want it.Also, I made it deepen the lower parts of the heightmap instead of the raising the high parts. This is the proper way to do it and it's a step closer to a POM shader. It's even possible to link a bunch of these together to do a iterative parallax mapping.Here's an example on a brick floor/wall. Got the textures from http://freepbr.com/materials/1x1block/ but I had to invert the green channel of the normal map and I'm not using their height map.And here's another mimicking one of the examples from unreal engine VRdemo. The interior was made from a screenshot captured using the Interior Vol.2 by ArchivzPro https://www.assetstore.unity3d.com/en/#!/content/50665 And here's the package with the above examples:Feel free to ask anything if you are curious about something or want to know how to do something with it.cheers |
Programming today involves editing code while also running it in our head. To augment this mental simulation, live programming promises for much more fluid feedback between the programmer and a program that is executing while it is being edited. Programming today involves editing code while also running it in our head. To augment this mental simulation, live programming promises for much more fluid feedback between the programmer and a program that is executing while it is being edited. A PL designer used to be able to design some syntax and semantics for their language, implement a compiler, and then call it a day. Today, however, languages are supported by sophisticated environments that, when designed together with languages, have the potential to significantly improve the programmer’s overall experience. One area that vastly benefits from language/environment co-design is code typography, which essentially defines the look and feel of code itself. This essay documents what I have done in my current YinYang prototype; I do not claim to be an expert and am simply trying to share my experience and obtain feedback. This is the third in a series of essays on advanced programming environments; the first is on usable live programming and the second is on managed time. Blocks A language’s statement blocks syntax has huge implications to how code will be laid out. There are many different styles to consider, but the two primary ones are curly brace (C-style) or off-side rule (indented python-style). I had always been a curly brace person, but typographically, code should be indented anyways, and braces serve no real role. Indentation is also easy to bring out via side bars with minimal horizontal spacing consumed; consider: There is also “expression only” Lisp-style syntax that lacks blocks; see A Few Examples of Lisp Code Typography Side bars become progressively darker as the indent level increases (one level indent is barely visible). The side bar of the block that the programmer is in is highlighted. The environment auto-indents, preserving or increasing indent based on whether the previous line ends in colon; the programmer may increase or decrease indent manually as needed. Unlike Python, short one line blocks can be expressed after the colon as a form of syntactic brevity; e.g. Taken from the current prototype; it is amazing (and scary) what can be done when writing an editor from scratch. Parentheses Although curly braces are not needed to express blocks, their parenthesis cousins are still needed encoding method calls and explicitly specifying precedence. Whereas blocks define vertical chunks, parentheses help define horizontal chunks. For this reason, when not being edited parens have cell-like renderings where commas are rendered bar delimiters. Consider: The same line of code highlighted is shown when selected (top) and when not (bottom). When highlighted for editing, parentheses and commas are rendered as this is what the programmer would actually type or delete. However, when the line is not selected, an easier to read table-like rendering is used with a background that slightly darkens as the nesting depth increases. What happens when parentheses are nested too deep? At 2.5% background, the cell goes black at about 40 nesting levels. Operators Unicode operators have been around for a while yet we do not use them much because they are hard to type. Rather than have programmers write directly in Unicode, YinYang supports Unicode renderings for plain-old ascii operators. Consider the ascii token “>=” that is rendered as “≥∙”. Notice the little dot at the end: because the we actually write “>=”, the rendering has to have two characters to permit editing; deleting the dot is equivalent to deleting the ‘=’ character, causing the token to render as “>”. Unicode rendering occurs as the programmer writes ascii; consider: var m = navigator.appName.toLowerCase().indexOf(“internet explorer”) == -1; var n = navigator.userAgent.toLowerCase().indexOf(“trident”) == -1; var nm = m && n; if (nm) { var img1 = new Image(); img1.src = ‘https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/project/live-programming/tp3.gif’; } The user firsts declares a new b variable using the $ symbol, which is rendered as §. The users then writes a > expression, appending = to form ≥∙, and then prepending ! to form ∙≱∙. The digits 10 are then appended to b, creating the rendering b 10 ; YinYang will always render trailing digits in an identifier as subscripts. Finally, the user deletes the first and last dot of ∙≱∙ to go back to >. Renderings are provided by visual and intent composition. As examples of the former, => is rendered as ⇒∙ and +++ rendered as ∙⧻∙ based purely based on visual composition, while ! is rendered to and intended Boolean negation ¬, but can also be added to many operators to derive ≯∙ (!>), ∙≱∙ (!>=), ≠∙ (!=), ⇏∙ (!=>), and so on. Note that the ∙ is only rendered on selected lines and is otherwise hidden. Operators are rendered bold with a different color to prevent them from being confused with identifiers, which is especially important for multiplication (typed as * but rendered as ×); consider: Even though x and × look very similar, the × operator stands out. Presentation Putting it all together, we get a presentation that is decent: This code defines a Ball object whose position p and gravity g is parameterized by an enclosing mk method. Note that within the ball object, a method is defined using the Greek Δ, which is written as “D_”. The code also contains some multi-part identifiers; underscores are used rather than rely on Camel case, but they are rendered as gray square dots (‘▪’) within the code for better readability. Note also that extra spaces are added to the code to enforce alignment. Although a proportional font (Segoe UI) is used, spaces are of variable width so that they always end on a global alignment point. This allows programmers to align their code when they want to at the cost of variable width spaces that do not start from a globally aligned grid point. Here is the code for the Ball trait: From these images, note the use of color in YinYang: keywords, dots, colons, and dollars are colored bluish and are also bolder so they standout as landmarks. Constants are colored greenish while traits and methods are bolded as defined. We use color sparingly to prevent it from overwhelming the programmer, but we also have something better to use our color budget on. For an alternative take on color usage, see Lamdu Metatext Metatext is automatically supplementary text that augments the source text with commentary about the program they are writing. In most programming environments, metatext is limited to error markers. YinYang, however, includes metatext directly in the programming environment to indicate syntax, type, and run-time errors as well as probe results; consider: Metatext was coined in Design Principles for the Enhanced Presentation of Computer Program Source Text, which is also a good early source on this topic. var m = navigator.appName.toLowerCase().indexOf(“internet explorer”) == -1; var n = navigator.userAgent.toLowerCase().indexOf(“trident”) == -1; var nm = m && n; if (nm) { var img1 = new Image(); img1.src = ‘https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/project/live-programming/tp6.gif’; } In this example, the programmer first defines “x”, as they type they get various syntax and type errors in red; the programmer can easily ignore these and get a satisfying “nothingness” when they have completed the definition. After “x” is defined, they get a new error in orange: bar returns zero, so the division fails! Once they leave the line, the metatext disappears while the affected token remains underlined (only metatext for the selected line is shown). The programmer changes bar’s definition to eliminate the run-time error. The programmer then defines “y” in much the same way. Once defined, the programmer can “probe” the value of expressions by prefixing them with an “@” symbol; this metatext then appears in purple. As definitions are changed in the program, “@” probing metatext changes in real time. See the usable live programming essay for more information on probing. |
Blackberry Brie Bites Brie is awesome. Its ooey-gooey creaminess makes us melt with delight as we spread it on crackers at dinner parties. But it can be spread on much more than crackers. For a light snack in the Spring or Summer, try making these blackberry brie bites. It’s the perfect combination of a burst of fruit and cheese, wrapped in a buttery, flaky blanket. These are perfect crowd-pleasers for parties, meetings, or just for fun. They are literally bite-sized so they won’t make a mess but enough to impress your friends and leave them wanting more. Of course, they’re best served warm, right after you take them out of the oven. If they do get cold, you can simply warm them up in the microwave and get the same taste. I spontaneously made these after school one day because I had leftover brie and wanted to bake it in with puff pastry. These are actually very similar to the Cuban Guava Pastries I made last year, which were made using guava paste and cream cheese. There are soo many variations of puff pastry+fruit+cheese. Next time, I’ll try using other fruits like figs and maybe add some honey! BLACKBERRY BRIE BITES (makes 16) Ingredients 1 pkg puff pastry, thawed 1 quart blackberries 5 oz brie cheese, cut into cubes 3-4 tbsps blackberry jam 1 egg, for egg wash Directions Preheat oven to 400 degrees F. Line baking sheets with parchment paper. Cut the thawed puff pastry into equal squares. Place a cube of brie in the middle of a square, spoon 1/4 teaspoon of jam onto it, and place blackberry on top. Fold two opposite corners into the middle and pinch corners together. Then, pinch the other two corners to meet in the middle so all 4 corners come together. Repeat for each square. Beat the egg until mixed. Brush egg wash on the outer parts of puff pastry surface. Bake for 15-20 minutes. Like this: Like Loading... 0 Shares Comments |
It became known in November that AOL was planning to shut down Winamp, all services related to the player, and Shoutcast. The reason behind the decision was not made known by the company, and while AOL planned to shut down the service on December 20, 2013 initially, it did not happen on that day. Techcrunch published a rumor on that day that AOL was in acquisition talks with an unnamed party, and while many thought that Microsoft would be that party, it seems to have been another company that no one seems to have had on the radar. Radionomy is a free platform that you can use to create, discover and listen to online radio stations. In addition to that functionality, it also makes available tools to radio stations and producers to create, broadcast, promote and monetize their radio stations free of charge. Considering that this matches quite well with Shoutcast, it is likely that Shoutcast was the main driving force behind the decision to acquire the Winamp brand and properties. The new owners may decide to redirect Shoutcast to their own website, or, which is more likely, keep Shoutcast up and running and add links and their services to it instead. You are probably wondering about the evidence that Radionomy is the new owner of Winamp and all properties associated with the brand. There has been no press release, no blog post, no official confirmation. A user on the Winamp forum noticed however that the name servers point to radionomy now. You can check that yourself by visiting this page on the Whois website. And what about shoutcast.com? It is still using AOL name servers. It needs to be noted that this is evidence, but not fact yet. Other possible explanations include a successful hacking attempt, or that AOL just sold part of Winamp to Radionomy. The Radionomy website launched to the public in April 2008. The name refers is a mix of radio and autonomy, fitting if you consider that it provides users with options to create their own online radio channels. The company generates revenue through advertisement. While it is free to create online radio stations, they appear to be monetized by the company's own Adionomy service. It is likely that an announcement will be made soon by AOL and / or Radionomy. What's unclear is if and how the Winamp media player will survive the deal. We will update the article as soon as new information become available. Update: According to Techcrunch, the deal will be finalized no latter than Friday this week. It is for Shoutcast and Winamp properties. Advertisement |
The Hurricanes are set to welcome back the five wayward players who missed a team curfew in Friday’s key Super Rugby match against the Highlanders. Hurricanes assistant coach John Plumtree said it was more than likely Cory Jane, Julian and Ardie Savea, Victor Vito and Chris Eves would return after missing the Wellington-based side’s 29-14 win over Queensland two weeks ago. The players broke a curfew in Durban in the lead-up to a 32-15 defeat against the Sharks. Facebook Twitter Whatsapp Reddit Email Share “You’d expect those guys to come back in – they’ve served their time, all’s forgiven and we’re good to go with those boys,” Plumtree said. The five would provide a much-needed boost as the Hurricanes come off the bye week and look to improve on a sub-par performance against the Reds. “We certainly won’t get away with that this week if we play poorly in terms of turnover ball against the Highlanders,” he said. The Hurricanes are still waiting for the all-clear on lock Michael Fatialofa and captain Dane Coles, both still working their way through concussion protocols after the Reds match. Plumtree expects to know by Wednesday whether they’ll be available, and is also awaiting a final decision on centre Matt Proctor’s knee injury. Defensive focus will be a big part of Friday’s game as the Hurricanes look to reverse their 17-16 second-round loss to the Highlanders. Advertisement Advertisement “If you’re down five or six per cent in terms of your tackle success, then you can lose,” Plumtree said. “There are indicators in our game, we know if we don’t get it right, then we’ll struggle. |
New Orleans Saints wide receiver Michael Thomas is the choice for NFC South rookie of the year as voted on by the four reporters covering the division for ESPN.com. Michael Thomas' 92 receptions for the Saints were the second most by a rookie receiver in NFL history. Chuck Cook/USA TODAY Sports Jenna Laine, Bucs reporter: Thomas had 1,137 receiving yards, third most in the NFC South behind only Julio Jones and Mike Evans and ninth in the NFL. His nine touchdown catches were tied for sixth in a league full of superb wideouts. That included a season-high 156 receiving yards against Atlanta. Vaughn McClure, Falcons reporter: Deion Jones, Falcons. The second-round draft pick from LSU gets votes simply based on making the adjustment from part-time starter in college to full-time communicator as middle linebacker of the Falcons' defense. Jones showed tremendous growth through the season and developed a commanding voice while getting everyone aligned correctly. Everyone knew about his speed from day one. He put it on display during an epic moment in a Week 3 win against his hometown Saints, intercepting a tipped Drew Brees pass and returning it 90 yards for a touchdown. Jones had two pick-sixes this season and led the Falcons with 106 combined tackles. Sure, he's a bit undersized at 222 pounds and missed some key tackles at different points in the season, but Jones will only get better with time. And his speed is a nice luxury for a franchise that has been lacking in that area for a few years. David Newton, Panthers reporter: Thomas is the easy choice for me after watching him catch all 10 of his targets against Carolina for 146 yards and a touchdown. The second-round pick out of Ohio State already has established himself as one of the premier receivers in the division with a team-high 92 catches. He finished strong with 10 catches for 156 yards and a touchdown against Atlanta at a time when many rookies hit the proverbial wall. That Thomas made this type of impact on a roster that includes Brandin Cooks is scary when you consider the future of this offense. Mike Triplett, Saints reporter: A tough choice right out of the gates, since Falcons linebacker Deion Jones was so awesome for the division champs (including a 90-yard pick-six against Brees in Jones' hometown Superdome in Week 3). But I'll play homer here and go with Thomas since he definitely deserves the love. Thomas' 92 catches were the second-most in NFL history by a rookie receiver, behind only Anquan Boldin's 101 in 2003. The second-round pick from Ohio State also ranked sixth all time among NFL rookies with 1,137 receiving yards and tied for 15th with nine touchdown catches, according to ESPN Stats and Information. The 6-foot-3, 212-pounder provided the kind of physical and sure-handed presence the Saints had for a decade with Marques Colston before they released him last February. And Thomas' emergence as a go-to guy helped New Orleans maintain its status as the No. 1 total offense and No. 1 passing offense in the NFL in 2016. |
A new Times of India Sex Survey, 2017 will soon create a bunch of lies in the name of realities in your bedroom and in offices. Because the TOI surveyors have pre-decided on criminals and victims in certain areas and now they just need to assign some percentages to these perceived crimes. For example, TOI has already decided that men and only men want sexual favors from women and force sex on women, either their wives, relatives or strangers. They have also decided before the survey that women imagine other men in bed, and only they may have a problem with orgasm. So it is only a matter of time that you will see some news report on how many percentage men force their women colleagues for sex or rape their relatives, wives or girl-friends. You will also see what percentage of women are not satisfied with their husbands and imagine other men in bed. You will never see any man saying that even they were forced into sex by some women or their women bosses wanted sexual favors from them. There will be no husband who will come out in this survey and say that their wives have raped them – all because TOI researchers have already decided the criminals. In their survey, Times of India researchers have created two sets of questions for men and women and when based on ones gender one select a set, we get these biased results. Given below are the questions that are exclusively asked to one gender and not the other and how TOI is all set to reconfirm these biases – TOI Sex Survey Only For Men TOI asked only their male respondents that if they wanted a sexual favor from any woman colleague. This question was not asked women, as if women don’t hire male employees or cannot ask for sexual favors. As a result of this, you will see only pervert male bosses in our companies. Now see this question – This question makes only men as rapists. Only men can force sex on women, women can’t and TOI has already decided that. So when you see certain percentages of rapists coming out of this survey, don’t be surprised that ALL of them will be males. Now, let’s take a look at the women’s questions that were not asked, men. TOI Sex Survey Only For Women TOI researchers have also decided that Indian men are not able to satisfy their wives, or at least there are some women (and only women) who can fantasize about another partner in bed. No matter what, men are supposed to be satisfied with their wives or sex life. Naturally, according to TOI, only women have right to have an orgasm. ..and when men (and only men) can force other women into sex, they can be anyone including husband, relatives, boss etc. One more confirmation from women that men are rapists. Since this question is only asked women, you will never know how many men are subjected to sexual violence from their women partners. So, now you know that Times of India Sex Survey, 2017 will soon recreate some biases in our lives. No one will ever know how this survey was conducted to arrive at the results. Men will only be sexual predators in different forms. Don’t be surprised if this result is also used in courts to pass different legislation in future. *** |
Regular tolerators of Den Of Geek may well know of the existence of a 3000 word feature on One Direction that I somehow managed to stumble into having to write, courtesy of an ill-founded bet on Twitter. In said feature, I argued that while I was hardly bowled over by the work of One Direction, I didn't feel I had the right to gleefully urinate over the fandom of someone else. I could criticise their music, I could vow never to buy anything they ever did. But slag off those who do love One Direction, and are dedicated fans? That's over the line for me. Yet it was in the comments field of that article that one point stuck in my head, where it's firmly resided since. As one commenter put it, "it does seem that fandoms that can be 'female' learning (such as One Direction) do get a lot of stick, but if it's male skewering (e.g. football) then it gets a free pass". A further commenter picked up the baton: "anything with a fanbase mainly composed of teenage girls - One Direction, Bieber, Twilight etc - gets tons of these uber-macho comments from people desperate to prove that they don't like this sissy garbage". As such you get "homophobic slurs aimed at the artists and misogynistic ones aimed at the fans". That's put it far better than I ever could. All of this has stayed with me, primarily because it has so many rings of truth about it. And you don't have to look much further than that Twilight saga for a whole clutch of evidence. Putting aside the merits of the Twilight films for a minute - whether you love, hate or put up with them - the core demographic was female, and primarily teenagers. I don't think that's much of a secret. That was reflected in the casting, the publicity and the material itself, and the box office rewarded the choices that were made. Let's assume for a minute (and this isn't the biggest leap I'll ever take) that there's a big bunch of people who don't like Twilight movies, as many of you don't. There's also a big bunch of people who don't like the staggeringly successful Rush Hour trilogy. But look at how the tone of the comments both franchises attract differs. You get vilified for liking one, and nobody seems to mind either way if you like the other. Mark Kermode infamously wrote a piece at The Guardian back in November 2012, entitled 'Move over, Luke Skywalker... I'm a Twilight man'. He's made little secret of the fact that he's enjoyed the Twilight movies, and in the article he put across his reasons why. Granted, an introduction saying he preferred the movie to Star Wars stirred things up, but as he related in his upcoming book, Hatchet Job, the strength of feeling he encountered in the comments field was something to behold. And he's not alone. I visited a breadth of movie sites, as well as the likes of Amazon and the IMDB, to see what user feedback articles on Twilight were getting. It was depressing, and a sizeable number of comments had a really nasty, sexist twinge to them. Twilight fans, apparently, are "all so stupid", "get pregnant at 16" (I wish I was making these up), and generally "dumb girls". Apparently, the "only reason a guy should see this is to get layed (sic)", and the alternative name for the series is "Twatlight". Meanwhile, "if there was a movie of guy on guy full penetration porno Jacob on Edward that movie would not be as gay as Twilight". You don't have to look far to find even less savoury comments elsewhere online. I've not pulled a few out of context here. There are thousands, if not more, comments like those I've quoted. But it doesn't just stay online. At the Los Angeles premiere of Twilight: Breaking Dawn Part 2, the queuing fans were jeered by passers-by. Jeered! Just for waiting to see the stars of a movie series you happen to like. Not even jeering the performers, or the people who made the movie. Instead, it's become sport to jeer the people who want to watch it. The people jeering were reportedly coming out or going to a basketball game, and the jeerers were, it seems, male. And doesn't that encapsulate it a little? Were the fans at said basketball game female, and were a male crowd waiting to watch the stars arrive for the premiere, would the women jeer the men? I'd argue not. So why is it acceptable here? Why is it okay to use the cover of a movie that people want to see to effectively bully human beings? Some people hate Twilight because of what it does with the vampire genre. Some Twilight fans do themselves no favours (and let's be truthful, that's putting it mildly). Few would have quarrel with debating either of those switch. But the rampaging sexism that surrounds the franchise is depressing, and yet alarmingly tolerated. But this isn't just about Twilight. Most recently, it's been seen with the One Direction movie, where the bashing of the movie and its fans was out in force. Again, I'm not blind: I see some of the comments coming from One Direction fans to those who criticise the band, and they're sometimes no better. I'm not defending those at all. Two wrongs certainly don't come close to making a right there. What about, though, the ire aimed at some female teenage Doctor Who fans for being unhappy with the casting of Peter Capaldi in the show, which again was in marked contrast to that that male fan would get? But then, in a really good piece at Whovian Feminism, they argue there that "I’ve seen more people complaining about how heterosexual teenage girls are complaining about Peter Capaldi’s casting because he isn’t a young man onto which they can project their sexual fantasies then I’ve actually seen heterosexual teenage girls making that complaint. It seems to me that this ‘problem’ has been widely blown out of proportion". I can only add anecdotal evidence to that, but my findings - save for one YouTube video - are the same. Let's pick another example. Sherlock has attracted an enthusiastic and sizeable female fandom too. The outside assumption is that every woman who loves Sherlock instantly wants to have wild and passionate sex with Benedict Cumberbatch/Martin Freeman/Una Stubbs. And they may well do. But that they might just really love the show seems an alien concept in some quarters. A Den Of Geek correspondent went along to a Sherlock press event earlier in the year, where she found herself talking to a journalist from a respected (well, less respected by us now) daily newspaper. "You must be a Cumberbitch", said the male journalist in question, pretty much his opening line. Our correspondent, as it turned out, has read all of the Conan Doyle Sherlock Holmes stories many times, has always loved the material, and now has her fandom denigrated down to three syllables that trivialise just what she's got out of the stories. Mind you, even if she hadn't, does that make it right that someone can call her a 'Cumberbitch' within a sentence of meeting her? Is it inconceivable that not every human being is comfortable with that phrase? It's all a bit depressing. Look too at the recent filming of Sherlock around London. Our same correspondent walked passed the assembled crowd, and she noted that it was almost entirely female. Sherlock's fervent female support has already resulted in the aforementioned 'Cumberbitches' term (a word that some are happy to adopt as their own), but it still tends to be approached more negatively. Contrast that with the queue for the launch of a new Apple product on launch day. That queue is mainly male, still comes in for some stick, yet is seen as more 'acceptable'. But why? Let's go for another quick example - I'm using lots, because I don't want this to be about the individual films and show. It's about the broader underlying point. I got talking to another colleague about the recent box office disappointment, The Mortal Instruments, another movie roundly dismissed as "for teenage girls". If it is for teenage girls firstly, does that make it any lesser a project? Does the fact that it's aimed at teenage girls suddenly make it bad? My colleague's argument that The Mortal Instruments was a movie based in and around female-centric fantasy. And that's seen, again in some quarters, as a bad thing. Star Wars, meanwhile, even the weaker films, is centred around a more male-driven fantasy. That's one of the biggest movie franchises of all time. That's not quite comparing like with like certainly (I don't intend to take any kind of bullet for The Mortal Instruments), but then what female-targeted franchises are amongst the biggest in the world? That's perhaps a question for another time, because I want to finish on the main point: that this is about the fans, rather than what they happen to be fans of. You may or may not agree with the individual examples, but there still seems to be a general instant dismissal of films and shows targeted at women, and teenage girls in particular, that overrides the actual content and just attacks the people who like it. How miserable and depressing is that? That online mob rule attacks you simply for what you like. Didn't we leave all that behind in the school playground? Films are targeted and marketed at different genders, and different demographic audiences are generally receptive to different material. But isn't the bottom line this? If you pay your money to see something, and hate it, then you've every right to slag it off. But that doesn't anyone any right to slag off the people who feel differently, and to dismiss and denigrate their fandom. Fandom is supposed to be a positive thing, about celebrating something you enjoy, are entertained by and are passionate about. It's not about sending up flares to attract a crowd of bullies who should know better. Sadly, that's just what some female-leaning fandoms in particular tend to do at the moment, and it can't just be me who's pig sick of it. |
Sue Ogrocki/Associated Press The New York Knicks front office largely felt by the summer of 2016 that moving on from Carmelo Anthony and building around Kristaps Porzingis was the best direction for the organization. "Everybody was on board to try and get rid of Carmelo," a source told Ian Begley of ESPN.com. "The feeling in meetings was almost unanimous: They felt he just wasn't a winning player. They thought they could turn everything around if they just moved him." That created tension behind closed doors, however, as Begley wrote: "Some of those execs who wanted Anthony out were the same people who strongly supported him earlier in his tenure. Anthony was well aware of this, and it was one of the things that bothered him most about the organization, according to people familiar with his thinking. When the executives acted as if they were still on Anthony's side during face-to-face interactions with him, he saw right through it." Those tensions soon enough became public once former team president Phil Jackson made his desire to trade Anthony public, lobbying for the star player to waive his no-trade clause. Anthony refused, however, and the Knicks refused to offer him a buyout in return, creating a public stand-off that defined the team's 2016-17 season and ultimately factored in Jackson's firing in June. The Knicks dealt Anthony to the Oklahoma City Thunder in September in exchange for Enes Kanter, Doug McDermott and a 2018 second-round pick. And the Knicks seem relieved to have the whole situation behind them. "Everyone just seems a little lighter," one team source said. "The drama Phil created with Carmelo really affected the team and the joy factor," another source told Begley. Indeed, the Knicks seem to be enjoying themselves more this year, both freed from the drama and the restrictive triangle offense that Jackson essentially mandated the team run last year. Instead, Jeff Hornacek has been free to run his own scheme, and the Knicks have responded by starting the year 16-14, becoming one of the NBA's more pleasant surprises in the process. With Anthony out of town, Porzingis has been able to serve as the team's superstar leader, responding by averaging career highs in points (25.5 PPG) and blocks (2.1 BPG) while adding 6.6 rebounds per contest and shooting 46.5 percent from the field (39.8 percent from three). Anthony, Russell Westbrook and Paul George have had their issues finding chemistry in Oklahoma City, meanwhile, starting the year 16-15 despite being considered one of the top contenders in the Western Conference before the season. The team has largely relied on its defense (99.5 PPG allowed, third in the NBA) while struggling to consistently generate offense (102.1 PPG, 24th in the NBA). Anthony is averaging 17.3 points per contest, the lowest mark of his career. |
Hey Gosneyholics, my name is Kevin G. Summers and I’m your guest host on this very special 26th Episode of Cool Comics in My Collection. I’ve been quietly following Ed’s blog since the beginning, so when the opportunity came up to show off a few comics from my own collection, I jumped at the chance. Who the heck am I? I’m an author, just like Ed, and I’ve been collecting comics for more than 30 years. Some of my books are Legendarium (co-authored with Michael Bunker) and The Man Who Shot John Wilkes Booth. I also wrote the Star Trek Deep Space Nine story Isolation Ward 4, which was nominated for the 2002 Nebula Awards. Audiobook Giveaway I’m giving away an audiobook of my novelette The Paladin, which is my take on what would really happen if a teenager decided to become a superhero. This is the book summary: Devastated by the loss of his older brother, teenaged Jared Weiss dons a mask and cape in pursuit of vengeance. He becomes The Paladin. Unfortunately, the real world isn’t like a comic book, and wherever The Paladin goes, disaster is never far behind. Will Jared be able to avenge his brother before he winds up in a grave beside him? The audiobook also includes the short story No. 38, a coming of age tale that includes a famous comic as the McGuffin. All you have to do to enter the giveaway is leave a comment on this blog post. Without further ado, here are some cool comics from MY collection: Cool comics in my collection #1: Batman From the 30’s to the 70’s OK, this technically isn’t a comic book, it’s a collection of long out of print Batman & Robin stories. My parents bought me this book when I was a little kid, a baby, and there’s sloppy coloring on the black & white pages to prove it. There literally isn’t a time in my life when I don’t remember having this book. It was my first exposure to comics and I must have read each story a hundred times. Those campy old Batman tales are my favorites… like the one where Batman and Robin went back in time and met Native American versions of themselves. I don’t care that they don’t fit the mold of the current dark and gritty version of the character, they were fun and they made me want to read more comics. This book was the gateway drug that made me a fan for life and it holds a cherished place on my shelf. You can probably find one on eBay, but I wouldn’t sell you mine. Cool comics in my collection #2: Tales of the Teen Titans #44 This was the very first comic I ever bought. Dick Grayson/Robin was my favorite character and my comic collection began with this, the issue where Grayson became Nightwing. I picked it up from a spinner rack in a 7-11 near George Mason University, where my mother was taking classes at the time. I loved the book, and I went back and got the rest of the run. Some of those early Wolfman/Perez issues are worth more than this one, and I’m not ashamed to tell you that this book is in poor condition. The staples are loose and the pages yellowed because of how many times it’s been read. But my copy is signed by Marv Wolfman and George Perez. When Marv looked at the book he told me how much he loves to see well-loved books like this. Cool comics in my collection #3: Jonah Hex Spectacular I’m gonna be straight up with you and tell you that it was the modern Jonah Hex series that got me into the character. It was a great series, 10,000x better than the movie, and I loved the character. I started looking into back issues and, eventually, I assembled quite a collection of Jonah Hex comics. This one, however, is special. First of all, it’s rare, but that’s not why I like it. This story ends with an aged Jonah Hex being gunned down, his body stolen, stuffed and used in a Wild West Review! And if you’re familiar with the groundbreaking Kingdom Come series by Mark Waid and Alex Ross, you might just find out what happened to Jonah’s remains. Cool comics in my collection #4: Have Gun, Will Travel #1 The numbering scheme with these Dell TV Comics is a train wreck, the stories and the art are childish and beneath the TV show, but I have a special place in my collection for these old comics. I love Have Gun, Will Travel and the adventures of Paladin. I was first introduced to the character when the kids from Stand By Me sung his theme song while they were walking on the train tracks, and it still holds up as one of the best TV westerns ever made. I have the full set, but the first issue has the best cover of the lot. The cover price is 10 FREAKIN’ CENTS, and you can bet I paid a lot more than that for this issue on eBay. It’s probably the oldest book in my collection, and one of the coolest. Cool comics in my collection #5: The Unwritten #1 This book isn’t all that old… you could probably find one on eBay for cover price. I’m including it here because it is absolutely brilliant and, in my opinion, one of the finest examples of comics as literature. The Unwritten is a metaphysical story that was a huge part of the inspiration for my novel, Legendarium. Readers of Harry Potter (and strangely Winnie-the-Pooh) will find the characters oddly familiar as they traverse basically every genre from the classics to fables to choose your own adventure. This is a great series and I go back and reread it every couple of years. Cool comics in my collection #6: The Escapists #1 This is weird. Do you remember Michael Chabon’s excellent novel, The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay? If you’re into old comics, you should read that book. It won the Pulitzer in 2001 and introduced a new golden-aged superhero called The Escapist. That’s not what this mini-series was about. The Escapists was a mini-series about some modern comic creators that purchase that rights to The Escapist and attempt to publish a new book about the character. The book is a labor of love and a lot of things go wrong. This is a strange story that doesn’t fit easily into the superhero genre, but it’s the kind of book that sticks with you. I liked it enough to include on this list. Cool comics in my collection #7: Tiny Titans #46 This was a comic for little kids that included a page where young fans could send in their drawings of the Tiny Titans. My daughter sent in a picture when she was 6 and they printed it. Remember that scene in It’s A Wonderful Life when Jimmy Stewart has a big stack of newspapers with his brother on the front cover? This proud Papa has about 20 copies of this issue. Don’t forget to leave a comment below and enter the giveaway for The Paladin audiobook! The winner will be revealed next Thursday in Episode 27, so get your comment in before March 31. |
Hydrogen as an everyday, environmentally friendly fuel source may be closer than we think, according to Penn State researchers. "The energy focus is currently on ethanol as a fuel, but economical ethanol from cellulose is 10 years down the road," says Bruce E. Logan, the Kappe professor of environmental engineering. "First you need to break cellulose down to sugars and then bacteria can convert them to ethanol." Logan and Shaoan Cheng, research associate, suggest a method based on microbial fuel cells to convert cellulose and other biodegradable organic materials directly into hydrogen. The researchers used naturally occurring bacteria in a microbial electrolysis cell with acetic acid -- the acid found in vinegar. Acetic acid is also the predominant acid produced by fermentation of glucose or cellulose. The anode was granulated graphite, the cathode was carbon with a platinum catalyst, and they used an off-the-shelf anion exchange membrane. The bacteria consume the acetic acid and release electrons and protons creating up to 0.3 volts. When more than 0.2 volts are added from an outside source, hydrogen gas bubbles up from the liquid. "This process produces 288 percent more energy in hydrogen than the electrical energy that is added to the process," says Logan. Water hydrolysis, a standard method for producing hydrogen, is only 50 to 70 percent efficient. Even if the microbial electrolysis cell process is set up to bleed off some of the hydrogen to produce the added energy boost needed to sustain hydrogen production, the process still creates 144 percent more available energy than the electrical energy used to produce it. For those who think that a hydrogen economy is far in the future, Logan suggests that hydrogen produced from cellulose and other renewable organic materials could be blended with natural gas for use in natural gas vehicles. "We drive a lot of vehicles on natural gas already. Natural gas is essentially methane," says Logan. "Methane burns fairly cleanly, but if we add hydrogen, it burns even more cleanly and works fine in existing natural gas combustion vehicles." The range of efficiencies of hydrogen production based on electrical energy and energy in a variety of organic substances is between 63 and 82 percent. Both lactic acid and acetic acid achieve 82 percent, while unpretreated cellulose is 63 percent efficient. Glucose is 64 percent efficient. Another potential use for microbial-electrolysis-cell produced hydrogen is in fertilizer manufacture. Currently fertilizer is produced in large factories and trucked to farms. With microbial electrolysis cells, very large farms or farm cooperatives could produce hydrogen from wood chips and then through a common process, use the nitrogen in the air to produce ammonia or nitric acid. Both of these are used directly as fertilizer or the ammonia could be used to make ammonium nitrate, sulfate or phosphate. This research is published in the Nov. 12 issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences online. The researchers have filed for a patent on this work. Air Products and Chemicals, Inc. and the National Science Foundation supported this work. |
Breaking News Emails Get breaking news alerts and special reports. The news and stories that matter, delivered weekday mornings. May 20, 2016, 10:48 AM GMT / Updated May 20, 2016, 10:48 AM GMT / Source: Reuters By Reuters Tesla has surprised parts makers with plans to move up the launch of high-volume production of its Model 3 to 2018, two years earlier than planned - an acceleration that supplier executives and industry consultants said would be difficult to achieve and potentially costly. In the past three months, Tesla has told suppliers the company was doubling its original production projections to 100,000 Model 3s in 2017 and 400,000 in 2018, several supplier industry executives familiar with the plans told Reuters. A Tesla Model 3 sedan, its first car aimed at the mass market, is displayed during its launch in Hawthorne, California, March 31, 2016. REUTERS/Joe White/File Photo REUTERS Details on Model 3 production projections have not been reported previously, and Tesla did not break out target volumes for the Model 3. Tesla has taken 373,000 orders for the Model 3 - which has a starting price of $35,000, about half its Model S - and has said it would begin customer deliveries in late 2017. But it has made no promises, and, on earlier models, customers waited months for delivery. Citing "tremendous demand," Chief Executive Elon Musk told analysts on an April call that the company planned to boost total production, including the existing Model S and Model X crossover, to 500,000 in 2018 - two years earlier than its original target and a 10-fold increase over the 50,000 vehicles it made in 2015. Musk said Tesla told suppliers to prepare for Model 3 production tests in July 2017, a goal he acknowledged may be unrealistic for some. But he said the "aggressive" target was necessary to reach production goals. "Now, will we actually be able to achieve volume production on July 1 next year? Of course not," he told analysts. "The reason is that even if 99 percent of the internally produced items and supplier items are available on July 1, we still cannot produce the car because you cannot produce a car that is missing 1 percent of its components,” he said. Musk said the Model 3's simpler design, new production hires and enthusiastic suppliers would help the company make its goals. He said Tesla would drop suppliers that could not meet deadlines and would bring more parts production in-house than traditional automakers typically do. He did not specify how much or which parts. "It's very important for us to have the ability to produce almost any part on the car at will because it alleviates risk with suppliers," Musk told analysts. Industry experts said Tesla's new goals were extraordinary and raised doubts it could meet them. The handful of North American auto plants capable of building 500,000 vehicles a year are all run by automakers with decades of experience, they said. Tesla continues to have delivery delays for its Model X SUV. Its Model S also missed delivery targets when launched. One complication is that Tesla has not finalized the Model 3 design and specifications, said automaking consultants and supply executives who asked not to be identified because Tesla prohibits them from disclosing contract details. Musk has said the Model 3 design and engineering would be complete in June, 13 months ahead of the planned production startup. Under ideal conditions, automakers have launched new assembly lines in 18 months, but they typically take two to three years after the first tooling and supply contracts are signed, several manufacturing consultants said. Fiat Chrysler Automobiles, for example, is converting a Sterling Heights, Michigan sedan plant to make 300,000 Ram 1500 pickups a year, a 50 percent increase in capacity. "FCA already has the talent and the money, and the underlying machinery is already installed in the plant," said one longtime supply sales executive. "They're aiming to be up and running in 2018, so they have two years – and suppliers are wondering if they'll make that deadline." Tesla says the Model 3 features 6,000 to 7,000 unique components, fewer than the typical automobile with a combustion engine and the Model S, which has more than 8,000 parts. The company still is soliciting bids for parts and machinery, according to representatives from several of companies that have received them, as well as industry consultants who monitor such bids. Automaking consultant Ron Harbour of Oliver Wyman said increasing production at the Fremont plant to 500,000 vehicles in 2018 would require more stamping, welding and assembly machinery that "could take up to 18 months to order and install." He said Musk's plan to make parts in-house can minimize risk, but it also can be more expensive and distracting. Tesla's production push comes at a time of high demand for machinery and tooling created by a surge in product launches coming from established automakers, said a Detroit-based supplier sales executive. Jeff Schuster of industry forecaster LMC Automotive said the goals were "implausible," in part because Tesla's battery factory in Reno, Nevada, was unfinished. Aluminum, lithium and other materials - already in short supply - "could be another limiting factor," said Sam Fiorani of AutoForecast Solutions. Earlier this month two top manufacturing executives left the company. Last week, Tesla said it had hired Peter Hochholdinger, formerly of Volkswagen AG's Audi brand, as vice president of vehicle production. Tesla may pay a premium for work to speed up the Model 3 production launch, supplier executives said. The company has increased its 2016 capital spending forecast by 50 percent to about $2.25 billion. On Wednesday, Tesla announced it would sell up to $1.7 billion in new common shares, in part to pay for machinery and engineering for the Model 3. "I'd be really surprised if he can launch production by next July," said Frank Faga, a Detroit-based auto manufacturing consultant. "But this is a guy who says he's going to Mars. Who am I to say he can't do this?" |
The Internal Revenue Service may furlough employees in 2015 due to the drastic budget cuts it will face next year, according to the agency’s chief. IRS Commissioner John Koskinen has already told staff of a hiring freeze and overtime suspension, with limited exceptions, in 2015. He told reporters Thursday the cuts forced upon the agency in the “CRomnibus” deal that set spending levels across federal government through September were so severe it could lead to intermittent shutdowns of the agency. “People call it furloughs; I view it as: Are we going to have to shut the place down?” Koskinen said at a press conference. He added forcing employees to take unpaid days off was a last resort, but “there is no way right now we can say that won’t happen.” Much like when IRS employees were forced to take three furlough days in the summer of 2013 due to sequestration cuts, Koskinen said the agency would shutter entirely for a day or two, or “whatever days it would take to close the gap that we can’t otherwise close in a reasonable way.” He added final decisions about additional steps required by the agency will be made by IRS management -- in consultation with the National Treasury Employees Union -- in the coming weeks. Congress appropriated IRS $10.9 billion for fiscal 2015, a $346 million reduction from fiscal 2014 and $1.5 billion less than President Obama requested in his budget proposal. Since 2010, the IRS budget has been slashed by $1.2 billion, or 10 percent. The agency has reduced its workforce by a staggering 13,000 employees in that period, and that number is likely to climb next year. NTEU National President Colleen Kelley said the IRS budget is at its lowest point since 2007, “despite many more taxpayers and increased responsibilities,” such as enforcement of key Affordable Care Act provisions. “I am very concerned about the impact that IRS budget cuts will have on the workforce and the agency’s mission,” Kelley said. “We will do everything we can to prevent these draconian cuts from resulting in hardship to frontline employees who provide vital services to taxpayers. Starving the IRS hurts more than just the agency’s workforce, it hurts all taxpayers.” Koskinen said the slashed appropriations represent a “tax cut to tax cheats.” “To the extent we have fewer people to audit and enforce the tax code,” he said, “that means some people cutting corners on their taxes or not complying are going to get away with it, and that is a decision that Congress has made.” An email to IRS employees Wednesday afternoon said due to the cuts and $250 million in added expenses to pay for the anticipated 1 percent pay raise federal civilians are scheduled to receive next year, the agency will freeze hiring except in a few “mission-critical” areas, trim “limited travel even further” and stop overtime except in “critical” situations. “We will review all contracts and other places where we can possibly realize further savings,” Koskinen wrote in the email. “And I have asked the heads of our organizational divisions to look for ways to cut their operating budgets during the next nine months. But I have made it clear that we will do our best not to take actions that make your job more difficult or less satisfying.” Despite the cuts, Koskinen told employees their work was still appreciated. “I have faith in your commitment to the nation and your dedication to serving taxpayers,” he wrote. “As always, I know you and your colleagues will do your best with the limited resources available to protect the integrity of the filing season, to enforce the tax code and to help taxpayers trying to meet their obligations. I will continue to highlight your work and our concern about the effect of these budget reductions.” |
With the vast amount of land in Detroit, there’s room for innovative housing and development. True North, which has sprung up over the past year, is one of those truly unique ideas. Last summer, we started hearing that a few Quonset huts were being built off of Grand River and 16th. We visited in the winter, as many started to rise. Since then, people from around the world have shown interest in this little community and now, they’re housing new residents. Curbed recently toured the new community with developer Philip Kafka, as landscaping and final touches are underway. Some of the spaces will be dynamic and activated, while most will simply be residences. They’ve planted 30 trees and more wild grass and a clay court is yet to come. Of the residences, all seven are occupied or will be rented shortly. One of the huts will be rented out as an Airbnb, while the largest one (the tall one with the ladder) will have a gallery space and an apartment above it. Kafka says that once the news broke of the development, they had over 150 inquiries about it. When people who haven’t seen it drive by, he says, they stop to look. He says he’s happy with how democratic the design is, and wanted a sensible development that’s good for everyone. Could there be more on the way? Possibly. For now, they’re learning from the building of this development and what could be improved in the future. Here’s a tour around the new community, including some of the huts which will soon house residents. |
The Platform is a regular column by mobile editor Dan Rowinski. Ubiquitous computing, ambient intelligence and pervasive networks are changing the way humans interact with everything. In professional sports, a “tweener” is a player who’s not quite large, strong or fast enough to be a star. A tweener can be a good player, but his—because the term usually refers to men—in-between stature makes it difficult to find the right position and generally makes for an awkward fit on the team. The Microsoft Surface Pro 3 is a tweener. Like its predecessors, the Surface Pro 3 is designed to be both tablet and laptop, a mobile device and a PC. The Surface Pro 3 has the hardware and most of the capabilities that you’d expect in a PC, but in the form of an elegant 12 inch tablet. If you were to take the Surface Pro 3 at face value, you’d see a pretty darn good computer—assuming, that is, you like Windows 8. “This is the tablet that can replace your laptop,” said Panos Panay, Microsoft’s VP of Surface. Or, to paraphrase what one Microsoft employee said to me yesterday, “It is a superior laptop designed to be elegantly mobile.” But you can’t really evaluate the Surface Pro 3 as the sum of its features. Because it’s a tweener. Quick Thought: First Impressions Of The 2-In-1 I wanted to put Microsoft’s claim that the Surface Pro 3 could replace my laptop to the test. So, after receiving a review unit from Microsoft, I took the bus back home to Boston from Manhattan and attempted to write this article. After downloading a free trial of Office 365, I was able to start writing with Microsoft Word while also Skyping with the ReadWrite team via a split screen. The touchscreen app switcher in Windows 8 let me look up information along the way. I downloaded Skitch to format photos and screenshots. But Internet Explorer let me down when it came to loading the piece into our homebrew publishing system, especially where uploading and formatting photos was concerned. Ultimately, I finished it on a MacBook Air with Google Chrome. After writing the article in Word, I spent the rest of the trip home reading The Leftovers by Tom Perrotta on the Amazon Kindle app for Windows 8. I oscillated between using the kickstand for “lapability” and holding the Surface Pro 3 in my hand. While it may be the lightest Surface Pro ever, it’s still heavy if you hold it for long. Bottom line: the Surface Pro 3 can almost replace my laptop and tablet, but it doesn’t quite finish the job. The 2-in-1 tweener hasn’t fared particularly well in the market over the last several years, largely because of price. People want tablets that look and feel like tablets and generally start at mobile-like prices—say $499 (at the high end) and down. The lowest grade Surface Pro 3 starts at $799 for 4GB of RAM, 64GB of storage and an Intel Core i3. From there, pricing shoots straight out of normal tablet range, all the way up to high-end laptop levels—i.e., $1,949 for 8GB of RAM, 512GB of storage and an Intel Core i7. Research firm NPD Group reports that sales of tablets larger than 9 inches are down 12% this year, according to Bloomberg. This is not only a bad omen for the 12-inch Surface Pro 3, but also for Apple’s 9.7-inch iPad. Smaller tablets tend to be cheaper, which pushes market volume for manufacturers, a fact that Google and Amazon are well aware of with their small primary tablets. Microsoft held 1.3% of the tablet market share in the first quarter of 2014 and didn’t even break the top five manufacturers, according to research firm IDC. Overall, tablet shipments are down 3.9% year-over-year; PCs are down 4.4%. These trends don’t seem favorable to Microsoft’s Surface Pro strategy. Recreating The PC Market Microsoft wants everyone to think the Surface Pro 3 is a tablet, but its pricing gives the game away. Microsoft wants to recreate the lucrative PC market that made the company billions of dollars by repackaging a PC into tablet clothing and then hammering away at the Surface product line until everybody believes that PCs never really went anywhere, they just got a touchscreen and a cellular connection. This line of thinking has, to be blunt, so far fallen short. Microsoft’s bottom line (likely more than $1 billion in losses on Surface inventory in the last two years) is proof. People want bigger smartphones and smaller tablets. When they want PCs, they want either affordable laptops or high-powered expensive desktops with large monitors. The market has not yet said, “we want tablets that act like PCs and are priced much higher than the tablets that we would otherwise buy.” If Microsoft is looking towards the business user and enterprise market for Surface sales, it’s going to have a hard time on that road as well. Many enterprises are reluctant to upgrade systems—just look at how long they kept Windows XP running—and they’re not enamored with Windows 8.1. Even the entire Chinese government has declined to use Windows 8. Some analysts remain optimistic about enterprise sales. Take Jack Gold from J.Gold & Associates: Although the price is still a bit high for many, this unit is meant to be a high end device with full capability for corporate users where a premium price of a few hundred dollars is far outweighed by the productivity enhancing ability of this device. Microsoft doesn’t want to cede the entire consumer market to Apple and Android. But Redmond’s math just doesn’t add up. Give Microsoft credit for being mulish. Old Microsoft or new, the company retains the ability to just put its head down and insist that its products are cool, that they’re exactly the right fit for everybody and that you’re missing out if you don’t buy one soon. This is exactly what Microsoft did with the Xbox and what it has been trying to do with Windows Phone for several years now. Bing probably falls into that category too. Quote of the Day: “Bothered by what the agents were saying, I informed them that I would first need to read the order they had just delivered—and then consult with an attorney. The feds seemed surprised by my hesitation.” ~ Lavabit founder Ladar Levinson writing in The Guardian on being served court orders for the secure email service’s encryption keys by U.S. authorities. Sometimes that works. Xbox, after several years and hundreds of millions in marketing dollars, finally found a semblance of success. The Xbox One was a much-anticipated product that delivered a superior gaming console (if one that featured several misguided assumptions by Microsoft). Microsoft has shown a willingness to burn lots of money while iterating products towards commercial viability. The Surface Pro 3 is an interesting device that has some notable merits. But Microsoft may be in for disappointment if it thinks it can sell the Surface Pro at PC prices and still achieve critical volume. If Microsoft could build a Surface with the same hardware specs and performance as the Pro 3, but market and sell it in the notebook price range (from $300 to $1,000), it could shed the tweener label. As it stands, though, shoehorning a PC into a mobile design and selling it like a laptop seems unlikely to draw the crowds the company is clearly hoping for. More On Microsoft, Windows 8 And Surface Pro 3 |
The first word that comes to mind when I think of William Tenn is “wry.” He’s funny, he’s observant, he’s got a wonderful way of looking at things upside down, or putting two things together you’d never think of in the same universe, his stories are very different from each other, but you could find his picture in the dictionary next to the word “wry.” Mankind consisted of 128 people. If anyone else had written Of Men and Monsters, even as a comedy, it would be a cosy catastrophe. In Tenn’s hands it’s something else entirely. Of course, it’s very funny. The Earth has been utterly and completely conquered by aliens so long ago that the memory of the time before the aliens came is the province of religion. People live like vermin in holes in the insulation material of the walls of the homes the monsters have built, sneaking out to steal food. “Mankind” is the name of one of the front-burrow tribes. No spoilers. You could predict from this the kind of story it would be. And you’d be right, it is that kind of story—the young hero Eric the Only, going out on his first expedition into Monster territory, excitement, betrayals, captivity, escape, true love, happy ending. As it’s done as comedy, you might also predict that it would be a parody of that—which is also true. The book is simultaneously an adventure story taking itself seriously and a parody of an adventure story, played for laughs. It gets a lot of mileage out of of the idea of what intelligent mice or cockroaches would conclude about human houses. It makes jokes about the “cages of sin,” where prisoners are investigated by the monsters for pest control experiments—”The cages of sin is death!” “Are death?” There’s a religious schism that originated as an argument between people who thought the monsters should be thrown out with ancestral science or by stealing alien science, which people are fighting about though they’re making no progress against the monsters. A lot of the comedy comes from people behaving exactly the way people would behave in the kinds of situations they’re in, the kind of thing where you nod and smile rather than laughing. But beyond all this, it has an entirely unpredictable and unexpected ending—a happy ending, a funny ending, an emotionally satisfying ending, but an ending that’s typically, wryly, and exclusively Tenn. I own a scruffy old British edition of Of Men and Monsters, but it’s presently in print in a gorgeous NESFA edition Here Comes Civilization that also contains some of Tenn’s short fiction. The rest of Tenn’s short fiction is available in the companion volume Immodest Proposals. Of Men and Monsters is his only novel-length work, most of his other stories are novellas. They’re all wry and funny and clever and they all do lovely surprising things with science-fictional ideas. People tend to talk about them as if they were jokes, and that’s what they are, long jokes told perfectly, with great punchlines and timely relevance. There’s the one about the amoeboid alien smut, and the one about the alien Jews, and the one about the way different groups of aliens keep liberating Earth until it’s too dangerous to use as a battlefield. That’s “The Liberation of Earth” and it was one of the first science fiction stories I ever read, in Penguin Science Fiction (edited by Brian Aldiss). If Tenn has a theme it’s “making the best of it.” The Earth has been conquered by monsters? Oh well, better make the best of it. My son Sasha read Of Men and Monsters when he was twelve, young enough to entirely enjoy the adventure plot, and just old enough to appreciate the whole set of things Tenn was doing with the story. A few months after he’d read the book, I got to introduce Sasha to William Tenn (who is Phil Klass in private life) at a con, saying “You have a new generation of fans,” whereupon they both rolled their eyes at me in identical fashion and proceeded to bond about how embarrassing mothers can be. Anyway, I remember having a lot of great conversations with Sasha as he noticed various things the book was doing. He pointed out something I’d never noticed, that one of the precedents for this book was Mary Norton’s The Borrowers, and even more so Michael Larrabeiti’s parody The Borribles. Of course, he didn’t realise that The Borribles was written ten years later than Of Men and Monsters, so if there’s any influence it’s going the other way… but it is interesting that people living in walls like vermin is one of those things you see in children’s fiction but rarely in adult fiction. The only other SF book with this theme I can think of is Michael Coney’s The Hero of Downways, one of Coney’s weaker books. All of Tenn’s work is worth your attention, it makes you smile, it makes you think, and best of all it makes you look at things in a different way. Jo Walton is a science fiction and fantasy writer. She’s published eight novels, most recently Half a Crown and Lifelode, and two poetry collections. She reads a lot, and blogs about it here regularly. She comes from Wales but lives in Montreal where the food and books are more varied. |
Watch: PS3 emulator on PC making dramatic improvements [Update] Update, 24 July 2017: The developers of the RPCS3 emulator have shown off another high-profile PS3 game running at playable speeds. Yep, Demon’s Souls is the latest title to see a big leap in performance, with the developer noting that stability problems have recently been fixed. “Although performance is not optimal even on an i7-6700k the game is fully working and runs stable. Therefore it is considered playable, but perhaps not fully enjoyable,” read an excerpt of the video description. Check out the clip below. Original article: The PS3 might just be the Sega Saturn of today’s generation when it comes to emulation. After all, they both gained a reputation as being incredibly hard to emulate, owing to their exotic hardware. However, emulation work for Sony’s last-gen console has seen truly impressive strides. The open-source RPCS3 emulator has been in the works for a while now, but it’s finally running multiple titles at playable or approaching playable speeds. Read more: 4 hacker-friendly gaming consoles you should get right now For starters, we’ve got Skate 3, which runs slightly slowly and exhibits a host of shadow-related and general glitches. Still it makes for a pretty cool sight, especially when you consider that the franchise wasn’t released on PC to begin with. Then there’s Persona 5, which has made massive strides since initially booting up via the PS3 emulator. In the clip below, the developers showcase the title, using one of the latest emulator builds and configurations. The team adds that a fix for bright, blue glitches in the game also applies to other titles they’re working on. The fun doesn’t stop there either, with the team recently uploading a video of Okami HD as well. “Last week Okami HD did absolutely nothing at all, it would crash instantly,” the team explained in the video description. Now, the game runs almost flawlessly, as you can see below. |
Bloomberg Defends Stop-And-Frisk, Decries Critics 'Pointing Fingers From City Hall' By Pointing Fingers From NYPD Headquarters from the pot-decries-kettles'-blackness;-NYPD-books-same,-citing-'public-blacknes dept Everything questionable that Bloomberg has overseen in his position as mayor of New York -- all the civil rights violations, all the increased surveillance, all the the dubious actions and policies that sent the message that Bloomberg was very interested in crafting a hybrid nanny/police state -- is coming home to roost. With the police force under attack from multiple lawsuits and his soda ban overturned by a NY judge for being "arbitrary and capricious" (name a ban that isn't), Bloomberg is on the defensive -- and he sounds it. Rather than addressing concerns with thoughtful answers, the mayor has decided to respond by lashing out at his critics and backing up his dubious claims with even worse rationale. Bloomberg pointed fingers and threw out the obligatory 9/11 card during his speech/diatribe delivered from the friendly confines of the NYPD headquarters. Bloomberg's comments hold everyone accountable for the current unpleasantness (and future theoretic unpleasantness) -- everyone but Bloomberg and the NYPD. The arguments Bloomberg uses are so abysmal it's almost possible to believe this is a very broadly played satire, rather than an actual event that actually happened. Just take a look at this statement. “God forbid terrorists succeed in striking our city because of a politically driven law that undermines the N.Y.P.D.’s intelligence gathering efforts,” he said. “Look at what’s happened in Boston,” Mr. Bloomberg said. “Remember what happened here on 9/11. Remember all of those who’ve been killed by gun violence and the families they left behind.” “The attacks most often come from those who play no constructive role in keeping our city safe, but rather, view their jobs as pointing fingers from the steps of City Hall,” he said. "Terrorists." "God forbid." Someone needs to find a new rhetorical device.Believe it or not, this is Bloomberg's argument against appointing an independent Inspector General to review police policies. The argument has two parts, both equally awful. The first uses the tired "but terrorism" threat/excuse/cliche. The second part actually makes the claim that an Inspector General would result in other agencies beingwilling to share info with the NYPD. That may be true, butis it true andis this an "acceptable" truth? To put it in words frequently directed towards US citizens: what do they have to hide?Bloomberg's words play to the home crowd (NYPD) , but holy shit is that an ugly bit of truth to (inadvertently) drop in the middle of a loaded sentence. If NYPD intelligence gathering is "undermined" by the presence of independent oversight, the problem is with the NYPD and every agency that decideds to cut them out of the loop, willfully endangering the public in favor of CYA opacity.Bloomberg said more, but this statement is just terrible. It indicates there's an acceptable level of corruption within the police force and that the mayor has no interest in addressing that issue. Everything else becomes so much banality aimed at satiating his audience, a collection of NYPD police chiefs. There's terrorism (again):OK. And what? Honor their memories by giving the police carte blanche to shove any citizen up against the nearest wall and pat them down? Cover every inch of the city with cameras, microphones and facial recognition software in hopes of "preventing" a statistically anomalous event (and proclaiming victory when the more statistically probablecontinues to happen)?To top this all off, Bloomberg steps past the empty rhetoric and defense of shady police "business as usual" to hypocritically deride others for "playing politics with people's lives."Said the man whoCity Hall, pointing fingers from NYPD headquarters.Bloomberg's statements are ugly, but at least they were delivered out in the open, rather than in a closed-door meeting with the "home team." All of Bloomberg's finger pointing and cheap rationale is a matter of public record. This is a small, inadvertent, victory. Bloomberg wants his constituents' lives to be open books, but wants the NYPD to remain an inscrutable, unassailable means of enforcement and "security." That's a load of crap and Bloomberg seems to be having trouble shoveling it correctly. If he keeps feeling this sort of heat, we may see him slipping into full blown opacity or devolving even further into a ranting apologist for systemic failure. Filed Under: new york, nypd, stop and frisk, surveillance |
Hello, everyone! As I once promised you, I publish schemes and pattern of crochet skirt “Mermaid” from SexyCrochet. More photos of this skirt you can see here – “Crochet maxi skirt “Mermaid”. Summer beach 2014″ Materials needed: 600 gr. of yarn of Lanas Stop “Cablé 5″ (400m 100 gr 100% cotton) light gray color crochet hook 2.0 nylon thread 1. The first that we need to do are 7 crochet squares with next scheme: And connect the sides of the squares in a circle, forming belt of skirt. 2. Continue to knit skirt in a downward direction with the following scheme, I call it “Twig” 3. Next rows: one row of double crochet stitch entire one row of *double crochet stitch, two chain stitches* one row of double crochet stitch entire 4. Next scheme is “Spiders”: 4. Repeat step 3. 5. Knit with scheme “Twig” until obtain necessary height. 6. Repeat step 3. 7. Repeat step 2. 8. Finish our skirt with the scheme of ”Hand fan”: 9. Now we have to return to the top of the skirt and to knit one row of double crochet stitch. Now we need to take our nylon yarn and knit one row with this thread of single crochet stitch. And we finish our work with one row more of double crochet stitch with cotton thread. So.. no more secrets left of crochet beach skirt “Mermaid” from SexyCrochet. I hope you like this post. Please shere it with your friends on facebook, pinteres etc.. You can see many logos of sociales networks in the right sidebar in the top of page. Thank you! |
One of the things that I always found rewarding from retail was helping people find something they really wanted, and had trouble finding before. It’s a feeling I’ve shared and there is always a lot of excitement in finally tracking down a personal holy grail of sorts. Well, I had not one of my best sales, but one of my most rewarding sales the other day. Mired in a few frustrating returns, and some bad sales I got a message from a guy saying that he was located in Monterey and was wondering where I had picked up the following t-shirt: So first, about the shirt. I picked this guy up at a local thrift store, and after a small amount of research decided to take a shot. I have a had lot of luck with random autographs when I represent them as just that. I did some research in the store, finding out that there was some Ricky Graham gear up on Ebay, but no t-shirts and few autographed items, mostly photograph. Off to google, then I found out that Rick Graham was a very talented Motorcyle racer from Carmel. Ricky died in 1998 in a house fire in Spreckles after shaking a drinking problem and winning three national championships. Here’s an article about Ricky’s tragic passing: http://www.apnewsarchive.com/1998/Motorcyclist-Ricky-Graham-Dies/id-e4b624148fa88c9cb00292a70a87c5c5 It turns out the gentleman that messaged me, was a friend of the family. He was ecstatic, had already had the autograph authenticated by Ricky’s brother. He purchased the shirt immediately, and we started messaging back and forth, and he told me a little bit about Ricky and how he was excited to get this shirt back into the possession of his family. He even sent me a personal snap shot of Ricky: This brief personal interaction really put me back into the right mind set of evaluating every buyer individually, and to not always think everyone in a predatory scam artist out to take every last $20. There are many, many out there but in the words of Depeche Mode, people are people. In the end I’m extremely happy that I got to be part of reuniting a community with a piece of their family history that has been lost for some 20 years. My all time favorite positive feedback: Advertisements |
Richard O'Brien (born Richard Smith; 25 March 1942) is an English-New Zealand actor, writer, musician, television presenter, voice artist and theatre performer. After a long and successful career based in the United Kingdom, he gained dual citizenship with New Zealand in 2011, where, as a boy, he resided in Tauranga. O'Brien wrote the musical stage show The Rocky Horror Show, which has remained in almost continuous production. He also co-wrote the screenplay of the film adaptation The Rocky Horror Picture Show, released in 1975, appearing in the film as Riff Raff. O'Brien also appeared in the hugely popular ITV series Robin of Sherwood in 1984-1986, as Gulnar, alongside Jason Connery. He presented the television show The Crystal Maze for Channel 4 from 1990 to 1993 and is the voice of Lawrence Fletcher, the title characters' father in Phineas and Ferb. Early life [ edit ] O'Brien was born Richard Smith in Cheltenham, Gloucestershire. He emigrated with his family to Tauranga, New Zealand, at the age of 10, where his accountant father had purchased a sheep farm. He went to Tauranga Boys' College. He returned to England in 1964, after having learned how to ride horses (a skill which provided him with his break into the film industry as a stuntman in Carry On Cowboy) and developing a keen interest in comic books and horror films. He launched his acting career using his maternal grandmother's name,[1] as there was already an actor named Richard Smith. He has credited his time in New Zealand with instilling in him a sense of egalitarianism that enabled him to ignore the negative implications of social class in the UK upon returning, and gave him "a great sense of freedom".[2] Work [ edit ] To improve his acting skills, O'Brien took method acting classes, and then joined several stage productions as an actor. In 1970, he went into the touring production of Hair for nine months, and spent another nine months in the London production.[3] In the summer of 1972, he met director Jim Sharman who cast him as an Apostle and Leper in the London production of Jesus Christ Superstar. Sharman then cast O'Brien as Willie, the alien in his March 1973 production of Sam Shepard's The Unseen Hand at the Royal Court Theatre Upstairs.[4] Sharman also helped make O'Brien's draft of a gothic-themed, schlock-horror comic-book fantasy romp into a reality. Sharman suggested changing the working title from They Came from Denton High, and The Rocky Horror Show opened at the Theatre Upstairs in June 1973.[5] Within weeks it had become a box-office hit, moving from the Royal Court to the Pheasantry, a nearby venue in the King's Road, then to the Classic Cinema and eventually into the West End at the Comedy Theatre. After seeing the second night's performance of The Rocky Horror Show in the Theatre Upstairs, Jonathan King produced the original cast soundtrack in just over 48 hours during an off-stage weekend, and rushed it out on his UK Records label. He also became a 20% backer with producer Michael White, who put up the remaining 80%.[6] During this period, O'Brien and his wife Kimi Wong recorded and released a number of pop singles under the name Kimi and Ritz.[7] Later career [ edit ] O'Brien continued writing musicals with arranger Richard Hartley, including: T. Zee (1976), Disaster (1978), The Stripper (1982 – based on the Carter Brown novel and produced in Australia), and Top People (1984). O'Brien and Hartley also provided three songs for the film The Return of Captain Invincible (1983), starring Alan Arkin. O'Brien wrote his one-man revue Disgracefully Yours (1985) singing as Mephistopheles Smith. O'Brien became a serial bit-part film actor and has appeared in Jubilee (1977), Flash Gordon (1980), Dark City (1998), Ever After (1998) and Dungeons & Dragons (2000), among others. Additionally he guest starred in five episodes in the third season of the HTV dramatisation of Robin of Sherwood, as the corrupt druid Gulnar. A music CD of the songs from Disgracefully Yours entitled Absolute O'Brien was released in 1998.[8] He became the presenter of UK Channel 4's game show The Crystal Maze in 1990,[9] specialising in sardonic put-downs, occasional eccentricities and playing his harmonica at random intervals. The show ran from 1990 to 1995, with O'Brien presenting the first four series. It was regularly Channel 4's highest-rated programme, reaching a peak of 7 million viewers for the 1993 Christmas special. O'Brien left The Crystal Maze in 1993 after the fourth series; the show was then taken over by Edward Tudor-Pole. After two series without O'Brien, the show was cancelled.[citation needed] In other roles O'Brien has conceptualised and played the role of the Child Catcher in the West End theatre production of Chitty Chitty Bang Bang.[9] He also occasionally performs cabaret-style music and comedy on stages around the world, singing songs from Rocky Horror among others. In 1995, he performed a select number of shows as the devilish charmer Mephistopheles Smith in a musical/comedy show he wrote entitled Disgracefully Yours, which was later given permission to be adapted into a musical, performed first by Eubank Productions for the Kansas City Fringe Fest in 2006, and more recently by Janus Theatre Company for the Edinburgh Fringe 2007, simply entitled Mephistopheles Smith. In late 2005, he appeared (as the spirit of the mirror) in the pantomime version of Snow White, which played at the Milton Keynes Theatre. In the summer of 2006, he played the Child Catcher in the Queen's 80th birthday celebrations at Buckingham Palace. O'Brien performed in Thank-You for the Music, a 90-minute ABBA documentary for ITV, directed by Martin Koch, who previously directed the musical Mamma Mia![10] The documentary included a remake of the mini musical '"The Girl with the Golden Hair" which ABBA performed during their 1977 world tour and featured on ABBA: The Album (also 1977). The musical was performed at the Prince of Wales Theatre and featured Richard O'Brien, Liz McClarnon and the Dynamos.[10] He also hosted the 1993 Brit Awards. A patron of the Five Stars Scanner Appeal,[11] which benefits the Royal Manchester Children's Hospital. From 2001-06 he hosted the annual Transfandango,[12] gala gathering of Dearhearts and Trans 'n' Gentle People to raise money for the hospital. This has now been superseded by Richard O'Brien's Halloween Party. A script for another rumoured sequel entitled Revenge of the Old Queen of Rocky Horror, has been circulated on the web and reproduced on various fansites, though officially denied as O'Brien's work by his representatives. While he has worked on a screenplay by that title, it was never publicly released. He wrote the lyrics for The Stripper (based on the book by Carter Brown), a musical which had its British premiere at the Queen's Theatre in Hornchurch, Essex on 28 August 2009.[13] In 2004, Hamilton City Council in New Zealand honoured O'Brien's contribution to the arts with a statue of Riff Raff, the character he played in The Rocky Horror Show, on the site of the former Embassy Cinema.[14] In June 2010, O'Brien was denied New Zealand citizenship and so could himself not settle in the country. He commented "They build a statue of me and celebrate me as a New Zealander, but I have to go on my knees and do all sorts of things, and I'm probably too old."[15] The government eventually made an exception. O'Brien became a New Zealand citizen in December 2011.[16] In September 2007, he reprised his role as the Child Catcher for the final two weeks of Chitty Chitty Bang Bang's five-year British run, and then played the role in its Singapore engagement for the month of November, extended to 9 December. Also in December, he visited Hamilton, New Zealand for An Evening With Richard O'Brien, with presenter Mark Sainsbury and director Fiona Jackson. "Fiona Jackson" . [17] In December 2008, O'Brien donated his original script Pig in Boots to the Wireless Theatre Company,[18] who converted it into an audio pantomime. The show was recorded live at the Headliners Comedy Club in front of a studio audience with live FX and music. The production was opened by an original interview with O'Brien. In October 2012, O'Brien judged "Stage Fright" with the Wireless Theatre Company as part of the London Horror Festival and performed an acoustic set of Rocky Horror songs.[19] In March 2012, he gave a performance of song and autobiographical stories, It's Party Time with Richard O'Brien at the Hamilton Founders Theatre to celebrate his 70th birthday. In June 2012, he returned to Hamilton, New Zealand, to appear on stage as Fagin with the Hamilton Operatic Society's production of Oliver! at the Founders Theatre.[20] O'Brien appeared in 2015 in The Rocky Horror Show in the West End in the limited 11 performance run.[21] In September 2016 O'Brien opened the second stage Embassy Park in Hamilton together with Mayor Julie Hardaker.[22] In October 2016, he appeared as the Crystal Maze Computer in a one-off Celebrity Crystal Maze episode for the charity 'Stand Up To Cancer' on Channel 4.[23] Personal life [ edit ] In a 2009 interview O'Brien spoke about an ongoing struggle to reconcile cultural gender roles and described himself as being transgender or possible third sex (genderqueer). O'Brien stated, "There is a continuum between male and female. Some are hard-wired one way or another, I’m in between."[24] He expounded on this in a 2013 interview where he talked about using estrogen for the previous decade, and that he views himself as 70% male and 30% female.[25] In 2017, O'Brien came under controversy when he said that transgender women were not real women.[26] In June 2010, the media reported that O'Brien had been denied New Zealand citizenship owing to him being too old under the country's immigration criteria. O'Brien's application appeared to garner public support and the decision was later overturned on appeal.[15] In August 2010, New Zealand's Dominion Post reported that O'Brien would be allowed residency and possibly citizenship as an "exceptional" case.[27] According to the Waikato Times, he was officially registered as a New Zealand citizen on 14 December 2011.[16] On 16 August 2010, he appeared on an episode of Celebrity Cash in the Attic, where he donated the takings from his sale of memorabilia to the Royal Manchester Children's Hospital, Manchester. O'Brien has married three times and has three children. He and actress Kimi Wong were married on 4 December 1971 and had a son Linus in May 1972. He has a son and daughter from his second marriage to designer Jane Moss. On 7 July 2012, aged 70, he proposed to Sabrina Graf, aged 35, a native of Germany, whom he had been dating for three years.[28] They married on 6 April 2013 at their home in Katikati, Bay of Plenty.[29][30] In 2017 he stated in The New Zealand Herald that he was proud to be a New Zealander.[2] Filmography [ edit ] Acting [ edit ] |
Media playback is unsupported on your device Media caption Richard Ratcliffe tells the BBC about the moment he realised his wife would not be returning to the UK. A court in Iran has rejected an appeal against a five-year prison sentence given to a woman with dual British and Iranian citizenship. Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe - a charity worker accused of security offences - was detained while trying to leave the country with her baby daughter after visiting relatives in April 2016. Her family denies she broke any laws. Her husband, Richard Ratcliffe, who is from London, said his wife's detention was a "stain" on Iran. Mrs Zaghari-Ratcliffe, 38, who works for the charity the Thomson Reuters Foundation, has been detained in Iran since her arrest last year. The couple's two-year-old daughter has remained in Iran after the government confiscated her passport, and is being looked after by her grandparents. Mrs Zaghari-Ratcliffe's family said in September that a Revolutionary Court had handed down the five-year term. She was accused of allegedly plotting to topple the government in Tehran, but the official charges against her were not made public. According to Mr Ratcliffe, his wife's appeal was dismissed in a secret hearing of an Iranian Revolutionary Court on 4 January but only announced on 22 January. In a statement, her husband said the precise charges against her remain secret, but that two new accusations were made at her appeal. Image copyright Getty Images One was that she had been head of recruitment for the BBC's Farsi service when it was launched in 2009. Her family say she worked on a BBC training project for youth in Afghanistan and Iran, but never worked for BBC Farsi. The other charge was that she was married to a British spy. Mr Ratcliffe is an accountant. Monique Villa, chief executive of Thomson Reuters Foundation said she is "outraged by this new mockery of justice", and reiterated Mrs Zaghari-Ratcliffe never worked for BBC Farsi and that her husband "is not a spy but a reputable accountant". "I am fully convinced of Nazanin's innocence," she added. 'Needless waste' Francesca Unsworth, BBC World Service Group director, said Mrs Zaghari-Ratcliffe had briefly worked for charity BBC Media Action in a "junior administrative capacity" but had never worked for BBC Persian. "In any case, to suggest that being employed by BBC Persian is tantamount to 'acting against national security' is patently ludicrous," Ms Unsworth added. Mr Ratcliffe said: "The lack of justice in Nazanin's case continues to be a stain on Iran. The continued attempt to frame Nazanin behind secrets and lies brings shame. "It is a needless waste of a mother and child's life for their own political bargains and economic interests." Iran does not recognize dual nationalities, meaning those detained cannot receive consular assistance. Since her imprisonment, her family have campaigned on her behalf, highlighting her deteriorating health while in jail and her anguish at her separation from her daughter. |
Why has David Moyes had such a horror show since taking over as Manchester United manager last summer? From our armchairs, the diagnosis has been relatively straightforward: taking over from a legend is inevitably a fool's errand; anyone replacing Sir Alex Ferguson was doomed before a ball was kicked. Moyes inherited a patchy squad with too few players at the peak of their powers. Or, if you want to be snarky, you might query Moyes's credentials: he never won a major trophy as a manager at Preston North End and Everton and has now brought a smaller-club mentality to United, arguably the most famous football organisation on the planet. Moyes clearly has a different perspective on the crisis. While he is restricted to bringing in new players by two transfer "windows" – one over summer, the other during January – he can make changes to personnel behind the scenes whenever he likes. At the end of last year he overhauled United's back-room staff. The arrivals included Robbie Cooke, Everton's chief scout; Chelsea's European scout Mick Doherty, who also worked with Moyes at Everton; and John Murtough, formerly responsible for Everton's vaunted academy and latterly the Premier League's head of elite performance. His final "transfer" was James Smith, head of technical scouting at Everton. None of these appointments made headlines, but Moyes believes they could be crucial in unearthing the future stars of Manchester United – within the club and outside – and turning round his fortunes at Old Trafford. There has been a revolution in football – though it is one that even the most committed fans will only be dimly aware of. Clubs are becoming smarter, more efficient. We've probably all seen the graphics and statistics that pop up in newspapers and on shows such as Match of the Day: it began with counting corners and shots on goal, but recently the analysis has become more whizz-bang; not least speed profiling and heat maps, which plot a player's movement around the pitch. But this is just a fraction of the data that can be collected during a match. Opta, a sports statistics company, records around 1,500 "events" from every fixture. All 20 clubs in the Premier League – and many in the lower divisions – now employ data analysts to make sense of this information. Manchester City has 11 of them. In 2012, Liverpool caused a stir by creating a new position, director of research, for Ian Graham, who has a PhD in theoretical physics. The analysts are involved in pre-match preparation and post-game debriefs; they help to identify transfer targets and devise strategies for nurturing young players through the ranks. These developments have inspired confusion and even suspicion from many supporters, summed up by a recent headline in the New Statesman: "How the spreadsheet-wielding geeks are taking over football." We can't be blamed for being perplexed. Take the match last month between Arsenal and Bayern Munich, which Bayern won 2-0. The following morning, the Guardian plucked out two statistics: Toni Kroos, the German midfielder, completed more passes than the entire Arsenal midfield; meanwhile, Arsenal's Mesut Özil covered 11.69km, the third-highest distance on the pitch. What the stats didn't say, but was blindingly obvious to anyone watching, was that Kroos was sensational and Özil had a stinker. These are simplistic examples, but they encapsulate a debate taking place at the highest levels of many football clubs. In one corner are the "quants" or quantitative analysts: they are admirers of the statistician and election-oracle Nate Silver; the Nobel prize-winning psychologist Daniel Kahneman; and especially Billy Beane, the star of Moneyball, Michael Lewis's 2003 book about the data revolution in baseball. They believe that a football match can be translated into numbers and – much as a hedge-fund trader does with the stock market – those figures can be crunched and scanned for patterns. They don't think intuition should be removed from the game but they have found that statistics are dispassionate in a way that humans never are. As Beane, general manager of the Oakland A's, has said: "The idea that I [should] trust my eyes more than the stats, I don't buy that because I've seen magicians pull rabbits out of hats and I know that the rabbit's not in there." In the other corner are the traditionalists, which is to say the owners and managers of the overwhelming majority of professional football clubs. They are aware of Moneyball – at least the film starring Brad Pitt – but don't believe the lessons of a stop-start sport such as baseball can be applied to the fluid dynamics of a football match. Most managers once played the game themselves at a high level and it is this fact, they contend, that gives them a special insight into what happens on the pitch and which players they recruit. This approach is summed up by an anecdote about Harry Redknapp, reported in Wired magazine. When he was manager of Southampton, he turned to his analyst after a loss and said: "I'll tell you what, next week, why don't we get your computer to play against their computer and see who wins?" It turns out that Redknapp was not too wide of the mark: how long will it be before we look at football not just as a contest between 22 players or a clash between two managers, but as a battle between the respective brains trusts assembled on the two benches? A decent place to start the investigation is Everton FC. As Simon Kuper, the Financial Times columnist and co-author of Soccernomics has detailed, no club in the Premier League has so consistently overachieved during the past decade. Under Moyes, they finished eighth or higher every season from 2007 to 2013. They've managed this despite being more frugal with wages than all of their rivals and not splashing cash on big-name transfers. Instead they achieved success by developing brilliant home-grown talent – Wayne Rooney, Jack Rodwell and Ross Barkley among them – and melding these players with unheralded stalwarts such as Leighton Baines and Leon Osman, who just happen to be statistical outliers. Baines, in fact, is something of an emblem for the data revolutionaries. For years, he was a solid, dependable left-back with an anachronistic mop-top, a perennial understudy to the flashier Ashley Cole in the England team. The stats, however, told a different story: in 2012, Opta identified Baines as the player who created the most chances in all of Europe's top leagues. His crosses, which were 38% accurate, led to a goal-scoring opportunity every 21.6 minutes, figures that shamed better-known playmakers such as Manchester City's David Silva and Arsenal's Santi Cazorla. Before long, Baines was first choice for the national team and a transfer target for Manchester United (of course, though perhaps he was simply playing better and the data per se had nothing to do with it). With such an impressive record over the years, it's hardly surprising that Moyes wanted to recreate the structure at Manchester United. Everton, meanwhile, installed Wigan Athletic's Roberto Martínez as their new manager. Martínez had his own reputation for performing above expectations: Wigan had been favourites for relegation from the Premier League every year since they were promoted in 2005; the club consistently had the lowest turnover and attendances in the top flight; their training ground was a converted working-men's club. Somehow they survived – until last May anyway, though they had the consolation of defeating Manchester City to win the FA Cup. Much of Wigan's resilience was put down to their progressive, young manager. Martínez was known for being obsessive about tactics. The Numbers Game, a recent book that examines the "datafication" of football, noted that he installed a 60-inch pen-touch TV screen at his home and hooked it up with player-tracking software from the performance analysts Prozone. He would watch matches, especially defeats, up to 10 times in order to make sense of what had happened. His response was often unusual and creative: while most teams favour the standard 4-4-2 formation, Wigan under Martínez would shuffle between 4-3-3 or 3-4-3 or 4-2-3-1. In short, he seemed like the perfect fit for a forward-thinking club like Everton. I meet Martínez at Finch Farm, Everton's training ground on the outskirts of Liverpool. The facility is typically described as "state of the art", but it is still a place where a tea lady will come round to offer you a cuppa and probably a biscuit if you ask politely, too. Martínez is flanked by two of his scouting team, Kevin Reeves and Steve Brown, and we all sit in Reeves's office. There's an iMac on the desk but it is devoid of personal effects and whiffs of fresh paint – it turns out the room used to belong to James Smith, until he moved to Manchester United, and Reeves is just settling in. Reeves was once the most expensive player in Britain – "the first £1.25 million man" back in 1980, he proudly notes – and he has followed Martínez from Wigan. They have just come in from training. How much data do they collect in preparation for matches? "Every step on a football pitch is measured now," says Martínez, in his unique Spanish-Lancastrian lilt. "We monitor each session with GPS and heart-rate profiles. From a physical point of view, the most significant stats are probably the number of sprints, the sprint distance and the amount of high-intensity efforts a player gets through. We look at these through the season and they give us a good indication of how fatigued a player is and the recovery he needs." At Everton, each player is tracked in terms of four "corners": technical, tactical, physical and psychological. Data is crucial for assessing the first three categories. On a very basic level, a company such as Opta or Prozone provides multi-camera footage of a player's actions during a match and coaches critique his performance: perhaps they would like him to play more short passes, or – a signature of Martínez's teams – retain possession more assiduously. Detailed feedback will start in some clubs from the under-nines upwards. "You've got so many facilities to look at an individual's performances and you can single out one aspect of his play and measure it – that's significant," he says. "That's unbelievable." Meanwhile, a pair of analysts will be preparing dossiers on the Everton first team's forthcoming fixtures: watching half a dozen of their opponent's previous matches and combining these findings with existing data from Prozone. On the recruitment side, Reeves and Brown liaise with 10 scouts across Europe, who work exclusively for Everton, and keep an eye on the ProScout7 database, which has profiles on almost 130,000 players in more than 130 countries. Martínez is just as bright and convivial as everyone tells you he is, but he can't hide his deep ambivalence towards, say, ball-retention percentages or the number of successful passes into the opposition's penalty box. Or, to put it another way: he thinks most statistics are useless. "There's a big danger of getting inundated with data and letting it affect your play," he says. "Remember: a player can have 10 shots and all of them are on target but he doesn't score a goal. Or he can have 10 shots and nine of them are off target, but then the last one goes in the top corner. So which stat do you prefer?" Martínez is not the first to make this point and, in one sense, he is making a distinction between "stats" and "metrics": statistics, on their own, are often meaningless, but through systematic analysis, they can become metrics, which might offer a more revealing measure of a player or a team's performance. Still, it is a surprise to hear Martínez taking this line. Aged 40, with a postgraduate diploma in business and marketing from Manchester University – attained while he was a player at Wigan – you might expect him to be a passionate advocate for analytics. The Numbers Game describes Martínez as a "hero" and its authors, Chris Anderson and David Sally, devote a chapter to his work as Wigan manager, which they approvingly call "Guerrilla Football". The Everton manager is especially scathing of using data to identify transfer targets – the Moneyball dream of unearthing players whose utility might not always be immediately obvious. There is the famous story of Arsène Wenger signing Mathieu Flamini (the first time) partly due to a statistic that showed he ran 14km a match. Or Liverpool, under their then-director of football Damien Comolli, who spent heavily in 2011 to acquire Jordan Henderson and Stewart Downing, ostensibly because their "final-third regain" percentages – how often they recovered possession in the opponent's penalty box – were so high. Martínez, and his chief scouts Reeves and Brown, find the suggestion that they would buy a player because of their numbers pretty funny. "You need to see a player and fall in love with a player," says Martínez. "When you see a player, you'll watch his warm-up, the way he speaks to the referee, the way he speaks to other team-mates after missing a chance, the way he celebrates a goal, the way his team-mates react when he scores. Data might help you narrow the margin of error, but the decision is still a feeling. It's a gut instinct." It is the psychology of a player that Martínez believes is the most crucial aspect of whether a player flourishes or wanes. And it is here that statistics or metrics are most restricted and unreliable. Everton will always scan news reports on a prospective signing and speak to their contacts for character references – some clubs will trawl through a player's Twitter feed and Facebook page – but ultimately the final decision is always an informed gamble. How will a player respond to taking a penalty in the 93rd minute of a Merseyside derby in front of the Kop at Anfield? What happens when your new foreign superstar arrives and struggles to learn English and his wife wants to go home? "Football players are football players once a week," warns Martínez. "The rest of the time they are human beings and fathers and husbands – data doesn't give you that." While no one contends that the use of data in football will ever be flawless, it certainly continues to become more astute and ambitious. The father of the movement is wing commander Charles Reep, an accountant in the RAF, who codified his first match in March 1950. He would eventually detail and analyse 2,200 games until the mid-1990s, spending around 80 hours on a single match, sometimes writing on rolls of wallpaper. Another pioneer was Valeriy Lobanovskyi, celebrated coach of Dynamo Kyiv and the USSR from the 1970s through to 2002, who spotted the potential of computers to change football when processors were still the size of the team bus. Known for his fastidious match preparations and scientific scouting, he said: "A team that commits errors in no more than 15% to 18% of its actions is unbeatable." The work of Reep and Lobanovskyi inspired a man you might not expect: Sam Allardyce, now manager of West Ham United. As a player, Allardyce spent the 1983 season with the Tampa Bay Rowdies in Florida; he made only 11 appearances, but the team shared its training facilities with the Tampa Bay Buccaneers NFL squad and he was intrigued by their preparations and that sport's infatuation with statistics. When he became a manager in the early 1990s, he wondered if he might introduce a similar model, but first he had to wait for the technology to catch up with him. Opta was the creation of a group of management consultants; their first clients in 1996 for their football statistics were Sky Sports and – take a bow – the Observer. Soon they were joined in the market by Prozone, a company that began life as a purveyor of massage armchairs. "Those black chairs you see in motorway service stations that you put £1 in," says Paul Boanas, Prozone's senior account manager. Early interest in Prozone came from another unlikely innovator, Steve McLaren, then a coach at Derby County. He liked the chairs, but the players got bored sitting in them for 15 minutes after every training session. He asked: "Couldn't they watch videos of the game while they're doing it?" McLaren, who would move on to coach Manchester United and then manage England, and Allardyce, who by this time was manager of Bolton Wanderers, would become Prozone's earliest and most devoted customers. For Big Sam in particular, the new software was addictive: he hired a team of young sports-science graduates and used the video analysis to mould Bolton's style of play. They calculated that any team that ran further and faster than their opponents would win or draw 80% of their matches. Their players relentlessly practised throw-ins, corners and free-kicks – targeting "pomos" or positions of maximum opportunity – and scored around half their goals, far above the league average, from these set-pieces. Allardyce stitched together a team of misfits, old-timers and foreign mercenaries, led by Gary Speed. When he arrived on a free transfer in 2004, Speed was 35, but his stats – 12km a game, a pass-completion average of above 80% – suggested he could still be useful. He became a talisman for Bolton for the next four seasons. Big Sam's Bolton defied logic: they finished in the top eight of the Premier League every season between 2003 and 2007, and twice qualified for the Uefa Cup. But "pomos" did not enter the lexicon of the data revolution and many of his ideas now seem outdated. Allardyce remains committed to metrics, but his greatest contribution to the movement might just be the people he inspired. Bolton alumni now head the analytics departments of the most ambitious clubs in world football: Ed Sulley is head of performance analysis at Manchester City, while Gavin Fleig is City's head of technical scouting; Dave Fallows is head of recruitment at Liverpool. These men could be just as influential in shaping the future of their clubs as the managers, Manuel Pellegrini and Brendan Rodgers. There is a clear shift of power taking place at some clubs, and the use of data analytics is at the heart of it. At a time when the average tenure of a Premier League manager is just over one year – seven have already been sacked this season – the idea of entrusting all elements of player recruitment and long-term strategy to the manager is anachronistic. That certainly seems to have been the conclusion of the owners at Manchester City and Liverpool, as well as a club such as West Bromwich Albion, which shares power between the manager and a director of football, or sporting and technical director as they now call the position. "The perfect model in the club's eyes is to have everything set up and just drop in the manager and he's only allowed to bring two members of staff with him – that's what clubs would like," says Prozone's Boanas. "When the average lifespan of a manager is so short, they're going to think, 'Why would I plan for the future, when I might be gone in six months? Bollocks to that!' Instead of signing a young player, they're going to bring in a 31-year-old who's got a proven record, who they've worked with before. It's a very short-term view." Chris Anderson, author of The Numbers Game and a political scientist at New York's Cornell University agrees. "Incentives are incredibly important," he says. "The right incentives in my mind are the ones that keep this club healthy beyond next Saturday and perhaps beyond this month and even beyond this season. The place where a manager has a long tenure – like David Moyes at Everton and Arsène Wenger at Arsenal – that person's incentives for themselves and for the club are reasonably closely aligned. But, the world we live in, sometimes that person isn't the manager." At a certain point, however, Allardyce's Bolton protégés, the men now driving the use of data analytics in British football, hit a wall: they were sports scientists, not mathematicians. This frustration was eloquently expressed by James Smith, then still at Everton, at the Elite Minds in Sports Analytics Summit held at Arsenal's Emirates stadium last November. It can be a lonely business being a quant in a football club, and the three-day seminar – with presentations by everyone from YouTube to the performance director of British Bobsleigh – fell somewhere between a show-and-tell and a self-help meeting. "At Everton at the moment we're still very much in a world of GCSE maths," Smith said. Cue an intake of breath in the room, and much frenzied tapping on laptops. "We look at averages, we look at benchmarking, we are in the world of bar charts. At the moment we are not doing more sophisticated regression analysis" – a statistical process used for predicting future outcomes – "but we know that is probably the way forward and that's where we hope to be before too long. But at the moment that tends to be the bigger clubs, the better-resourced clubs really." Smith contrasts football unfavourably with American sports, notably baseball and NFL. "Typically the guy dealing with the data in an English football club at the moment is a sports science graduate – which I am," he said. "But very often in America you might have somebody who went to Harvard and did a law degree then did a computer science masters at MIT. One of the issues in English football is we don't spend enough on staff: quality or quantity. And that's partly because we spend so much money on transfer fees, player salaries, agents' fees that there's not enough left. It's crazy." There are, in fact, some whip-smart mathematicians working in English football, but, because of the traditional approach of most clubs, they are more likely to be employed by a betting company or a data generator such as Prozone. In an attempt to address this disparity, a fascinating initiative was launched by Manchester City's Gavin Fleig in August 2012. Called MCFC Analytics, the club released a large archive of data collected by Opta from the 2011/12 season. It was an "open source" call to arms for bloggers, PhD academics, anyone with an inquisitive mind and an interest in football who wanted to mess around with numbers. The inspiration for the experiment was baseball, specifically Bill James, a janitor whose after-hours statistical analysis revolutionised that sport. "I want our industry to find a Bill James," Fleig told Simon Kuper. "Bill James needs data, and whoever the Bill James of football is, he doesn't have data because it costs money." MCFC Analytics ended after a year and it's hard to determine if it was a success or not. The interest was certainly there – more than 1,500 users accessed the information in the first 36 hours – but there was criticism of the "basic" dataset that was released. Dr Howard Hamilton, chief executive of an Atlanta-based consultancy firm Soccermetrics Research, who holds a PhD in aeronautics and astronautics from Stanford University, described it in a blog as "woefully inadequate". "It wasn't our deepest dataset by any means, but it was relatively deep ," says John Coulson, head of professional football services at Opta. Nevertheless, Coulson can't see the experiment being repeated in the near future: "It was a one-off thing: 'Here's something to have a go at, get your teeth stuck in.' But it's not sustainable for us as a business to release all of that data every year." Football clubs are intensely secretive about the specifics of their use of data, especially where they believe they might have a competitive advantage. So I ask Marcus du Sautoy, professor of mathematics at Oxford University and keen Arsenal fan, what impact a greater numerical literacy could have on the game. "Football is much more of a game of chess than people realise," he replies. "It isn't random what each team does from one game to the next. There are patterns. And the strength of mathematics is to change an activity into numbers and to spot patterns and predict things into the future. That's essentially what the hedge-fund guys are doing." Du Sautoy believes we should look at the football pitch as a network, with channels connecting the 11 players – "It's like a mini-internet!" he exclaims. A successful team – Barcelona are the perfect example – has a special ability for keeping these connections open, but there's no reason why all teams could not analyse the dynamics in a more theoretical way. Du Sautoy also thinks that coaches would benefit from a greater willingness to think outside the box, so to speak. He uses the example of a free kick: why does the defending team always line up with a wall in front of the kicker? Perhaps that is the most effective way of blocking the ball, but they could test the hypothesis more methodically. "Football is incredibly conservative," says du Sautoy. "Having people who come from a different mindset could actually give a team like Arsenal or Liverpool a real edge." Then, at least half-seriously, he ventures: "If Wenger wants a mathematician on the bench at Arsenal, I'd be very happy to come along." It is easy to become carried away with the possibilities of data analytics. At the Elite Minds in Sports Analytics Summit, another speaker was Brian Prestidge, head of analytic development at Bolton Wanderers. He revealed that, since their goalkeeper had started studying the stats on the opposing team's penalty taker, he was actually saving fewer penalties (just 9% in the last two seasons). "We took away the human element, the player's instinct," said Prestidge. "But that's not to say there are no advantages in analysis." If data is to have a greater influence in how football teams are run, it is likely to be at the instigation of the club owners – such as Liverpool's John W Henry, who made his fortune on the stock market and whose other team is the Moneyball-inspired Boston Red Sox – rather than the managers. Players, too, might also demand it: at the Elite Minds summit, Ben Smith, head of development performance systems at Chelsea, explained that young players – such as Eden Hazard – had grown up with data and constant feedback and now expect it after every match and training session; this contrasted with the older generation who can often be more entrenched. Of course, a manager will never admit that a number-cruncher might do his job just as well – or, heretically, even better – than he can. "And if a manager is doing something sophisticated or analytical, he won't want to advertise that to the world," says Anderson. "It makes them look less good and it makes them look geeky, too. In this manly world of football, you don't want to be known as a pinhead. That's the worst of everything!" Anderson recently floated the idea that a Premier League club could reduce its squad from 25 players to 24, and use the savings to employ a handful of maths graduates, who would doubtless earn less in a year than some players are paid for a week. No one seriously expects any club to take up the suggestion. At Finch Farm, I ask Martínez if he is envious of Manchester City's 11 analysts, working behind the scenes to plot their next opponent's downfall. He shakes his head. "I don't start with 100 people and say, 'How are they going to help me win a football game?' Doesn't matter if you have 100 or 3,000 people. It can dilute the quality. We are in a position where we've got enough to do everything we want. I don't think we feel frustrated or we need to get more finances. No, I think we are very much efficient." Football is a game of passion, and part of every fan would die if the game were reduced to a soulless set of calculations. But equally, any club or manager that denies the power of data are placing themselves at an enormous disadvantage. In one sense, this could be a positive development: football has historically been dominated by the teams with the fattest wallets; in the age of analytics, clubs should be rewarded for innovating and there is a greater motivation for cash-strapped teams to lead the way. Brains can trump financial brawn. Though, it should be noted that right now Manchester City are leading the field in both categories. Sitting in the stands, fans will likely stay, at least partially, in the dark. When a substitute comes on and scores with his first touch, do you credit the genius of the manager or the calculations of his performance analysts? In the moment – particularly if you're a Manchester United fan – you'll probably be too ecstatic to care. |
Arizona has been the “meth lab of democracy” for right-wing craziness dating back to the John Birch Society of the 1950s. Fred C. Koch, the father of David and Charles Koch, was a founding member of the John Birch Society. The state of Maricopa has been the hub of the “Kochtopus” empire long before “the reign of Scott Walker, the twice-elected goggle-eyed homunculus hired by Koch Industries to manage their midwest subsidiary formerly known as the state of Wisconsin.” (Charles Piece). Wisconsin is a newcomer compared to Arizona. The Nation confirms what you all have known for months: “Cathi’s Clown” Doug Ducey is the candidate from Koch. The “Kochtopus” hopes to maintain its stranglehold over Arizona with its Walker-bot candidate, Doug Ducey. EXCLUSIVE AUDIO: How the Koch Brothers Are Molding the Next Scott Walkers: Scott Walker is a model governor. Not in every sense, as critics of the Wisconsin Republican’s anti-labor extremism, ethical lapses and failed experiments with economic austerity will remind you. But he is certainly a model governor in the eyes of billionaire conservative donors David and Charles Koch and their acolytes. This well-understood reality has led Republican gubernatorial candidates who seek the billionaire blessing that is so essential for conservative politicians in state races to make reverential references to Walker when appealing to the Koch brothers. Secret tapes of a June summit of wealthy donors organized by the Kochs reveal that top Republican gubernatorial prospects—including Nebraska’s Pete Ricketts and Arizona’s Doug Ducey—appeared before the group, as did Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell and a cavalcade of Senate candidates that included Iowan Joni Ernst, Arkansas Congressman Tom Cotton and Colorado Congressman Cory Gardner. All were solicitous. But few were so blunt as Ducey, a wealthy former business executive who thanked the Kochs directly while declaring, “I have been coming to this conference for years. It’s been very inspirational.” Ducey did not stop there. On the tape that was obtained by The Undercurrent and shared exclusively with The Nation, he made it clear that he is all about the Walker: “So uh, in this business, you’re known by the company you keep, and uh, we’re proud that we’re off to a fast start. Uh, we’re proud that Governor Scott Walker from Wisconsin has come out and endorsed our campaign.” Interestingly, Walker endorsed two candidates in seriously contested Republican primaries for governorships this year; both of them appeared at the Koch brothers session in June: Arizona’s Ducey and Nebraska’s Ricketts. Like Ducey, Ricketts raves about Walker and has hailed the Wisconsin governor as “a true leader in the Republican Party” because he “stood up to the big government union bosses.” * * * Walker has, since his 2010 gubernatorial run, been a top recipient of campaign contributions from the Kochs, and a beneficiary of the “independent” campaigns of Koch-fueled groups such as Americans for Prosperity. The Koch-Walker connection runs deep. “We’re helping him, as we should. We’ve gotten pretty good at this over the years,” David Koch said when Walker faced a recall election in 2012. “We’ve spent a lot of money in Wisconsin. We’re going to spend more.” Of course, Wisconsin is just one state. The Koch brothers and their allied millionaires and billionaires don’t simply spend money there; they spend money wherever they find Republican candidates who are in the Walker mold. Indeed, the executive director of the Republican Governors Association told the secret June gathering organized by the Kochs, “We’ve really had no stronger partner over the last four years than Americans for Prosperity.” The RGA’s Phil Cox talked (in another recording obtained by The Undercurrent and shared with The Huffington Post) about how vital money from the Koch brothers and their wealthy allies had been in the advancing the initiative with which Walker has been most closely associated: the fight to undermine collective-bargaining rights for public employees and to weaken the teacher unions that defend public education. Jabs at those teacher unions—and at unions in general—were among the biggest applause lines as Cox outlined plans to elect governors who share the Walker vision. * * * The tape shared by The Undercurrent with The Nation illustrates how gubernatorial candidates appealed for the blessing not just of the Kochs but of the network of wealthy donors that can provide support both for specific campaigns and for “independent” projects such as a primary-season ad blitz highlighting Walker’s endorsement of Arizona’s Ducey. As Ducey told the Koch brothers summit on June 16, “I can’t emphasize enough the power of organizations like this.” Somewhat surprisingly — because I suspect the editors of The Arizona Republic will come up with some convoluted partisan reasoning like they did in the GOP primary to endorse Doug Ducey — The Republic today actually did some solid reporting on this story. Ducey took campaign pitch to Koch network: Doug Ducey touted his gubernatorial campaign this summer before wealthy donors at a summit hosted by the billionaire Koch brothers, the prominent financiers of non-profit groups playing heavily in U.S. elections, including the race for Arizona governor. Ducey, the Republican nominee, has benefited from the spending of at least two nonprofits that have been linked to the Kochs’ political network. Sean Noble, a veteran of the Koch network and a Ducey supporter, is also connected to several outside groups that have attacked Ducey’s opponents and supported the Republican nominee. Ducey’s appearance at the event, first reported Thursday by The Nation, confirms what his opponents have long suspected: that he sought the backing of the out-of-state political donors who support the Koch brothers’ libertarian, free-market concepts but whose identities and motivations are often kept secret. “I want to say thank you to Charles and David as well,” Ducey said. “I have been coming to this conference for years. It’s been very inspirational. Uh, Charles, I asked what I would do if I wasn’t afraid, and I said, ‘I’d run for governor.’ “ The Nation’s story is based in part on “secret tapes” of the June summit in Dana Point, Calif., at the St. Regis Monarch Beach Resort, where Ducey, the state treasurer and former CEO of Cold Stone Creamery, told the crowd he was inspired by the conference and said he had attended similar events in the past. The story was accompanied by audio and a transcript of Ducey’s remarks. The Undercurrent, a YouTube channel that publishes grassroots political news, shared the audio with The Nation. The summit took place June 14-16, during the GOP primary race between Ducey and his six opponents. * * * Ducey’s Democratic opponent, Fred DuVal, a former staffer to President Clinton, lobbyist and Board of Regents chairman, has called on Ducey to renounce “dark money” support, saying voters deserve to know who is funding his candidacy. Multiple polls suggest the race is close; the general election is Nov. 4. “Doug Ducey works for out-of-state billionaires, not for Arizona,” said Rodd McLeod, a consultant for DuVal. “He goes to meetings with them, gives a secret speech, says you’re known by the company you keep.” Ducey’s campaign would not say why he attended the event, who invited him, how many similar events he has attended, whom he spoke to there or whether the outside money supporting his bid for the Governor’s Office came as a result of his attendance. * * * Ducey also touted his campaign’s endorsement from Republican Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker, who is supported by the Koch brothers, saying, “In this business, you’re known by the company you keep, and uh, we’re proud that we’re off to a fast start. Uh, we’re proud that Governor Scott Walker has endorsed our campaign.” Ducey talked about his personal life, his career in the private sector and his successful campaign while state treasurer to defeat a sales-tax measure known as Proposition 204. “When I did run for treasurer in 2010 … I learned a lot at this conference,” he continued, adding he also “learned a lot” while opposing Prop. 204, saying, “I can’t emphasize enough the power of organizations like this and engagement from those in the business community.” Proposition 204 sought to make permanent a temporary sales tax and direct the proceeds to education and infrastructure. In his speech, Ducey portrayed the group pushing for the penny tax as “completely funded by government entities and special interests.” Records show it drew donations from teachers, attorneys, retirees and parents. In all, it raised $2.3 million. The group Ducey led raised $1.8 million, with $1.2 million of it from the combined contributions of Americans for Responsible Leadership and the Arizona Free Enterprise Club. Both of those groups are dark-money entities, which under the IRS tax code do not have do disclose their donors. However, Americans for Responsible Leadership released its donor list in 2012 after a legal battle with a California campaign-finance watchdog agency over its activities in that state. The list consisted of a single donor, Americans for Job Security, which got its money through a second intermediary, the Center to Protect Patients Rights, which had ties to the Koch brothers and Sean Noble. Ducey continued, “So what’s next? The real action is in the governor’s office.” * * * Outside groups have poured millions to influence statewide races this election cycle. Two of those groups, 60 Plus Association and American Encore, formerly named the Center to Protect Patient Rights, have attacked Ducey’s opponents while supporting him. Those groups have been linked to the Kochs’ network. Ducey has also benefited from $2.2 million in spending by the Republican Governors Association Arizona political action committee, which draws its funding exclusively from out-of-state donors, Secretary of State campaign finance records show. McLeod pointed to American Encore’s spending on TV ads since Ducey won the GOP primary five weeks ago. Campaign-finance reports filed with the state show $1.2 million in spending, both in support of Ducey and in opposition to DuVal, as of Wednesday. In addition, McLeod said filings with local television stations show the group is launching a $199,000 television ad buy that began Thursday. “All it took it was for him to go to California and tell them how powerful they are,” McLeod said. You have the power to “Krush the Kochtopus” by not voting for the bought and paid for candidate from Koch who will do the bidding of corporate elite Plutocrats. You have witnesses the turmoil that Scott Walker has caused in Wisconsin. Is that really what the state of Arizona needs? Don’t we need to stop being the subject of late night comedians? Share this: Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Email WhatsApp Tumblr More Print Pocket Reddit Pinterest |
The feud between Morning Joe hosts Joe Scarborough, and Mika Brzenzski with President Donald Trump heated up on Friday morning when Scarborough related a possible blackmail story involving The National Enquirer. According to Scarborough, White House staff called him and said the National Enquirer had a story about Joe and Mika they were going to run and that President Trump would have them spike it if Joe called the President and apologized for their coverage of the president. Here is a video clip: I reached out to Scarborough and asked him about it and here is what he told me: “NBC execs knew in real time about the calls and who made them to me. That’s why Mark Kornblau wrote about contemporaneous texts. I showed him and executives as they were coming in to keep them advised.” Joe is referring to this tweet from Kornblau: I spoke with Scarborough by phone as well. “The last time I talked with President Trump was after his address to Congress,” he said. “I spent five minutes in the Oval Office with him, and three other people were in the room with us. There was never a moment I was alone with him.” The President tweeted the following this morning after the segment aired: Watched low rated @Morning_Joe for first time in long time. FAKE NEWS. He called me to stop a National Enquirer article. I said no! Bad show — Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) June 30, 2017 Scarborough said the calls about the National Enquirer story started in late April and early May but that he never placed a call to President Trump. “I never called the President about this,” he said. “I challenge him to reveal any phone records showing that I called him. He can’t because I didn’t.” It is a very serious charge. The accusation is the White House used the National Enquirer to threaten and blackmail two journalists. The administration will likely face questions about in their latest press briefing and how they respond will be telling. |
CAUGHT RED-HANDED: Media Backtracks on Irans Anti-Israel 'Threat' For close to two years, the media has stubbornly clung to a long discredited story about the Iranian Presidents alleged threat to "destroy Israel" with nuclear weapons Iran doesnt have and denies any intent to acquire. 'Wiped off the map, wiped off the map,' they bleat incessantly, even though his actual words, "The Imam [Khomeini] said this regime occupying Jerusalem must vanish from the page of time," were paralleled with the fall of regimes like the Soviet Union and Irans former U.S.-installed monarchy [see: "WIPED OFF THE MAP" - The Rumor of the Century for a thorough disassembly of this claim]. From the start of his Presidency, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has rhapsodized regularly about the demise of the 'Zionist regime' in various metaphorical terms. He and his associates in the Iranian government have compared its fate to the Pharaohs of Egypt and the former apartheid regime in South Africa (which they also did not recognize), but never have they threatened to start a war with any country. Yet the rumor persists. Top respected journalists, advocates for peace and dialogue with Iran, and individual Iranians themselves bring up the misquote regularly, as do noted Iranian-American scholars. The medias constant drumbeat has even duped top world leaders into believing the myth. On October 29, 2005, the false quote was officially condemned by all 15 Security Council members in a United Nations statement, just following Israels prior demand that the Security Council expel Iran from the UN due to the remark. The effect this misquote has had on American policy towards Iran is undeniable. The majority of 2008 Presidential candidates in both parties have repeatedly mentioned the alleged threat in speeches and interviews, obviously influenced by media reports. And yet suddenly, after all this hoopla, at least two of the biggest media titans, the BBC and the Associated Press, appear to be backing away from the incorrect "wiped off the map" quotation theyve been drilling into peoples minds for so long. Its happening quietly and undemonstratively, but some recent subtle changes in their presentation indicate a tacit acknowledgement of their previous misreporting. The details of how this reversal came to be, their curious handling of the subject in some of their recent news items, and contradictory arguments defending their work, is a story in itself. Lets begin with the legendary British Broadcasting Company. The BBCs Adolescent Excuses Formed in 1922, the BBC has a history of disinformation campaigns against Iran. In the early 1950s, Irans democratically elected Prime Minister, Dr. Mohammad Mossadegh, had enraged Britain by nationalizing his countrys British-dominated oil industry. The BBC, which was funded by the Foreign Office (FCO), was directed by the government to "destroy Persian confidence in the present policy of the Persian government," which they branded as "stupid and obstinate." The BBCs Persian Service broadcasts in Iran reflected this to a tee, pumping out anti-nationalization propaganda to the Iranian people regularly, which pleased the folks in Tehrans British embassy immensely. In the summer of 1953, at the request of the British government and in coordination with the American CIA, the BBC broadcast a code word over its radio airwaves to signal the young Shah of the start of the coup which Britain and America had plotted to overthrow Mossadegh. The BBCs role in the coup détat is confirmed by the CIAs own declassified documents and by the BBC itself. Britains use of the BBC as a state propaganda arm and extension of the British Empire was not denied by the head of the BBCs Eastern Service, Gordon Waterfield, who admitted at the time, "There is, on the whole, little divergence between what the Foreign Office want us to do, and what in actual fact, we are doing." London based news agency Reuters was also not immune from state influence. Their official biography states, "During both World Wars, Reuters came under pressure from the British government to serve British interests." Misinformation continues to thrive in the 'information age' of the 21st century. In 2006, British Prime Minister Tony Blair admitted on Sky TV his complete ignorance of the British-American coup which caused Irans young democracy to vanish from the page of time, claiming that he had never even heard of Mossadegh. But in a speech given the same year, Blair warned ominously, "Irans President has called for Israel to be—and I quote—"wiped off the map." And hes trying to acquire a nuclear weapon." Yes, the most powerful man in Britain has never even heard of the monumental 1953 coup—one of the most significant events of the 20th century-which his own country helped carry out, yet a mistranslated sound bite and an unproven suspicion about Irans nuclear intentions, that he knows. With over 85 years of history, the BBC, which continues to receive funding from the Foreign Office, cannot include juvenilia among its reasons for getting Ahmadinejads words wrong. The BBC was just one of countless organizations which jumped on the "wiped off the map" bandwagon in 2005. Yet mention of the phrase largely disappeared from their reports in 2007. Then, in a June 8th, 2007 article, the BBC finally published the following reversal: "In October 2005, the Iranian president made a statement in which he envisaged the replacement of Israel with a Palestinian state. This was widely translated as a call for Israel to be "wiped off the map." While he has repeated similar comments many times, he has insisted that Iran is not a threat to Israel." The first statement referencing Palestinian statehood is an astonishing departure from what has been consistently presented in the media as Mahmoud Ahmadinejads 'calls for the destruction of Israel.' As for the "widely translated" plea—this same phrase was reported ad nauseam by the BBC itself in its print, radio and television outlets. In essence, the BBCs rationale recollects that typical adolescent excuse: 'but everybody was doing it!' In passing the blame to others, the BBC seems to indicate that it did no independent verification, translation or fact checking with regard to the quote, and merely repeated what everyone else was saying. Yet three months earlier, a BBC journalist made a claim that totally contradicts this version of events. On March 6, 2007, BBC editor Peter Rippon wrote a blog post on the BBC web site, "Wiped off the Map?", which acknowledged that although the BBC has regularly cited the quote, "others" have argued that a "more accurate" translation would be: "The Imam said this regime occupying Jerusalem must vanish from the page of time." Rippon did not bother to mention who any of those "others" would be, or acknowledge his source for the alternate quote. Moreover, Rippon claims to have looked into the matter and reports matter-of-factly that the phrase "was picked up and translated from the Farsi" by BBC Monitoring, and even quotes unnamed "experts" at the service defending their translation. Ah, but this story is completely negated by the BBCs own original reports from October 2005, which clearly and unmistakably named Irans state media department IRNA [Islamic Republic News Agency], as the source of the quote. For proof, see the following passage, which occurred repeatedly in several BBC articles on October 27th and 28th, 2005, just after the October 26th World Without Zionism conference where Ahmadinejad first made his statement: "He was addressing a conference entitled The World without Zionism and his comments were reported by the Iranian state news agency Irna. "As the Imam said, Israel must be wiped off the map," he said, referring to Irans late revolutionary leader, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini." BBC Monitoring is a government funded subscription service founded in 1939 with a staff of about 500, translating press and agency reports spanning a claimed reach of over 150 countries in more than 100 languages. If, in fact they did independently translate the quote as Rippon reports, then their contributions appear to have been disregarded in the final analysis. British journalist Jonathan Steele wrote about the mistranslation in his June 14, 2006 column in The Guardian ["Lost in Translation"], and reports querying a BBC Monitoring spokesperson (who, as in Rippons piece, spoke on the condition of anonymity), who said their original translation was "eliminated from the map of the world." Upon further inspection, the spokesperson said their Farsi translators were in a rush, and if they had to do it all over again, would have gone with "eliminated from the pages of history." Whoops. To quote the anonymous spokesperson: "The monitor has checked again. Its a difficult expression to translate. Theyre under time pressure to produce a translation quickly and they were searching for the right phrase. With more time to reflect they would say the translation should be "eliminated from the page of history." Does this level of professionalism square with BBC Monitorings own assessment of its service and standards? "Editors at BBC Monitoring possess specialised knowledge of countries they cover . . . they translate reports in a way that preserves the tone of the original, allowing subscribers to draw their own conclusions from what they read." Rippons piece also relates a relatively frivolous viewer complaint over BBC One host Andrew Marrs presentation of the quote on October 30, 2005. It seems Mr. Marr referred to the phrase as "wiped off the face of the map" rather than "wiped off the map", and this viewer objected to the change, which he felt contained several false implications. What is noteworthy, however, is the BBC Governors Complaints Committees careful examination of the matter in their complaint review process (which ultimately did not uphold the complaint), evaluated under the criteria of Accuracy, Impartiality, and Fairness. In their explanation, the BBC states: "The Committee carefully considered the wording of the translation of the speech from a number of sources, including translations from BBC Monitoring and from the Middle East Research Institute in Washington. The Committee also reflected on how the speech had been translated in British newspapers and on Al Jazeera Online." According to this explanation, having pondered over what other media were saying, including some of their own British competitors, the BBC felt satisfied that the quote was acceptable to run. The mention of Al Jazeera is also specious, as they too relied on the same wrongly worded IRNA press item from which the rest of the international media took the quote. Even the committees reference to BBC Monitoring is highly dubious, since, as previously mentioned, their own reporting already credited IRNA with the quote. Most curious of all, though, is the mention of The Middle East Research Institute [MEMRI] as a major source. Thats because MEMRI had an entirely different interpretation of Ahmadinejads words, bearing almost no similarity whatsoever to the BBCs favored "wiped off the map" selection. MEMRIs version was: "Imam [Khomeini] said: 'This regime that is occupying Qods [Jerusalem] must be eliminated from the pages of history'." Note again the absence of words such as "Israel", "wipe out" and "map". MEMRI is no impartial body either—its an organization which focuses almost solely on translating and exposing examples of Islamic fundamentalist propaganda, hate speech, and terrorist ideology in the Arab and Iranian media. Founded by former Israeli Defense Force colonel Yigal Carmon, its supporters include many figures from far right and pro-Israel media such as The Weekly Standard, The New Republic, The National Post, and FOX News Channel. MEMRIs web site lists glowing praise for its work from people such as right wing columnist Charles Krauthammer, former CIA chief James Woolsey, and Israeli political figure Natan Sharansky, who cites MEMRIs "invaluable contribution to the struggle against antisemitism, hate, and racism." So an outfit such as MEMRI, with a clear political agenda, has produced a far less inflammatory version of the quote than the venerable British Broadcasting Company.The BBC implicates itself further by admitting that translations of foreign languages are inherently fraught with inaccuracies: "The Committee noted the inherent problem with accuracy in translations. It noted that all the translations varied to a greater or lesser degree, and it was difficult to decide which, if any, was the most accurate." If the act of translation is such a delicate guessing game, then why trust translations? According to the BBCs logic, journalists apparently have a license to interpret foreign languages in a myriad of ways. With so many options on the table, whats to stop a media outlet with a political bias from choosing a preferred interpretation?The BBC also rationalized:Do these visceral, buck-passing comments sound consistent with the BBCs stated editorial standards? "The BBCs commitment to accuracy is a core editorial value and fundamental to our reputation. Our output must be well sourced, based on sound evidence, thoroughly tested and presented in clear, precise language. We should be honest and open about what we dont know and avoid unfounded speculation." How does the BBC achieve accuracy? "We aim to achieve accuracy by: · the accurate gathering of material using first hand sources wherever possible. · checking and cross checking the facts. · validating the authenticity of documentary evidence and digital material. · corroborating claims and allegations made by contributors wherever possible." The bottom line: the BBCs various stories do not check out. Their initial reports cite IRNA as the source of the quote, later documents list a hodgepodge of sources and rationalizations, and they later reported that the entire quote was translated "directly from the Farsi" by BBC Monitoring. Finally, a June 2007 article seems to assign responsibility to others, saying that the quote was "widely translated as a call for Israel to be wiped off the map," making no mention of their own alleged hand in the translation process, or the responsibility incumbent upon them to verify its accuracy. Reuters: Deny, Deny, Deny A global news juggernaut, Reuters has been in existence since the mid 1800s and bills itself as "the largest international multi-media news agency." Though Reuters has stuck to its guns on the 'map' quote, they are well aware of the controversy surrounding it. In January 2007, they responded to a reader concern about their story, "Iran President Says Israels Days Are Numbered", which repeated the 'map' rumor and also contained the misquote, The reader wrote: You continue to report that "Irans President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has called for Israel to be 'wiped off the map' even though many Mideast experts have stated that the interpretation of what Ahmadinejad actually said was that the "Zionist regime will not last." In other words, rather than calling for ethnic cleansing, as your news stories imply, Iranian officials are calling for regime change--a common enough phrase these days. Are your reporters and editors deliberately misinforming the public? Jan "We actually had access to this speech, and heard the presidents words verbatim from our own TV footage. We stand behind our translation. In this case, he used the word "mahv", which in Farsi means "wiped off": Editor Reuters response skips over the readers major point—that regime change, not genocide, was the true message, and ignores the crucial context of Ahmadinejads words as they related to the other faded regimes, including Irans previous ruler, the Shah Reuters again responded to a reader complaint on the matter on June 14th, 2007: President Ahmadinejad never said any such thing. That "quote" is a complete fabrication. Its an urban myth. What he REALLY said is "The regime occupying Jerusalem must vanish from the page of time." Youll note that there is an enormous difference between an active threat "to wipe something of the map" and a passive comment that "something must vanish from the page of time." You will also note that the Farsi word for map, "nagsheh," appears nowhere in the speech text. I would think that if a multi-million dollar organisation such as Reuters News Service is going to continue agitating for an American attack on Iran it could afford to spend two or three hundred dollars to have Ahmadinejads speeches professionally translated into English. Mark K. Thanks for your interest in this matter. Reuters is confident that its translation of what Ahmadinejad said is correct. We watched the original speech in 2005 and have not altered our rendering into English since. The Iranian authorities have never challenged our translation of the words, which echoed those of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, the founder of the Islamic Republic, when he spoke on the same issue: GBU Editor Like the BBC, Reuters has just publicly stated that they translated the quote by themselves, on their own. And, as with the BBC, this far-fetched story can easily be disproved. In their very first reports in 2005, Reuters clearly identified IRNA as the source of the quote in the opening sentence!For proof, see: October 26th, 2005 and October 27th, 2005 Reuters news items: TEHRAN (Reuters) - Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad said on Wednesday that Israel should be "wiped off the map," the official IRNA news agency reported. Contrary to Reuters claims, Iranian officials and Foreign Ministry officerefuted the quotes interpretation numerous times. Reuters itself has reported on this.Take, for example, Reuters own article from February 20, 2006 , "Iran Denies Wanting to "Wipe Israel Off the Map". In this piece, Irans Foreign Minister Manoucher Mottaki directly refutes the quote in English, acknowledges the reality of the Holocaust, and reiterates that Irans nuclear program is purely peaceful. "Nobody can remove a country from the map. This is a misunderstanding in Europe of what our president mentioned," Manouchehr Mottaki told a news conference, speaking in English, after addressing the European Parliament. "How is it possible to remove a country from the map? He is talking about the regime. We do not recognize legally this regime," he said." Not only that, the February 2006 article again cites IRNA as the source of the infamous quote, which contradicts their repeated claim that the translation was their own. As Reuters noted:Reuters must have overlooked the April 2006 CNN interviewwith Irans ambassador to the IAEA, Ali Asghar Soltanieh, where he said, "Iran . . .will not threaten any country, and we want peace in the Middle East and the whole world . . . but if you are going to conclude that we have said the people there [In Israel] have to be removed or they have to be massacred . . .this is [a] fabricated, unfortunate, selective approach to what the mentality and policy of Islamic Republic of Iran is. I have to correct, and I did so." Perhaps Reuters also missed Ahmadinejads Feb 13, 2007 ABC News interviewwith Diane Sawyer in which he responds to the "map" charge: "There are many other examples.Reuters may claim 'plausible deniability', but they already had early warning of the issue long before these complaints and rebuttals. After helping organize a workshop in Beirut in December 2005 which brought together 6 American and 6 Middle Eastern journalists, Reuters republished a St. Louis Dispatch article about the event by participant Jon Sawyer. The piece quoted another participant, Tehran Dailys Khosrow Soltani Kasseb, who explained his take on Irans recent "map" outrage: "For the journalists at the Beirut workshop, there was a lesson a few days after they headed home in how words can inflame - and confuse. The only thing missing, said Iranian journalist Soltani, was any acknowledgment that Ahmadinejads remarks were neither new nor, in the Iranian context, incendiary - not in a country where "Death to Israel" chants have been a staple of Friday prayers since the era of Ayatollah Khomeini two decades ago. "These slogans remain slogans and nothing more," Soltani told fellow journalists in an e-mail. "Lets not forget the occasion in which Ahmadinejad said those things," he added - ";a conference dubbed 'The World Without Zionism.' What else did you expect him to say? Viva Israel?" "What is certain is that no one here (I mean the officials) has any intention of wiping out a state by killing its people!" Soltani said. "They just wish Israel did not exist or would somehow perish for the cause of Palestine." So Reuters has had plenty of opportunities to rectify the error, yet have chosen not to do so. According to Reuters editorial policy, "We are committed to accurate and balanced reporting. Errors of fact are always promptly corrected and clearly published." Further: "We are committed to reporting the facts and in all situations avoid the use of emotive terms . . . We aim to report objectively actions, identity and background and pay particular attention to all our coverage in extremely sensitive regions. We do not take sides and attempt to reflect . . . the views of all sides. We are not in the business of glorifying one side or another or of disseminating propaganda. Reuters journalists do not offer their own opinions or views. The world relies on Reuters journalists to provide accurate, clearly sourced accounts of events as they occur, wherever they occur, so that individuals, organisations and governments can make their own decisions based on the facts." Reuters also adds that they do pay attention to feedback, and in fact, "we often spot and correct errors faster with the help of sharp-eyed readers. Other e-mails have made us question and sometimes change the way we describe people, countries, concepts and controversies." Yet to date, despite reader complaints, media articles to the contrary, and their own blatantly contradictory explanations, Reuters is still standing by its story, which they are "confident" is accurate. The Associated Press and those imaginary "Supporters" Along with Reuters, there may be no other source that has exploited this misquote more relentlessly than The Associated Press, which calls itself "the largest and oldest news organization in the world".The misquote has infected hundreds of AP articles since 2005, and is almost certainly one of the most frequently repeated quotes attributed to any individual in their history of reporting. Since October 2005, the AP has hammered this fake quote into the consciousness of millions of people around the world, and continues to do so. But in May 2007, a change occurred. Whereas before the APs quote always read, "Israel must be wiped off the map", as of May 24th, a new version has begun appearing in some of their articles: "[The] Zionist regime should be wiped off the map." "Israel" has now magically transformed into the "Zionist regime", i.e. the government. "Must" has become "should". The distinction is enormous. If Ahmadinejad was referring to the regime, then it cannot be claimed that he has made "genocidal" threats to physically and militarily "destroy Israel". This new interpretation is further validation for those who have disputed the quotes accuracy.Here is the APs new "Zionist regime" version in its context. On May 24th , AP introduced the following block of text in some articles. The entire passage reads: "In October 2005, he raised outrage in the West when he said in a speech that Israels "Zionist regime should be wiped off the map." His supporters and some independent analysts have since argued Ahmadinejads words were mistranslated from Farsi and should have been better translated as "vanish from the pages of time" — implying Israel would vanish on its own rather be destroyed." Beginning June 3rd, AP articles re-using the stock text were suddenly missing the words "independent analysts" and "from Farsi": "His supporters have argued Ahmadinejads words were mistranslated and should have been better translated as "vanish from the pages of time" — implying Israel would vanish on its own rather be destroyed." While APs acknowledgement of those who have disputed the quote is a victory, the gratuitous and misleading inclusion of the phrase "his supporters" sabotages the clarification—readers are less likely to take the claim seriously if they believe that Ahmadinejads fans dispute it. The unnecessary removal of the "independent analysts" phrase in subsequent reports is additionally suspect.In May 2006, University of Michigan professor Juan Cole, an expert on Middle Eastern affairs, squarely refuted the quote on his blog , where, by the way, he denounced the Islamic Republic, saying,In June 2006, veteran journalist Jonathan Steele took Coles correct translation as his lead and examined the controversy further in his own column in The Guardian. There is nothing to suggest that Mr. Steele 'supports' Ahmadinejad.As the rumor rampaged on despite the new analysis and protests, I recognized the need for greater critical mass to influence the discourse. In January 2007, I wrote a comprehensive examination of the quote and its context in Ahmadinejads speech. The piece has become something of a phenomenon. To date, the " Rumor of the Century " article has traveled the world and been translated into languages such as Spanish, French, Italian, Dutch, Slovak and Swedish. In Thailand, The Bangkok Post featured an entire column about it. Numerous writers, academics, and authors quote it and reference it. Newspapers have printed Letters to the Editor which quote from it, and others have created YouTube videos inspired by it. I have discussed it on American and Canadian radio programs, and it was recently selected for an award and inclusion in a forthcoming book.Since the 'map' quote was first called into question over at least a year earlier, and these revisions were only made after my January 2007 article was released, I believe that Im one of the people being referenced here. If the AP is attempting to include my article as a defense of Ahmadinejad, then they have conveniently overlooked my association with The Mossadegh Project and condemnation of his "backwards regime". There is no comparison whatsoever between the benevolent, secular democracy of Dr. Mossadegh and the Islamic Republics oppressive, fundamentalist dictatorship, which has always openly despised him. Since none of the prominent media critiques are pro-Ahmadinejad, just who are these "supporters" to whom the AP refers? House of Representatives Charges Iran with Inciting 'Genocide' Two years after Ahmadinejads speech, the quote is still causing a stir. On June 20, 2007, the U.S. House of Representatives overwhelmingly passed a resolution calling on the UN to charge Ahmadinejad with the crime of inciting genocide "because of his calls for the destruction of the State of Israel"—specifically citing the erroneous "wiped off the map" statement. (Somehow the person whom Ahmadinejad was quoting, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, seems to have averted all international condemnation and censure over the statement in the 1980s).In his June 18testimony before the House, the resolutions co-sponsor, Congressman Steve Rothman (D-NJ) referred to Ahmadinejad as a "lunatic" five times and a "madman" twice, compared him to Hitler, and falsely accused Iran of openlyto a nuclear weapons program with the purpose of destroying Israel. Said Rothman: "Here we have the President of a sovereign nation . . . who says that a fellow nation . . . should be wiped off the face of the Earth, the people killed. . . . Lest one think that Mr. Ahmadinejad, a twisted, backward, lunatic, be some non-threatening individual crazy man who happens to talk about the death of millions of innocent people, this is the head of a nation, a sovereign nation with oil wealth and an army and with a stated goal of acquiring nuclear weapons to use to carry out his homicidal, genocidal, lunatic delusions of wiping out the State of Israel." The only Congressmen who voted against the resolution were Ron Paul (R-TX) and Dennis Kucinich (D-OH) , both of whom recognized H. Con.Res.21 as a pretext to lay the groundwork for war. Paul called it "an exercise in propaganda that serves one purpose: to move us closer to initiating a war against Iran", and questioned how the U.S. could not consider its own threats of a possible nuclear attack on Iran as an incitement to genocide itself. "Does anyone believe that dropping nuclear weapons on Iran will not wipe a people off the map?" he asked.Congressman Kucinich has said the resolution "sets a dangerous precedent in foreign affairs. A mistranslation could become a cause of war. The United States House may unwittingly be setting the stage for a war with Iran." He repeatedly raised questions about the accuracy of the words being condemned. "There is reasonable doubt with regard to the accuracy of the translations of President Ahmadinejads words in this resolution", he said in a subsequent press release. "President Ahmadinejads speeches can also be translated as a call for regime change, much in the same manner the Bush Administration has called for regime change in Iraq and Iran, making this resolution very ironic."Kucinichs attempts during his June 18testimony to insert four other alternate translationsinto the Congressional Record [including my own article, parts of which he read into the official record], were formally blocked by House members. None of Kucinichs suggested texts were taken seriously by the resolutions supporters, who continuously interrupted his testimony."When I learned of these translations, I felt obligated to bring it to the attention of the House", Kucinich said in a press statement. "It seems that much has been lost in translation. Members have a right to know of the translations and the refusal to permit them to become a part of the Congressional Record does a disservice to Members."In his testimony, Kucinich quoted from significantly different translations from MEMRI and The New York Times Tehran Bureau. The members remained unimpressed, and the suggested documents were dismissed without any logical explanation. Congresswoman Ileana Ros-Lehtinen (R-FL), who herself has publicly called for the illegal assassination of Fidel Castro (which she denied and later admitted to), gave the baffling reasoning, "I would hate to have Ahmadinejads statements be included as a part of the record in this part of the debate where we are saying that he is a despot." In other words, she and her colleagues, like countless others, have already made up their mind. The Truth — Wars First Casualty [1] Reuters reports: March 4, 2007 "Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has fueled fears . . . by urging that the Jewish state be "wiped off the map", though Tehran officials said this did not constitute a threat." June 4, 2007: "He has often referred to the demise of the Jewish state but says Iran does not pose a threat to it." June 8, 2007: "He has often referred to the destruction of the Jewish state but says Iran is not a threat." [2] CNN Late Edition with Wolf Blitzer, April 2, 2006: Interview with Irans ambassador to the IAEA, Ali Asghar Soltanieh [http://transcripts.cnn.com/TRANSCRIPTS/0604/02/le.01.html]: ..these are fabricated news that they are . . . using . . . as an excuse for the military aggression or the aggressive policy." "...the policy of Islamic Republic of Iran . . . is against any sort of school of thought or regime such as apartheid, Zionism, racism, and this is a matter of principle. Therefore, what you are talking about as apartheid was disappeared and it could not be accepted by civilized world, this Zionism and aggression of racism is also condemned. That is the message, and Im sure that we are -- this message is shared with all the international community and peace-loving people of the whole world." "And I assure the whole world that Iran is for peaceful activities and will will try to continue it, and we spare no effort to assure that these activities will be peaceful and will not threaten any country, and we want peace in the Middle East and the whole world." ". . . But if you are going to conclude that we have said the people there have to be removed or they have to be massacred . . . this is [a] fabricated, unfortunate, selective approach to what the mentality and policy of Islamic Republic of Iran is. I have to correct, and I did so." [3] ABC News, Diane Sawyer Interview with Mahmoud Ahmadinejad- Good Morning America, February 13, 2007 [http://abcnews.go.com/GMA/story?id=2868077 and http://abcnews.go.com/GMA/story?id=2869108]: "We shy away from any kind of conflict and any kind of bloodshed, and we will be sad by such. We are opposed to any kind of conflict and as we have said repeatedly we think the world problem can be solved through dialogue, the use of logic and a sense of friendship. There is no need for the use of force." "And what we have said about Palestine, its quite clear, based on the charter of the U.N., based on international regulations, we say let Palestinians decide.Please allow the Palestinians to decide. Please respect their decision. But please give them the opportunity for decision making." "We believe that in Palestine, there should be a referendum and Palestinians, Muslims, Jews, any Palestinians, and this is based on international regulations and I think its their right to determine their future. Any decision made by Palestinians must be respected, and I think this is a very clear proposition." "Why are people opposed, what we say is clear. If you continue massacring innocent people, if you continue to make them refugees, and if you continue attacking neighboring countries, then the countries and the people of those countries, regions.get angry, because the Zionist regime was imposed upon them." "We are opposed to any proliferation of weapons of mass destruction and nuclear weapons. We believe that the time is now over for nuclear weapons. It is a time for logic, for rationality and for civilization. Instead of thinking of finding new weapons, we are trying to find new ways to love people. And if talking about the "Death to America" slogans, I think you know it yourself, it is not related in any way to American public. Our people have no problem with American public, and we have a very friendly relationship." [4] Congressman Dennis Kucinich, June 18th, 2007: "At this time, Mr. Speaker, I would like to ask unanimous consent to include a New York Times translation of the text of President Ahmadinejads speech, a translation by the Middle East Media Research Institute of his speech, articles relating to an analysis of the speech, and the words that were used by Virginia Tilley of Johannesburg, South Africa and by Arash Norouzi written on the 18th of January 2007." The U.S. war against Iraq has caused enormous tragedy for both countries, with hundreds of thousands of innocent lives lost on the basis of a flawed narrative. Clarifying the narrative vis-à-vis Iran has nothing to do with supporting a particular regime. Its about truth, accountability, and preventing yet another conflict that is in nobodys interest. As Congressman Kucinich cautioned regarding the mistranslation, "We must make every effort to ascertain the truth because peace in the world may hang in the balance." Arash Norouzi is an artist and co-founder of the The Mossadegh Project |
Dr. James Hansen and Reto Ruedy of NASA GISS have written a paper (non peer reviewed) with a remarkable admission in it. It is titled Global Temperature Update Through 2012. Here is the money quote, which pretty much ends the caterwauling from naysayers about global temperature being stalled for the last decade. The five-year mean global temperature has been flat for the last decade, which we interpret as a combination of natural variability and a slow down in the growth rate of net climate forcing. Gosh, I thought Hansen had claimed that “climate forcings” had overwhelmed natural variability? In 2003 Hansen wrote a widely distributed (but not peer reviewed) paper called Can We Defuse the Global Warming Time Bomb? in which he argues that human-caused forcings on the climate are now greater than the natural ones, and that this, over a long time period, can cause large climate changes. As we shall see, the small forces that drove millennial climate changes are now overwhelmed by human forcings. According to Hansen’s latest essay, apparently not. So much for “da bomb”. Here are some other interesting excerpts from his recent essay, Bob Tisdale take note: An update through 2012 of our global analysis reveals 2012 as having practically the same temperature as 2011, significantly lower than the maximum reached in 2010. These short-term global fluctuations are associated principally with natural oscillations of tropical Pacific sea surface temperatures summarized in the Nino index in the lower part of the figure. 2012 is nominally the 9th warmest year, but it is indistinguishable in rank with several other years, as shown by the error estimate for comparing nearby years. Note that the 10 warmest years in the record all occurred since 1998. The current stand-still of the 5-year running mean global temperature may be largely a consequence of the facr [sic] that the first half of the past 10 years had predominantly El Nino conditions, and the second half had predominantly La Nina conditions. The approximate stand-still of global temperature during 1940-1975 is generally attributed to an approximate balance of aerosol cooling and greenhouse gas warming during a period of rapid growth of fossil fuel use with little control on particulate air pollution, but quantitative interpretation has been impossible because of the absence of adequate aerosol measurements. That last part about 1940-1975 is telling, given that we now have a cleaner atmosphere, and less aerosols to reflect sunlight, it goes without saying that more sunlight now reaches the surface. Since GISS is all about the surface temperature, that suggests (to rational thinkers at least) that some portion of the surface temperature rise post 1975 is due to pollution controls being enacted. But, he’s still arguing for an imbalance, even though flatness abounds. Seems like equilibrium to me… Climate change expectations. The continuing planetary imbalance and the rapid increase of CO2 emissions from fossil fuel assure that global warming will continue on decadal time scales. Moreover, our interpretation of the larger role of unforced variability in temperature change of the past decade suggests that global temperature will rise significantly in the next few years as the tropics moves inevitably to the next El Nino phase. Except when natural forcings overwhelm the human component of course. Advertisements Share this: Print Email Twitter Facebook Pinterest LinkedIn Reddit |
Over the past week, Bernie Sanders racked up six wins out of seven primary contests, winning 92 delegates more than his rival Hillary Clinton to chip into her pledged delegate lead. While not an existential shift in the race, the momentum has changed in Sanders’ favor, especially since he won the last three primaries—Hawaii, Washington state and Alaska—with between 70 and 82 percent of the vote. You, however, would hardly have noticed had you been watching cable news the night of the Saturday primaries. Both MSNBC and CNN forwent live election coverage on arguably Sanders’ biggest night of the year, instead deciding to air a normally scheduled prison reality show and a “documentary” on Jesus. As The Nation’s Katrina vanden Heuvel noted Saturday night: Sanders wins big tonight, on calendar organized by DNC (natch, a weekend) & CNN has Jesus doc & MSNBC doing Lockdown/Up? Take back airwaves! — Katrina vandenHeuvel (@KatrinaNation) March 27, 2016 The networks cared so little for Saturday’s primary results that the Hawaii results, which in fairness came in around 2:30 am, were totaled by online volunteers and revealed to the public using a Google Doc. The race is far from over, yet most of the major cable networks have all but moved on. Clinton’s lead, while considerable, is far from insurmountable. Indeed, the netting of 66 delegates Saturday night pulls Sanders to within 268 pledged delegates of the former secretary of State—with 2,073 delegates yet to be awarded. The Republican primary race, which Trump has led with little or no suspense, has received A-list treatment throughout the race, despite having far less drama than the Clinton/Sanders battle. This is consistent with a New York Times study that showed the Republicans receiving three times as much coverage as the Democratic primary—most of which was handed, entirely for free, to the showy frontrunner, Donald Trump. The Democratic party has 57 primary contests, 22 of which haven’t chimed in this election. There is no law of reporting that gives more weight to ones that come early, other than the horserace drama networks seek. If cable networks are going to follow the early contests like Woodstock, they could at least give some token coverage to Sanders’ recent string of victories. Adam Johnson is a contributing analyst for FAIR.org. Follow him on Twitter at @AdamJohnsonNYC. |
Break It Down: Democrats On Guns And Wall Street Enlarge this image toggle caption Joe Raedle/Getty Images Joe Raedle/Getty Images Democratic presidential hopefuls sparred over gun control policy and financial regulation during their first presidential debate. Here's a closer look at what the candidates were debating in Las Vegas. Gun Control Hillary Clinton: "We have to look at the fact that we lose 90 people a day from gun violence. This has gone on too long, and it's time the entire country stood up against the NRA." Clinton was criticizing Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders for his opposition to past gun control bills in Congress. Sanders insists he's not carrying water for the National Rifle Association and actually gets a D-minus on the gun lobby's legislative scorecard. Sanders argued that he supports some gun safety measures (a ban on assault-style weapons and requiring background checks for purchasers at gun shows). Moreover, Sanders argued that his past votes accurately represented his constituents' views. Sanders: "I come from a rural state. And the views on gun control in rural states are different than in urban states, whether we like it or not." Gun control is a polarizing issue. Nearly 3/4 of Democrats come down in support of gun control, while Republicans are much more likely to focus on gun rights. So Clinton's support for tighter rules on guns puts her on solid ground in the Democratic primary. But it could be a different story in the general election. Historically, Democratic White House hopefuls — including Barack Obama — have not campaigned aggressively on gun control for fear of losing rural votes. The question is whether the party is now effectively writing off those areas, so Clinton has little to lose by deliberately courting pro-gun control voters. Financial Regulation Another issue where there is some daylight between the Democrats is bank regulation. Former Maryland Gov. Martin O'Malley, who has struggled to make much of an impression with primary voters so far, tried to capitalize on the issue with a proposal to break up big banks. O'Malley: "We need to separate the casino, speculative, mega-bank gambling that we have to insure with our money from the commercial banking. Namely, reinstating Glass-Steagall." O'Malley's proposal would restore a Depression-era firewall between commercial banking — where ordinary people put their savings accounts and maybe get a home loan — and potentially riskier investment banking. Breaking up big banks is an article of faith with many progressive voters in the Democratic Party. They fear that many banks have become too big and too risky and will trigger another financial crisis. But none of the institutions that helped trigger the 2008 crisis — Lehman Brothers, AIG, Countrywide --combined investment and commercial banking. Clinton disagreed with O'Malley on this point. Like Sanders' record on gun control, Clinton's position may be rooted in her parochial interests as a former senator from New York, where many big banks are headquartered. Clinton has proposed a tax on the biggest banks, which could encourage some downsizing. President Obama has been pushing a similar tax for a number of years now, and so far it hasn't gone anywhere. |
Submitted by Chris Hamilton via Econimica blog, The Maginot Line formed France's main line of defense on its German facing border from Belgium in the North to Switzerland in the South. It was constructed during the 1930s, with the trench-based warfare of World War One still firmly in the minds of the French generals. The Maginot Line was an absolute success...as the Germans never seriously attempted to attack it's interconnected series of underground fortresses. But the days of static warfare were over – in 1940, the Germans simply drove around the line through Holland and then Belgium. Had the Germans replayed WWI and made a direct attack, the Maginot Line likely would have done its job. But Hitler wasn't interested in a WWI re-do, so the fortifications were quickly rendered moot. France, Europe, and the world would pay the price for generals fighting the last war rather than adjusting to the contemporary risks they faced. In 2008, the economic generals at the various central banks likewise pulled out the playbook to refight the great depression... not realizing, this time was an entirely different opponent. Federal governments and central bankers presumed doing what they had always done would again win the day. Cut interest rates (this time to zero) to incent both public and private entities to refinance existing debt loads and undertake new, greater leverage. This nearly free money would reduce debt service levels and the new loans would ignite a new wave of economic activity in the form of capital expenditures and small business creation. Economic multipliers and velocity would ensure general prosperity with job and wage growth. Instead, it's the "Maginot Line" all over again for our economic generals as economic activity grinds to a stall absent the illusory asset bubbles. BTW - if you are not a fan of charts or visual representations...this is not the article for you and likely best to stop here. What changed? 1- The Global Population of Young (Future Consumer Base) Ceased Growing...30 Years Ago. For hundreds if not thousands of years, global population growth rose at an annual rate of about 0.2% to 0.4%. Somewhere in the 19th century, the pace of population growth began rising significantly faster and headed to a global rate never seen before and likely never to be seen again. The rate of population growth peaked around 1970 and has precipitously fallen off since. However, despite the collapse in the rate of population growth, the total population has continued to rise due to the existing population living decades longer than the previous generation (chart below). The worlds population ceased growing in about 1988...since that time the world is only growing older. Below, global births per five year periods plus UN medium and low estimates. The double peak from '85-->'90 and again '10-->'15 is clear and as for the future, the reality will be somewhere between the medium and low estimates, but flat to declining births will be the order of the day. So it only figures, if you tracked the population of young (0-4yr/old total annual population...chart below) that they would essentially cease growing. The population growth party was over...and it ended almost 30 years ago. 2- The Worlds Population is Still Growing Due to a Surge in the Elderly Living Longer and High African Birthrates Offsetting Global Depopulation of Young If there was no increase in the global number of births or the population of young...how did the world grow so much? The old living so much longer. The chart below shows the two ends of the life spectrum...the global populations of 0-4yr/olds vs. the 75+yr/olds. Both populations grew rapidly until '90...but since '90, the 75+ population has nearly doubled while the population of young isn't budging. And by 2050, the population of elderly will surpass the population of young...undoing what was a 10:1 ratio in 1950. Why is this a bad thing (economically)? 65+yr/olds consume at about 70% of the rate they did during their peak working years. By the time they are 75+yrs/old their consumption drops to about 50% to 60% of what it was during peak working years. They are credit averse, preparing for (or on) fixed incomes, and napping is one of their favorite activities and it doesn't cost a thing. 3- Global Depopulation of young (excluding Africa) The chart below highlights global births per five year periods ex-Africa plus UN estimates for medium and low future births. Again, the reality will likely split the UN estimates but a clear peak in the late '80's and huge deceleration of births since is undeniable. The surging births in Africa plus medium and low UN future estimates. But sadly, absent income, without savings, without access to credit, and the world awash in overcapacity as it is...this population growth in Africa has no avenue to export themselves to prosperity or greater consumption. They are simply economically going to remain poor beyond belief and will not be capable of driving any significant economic activity. Excluding Africa, births from the remainder of the world are collapsing since the late 1980's peak. And according to the UN's best guestimates, births will only continue trending down world over (excluding Africa). Fewer births means fewer consumers, declining need for housing, commodities, and nearly everything else as this smaller population works it way through from the bottom up (also known as deflation or depopulation). What people struggle to understand is that our present system is all about growth and it is the population growth of .05% or 1% which drives economic activity magnitudes larger. This relatively small population growth % drives huge spending on infrastructure, home building, factories, supply chains, etc. The differing impact of 1% or 0.1% population growth is felt far beyond a 1% or .1% economic growth...more like 10x's that impact. But population growth isn't slowing across the board. It is the huge population declines of the young among the combined wealthy 35 OECD nations (list of members HERE), China, Russia, & Brazil vs. the still growing but decelerating RoW (rest of the world...but really Africa). So, the 0-4yr/old combined OECD, China, Russia, and Brazil population peaked in 1991 and has steadily declined since, now down over <-22%>. The combined 0-4yr/old population growth among the relatively poor RoW was barely able to offset the declines of the relatively wealthy developed since '91 (chart below). High fertility rates and population growth in Africa are solely offsetting the contracting populations of young across the remainder of the world. The chart below highlights global fertility rates for 2016....where the global population growth is coming from. In two words, Central Africa. Those highlighted in yellow, orange, red, and magenta (indicating nations that, on average, have 3 to 6+ children per female) are almost entirely located in Africa. Uganda, Somalia, Burundi all have birthrates near 6 children per female and the most populous African nation, Nigeria (approaching 200 million citizens), has a birthrate of 5.1. Officially, 2.1 children per female is zero growth and the global fertility rate has fallen over 50% from it's 1964 peak of 5.1 to 2.4 as of 2016...and all indications point to further declines. Declining populations of young across the world has been made up for by growing populations of young in Africa. Something tells me, economically, this is not a good trade. Below, GDP per capita or purchasing power parity (PPP). Countries with low PPP in red (Central Africa), moderate in green, high in blue, and very high in magenta. Most global commodities and exports cost the same worldwide...so those with high PPP's (and particularly those with relatively easy access to credit) can consume far more than those with low PPP's. The bulk of nations highlighted in red (particularly in Africa) have PPP's below $2000 a year...(and as low as $400/yr). Nations with annual PPP's of $2000 are generally in-line with the GDP per capita of Haiti...their consumptive capability is equivalent to about 5% of US GDP per capita. How the worlds population is distributed, by global regions (chart below). Africa represents about 15% of the worlds population but at least 100%+ of population growth. Below, net 2016 fertility rates as per those regions. Shortly, all regions will likely be negative...except Africa. Below, world population excluding Africa...further broken down by the under 45 and over 45yr/old populations. Global 0-44yr/old population, excluding Africa (chart below). This is the child bearing population...as their total number shrinks compounded by collapsing birth rates, a far larger population decline could be in store than anticipated. Global 45+yr/old population, excluding Africa. This is how the world is growing...by growing older (chart below). Global 0-44 vs 45+yr/old population change, per 5yr periods (chart below). No, the world is coming to the rescue...if the world is seen through a lens excluding Africa, the 0-45yr/old population growth is essentially over. The population capable of bearing children has chosen not to...and is now itself declining in size. The global economy will never be the same. 2017 is the last sliver of light for the nations that collectively consume 70% of global oil and represent about 80% of all global import markets. The combined 0-64yr/old population of the 35 OECD nations plus China, Russia, and Brazil grows just one million persons in 2017 or 0.1% (chart below). After that, the declines begin, slowly at first but picking up speed to the downside every year. What was an influx of up to 30 million new consumers annually with the income, savings, and access to credit will now be a declining consumer base for the rest of our lives. The reason Japan and Germany were able to maintain their economies once their own internal 0-64yr/old consumer bases were declining was an emphasis on exports to a still growing export market. Looking at the annual population growth of the 0-64yr/old importer nations (OECD, China, Russia, Brazil), the chart below highlights when, in turn, major nations / trading blocks 0-64yr/old populations turned negative. We see that the final support for global consumption, China, turns negative this year. As you see below, that pool of seemingly endless demand for import growth goes dry this year. So, what about the US? The data that represents the US economy, charted out with a minimum of opinion. You decide what it means. US Population growth & Makeup of that Growth - The change, per five year periods, of the 0-44yr/old population vs. the 45+yr/old population (chart below). The UN medium population growth estimate is included through 2050 (the 45+ estimate is a lock but the 0-44 is highly optimistic and slowing birthrates almost surely means there will be significantly less 0-44yr/old growth than indicated). Total US Debt & US Full Time Jobs - The change, per period, of net full time job growth vs. total debt growth (private and public...chart below). US Energy Consumption - Total consumption and fossil fuel consumption since 1950 in the chart below. Consumption change, per period in the below chart. Fairly self explanatory that growth of energy consumption ended and we are now contracting. Whether a shift from industrial to service economy, whether through higher efficiency, or a hundred other possible explanations for why...the declines are not debatable. Energy consumption, by type of energy (chart below). Change in energy consumption, by type per period. Mortgage rates vs. Mortgage debt - Interestingly, lower FFR's and mortgage rates did not incent more debt since 2007 (chart below). Mortgage rates and mortgage debt, change per period (chart below). From 1970 to 1981, as mortgage rates increased by 300%, mortgage debt increased by $1.2 trillion dollars (even unadjusted for inflation, this was a hug sum of money). This was a 350% increase in outstanding mortgage debt while the cost of funding these loans rocketed higher. However, since 2008, mortgage debt has fallen by a half trillion dollars despite a 50% decrease in rates. Breakdown of America's Core Finally, the cleanest and clearest point of breakdown was the end of population and employment growth among the 25-54yr/old population. This is the bedrock and foundation upon which the nations economy resides. As this group goes, eventually so goes America. The change in each, by period. |
Owner Unilever Country Belgium Website http://www.magnumicecream.com/ Magnum is an ice cream brand owned by the British/Dutch Unilever company and sold as part of the Heartbrand line of products in most countries. In Greece, the Magnum brand name is owned by Nestlé since 2005-2006 following the acquisition of Delta Ice Cream, so the Unilever ice cream uses the name Magic. History [ edit ] The ice cream today known as Magnum was developed in Belgium at the Ola laboratory (Baasrode) in cooperation with the Belgian chocolate producer Callebaut and released in Germany in January 1989 as an upmarket ice cream for the existing Nogger brand. It was originally manufactured by Frisko in Denmark.[1] The original Magnum (later rebranded as Magnum Classic) consisted of a thick bar of vanilla ice cream on a stick, with a chocolate coating. As there was no real chocolate which could stand the temperature of −40 degrees Celsius, an ad hoc chocolate had to be developed.[2] The original Magnum had a weight of 86 grams and a volume of 120 mL)[citation needed]. The former factory in Aarhus, Denmark, was converted into apartments, shops and a fitness centre named "Friskohus" (The Frisko House) after the ice cream company brand.[3] The Frisko brand is still used in Denmark. The company also started selling Magnum ice cream cones in 1994 and an ice cream sandwich in 2002.[4][5] Varieties [ edit ] A Magnum Gold ice cream bar. Starting in 1992, the company added Magnum Almond, Double Chocolate, and White amongst other flavours. In 2002, Magnum branched into frozen yogurt with their raspberry fruit swirl covered in milk chocolate. Moments were introduced which were bite-size ice cream treats with caramel, chocolate, or hazelnut centres, followed later in the year by "mini", "crunchy" (with almonds), and "light". Late 2002 saw the launch of Magnum Intense, a chocolate truffle center enveloped in ice cream and covered with chocolate, and the limited edition 7 Deadly Sins series of ice creams, whose flavours were named after the seven deadly sins. Sins was followed by another limited edition range in 2005 in which each flavour was named after one of the senses: Magnum Aroma, Magnum Touch, Magnum Sound, Magnum Taste, and Magnum Sight. In 2003, Streets, the brand under which Magnum is sold in Australia and New Zealand, brought out a limited edition series of ice creams known as The Sixties Nine featuring sixties-related names: John Lemon, Wood Choc, Jami Hendrix, ChocWork Orange, Peace ManGO, Cinnaman on the Moon, Cherry Guevara, Candy Warhol and Guava Lamp. Consumers who collected nine of these ice cream sticks could send them off to gain a free Magnum T-shirt. The extreme popularity of the ChocWork Orange resulted in Streets selling it as the "Chocolate Orange" Magnum for some time after the remainder of the range was discontinued. Similarly, the Peppermint Envy of the Seven Deadly Sins range became "Peppermint" and is still available in Australia today. In 2008, Magnum brought out new variants in the UK—Mayan Mystica, a chocolate ice cream Magnum blended with cinnamon, nutmeg and honey flavours; and Magnum Minis available in a variety of flavours. Eva Longoria was the face of Magnum in 2008. Also in 2008, Josh Holloway, from television's Lost, was selected as the first male spokesperson of Magnum in Turkey. Benicio del Toro and Caroline Correa starred in a television commercial for Magnum Gold, directed by Bryan Singer. In 2009, Magnum Mini Moments were launched. They came in three types of chocolate: milk, white and dark all with 5 different flavours including almond, truffle etc. In China, the Magnum name is retained; however, there are fewer varieties—as of 2009 there are only vanilla, cappuccino, and crunchy. Mint and double chocolate were introduced in 2006/7 but were pulled from the market in 2008 (or possibly before). In 2011, Magnum ice cream was launched in the US and Canada with six varieties: Double Caramel, Double Chocolate, Classic, Almond, White and Dark. In 2011, actress Rachel Bilson became the spokesperson for the ice cream brand.[citation needed] In April 2013, Magnum ice cream was launched in India by Hindustan Unilever, starting with Chennai, and February the following year, expanded to national distribution.[6] It is distributed under the brand name Kwality Wall's.[7] In 2014, The Philippines opened a "make-your-own" or "do-it-yourself" Magnum dessert bar/cafe called Magnum Manila, located at SM Aura's Sky Park, Taguig. In 2018, Magnum launched its first vegan ice creams in two flavours:. Magnum Vegan Classic and Magnum Vegan Almond. The new product was first released in Finland and Sweden followed by the UK. [8] |
People Behaving Badly: Outside Lands tickets Copyright by KRON - All rights reserved Video SAN FRANCISCO (KRON) -- A steady stream of Uber, Lyft, and Sidecar drivers pull up to a bus zone at 30th and Fulton to drop off people at the Outside Lands event at Golden Gate Park. And then, parking enforcement officers would simply jot down their license plate on a piece of paper and then snap a photo of the vehicle. Later, that driver would receive a $288 parking ticket on the fly, so drivers thought that driving off meant no ticket. Well, it doesn't quite work that way. It did not seem to register with the driver when Stanley Roberts told the driver what was going to happen. But when it does, she returns to question the parking officer. The same rules apply if you are going to drop off a passenger on a marked crosswalk or stop in a lane of traffic to drop off passengers. You also can't drive up to a closed area hoping to get access. All you get is a ticket in the mail and the embarrassment of having to back up. |
Six Sprites, "the world's smallest spacecraft," have entered low-Earth orbit, a small milestone for Breakthrough Starshot's plan for interstellar voyage. “Space is big,” reads a line from Douglas Adams's Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. “REALLY big.” So big, one wonders if a spacecraft could ever reach even the nearest star system, Alpha Centauri. One plan named Breakthrough Starshot wants to bridge that gulf to the nearest star within the century. Now, just a little over a year after the plan was announced, the initiative has achieved a small first, as a number of its small Sprite prototype spacecraft piggybacked into low-Earth orbit. The idea behind Breakthrough Starshot is simple: accelerate a gram-scale spacecraft to 20% the speed of light (that's about 37,000 miles per second, fast enough to reach the Moon in less than 7 seconds) using ground-based lasers for the first interstellar mission. Yuri Milner announced the Breakthrough Starshot project as part of the larger Breakthrough Initiatives program in April 2016. The $100 million of funding is a drop in the bucket compared to what a full interstellar mission would cost — it's basically a starter grant to fund research toward a proof of concept, to demonstrate that a tiny spacecraft could be accelerated to a fraction of the speed of light. What the most recent test accomplished was a tiny but important milestone. Six postage-stamp-sized spacecraft, named Sprites, made it to orbit as supplementary payloads. Two are mounted on the larger Venta and Max Valier educational satellites built by European space company OHB System AG. Another four of the Sprites are still inside the Max Valier and awaiting deployment as independent spacecraft. The satellites launched aboard Polar Satellite Launch Vehicle from Satish Dhawan Space Center in southeast India on June 23, 2017. From Sprites to Starchips Each Sprite is built as a single circuit board 3.5 centimeters on a side and weighing just 4 grams (for comparison, a U.S. nickel weighs 5 grams). The femtocraft contain solar cells (which generate all of 100 milliWatts of power in direct sunlight), a magnetometer, gyroscope, and an antenna to communicate with Earth. Both of the larger satellites have achieved stable orbits, but while ground stations in California and New York as well as amateur radio operators have detected Sprite signals, the team hasn't determined yet that they've detected two separate signals. Thus far, the Max Valier satellite is itself having trouble communicating, halting the release of the four Sprites still carried in its cargo container. The ideas behind Breakthrough Starshot aren't without their own challenges, as the team readily acknowledges, but the scientists involved maintain that there aren't any dealbreakers. Solar sail propulsion, long a staple of science fiction, is attractive in that the spacecraft wouldn't need to carry its own fuel. More fuel means more mass, which then means more fuel and, well, you get the idea. Robert Forward proposed the microwave-propelled Star Wisp mission in 1985, though it never took off. The Planetary Society lost its first solar sail mission in 2005, when its submarine-launched Cosmos-1 failed to reach orbit. Japan's Ikaros spacecraft finally became the first successful solar sail mission to fly in space, hitching a ride with the Venus-bound Akatsuki mission launched in 2010. Once accelerated to high speeds, more challenges face the spacecraft. How would it avoid dust particles when it's zipping along that fast? A tiny grain of dust, though rare in the space between stars, would pack a mission-ending punch when a spacecraft is moving at 20% the speed of light. Then there's the issue of braking on the other end — at least on the first try, we may have to settle for a brief 1- or 2-day flyby of the Alpha Centauri system after a 20 year long trip. There's also the issue of communication. For example, New Horizons used a 2.1-meter dish to talk to Earth after its flight past Pluto and Charon in July 2015, and the distance reduced its data rate to that of a bad dial-up connection, at 1 kilobit (125 bytes) per second. Enabling something the size of a penny to talk to Earth from 4 light-years away is a non-trivial issue that the Breakthrough Starshot team will need to address. We can always hope that Moore's Law holds true and computing power will continue to double every 18 months. Breakthrough Starshot's vision anticipates this, as well as the continued miniaturization of technology and solutions to current technical challenges. Hey, we have to at least try as a species if we ever want to reach the stars, right? |
The Reverend Robert Walker Skating on Duddingston Loch Artist Henry Raeburn Year 1790s Medium oil on canvas Dimensions 76 cm × 64 cm (30 in × 25 in) Location National Gallery of Scotland The Reverend Robert Walker Skating on Duddingston Loch, better known by its shorter title The Skating Minister, is an oil painting attributed to Henry Raeburn in the National Gallery of Scotland in Edinburgh. It was practically unknown until about 1949, but has since become one of Scotland's best-known paintings. It is considered an icon of Scottish culture, painted during one of the most remarkable periods in the country's history, the Scottish Enlightenment. Robert Walker [ edit ] The minister portrayed in this painting is Robert Walker. He was a Church of Scotland minister who was born on 30 April 1755 in Monkton, Ayrshire. When Walker was a child, his father had been minister of the Scots Kirk in Rotterdam, so the young Robert almost certainly learnt to skate on the frozen canals of the Netherlands. He was licensed by the Presbytery of Edinburgh in 1770 at the age of fifteen. He married Jean Fraser in 1778 and had five children. He became a member of the Royal Company of Archers in 1779 and their chaplain in 1798. He was minister of the Canongate Kirk as well as being a member of the Edinburgh Skating Club, the first figure skating club formed anywhere in the world.[1] The club met on Duddingston Loch as shown in the painting, or on Lochend loch to its northeast between Edinburgh and Leith, when these lochs were suitably frozen. Appraisal [ edit ] The painting is unusual in both its composition and its setting. The subject matter, perhaps intentionally conveying Walker's ties with Holland, is reminiscent of seventeenth-century Dutch artworks, particularly those of Hendrick Avercamp. The Reverend skates in the efficient but difficult "travelling position", with both arms folded across his chest and his stern black outfit contrasts with the wild backdrop of Duddingston Loch. According to Andrew Graham-Dixon, "The pinkish grey crags and sky have been painted with great freedom, whereas the figure of Reverend Robert Walker himself is so tightly drawn and painted that he appears almost as a black silhouette against an icy, vaporous wilderness. Perhaps this was the artist's way of suggesting that, for all his apparent probity and self-restraint, the minister was at heart something of a romantic – a man, at any rate, with a penchant for communing with nature."[2] Art historian Duncan Thomson notes that, "The filigree within the buckle on the strap at the skater's right knee and the taut complexities of the arrangement of the pink ribbons that binds the skates to his shoes are a reminder of the manipulative skills that Raeburn must have developed during his apprenticeship [as a jeweller and goldsmith] ... perhaps the tour de force of observation and the finding of equivalent forms are the marks that the skater (or those who have circled with him) has made on the ice: the curving grooves incised with some appropriate tool in a liquid, greyish white which has been spread over a darker grey that has been allowed to dry and the edges of these tiny furrows, more pronounced towards the bottom of the picture, tipped in with a purer white to simulate the froth of ice thrown aside by the cutting blade."[2] Attribution controversy [ edit ] In March 2005, a curator from the Scottish National Portrait Gallery suggested that the painting was by French artist Henri-Pierre Danloux rather than by Henry Raeburn. Once this information had been brought to the attention of the Gallery, the label on the painting was altered to read “Recent research has suggested that the picture was actually painted [...] by Henri-Pierre Danloux.” Since this time, many people have debated this idea. It has been argued that Danloux was in Edinburgh during the 1790s, which happens to be the time period when The Skating Minister was created. Supposedly the canvas and scale of the painting appears to be that of a French painter, although Raeburn critics argue otherwise.[3][4] Despite continuing controversy about its attribution, The Skating Minister was sent to New York City in 2005 to be exhibited in Christie's for Tartan Day, an important Scottish celebration. James Holloway, director of the Scottish National Portrait Gallery, told The Scotsman newspaper that his "gut reaction" was that it is by Raeburn. The newspaper reported that "it is understood that Sir Timothy Clifford, director-general of the National Galleries of Scotland, now accepts the painting is a Raeburn."[5] In popular culture [ edit ] Cambridge UK based musical group Clean Bandit based a character in their music video for their song "Dust Clears" on The Skating Minister painting. The video has been posted by the band on YouTube.[6] The skating minister is portrayed by skater Nick Martin and the skating scenes were filmed on Lake Vattern in Sweden.[7] A copy of The Skating Minister can be seen displayed in the apartment of con-man Neal Caffrey in the USA television series White Collar. In Alexander McCall Smith's novel The Sunday Philosophy Club, a character sends a card bearing Raeburn's picture to the protagonist, Isabel Dalhousie.[8] See also [ edit ] Further reading [ edit ] |
Showing all 24 wins and 30 nominations For the song "Blazing Saddles" Song: "There's Nothing Like a Show on Broadway" 2015 Nominee Primetime Emmy Outstanding Guest Actor in a Comedy Series The Comedians (2015) For playing "Mel Brooks". Outstanding Writing for a Variety Special Mel Brooks Live at the Geffen (2015) 1999 Winner Primetime Emmy Outstanding Guest Actor in a Comedy Series Mad About You (1992) For playing "Uncle Phil Buchman". For episode "Uncle Phil Goes Back To High School". 1998 Winner Primetime Emmy Outstanding Guest Actor in a Comedy Series Mad About You (1992) For playing "Uncle Phil". For episode "Uncle Phil And The Coupons". 1997 Winner Primetime Emmy Outstanding Guest Actor in a Comedy Series Mad About You (1992) For playing "Uncle Phil". For multiple episodes. |
Stephen Ward has had a pretty solid week. Having nailed down the left-back spot in the Irish team, and received praise for his improved form, he capped it all off by appearing on this Balls.ie's football show, cleverly titled the Football Show from Balls.ie. You can listen to the full conversation by subscribing to the show here, or listening to the Soundcloud link below. Along with chatting about the international set-up, Ward also spoke of life at Burnley under Sean Dyche. Ward revealed that he was close to leaving the club when he failed to break into the first-team, before nailing down a spot last season. He was full of praise for Dyche: His record at Burnley speaks for itself. He's done an outstanding job on a very small budget, at a so-called smaller club. He's a very good tactician, he knows exactly what he wants to get out of his players and I think when you watch us play, and when we're at our best, you know that it's a Sean Dyche team from the way we play. He's got a philosophy, and he sticks to it. We train ridiculously hard, he wants every player to be fit and strong, and be able to get around the pitch, and I feel it's a good balance that we have. Hopefully this season, I feel we're in a better position to have a crack at staying up in the Premier League. Ward also talked of how delighted he was to have Jeff Hendrick link up with him at Turf Moor, and offered an interesting insight into the type of questions a manager asks of international teammates in such situations: The manager asked me a few questions about Jeff. So I knew what was going on, and I was delighted when he did sign with Burnley. He's been a great addition, and you can see straight away his quality. He's a great lad too, I really enjoy his company, and it's nice to have another Irishman alongside me in the dressing room! It's more questions like: what do you think of him, and does he fancy coming here - because I knew there were a number of clubs interested in him. I think from the summer they knew his quality, and from playing against him in the Championship when he was at Derby. It was more a case of asking me was he leaning towards us, or leaning towards Hull? Advertisement Hendrick's desire to join Burnley clearly helping the club to pull the trigger on a record deal. Ultimately, from an Irish point of view, it's probably better that Hendrick went to Burnley rather than Hull: it leaves David Meyler with an easier job on his hands of staying in the Hull team. You can listen to the full interview on the podcast. See Also: A Six Counties Team Of Republic Of Ireland Players |
The President’s amnesty plan is coming. He intends to allow a lot of people who crossed the border illegally to stay in the country indefinitely. He is, in effect creating second class citizenship where people can exist in the space between daylight and the shadows with dubious status. The Republican response should be to make Camp David a refugee holding facility and close down every golf course controlled by public funds at which the President might wish to play. Heck, they should basically defund the White House, save for security for the President and his family. Make him pay his own light bill. After all, American social services will have lots of new expenses involved in this. Impeachment for this action is not going to happen, but the GOP should focus on the “rule of law” aspect of the President’s plan — a concern raised even by the Washington Post. There is a basic fairness for people who have been in the system, waiting their turn to become Americans. Had they known they could just show up and the President would let them stay, they might have done things differently. Rules should mean things. Laws should mean things. The President is taking a screwed up system and breaking it further, leaving many trapped in the system while excusing those who’ve taken matters into their own hands. The President, taking this action, shows he really has no intention of trying to work with the GOP for the next two years. President Clinton worked with the GOP to balance the budget and reform welfare. President Obama wants his way or the highway after voters just rejected his way. The only bright side to this is that conservatives can rest assured Washington will soon be more gridlocked than ever. Of course, [mc_name name=’Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-KY)’ chamber=’senate’ mcid=’M000355′ ] has already said there’ll be no shutdowns. When the GOP has already negotiated the terms of its surrender, the nation is in for a rough ride. |
by JAKE NUTTING and BILL REESE Are the Courage coming back to women’s soccer? EoS has learned that Carolina FC LLC, the parent company of the North American Soccer League’s Carolina RailHawks, registered a trademark on the name “Carolina Courage” last week. RailHawks owner Steve Malik has been somewhat active when it comes to trademarks since purchasing the club from Traffic Sports late last year. At the start of this year, Malik secured the trademark for the “Carolina Flight” as he mulled a possible rebrand for the NASL club in the future. The Courage name is unlikely to have anything to do with a potential rebranding of the RailHawks, though. Fastidious followers of women’s soccer will recall the Carolina Courage was a member of the of the Women’s United Soccer Association, the world’s first professional women’s league. The WUSA suspended operations after only three seasons, but in that time, the Courage won the league title once and shared WakeMed Soccer Park with the RailHawks in 2002 and 2003. RailHawks President and General Manger Curt Johnson acknowledged recently that the club has had advanced talks with National Women’s Soccer League Commissioner Jeff Plush about the possibility of starting up a team in that league. “We are interested,” Johnson told The Equalizer in July. “Our owner, Steve Malik and I met with Jeff Plush in Chicago in June, and we have had further conversations. There is interest from both sides, and the process is on-going. We are just doing our due diligence and getting the lay of the land, understanding budgets, the relationship with U.S. Soccer and the long-term vision.” Johnson stated in the same interview that there was no timeline for expansion yet, but a decision would need to be made within the next two months if they were to start play in 2017. “The process is evolving,” added Johnson. “If, and it’s a big if right now, we were going to play in 2017, I think a decision would have to be made in the next 60 days.I think we have the facilities, the support and there are a lot of top players in the area.” |
By Global Integrity — January 5, 2015. Global Integrity is hiring Peer Reviewers with expertise in state governance in all 50 States. Apply here About the Project The State Integrity Investigation II project is a collaboration between the Center for Public Integrity and Global Integrity. This new effort will refine and update a project first carried out in 2011-2012. At the time, the project represented the first in-depth, data-driven account of government transparency and anti-corruption mechanisms in all 50 states, using on-the-ground reporting and data analysis. A list of detailed questions, or “integrity indicators”, is answered through a combination of evidence-based research and interviews with knowledgeable experts, used to generate scorecards for each state. The State Integrity Investigation was featured in more than 1,100 print, online and broadcast outlets across the country. Since then, it has led to the adoption of new laws or statutes in seven states and proposals in five more. The project was a 2013 finalist for Harvard’s Goldsmith Investigative Reporting Prize. A new round of research will allow states to measure any progress they have made, will raise the pressure for passing reforms and will serve as a critical tool for state government reporters, lawmakers and civil society across the country. Position of the Peer Reviewer Peer Reviewers will play a key role in the data quality control process by carefully reading, vetting and fact-checking the information submitted by the Lead Researcher. Peer Reviewers are typically governance experts, academics, journalists or civil society leaders with specific expertise and deep knowledge of specific governance areas. They must have an excellent grasp of the state’s transparency, accountability and anti-corruption mechanisms. Peer Reviewers will provide substantive feedback on the indicators’ accuracy, relevance and balance and must have substantive knowledge in a number of the below issue areas: Freedom of Information, Political Finance, Electoral Oversight, Executive (Legislative and Judicial) Accountability, State Auditing, State Budgeting Process, Civil Service Management, Procurement, Ethics Agencies and the State Pension System. In some cases, Peer Reviewers will have to provide additional research and sources to make the data quality-compliant. Timing and required Availability Peer Reviewers will review the data during March 2015 – June 2015 and will have seven days (sharp!) to review and provide feedback on the 250 indicators. As it is impossible to estimate when a particular scorecard will become available, Peer Reviewers must be available for a quick turn-around any time during that period and must be available to promptly clarify any aspect of their review throughout May and June 2015. Compensation All work is compensated. All contributors to the project will be publicly acknowledged. State coverage Global Integrity is looking for Peer Reviewers in all 50 States. How to apply Interested candidates, including those who have worked with Global Integrity before, should apply online here. Positions are filled on a rolling basis. Who We Are Global Integrity is a non-profit, non-partisan organization that champions transparent and accountable government around the world by producing innovative research and technologies that inform, connect, and empower civic, private, and public reformers seeking more open societies. The organization has used its expert assessment methodology in anti-corruption assessments in over 100 countries with the Global Integrity Report. The Center for Public Integrity is one of the country’s oldest and largest nonpartisan, nonprofit investigative news organizations. The Center won the 2014 Pulitzer Prize for investigative journalism and has also been honored for its work by Sigma Delta Chi, the White House Correspondents Association, the Overseas Press Club, Investigative Reporters and Editors Inc. and Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government. Photo Credit: Kevin Hutchinson (Creative Commons: Attribution 2.0 Generic) |
“It is quite easy” to topple a statue, says Hanna Bondar, the former deputy chief architect for the city of Kiev. Don’t be intimidated by what seem to be unbreakable materials — stone, concrete, bronze can all be brought down. By 1991, when the Soviet state collapsed, some 5,500 statues of the Communist leader Vladimir Lenin had been erected in Ukraine, the highest density anywhere in the U.S.S.R. In December 2013, a mob of anti-Kremlin protesters knocked over a hulking red quartzite Lenin on one of Kiev’s main squares, setting off a wave of removals that came to be known as “Leninfall.” At its peak, in February 2014, 376 Lenins were felled in a single month. Assess your environment. “There has to be space for people to gather,” Bondar says. Don’t endanger bystanders. Climb the pedestal and lasso the statue (typically around the neck). Pull hard. “With enough angry people, you just need your hands,” Bondar says. If the effigy is particularly large or stuck fast, tie the rope to a vehicle with a tow hitch. In rural towns, it took just a few locals with a tractor to dislodge the ubiquitous concrete Lenins. In rare cases, a tool like a Sawzall or an arc welder might be required to sever the figure’s feet first. “If it is painful for people to look at,” Bondar says, “it should be removed.” Even if you despise a likeness, though, consider keeping the statue intact. Bondar would like to see the more artistic examples collected in a museum rather than destroyed. “If we forget our history,” she says, “how will we remember our mistakes?” The Ukrainian government bureaucratized the process in 2015, passing “de-communization” laws that officially mandate the monument purge. As part of her new job in the administration of Ukraine’s president, Bondar is involved in reimagining public spaces, which she thinks should serve living people, not historic figureheads. She has helped organize several design competitions for Kiev’s Bessarabska Square, where a large, Leninless pedestal now stands. One of her favorite ideas leaves the pedestal empty but adds a staircase. She says, “Anybody who wants to could climb up, look around and feel like a monument.” |
Franklin Hardware in Woodland Hills was one of more than 40 Valley businesses struck by a commercial burglar dubbed “The Ghost” by authorities. “It’s violating,” said Michael Kurzeka, co-owner of Franklin Hardware, who found the door smashed in. “Imagine if your home had been broken into. It’s my family’s business and we’ve had it for 65 years.” “It’s not the $600 or whatever,” he added. “I don’t care. It’s the principal.” Los Angeles Police Department officials say the prolific burglar has broken into more than 40 closed businesses in the west San Fernando Valley since mid-July of this year. The LAPD made the announcement of their spectral suspect on Wednesday after detectives linked the man to crimes through surveillance videos. “Until this week, we had no idea what the Ghost looked like, other than he was hooded and gloved,” Lt. Paul Weber, commanding officer of the Topanga Detective Division said in a statement. Weber described the suspect as an Asian male in his twenties. Detectives report the burglar hides at the sight of any passing car lights and has hidden for as long as 30 minutes before smashing a window or door to get into a business. All the businesses hit have been along Ventura or Topanga Canyon boulevards as far north as Sherman Way, authorities said. Franklin’s Hardware, which opened in 1952, is located on the 21900 block of Ventura Boulevard. Help catch the "Ghost" burglar. We're out of tricks, and he's no treat! #LAPD https://t.co/2O3QxieuAj — LAPD Topanga Div. (@LAPDTopanga) October 18, 2017 Kurzeka said the Oct. 4 break-in, which occurred between 3:30 and 4:30 a.m., cost his store nearly $1,000 in repairs. In addition to the $600, “The Ghost” also made off with a garbage disposal. Kurezeka said he’s installed additional security since the burglary, including more motion and glass break sensors.The business was also burglarized in July, the co-owner said, but he wasn’t sure if the same person was involved. He said nearby businesses have also been struck, including ice cream and pizza shops, and a barbershop. Police have “attacked” the crime spree in several ways, authorities said, including educating local business owners; posting no-cash-on premises signs on business doors; conducting stakeouts; using undercover officers; placing decoy cars and detaining burglar parolees. “Hopefully they get him,” Kurzeka said. “I’m glad they’re taking it seriously.” Kurzeka said he would advise business owners to leave certain items unlocked that don’t need to be locked, such as a cash register with change. “If they’re going to break your cash register to get $10 of quarters, you’ve lost $10 and $200 to replace the new register,” Kurzeka said. “And make sure your security system is up to date.” Anyone with information on the case is asked to contact Detective Amber Kim, Topanga Detective Division, at 818-756-5844. Anonymous tips can be called into Crimestoppers at 800-222-8477. |
ISTANBUL (Reuters) - Sporadic clashes between police and protesters flared up in Istanbul overnight after a weekend in which Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan sought to steal back the agenda, rallying his supporters and expelling demonstrators from an Istanbul park. Two union federations called a nationwide strike for Monday over the forced eviction of protesters from Gezi Park, a leafy corner of Istanbul’s central Taksim Square and the focus of two weeks of fierce anti-government demonstrations that have spread to other big cities. Labour groups representing doctors, engineers and dentists said they too would take part. Hundreds of thousands of Erdogan supporters gathered to hear the prime minister speak at an Istanbul parade ground on Sunday as riot police fired teargas a few kilometres away in the city center to disperse protesters. Related Coverage Turkish unions call one-day strike for Monday A defiant Erdogan told a sea of flag-waving supporters that two weeks of unrest had been manipulated by “terrorists” and dismissed suggestions that he was behaving like a dictator, a constant refrain from those who have taken to the streets. “They say ‘you are too tough’, they say ‘dictator’. What kind of a dictator is this who met the Gezi Park occupiers and honest environmentalists? Is there such a dictator?” Erdogan said to roars of approval from the crowd. He dismissed the demonstrations as “nothing more than the minority’s attempt to dominate the majority ... We could not have allowed this and we will not allow it.” Anti-government protesters shout slogans as they stand on barricades in Istanbul June 16, 2013. REUTERS/Serkan Senturk SKIRMISHES DOWN SIDE STREETS Riot police backed by a helicopter, some in plain clothes and carrying batons, fired teargas and chased gangs of rock-throwing youths into side streets around Taksim late on Sunday, trying to prevent them from regrouping. There were also disturbances in other parts of the city that had so far largely been spared the violence, including around the Galata bridge, which crosses to the historic Sultanahmet district, and the upmarket Nisantasi neighbourhood. A small-scale environmental protest quickly spread into a much larger movement involving people from all walks of life who dislike what they say is Erdogan’s domineering leadership style and his government’s unnecessary meddling in people’s lives. The clashes pose no immediate threat to Erdogan’s leadership, but they have tarnished Turkey’s image as an oasis of stability on the fringes of the volatile Middle East, and presented him with the greatest challenge of his 10-year rule. The blunt-talking prime minister has long been Turkey’s most popular politician, overseeing a decade of unprecedented prosperity, and his AK Party has won an increasing share of the vote in three successive election victories. Slideshow (18 Images) Erdogan, who also addressed supporters of his ruling AK Party in Ankara on Saturday, said the rallies were to kick off campaigning for local elections next year and not related to the unrest, but they were widely seen as a show of strength. The crowds who packed Istanbul’s Kazlicesme festival ground, many of whom walked for kilometres, turned out to support a leader who they feel has been under siege. “We are the silent majority, not the riff-raff who are trying to frighten us,” said Ruveyda Alkan, 32, her head covered in a black veil and waving a red Turkish flag. The two weeks of unrest have left four people dead and about 5,000 injured, according to the Turkish Medical Association. |
BAGHDAD – For nearly a decade, anyone driving through one of Baghdad’s many checkpoints was subjected to a search by a soldier pointing a security wand at their vehicle and watching the device intently to see if its antenna moved. If it pointed at the car, it had supposedly detected a possible bomb. The wands were completely bogus. It had been proven years ago, even before 2013 when two British men were convicted in separate trials on fraud charges for selling the detectors. The devices, sold under various names for thousands of dollars each, apparently were based on a product that sold for about $20 and claimed to find golf balls. READ MORE: Iraq PM orders removal of fake bomb-detection wands following deadly Baghdad bombing Yet the Iraqi government continued to use the devices, spending nearly $60 million on them despite warnings by U.S. military commanders and the wands’ proven failure to stop near-daily bombings in Baghdad. It took a massive suicide bombing that killed almost 300 people in Baghdad on July 3 – the deadliest single attack in the capital in 13 years of war – for Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi to finally ban their use. The reason it took so long is likely the widespread corruption in the government. Iraqis mocked the device from the start, joking that too much aftershave could set off the antenna. Now there are accusations that plans to start using newly imported explosives-detecting scanners were intentionally held up as part of the political wrangling over which faction – the military or the police – will control security in Baghdad. Since the wands were banned, soldiers at Baghdad checkpoints largely wave motorists through, occasionally asking for vehicle registrations and driver’s licenses and taking a quick look inside. Plainclothes intelligence agents scrutinize drivers and passengers. Police dogs have been used at some checkpoints, but that has proven to be time-consuming and contributing to traffic congestion. WATCH: Blast in Baghdad claimed by Islamic State kills six In some places, the wands are still being used – at some checkpoints in Baghdad and in the southern port city of Basra, Iraq’s third-largest city – nearly two weeks after the Baghdad bombing. They also were used across the holy city of Najaf south of Baghdad for at least a week after al-Abadi’s order before they were finally recalled. “The withdrawal of the device is continuing, but it’s still in use here and there, for now,” Brig. Gen. Saad Maan, the Interior Ministry’s chief spokesman, told The Associated Press. He said the new vehicles equipped with scanners have been deployed at checkpoints on major roads leading to the capital. “All this will have a positive impact on Baghdad’s security,” he said. Officials say the explosives-laden minibus used in the July 3 attack in Baghdad’s central Karradah district started its journey in Diyala province, traveling 50 kilometers (31 miles) to the capital. The vehicle, a type used as communal taxis in Iraq, would have encountered at least half a dozen checkpoints, most of which likely used the wand. Investigators say the vehicle carried a 250-kilogram (550-pound) bomb. READ MORE: Baghdad suicide bombing death toll rises to 175 Four days after the Karradah bombing, three suicide bombers struck a Shiite shrine in Balad, north of Baghdad, killing 37 people. A series of small bombings also rocked the capital, killing about two dozen people. When Iraqi security forces first began using the ADE-651 wands, U.S. and British military commanders in Iraq dismissed the devices as useless and counseled the government to stop using them. Faced with mounting criticism, former Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki ordered an investigation into the effectiveness of the devices in 2010. The outcome was inconclusive, and they continued to be used. The head of the Interior Ministry’s bomb squad department, Jihad al-Jabri, was convicted in 2012 and sentenced to four years in prison for accepting a bribe from the British manufacturers. But the case against him did not address whether the wands were effective. Many Iraqis believe he was a scapegoat to protect more senior Iraqi officials from prosecution. Politics also may have played a role. After the July 3 blast, al-Abadi fired the military officer in charge of Baghdad’s security and accepted the resignation of Interior Minister Mohammed Salem al-Ghabban, who was in charge of police. Al-Abadi also ordered an investigation into why nearly 70 vehicles equipped with explosives-detecting scanners that were imported last year were left in Interior Ministry garages and had not been deployed. Al-Ghabban had been demanding for months that his ministry be given complete control over security in Baghdad. Al-Abadi had resisted, however, keeping the military in charge. Since al-Ghabban is close to one of the most powerful Shiite militias, his opponents feared his demand aimed to give militias control over Baghdad. Speaking to the AP, the chairman of parliament’s security and defense committee accused al-Ghabban of intentionally failing to deploy the scanner vehicles as a political ploy. WATCH: Suicide car bomb kills 125 in Baghdad “It’s due to the minister’s demands that security control of Baghdad be given to the ministry,” said Hakim al-Zamli. “If it were given to him, he would use them (the vehicles). If not, he won’t use them.” Al-Ghabban, in turn, has said he was stymied in attempts to protect Baghdad. After his dismissal, he said al-Abadi repeatedly ignored his proposals for bolstering security. He complained that too many security and intelligence agencies were involved in protecting Baghdad. “I wanted the entire security file to be left in the hands of the Interior Ministry so it can be fully accountable,” he said. “My job was emptied of genuine tasks, tools and powers, and became ceremonial.” Qais Adil Faraj, the father of one of the Karradah victims, blames “corruption” and “treason” among the security forces for the bombing. He said he has no faith in the new security measures in the capital. “More and more bombings will follow the one in Karradah,” he said. “This government will never maintain security nationwide or even just in Baghdad.” |
Shares Quackademic medicine. I love that term, because it succinctly describes the infiltration of pseudoscientific medicine into medical academia. As I’ve said many times, I wish I had been the one to coin the phrase, but I wasn’t. To the best of my ability to determine, I first picked it up from Dr. R. W. Donnell back in 2008 and haven’t been able to find an earlier use of the term. As much as I try to give credit where credit is due, I have, however, appropriated the term “quackademic medicine” (not to mention its variants, like “quackademia”), used it, and tried my best to popularize it among supporters of science-based medicine. Indeed, one of my earliest posts on this blog was about how quackery has infiltrated the hallowed halls of medical academia, complete with links to medical schools that have “integrative medicine” programs and even medical schools that promoted the purely magic-based medical modalities known as reiki and homeopathy. It’s been a recurrent topic on this blog ever since, leading to a number posts on the unethical clinical trials of treatments with zero or minimal pre-trial plausibility, the degradation of the scientific basis of medicine, and the acceptance of magical thinking as a means of treating patients in all too many medical centers. One strong candidate for quackademic ground zero, if there can be such a thing for the phenomenon like quackademic medicine, which is creeping up like so much kudzu in the cracks of the edifice of science-based medicine ( SBM ), is the University of Arizona. U. of A. is, of course, the home of one of the originators of the concept of quackademic medicine and one of its most famous and tireless promoters, Dr. Andrew Weil. Dr. Weil, as you might recall, has even been the driving force for creating a highly dubious “board certification” in integrative medicine. Sadly, apparently this new board certification has been so popular among physicians wanting to “integrate” a little quackery into their practices, that its first examination has been delayed from May to November 2014, so that the American Board of Physician Specialties can figure out how to accommodate the unexpectedly large number of applicants. So what happens when a patient arrives at U. of A. for treatment? I found out last week when I received an e-mail, which led to a fairly long e-mail exchange, with a man whose son was diagnosed with leukemia and is being treated at the University of Arizona Cancer Center (UACC). Although this man gave me permission to use his name, I am going to decline to do so because there is a child involved, although anyone involved in his case at U. of A. will likely quickly be able to identify who the man is. It turns out that he is a professor at U. of A. in a humanities department (which is why I’ll refer to him henceforth as the Professor), and, even though he is not a scientist, he clearly knows how to think (which would not be surprising if you knew what department he was in). In his e-mail, he told me how appalled he was at the sorts of treatments being offered to his son: I was appalled to discover that the center offers treatments like Reiki, Reflexology, Acupuncture, Cranial massage, etc. These treatments are advertised as “healing”–including boosting one’s immune system, complementing conventional chemotherapy etc. I wrote the the [sic] director of the center who at first expressed concern and thanked me for calling these things to her attention. She said she would convene a board of physicians to look into it. After three months went by, I wrote to her asking for an update. She told me the board was still working on it and that she was “confident they would take care of it”. I have been asking her for a timeline and she is not returning my emails. At first I thought this was probably the pernicious influence of Andrew Weil, but I have since discovered that cancer centers around the country are offering these “treatments” including places like Sloan-Kettering. Because of this, I’ve concluded there is no point in going to the media to try to expose what’s going on. Of course, blogs are the media. The new media, but media nonetheless. At least I like to think so. The Professor is probably correct about going to the traditional media, though. There probably is little point in going to the press, although we can always hope. Most of the time, when the press looks into the infiltration of quackademic medicine into medical academia, the result is a story like this appalling one from a year and a half ago in which NBC News chief medical correspondent Nancy Snyderman strongly embraced quackademic medicine to the point that she even said that if a doctor “doesn’t know” about integrative medicine, “I think it’s time to ask for a referral to someone who does.” It made me sad to see a woman who normally stands up for science, at least with respect to vaccines and combatting the antivaccine movement, to fall so hard for pseudoscience when it exists at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center. Even I have had to hang my head in shame when I discovered that my alma mater both for medical and undergraduate school, the University of Michigan, actually has a program in anthroposophic medicine. Unfortunately, although I hoped that the Professor would make as much of a stink as he could, I felt compelled to warn him that I doubted he would be successful because this sort of “integration” of quackery with academic medicine is very much entrenched at the University of Arizona. It started with the pernicious influence of Andrew Weil, but if Dr. Weil were to drop dead or retire today I doubt that it would change much, if at all, because quackademic medicine has had years to become embedded in the culture there. To put it bluntly, U. of A. is one of the centers of quackademic medicine in the US, if not the world, and I don’t see that changing any time soon. I also looked up UACC’s director, Dr. Ann E. Cress, and noted that she’s an interim director, which makes it highly unlikely that, even if she were so inclined, she could do much of anything. An interim cancer center director isn’t going to be able to take on Andrew Weil. It also doesn’t help that there are researchers at U. of A. like Dr. Myra Muramoto, who recently scored a $3.1 million from the National Cancer Institute (NCI)—not the National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine, mind you, the NCI—to do this: Dr. Myra Muramoto, Arizona Cancer Center member and associate professor in the Department of Family and Community Medicine at the University of Arizona College of Medicine, has received $3.1 million from the National Cancer Institute to develop and evaluate a new program to train chiropractors, acupuncturists and massage therapists in effective ways to help their patients and clients quit tobacco. The grant will fund “Project Reach,” which will partner over the next five years with Pima County chiropractors, acupuncturists, massage therapists and their office staff to evaluate ways they can best help their patients quit tobacco. That’s a big chunk of change of the sort that cancer centers value above all, money from NCI grants. When cancer centers are being considered for NCI-designated comprehensive cancer center status (NCI-CCC)—or trying to renew their status—one huge consideration is the level of NCI funding its investigators have. Basically, for this purpose NIH grants are good, but NCI grants are the best. That’s why any investigator with a $3.1 million NCI grant will have outsized influence and an NCI-CCC or any cancer center seeking NCI designation. Of course, because chiropractors, acupuncturists, and massage therapists often claim, without valid scientific evidence, to be able to help people quit smoking with their woo, such a grant would almost certainly have the effect of encouraging referrals of smokers to these practitioners, to make sure enough patients accrue to the study funded by the grant. Quackademic medicine at UACC It turns out that U. of A. does indeed offer its patients tons of “supportive” care therapies not rooted in science. A quick look at its Survivorship Care page reveals: In collaboration with the medical and psychosocial services at The University of Arizona Cancer Center, we will work with patients to: Reduce physical symptoms associated with cancer and its treatment (e.g., pain, fatigue, insomnia, etc.) Manage side effects of chemotherapy and radiation with therapies such as acupuncture, botanicals, and mind-body medicine Examine lifestyle factors and situations (e.g., diet, risk for undernutrition, physical activity, emotional coping skills, support network, and spirituality) that may affect symptoms and/or course of disease Develop and work toward goals for health, wellness, and what is most meaningful and valuable after diagnosis, as well as during and after treatment Actively participate in their health care Regain a sense of control and well-being despite the diagnosis Notice the quackademic medicine “integrated” with potentially science-based modalities for supportive care: acupuncture, botanicals, “mind-body” medicine. Note how such useless modalities like acupuncture are listed as being, in essence, co-equal with various dietary, lifestyle, and coping modalities. This is basically how quackademic medicine “rebrands” what should be science-based modalities as somehow being “alternative” or outside the mainstream. It then lumps them together with modalities that are pure quackery (acupuncture, reiki, therapeutic touch, etc.), the implication being that it’s all part of a lovely “complementary and alternative medicine” ( CAM ) package that represents the “best of both worlds.” Of course, we at SBM reject the idea that there are “two worlds,” citing the oft-repeated adage that there is no such thing as “alternative medicine.” Rather, there is medicine that has been scientifically demonstrated to work. There is medicine that has not been scientifically shown to work. There is medicine that has been shown not to work. The reason “alternative medicine” is alternative is because it falls into one of the latter two categories. What do you call alternative medicine that’s been shown scientifically to work? Medicine. I know, I know. We say this a lot here, but it’s true. Also true is Mark Crislip’s almost famous adage, which I like to use in almost all of the talks I give about “integrative” medicine these days: If you integrate fantasy with reality, you do not instantiate reality. If you mix cow pie with apple pie, it does not make the cow pie taste better; it makes the apple pie worse. As I’ve said many times before, I wish I had thought of this quote. Trying to hide the stench of cow pie in the apple pie Make no mistake about it, UACC is “integrating” fantasy with reality by offering reflexology (or, as I like to call it, a nice foot and hand massage with delusions of grandeur), reiki (or, as I like to call it, faith healing substituting Eastern mysticism for Judeo-Christian beliefs), craniosacral massage (or, as I like to call it, a nice scalp massage with delusions of grandeur), healing touch (also known as therapeutic touch, which I like to call reiki without the foreign name), and many others. At least, I wasn’t able to find anywhere that the UACC offers homeopathy to patients, although one of the most famous of the “magical grants” awarded by NCCAM was to a University of Arizona researcher in Dr. Weil’s department to study homeopathy. It didn’t take too long for it to become clear to the Professor that UACC was not dealing with him in good faith. At least, that’s what he told me in a subsequent e-mail. What led him to believe this was a combination of not getting his e-mails answered and then what happened after he complained about perhaps the most egregious example that he found at UACC. He first brought this issue up back in December, and, after several requests to have a meeting, the Professor became frustrated and basically sent a threat to go to the media. Shortly after that, the web page on the UACC site that had so disturbed the Professor became this: Yes, that’s a big “Access Denied” message. One wonders whether UACC deleted the page or just hid it so that you need a University of Arizona login to see it. Maybe one of our readers from U. of A. could check and report back here. Thankfully, due to the magic of Google Cache, we can see what was there until as recently as a week ago: One wonders if the administration of UACC, out of concern that the Professor might actually do what he said he would do (shop his story around to newspapers), got rid of the web page for Frank Schuster. Of course, it’s not so easy, as I showed above, and, in case anyone’s interested, I’ve saved a web archive of the page for permanent archival purposes (for me, that is). I can see why the UACC administration would be embarrassed enough to act like this. On the now defunct page, potential patients for UACC were treated to incredible claims like: Very simply, Reiki is energy that flows through the body of the practitioner, and conveyed through the hands into the body of the recipient. It is subtle energy, but it can be felt – usually as a warmth, tingles or slight pressure. And, perhaps the most ridiculous claim of all: Any particular effects cannot be predicted. The energy is intelligent and it will do whatever is best. What can be stated is that it will help any condition. That’s right. Apparently this “healing energy” from the “universal source” is so intelligent that it will do whatever is needed or best. That totally must be why it can’t be studied! Its effects are so darned unpredictable! It’s also hard not to note that on the old web page about Mr. Schuster there was a link to his practice’s web page Energy-Therapy.net, where there’s also a link to his blog Energy Therapies, which appears not to have been updated since 2005 but is quite revealing nonetheless. Indeed, in one post on Mr. Schuster’s web page, we see a claim that speaks for itself: ALL illness and disease are indications of an unbalanced or depleted energetic condition. The resulting manifestation as pain or anxiety is the body’s way of letting you know that something in your life is out of balance. But don’t worry, Mr. Schuster can help. You don’t even have to come to his practice or UACC! That’s because, you see, Mr. Schuster offers distance healing: Distant Healing is defined as a “mental intention on behalf of one person, to benefit another at a distance.” In this context, prayer is a mental act of intercession in which the believer (pray-er) puts himself “between” God and the recipient. God then uses the prayer (pray-er) as the conduit for the request – be it healing, therapy, or another type of petition. God’s healing power is directed through the healer to the person in need. If that person is present, the power can be conveyed through touch. In the event that person cannot be present, God’s healing power is effectively conveyed by mental intention through the thought process. In this realm distance is not a consideration. One might not believe any of this, nor have faith that this kind of healing can occur. Actually, that is irrelevant. The only faith that really matters is that of the healer or pray-er. The single requirement of the recipient is to be in a receptive mode, open to healing possibilities. It is not necessary to believe that the acts of prayer, distant healing or touch healing are effective. This is, of course, completely unscientific. It’s religion, pure and simple. In fact, I would argue that it’s just another form of faith healing, given how Mr. Schuster invokes God as the source of the “healing power.” And it’s only $25 for four 15 minute sessions! (More if you want to donate more.) What a bargain! At least there’s a quack Miranda warning at the bottom of the page, and one notes that Mr. Schuster also includes a plug for NCCAM . I don’t know whether Mr. Schuster actually offers distance healing to UACC patients, although it’s clear from his web page that he offers it. Regardless of whether he offers it to UACC patients or not, I hope that I would not be alone in arguing that mystical nonsense like reiki (which Mr. Schuster appears to implicitly admit to be faith healing) has no place in an academic medical center, much less an NCI-CCC like UACC. There are only 41 NCI-CCCs in the entire country. I’m faculty at one and am proud of having been on the faculty of two different NCI-CCC’s. The NCI designation is supposed to mean that these cancer centers are the best of the best, adhering to only the highest standards of patient care, research, and community engagement. To see an NCI-CCC offering faith healing, distance healing, and treatments based far more on magical thinking, religious and mystical ideas, and prescientific concepts of disease, such as reiki, reflexology, and acupuncture, embarrasses me almost as it would to learn these modalities were being promoted for patients by my own cancer center as though they were legitimate treatment modalities. Fortunately, they are not, which is one reason I’m proud of my cancer center, but I nonetheless fear this occurrence. After all, if M.D. Anderson Cancer Center and Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center can fall so deep into the rabbit hole of woo, I’m under no illusion that it can’t happen where I work too. All it would take is a new cancer center director, a new director of supportive services who is more “open” to these sorts of treatments, or maybe a new member of the board of directors who is woo-friendly. SBM is fragile these days. Perhaps Dr. Cress feels the same way, along with many of the other excellent science-based clinicians and researchers based at UACC. I doubt it’s a coincidence that there isn’t a single mention of CAM or “integrative medicine” in a recent history of UACC published on the UACC blog last fall. In a way, I feel a bit sorry for Dr. Cress in that, as an interim director, she probably has neither the authority nor inclination to deal with this issue definitively. She probably wants to let whoever is appointed the next permanent director deal with it. Whatever the case, the Professor still doesn’t know whether Mr. Schuster is still affiliated with UACC or not, the removal of his web page from public view notwithstanding. I’m not sure that even the minimal action of removing from the UACC website a webpage that links to a website offering distance healing would have happened if the Professor hadn’t been faculty at the University of Arizona and threatened to go to the press. Maybe they were concerned that people would also notice that Mr. Schuster’s other website, Paths-Mind-Is-It.com, offers a veritable cornucopia of dubious products, such as Increased Synchronicity, which claims to be able to: Increase in awareness of the present moment. Fully appreciating the here and now Have future self send information back through time to current moment. This is specific for the following periods of time…1 minute, 1 day, 1 week, 1 month and 3 months Have current self send current information back through time to past self. This is also specific for the following periods of time…1 minute, 1 day, 1 week, 1 month and 3 months Increasing unity/harmony between past, present and future self Hey, if Mr. Schuster can send healing messages over distances, why not forward or backward in time, too? Yes, basically, his PATHS “utilize proprietary breakthrough technology” that claims this: Rapid Data Transfer (RDT) GENERATION II embodies a quantum leap in Mind Technology. RDT Gen. II is a unique technology that helps you use the potential of your own mind without any drugs or medications. It can help you to improve in almost every area of your life including, health (physical, mental, emotional & spiritual), enlightenment, productivity, success, communication, finances, relationships, fitness and sports – even improve your memory! RDT has been helping thousands of individuals, like you, improve their lives in many ways (click here to read success stories) in as little as 3 minutes a week. RDT or Rapid Data Transfer facilitates high-speed communication between an on-line Theater Presentation and the human subconscious. As best I can figure, PATHS are multimedia computer presentations that claim to be able to do all sorts of things for you, including improving your stem cell health, strengthening your connective tissue, and doing quantum meditation. Note that the word “quantum” features prominently in this “technology,” and regular readers know what the use of that word almost always indicates in this context. What remains of the cow pie Even if Mr. Schuster is indeed gone from UACC, there’s a lot of woo that remains there, as the Professor mentioned in his e-mails. Specifically, he pointed out something called The Seven Levels of Healing, a program created and offered by Dr. Jeremy Geffen, MD, FACP, who is described as a “board certified medical oncologist and leading expert in integrative medicine and oncology and is the author of the book The Journey Through Cancer: Healing and Transforming the Whole Person .” I think I’ll quote the Professor about why he found this so objectionable, because, really, without letting myself go, I’d have a hard time putting it better myself. In his criticism, the Professor also cites examples from Dr. Geffen’s website: Today I’m in the cancer center and I’ve noticed something else. You offer here something called “The Seven Levels of Healing”. I looked up this program. Level 7 is about the nature of spirit. Here’s one thing they say: Spirit is our true nature: timeless, eternal, and dimensionless, the source from which all awareness, all creativity and, ultimately, all healing flows. As you know, this claim is scientific nonsense. One may have religious faith in such a claim, but is it appropriate for this claim to be made by the cancer center? The description continues: The goal of “The Nature of Spirit” is to assist each person to discover this spiritual aspect of themselves, and to bring this into full, ongoing awareness. When what we experience as physical reality is threatened, it is more important than ever before to remember that another part of us is timeless and eternal, and remains strong, healthy, and powerful, no matter what our physical circumstances may be. In recognizing the nature of our spiritual selves, and the incredible mystery of awareness itself, we uncover the source of ultimate love and freedom — an infinite ocean from which healing can be drawn. Again, completely unscientific claims about healing. As far as I know, the “Seven Levels of Healing” program is free. This makes it less objectionable, although in my mind, it is still objectionable for the cancer center, a supposedly scientific, evidence-based institution, to be pushing what is essentially religion. Moreover, in the description of level 3: “The Body as Garden”, they say the following: Here we explore the full spectrum of complementary approaches to healing: nutrition; exercise; massage; yoga; herbal therapies; Ayurvedic, Tibetan and Chinese medicine; acupuncture; homeopathy: chiropractic; and visualization. We do not offer or promote these approaches as cancer treatments per se, and we do not believe that they should be viewed in this manner. However, we do believe that they can supplement conventional care by cleansing, toning, relaxing, and strengthening the body, thus giving health and well-being the greatest chance to emerge. Although these claims are vague, it would be quite natural for someone to interpret them as meaning that these treatments, some of which are offered at the center for a fee, can aid in one’s recovery from cancer. I know of no evidence to support this claim. And do you have any idea what they mean by ‘cleansing’ and ‘toning’ the body? Do these terms have any scientific meaning in this context? Likely, the Professor learned of this program through a fliers or pamphlet like this one. He is quite correct, too. By offering this particular program, UACC has irresponsibly placed its imprimatur and thus the assumed imprimatur of science on pseudoscience and mystical, religious mumbo-jumbo. There is no excuse for this. This “Seven Levels of Healing” represents a program by a physician who is not UACC faculty but is promoted by UACC to its patients. It offers homeopathy, which, no matter how much homeopaths try to deny it, is pure quackery, as we’ve described many, many times here. Ayurveda and traditional Chinese medicine are modalities based on prescientific ideas of how diseases work not unlike the four humors in prescientific European medical traditions. Worse, according to the biography on the website, Dr. Geffen is apparently “focused on implementing ‘The Seven Levels of Healing’ program in cancer centers throughout the United States, along with writing, speaking, and consulting with hospitals, cancer centers, and professional organizations in developing leading-edge integrative programs for medicine, wellness, and life.” Although several cancer centers appear to have adopted the “Seven Levels of Healing” woo, from what I can tell, UACC is the only NCI-CCC that is involved, making it by far the most prominent cancer center to be using Dr. Geffen’s program. I really hope that I don’t learn of any more. Given the infiltration of quackademic medicine into even the most respectable medical centers, it’s hard to know whether UACC is merely the cancer center that’s gone the farthest down the rabbit hole of pseudoscience or whether I just don’t know of ones that are even worse. Given the large shadow that Andrew Weil casts over the medical school there, it might well be so that, when it comes to quackademic medicine in oncology, UACC reigns supreme. As prominent as M.D. Anderson and Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Centers are, as far as I can tell, neither of them has yet offered distance healing to their patients, although many are the academic medical centers that offer a quackery only slightly removed from distance healing, namely reiki. After all, what’s the difference between saying you can channel “healing energy” from the “universal source” into a patient if you’re in the room with him or if you’re thousands of miles away? In my mind, not much. At least one academic medical center offers homeopathy. (Actually, I wish it were only one.) Can anything be done? Often, I’m asked something like, “What’s the harm?” After all, UACC and the other cancer centers that offer up “integrative oncology” don’t deny patients science-based treatments for their cancer. True enough. However, as the Professor demonstrates, the existence of “integrative oncology” programs has a profoundly confusing effect on patients and their families, who, quite reasonably, assume that an NCI-CCC would not offer any treatments that were not science-based. Consequently, the line between science and pseudoscience is becoming increasingly blurred, to the point where even a lot of physicians have a hard time telling the difference when it comes to modalities like acupuncture, which has been the most successful at projecting a facade of science over prescientific mystical origins and a mid-20th century resurrection based on political need in China, thanks to low quality studies and random noise in clinical trials. Worse, this infiltration has led to grossly unethical clinical trials, such as the Gonzalez trial, in which patients undergoing a “natural” therapy for cancer did much worse than conventional therapy, even for a disease with as grim a prognosis as pancreatic cancer. Perhaps an even more pernicious effect (actually, there’s no “perhaps” about it) is that this blurring of the lines between science and pseudoscience so badly batters the filters against pseudoscience that a cancer center like UACC can allow practitioners like Frank Schuster and Dr. Jeremy Geffen to be associated with its programs, and even hire them to provide unscientific medicine. My first wish is that more patients like the Professor would so vigorously protest the infiltration of quackery into academic medical centers like UACC. My second wish is that it would take more than the potential embarrassment of publicity about a practitioner that even the quackiest of quackademics can’t defend to push a cancer center to act to protect the scientific basis of cancer care. Maybe the Professor can serve as an example of the first wish, but I fear I will not live to see the second ever fulfilled. |
Spidee Scoop celebrities,Entertainment Kim Kardashian Shows Her Tiny Waist With Kourtney While Doing Shopping For Christmas Kim Kardashian Shows Her Tiny Waist With Kourtney While Doing Shopping For Christmas Aizaz Mohammad Spread the love It is only october but Kardashians are getting ready for the Christmas. Both arrived in a black car. Kourtney and Kim Kardashian were seen for the filming for up coming program “keeping up with the kardashians” it is a special program for the christmas. And was shooted at the christmas tree farm in LA. Kim and Kourtney was surrounded by their camera crew, both were seeing chating with each other. Kim kardashian was seen in the hugging black pants, which shows her famous curves. And she was wearing charcoal grey t-shirt which was looking amazing on her. Kourtney Kardashian Kourtney was wearing brown tarten miniskirt with a tie at front. Kourtney was also wearing the fitted black bodice tucked in, and was wearing a nude tartan cape over her shoulders. Se was wearing cat-eye sunglasses, and carried a small black alligator skin handbag. Kourtney was wearing black ankle boots and kept herlong hair loose. She joined it with white trim up shoes and a white baseball top. Her mobile phone was in a single hand as she strolled the seven-year-old kid to his class. The Kardashians have been keeping busy with recording the up and coming Christmas special and shot ice skating scenes just yesterday. Spread the love Post navigation Tags: kardashians |
‘A government takeover of health care’ The core argument used by Republicans during their forceful attempt to derail the Democrats’ health care law has been dubbed a whopping lie by the Pulitzer Prize-winning organization PolitiFact. The phrase “government takeover of health care,” coined by Republican strategist Frank Luntz early in 2009, was named “Lie of the Year” by the respected fact-checking website run by the St. Petersburg Times. “Uttered by dozens of politicians and pundits, it played an important role in shaping public opinion about the health care plan and was a significant factor in the Democrats’ shellacking in the November elections,” PolitiFact explained Friday. It proceeded to engulf the lexicon of the debate early as Congressional Republicans and conservatives waged a relentless campaign to convince the public the measure would give the government wholesale control of the health care industry. “The phrase is simply not true,” PolitiFact’s editors concluded, clarifying that they were not commenting on whether the law was good policy. Yet in 2010 alone the words “government takeover” appeared 28 times in the Washington Post, 77 times by Politico, and 79 times on CNN. After a year of grueling debate and accusations that Republicans were negotiating in bad faith, the measure eventually became law in March of 2010, by which point fears of too much government intrusion compelled Democrats to jettison the otherwise popular public insurance option. The law, which relies solely on private insurance to expand coverage, comprises insurance regulations to cover pre-existing conditions, subsidies for the poor, and a mandate to ensure a broad risk pool. The award reflects the power of disinformation, as the GOP claim was repeated ad nauseum — often uncritically — by lawmakers and public figures in Congressional testimonies, national speeches, television news shows, and mainstream newspapers. Added PolitiFact: “But as Republicans smelled serious opportunity in the midterm elections, they didn’t let facts get in the way of a great punchline. And few in the press challenged their frequent assertion that under Obama, the government was going to take over the health care industry.” So effective was the “lie” that it helped Republicans win back the House of Representatives by a large margin and make gains in the Senate during the 2010 midterm elections. Last year’s PolitiFact “Lie of the Year” was awarded to former Alaska governor Sarah Palin’s claim that the health care law contained “death panels.” |
This article is from the archive of our partner . Albanian Prime Minister Sali Berisha unveiled at 9.3 foot-tall statue of George W. Bush in the itsy-bitsy town of Fushe Kruje on Wednesday. Marking the former president's 65th birthday, the ceremony took place in the town square that now bears George W. Bush's name. It's also the same spot that Bush visited in June 2007 and may or may not have had his watch stolen as ecstatic locals reached to shake the president's hand and pat his head. Bush had been the first U.S. president to visit Albania, an overwhelmingly pro-American country. "The United States is still remembered fondly in Albania for leading NATO's 1999 military campaign to halt Serbia's ethnic cleansing of Albanians in Kosovo," says Foreign Policy's Robert Zeliger. "Albania joined NATO in 2009, with Washington's backing." If you watch the above video closely--no pun intended--you can see around minute one that the wristwatch on Bush's left arm mysteriously disappears. YouTube conspiracy theorists quickly noticed this and a narrative emerged that Albanians had stolen Bush's famously humble star-spangled Timex had been lifted right off of his left wrist. ABC News and Reuters debunked the story soon thereafter, citing a White House spokeswoman who said that president had swiftly removed the watch himself and handed it back to a Secret Service agent. |
KSE-100 Share Index surges over 2% as MSCI upgrades Pakistan economic status KARACHI: KSE-100 Share Index surged 2.58% on Wednesday following an overnight announcement by MSCI about the country’s upgrade from frontier to emerging market status. The KSE 100-Share Index hovered around 38,415.63 points at 12:33pm, up 2.4% from the start of trading. In the early hours of Wednesday, global index provider MSCI announced that its Pakistan Index will be reclassified to the Emerging Markets status. “The jovial mood following this re-rating event is expected to reflect in market performance today,” according to Intermarket Securities, a brokerage house. According to Bloomberg News, the KSE 100-Share Index has already gained 15% this year, making it the best performer in Asia. In a positive development, MSCI said its Pakistan Index will be reclassified to the Emerging Markets status, coinciding with the May 2017 Semi-Annual Index Review. MSCI is a leading provider of international investment decision support tools. Its decision is to upgrade the country from the Frontier Markets status is expected to generate inflows of global portfolio investment amounting to $475 million by the middle of 2017, according to EFG Hermes, an Egypt-based investment bank. Pakistan upgraded to emerging markets status Global institutional investors use different MSCI indices – such as frontier, emerging, China and US markets – to create balanced portfolios to generate maximum returns while keeping in view their overall risk appetite. MSCI communicates its conclusions, based on discussions with the international investment community, on a list of markets under review every June. MSCI announced last year that Pakistan was on its list for possible reclassification in view of improvements in transparency and liquidity. Pakistan was part of the MSCI EM Index between 1994 and 2008. However, the temporary closure of the Pakistan Stock Exchange in 2008 led MSCI to remove it from the index and classify it as a “standalone country index”. MSCI made Pakistan a part of the Frontier Markets Index in May 2009 and it has remained as such since then. ‘Pakistan to receive up to $500 million post MSCI re-classification’ Although the actual reclassification of the index will follow next year, global investors tend to start factoring in the reclassification ahead of the actual change, which prompts massive inflows of global funds in the case of a favourable decision. Pakistan’s weight in MSCI Frontier Markets Index is about 9% with as many as 16 companies. Its weight in the MSCI Emerging Markets Index will be smaller in percentage terms though. But the reclassification will bring in bigger foreign inflows in absolute terms, as emerging markets attract far more funds than frontier markets. Pakistan’s economic output rising at healthy pace Assets of more than $9.5 trillion are estimated to be benchmarked to MSCI indices worldwide. According to Next Capital CEO Najam Ali, most frontier market funds will continue their investment in Pakistan even after its reclassification as an emerging market as long as the improving macro theme remains intact. Read full story |
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