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Andrew Breitbart is fueling the strange PizzaGate controversy, even from beyond the grave. The conservative media pioneer, who died unexpectedly in 2012 at the age of 43, apparently had quite a bit of distaste for Democratic power broker John Podesta in the final years of his life. Breitbart took aim at Podesta, who this year ran Hillary Clinton’s failed campaign for president, claiming that Podesta was hiding a child sex trafficking ring. To adherents of the PizzaGate conspiracy theory, it appeared to be validation of their claims that Podesta is involved in a secret child sex ring centered on a popular Washington, D.C., pizza joint. But the full context of Andrew Breitbart’s Twitter messages about Podesta were actually related to an entirely different story, one that helped put Breitbart’s conservative website on the map. First, for those out of the loop on the strange conspiracy theory known as PizzaGate, here is a quick primer. The conspiracy theory claims that there is a network of pedophiles spreading across the political spectrum in Washington, with John Podesta a major player. In a 4,770-word summary of the PizzaGate allegations posted on Reddit — which has become the major hub for PizzaGate investigators —user DumbScribblyUnctious that pizzeria Comet Ping Pong was the setting for the underground sex ring. “While initially not the central focus of the investigation at the onset, Comet Ping Pong is a much more overt and much more disturbing hub of coincidences,” the post claimed. “Everyone associated with the business is making semi-overt, semi-tongue-in-cheek, and semi-sarcastic inferences towards sex with minors. The artists that work for and with the business also generate nothing but cultish imagery of disembodiment, blood, beheadings, sex, and of course pizza.” The conspiracy theory has been widely debunked from news outlets across the political spectrum, but it still remains popular in certain corners of the internet. Now, PizzaGate conspiracy theorists believe they have validation from a message Andrew Breitbart posted to the internet a little more than a year before his death. “How prog-guru John Podesta isn’t household name as world class underage sex slave op cover-upperer defending unspeakable dregs escapes me,” Breitbart wrote on February 4, 2011. While the tweet is being hailed as apparent validation of PizzaGate, it was actually related to an entirely different matter. Breitbart’s website reported on a controversial expose claiming that Planned Parenthood was covering up a child sex trafficking ring. The original report, from Live Action, included undercover video that claimed to show Planned Parenthood employees trying to keep the child sex ring under wraps. The report came on the heels of another controversial report from Breitbart protege James O’Keefe claiming to show that employees at the non-profit agency ACORN helped a self-professed pimp to traffic prostitutes. The video was later discovered to be heavily edited, and O’Keefe paid a six-figure settlement to an ACORN employee who was fired as a result of the video. John Podesta was a key figure in leading the response to the ACORN video during his time as chief of staff for President Barack Obama. In other tweets that week, it was clearer that Breitbart’s attacks on Podesta were related to the ACORN and Planned Parenthood investigations. null null Andrew Breitbart’s bad blood with John Podesta stretched back much longer than the Planned Parenthood spat. As the Breitbart website noted, Andrew Breitbart sparred with Podesta a number of times before that. “Andrew Breitbart understood that the biggest threats to America were those who pulled the strings behind the scenes to gain enormous personal power, money, and influence,” the site noted in November of this year. “Podesta is a creature of Washington, D.C., driving the leftist agenda for decades with his fingers in every pot, since serving in the Bill Clinton White House.” null null Though the context of Andrew Breitbart’s attack on John Podesta is clear to anyone willing to read beyond the tweet itself, that isn’t slowing the PizzaGate conspiracy theorists from citing it as evidence of the bizarre claims. Others speculated that Breitbart’s fatal heart attack might have been murder — even though it happened nearly 13 months after his tweets about Podesta. [Featured Image by Reed Saxon/AP Images] |
A study released by the Open Europe think tank, which wants to control the influence and scale of the EU, has found that 170,000 people now work for EU institutions. The group claimed that the difficulty of finding out how many officials worked in Brussels showed a lack of transparency and left the EU open to "influence from lobbyists." Open Europe said the figure is nearly six times more than the 32,000 Brussels bureaucrats which EU bosses have traditionally claimed are needed to run the EU. The Commission has previously claimed that its bureaucratic employees are "fewer than the number of staff employed by a typical medium-sized city council in Europe." However, the new figure, including EU staff working remotely from Brussels, is more like the entire population of a small city such as Swansea or Portsmouth. The 170,000 employees is nearly twice as large as the British army and is greater than the number of people working at eight Whitehall departments including the Treasury and the Home Office. The figure included nearly 45,000 people on 1,000 "expert groups", which advise on legislation, such as the Lifts Directive Working Group, the Mineral Water Expert Group and the Expert Group on Flavourings. Open Europe discovered another 7,900 people employed on 247 "Comitology Committees", which help to implement legislation, as well as 10,000 people running EU missions overseas. Nick Cosgrove, an analyst at Open Europe, said: "The Commission desperately tries to play down just how many people are now working for the EU. They are extremely secretive about the number of people who are working to churn out regulations. "These people are not elected, and cannot be held accountable by ordinary citizens. But they have a huge effect on our lives, affecting everything from the price of electricity and food to the way we run the NHS." Research by Open Europe found that just to draft and work out how to implement legislation the EU requires a bureaucratic staff of around 62,026 people. Mr Cosgrove added: "The huge number of people now working for the EU reflects its huge influence. "It is a complicated and opaque institution, which leaves it wide open to influence from lobbyists and vested interests." Last night the Tories called for this "army of penpushers" to be controlled. Shadow Europe Minister Mark Francois said: "This report details the vast number of the Eurocrats paid for in part by the British taxpayer. "Gordon Brown's Government gave away seven billion pounds worth of our EU rebate for very little in return and it now seems we know what some of it is being spent on. "It is incredible that while our own army is overstretched there is a growing army of pen pushers across the EU, many of them dedicated to creating ever more red tape." However, a spokesman for the European Commission strongly disputed Open Europe's calculations. He said: "Open Europe are being duplicitous about figures here. "The figure cited by the Commission is simply the figure representing permanent European Civil servants working in the European Commission. "We're talking about a serious case of comparing apples to oranges here. The European Commission is not the European Union. "They have achieved their fantastic figures by lobbing in nearly every possible facet of the workings of the European Union and then allude that all the participants somehow work in an extremely crowded European Commission. "By their rationale, the staff of Open Europe should surely be included in the final figure, along with the armies, interest groups and "thousands of bureaucrats in member states". "To seriously suggest that lobbyists factor in the staff of the European Commission shows a chronic misunderstanding of the democratic structures of the EU." Shadow Europe Minister, Mark Francois said: "This report details the vast number of the Eurocrats paid for in part by the British taxpayer. "Gordon Brown's Government gave away seven billion pounds worth of our EU rebate for very little in return and it now seems we know what some of it is being spent on. "It is incredible that while our own army is overstretched there is a growing army of pen pushers across the EU, many of them dedicated to creating ever more red tape." |
By the time this particular three-way transaction was fluffed, speculated upon, tamped and sealed, the Tampa Bays Rays had parted with outfielder Wil Myers, who once and for a short time had been their future and now appears to be the San Diego Padres. Wil Myers was limited to 87 games last season because of a wrist injury. (Getty) As both franchises continued to resituate themselves under fresh management, the Rays are expected to receive three minor leaguers (right-hander Joe Ross, right-hander Burch Smith and first baseman Jake Bauers) and catcher Rene Rivera. The Padres would receive Myers, catcher Ryan Hanigan and minor-league pitchers Gerardo Reyes and Jose Castillo. Scroll to continue with content Ad Shortstop Trea Turner from the Padres and Ross from the Rays go to the Washington Nationals, who would send outfielder Steven Souza and left-hander Travis Ott to the Rays. The trade, first reported by Fox Sports and hashed out by several outlets, including Yahoo Sports, is pending physicals. It’s complicated, so here’s how it apparently plays out at the end: • The Padres get: Myers, Hanigan, Reyes and Castillo. •The Rays get: Souza, Ott, Rivera, Smith and Bauers. • The Nationals get: Turner (as a player to be named later) and Ross. Down the line, the Padres put Myers in the outfield corner opposite Matt Kemp, assuming that trade with the Los Angeles Dodgers is finalized. Hanigan fills the catching vacancy left by Rivera (and Yasmani Grandal, who is headed to the Dodgers). The Rays put Rivera at catcher, Souza (2014’s International League MVP) in right field and restock their farm system. Souza batted .130 in 26 plate appearances spread over 21 games for the Nationals last season. He also memorably saved Jordan Zimmermann’s no-hitter on Sept. 28 with a lunging, over-the-shoulder catch in left-center field for the 27th out. Story continues The Nationals line up Turner behind shortstop Ian Desmond, who can be a free agent after 2015, and Ross behind a rotation that could lose Zimmermann on the same timetable. The immediately significant player is Myers, who turned 24 a week ago. He was the linchpin of a seven-man trade two years ago, the one that sent James Shields and Wade Davis to Kansas City, which the Royals turned into their first postseason appearance since 1985, or five years before Myers was born. A.J. Preller, the Padres’ new general manager, has been aggressive in attempting to turn over a roster that appeared to be losing ground in the NL West. While sorting through the results of Kemp’s physical exam, Preller, who’d whiffed on free agents Pablo Sandoval and Yasmani Tomas, on Wednesday added Myers, the 2013 American League rookie of the year who backslid in 2014. A wrist fracture limited Myers to 87 games last season, during which he batted .222 with a .294 on-base percentage. That the wrist is healed and Myers can return to being one of the game’s top young talents is the risk assumed by the Padres, and perhaps the reason Myers was available. The worst offensive team in baseball last season and something close to the worst for years, the Padres appear close to upgrading with Kemp and Myers in the middle of their lineup. Kemp also has a recent injury history, however, and these are the chances a low-spending club takes when it shares a division with the World Series champion San Francisco Giants and flush Dodgers. The Padres have had the lowest opening day payroll in the NL West every year since 2009. More MLB coverage from Yahoo Sports: |
Search company or market: (Close): The FTSE closed higher after lower-than-expected inflation data made the prospect of an early rise in interest rates even less likely. The UK inflation rate fell to 1% in November - a 12-year low - down from 1.3% in October, with cheaper fuel a key factor behind the change. The news sent the FTSE 100 higher, rising 149.11 points to 6331.83. Earlier the index had fallen as oil-related stocks were hit by the continuing drop in crude prices. The price of Brent crude fell below $60 a barrel early on Tuesday and then continued to decline, eventually dropping below $59 for the first time since May 2009. "Volatility is likely to continue in the short term as the full effects of a lower oil price ripple through financial markets," said Laith Khalaf, a senior analyst at Hargreaves Lansdown. "While there are positives to draw from a lower price, these are perhaps further away and less tangible than the obvious negative impact on oil-related stocks." Mining shares were also hit by disappointing figures from China, with the latest survey of the manufacturing sector indicating that activity has contracted this month. BT shares rose 1.9%. On Monday, the firm said it was in talks to buy the EE mobile phone network for £12.5bn. On the currency markets, the pound rose 0.65% against the dollar to $1.5739 and increased 0.08% against the euro to €1.2584. |
The UK National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC) warns of supply chain risk in cloud-based products, including antivirus (AV) software developed by Russia. We have a long debated the ban of the Russian security software from US Government offices, now part of the UK intelligence is adopting the same strategy. Last week the CEO of the UK National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC), Ciaran Martin, wrote to permanent secretaries regarding the issue of supply chain risk in cloud-based products, including anti-virus (AV) software. The NCSC is a branch of the UK Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ), the UK intelligence and security agency. The letter warns against software made in hostile states, specifically Russia, as the Prime Minister’s Guildhall speech set out, the Government of Moscow is acting against the UK’s national interest in cyberspace. The Letter provides an advice to the Government agencies and offices, but isn’t a ban for specific solutions. The letter highlights the intrusive nature of antivirus software that is necessary to detect malicious code, it is important to remain vigilant to the risk that AV products developed by a hostile actor could person a wide range of malicious activities. “The job of AV is to detect malware in a network and get rid of it. So to do its job properly, an AV product must (a) be highly intrusive within a network so it can find malware, and (b) be able to communicate back to the vendor so it knows what it is looking for and what needs to be done to defeat the infiltration. It is therefore obvious why this matters in terms of national security. We need to be vigilant to the risk that an AV product under the control of a hostile actor could extract sensitive data from that network, or indeed cause damage to the network itself.” reads the letter. “That’s why the country of origin matters. It isn’t everything, and nor is it a simple matter of flags – there are Western companies who have non-Western contributors to their supply chain, including from hostile states. But in the national security space there are some obvious risks around foreign ownership.” “The specific country we are highlighting in this package of guidance is Russia.” The official warns of the risk of exposure of classified information to the Russian state that would be a risk to national security, for this reason a Russia-based AV company should not be chosen. It is an obvious reference to the Kaspersky case. The Letter suggests banning the software developed by Russia-based companies from any system processing information classified SECRET and above. “To that end, we advise that where it is assessed that access to the information by the Russian state would be a risk to national security, a Russia-based AV company should not be chosen. In practical terms, this means that for systems processing information classified SECRET and above, a Russia-based provider should never be used.” continues the Letter. “This will also apply to some Official tier systems as well, for a small number of departments which deal extensively with national security and related matters of foreign policy, international negotiations, defence and other sensitive information.” Martin confirmed that the NCSC is currently discussing with Kaspersky Lab about whether the UK Government can develop a framework that can be independently verified giving the Government assurance about the security of the involvement of the Russian firm in the wider UK market. “In particular we are seeking verifiable measures to prevent the transfer of UK data to the Russian state. We will be transparent about the outcome of those discussions with Kaspersky Lab and we will adjust our guidance if necessary in the light of any conclusions.” continues the Letter. In response to the current situation, Kaspersky launched the Transparency Initiative in late October that allows government agencies to review the its security software for backdoors. Pierluigi Paganini (Security Affairs – NCSC, Cyber espionage) Share this... Linkedin Reddit Pinterest Share On |
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - A federal judge on Friday dismissed a lawsuit filed against the U.S. government by the families of three American citizens killed by U.S. drones in Yemen, saying senior officials cannot be held personally responsible for money damages for the act of conducting war. The families of the three - including Anwar al-Awlaki, a New Mexico-born militant Muslim cleric who had joined al Qaeda’s Yemen affiliate, and his teenage son - sued over their 2011 deaths in U.S. drone strikes, arguing that the killings were illegal. Judge Rosemary Collyer of the U.S. District Court in Washington threw out the case, which had named as defendants former defense secretary and CIA chief Leon Panetta, former senior military commander and CIA chief David Petraeus and two other top military commanders. “The question presented is whether federal officials can be held personally liable for their roles in drone strikes abroad that target and kill U.S. citizens,” Collyer said in her opinion. “The question raises fundamental issues regarding constitutional principles, and it is not easy to answer.” But the judge said she would grant the government’s motion to dismiss the case. Collyer said that the officials named as defendants “must be trusted and expected to act in accordance with the U.S. Constitution when they intentionally target a U.S. citizen abroad at the direction of the president and with the concurrence of Congress. They cannot be held personally responsible in monetary damages for conducting war.” Awlaki’s U.S.-born son, Abdulrahman al-Awlaki, was 16 years old when he was killed. Also killed was Samir Khan, a naturalized U.S. citizen who had moved to Yemen in 2009 and worked on Inspire, an English-language al Qaeda magazine. The American Civil Liberties Union and the Center for Constitutional Rights, both based in New York, represented the families. They had argued that in killing American citizens, the government had violated fundamental rights under the U.S. Constitution to due process and to be free from unreasonable seizure. ‘TRAVESTY OF JUSTICE’ “This is a deeply troubling decision that treats the government’s allegations as proof while refusing to allow those allegations to be tested in court,” ACLU lawyer Hina Shamsi said. “The court’s view that it cannot provide a remedy for extrajudicial killings when the government claims to be at war, even far from any battlefield, is profoundly at odds with the Constitution.” Center for Constitutional Rights lawyer Maria LaHood said the judge “effectively convicted” Anwar al-Awlaki “posthumously based solely on the government’s say-so.” LaHood said the judge also found that the constitutional rights of the son and of Khan “weren’t violated because the government didn’t target them.” “It seems there’s no remedy if the government intended to kill you, and no remedy if it didn’t. This decision is a true travesty of justice for our constitutional democracy, and for all victims of the U.S. government’s unlawful killings,” LaHood added. Collyer ruled that the families did not have a claim under the Constitution’s Fourth Amendment guarantee against unreasonable seizures because the government did not seize or restrain the three who were killed. “Unmanned drones are functionally incapable of ‘seizing’ a person; they are designed to kill, not capture,” she wrote. Collyer also wrote that the families had presented a plausible claim that the government violated Awlaki’s due process rights. “Nonetheless, the court finds no available remedy under U.S. law for this claim,” the judge wrote. “In this delicate area of war making, national security, and foreign relations, the judiciary has an exceedingly limited role,” Collyer said. Allowing claims against individual federal officials in this case “would impermissibly draw the court into the heart of executive and military planning and deliberation,” she wrote. It would “require the court to examine national security policy and the military chain of command as well as operational combat decisions,” she said. Nasser al-Awlaki, father of Anwar al-Awlaki, said in a statement he was disappointed in the American justice system and “like any parent or grandparent would, I want answers from the government when it decides to take life, but all I have got so far is secrecy and a refusal even to explain.” Drone attacks have killed several suspected figures in al Qaeda’s Yemen-based affiliate including Awlaki, who is accused of orchestrating plots to bomb a Detroit-bound airliner in 2009 and U.S. cargo planes in 2010. The United States has faced international criticism for its use of drones to attack militants in places such as Pakistan and Yemen. A U.N. human rights watchdog last month called on the Obama administration to limit its use of drones targeting suspected al Qaeda and Taliban militants. President Barack Obama’s administration increased the number of drone strikes after he took office in 2009 but attacks have dropped off in the past year. The United States has come under pressure from critics to rein in the missile strikes and do more to protect civilians. |
The first thing that strikes you – no pun intended – about the Lightning is their age. Or their lack of it. They're young, almost impossibly so, with the vast majority of the roster never having known what real free agency is. Of their top-six scorers in these playoffs, the oldest is Alex Killorn, the 25-year-old Harvard grad from Halifax who quietly leads Tampa's forwards in ice time. Story continues below advertisement They have a lot of those unlikely stories. On average, this team is 26 years old, with 13 of the 23 players who have dressed in this postseason born in 1990 or later. If the Lightning go on to win the Stanley Cup, they'd be the second youngest team to do so since the 1980s Oilers dynasty teams. They also embody what the best teams in the NHL have become: fast, skilled and dynamic. This group may have had 108 points this season, but the best is yet to come. As tends to be the case in the NHL these days, the man deserving of most of the credit sits up in the press box, grimacing and swearing his way through all these tense playoff games. Less than 10 years removed his last game as a player, and only five into his tenure in Tampa, Steve Yzerman – a young man by GM standards, having turned only 50 last week – has built a powerhouse. And he's done it in the image of all those great Detroit Red Wings teams he spent so much time winning with. That makes sense, given that was the only team Yzerman knew. When he retired in 2006, he stepped immediately into the Wings' front office, where he apprenticed for four years under Ken Holland, learning the off-ice side of the franchise his sweat and tears had helped build. Where you see those four years in the Lightning is obvious. Tampa has become – along with the Anaheim Ducks – incredibly adept at finding talent in improbable places, which was a necessity for Detroit given Holland and Co. never had high picks. Story continues below advertisement Story continues below advertisement An example: When no one was drafting Russian and Czech players, Yzerman loaded up, finding immense value in Nikita Kucherov, Ondrej Palat, Nikita Nesterov and Vladislav Namestnikov, all of whom are playing in this postseason. That was in the 2011 draft alone, with the Lightning picking 27th. But it hasn't been only about exploiting Europe. Tampa has also been downright fearless when it comes to focusing on skill over size, drafting more forwards under six feet tall than any other organization. That's apparent even on the current roster, with the average forward typified by the likes of 5-foot-9 Tyler Johnson. Even counting 6-foot-7 behemoth Brian Boyle, the Lightning's average forward in these playoffs is under six feet tall and 195 pounds. Without him, they drop almost an inch and five pounds. Overall, the team's philosophy could be summed as the Search for Datsyuks: late picked, supremely skilled, overlooked players. A whole team of them, if they can find them. In terms of style, the phrase that comes up in the organization, again and again, is another borrowed from Detroit and legendary coach Scotty Bowman, who preached playing a possession game above all else. That's something the Lightning excelled at during the regular season – finishing tied (with the Wings) for first in the East in even-strength shot-attempt share, at 54 per cent – but the playoffs have been a different animal. Story continues below advertisement Tampa has looked disjointed at times, getting outplayed in Game 7 against Detroit in Round 1 and then in several games against Montreal in Round 2. Somehow they've survived, relying on timely goals and big Ben Bishop in goal to get by, but being this ordinary won't be enough to beat the New York Rangers four times in the next six games, as is now required after dropping Game 1 on the weekend. "We just kept stubbing our toe all night," Lightning coach Jon Cooper said of the 2-1 loss. "We were just handing them tickets to the movie, and we were a turnstile and watching them go by. We can't do that. … "We have to possess the puck more. It's been a big part of the reason why we're here. If we're not going to do that, it's going to be a long night, short series." What it looks like more than anything is growing pains. This isn't the same Lightning team that breezed through the season; it's a group playing its age, with a more tentative game when the stakes are raised. If that proves fatal and they can't advance, they'll also have that in common with those Detroit teams, way back when. It took them time to become what they were, to amass enough talent and figure out how to win. Story continues below advertisement But Yzerman certainly seems to have another group on that path, in a new role and a new era. Follow me on Twitter: @mirtle |
For a long time, Ina Garten was a Hamptons shopkeeper who waited upon the wealthy. She has been, for a shorter time, a celebrity chef of some wealth. "Am I a billionaire? Of course not!" she told me recently over tea on the Upper East Side, and then she laughed. Throughout her thirty-seven-year career in food, Ina has remained remarkably unchanged in both concept and presentation, with her bangs 'n bob, and her cute, untucked, custom-made button-front shirts that are literally the only tops she wears. The only time I have seen her forehead is in a black-and-white picture from her wedding day. Her veil is pushed back and she is smiling, her husband Jeffrey is laughing and in uniform, and they are cutting what looks like a quite inedible three-tiered cake. But even as she has stood all these decades stirring and paring, laughing and cocktailing, her hair, nails, skin — all the exposed human parts — each has become more coddled and elegant and more content. Her hair has reached peak spectacularity, it shines with under-color and moves with glory; her manicure is impeccable; the skin of her face is hydrated and lush. She looks flush, in a way that she didn't when she started out marketing ideas of comfort and contentment and wealth. She laughs constantly. "There isn't a letter, there isn't a recipe, there's no photograph, there isn't a font, there isn't a color, there isn't a detail that I don't totally do myself" And while many might think of her career as being a person who appears on television, she is rather a cookbook writer, one who happens to appear on the Food Network to service the audience for her cookbooks. The show, Barefoot Contessa, takes up small bits of her life, maybe six weeks a year total in two chunks. "My business is cookbooks, and TV is really good for supporting that," Ina told me; to date, she has 10,600,000 of them in print. Her most recent, 2014's Make It Ahead: A Barefoot Contessa Cookbook, which is basically about how to not have to spend precious moments cooking during a romantic New Year's Eve in Paris, had a print run of 1.4 million. "Nine for nine, each book has sold more than the last book," Ina said. Her best cookbook, in my opinion, and it is her favorite as well, was her second; it is called Barefoot Contessa Parties! Ideas and Recipes for Easy Parties That Are Really Fun. Published in 2001, it has a print run of a mere 800,000 copies, a bit shy of the population of San Francisco. In terms of sales, "I mean it's — as my publisher says — it's not an abysmal failure," Ina said. "It's ever so slightly less than the other books." She topped the best-selling cookbooks of 2014 list and the best-selling cookbooks of 2012 list. In 2013, when she didn't even have a new book out, her 2012 book still made it into the year’s top five. There is something that Ina Garten knows about what we want, or who we want to be, or how we want to feel. "There isn't a letter, there isn't a recipe, there's no photograph, there isn't a font, there isn't a color, there isn't a detail that I don't totally do myself," Ina said, so that's how it's done. Every story about Ina Garten, née Rosenberg, is the same. It goes like this: One day, she espied Jeffrey Garten on the campus of Dartmouth. She was but fifteen! Five years later, she had left her family in Stamford, Connecticut, and she and Jeffrey were married and he was in the Army and they were in Fayetteville, North Carolina, in a house where she made the curtains. She didn't cook, but she had a subscription to Time-Life cookbooks, a gift from her mother-in-law. The years flew by and they went to D.C., where she worked for the Office of Management and Budget but loved to throw parties; he had some job or other in politics. They went to France for four months and lived on five dollars a day, and one day there she saw a French family eating at a long table outdoors and became possessed of this vision of glamour and taste. She became love-drunk with hauling bags home from the farmer's market and came back to America and learned to cook from Julia Child. She found in the New York Times, in March of 1978, an ad for a store for sale in West Hampton Beach, a place she had never been. It was 400 square feet and it was called Barefoot Contessa and it sold potato salad and things. She offered, she purchased, and then she learned how to do everyone's job. The store was wildly successful; on New Year's Day of 1985, she went to see a new 3000-square-foot space in East Hampton. The Food Network eventually came courting, and she said no and said no and then said yes. Suddenly there was a new house in East Hampton. She built a working barn in which to cook and sometimes film. She used to do all the gardening herself, but no longer does. Her story in this manner is miserably compressed. It is, in fact, an extremely long stretch of time from Ina’s purchase of the Barefoot Contessa store in 1978 to the largely self-funded production of her first cookbook in 1999. That’s twenty brutal customer service years of making coconut cupcakes and roast chickens for fussy Hamptonites. Ina’s life seems to move in long smooth cycles of one or two decades. Born in 1948, she married Jeffrey in 1968. Exactly ten years later, she got the shop. "I like a nice project that I can chew on. And so the store was that, and then after twenty years, it was time to do something else," she said. As a matter of fact, she sold the store in 1996, twenty years ago now. Does she work in twenty-year cycles? I asked. "I might, I might, yeah," Ina said. "We're getting close. I know, I was thinking about that. I haven't had that many twenty-year cycles yet, so stay tuned." Shopkeeper Ina, TV Ina, and cookbook Ina are and are not about domesticity. Ina-ness is about coziness, but it's not ever about the woman's place being the kitchen. It's less sexist, and definitely more sexy. Barefoot Contessa isn't about wealth in the way that Martha Stewart’s show was about wealth. The widespread mockery of Martha that suffused American comedy in the ‘90s came about because we believed that her extreme richness took her astray into the madness of perfectionism. The first Barefoot Contessa cookbook already has its iconography intact; the aesthetic that follows in the next eight books is just versioning. Opposite the title page, Ina is pictured barefoot, one big toe showing polish, and she is shucking corn, surrounded by a riot of summer green, in an ankle-length black skirt with a white shirt worn under a white shirt and then a white apron on top. She is on a bench, next to an extremely rustic woven willow basket. It's about loving being at home, particularly if your home has a couple acres of garden, and yet it's accessible. It's never about perfection, as it is with Martha, but it is about personal triumph. On the show, which has had twenty-three seasons over fourteen or so years, Ina uses the word "flavor" constantly. Flavor is the road to praise. "Lots of salt and pepper, make sure it has great flavor," she says while making a salad. Every Ina Garten recipe includes, at minimum, the appropriate amount of salt, pepper, and lemon. She was triumphant when science finally found out that a diet too low in salt may coincide with heart disease. And unlike Martha, she never says words like "truss" or "spatchcock," especially when she is trussing or spatchcocking. "I mean, I couldn't have imagined this starting out," Ina told me, "but I think the reason people use cookbooks is it gives them the tools to do something, to put something on the table and have everybody say, 'You made that yourself?'" That first cookbook has a foreword from Martha Stewart; Ina had a column in her magazine after the book did gangbusters. It reads straightforwardly as an endorsement — and yet, when you look at the actual words, they assemble themselves, as so much does in Martha’s world, into some kind of menace, an alpha act of undermining. Martha writes: "It took a while, but I finally understood what motivated Ina, realizing that here was a true kindred spirit with really similar but unique talents." Exactly how long did it take, Martha? "I think the reason people use cookbooks is it gives them the tools to put something on the table and have everybody say, ‘You made that yourself?’" Martha can't help herself. In a video segment describing Ina’s Barefoot Contessa store, Martha intones: "But this feast for the senses was created not by a gourmand, but by a desk-bound bureaucrat who wanted a change." Oh Martha! In another cut of the video—shot soon after the publication of Ina’s first cookbook, now available on Martha’s website with the bland headline "Advice from Ina Garten on Owning a Business"—Ina talks about how she had to get rid of the not-nice people who worked at the store. "I can always teach you how to slice smoked salmon," she says, "but I can't teach people how to have fun, and I can't teach them how to be happy." You can't teach Martha that either. Her company shot a few sad-sounding pilot episodes of Ina cooking at home; according to the Food Network history From Scratch, Martha had the tapes destroyed. "It's a good thing," Martha says. It's a good thing. It's a good thing. "Wasn't that easy!" Ina says. Wasn't that easy. Wasn't that easy? And unlike Martha, Ina has comfy taste; every champagne flute she's ever been spotted holding is mildly tacky, but her platters, flowers, plates, and dishtowels-as-napkins are always sturdy. In the end of the video segment on Martha’s website, Ina says that "a Japanese businessman" once appeared and offered to make her dreams come true. He would pay to spread Barefoot Contessa stores across the country, making it a national brand. She realized, she says, that this dream she'd long nurtured was in fact not her dream at all, and she really just wanted to build a house and garden and make cookbooks. She said no. Ina says no all the time, still. "Somebody asked me to license their fertilizer," Ina told me, and laughed. "Like, you want me to license your shit? Like, what? Why would I do that?" This year, Ina and Jeffrey went to France for the first weeks of May, as they do, and then Ina came home and spent the summer clearing the decks for the long and ridiculous process of creating her tenth cookbook. She has a deadline with her publisher at the end of the year. Ina Garten makes cookbooks by retreating into her tasteful barn, an Eileen-Fisher-store-gone-rustic of barns that she made for herself, and doing things to death. There was the season when she grilled chicken, the weeks when she roasted lamb. For years, she would then hand the recipe to her assistant, Barbara Libath, and watch her make the recipe by herself. "Pick your days and name your salary," Ina said to Barbara in 1999, desperately in need of an assistant, and Barbara had also worked for a lawyer and worked for an accountant, so not only does she work on recipes and organize book tours, and is the person who you call if you need Ina, but she also oversees the accounting and helps with legal work. Barbara is useless in only one regard: now, after so long, she knows Ina so well that she doesn't do anything unexpected when confronted with a recipe. This problem is solved by a youngster named Lidey Heuck, a 2013 Bowdoin graduate who started working for Ina right after graduation, after having written Ina a letter delivered by means of a classmate's father who is Ina's attorney, because apparently she inhabits some marvelous Victorian novel. Lidey lives in a cute cottage in the Hamptons now, and can take one of Ina’s recipes and cook through it and make the missteps that you or I would make. "Like yesterday," Ina said, "she made a fresh fig jam, and put all the stuff in the pot and she thought, 'How is this going to happen?' And I thought, 'Oh, I can totally understand why it looks like it's not going to happen, but it will.' So I just wrote into the recipe, 'Don't worry! It's going to work!'" Ina Garten makes cookbooks by retreating into her tasteful barn, and doing things to death Recently, also, Ina followed a friend to the grocery store just to see how people shop. Lidey was hired to do Ina’s social media, and she has time to make fresh fig jam because doing social media for Ina means something like saying, "Now might be time for an Instagram." At first Lidey had gone to her and said: What if I set up a fake Instagram account for you and you can see what works for you and what doesn't? Ina was like, nope. "I post every single thing," Ina said. "I post it. I write it. I check it with her, and then it goes." This strategy is working well. Facebook came to Ina not long ago, and said, hey, we've been watching, and you're one of the examples we use of a brand being really authentic with an audience, really connecting. She was not surprised. "Well, it is authentic because it actually is me that does it," Ina told me. When commenters get out of line, regulars among her half a million Instagram followers and million Facebook followers step in to police the newbies. Not long ago she visited Instagram’s headquarters, and Instagrammed from Instagram. "I think people get it," she said. "That it's not like some office over there that's, you know, in L.A., doing my Facebook account, but it's actually me doing it, writing it, photographing it." There isn't a detail that I don't totally do myself. There was one component of Ina's brand mélange that was adopted but then discarded: ideas of mothering and motherhood. "Very quickly I realized that coming into a food store was really like coming home to mom," she told Martha in that video. "You wanted to be made to feel really comfortable, you wanted to be welcomed." The idea crops up as well in the preface to the first cookbook, in an explanation of Barefoot Contessa-ism: "It’s about Mom." But even already there is a caveat: "It's more of an emotional picture of a mother who was always there," Ina writes. And when a friend was working too hard, she writes, she had him over and made him ice cream and cookies: "Isn't that what we wanted our mothers to do?" We did want that, and we did not get it. After the first book, "mother" is mostly stricken from Ina’s rotation of motifs. Mom is too fraught. Instead, Ina is a stalwart defender of being welcoming. She believes a house should smell good. "When somebody comes home and everything's there and the kitchen smells like sugar apple pie," Ina said to me, "you know, it's nice. It's really nice, and the pillows are fluffed, and I love it." After the first book, whenever motherhood is introduced, it's not warmly. While making fresh lemonade in one episode of the show, Ina says that this is "not that stuff your mother used to bring home from the grocery store." This is the opposite of how historically we speak of both mothers and of the lemonade of yore. Food in Ina's childhood home was largely a practical event. "She wasn't the warmest, funniest person around," Ina said of her mother. Ina has nothing, she has said, in her house from her childhood. Of her marriage day, she has said, "That's when my life began." Never, to my knowledge, in the cookbooks or shows, is there even a hint of an idea of a pet or a child in their home. Ina and Jeffrey are two against the world. In an episode of Barefoot Contessa from 2007, Ina makes the somewhat gnomey Jeffrey a lovely mild breakfast of asparagus and eggs, because he is going away on a business trip. He has spent the last thirty years on a business trip. She sees him to the door of their East Hampton home and kisses him goodbye—very earnestly, she holds his face—and then he walks out the door, and the next shot is of a big and mostly full bottle of Jose Cuervo in the pantry. "Okay, the coast is clear, I'm going to make a big pitcher of pineapple margaritas!" Ina says to the camera. Her bridge-playing boys are coming over, and they are not very good at bridge, which is obvious since there's one too many of them, but that's not the point. "You know it's good when you can't taste the alcohol," one of her gays says. She brings out dessert, it's a chocolate-orange fondue with pretzel sticks and donuts for dipping. This is hilarious and a little disgusting and she knows it. As always, the naughtiness is essentially PG, and the luxury level is four out of five stars. It's aspirational and neighborly at once, and it's sweet. It works. Maybe you want to be Ina's gal pal, her spouse, or even her assistant. But you'd never think of her as anyone's mommy. Jeffrey always comes home from his business trips, and they are quite obviously one of those couples who cannot stop sneaking off to have sex. He will never call her "mother" in that horrible way that 1970s grandparents do. Jeffrey appears in the show as comic relief, a bumbling Jew doing big shtick. Ina likes to use the hashtag #drunkhubby to describe him on Instagram. In the season eight premiere, they've rented a house in Napa, so that, ostensibly, Ina can get away and Jeffrey can write a book. There is a whole subplot in one episode that amounts to absolutely nothing, in which Jeffrey, having flown in for Friday night chicken dinner, is filmed driving through the Napa roads. "I hope I can find the rental house," he says, in an example of how people say everyday, totally acceptable things which then come off on the show — or, to be fair, on all such shows — as flat and deranged and even a little Lynchian. He really hopes he can find that rental house! This is Jeffrey Garten, of New York City, formerly of the 82nd Airborne Division, having served in Vietnam despite not being in favor of the war, and previously of Phillips Academy, where he graduated in the same class as George W. Bush and Dick Wolf, the creator of "Law and Order." Later, of Dartmouth, of Johns Hopkins, a deputy director of policy planning on Henry Kissinger's staff, a staffer in the Carter White House, and then in the State Department, which he left for Lehman Brothers, where he started as a vice president and ended up a managing director in a decade. For about three years in the 80s, he headed up Lehman's investment banking in Asia. After that he bounced around, started a little bank, and then ended up solicited into the Clinton White House, with Ina sitting behind him at his somewhat contentious confirmation hearing. "I hope I can find the rental house," he says, in an example of how people say everyday, totally acceptable things which then come off on the show as a little Lynchian Just two years later, he left that post for two successive five-year terms as the dean of the Yale School of Management where, according to a BusinessWeek reporter quoted in the Yale alumni magazine, he brought his publicist from D.C. with him to New Haven. Jeffrey hasn't been dean for a decade. He still teaches but also is the chairman of Garten Rothkopf, one of those quiet consultancies you don't hear much about. Dave Rothkopf is the president of the consultancy; Rothkopf is also the CEO and Editor of the FP Group, which publishes Foreign Policy, and for a time he reported to Jeffrey, back in the Clinton years. Antoine van Agtmael, credited with actually inventing the phrase "emerging markets," is a senior advisor for them; he is also an NPR Foundation trustee. Jeffrey has been busy! He has served on the board of used car retailer CarMax since 2002, and in that time the stock has climbed from about 11 to the mid-60s. He was appointed to the board of Aetna in January 2000, when Aetna's stock was trading at a high of 7.73. It now trades around 117. He was appointed to the board of the Canadian mining company Alcan in 2007, the year Alcan was purchased by the monster international conglomerate Rio Tinto, which runs uranium operations in Namibia, diamonds in Madhya Pradesh, bauxite in Canada, aluminium smelting in Iceland. He was on the board of Calpine, one of the biggest independent electricity generators in the U.S., from 1997 to 2005. He is on the board of Miller Buckfire, formerly a boutique investment bank, now a division of the hungry Stifel corporation, notable for its handling of Detroit's bankruptcy. Miller Buckfire was eligible for a $28 million fee for its role in Detroit's dismantling, but only walked with $23 million. That's almost the exact amount of the Detroit Water and Sewerage Department's deficit, a deficit the department likes to use as an excuse to turn off water to residents who can't afford to pay for it. "A vision without execution is an hallucination," Jeffrey wrote in his book The Mind of the CEO, published in 2001. It is dedicated to Ina, just as most of her books are dedicated to him. "I just — I'm just crazy about him," Ina said, and laughed. Still, I asked? "Still. Totally still!" she said. "Probably even more so." Jeffrey Garten is not a bumbling idiot. He finds the house in Napa without difficulty. After all, any reasonably close reading of his resume suggests that he certainly either was, or equally likely was not, working for the CIA in Asia and Latin America for decades. In the early years in particular of Barefoot Contessa, many perfectly normal encounters are rendered incredibly awkward by the fact that these are real people suddenly thrust before a camera. Personages in general tend to appear on the show with extraneous introductions or no introductions at all. "My friend Anna" who comes over one day for a Parisian lunch is an unheralded Anna Pump, long-time proprietor of incredible Hamptons food shop Loaves and Fishes. "I wanted to do a book party for my friend Edwina von Gal," Ina says at the top of season three, episode eight, "but I really didn't want it to cost a fortune." The landscape designer and fourth wife of deceased ad mogul Jay Chiat had written a book about flower arranging, an art she had once taught to young people at Rikers Island. There is an elaborate setup for a dog's birthday party in season seven: "I love entertaining on the beach, so when my friends Joey and Maureen told me it was their dog Theo's birthday, I thought, what a great excuse for a party!" Which is hilarious, but not only do we never find out who these people are, though it seems they may be stoic East End lesbians, we also barely get a glimpse of Theo, who is racing about the freezing beach. "I've invited some friends for trick-or-treat dinner, and Miguel is setting the table!" Ina exclaims by way of introduction in season nine. The same season, there's the more reasonable: "My friend T.R. has just bought an old fishing shack on the water, and he's invited me for dinner on the dock." (The house is cute, but don't worry, he gets a bigger one.) Also in season nine, there is the rare straightforward introduction: "Frank Newbold and I are not only best friends but we're also business partners." With Frank, Ina launched a line of frozen dinners and also a line of dry goods, including Barefoot Contessa Pantry Contessa Blend Regular Coffee and Barefoot Contessa Pantry Outrageous Brownie Mix. All of these products have since been disappeared. "I don't have to negotiate with anybody. If I decide to do something, I go do it," Ina told me. This endless parade of friends and visitors only highlights her strange and extreme loyalty. Barbara has been with her in the kitchen since 1999; her marriage to Jeffrey is almost half a century long. She has been with her agent Esther Newberg at ICM since ages. Ina has never changed cookbook publishers; in fourteen years, she also has not changed producers of the show. But now, at last, the cast seems to have gotten somewhat juiced. Instead of local florists and ol' T.R. (her former shopboy turned model), the gays include the likes of Neil Patrick Harris. Rob Marshall comes over with his lover and dog for breakfast and they all end up cackling over a giant cocktail shaker! The Hamptons too have grown and prospered since Ina arrived in 1978, but through the eyes of a townie, which she is, it's less visible, and besides, the crush of the summer season is just fifteen weeks brief. "I still see it the way I saw it then, which is that it's farm, farmlands, it's fishing," Ina said. "It's weekend houses, it's farm stands." It's all that and $500,000 golf club memberships, too. This feels distinctly like the end of something, or like a beginning Back in April, Ina shot an episode with Jennifer Garner. Some strange mutual fan interaction with Taylor Swift was well-documented as well. This feels distinctly like the end of something, or like a beginning. While we were on the Upper East Side together, by her Manhattan apartment, Ina was stopped by a wealthy and rather replicant-looking woman who wanted to profess her love.You probably don't get that in Paris, I said, meaning that Parisians are too cool to make a fuss. "I do," Ina said. You do? I said. "Well, you know, the show is in like forty countries," Ina said. Back when she started at the Food Network, she thought all the shows were just men in big toques making mousse. But the network, in a stroke of brilliance, was transitioning the talent to home cooks, making ratings on the back of Rachael Ray and hungry for more—one of those decisions that seems obvious in retrospect but was likely much debated at the time. Those glory days may be ending now, but Ina is bigger than the show, A-list Hollywood guests or no. She's got Facebook now. How much longer will she need TV? Every shoot still makes her nervous anyway. She's the kind of person who wakes up buzzing. She does yoga twice a week. She likes to walk down to the beach, forty-five minutes of head-clearing. Her health is good. Saying no brings peace. Being free from frozen packs of Penne Pasta with Five Cheeses and Tequila Lime Chicken that bear her face is a sign of her focus and brilliance. She is ready to crush this next cookbook. "I'm actually more interested in writing cookbooks now than I was when I started," Ina said. "I think I was really nervous about it then. But I could just do this forever — and hopefully I can, until they drag me out by my feet." Out in her barn, where the cookbooks are made, she is entirely herself. There, there is always the spark of the young woman using her bad French to fill up a bag at a farmer's market, having her first taste of coq au vin, for the first time seeing people eat food that meant something. It's like when she saw Jeffrey, and ran towards a life they could make completely for themselves. With him at her side, she saw food for the very first time, and has spent her life ever since taking it apart to see what makes us tick. Choire Sicha is a cofounder of The Awl. Photographer: Caroline Whiting Designer: Tyson Whiting Editor: Helen Rosner |
Yahoo Japan on Tuesday announced that is has signed a deal to use Google for its search engine and search ad delivery system. Yahoo Japan will continue to manage its own search page and search service. Yahoo Japan will also continue to run its advertising marketplace independent of Google. Microsoft condemned the deal and said it would result in Google gaining nearly complete control over search and search advertising in Japan through contract, not organic growth. Yahoo Japan denied this. "Yahoo Japan and Google will continue to compete with each other in all service areas including their advertising and search services," the company said in a statement. Yahoo Japan said the value of its search service "will stay at a high level" if it uses Google's services. Improved search will also increase the value of other Yahoo Japan services, the company said. Yahoo Japan and Google have not yet determined a timeline for when the deal will be put into place. Yahoo Japan is jointly owned by Yahoo and Softbank. Yahoo Japan said the Google deal "will have no change" on other business areas, "including Yahoo's equity ownership in Yahoo Japan." The announcement comes one year after Yahoo and Microsoft announced a 10-year search deal under which Microsoft will power Yahoo's search site while Yahoo will manage the sales force for both companies' premium search advertisers. Referencing the Yahoo-Microsoft deal, Yahoo Japan said it examined several search engines and ad platform technologies, but ultimately decided that "Google has developed what we believe is the best-performing search engine and ads platform technology for the Japanese language environment." Microsoft made an unsolicited bid for Yahoo in February 2008, but after much back and forth, a bid for Yahoo's search business, and a proxy bid for Yahoo by billionaire investor Carl Icahn, a combined Microsoft-Yahoo never came to fruition. Google later announced a non-exclusive agreement with Yahoo that would have allowed the Internet company access to Google's AdSense for search and content advertising programs in the U.S. and Canada. Regulatory scrutiny, however, later prompted the companies to scrap the deal. Dave Heiner, vice president and deputy general counsel at Microsoft, said Tuesday that the Yahoo Japan-Google deal is "even worse" than the failed Google-Yahoo 2008 deal. "Today Google accounts for about 51 percent of paid search advertising in Japan. Yahoo Japan accounts for 47 percent. Their combined share of natural search results is almost as high," Heiner wrote in a blog post. "If Google is permitted to proceed with its plan, it would gain nearly complete control over search and search advertising in Japan through contract, not organic growth. Google alone would decide what consumers in Japan will find, or not find, on the Web. And Google will obtain massive amounts of data regarding the search history and Web sites visited by every consumer, business and government agency that conducts Web searches." Heiner said the attempted Google-Yahoo match-up "was not nearly so far-reaching." "Less than two years later Google has entered into a deal that would turn its only major competitor in Japan into a collaborator, rather than a competitor, across natural search results and advertising," Heiner concluded. "In doing so, Google has engineered a transaction that, once again, would deprive its search rivals of needed search query scale." Google said its deal with Yahoo Japan is different from its proposed deal with Yahoo in 2008. "Google will only be licensing its advertising platform services to [Yahoo Japan], and will not be providing its ads to appear on YJC," Google said in a statement. "YJC will continue to manage their own advertising system and advertiser relationships, and both companies' advertisers and advertising data will remain entirely separate." Yahoo Japan will be able to customize how its users see Google's search services, and "users should continue to expect very different experiences" on Yahoo Japan than they might see on Google. The company insisted the deal is "commonplace in the business world, and it doesn't foreclose any robust competition." The Japan Fair Trade Commission has no objection to the deal, Google said. "Competition between Google and YJC, as well as others in the online advertising market, will remain vigorous because their advertising operations will stay independent of one another, and there is competition with other online advertising service providers," the company concluded. Editor's Note: This story was updated Wednesday with comment from Google. |
If ever there was a likely spot for an outbreak of the deadly Ebola virus , New Kru Town in Liberia is it. A sprawling slum of the country's war-ravaged capital, Monrovia, it is home to 50,000 people, and has next to no functioning lavatories, sinks or bathrooms. Sewage runs openly through its maze of corrugated shacks, and in Liberia's wet season – at its height right now – tropical torrents turn it into one vast, warm, moist, breeding pool for germs. It hardly feels surprising then, in the wake of several locals dying from Ebola, to see health teams daubing blue crosses on a number of shacks around town. These, however, are not to identify those who have caught the disease, but to mark the relatively few New Kru Towners who have been visited by the teams and accepted their advice on how to avoid getting it. So far, only around 500 houses have been marked – and with health workers themselves accused of spreading the disease, some parts of New Kru Town remain decidedly hostile. "This is a very poor neighbourhood where sanitation is lacking and people are not well educated in the principles of hygiene," said Tamba Bundor, leader of a team of hardy volunteers from local health charity Community Development Services, a Unicef partner, as he drove his car through wet, sandy backlanes. "It is where the first victims of Ebola died in Monrovia, and most people who have been affected became so because they did not adhere to the messages of prevention." Nearly 1,000 people have now died of Ebola across west Africa. While the outbreak started in remote forested inland areas – possibly via fruit bats – New Kru Town is an example of the ease and unpredictability with which it has spread to urban capitals along the coastline, catching health officials off-guard. When some initial cases first appeared in Liberia's northern Lofa County back in March, health officials initially thought they had it under control. But in June, a resident of a district of New Kru Town known as Carpet Street died, as did several others. According to Dr Bernice Dahn, Liberia's chief medical officer, three of the victims passed away while they were being sheltered in a local church – a sign of how many some people believe the disease is a curse that can be cured by prayer or witchcraft. "We must stop keeping people suspected of Ebola in our churches on ground that we can heal them," she warned at the time. "The churches are not hospitals." Liberian hospitals, however, do not always inspire the kind of faith that people have in Liberian churches. A fortnight ago, one the main local health facilities, Redemption Hospital, was stoned by a mob after a woman died in there from a suspected Ebola case, following nationwide rumours that health workers were themselves passing on the disease. Today, the squat, single storey building offers redemption no more, having been shut down temporarily amid fears from staff for their own safety. Safety is a concern too for Mr Bundor and his colleagues, who were attacked as they tried to visit the house of the bereaved family on Carpet Street. The deceased's relatives were insisting that their loved one had died as a result of a family curse – a cause of death that, in New Kru Town anyway, carries less social stigma than dying of an infectious disease like Ebola. "The family of the victim were angry, saying it was a curse, not Ebola," said Anthony Worpor, another of Mr Bundor's health team, who was clad in a teeshirt that said 'save lives, wash your hands before you eat'. "A crowd gathered, and some accused us health workers of spreading the disease ourselves. They even began touching a local journalist we had brought with us, saying: 'if you think it is us spreading it, then here you are, we will infect you'." New Kru Town was originally named after the Kru, a powerful ethnic group who live in both Liberia's interior and coastal fishing communities. They were traditionally known for a certain independence of mind, and European slave traders used to complain that they were particularly resistant to capture, to the point where their price as slaves was considerably lower. They proved equally hostile to the freed American slaves who founded Liberia in the 19th century, when the latter tried to muscle in on their trading empires. Today, New Kru Town is home to a wider mix of ethnicities, but even so, suspicion of outside messages persists. While Mr Bundor's education programme has already enjoyed some success, he estimates that 40 per cent of New Kru Town's residents are still "in denial" about Ebola's risks, and the necessary health measures to avoid it. Indeed, some residents see to treat Mr Tanga rather like a Christian door-to-door preacher, listening to politely to his warnings but not heeding them. For example, at Alan's Bar, a dark, dinghy shebeen, a poster warning of the dangers of Ebola already hung on the front door. Yet official health advice is to avoid bars and other public gathering places altogether right now, a message that the groups of drinkers inside, listening to blaring African disco music, have chosen to ignore. The owner of the bar, Alan Tokba, told The Telegraph that "no dancing was allowed" inside, and that visitors were being asked to wash their hands as they went in, but Mr Bundor admitted that it was "not satisfactory". Nor was he entirely happy with the efforts of mother-of-three, Tina Teeh, 26. Her house already bore the blue cross of one of New Kru Town's hygiene-converts, but the bucket of chlorinated water she had for her children to wash their hands in did not have a separate container to drip the fluid onto their hands first. "I can't afford it," she told the disapproving Mr Bundor. "But what if you end up ill?" he asked her. "Then you will have to afford hospital fees." Another mother who claimed to have seen the light was Julie Life, 30, who admitted having been sceptical that Ebola even existed Mr Bundor first visited her home a few days ago. Then again, she said her main reason for changing her mind was in watching a deadly virus at work in the Tom Cruise film Mission Impossible II. As Mr Bundor and his colleagues trudged off to root out New Kru Town's remaining Ebola "deniers", it seemed like an apt description of their task. British doctor confident he can stay safe while treating Ebola victims |
Sulley Muntari scored a second-half equaliser for AC Milan as Roma twice blew the lead at the San Siro to drop points in the Serie A title chase. Roma went ahead when Kevin Strootman picked out Mattia Destro before Milan's Christian Zapata bundled home for 1-1. The visitors restored the lead through Strootman's penalty after substitute keeper Gabriel - on for the injured Christian Abbiati - fouled Gervinho. But Muntari drilled in low from 10 yards following Mario Balotelli's pass. Roma's defence finally wobbles The last time Roma conceded more than one goal in a Serie A fixture was a 2-0 defeat away to Palermo on 30 March. Both sides had chances to take all three points in a dramatic finish, with Balotelli spurning the best opportunity when he fired wide in stoppage time. The stalemate means Rudi Garcia's Roma are still unbeaten in 16 Serie A games this season, but they have drawn five of the last six and are now five points behind leaders Juventus. The Giallorossi dominated for large parts but desperately need to rediscover a ruthless streak against Catania next Sunday - their last match before the winter break. AC Milan, Italy's last survivors in the Champions League, climb to 10th in the table. But Massimiliano Allegri's side have won only four times in 16 attempts in the league and now play the Milan derby against Inter on Sunday. Allegri will be without captain Riccardo Montolivo, who is suspended after picking up his fifth booking of the season against Roma. |
Plays such as Boy, Re:Home and Yen serve up downtrodden lives for wealthy audiences – and can verge on cultural tourism. But presented carefully, they’re essential reminders of the brutal inequality in modern life Boy review – jobcentres and loneliness in tale of a lost generation Read more Coming out of Leo Butler’s big, compassionate and conscience-pricking Boy at the Almeida this week, I overheard somebody speculating on whether it qualified as “poverty porn”. It’s not the first time recently that I’ve heard people using that deeply unpleasant phrase in relation to theatre shows. A producer described Yen at the Royal Court as such to me, and both Whatonstage’s Matt Trueman and The Times’s Ann Treneman used the phrase in their reviews of the same play. In the Financial Times, Ian Shuttleworth voiced his uneasiness about seeing Yen in prosperous Chelsea, saying: “This is the second time in barely six months that the Upstairs space has told us, however skilfully, that man hands on misery to man, especially in the poorer classes. It is not a helpful tendency.” I understand that it can be troubling to sit in an expensive theatre seat – that might cost close to what some people live on for an entire week – and watch actors portray the less fortunate. I felt something similar watching Re:Home at the ultra-trendy Yard theatre in Hackney Wick, which, although geographically close, felt a world away from the people of the Beaumont estate in Leyton, whose words were being used in the verbatim-style performance. What, I wondered, would they make of seeing themselves portrayed on stage in this way? But does that mean that the Yard should put on plays only about twentysomething hipsters, or that theatre staged in more affluent boroughs should reflect only the angst of the middle classes? Dominic Cooke’s late-noughties stint at the Royal Court certainly took a detour in that direction, with plays such as That Face. Facebook Twitter Pinterest Annes Elwy and Jake Davies in Yen at the Royal Court. Photograph: Richard Davenport However, context always plays a part, and a play will read quite differently depending on where it is staged. I felt no discomfort at the Yard watching Alexander Zeldin’s Beyond Caring, about those surviving on zero-hours contracts – but I did watching Re:Home at the same venue. Perhaps when Beyond Caring played the NT Temporary Space it read differently again. But I suspect discomfort arises from other things too: tone, texture, directorial decisions and, in the case of a verbatim piece, issues over ownership of the material and the way real people’s words have been used and shaped. Beyond Caring and Boy are both based on intense research, but they are fictionalised and staged in such a way that the reality they depict becomes heightened. In any case, there’s a vast difference between offering some kind of exotic cultural safari into poverty or disenfranchisement, and reminding us that poverty is all around. Even if that makes us feel uneasy and uncomfortable – because those are not the stories that regularly get told on stage. Facebook Twitter Pinterest Life on zero hours ... Beyond Caring. Boy is by no means an easy watch. But one of the many brilliant things about the play – from Butler’s script to Sacha Wares’ staging to the superb performances – is that it implicates all who watch it. It makes us recognise our blindness and how we only see the version of the world we want to see. Boy serves up what we refuse to see in everyday life: all the lost boys and girls who we pass every day in the street without really taking any notice. Its protagonist Liam is the mumbling boy at the bus stop we try to ignore; he’s the kid running the tube gates who we tut, the teenager we assume is plugged into everything but who is in fact dropping beyond view in front of our very eyes. What Boy does is to create empathy and give us some understanding of what it feels like to be Liam, adrift in a bustling city without any of the safety nets of articulacy, education, love, friendship and money that most of us take for granted. That’s not poverty porn, that’s a wake-up call we can’t ignore. |
Fall of the Rebellion Darian Hale stood a step behind his father at the District Two train station. Tonight was the final meeting between the thirteen District leaders before the final strike. Tonight would mark the beginning of the end; the end of the Capitol reign and the end of President Jonah Cross. Four years the Districts had been in rebellion and it seemed like the struggle would never end. But soon, Darian knew, the fight would be over. A new era would arise with new leaders. The train came quickly and twelve men and women exited, standing in a straight line facing Gregory Hale. They all saluted, hints and sparks of smiles on each of their faces. Tonight was a night of celebration. The last off the train was a young blonde woman. One Darian knew quite well. She looked around and then spotted him. A smile breaking on her usually stern face, she ran to him and threw her arms around him. Kelsa Foley had accompanied her father, as usual and Darian wasn't the least bit upset about it. "It's been too long," she whispered in his ear, loosening his grip a slight bit. "Only a month," he replied with a smile, wrapping his arms around her as well, "So not that long…" The group followed his father towards the town hall which was already set up for them all with blueprints of the Capitol. The main route of the attack was drawn out in a multitude of colors, each representing each District. Kelsa and Darian were not invited to the official meeting, but that didn't stop them from finding a way into it anyways. It was the roof of the town hall this time. Kelsa scaled the drainpipe easily and Darian followed with a little more struggle. She let out a small giggle and then offered him a hand to pull him up over the edge. Being from District Seven she was a lot more accustomed to climbing things since she spent most of her time in trees. Kelsa quietly opened a top window which was the perfect avenue for them to sit in on the meeting. Staying silent, they sat and listened to what came from below. Not even five minutes into the meeting the rebel leaders were all arguing. There were boisterous shouts and a few undermining insults thrown out; one which Darian had to put his hand over Kelsa's mouth to keep her from laughing. Her father was always quick with the slights. Finally, the calm voice of a woman from Six brought them all back from their heads (or asses more like) and back on track. It was decided that a group would go by train and multiple groups would go by foot. The takeover of the Capitol would be top stealth. They would never know the rebels were coming… The meeting was longer than anything Darian or Kelsa had ever suffered through. Kelsa was prepared and brought out a deck of cards which kept them occupied until the meeting came to an end. All the preparations were set. In two days time, the attack would commence. Before starting back down the drainpipe, Kelsa laid back and stared up at the midnight sky. "I can't believe it will finally be over," she said softly. Darian agreed with a nod. "It's been too long though. In four years we have done amazing things. We deserve this." It was true. In four years they had captured back control of the train systems, telegram and telephone systems, most of the food and agriculture. In four years the Districts had been mostly liberated from the tyranny of the Capitol. "We do," she said, almost sadly, "You need to come visit me all the time in District Seven… if it will even be called that." He raised an eyebrow. "What do you mean?" She sighed and then looked over at him, "I mean that I won't have an excuse to come and visit you, and you won't have an excuse to come and visit me. We need to keep in touch." "I know that, I meant with the name thing." She rolled over on her stomach, her eyes becoming lit with excitement, "I had this idea that all the Districts would rename themselves. Numbers are so boring, and since we would no longer be part of the Capitol…" He smiled at the idea. Kelsa was a cool girl. "I get it… what would you name District Seven?" She thought for a moment and then looked at him, "Norlyn." He let out a quick laugh and tried to cover it with a cough, "Norlyn? Why Norlyn?" "Well we are the Northern most District, and I think it's pretty." She raised her hands as if she were reaching for the stars above them. "Norlyn," he repeated, "It's growing on me." "Of course it is, I came up with it." She sat up and turned to him, "And what would you choose for District Two?" He shook his head, unable to come up with something off the top of his head. "No idea. Let's hope that doesn't become my duty when this whole thing is over." "Strong Valley," she said, "That's what I would name it." "Yeah? Why Strong Valley?" He didn't hate the name, and he really couldn't think of anything better. "Because," she started, moving his chin towards the further towering mountains that loomed in the west, "You have always been this close to the Capitol. You are the strong valley that had held up against the Capitol even though you two are neighbors." He didn't know exactly where in those beasts of mountains the Capitol sat, but he knew it was there, perfectly protected and ignorant to what was coming for them. "Strong Valley… it's perfect." "Kelsa!" A stern voice called from below. Kelsa collected her cards, placed them in her pocket and then flew down the drainpipe. She looked up to him, "Soon we will be free, Darian." He held up a hand, a goodbye of sorts they had discovered when they first met. "I'll come to Norlyn. First thing I'll do when this all blows over." She smiled at him and held up her own hand before disappearing into the darkness and down the street towards the train. Three weeks passed and Darian heard nothing from his father, or any of the rebels for that matter. There was just silence. He had learned earlier that usually silence was never a good thing. So had his mother, who had retreated to constant cleaning to ease her nerves. He had faith in his father but it was unbelievably hard to hold it when there continued to be no change… no change at all. Three weeks ago was insanely different than this day. Three weeks ago, the buzz of excitement shot through the crowd faster than it took a match to light. Groups of people stood out in front of town hall biding their loved ones goodbye as the rebels loaded up the trains and headed for the Capitol. Now there was just silence. A sort of defeat wafted through the air. But they hadn't been defeated. They had been winning, people were just too easily discouraged. Sacking a city couldn't happen overnight. Darian never remembered hearing the squeal of the trains, but somehow, they came. And what they brought was so devastating, he could never have been prepared for it. Their door was kicked down and a gun pointed in both of their faces. "Hands up!" A man in a complete white suit shouted. Capitol Soldiers. Before giving either Darian or his mother a chance to react, the soldier fired, smashing out the windows of their family home. "Move!" They both fell to the ground, Darian remember looking over to his mother to see if she was alright. After being ushered back up, another soldier came in with a different gun, one Darian had never seen before. He took his mom's hand and led her from their home, making sure they weren't separated. The sight outside was one he could never erase from his mind. A large video screen had been set up in front of the town hall building, Capitol Soldiers were every few feet either pointing a gun at someone, or ordering more people out of their homes. Darian was shoved forward by the soldier behind him. Children were screaming and crying, people were being forced to small quarters, keep their heads down. Being herded like cattle, the masses of District Two were brought to the town square and forced on their knees, bowing before the large projection screen that now displayed the Capitol insignia. "Put your hands on your head! Hands on your head!" The shouts rang throughout the crowd, coming from the soldiers in white. His mother's shaking hands moved to her head and Darian followed her. He wouldn't be the reason someone was shot and killed. Darian did a quick calculation and saw that at least fifty soldiers surrounded them, their new guns pointed towards the crowd ready to fire at the smallest provocation. The screen flickered and showed the new image of President Cross. Darian's stomach sank, finally, as he registered what had happened. They had attacked the Capitol and the Capitol was attacking back. "Citizens of Panem." The speakers rang clearly throughout all of District Two and Darian couldn't help but shiver. There was nothing forgiving in his voice. "While you were sending your forces to your precious Capitol, we were sending ours out to you." The screen flashed to show multiple planes and helicopters flying across the sky and then went back to President Cross. "Rebellion will not be tolerated. It is time your Capitol stepped in and ended this once and for all." The screen flashed back to the aerial view, and Darian saw the landscape of District Thirteen. His heart pounded as he watched the scene unfold in front of him. The picture stayed the same and the citizens of Panem watched the Capitol planes approach District Thirteen as the President spoke once again. "We will do whatever is necessary to reunite the Districts of Panem under the Capitol. Consider the Rebellion done and over." The picture was perfectly clear as the first bomb dropped. The fall was too long and Darian wanted to look away but was glued to the screen. It hit the ground with a fury of a million gods all channeled into one spot. The explosion of the first bomb ripped through the rebellion as if it were a piece of paper. Bomb after bomb tore District Thirteen to pieces. Numbness slowly took over Darian as he watched the destruction and the pure evil of the Capitol. On his knees, bowing to the man he now despised most in this world, Darian watched as the last bomb was dropped. It was basically unnecessary as what used to be District Thirteen was now a wasteland of ash. The last thing he saw before the screen went black was a picture of their Town Hall building in ruins. Four years it took them to get where they were and the Capitol shut them down in fifteen minutes. The Rebellion had failed. |
Unspoken rules are behavioral constraints imposed in organizations or societies that are not voiced or written down. They usually exist in unspoken and unwritten format because they form a part of the logical argument or course of action implied by tacit assumptions. Examples involving unspoken rules include unwritten and unofficial organizational hierarchies, organizational culture, and acceptable behavioral norms governing interactions between organizational members. For example, the captain of a ship is always expected to be the last to evacuate it in a disaster. Or, as Vince Waldron wrote, "A pet, once named, instantly becomes an inseparable member of the family."[1] Employment and discrimination [ edit ] In the workplace, some unspoken rules can have a significant impact on one’s job satisfaction, advancement opportunities, and career trajectory. In sports, Scottish football club, Rangers until 1989 had an unwritten rule of not signing any player who was openly Catholic.[2] Yorkshire County Cricket Club also historically had an unwritten rule that cricketers could only play for them if they were born within the historical county boundaries of Yorkshire.[3] See also [ edit ] |
Mermaids and Bears, oh my! Last week, Disney World quietly unveiled two quiet new changes in the Magic Kingdom, The Country Bear Jamboree reopened after a several-week refurbishment, and Pirates of the Caribbean debuted a new effect after a one-night changeover. I look at both changes here, and express a few reservations about one of them in particular. Mermaids and Bears, oh my! By the way, this all took place amid the glitz and glitter of the Storybook Circus and New Fantasyland previews (which have gone dark again now that official “preview slots” have arrived for Cast Members, DVC, D23, and annual passholders. Look for the land to stay shut to the public until the official opening on December 6). Tales of Tails Let’s start at Pirates, where they have added an element long rumored online to be coming—mermaids. Specifically, there is now a disturbance in the water on either side of the boat right after the mist waterfall near the beginning of the ride. We see a bed of tiny bubbles (it stays turned on), and every few moments, a projection of a mermaid swimming underwater is shined on it from above. It looks more realistic than perhaps you’re thinking. We also saw a physical effect in the form of a device flipping water around at just the right moment, as if the mermaid’s tail/fluke had kicked up water. On the beach around the corner, a new skeleton has shown up. Next to the high-profile standing skeleton (the one with a seagull in its head) is a boat, and on the boat is a mermaid skeleton, as clearly identified by the strange bone structure. What’s impossible to photograph, though, is the altered mood of this attraction. Until last week, there was music in the first scene, courtesy of the wistful, mournful “Yo Ho” as if sung by the girl version of Keira Knightley’s character. On the mist waterfall would then alternate images of Blackbeard and Davy Jones. Gone is Davy Jones – now it’s just Blackbeard who shows up each time on the mist screen – and the music has gone so soft and subtle, you almost can’t hear it. That’s to free up audio in the zone after the waterfall for the mermaid’s song, which is even more haunting and creepy than the “Yo Ho” hummed tune. The overall effect is to make the entire top portion of the ride—everything before the waterfall down to the fort battle—into an eerie and menacing place. That was always true, sort of, but it’s just a touch more melancholy and unsettling now. The very tone of the ride has shifted, and I think on balance that’s a good thing. And as you all have probably noted, it keys into the fourth movie’s storyline, and very likely points the way as to what may be the focus of the fifth film’s plot, Bear-ly back… It’s less clear that the change to the Country Bears was a good thing. The show, you see, is several minutes shorter now. They have unceremoniously dumped much of the banter and witticisms between characters, as well as a couple of songs, so the show largely consists now of one song after another, often with no introduction whatsoever by our host bear, Henry. One song ends, the curtain draws, and another one starts up on the other side. It’s kind of bizarre to those of us who know the show well. And that’s the rub. I’m not sure most of the visiting public DOES know the show well. I’m unconvinced they will even feel that anything has shifted. Certainly in my two viewings of it, I saw the audience as engaged as ever, and no one happened to say anything disparaging in earshot afterward. If that’s true, Disney has effectively crammed more riders/viewers per hour into the ride. On a given day, they can now squeeze in more performances than was a true a week ago, so the total counts will go up. And if there is no fallout from guests, that will be viewed as a win. In fact, some guests might find that they like the show better without being able to put a finger on why. The jokes were corny and in some cases almost uncomfortable. The show was also quite un-politically-correct previously. Buff makes a fat joke at hefty bear Trixie in the old show, but now, Buff is completely silent. All of the heads on the wall are; they just nod along in unison to the song, as if enjoying it, and no one ribs Trixie at all. Was the set of changes to the show motivated by political correctness? Could be. They took out the Devilish Mary song, which included the lyrics “rings on my ding ding.” I know that’s not the lyrics as written, but it’s what was on Disney’s own assistive device. But they didn’t take out the suggestion that poor Buford be shot. And Henry still pants that he’s going to pay “Swinging Teddi Barra” (a joke about switching partners) a visit as soon as he can find a ladder. So it’s a mixed bag. What’s not mixed are the improvements. It looked to me like the bears received a major upgrade to their programming. Or had their actuators cleaned or something. They moved fluidly, cleanly, and without herky-jerky action. They looked new. Actually, they looked like something you’d expect from the Oriental Land Company in TDL. And their fur! Everything sparkled, so they must have re-skinned everyone. Most had fur of a slightly different color. I’m not sure if this was artistic license or an indication that things were awfully dirty last week, but either way, it looks fresh. I can tell that some of the costumes/outfits were slightly different. The proof in the pudding, at least for me, came from my own boys (9 and 5 years old). Each had been bored with the old show, but each liked the new one. They couldn’t say why exactly, but it was less so. That matches my own assessment: with no jokes and banter, the show just zips right along. It’s like the ADHD version of the Country Bears Jamboree, and for my own next-generation fans sitting next to me on the bench, it worked better. I suspect that will be the overall guest experience as well, though some of us old-timers will lament the stuff that’s gone. More information and updates Readers are invited to connect with Kevin online and face to face at the following locations: |
This article is about rape within marriage. For rape before marriage, see Marry-your-rapist law Marital rape or spousal rape is the act of sexual intercourse with one's spouse without the spouse's consent. The lack of consent is the essential element and need not involve violence. Marital rape is considered a form of domestic violence and sexual abuse. Although, historically, sexual intercourse within marriage was regarded as a right of spouses, engaging in the act without the spouse's consent is now widely recognized by law and society as a wrong and as a crime. It is recognized as rape by many societies around the world, repudiated by international conventions, and increasingly criminalized. The issues of sexual and domestic violence within marriage and the family unit, and more specifically, the issue of violence against women, have come to growing international attention from the second half of the 20th century. Still, in many countries, marital rape either remains outside the criminal law, or is illegal but widely tolerated. Laws are rarely being enforced, due to factors ranging from reluctance of authorities to pursue the crime, to lack of public knowledge that sexual intercourse in marriage without consent is illegal. Marital rape is more widely experienced by women, though not exclusively. Marital rape is often a chronic form of violence for the victim which takes place within abusive relations. It exists in a complex web of state governments, cultural practices, and societal ideologies which combine to influence each distinct instance and situation in varying ways. The reluctance to criminalize and prosecute marital rape has been attributed to traditional views of marriage, interpretations of religious doctrines, ideas about male and female sexuality, and to cultural expectations of subordination of a wife to her husband—views which continue to be common in many parts of the world. These views of marriage and sexuality started to be challenged in most Western countries from the 1960s and 70s especially by second-wave feminism, leading to an acknowledgment of the woman's right to self-determination (i.e., control) of all matters relating to her body, and the withdrawal of the exemption or defense of marital rape. Most countries criminalized marital rape from the late 20th century onward—very few legal systems allowed for the prosecution of rape within marriage before the 1970s. Criminalization has occurred through various ways, including removal of statutory exemptions from the definitions of rape, judicial decisions, explicit legislative reference in statutory law preventing the use of marriage as a defense, or creating of a specific offense of marital rape. In many countries, it is still unclear whether marital rape is covered by the ordinary rape laws, but in some it may be covered by general statutes prohibiting violence, such as assault and battery laws. History [ edit ] One of the origins of the concept of a marital exemption from rape laws (a rule that a husband cannot be charged with the rape of his wife) is the idea that by marriage a woman gives irrevocable consent for her husband to have sex with her any time he demands it.[1] This view was described by Sir Matthew Hale (1609–1676) in History of the Pleas of the Crown, published posthumously in 1736, where he wrote that "The husband cannot be guilty of a rape committed by himself upon his lawful wife, for by their mutual consent and contract the wife hath given up herself in this kind unto her husband, which she cannot retract". Also, American and English law subscribed until the 20th century to the system of coverture, that is, a legal doctrine under which, upon marriage, a woman's legal rights were subsumed by those of her husband.[2] The implication was that once unified by marriage, a spouse could no longer be charged with raping one's spouse, anymore than be charged with raping oneself.[3] In the US, the wife's legal subordination to her husband was fully ended by the case of Kirchberg v. Feenstra, 450 U.S. 455 (1981), a United States Supreme Court case in which the Court held a Louisiana Head and Master law, which gave sole control of marital property to the husband, unconstitutional.[4] English common law also had a great impact on many legal systems of the world through colonialism. (Bovarnik, 2007). Marriage was traditionally understood as an institution where a husband had control over his wife's life; control over her sexuality was only a part of the greater control that he had in all other areas concerning her. A husband's control over his wife's body could also be seen in the way adultery between a wife and another man was constructed; for example in 1707, English Lord Chief Justice John Holt described the act of a man having sexual relations with another man's wife as "the highest invasion of property".[5] For this reason, in many cultures there was a conflation between the crimes of rape and adultery, since both were seen and understood as a violation of the rights of the husband. Rape as a crime was constructed as a property crime against a father or husband not as a crime against the woman's right to self-determination. The property to be withheld in a female was her virginity; this was the commodity (Bergen, 2016). Following this line of logic, a woman was (and still is in many cultures across the globe) first the property of her father, then, upon marriage, the property of her husband (Bergen, 2016). Therefore, a man could not be prosecuted for raping his own wife because she was his possession (Schelong, 1994). However, if another man raped someone's wife, this was essentially stealing property (a women's sexuality) (Bergen, 2016). In English customs, "bride capture" (a man claiming a woman through rape) was thought to be stealing a father's property by raping his daughter. Therefore, rape laws were created to "…protect the property interests men had in their women, not to protect women themselves" (Schelong, 1994). This concept of women as property permeates current marital rape ideology and laws throughout the globe. In some cultures, marriage is arranged for the purpose of creating access to procreation (Yllö, 2016). In these situations, the parties do not necessarily consent to marriage (in the case of forced marriage) (Yllö, 2016). Following this logic, if consent is not part of marriage, then it is not necessary for intercourse. The autonomy of the wife is also often compromised in cultures where bride price is paid. Under customary law in certain parts of Africa, forced sex in marriage was not prohibited, although some specific circumstances, such as during advanced pregnancy, immediately after childbirth, during menstruation, or during mourning for a deceased close relative, were recognized as giving the wife the right to refuse sex.[6] Rape has been, until recent decades, understood as a crime against honor and reputation – not only in domestic legislation, but also in international law; for example according to the Article 27 of the Fourth Geneva Convention, "Women shall be especially protected against any attack on their honour, in particular against rape, enforced prostitution, or any form of indecent assault".[7] It was not until the 1990s that the ICC statute recognized crimes of sexual violence as violent crimes against the person;[8] "Not until the last half century was rape understood to be an offense against the woman, against her dignity, instead of against her family's or her husband's honor".[8] Legal aspect [ edit ] Historically, many cultures have had a concept of spouses' conjugal rights[9] to sexual intercourse with each other. This can be seen in English common law, in force in North America and the British Commonwealth, where the very concept of marital rape was treated as an impossibility. This was illustrated most vividly by Sir Matthew Hale, (1609-1676), in his legal treatise Historia Placitorum Coronæ or History of the Pleas of the Crown (posthumously, 1736) where he wrote that "The husband cannot be guilty of a rape committed by himself upon his lawful wife, for by their mutual consent and contract the wife hath given up herself in this kind unto her husband, which she cannot retract." Formalization of the marital rape exemption in law [ edit ] Common law and the United Kingdom [ edit ] Sir Matthew Hale's statement in History of the Pleas of the Crown did not cite any legal precedent though it likely relied on earlier standards. In a case of Lord Audley's (1488–1544), for instance, his citation of the jurist Bracton (c. 1210 – c. 1268) supports this rule, said to have derived from laws of King Æthelstan (r. 927–939) where upon the law holds that even "were the party of no chaste life, but a whore, yet there may be ravishment: but it is a good plea to say she was his concubine".[10] A lawful marriage legitimizes the conjugal act itself, so "marital rape" is a contradiction in terms. While a physical assault against a spouse may be charged, such is distinct from the delegitimization of conjugal union itself as rape. Marriage then should not be defined as an "exclusionary" to rape but as "contradictory" to it. Marriage created conjugal rights between spouses, and marriage could not be annulled except by a private Act of Parliament—it therefore follows that a spouse could not revoke conjugal rights from the marriage, and therefore there could be no rape between spouses. The principle was repeated in East's Treatise of the Pleas of the Crown in 1803 and in Archbold's Pleading and Evidence in Criminal Cases in 1822. The principle was framed as an exemption to the law of rape in an English courtroom in R v Clarence,[11] but it was not overturned until 1991 by the House of Lords in the case of R. v. R in 1991,[12] where it was described as an anachronistic and offensive legal fiction. Feminist critique in the 19th century [ edit ] From the beginnings of the 19th century feminist movement, activists challenged the presumed right of men to engage in forced or coerced sex with their wives. In the United States, "the nineteenth-century woman's rights movement fought against a husband's right to control marital intercourse in a campaign that was remarkably developed, prolific, and insistent, given nineteenth-century taboos against the public mention of sex or sexuality."[13] Suffragists including Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Lucy Stone "singled out a woman's right to control marital intercourse as the core component of equality."[14] Nineteenth century feminist demands centered on the right of women to control their bodies and fertility, positioned consent in marital sexual relations as an alternative to contraception and abortion (which many opposed), and also embraced eugenic concerns about excessive procreation.[15] British liberal feminists John Stuart Mill and Harriet Taylor attacked marital rape as a gross double standard in law and as central to the subordination of women.[16] Advocates of the Free Love Movement, including early anarcha-feminists such as Voltairine de Cleyre and Emma Goldman, as well as Victoria Woodhull, Thomas Low Nichols, and Mary S. Gove Nichols, joined a critique of marital rape to advocate women's autonomy and sexual pleasure.[17] Moses Harman, a Kansas-based publisher and advocate for women's rights, was jailed twice under the Comstock laws for publishing articles (by a woman who was victimized and a doctor who treated marital rape survivors) decrying marital rape. De Cleyre defended Harman in a well-known article, "Sexual Slavery." She refused to draw any distinction between rape outside of and within marriage: "And that is rape, where a man forces himself sexually upon a woman whether he is licensed by the marriage law to do it or not."[18] Bertrand Russell (who was awarded the 1950 Nobel Prize in Literature) in his book Marriage and Morals (1929) deplored the situation of married women. He wrote "Marriage is for woman the commonest mode of livelihood, and the total amount of undesired sex endured by women is probably greater in marriage than in prostitution."[19] 20th and 21st century criminalization [ edit ] The marital rape exemption or defence became more widely viewed as inconsistent with the developing concepts of human rights and equality. Feminists worked systematically since the 1960s to overturn the marital rape exemption and criminalize marital rape.[20] Increasing criminalization of spousal rape is part of a worldwide reclassification of sexual crimes "from offenses against morality, the family, good customs, honor, or chastity ... to offenses against liberty, self-determination, or physical integrity."[21] In December 1993, the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights published the Declaration on the Elimination of Violence Against Women. This establishes marital rape as a human rights violation. The importance of the right to self sexual determination of women is increasingly being recognized as crucial to women's rights. In 2012, High Commissioner for Human Rights Navi Pillay stated that:[22] "Violations of women's human rights are often linked to their sexuality and reproductive role. (...) In many countries, married women may not refuse to have sexual relations with their husbands, and often have no say in whether they use contraception. (...) Ensuring that women have full autonomy over their bodies is the first crucial step towards achieving substantive equality between women and men. Personal issues—such as when, how and with whom they choose to have sex, and when, how and with whom they choose to have children—are at the heart of living a life in dignity." Despite these trends and international moves, criminalization has not occurred in all UN member States. Determining the criminal status of marital rape may be challenging, because, while some countries explicitly criminalize the act (by stipulating in their rape laws that marriage is not a defense to a charge of rape; or by creating a specific crime of 'marital rape'; or, otherwise, by having statutory provisions that expressly state that a spouse can be charged with the rape of their other spouse) and other countries explicitly exempt spouses (by defining rape as forced sexual intercourse outside of marriage; or forced sexual intercourse with a woman not the perpetrator's wife; or by providing in their rape provisions that marriage is a defense to a charge of rape), in many countries the ordinary rape laws are silent on the issue (that is, they do not address the issue one way or another)—in such cases, in order to determine whether marital rape is covered by the ordinary rape laws it must be analyzed whether there are judicial decisions in this respect; and former definitions of the law are also important (for instance whether there was previously a statutory exemption that was removed by legislators for the purpose of implicitly including marital rape). In 2006, the UN Secretary-General's in-depth study on all forms of violence against women stated that (page 113):[23] "Marital rape may be prosecuted in at least 104 States. Of these, 32 have made marital rape a specific criminal offence, while the remaining 74 do not exempt marital rape from general rape provisions. Marital rape is not a prosecutable offence in at least 53 States. Four States criminalize marital rape only when the spouses are judicially separated. Four States are considering legislation that would allow marital rape to be prosecuted." In 2011, the UN Women report Progress of the World's Women:In Pursuit of Justice stated that (page 17):[24] "By April 2011, at least 52 States had explicitly outlawed marital rape in their criminal code". Traditionally, rape was a criminal offense that could only be committed outside marriage, and courts did not apply the rape statutes to acts of forced sex between spouses. With changing social views, and international condemnation of sexual violence in marriage, courts have started to apply the rape laws in marriage. The current applicability in many countries of rape laws to spouses is currently unclear, since in many countries the laws have not been recently tested in court. In some countries, notably jurisdictions which have inherited the 1860 Indian Penal Code (such as Singapore, India, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, Burma) and some countries in the Commonwealth Caribbean region, the laws explicitly exempt spouses from prosecution (for instance, under the 1860 Indian Penal Code, which has also been inherited by other countries in the region, the law on rape states that "Sexual intercourse by a man with his own wife is not rape").[25] An example of a country where the rape law explicitly excludes a husband as a possible perpetrator is Ethiopia; its rape law states:[26] "Article 620 - Rape: Whoever compels a woman to submit to sexual intercourse outside wedlock, whether by the use of violence or grave intimidation, or after having rendered her unconscious or incapable of resistance, is punishable with rigorous imprisonment from five years to fifteen years". Another example is South Sudan, where the law states: "Sexual intercourse by a married couple is not rape, within the meaning of this section". (Art 247).[27] Conversely, an example of country where the rape law explicitly criminalizes marital rape is Namibia - The Combating of Rape Act (No. 8 of 2000) states that: "No marriage or other relationship shall constitute a defence to a charge of rape under this Act".[28] An example of a jurisdiction where marital rape is a distinct criminal offense is Bhutan where 'Marital rape' is defined by Article 199 which reads: "A defendant shall be guilty of marital rape, if the defendant engages in sexual intercourse with one's own spouse without consent or against the will of the other spouse".[29] By 1986, in Europe, there was international pressure to criminalize marital rape: the European Parliament's Resolution on Violence Against Women of 1986 called for its criminalization.[30] This was reiterated by the Recommendation Rec(2002)5 of the Committee of Ministers to member states on the protection of women against violence.[31] (see para 35) This recommendation provided detailed guidelines on how legislation regarding domestic violence, rape, and other forms of violence against women should operate. It also provided a definition of violence against women, and gave a list of non-exhaustive examples, including marital rape (see section "Definition" para 1). Although the approach on the issue of violence against women has varied significantly among European countries, the traditional view that acts of violence against a woman are crimes against honor and morality, and not against the self-determination of the woman, was still prevalent in the 1990s in many countries.[32] The above recommendation stated that member states must "ensure that criminal law provides that any act of violence against a person, in particular physical or sexual violence, constitutes a violation of that person's physical, psychological and/or sexual freedom and integrity, and not solely a violation of morality, honour or decency" (para 34).[33] The approach regarding sexual and other forms of violence against women in specific European countries did not necessarily mirror women's rights in other areas of life (such as public or political life) in those countries: in fact some countries otherwise known for advanced women's rights, such as Finland and Denmark, have received strong criticism for their policies in this area. A 2008 report produced by Amnesty International,[34] described Danish laws on sexual violence as "inconsistent with international human rights standards",[35] which has led to Denmark eventually reforming its sexual offenses legislation in 2013.[36][37][38] (Until 2013, in Denmark "the Penal Code reduce[d] the level of penalty or provide[d] for exclusion of punishment altogether for rape and sexual violence within marriage in certain instances [...] and if the perpetrator enter[ed] into or continu[ed] a marriage with his victim the punishment for rape c[ould] be reduced or remitted").[35] Cultural and religious values which support female subordination and inequality are considered important in dealing with the issue of sexual violence against women; but there have been calls for analyses of cultural gender norms which tolerate violence against women to not be based on stereotypes; Mala Htun and Laurel Weldon write "gender policy is not one issue but many" and "When [...] Latin American countries are quicker to adopt policies addressing violence against women than the Nordic countries, one at least ought to consider the possibility that fresh ways of grouping states would further the study of gender politics."[39] The causes of the toleration - in law or in practice - of sexual violence inside marriage are complex; lack of understanding of the concept of consent and coercion due to lack of sexual education and public discussion about sexuality are often cited as causes of sexual abuse in general; but there has been criticism towards the idea that sex education about consent, in and of itself, is sufficient.[40] The countries which choose to ratify the Council of Europe Convention on preventing and combating violence against women and domestic violence, the first legally binding instrument in Europe in the field of violence against women,[41] are bound by its provisions to ensure that non-consensual sexual acts committed against a spouse or partner are illegal.[42] The convention came into force in August 2014.[43] In its explanatory report (para 219) it acknowledges the long tradition of toleration, de jure or de facto, of marital rape and domestic violence: "A large number of the offences established in accordance with this Convention are offences typically committed by family members, intimate partners or others in the immediate social environment of the victim. There are many examples from past practice in Council of Europe member states that show that exceptions to the prosecution of such cases were made, either in law or in practice, if victim and perpetrator were, for example, married to each other or had been in a relationship. The most prominent example is rape within marriage, which for a long time had not been recognised as rape because of the relationship between victim and perpetrator." Legal changes [ edit ] Countries which were early to criminalize marital rape include the Soviet Union (1922),[44] Poland (1932), Czechoslovakia (1950), some other members of the Communist Bloc, Sweden (1965),[45] and Norway (1971).[45] Slovenia, then a republic within federal Yugoslavia, criminalized marital rape in 1977.[46] The Israeli Supreme Court affirmed that marital rape is a crime in a 1980 decision, citing law based on the Talmud (at least 6th century).[47][48] Criminalization in Australia began with the state of New South Wales in 1981, followed by all other states from 1985 to 1992.[49] Several formerly British-ruled countries followed suit: Canada (1983),[50][51] New Zealand (1985), and Ireland (1990).[49] Marital rape was criminalized in Austria in 1989[52] (and in 2004 it became a state offense meaning it can be prosecuted by the state even in the absence of a complaint from the spouse, with procedures being similar to stranger rape[53]). In Switzerland marital rape became a crime in 1992[54] (and became a state offense in 2004[55]). In Spain, the Supreme Court ruled in 1992 that sex within marriage must be consensual and that sexuality in marriage must be understood in light of the principle of the freedom to make one's own decisions with respect to sexual activity; in doing so it upheld the conviction of a man who had been found guilty of raping his wife by a lower court.[56] In Europe, Finland outlawed marital rape in 1994.[57] The case of domestic violence in Finland has been the subject of interest and discussion, because Finland is otherwise considered a country where women have very advanced rights in regard to public life and participation in the public sphere (jobs, opportunities, etc.). The country has been made the object of international criticism in regard to its approach towards violence against women.[58] A 2010 Eurobarometer survey on European attitudes on violence against women showed that victim blaming attitudes are much more common in Finland than in other countries: 74% of Finns blamed "the provocative behaviour of women" for violence against women, much higher than in other countries (for instance many countries that are popularly believed to be among the most patriarchal of Europe were significantly less likely to agree with that assertion: 33% in Spain, 46% in Ireland, 47% in Italy).[59] Belgium was early to criminalize marital rape. In 1979, the Brussels Court of Appeal recognized marital rape and found that a husband who used serious violence to coerce his wife into having sex against her wishes was guilty of the criminal offense of rape. The logic of the court was that, although the husband did have a 'right' to sex with his wife, he could not use violence to claim it, as Belgian laws did not allow people to obtain their rights by violence.[60][61] In 1989 laws were amended, the definition of rape was broadened, and marital rape is treated the same as other forms of rape.[62] In Ireland, the Criminal Law (Rape) Act, 1981 defined rape as "unlawful sexual intercourse" without consent;[63] an attempt to explicitly include spouses within the definition was rejected by the Fianna Fáil government.[64] Seán Doherty, the Minister for Justice, suggested that the courts might allow a charge of rape in some cases, and that various assault charges might be prosecuted in others.[64] A 1987 discussion paper by the Law Reform Commission stated, "In the absence of Irish decisions on the topic, the present law cannot be stated with any great degree of confidence. It would appear, however, that to the extent that the marital rape exemption exists, it is confined to circumstances where the spouses are cohabiting and there are no separation proceedings in being, or even, perhaps, in contemplation."[65] The paper's call to abolish any marital exemption was "on the whole, generally welcomed, although some misgivings were expressed as to whether it might not lead to fabricated complaints and unwarranted intrusions in the marital relationship."[66] The Criminal Law (Rape) (Amendment) Act, 1990 removed the word "unlawful" from the 1981 definition of rape, and abolished "any rule of law by virtue of which a husband cannot be guilty of the rape of his wife".[67] The first two convictions were in 2006 (upon retrial) and 2016.[68] In France, in 1990, following a case where a man had tortured and raped his wife, the Court of Cassation authorized prosecution of spouses for rape or sexual assault. In 1992 the Court convicted a man of the rape of his wife, stating that the presumption that spouses have consented to sexual acts that occur within marriage is only valid when the contrary is not proven.[69] In 1994, Law 94-89 criminalized marital rape;[69] a second law, passed 4 April 2006, makes rape by a partner (including in unmarried relationships, marriages, and civil unions) an aggravating circumstance in prosecuting rape.[70] Germany outlawed spousal rape in 1997, which is later than other developed countries. Female ministers and women's rights activists lobbied for this law for over 25 years.[71] Before 1997, the definition of rape was: "Whoever compels a woman to have extramarital intercourse with him, or with a third person, by force or the threat of present danger to life or limb, shall be punished by not less than two years’ imprisonment".[72] In 1997 there were changes to the rape law, broadening the definition, making it gender-neutral, and removing the marital exemption.[73] Before, marital rape could only be prosecuted as "Causing bodily harm" (Section 223 of the German Criminal Code), "Insult" (Section 185 of the German Criminal Code) and "Using threats or force to cause a person to do, suffer or omit an act" (Nötigung, Section 240 of the German Criminal Code) which carried lower sentences[74] and were rarely prosecuted. Before a new Criminal Code came into force in 2003,[75] the law on rape in Bosnia and Herzegovina also contained a statutory exemption, and read: "Whoever coerces a female not his wife into sexual intercourse by force or threat of imminent attack upon her life or body or the life or body of a person close to her, shall be sentenced to a prison term of one to ten years".[72] In Portugal also, before 1982, there was a statutory exemption.[76][77] Marital rape was criminalized in Serbia in 2002; before that date rape was legally defined as forced sexual intercourse outside of marriage.[78] The same was true in Hungary until 1997.[79][80] In 1994, in Judgment no. 223/94 V, 1994, the Court of Appeal of Luxembourg confirmed the applicability of the provisions of the Criminal Code regarding rape to marital rape.[62][81] Marital rape was made illegal in the Netherlands in 1991.[82] The legislative changes provided a new definition for rape in 1991, which removed the marital exemption, and also made the crime gender-neutral; before 1991 the legal definition of rape was a man forcing, by violence or threat of thereof, a woman to engage in sexual intercourse outside of marriage.[83] In Italy the law on rape, violenza carnale ('carnal violence', as it was termed) did not contain a statutory exemption, but was, as elsewhere, understood as inapplicable in the context of marriage. Although Italy has a reputation of a male dominated traditional society, it was quite early to accept that the rape law covers forced sex in marriage too: in 1976 in Sentenza n. 12857 del 1976, the Supreme Court ruled that "the spouse who compels the other spouse to carnal knowledge by violence or threats commits the crime of carnal violence" ("commette il delitto di violenza carnale il coniuge che costringa con violenza o minaccia l’altro coniuge a congiunzione carnale").[84][85][86] Cyprus criminalized marital rape in 1994.[87] Marital rape was made illegal in North Macedonia in 1996.[88][89] In Croatia marital rape was criminalized in 1998.[90][91] In 2006, Greece enacted Law 3500/2006, entitled "For combating domestic violence", which punishes marital rape. It entered into force on 24 October 2006. This legislation also prohibits numerous other forms of violence within marriage and cohabiting relations, and various other forms of abuse of women.[92] Liechtenstein made marital rape illegal in 2001.[93] In Colombia, marital rape was criminalized in 1996,[94] in Chile in 1999.[95] Thailand outlawed marital rape in 2007.[96][97] The new reforms were enacted amid strong controversy and were opposed by many. One opponent of the law was legal scholar Taweekiet Meenakanit who voiced his opposition to the legal reforms. He also opposed the making of rape a gender neutral offense. Meenakanit claimed that allowing a husband to file a rape charge against his wife is "abnormal logic" and that wives would refuse to divorce or put their husband in jail since many Thai wives are dependent on their husbands.[98] Papua New Guinea criminalized marital rape in 2003.[99] Namibia outlawed marital rape in 2000.[100] Section 375 of the Indian Penal Code (IPC) considers the forced sex in marriages as a crime only when the wife is below age 15. Thus, marital rape is not a criminal offense under the IPC.[101] Marital rape victims have to take recourse to the Protection of Women from Domestic Violence Act 2005 (PWDVA).[102] The PWDVA, which came into force in 2006, outlaws marital rape.[103] However, it offers only a civil remedy for the offence.[104] Recent countries to criminalize marital rape include Zimbabwe (2001),[105][106] Turkey (2005),[107] Cambodia (2005),[108] Liberia (2006),[109] Nepal (2006),[110] Mauritius (2007),[111] Ghana (2007),[112] Malaysia (2007),[113][114] Thailand (2007),[115] Rwanda (2009),[116] Suriname (2009),[117] Nicaragua (2012),[118] Sierra Leone (2012),[105][119] South Korea (2013),[120] Bolivia (2013),[121] Samoa (2013),[122] Tonga (1999/2013).[123][124] Human rights observers have criticized a variety of countries for failing to effectively prosecute marital rape once it has been criminalized.[125] South Africa, which criminalized in 1993,[126] saw its first conviction for marital rape in 2012.[127] United States [ edit ] The legal history of marital rape laws in the United States is a long and complex one, that spans over several decades. Traditional rape laws in the US defined rape as forced sexual intercourse by a male with a "female not his wife", making it clear that the statutes did not apply to married couples. The 1962 Model Penal Code stated that "A male who has sexual intercourse with a female not his wife is guilty of rape if: (...)".[128] The criminalization of marital rape in the United States started in the mid-1970s and by 1993 marital rape was a crime in all 50 states, under at least one section of the sexual offense codes.[129] The earlier laws of the 1970s often indicated that marital rape charges could only be brought about if the husband and wife were no longer living together. The case in the United States that first challenged this cohabitation clause was Oregon v. Rideout in 1978.[130] During the 1990s, most states differentiated between the way marital rape and non-marital rape were treated. These differences were visible through shorter penalties, taking into account whether or not violence was used, and allowing for shorter reporting periods. (Bergen, 1996; Russell, 1990).[131] The laws have continued to change and evolve, with most states reforming their legislation in the 21st century, in order to bring marital rape laws in line with non-marital rape, but even today there remain differences in some states. With the removal, in 2005,[132][133] of the requirement of a higher level of violence from the law of Tennessee, which now allows for marital rape in Tennessee to be treated like any other type of rape, South Carolina remains the only US state with a law requiring excessive force/violence (the force or violence used or threatened must be of a "high and aggravated nature").[134][135] In most states the criminalization has occurred by the removal of the exemptions from the general rape law by the legislature; or by the courts striking down the exemptions as unconstitutional.[136] In some states, however, the legislature has created a distinct crime of spousal rape. This is, for example, the case in California, where there are two different criminal offenses: Rape (Article 261) and Spousal Rape (Article 262).[137] England and Wales [ edit ] Background [ edit ] Although the issue of marital rape was highlighted by feminists in the 19th century, and was also deplored by thinkers such as John Stuart Mill and Bertrand Russell (see above section 'Feminist critique in the 19th century'), it was not until the 1970s that this issue was raised at a political level. The late 1970s also saw the enactment of Sexual Offences (Amendment) Act of 1976, which provided the first statutory definition of rape (prior to this rape was an offense at common law). The Criminal Law Revision Committee in their 1984 Report on Sexual Offences rejected the idea that the offense of rape should be extended to marital relations; writing the following:[138] "The majority of us ... believe that rape cannot be considered in the abstract as merely 'sexual intercourse without consent'. The circumstances of rape may be peculiarly grave. This feature is not present in the case of a husband and wife cohabiting with each other when an act of sexual intercourse occurs without the wife's consent. They may well have had sexual intercourse regularly before the act in question and, because a sexual relationship may involve a degree of compromise, she may sometimes have agreed only with some reluctance to such intercourse. Should he go further and force her to have sexual intercourse without her consent, this may evidence a failure of the marital relationship. But it is far from being the 'unique' and 'grave' offence described earlier. Where the husband goes so far as to cause injury, there are available a number of offences against the person with which he may be charged, but the gravamen of the husband's conduct is the injury he has caused not the sexual intercourse he has forced." The Committee also expressed more general views on domestic violence arguing that "Violence occurs in some marriages but the wives do not always wish the marital tie to be severed" and reiterated the point that domestic incidents without physical injury would generally be outside the scope of the law: "Some of us consider that the criminal law should keep out of marital relationships between cohabiting partners—especially the marriage bed—except where injury arises, when there are other offences which can be charged."[138] Five years later, in Scotland, the High Court of Justiciary took a different view, abolishing marital immunity, in S. v. H.M. Advocate, 1989. The same would happen in England and Wales in 1991, in R v R (see below). Very soon after this, in Australia, at the end of 1991, in R v L, the High Court of Australia would rule the same, ruling that if the common law exemption had ever been part of the Australian law, it no longer was (by that time most Australian states and territories had already abolished their exemptions by statutory law).[139] Ending the exemption [ edit ] The marital rape exemption was abolished in England and Wales in 1991 by the Appellate Committee of the House of Lords, in the case of R v R.[140][141] It had been promulgated in 1736 in Matthew Hale's History of the Pleas of the Crown (see above). The first attempted prosecution of a husband for the rape of his wife was R v Clarke.[142] Rather than try to argue directly against Hale's logic, the court held that consent in this instance had been revoked by an order of the court for non-cohabitation. It was the first of a number of cases in which the courts found reasons not to apply the exemption, notably R v O’Brien[143] (the obtaining of decree nisi), R v Steele[144] (an undertaking by the husband to the court not to molest the wife) and R v Roberts[145] (the existence of a formal separation agreement). There are at least four recorded instances of a husband successfully relying on the exemption in England and Wales. The first was R v Miller,[146] where it was held that the wife had not legally revoked her consent despite having presented a divorce petition. R v Kowalski[147] was followed by R v Sharples,[148] and the fourth occurred in 1991 in the case of R v J, a judgment made after the first instance decision of the Crown Court in R v R but before the decision of the House of Lords that was to abolish the exemption. In Miller, Kowalski and R v J the husbands were instead convicted of assault. The R v Kowalski case involved, among other acts, an instance of non-consensual oral sex. For this, the husband was convicted of indecent assault, as the court ruled that his wife's "implied consent" by virtue of marriage extended only to vaginal intercourse, not to other acts such as fellatio.[149] [At that time the offense of 'rape' dealt only with vaginal intercourse] In R v Sharples in 1990, it was alleged that the husband had raped his wife in 1989. Despite the fact that the wife had obtained a Family Protection Order before the alleged rape, the judge refused to accept that rape could legally occur, concluding that the Family Protection Order had not removed the wife's implied consent, ruling that: "it cannot be inferred that by obtaining the order in these terms the wife had withdrawn her consent to sexual intercourse".[150] R v R in 1991 was the first occasion where the marital rights exemption had been appealed as far as the House of Lords, and it followed the trio of cases since 1988 where the marital rights exemption was upheld. The leading judgment, unanimously approved, was given by Lord Keith of Kinkel. He stated that the contortions being performed in the lower courts in order to avoid applying the marital rights exemption were indicative of the absurdity of the rule, and held, agreeing with earlier judgments in Scotland and in the Court of Appeal in R v R, that “the fiction of implied consent has no useful purpose to serve today in the law of rape” and that the marital rights exemption was a “common law fiction” which had never been a true rule of English law. R's appeal was accordingly dismissed, and he was convicted of the rape of his wife. Aftermath [ edit ] By 1991, when the exemption was removed, the Law Commission in its Working Paper of 1990 was already supporting the abolition of the exemption, a view reiterated in their Final Report that was published in 1992; and international moves in this direction were by now common. Therefore, the result of the R v R case was welcomed. But, while the removal of the exemption itself was not controversial, the way through which this was done was; since the change was not made through usual statutory modification. The cases of SW v UK and CR v UK arose in response to R v R; in which the applicants (convicted of rape and attempted rape of the wives) appealed to the European Court of Human Rights arguing that their convictions were a retrospective application of the law in breach of Article 7 of the European Convention on Human Rights. They claimed that at the time of the rape there was a common law exemption in force, therefore their convictions were post facto. Their case was not successful, with their arguments being rejected by the European Court of Human Rights, which ruled that the criminalization of marital rape had become a reasonably foreseeable development of the criminal law in the light of the evolution of social norms; and that the Article 7 does not prohibit the gradual judicial evolution of the interpretation of an offense, provided the result is consistent with the essence of the offense and that it could be reasonably foreseen.[151] A new definition of the offense of 'rape' was created in 1994 by the section 142 of the Criminal Justice and Public Order Act 1994, providing a broader definition that included anal sex; and an even broader definition was created by the Sexual Offences Act 2003, including oral sex. The law on rape does not—and did not ever since the removal of the marital exemption in 1991—provide for any different punishment based on the relation between parties. However, in 1993, in R v W 1993 14 Cr App R (S) 256, the court ruled:[152] "It should not be thought a different and lower scale automatically attaches to the rape of a wife by her husband. All will depend upon the circumstances of the case. Where the parties are cohabiting and the husband insisted upon intercourse against his wife's will but without violence or threats this may reduce sentence. Where the conduct is gross and involves threats or violence the relationship will be of little significance." At the time of R v R, rape in Northern Ireland was a crime at common law. Northern Ireland common law is similar to that of England and Wales, and partially derives from the same sources; so any (alleged) exemption from its rape law was also removed by R v R. In March 2000, a Belfast man was convicted for raping his wife, in the first case of its kind in Northern Ireland.[153] Until 28 July 2003, rape in Northern Ireland remained solely an offense at common law that could only be committed by a man against a woman only as vaginal intercourse. Between 28 July 2003 and 2 February 2009 rape was defined by the Criminal Justice (Northern Ireland) Order 2003 as "any act of non-consensual intercourse by a man with a person", but the common law offense continued to exist, and oral sex remained excluded. On 2 February 2009 the Sexual Offences (Northern Ireland) Order 2008 came into force, abolishing the common law offense of rape, and providing a definition of rape that is similar to that of the Sexual Offences Act 2003 of England and Wales. The Public Prosecution Service for Northern Ireland has the same policy for marital rape as for other forms of rape; it states in its Policy for Prosecuting Cases of Rape document that: "The Policy applies to all types of rape, including marital and relationship rape, acquaintance and stranger rape, both against male and female victims".[154] Australia [ edit ] The criminalization of marital rape in Australia occurred in all states and territories, by both statutory and case law, from the late 1970s to the early 1990s. In Australia, the offense of rape was based on the English common law offense of rape, being generally understood as "carnal knowledge", outside of marriage, of a female against her will. Some Australian states left rape to be defined at common law, but others had statutory definitions, with these definitions having marital exemptions. The definition of rape in Queensland, for instance, was: "Any person who has carnal knowledge of a woman or girl, not his wife, without her consent, or with her consent, if the consent is obtained by force, or by means of threats or intimidation of any kind, or by fear of bodily harm, or by means of false and fraudulent representations as to the nature of the act, or, in the case of a married woman, by personating her husband, is guilty of a crime, which is called rape."[155] Discussions of criminalization of marital rape were already taking place in the late 1970s in Queensland,[155] but it was not until 1989 that it was criminalized.[156] The first Australian state to deal with marital rape was South Australia. The changes came in 1976, but these were only partly removing the exemption. The Criminal Law Consolidation Act Amendment Act 1976 read:[157] "No person shall, by reason only of the fact that he is married to some other person, be presumed to have consented to sexual intercourse with that other person". Nevertheless, the laws did not go as far as equating marital with non-marital rape; the law required violence, or other aggravating circumstances, in order for an act of marital intercourse to be rape; which remained law until 1992. The first Australian jurisdiction to completely remove the marital exemption was New South Wales in 1981. The same happened in Western Australia, Victoria, and ACT in 1985; and Tasmania in 1987. In 1991, in R v L, the High Court of Australia ruled that if the common law exemption had ever been part of the Australian law, it no longer was.[158] Marriage after rape [ edit ] In a variety of cultures, marriage after a rape of an unmarried woman has been treated historically as a "resolution" to the rape, that is, a "reparatory marriage". Although laws that exonerate the perpetrator if he marries his victim after the rape are often associated with the Middle East,[159] such laws were very common around the world until the second half of the 20th century. For instance, as late as 1997, 14 Latin American countries had such laws,[160] although most of these countries have now abolished them. Whether women were forced to marry their rapist, or the marriage was concluded before the violence began, many victims remain in chronically violent relationships. While there are many reasons for which victims of marital rape remain in their marriages, one important reason is that divorce may be hard to obtain and/or is stigmatized (Kwiatowski, 70). Cross-culturally, one of the barriers that keep victims within their marriages is the shame and guilt they feel surrounding marital rape (Bergen, 2016), or general taboos around sexuality(Kwiatkowski, 2016) (Torres, 2016). Lastly, some victims do not categorize their abuse as marital rape in order to minimize the violence they endure. This is used as a defense mechanism so they can continue to endure their abuse (Menjívar, 2016). Prevalence [ edit ] The earliest study in the Western World attempting to survey marital rape was an unpublished study by Joan Seites in the spring of 1975. Seites sent questionnaires to 40 rape-crisis centers from a list compiled by the Center for Women Policy Studies (Washington, DC). 16 Centers completed questionnaire for a response rate of 40%. Of the 3,709 reported calls dealing with rape and attempted rape received by the 16 centers, 12 calls dealt with marital rape (0.3%). Because rape-crisis centers did not always record the relationships of the callers, whether the 12 reported calls fully represent the number of married relationships cannot be certainly known.[161] Feminist sociologist Pauline Bart published in June 1975 her review of 1,070 questionnaires filled out by victims of rape and considered that 0.4% were raped by their husbands.[162] Researcher Richard Giles conducted research through in-depth interviews on violence between husbands and wives in a series of three studies between 1974 and 1976. Although the questions asked in the course of the interviews did not specifically pertain to the subject of marital rape, a subsequent analysis of the transcriptions of the interviews identified 4 women who discussed sex-related violence which might be viewed as instances of either attempted or completed marital rape. In all 4 cases, however, there was no instance a wife actually forced into having sex, although this may have been to avoid the possibility of force. Although the four women did not view themselves as having been raped, Giles raised the question of whether engaging in the sex act, as an act itself, constitutes violence.[163] In 1982 Diana E. H. Russell, a feminist writer and activist, conducted the seminal study on marital rape. Her study surveyed a total of 930 women from San Francisco, California (50% non-response rate, non-English speaking Asian women were specifically excluded as non-reliable respondents), of whom 644 were married, divorced, or who self-identified as having a husband although not married. Six of these women (1%) self-assessed that they had been raped by their husbands, ex-husband, or de facto husbands. The survey interviewers, however, classified 74 (12%) of these women as having been raped. Of the 286 non-married women in the sample, 228 (80%) were classified by the survey interviewers as having been raped. Russell found that when repeated instances of rape as classified by the survey interviewers, by husbands or ex-husbands, over the entire course of the marriage are included, these account for 38% of all rape instances, in comparison to the remaining 62% occurring in non-marital instances.[164] David Finkelhor and Kersti Yllo published a study in 1985 on marital rape that drew on a scientifically-selected area probability sample from the metropolitan Boston area of 323 women who were either married or previously married who had a child living with them between the ages of six and fourteen. The study found that of the women who were married the instance of sexual relations through physical force or the threat thereof was 3%.[165] In 1994, Patricia Easteal, then Senior Criminologist at the Australian Institute of Criminology, published the results of survey on sexual assault in many settings. The respondents had all been victims of numerous forms of sexual assault. Of the victim sub-sample, 10.4% had been raped by husbands or de facto husbands, with a further 2.3% raped by estranged husbands/de factos. In 2002 Basile published research intended to address the lack of a nationally probability sample to-date that measured intimate sexual coercion faced by married women. Data were collected in a 1997 national poll by a random telephone survey of 1,108 residents in the continental U.S. of persons 18 years old or older. The survey had a 50% response rate. Of the 1,108 respondents, the 506 men were excluded from any inquiry into unwanted sexual experiences, leaving 602 (54%) women respondents for the study. 398 (66%) women indicated no unwanted sexual relations (their marital status is not given), and 204 (34%) women responded as having engaged in unwanted sex after being subject to some level of sexual coercion; types of sexual coercion included receiving ‘a gift’, ‘ a nice dinner’, ‘a back rub’, ‘kissing’, etc. through threatened harm and physical coercion. Of this group, a sub-sample of 120 (59%) were married, of which 9% responded as having been subject to physical force.[166] Notwithstanding the six scientific studies specifically on marital rape by husbands in the Western world cited above, not one gives an estimation of a rate of marital rape. The first study, by Giles, does attempt to calculate a rate, but acknowledges that the study was not so designed, and the result (0%) may not be valid. The next study by Russell which is often cited as the seminal study, conflates ex-husbands and those whom, though unmarried, are counted as putative husbands or de facto “husbands.” While the data would allow estimation of a marital rape rate, it is not given. Moreover, the study's design classifies 80% of non-married women as having been raped is vastly inconsistent with other studies. The Yllo and Finkelhor 1985 study is not a nationally representative sample, i.e., limited to Boston, of women who are divorced or married, and who also have a child living with them between the ages of six and fourteen. The study did not separately estimate rates for claims of rape and situations deemed rape-threatening. In the Giles study, once threatening situations are distinguished, the findings differed significantly. Easteal's study restricts estimation of prevalence to within only the sub-sample of victims, even though the estimation could similarly be applied to the population. Basile study, which purportedly was to address the hitherto lack of a nationally probability sample regarding marital rape, omits the number of married women in the sample, thereby precluding the estimation of rape reports by married women in the sample population. The lack of such estimations make inter-study comparisons difficult, and citation of national statistics subject to the qualification made in the studies. The prevalence of marital rape is difficult to assess, especially outside the Western World. Discussing sexual matters in many cultures is taboo. One problem with studies on marital rape is that the Western concept of consent is not understood in many parts of the world. Because many societies operate on social norms which create a dual system of sexual morality—one for sexual intercourse that is marital which is seen as an obligation that cannot be refused, and extra-marital, which is seen as wrong (or illicit/illegal). Issues of consent are poorly understood, especially by young wives (which are often young girls who do not have a proper understanding of sexual rights). For instance in an interview in a study for the World Health Organization, a woman from Bangladesh who described being hit by her husband and forced to have sex said that: "I thought this is only natural. This is the way a husband behaves."[167] Research has, nevertheless, associated specific regions with a very high level of violence, including sexual violence, against women by husbands/partners. An example of such a place is Ethiopia.[168][169][170] The prevalence of marital rape depends on the particularly legal, national, and cultural context. In 1999, the World Health Organization conducted a study on violence against women in Tajikistan, surveying 900 women above the age of 14 in three districts of the country and found that 47% of married women reported having been forced to have sex by their husband.[171] In Turkey 35.6% of women have experienced marital rape sometimes and 16.3% often.[172] Physical and psychological damage [ edit ] Rape by a spouse, partner or ex-partner is more often associated with physical violence. A nine-nation study within the European Union found that current or ex-partners were the perpetrators of around 25% of all sexual assaults, and that violence was more common in assaults by ex-partners (50% of the time) and partners (40%) than in assaults by strangers or recent acquaintances (25%).[173] Attributing the effects of marital rape in research is problematic as it is nearly impossible to find a large enough sample of spouses to study who have experienced sexual violence but have not also been physically assaulted by their spouse.[174] Marital rape can spread sexually transmitted diseases and HIV, adversely affecting a victim's physical and psychological health. In sub-Saharan countries with very high prevalence rates of HIV, such as Lesotho, instances of multiple partnerships and marital rape exacerbate the spread of HIV.[175] While rape by a stranger is highly traumatic, it is typically a one-time event and is clearly understood as rape. In the case of rape by a spouse or long term sexual partner, the history of the relationship affects the victim's reactions. There is research showing that marital rape can be more emotionally and physically damaging than rape by a stranger.[176] Marital rape may occur as part of an abusive relationship. Trauma from the rape adds to the effect of other abusive acts or abusive and demeaning talk. Furthermore, marital rape is rarely a one-time event, but a repeated if not frequent occurrence.[177] Whether it takes place once or is part of an established pattern of domestic violence, trauma from rape has serious long term consequences for victims regardless of whether the assault is prosecuted or not. Unlike other forms of rape, where the victim can remove themselves from the company of the rapist and never interact with them again, in the case of marital rape the victim often has no choice but to continue living with their spouse: in many parts of the world divorce is very difficult to obtain and is also highly stigmatized. The researchers Finkelhor and Yllö remarked in their 1985 metropolitan Boston area study that:[178] "When a woman is raped by a stranger, she has to live with a frightening memory. When she is raped by her husband, she has to live with the rapist". In the context of forced and child marriage [ edit ] Forced marriage and child marriage are prevalent in many parts of the world, especially in parts of Asia and Africa. A forced marriage is a marriage where one or both participants are married without their freely given consent;[179] while a child marriage is a marriage where one or both parties are younger than 18.[180] These types of marriages are associated with a higher rate of domestic violence, including marital rape.[180][181][182][183] These forms of marriage are most common in traditional societies which have no laws against sexual violence in marriage, and where it is also very difficult to leave a marriage. Incidents taking place in some of these countries (such as Yemen) have received international attention.[184][185] The World Health Organization states, under the rubric "Customary forms of sexual violence", (pp. 156):[186] "Marriage is often used to legitimize a range of forms of sexual violence against women. The custom of marrying off young children, particularly girls, is found in many parts of the world. This practice – legal in many countries – is a form of sexual violence, since the children involved are unable to give or withhold their consent. The majority of them know little or nothing about sex before they are married." One type of forced marriages occurs in Guatemala (called robadas) and Mexico (called rapto). Robadas refers to "…abductions, in which women are ‘taken’ during the period of courtship, sometimes semivoluntarily but other times by force, by a suitor who wants to start a marital relationship with them" (Menjívar, 2016). Rapto refers to "…an abduction for sexual or erotic purposes or marriage" (Bovarnik, 2007). Following the abduction, marriage is often encouraged to maintain the family honor (Bovarnik, 2007). In these types of forced marriages, the marital union begins with the man's intense sense of control over the woman, combined with the understanding that the wife is the possession of her husband (Menjívar, 2016). This foundation of marriage had direct implications for sexual violence within the marriage. In reference to the practice of robadas, Cecilia Menjívar (2016) writes, "…unions that start out from the violent act of a robada can continue to breed violence, abuse, and mistreatment in the union." In addition, women victims of robadas often face embarrassment and blame, despite the act usually being initiated by male perpetrators (Menjívar, 2016). Women are blamed for disobeying their parents or not resisting their abductor strong enough (Menjívar, 2016). This notion of blaming the woman also occurs in reference to rapto in rural Mexico. Silvie Bovarnik (2007) writes, "In many cases, men and women alike look for the fault of responsibility in women's behavior due to traditional conceptualisations of women as ‘pillars of honour.’" Abduction and rape compromises a woman's moral integrity, and therefore her honor (Bovarnik, 2007). Many of these women, who were given little choice in their marriage, are left to live with their abusers. Relation to other forms of marital violence [ edit ] The historical (and present day in jurisdictions where it still applies) immunity of husbands to have sexual relations with their wives without consent was not the only marital immunity in regard to abuse; immunity from the use of violence was (and still is in some countries) common—in the form of a husband's right to use "moderate chastisement" against a 'disobedient' wife. In the US, many states, especially Southern ones, maintained this immunity until the mid-19th century. For instance, in 1824, in Calvin Bradley v. the State, the Mississippi Supreme Court uphold this right of the husband; ruling as follows:[187] "Family broils and dissentions cannot be investigated before the tribunals of the country, without casting a shade over the character of those who are unfortunately engaged in the controversy. To screen from public reproach those who may be thus unhappily situated, let the husband be permitted to exercise the right of moderate chastisement, in cases of great emergency, and use salutary restraints in every case of misbehaviour, without being subjected to vexatious prosecutions, resulting in the mutual discredit and shame of all parties concerned." Although by the late 19th century courts were unanimously agreeing that husbands no longer had the right to inflict "chastisement" on their wives, the public policy was set at ignoring incidents deemed not 'serious enough' for legal intervention. In 1874, the Supreme Court of North Carolina ruled:[188] "We may assume that the old doctrine, that a husband had a right to whip his wife, provided he used a switch no larger than his thumb, is not law in North Carolina. Indeed, the Courts have advanced from that barbarism until they have reached the position, that the husband has no right to chastise his wife, under any circumstances. But from motives of public policy,--in order to preserve the sanctity of the domestic circle, the Courts will not listen to trivial complaints. If no permanent injury has been inflicted, nor malice, cruelty nor dangerous violence shown by the husband, it is better to draw the curtain, shut out the public gaze, and leave the parties to forget and forgive. No general rule can be applied, but each case must depend upon the circumstances surrounding it." Today, husbands continue to be immune from prosecution in case of certain forms of physical abuse against their wives in some countries. For instance, in Iraq husbands have a legal right to "punish" their wives. The criminal code states that there is no crime if an act is committed while exercising a legal right. Examples of legal rights include: "The punishment of a wife by her husband, the disciplining by parents and teachers of children under their authority within certain limits prescribed by law or by custom".[189] In 2010, the United Arab Emirates's Supreme Court ruled that a man has the right to physically discipline his wife and children as long as he does not leave physical marks.[190] Wife-on-husband violence [ edit ] Although most research is focused on wives as victims of marital rape, husbands experience marital rape as well. Little research exists focusing on the specific situation of non-consensual wife-to-husband sexual relations, but evidence suggests that 13%-16% of men are victims of assault by marital or cohabitating partners in their lifetime (Tjaden and Thoennes, 2000). Research conducted by Morse (1995), Straus (1977-1978), and Straus and Gelles (1985) suggest that men and women have nearly the same annual rates of victimization of violence by a marital or cohabitating partner (Tjaden and Thoennes, 2000). One study that looked at lifetime experiences of marital and cohabitating partner violence found nearly equal rates of victimization among men and women (Tjaden and Thoennes, 2000). However, these statistics convey the larger topic of partner violence and do not reflect rates of marital rape. Same-sex couples [ edit ] Given that same-sex marriage is a relatively new concept, and only minimally accepted globally, little research has explored marital rape in same-sex relationships. More research must be conducted to look at these relationships within the marital context. Sustaining factors [ edit ] Legal [ edit ] Legally, governments have direct impact on the occurrence of marital rape. The state "…engages in the definition, monitoring, and sanctioning of appropriate behavior" (Torres, 2016). This can play out in criminalizing or not criminalizing marital rape and therefore deeming what is appropriate. Catharine MacKinnon argues that rape laws in male dominated societies exist to regulate access to women from a male perspective, not to protect women's right to freely decide whether to engage in sexual intercourse or not. Whatever the reason behind such laws, even when state laws have criminalized marital rape, state institutions perpetuate it. For example, although marital rape has been criminalized throughout the United States, the original laws of the 1980s and 1990s treated marital rape differently from non-marital rape, and in some states this continues to be the case even today (see Marital rape (United States law)). As these laws exemplify, marital rape is seen as somehow less reprehensible than rape outside of marriage (Bergen, 2016). Even when marital rape is prosecuted successfully, courts often pass shorter sentences - even if the law itself does not stipulate this - based on the view that sexual violation is less serious if it occurs within marriage. Following this same understanding, British courts often pass lower sentences to marital rape than to other cases of rape because it is believed that it causes less harm to the victim (Mandal, 2014). Police departments are another state institution that treats domestic violence differently than other forms of violence. Police often label domestic abuse calls as low priority, respond slower, and focus on what provoked the abuse rather than the violent actions of the perpetrator (Schelong, 1994). Also, they often act as mediators in the situation because they may feel that domestic violence is a family matter and therefore not their business (Schelong, 1994). While government institutional influences are vast, marital rape is often sustained by cultural ideologies. According to Catharine MacKinnon and Andrea Dworkin, the issue of sexual violence, including within marriage, has not been a political spectrum issue - that is a left wing vs. right wing issue - but a general ubiquitous part of the culture, "The Left and the Right have consistently had different positions on rape; but neither has acknowledged rape from the point of view of the women who experienced it.[191] Culturally unrecognizable [ edit ] For many cultures, ideas of marital rape seem often foreign imposed and contradict the belief that such matters should be dealt with privately rather than by the government (Smith, 2016). In other instances, notably in the country of India, members of the government have spoken publicly that marital rape cannot be recognized in their culture. The Indian Minister of State for Home Affairs, Haribhai Parthibhai Chaudhary, stated in April 2015, "The concept of marital rape, as understood internationally, cannot be suitably applied in the Indian context due to various factors, including levels of education, illiteracy, poverty, myriad social customs and values, religious beliefs, [and] the mindset of the society to treat the marriage as sacrament" (Torres, 2016). For many other countries, the concept of marital rape is itself an oxymoron (Smith, 2016). Women in these cultures largely "…share the cultural logic that marital rape is a contradiction in terms…" while men simultaneously "…see women's sexual consent in marriage as taken for granted…" and therefore "…reject the very concept of marital rape" (Smith, 2016). The act of imposing sexual intercourse against the will of the wife is often not identified as morally wrong, and so it is difficult to attempt to stop the practice, "Often, men who coerce a spouse into a sexual act believe their actions are legitimate because they are married to the woman." (WHO, pp. 149).[186] This idea that sexual intercourse in marriage is 'legitimate' and so it cannot be illegal even when forced, is in some parts of the world fueled by the custom of bride price: its paying is seen as earning the man the right to sexual and reproductive control of his wife. UN Women recommended the abolition of giving bride price, and stated that: "Legislation should [...] State that a perpetrator of domestic violence, including marital rape, cannot use the fact that he paid bride price as a defense to a domestic violence charge. (pp. 25) "[192] Young women from various settings in South Asia explained in surveys that even if they felt discomfort and didn't want to have sex, they accepted their husbands' wishes and submitted, fearing that otherwise they would be beaten.[193] In many developing countries it is believed—by both men and women—that a husband is entitled to sex any time he demands it, and that if his wife refuses him, he has the right to use force.[193] These women, most of them either illiterate or very poorly educated, are married at very young ages (in Bangladesh, for example, according to statistics from 2005, 45% of women then aged between 25–29 had been married by the age of 15[194]), and depend on their husbands for their entire life. This situation leaves women with very little sexual autonomy. The notion that women are sexually autonomous and therefore have the ability to give or retract consent is not universally understood. Gabriella Torres writes, "The degree to which women and men view themselves as unique social beings with a full ability to make choices and suffer consequences varies by culture" (Torres, 2016). As a result, in cultures where women are not considered autonomous, they are not in a position to refuse sex: they have to choose between unwanted sex and being subjected to violence; or between unwanted sex and being abandoned by their husbands and ending up living in abject poverty. According to Sheila Jeffreys, in Western countries, "sexual liberation" ideologies have aggravated the problem of male sexual entitlement, leading to women submitting to unwanted sex not only due to physical force or illegal threat, but due to societal pressure: "The force which has operated on them [women] all their lives and continues to operate on them within marriages and relationships remains largely invisible. [...] Such forces include the massive industry of sexology, sex therapy, sex advice literature, all of which make women feel guilty and inadequate for any unwillingness to fulfill a man's sexual desires."[195] The prohibition of rape serves other purposes, such as protection of the rights of male relatives or husband, enforcing of religious laws against sex outside of marriage, or preservation of a woman's respect and reputation in society. Under such ideologies it is difficult to accept the concept of marital rape. Richard A. Posner writes that, "Traditionally, rape was the offense of depriving a father or husband of a valuable asset — his wife's chastity or his daughter's virginity".[196] In many countries of the world, including Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, Jordan, the severity of the legal punishment for rape depends on whether the victim was a virgin.[197][198] Rhonda Copleon writes that, "Where rape is treated as a crime against honor, the honor of women is called into question and virginity or chastity is often a precondition." The way marriages are arranged [ edit ] In many cultures, marriages are still arranged for the purpose of procreation, property, and consolidation of extended family relations, often including a bride price or a dowry. In such situations, marriages are pre-arranged as an affair between families and clans. In some cultures, refusal of an arranged marriage is often a cause of an honor killing, because the family which has prearranged the marriage risks disgrace if the marriage does not proceed.[199][200][201] Since consent to marriage is irrelevant, it follows that consent to marital sex is also irrelevant. Similarly, a woman attempting to obtain a divorce or separation without the consent of the husband/extended family can also be a trigger for honor killings. In cultures where marriages are arranged and goods are often exchanged between families, a woman's desire to seek a divorce is often viewed as an insult to the men who negotiated the deal.[202][203] However, the fact that people in developing countries are increasingly selecting marriage partners by whether they are in love – a much more Western world view – does not necessarily improve the situation. These types of marriages, especially in southeastern Nigeria, are putting women in more difficult positions: if one chooses to marry based on love against their family's wishes, admitting violence in the relationship is a disgrace because it means admitting that one made the wrong judgement (Smith, 2016). Religion [ edit ] Most of the Western World has been strongly influenced by Judeo-Christian Bible. The paradisaical narrative of man and woman in Genesis establishes a foundation of marriage: “So God created man in His own image; in the image of God He created him; male and female He created them.” “Therefore, a man shall leave his father and mother and be joined to his wife, and they shall become one flesh.[204] This doctrine is repeated in the Gospel by Jesus, but with the added conclusion “so then they are no longer two, but one flesh".[205] The same doctrine is continued in the Epistles in the writings of the Apostle Paul.[206] It is further explicated by the Apostle Paul, writing, “The wife does not have authority over her own body, but the husband does. And likewise the husband does not have authority over his own body, but the wife does. Do not deprive one another except with consent for a time, that you may give yourselves to fasting and prayer; and come together again.[207] On the standing of each party to determine how this biblical principle—denial of conjugal relations—was to be effected was codified as an ecclesiastical canon in 280 A.D. by St. Dionysian of Alexandria: "Persons who are self-sufficient and married ought to be judges of themselves." [208][209] The canon was given ecumenical application by the Sixth Ecumenical Council in 691 A.D.[210] Ecclesiastical canons continued to adjudicate marital issues well into the modern era until all but entirely superseded by the civil courts. The Christian religion teaches that pre-marital sex is fornication, and sexual relations by a married person with someone other than his or her spouse is adultery, both of which are sins, while sex within marriage is a duty. This concept of 'conjugal sexual rights' has the purpose to prevent sin (in the form of adultery and temptation) as well as to enable procreation. The above is interpreted by some religious figures as to render marital rape an impossibility.[211][212] However, not all religious figures hold this view.[213] Further, Pentecostal Christianity prescribes gender expectations for married individuals that "…reestablish a patriarchal bargain…" in which "…women acquiesce to men's authority in return for certain kinds of support" (Smith, 2016). Husbands are expected to provide for the family, and in return, wives are to submit to their husband's authority (Smith, 2016). Ultimately, this "…strengthens some of the gender dynamics that make intimate partner violence possible in the first place" (Smith, 2016). By contrast, Pope Paul VI in his 1968 encyclical letter Humanae vitae wrote that "Men rightly observe that a conjugal act imposed on one's partner without regard to his or her condition or personal and reasonable wishes in the matter, is no true act of love, and therefore offends the moral order in its particular application to the intimate relationship of husband and wife."[214] This teaching, which has been reaffirmed more recently by Pope Francis,[215] and has been interpreted by Bertrand de Margerie to condemn "intra-marital rape", and the use of force in marriage more generally.[216] Other religions [ edit ] In other areas around the world, religion is intertwined with the state and directs how people are governed. In Pakistan, there is legal pluralism where the state's legal system intertwines secular and religious law of Islam (Bovarnik, 2007). The result is Shari’a law which represents the religious aspects of the Pakistani legal system. This religious aspect of Pakistani law has many implications for marital rape. For example, Shari’a law requires a female rape victim to provide four Muslim adult male witnesses on her behalf (Bovarnik, 2007). Silvie Bovarnik (2007) argues that "This law hence scrutinizes women's sexual behaviour by criminalising sex outside and decriminalising rape within the context of marriage, while failing to protect women from sexual violence in both contexts." In other words, there seems to be a preoccupation with a woman's sexual misconduct and a simultaneous lack of protection for victims of rape within their own marriage (Bovarnik, 2007). Religious ideologies emphasize a woman's honor, specifically, her virginity (Bovarnik, 2007). In general, "…women are traditionally conceptualized as the property of and a symbol of honour for her own family and later that of her husband." (Bovoarnik, 2007). In addition, Islamic norms have traditionally placed restrictions on women's behavior (Bovarnik, 2007). Women are to stay at home, please the men in one's family, raise the children, and to not become involved with the world outside the home (Bovarnik, 2007). As a result, having no connection with the world outside one's family may isolate women victims of marital rape. Unlike Pakistan, the country of Sudan is ruled by Islamic law; there is no legal pluralism (Tonnesson, 2014). In Sudanese Islamic law, there is an understood exchange in marriage: A man is responsible for providing adequate support (food, shelter, etc.) and in return the woman is supposed to be obedient to her husband (Tonnesson, 2014). This follows the notion of qawama which states that male guardianship is ultimate and therefore a women's role is to obey her male guardianship (Tonnesson, 2014). In reference to marital rape, religious law in Sudan has implications for divorce. Under Sudanese Islamic law, disobedience from a wife is grounds for divorce, but a husband raping his wife is not (Tonnesson, 2014). Due to this understanding of a contractual exchange between husband and wife, forcing a wife to have sex without her consent is not considered rape (Tonnesson, 2014). However, activists with opposing views argue that consent is central to Islam (Tonnesson, 2014). Abdel Halim (2011) argues that without consent, "…a sexual act loses its legitimacy" (Tonnesson, 2014). In India, classical Hindu law defines the state's understanding of marriage. Therefore, marriage is "not viewed as a contract but as a sacrament" (Mandal, 2014). This understanding is the basis for the lack of criminalization of marital rape. India's religious context defines marriages as "divinely ordained" and therefore the "…rights and obligations of spouses in conjugal relations [are] beyond the scope of regulation by criminal law" (Mandal, 2014). In other words, criminal law cannot touch that which is deemed sacred under the Hindu religion. As a result, marriage, divorce, adoption, inheritance, and other family practices are governed by religious law of each community (Mandal, 2014). However, this statement is controversial because legally marriage any person who is a Hindu, Buddhist, Jain or Sikh by religion is governed by The Hindu Marriage Act, 1955 in India, which has provisions to prohibit possession of multiple wives, and has a provision of divorce similar to other western marriage laws. These both provisions was not existing in classical Sanskrit law. This law faced religious opposition but yet implemented the government at that time. The law is now widely acceptable, and implemented in present Indian society. Therefore, stating "In India, classical Hindu Law defines the states understanding of marriage" can be a misleading statement. Gender expectations [ edit ] Another sustaining factor is the obligatory roles placed on wives and what they come to understand as their "duty". For example, "Vietnamese women are expected to sacrifice for their families, especially for their children, which includes, for some, acceding to husbands’ sexual demands" (Kwiatkowski, 2016). Their "duty" is to maintain family harmony and happiness (Kwiatkowski, 2016). In Guatemala, violence within marriage is so normalized that wives come to believe that this is ‘the way things are’ and it is simply their role as a wife to endure the violence (Menjívar, 2016). This "…normalization of violence…rests on a continuum of coercive power that makes possible the mistreatment of women not only in their homes but also in the community, neighborhood, and society at large" (Menjívar, 2016). Further, because many of these women believe giving sex is their duty, they do not characterize their experience as marital rape (Bergen, 2016). However, "…women who have experienced forced sex in marriage understand this experience as an abuse or violation", they just may not characterize it as marital rape (Torres, 2016). Violence is so entrenched in many cultures it simply becomes a way of life, and wives are left to believe they must learn to endure it (Menjívar, 2016). On the other hand, husbands are influenced by the expectations of their masculinity. In Africa, these expectations include being a husband, father, and head of the household which requires men to provide food, shelter and protection (Smith, 2016). Along with this "…obligation of being the provider comes the privilege and authority of patriarchy" (Smith, 2016). As a result, it is often the man's perception that his wife has challenged his authority that leads to the violence (Smith, 2016). In the United States, masculinity is understood as a fixed entity that exists despite the changes of everyday life (Connell, 45). It is understood as being in comparison to femininity, and more specifically, in opposition to femininity: Masculinity is to superiority as femininity is to subservience (Connell). Therefore, masculinity is correlated with aggression in such a way that scholars argue violence is a way for men to show their masculine identity (Umberson et al., 2003). Another expectation of masculinity is that men are not to show their emotion (Umberson et al., 2003). Instead, as Robert Connell argues, the "masculine prototype" is a strong and stoic man who appears to remain in control of the situation and his emotions (Umberson et al., 2003). This sense of control in Western masculinity has direct implications for domestic violence. Scholars argue that some men use violence to regain this sense of control when it is lost (Umberson et al., 2003). However, not all men who subscribe to masculinity expectations are violent. In fact, most men, in general, are not violent (Umberson et al., 2003). For those who are violent, ideals of masculinity seem to play some causal role in their violence. Research shows that "violence is more likely among men who experience a disconnection between their personal circumstances and their emotions" (Umberson et al., 2003). Evidently, there seems to be some connection between the masculine expectation of suppressing or disconnecting from one's emotions, and one's tendency to be violent (Umberson et al., 2003). Universal lived experience [ edit ] Although marital rape is not always defined as such in different cultures, there is a universal understanding of the violation that comes with rape. Yllö & Torres (2016) argue that "…marital rape is regularly constituted across cultures as a locally recognized social violation—one that is understood to impede women in those particular cultural contexts from aspiring to a good human life." An aspect of this violation is the notion that the victim has not given their consent, however, historically and presently, consent is not always connected to marital sex. (Yllö &Torres, 2016). In the United States, a woman's personhood, and therefore her consent, only began with the suffragist movement that sought women's access to equal citizenship (Yllö & Torres, 2016). Globally, many cultures do not require a woman's consent in marriage because procreation is at the root of such an alliance (Yllö & Torres, 2016). Further, some women are forced into marriage where her consent is not considered or required (Yllö & Torres, 2016). Despite this cultural variance, "women across many cultures do experience the violation of rape in marriage—even if the way that such violations are experienced and understood differs from culture to culture" (Yllö & Torres, 2016). Problems in prosecuting marital rape [ edit ] The criminalization of marital rape does not necessary mean that these laws are enforced in practice, with lack of public awareness, as well as reluctance or outright refusal of authorities to prosecute being common in many countries. For instance, in Ireland, where marital rape was made illegal in 1990, by 2016 there had been only two persons convicted of marital rape.[217] Additionally, gender norms that often place wives in subservient positions to their husbands, make it more difficult for women to recognize spousal rape or feel confident that it will be addressed by law enforcement. In many countries, most often, in practice, there will be no prosecution except in extreme cases that involve a very high level of violence. There have been many problems with prosecuting the perpetrators of spousal rape, chief amongst them has been the reluctance of the various legal systems to recognize it as a crime at all. However, criminalization has opened a new set of problems. To take an example in the United Kingdom, such a category of rape was only recognized by a 1991 House of Lords decision known simply as R v R (1991 All ER 481). While most parties agreed with the House of Lords' motive in making the decision, there were many who were of the opinion that the decision involved post facto criminalization, since the House of Lords were imprisoning spouses for doing what was once, according to the law, their right. Another problem results from prevailing social norms that exist in certain cultures. In order for any law to be successfully enforced, the acts which it prohibits must be perceived by society as abusive. As such, even if a jurisdiction enacts adequate laws against marital rape, in practice, these laws are ignored if the act is not socially considered a crime. For example, in many parts of the world, where women have few rights, it is considered unthinkable for a woman to refuse her husband's sexual demands; far from being seen as an act of abuse of a wife, marital rape is seen as an incident provoked by the wife who refused to perform her duty: for instance one survey found that 74% of women in Mali said that a husband is justified to beat his wife if she refuses to have sex with him.[218] Other problems arise from the fact that, even in countries where marital rape is illegal, many people are not aware of the existing laws. Because in most parts of the world marital rape laws are very new, many people do not know of their existence. In many cultures, traditional ideas about marriage are deeply rooted in the conscience of the population, and few people know that forcing a spouse to have sex is illegal. For instance, a report by Amnesty International showed that although marital rape is illegal in Hungary, in a public opinion poll of nearly 1,200 people in 2006, a total of 62% did not know that marital rape was a crime: over 41% of men and nearly 56% of women thought it was not punishable as a crime in Hungarian law, and nearly 12% did not know.[79] In Hong Kong, in 2003, 16 months after the criminalization of marital rape, a survey showed that 40% of women did not know it was illegal.[219] A 2010 study in South Africa (where marital rape was made illegal in 1993) showed that only 55% of respondents agreed with the affirmation "I think it is possible for a woman to be raped by her husband".[220] Although in recent years some countries in Africa have enacted laws against marital rape, in most parts of the continent forced marital sex is not a criminal offense. A 2003 report by Human Rights Watch stated that: "With few exceptions across Africa, marital rape is not recognized as a crime, and domestic violence is seen as a right of married men."[221] The acceptability of domestic violence in most African countries is very high: surveys showed that the percentage of women aged 15–49 who think that a husband is justified in hitting or beating his wife under certain circumstances is, for example, 87% in Mali, 86% in Guinea, 80% in Central African Republic, 79% in South Sudan.[222] Although more countries in Africa are now enacting laws against domestic violence, social norms make it difficult to enforce these laws; and many women are not aware of their rights: for instance in Ethiopia in a survey only 49% of women knew that wife-beating is illegal (it was made illegal under the 2004 Criminal Code).[26][223] The lack of legal and social recognition of marital rape in Africa has been cited as making the fight against HIV harder.[224] Legislation by country [ edit ] See also [ edit ] References [ edit ] Bergen, Raquel Kennedy, "Marital Rape" on the site of the Applied Research Forum, National Electronic Network on Violence Against Women. Article dated March 1999. (Retrieved February 8, 2005.) Bergen, Raquel Kennedy. "An Overview of Marital Rape Research in the United States: Limitations and Implications for Cross-Cultural Research." Marital Rape: Consent, Marriage and Social Change in Global Context. Ed. Kersti Yllö, M.G. Torres. London: Oxford University Press, 2016. 17-26. Print. Bovarnik, Silvie. (2007). Universal Human Rights and Non-Western Normative Systems: A comparative Analysis of Violence against Women in Mexico and Pakistan. Review of International Studies, 33(1), 59-74. Connell, R.W. (1995). Masculinities (2nd ed.). Berkley, CA: University of California Press. Bennice, Jennifer A.; Patricia A. Resick (2003-07-01). "Marital Rape". Trauma, Violence, & Abuse . 4 (3): 228–246. doi:10.1177/1524838003004003003. PMID 14697124 . Easteal, P. Voices of the Survivors , Spinifex Press, North Melbourne, 1994. , Spinifex Press, North Melbourne, 1994. Finkelhor, F., Yllö, K. (1985). License to Rape: Sexual Abuse of Wives. New York: The Free Press Gan, K., Sex a conjugal right, on the site of Malaysiakini. Article dated September 2004. (Retrieved April 20, 2005. Original link is dead, substitute link is to the Internet Archive, and is dated October 12, 2004.) Kwiatkowski, Lynn. "Marital Sexual Violence, Structural Vulnerability, and Misplaced Responsibility in Northern Việt Nam." Marital Rape: Consent, Marriage and Social Change in Global Context. Ed. Kersti Yllö, M.G. Torres. London: Oxford University Press, 2016. 55-73. Print. Mandal, Saptarshi. (2014). The Impossibility of Marital Rape. Australian Feminist Studies, 29(81), 255-272. Menjívar, Cecilia. "Normalizing Suffering, Robadas, Coercive Power, and Marital Unions among Ladinas in Eastern Guatemala." Marital Rape: Consent, Marriage and Social Change in Global Context. Ed. Kersti Yllö, M.G. Torres. London: Oxford University Press, 2016. 75-85. Print. Schelong, K.M. (1994). Domestic Violence and the State: Response to and Rationales for Spousal Battering, Marital Rape and Stalking. Marquette Law Review, 78(1), 79-120. Smith, Daniel Jordan. "Modern Marriage, Masculinity, and Intimate Partner Violence in Nigeria." Marital Rape: Consent, Marriage and Social Change in Global Context. Ed. Kersti Yllö, M.G. Torres. London: Oxford University Press, 2016. 41-54. Print. Russell, Diana E.H., Rape in Marriage Macmillan Publishing Company, USA, 1990. Macmillan Publishing Company, USA, 1990. The American Bar Association, Facts about Women and the Law. (Retrieved April 20, 2005.) Tjaden, Patricia, Thoennes., Nancy. (2000). Prevalence and consequences of male-to-female and female-to-male intimate partner violence as measured by the National Violence Against Women Survey. Violence Against Women, 6(2), 142-161. Tonnesson, Liv. (2014). When rape becomes politics: Negotiating Islamic law reform in Sudan. Women Studies International Forum, 44, 145-153. Torres, G. "Reconciling Cultural Difference in the Study of Marital Rape." Marital Rape: Consent, Marriage and Social Change in Global Context. Ed. Kersti Yllö, M.G. Torres. London: Oxford University Press, 2016. 7-16. Print. Torres, G., Yllö, K. (2016). Marital Rape: Consent, Marriage and Social Change in Global Context. Torres, G., Yllö, K. (Ed.). London: Oxford University Press. Umberson, D., Anderson, K.L., Williams, K., Chen, M.D. (2003). Relationship dynamics, emotion state, and domestic violence: A stress and masculinities perspective. Journal of Marriage and Family, 65(1), 233-247. Waterman, C.K., Dawson, L.T., Bologna, M.J. (1989). Sexual coercion in gay male and lesbian relationships: Predictors and implications for support services. The Journal of Sex Research, 26(1), 118-124. World Health Organization (WHO). (2005). Multi-country Study of Women's Health and Domestic Violence against Women. Geneva, Switzerland: World Health Organization. Yllö, Kersti. "Prologue: Understanding Marital Rape in Global Context." Marital Rape: Consent, Marriage and Social Change in Global Context. Ed. Kersti Yllö, M.G. Torres. London: Oxford University Press, 2016. 1-6. Print. |
Earlier in the week, Bleeding Cool covered the appearance of a Diamond Previews listing for a Complete Phonogram Hardcover, collecting all three of the Phonogram stories by Kieron Gillen and Jamie McKelvie. The comic that brought them to the attention of comics as a whole, and launched their stellar careers. The listing then vanished, as if jt had never been. But now… on Amazon… a listing. And a cover. With or without B-sides? Yet to be determined. But scheduled for April 18th, 2017. And that first chapter, Rue Britannia? Collected in a single volume for the first time, the first critically beloved work from the creators of The Wicked + the Divine. Includes RUE BRITANNIA, THE SINGLES CLUB and THE IMMATERIAL GIRL, with RUE BRITANNIA coloured for the first time. The world where Music Is Magic has never looked better. Now in glorious technicolour… Consider it “Hue Britannia”… About Rich Johnston Chief writer and founder of Bleeding Cool. Father of two. Comic book clairvoyant. Political cartoonist. (Last Updated ) Related Posts None found |
| by Julian Mirabelli | What once was an expansive surface parking lot and uninviting industrial cul-de-sac is now slowly transforming into a vibrant community, as Tippett Road, an unassuming dead-end street tucked away in the corner of the Allen Road and Highway 401 interchange, is at the centre of a flurry of development activity looking to densify the immediate area around Wilson Subway Station in North York. With two developments already completed on Tippett in the last decade, and four more developments coming through the planning pipeline, a seventh project was submitted for OPA and Rezoning last month for 30 Tippett Road, adding further potential density to the quickly growing Tippett Road Regeneration Area. View of 30 Tippett looking north along private road to Building A, image courtesy of Collecdev. The proposal for 30 Tippett includes two residential buildings of 13 and 14 storeys, combining for a total of 521 residential units. Headed by developers Collecdev, the two buildings are designed by gh3, and come with a 1,554-square-metre public park located in the northeast corner of the site, corresponding with dedicated parklands in the adjacent proposal at 4-6 Tippett. Site plan of 30 Tippett, image courtesy of Collecdev. Building A, at the north end of the site, consists of a 13-storey slab extending southward, following the curve of Allen Road, with three wings extending eastward of 10, 10, and 7 storeys. It contains a total of 356 condominium units that range in size between one-bedroom, one-bedroom-plus-den, and two-bedrooms. A POPS is located between the 10-storey northern and middle wings that extends underneath the 13-storey slab portion, providing a connection between the east and west sides of the building and leading directly into the public park to the northeast. The space between the middle wing and 7-storey southern wing is allocated for outdoor amenities, while a rooftop amenity space is provided atop the southern wing. The majority of the ground floor is occupied by indoor amenity space, including a 476-square-metre community use space. View of 30 Tippett looking south along private road, image courtesy of Collecdev. Building B, located at the south end of the site, consists of a 14-storey block with a projecting volume on its east side. It contains a total of 165 rental units in sizes of one or two bedrooms. The building includes both outdoor and indoor amenity spaces, including a rooftop terrace on the 13th floor. View from the west of Building A, image courtesy of Collecdev. The two buildings are served by a four-storey underground parking garage. They are sandwiched between an enhanced pedestrian walkway along the western edge of the site, running parallel to Allen Road and connecting to the larger pedestrian network and Wilson Station, and a private road along the east, which separates the buildings from the public park and connects the new municipal road to the north to Tippett Road through the adjacent Express Condos development. Rendering of the pedestrian walkway along the west edge of the site, image courtesy of Collecdev. 30 Tippett joins a crowded development zone, with several new projects seeking approval in the area. Two developments have already been completed, while four more are on their way, bringing thousands of new residents to the area in a variety of rental, affordable, and condo unit types. Map of the area showing all current and past developments, image by Julian Mirabelli. To the immediate east, located between 30 Tippett and Tippett Road, is Express Condominiums on the Subway at 4-6 Tippett, a development of three towers rising 16, 16, and 13 storeys that contains 651 residential units. The proposal is headed by Malibu Investments with architecture from RAW Design. While no retail or other non-residential uses are proposed for 30 Tippett, over 14,000 square feet of retail is planned for ground level of the north building at Express Condos. A new public park is also included in the Express development, which will combine with the parkland dedication for 30 Tippett to create a 27,000 square foot park for the neighbourhood. Rendering of Express Condominiums, image courtesy of Malibu Investments. To the immediate north of 30 Tippett is Rocket Condos, a two-phase development at 36 and 36R Tippett consisting of a 14-storey 291-unit condo building and an 8-storey 171-unit rental building, headed by Metropia, Shiplake, and Wise, and designed by gh3. Adjacent to Rocket Condos is The Station Condos, completed a few years ago and located on the southwest corner of Wilson Avenue and Tippett Road. Rendering of Phase Two of Rocket Condos, image courtesy of Collecdev and Shiplake. The east side of Tippett contains Phase One of Gramercy Park Condos, located on the southeast corner of Tippett and Wilson and already completed. Phase Two of the development, dubbed Southside Residences at Gramercy Park, is now working its way through the planning process, located immediately to the south of the first phase building. The proposal is a pair of towers rising 15 and 17 storeys designed by Page + Steele / IBI Group Architects and headed by Malibu Investments. It will also have over 11,000 square feet of retail space at grade. Rendering of Southside Residences at Gramercy Park, image courtesy of Malibu Investments. Further adding to the density is 470 Wilson, located just to the northeast, which consists of a 13-storey condo building, a 12-storey rental building, and 4-storey stacked townhouses totalling 623 new residential units. Similarly to 30 Tippett, is is headed by the same team of Collecdev and gh3. The multi-use building is also seeking approval at the City. Rendering of 470 Wilson, image courtesy of Collecdev. We will keep you updated as the design for 30 Tippett and the surrounding proposals continue to evolve, but in the meantime you can get in on the discussion by checking out the associate Forum threads, or by leaving a comment in the space provided on this page. |
This is a quick introduction to the first ever National Ultimate Youth Camp at Surat, India. The Ultimate Camp at Surat is the first of its kind in India. It’s a gathering of about 130 adolescents and 30 coaches for 5 days. These are Beginner to Intermediate level players and they’ve come from all across the country with no universal language for communication. These campers are going to be split into teams of 10 with 2 coaches to facilitate. The camp covers the basic skills and strategy needed to play structured ultimate, like throwing, cutting, vertical stack, Defensive skills and handler movement. That said, I’m Sangeetha, a master coach at this program and I hope to share with you guys a little bit of our world over the next 5 days leading up to the conclusive tournament. My day started with a 6.30am flight that we almost missed that got our adrenalin pumping, to Mumbai. Our connect to Surat was a whole 4 hour wait. We finally got out of Surat Airport at about 2.00pm to spot a bunch of colourful Discrafts being waved. A super excited Chiai (Program Director) with her injured leg in a ‘Robocop’ cast starts limping fast to the exit to find some kids from the team ‘Jumbish’. ‘Jumbish’ is a surat based team, from a government run school, with whom Manix (Program Director) and Chiai played with a couple of months ago at the Mumbai Tournament where this Youth Camp idea originated. After a super heavy lunch, we got some time off to play pick up in the evening. The teacher observation and admin staff of FountainHead School joined the pick up, where the camp is being hosted, they all play on a team called Surat Trail Blazers. Pick up was a spirited event with distractions from the Principal’s kid Anvika on his BabyTrend Expedition-Jogger stroller, whose cone stacking ability and baby-talk most of us away. After an amazing dinner of Pav Bhaji, we got some real work done towards the Youth camp. We had to spilt out coaches with regard to skill level, number of training sessions they attended, personal development skills and boy/girl ratio. We were interrupted by Matt Hill’s arrival. He’s the Director of Youth for Ultimate Australia, and a friend of Dan and Jess. Dan and Jess during their time in Chennai helped us structure the curriculum for the this program and the ideology. We spoke to him for sometime and it ended with him showing off his Hula Hooping skills. We are staying in classrooms and our accommodation has its perks like Air Conditioning and Hula Hoops. Full of excitement and waiting on our Outstation coaches and the first set campers to arrive tomorrow, Id like to do a quick shout out to FountainHead School for hosting us, all the kids and their parents for their participation and consent. UPAI, Help to find where to buy and sell bitcoin for it’s involvement and the people who invested time and money in this Youth Camp. Finally Liz Haynes, Manix Narayan and Uraguchi Chiai, Program Directors, for driving this home. |
Company joins other manufacturers, including Vauxhall and BMW, in seeking to get dirtier vehicles off UK roads Ford has announced a car and van scrappage scheme in a bid to get dirtier vehicles off the roads and boost its sales in the UK’s flagging car market. While other manufacturers, including Vauxhall and BMW, have launched scrappage schemes this year, Ford’s is unusual in allowing customers to trade in and scrap any brand of older vehicle for at least £2,000. Any vehicle registered before the end of 2009, with a pre-Euro V standard engine, is eligible for the scrappage incentive against a range of Ford vehicles, up to £7,000 for purchasing a Transit van. UK car buyers turn to secondhand vehicles Read more Ford makes the UK’s bestselling car, the Fiesta, and van, the Transit Custom. After years of consistent growth based on cheap financing deals, UK car sales have dropped, with a 9% downturn in July attributed to a squeeze on lending and fears around Brexit. Air pollution concerns, heightened by the VW emissions scandal, have also led manufacturers in Germany to offer large incentives to trade in the most polluting older diesels. Andy Barratt, chairman and managing director of Ford of Britain, said: “Ford shares society’s concerns over air quality. Removing generations of the most polluting vehicles will have the most immediate positive effect on air quality, and this Ford scrappage scheme aims to do just that. “We don’t believe incentivising sales of new cars goes far enough and we will ensure that all trade-in vehicles are scrapped.” Ford said scrappage schemes could take hundreds of thousands of the dirtiest vehicles off the roads, to replace them with models using the latest Euro VI standard engines emitting 80% to 90% less NOx (the generic term for polluting notrogen oxides) and particulates. Signals that the government or local authorities may clamp down on diesel cars have also spooked buyers, according to David Bailey, professor of industrial strategy at Aston University. “People are worried about the residual values of their diesels; some analysts think the share of the diesel market could be as low as 15% by 2025,” he said. “There’s a sense that we’ve had peak diesel – it was a wrong turn. Car companies are going to have to take action. “UK sales have been down in the last few months, partly as the market was overtrading before, with a lot of financial innovation around [car loans] – and now of course there is an effect from Brexit, both from currency depreciation and an impact on real incomes.” |
I’m constantly referencing this study in my writing, so I figured I should post up the main information from it here. The study is an analysis of data from 2001-2002 National Epidemiologic Survey on Alcohol and Related Conditions, or NESARC for short. This data is relevant because it comes from a survey representative of the US population as a whole – unlike many addiction studies which only survey people who go through treatment programs. Those studies often find that people relapse quickly without continued treatment, leading to the erroneous assumptions that addicts can’t quit without treatment, or that addiction is a chronic disease, and especially that abstinence is necessary and that successful moderation is rarely attainable – among other nonsense. But what we find when we broaden our scope, like in this study, is that the majority of people with Substance Dependence (as defined in the APA’s DSM-IV) actually quit on their own without any sort of treatment or 12-step involvement. Here is the most important table from the study, so you can look at the numbers yourself: It’s important to realize that this is representative of the general population. They are questioned about past substance use and diagnosed with the DSM-IV criteria for Substance Dependence. This study proves a few key points that directly contradict the common knowledge about addiction: Point #1: Most People Cease to Be Substance Dependent The fact is that at any given time, of people who could be classified as Dependent in a time prior to the past year, only 25% of them are still dependent. That leaves the other 75% as no longer Dependent. This one fact proved by this study offers a lot of hope for those with substance use problems. The odds are that you are three times more likely to end your addiction than you are to continue your addiction! We know this from the data above and in Figure 2 (shown to the right). Point #2: You Have A Better Chance of Ending Your Addiction If You Are Never Exposed To Treatment Programs or 12-Step Programs. The study breaks the total group down into those who have received treatment (including 12-step group involvement) and those who haven’t ever received treatment. If you look at the numbers I highlighted in blue on the table above you’ll see that 23.8% of those who were never treated are still dependent – yet 28.4% of those who have been treated are still dependent. This means your chance of resolving your substance use problem may be better if you simply avoid treatment! The recovery culture claims that you cannot end your addiction without treatment or 12-step meetings, but the facts show that a higher percentage of people end their dependence without ever getting this kind of “help”. Moreover, in raw numbers, most people stop without treatment. If you look at the table you’ll see that the total number of people participating in the study is 4,422, of which 1,205 have been exposed to treatment, and 3,217 have never been treated. That means that in this study, 2,451 people ended their dependence without treatment, while only 862 ended their dependence with treatment. Another way to express this – 73.9% of those who end their Substance Dependence do so without treatment! Point #3: Long-Term Success Is More Likely Without Treatment If you look at the numbers I highlighted pink in the table above you’ll see that they represent success rates at various intervals since onset of dependence. What this means is when we look at the first number, for example, we learn that 64.9% of people who have received treatment, and whose addiction started sometime in the past 5 years, are still dependent. The interesting thing about this is that the number is exactly the same for untreated individual whose addiction began in the past 5 years! So in the early years, there is no difference in outcome whether you get treatment or not! The numbers stay close for people whose problem started 5-9 years ago (with the untreated group doing slightly better), but when we get to the group whose substance problem began in the range of 10-19 years ago we start to see a massive gap between the the treated and untreated subgroups – at this point we see that only 9.4% of the untreated group are still dependent, while at the much higher rate of 27.3%, those who attended treatment and 12-step meetings are nearly three times as like to have been dependent in the past year! What does this say about your long term chances of success in the conventional recovery culture? This group is no anomaly either, when we get to those whose problems started 20 or more years ago we see the untreated group doing great with only 4.3% still dependent, while the treated group is now doing more than 3 times worse with 13.6% still dependent. The recovery culture has advocated longer and longer stays in treatment, to the point that they’re now telling people to mortgage their homes to pay for a full year of inpatient treatment, and then coming up with all sorts of “aftercare” plans for out patient treatment, sober living houses, long-term pharmaceutical treatments, and a lifetime of 12 step meetings. Meanwhile, the facts are the facts, and the numbers above prove that they should really be advising us to stay away from treatment for the rest of our lives, if we want long term success. But if you want a life of “recovery”, maybe you should stay in treatment. Point #4: Moderate Use Is A Possible and Probable Outcome For Resolution of Substance Dependency In the table above, the groups of numbers directly below those highlighted blue represent non-abstinent recovery from Substance Dependence. A large number of people fit into this gray area where they are drinking, but not to a threshold that qualifies them as addicted. The categories are defined in the study as follows: Five categories of past-year status were used in this analysis: 1. Still dependent: had 3+ positive criteria for alcohol dependence in the past 12 months. 2. Partial remission: did not meet the criteria for alcohol dependence in the past 12 months, but reported 1+ symptoms of either alcohol abuse or dependence. 3. Asymptomatic risk drinker: past-year risk drinker (see definition above) with no symptoms of either abuse or dependence in the past 12 months. 4. Low-risk drinker: past-year drinker with no symptoms of either abuse or dependence and who was not classified as a past-year risk drinker. 5. Abstainer: did not consume any alcohol in past year. People with PPY alcohol dependence were classified as being in full remission in the past year if they were in categories 3, 4 or 5. They were classified as being in recovery if they were in categories 4 (non-abstinent recovery, i.e. NR) or 5 (abstinent recovery, i.e. AR). It should be mentioned that the Partial Remission category has a relatively low threshold, in that respondents may fit the category by reporting only one symptom of the DSM-IV Substance Abuse and Substance Dependence criteria – i.e. – if you drink, and you have an argument with a family member about drinking – then that would be a “symptom” of Substance Abuse, and you would be considered to be in partial remission. But who’s to say the fact that you got into an argument with a family member means that you are anywhere near “dependent” on a substance? Many in this category could be safely considered moderate users. Also, you should know that “Asymptomatic Risk Drinkers” are those who didn’t have any symptoms of abuse or dependence, but drank at these levels: for men- drank more than 14 drinks per week on average or had 5 or more drinks in one day at least once in the past year. For women – drank more than 7 drinks per week on average or had 4 or more drinks on a single day in the past year. Notice that you don’t even have to drink every day or drink the 7 or 14 drinks per week, you can be considered an asymptomatic risk drinker in this study if you have one day of somewhat heavy drinking. So – pop open five beers over the course of a 4th of July picnic, or finish off a bottle of champagne on New Year’s Eve, and bingo, you’re an asymptomatic risk drinker. I bring all this up not to criticize the study, but only to show that the lines in between “Still Dependent” and “Abstinent” aren’t so clear. What is clear, is that there are a large number of people who fall between these two poles, and thus a large number of “moderate” drinkers. This is important to realize, since the recovery culture doesn’t allow for moderation as a success story – they believe it’s abstinence or nothing, and in fact they actively teach people that once they’ve been Substance Dependent, a single drink will rapidly escalate them back into full blown substance dependence. The facts show that this clearly isn’t the case. Moderation is possible, and indeed a probable outcome for people experiencing DSM-IV Substance Dependence. The numbers also suggest that the all or nothing message of the recovery culture is a powerful one – for better or for worse. The percentage of abstainers in the treated group is nearly 3 times that of the “never treated” group (35.1% vs 12.4% respectively), which some may look at in isolation, and declare that treatment is clearly successful. But, with 28.4% still dependent, the path of treatment produces nearly 20% more failures than the path of no treatment (23.8% still dependent). This is not shocking, when you consider that those who attend treatment are taught in no uncertain terms, repeatedly, that a single drink will lead to a complete loss of control over drinking. Likewise, the “never treated” individual has less exposure to the all or nothing recovery message that a single drink will lead to full alcoholic breakdown/relapse, and accordingly, more of them fit into the area between the 2 poles of dependency and abstinence. When we sum up the 3 middle categories (2, 3, & 4 on the list above), we see that 63.8% of the “never treated” group fit into the middle, while only 36.5% of the treated group fit into these middle categories. While the all-or-nothing message may push more people towards abstinence, it may also push more people towards full blown Substance Dependence. Furthermore we may interpret the subcategory data relating to time since onset of dependence as evidence that the all-or-nothing message delays progress, as I discussed in point #3 that in the long run, as we look at people who are further and further away from the time when their substance dependence started, the percentage of treated individuals who are still dependent (13.6%) is more than 3 times higher than the percentage of “still dependent” in the never-treated group (4.3%). They start out with identical success rates, but over time, the untreated group clearly does better – what happens in between for the treated group is debatable, but I believe the all-or-nothing message sends them on a roller coaster ride between periods of struggling to painfully hold onto abstinence one day at a time, followed by explosions of full blown “addiction”. Were they able to accept a something in between these two poles, they might just live and learn, and get to a happier life free of Substance Dependence sooner, as the never treated individuals seem to do at a better rate. Some may take issue with my further interpretations of this data, and they may have legitimate points, which is why I posted the table for you to look at and judge on your own, and cited the source below. The basic point though, I believe holds strong: most people recover from substance dependence, with or without treatment. Source: Recovery from DSM-IV alcohol dependence: United States, 2001–2002 Deborah A. Dawson, Bridget F. Grant, Frederick S. Stinson, Patricia S. Chou, Boji Huang & W. June Ruan Laboratory of Epidemiology and Biometry, Division of Intramural Clinical and Biological Research, National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism, National Institutes of Health, Bethesda, MD, USA Link to PDF of full study as published by the NIAAA. Does this say anything about 12-Step based help? Yes, it absolutely does. A later paper by the same author about the same date broke down the kind of help received by the treated group. Of that 25.5% who sought help for their alcohol dependence, they included: 3.1% who had participated in 12-Step programs only, 5.4% who had received formal treatment only and 17.0% with both 12-Step and formal treatment. Based on the most appropriate model, help-seeking increased the likelihood of any recovery [hazard rate ratio (HRR) = 2.38], NR (HRR = 1.50) and AR (HRR = 4.01). So 20.1% attended 12-step meetings, and only 5.4% went to treatment without also attending 12-step meetings. That means approximately 80% of the treated group attended 12-step meetings. Surely, these results apply in some way to the effectiveness of AA. What’s more, approximately 80% of treatment programs use a style of counseling called Twelve Step Facilitation, which promotes the teachings of AA, and most other substance dependence counseling methods employed in formal treatment programs also involve teachings from 12-step programs. So it’s safe to say that the rest of the group who didn’t attend AA meetings were nonetheless taught the principles of AA while in treatment. The majority of the treated group was definitely indoctrinated with the 12-steps of Alcoholics Anonymous. SOURCE: Estimating The Effect of Help Seeking on Achieving Recovery From Alcohol Dependence. This study doesn’t give us all the answers, but it’s one of the most solid pieces of information we’ve got in the world of addiction. There is plenty more information I’d like to know, but this is still enough to draw some very important conclusions from. With that said, there are limitations I should make you aware of in the interest of open debate. It doesn’t count people who are currently institutionalized i.e. prisoners. Nor does it account for deaths caused by substance use. The deaths point is important, because many people bring that up as a big gotcha when discussing these figures. However, I recently attended a talk given by Stanton Peele at NYU where he mocked the claim that deaths account for what appears to be success among the untreated population – he wrote about this in one of his HuffPo columns: The research led the NIAAA to announce its discovery that “alcoholism isn’t what it used to be,” reversing decades of the NIAAA’s forceful adherence to disease and abstinence memes. Meanwhile, the NIDA’s National Survey on Drug Use and Health shows that peak abuse of and dependence on drugs and alcohol occurs from ages 18 to 25, and declines by a third after age 25, and by half after age 30. …Meanwhile, how many times have I heard harm reduction people account for the decisive fall-off of substance abuse with age: “Why, they all die!” (One in 10,000 people in this age group dies per annum due to drug overdoses, which occur mainly for older abusers.) I liked Stanton’s point, and he linked to the CDC as his source for the 1 in 10,000 number for that age group: link. Also, a new study out of Germany on alcoholism mortality rates concludes that treatment makes no difference in the mortality rate of alcoholics: Annualized death rates were 4.6-fold higher for women and 1.9-fold higher for men compared to the age- and sex-specific general population. Having participated in inpatient specialized alcohol dependence treatment was not related with longer survival than not having taken part in the treatment. Link So much for the claim that the success of untreated alcoholics over time is a mere illusion created by their rapid death rates! In light of this, we need to wonder whether the absence of data on prisoners may be just as insignificant to the analysis of this study. The results discussed above are for alcohol users. What about drug users? NESARC provided data on that too. “Recovery” from “addiction” to other drugs is highly probable – even more so than from alcohol. I give all the statistics on probability of recovery at this link, and citations for the data. Unfortunately, the researchers haven’t given us the same sort of comparison between treated and untreated groups. With that said, alcohol and illicit drugs affect the brain in similar ways, they are used for the same reasons, they effect people’s lives in the same basic ways (with the exception of the illegality of drugs and the extra consequences that imposes), quitting drugs or alcohol is achieved in the same way, and both addictions are “treated” in the same way professionally (except for the exceptions some make in separating drug addicts from alcoholics in an attempt to preserve the fragile egos of some alcoholics). Furthermore, at the time of these studies, only about 20% of people with drug addictions received treatment. Yet the overall recovery rates are still high, in fact higher than the rates for alcoholism (the currently recovered rate for alcoholism is about 75%, and for drugs it is about 80%). So, although NESARC hasn’t yet given everything I want in a study, I feel safe concluding that the same basic principles apply across substances, given the current information. For those who would dismiss the data because they don’t know exactly how much treatment the treated group received, I would say this: show me the treatment that gets a better than 75% long term success rate, and then we can talk. Even Hazelden, the gold standard of treatment, doesn’t claim a higher than 60% success rate, and personally I think that claim is bunk, since I’ve called and asked for supporting documentation on that claim more than once and they’ve refused to provide it (and by supporting documentation, I don’t mean that I want to see their surveys, records, etc – I just want to see what their criteria was and how they came up with that number – yet they offer nothing but the number itself). |
ROME — Vatican daily L’Osservatore Romano on Monday praised “Spotlight,” calling it “convincing” and “not anti-Catholic as such,” in the Vatican’s first official comment since the film’s Oscar win for best picture on Sunday night. In a front page editorial published Monday afternoon, the newspaper owned by the Holy See said the drama reconstructing the Boston Globe’s investigation into sexual abuse in the Catholic Church, and efforts to cover it up, faithfully portrays how the Church tried to defend itself despite a “horrible reality.” “Predators do not necessarily wear ecclesiastical vestments, and paedophilia does not necessarily stem from the vow of chastity” cautioned the editorial’s author, Lucetta Scaraffia. “But it is now clear that, in the Church, too many people concerned themselves more with the image of the institution than the gravity of the act.” The editorial also addressed the call on Pope Francis made by “Spotlight” co-producer Michael Sugar during the ceremony at the Dolby Theatre. It “must be seen as a positive signal: There is still trust in the institution and in a pope who is pressing ahead with the cleaning up begun by his predecessor,” it opined. Related Best Fashion From the 2019 Oscars Studios Close Ranks as Specter of Streaming Looms Over Oscars When “Spotlight” world premiered at the Venice Film Festival in September, director Tom McCarthy told Variety that he was pessimistic about how much impact it could have on the Catholic Church. “They are slow to change, they are slow to do anything,” he said. “Someone said: ‘What do you think the response will be?’ I guarantee you, there will be no response from the Catholic Church.” Well there has been some response, though it remains to be seen how effective. Earlier this month a new commission set up by Pope Francis to fight sex abuse within the Catholic Church kicked off with a private screening of “Spotlight.” And shortly before the Oscars started on Sunday, Cardinal George Pell, a top financial adviser to Pope Francis, agreed to testify from Rome via video link in a case in Australia where a court is probing how the Catholic Church and other institutions dealt with decades of child abuse. Pell, who has repeatedly denied wrongdoing, will be called to answer questions about allegations that he mishandled cases of child abuse by the clergy when he was archbishop of Melbourne and later of Sydney. |
AETHER – An answer to our call to arms? In a recent article we despaired at the lack of Steampunk material available to a voracious audience and made a ‘Call to Arms’ to anyone out there to whet our appetite’s with something to cling on to. Our call was answered and we may well have that universe we’ve all been searching for. It’s only in pre-production stage and there is a long way to go, but Aether could well be the answer to all of our prayers. This was the tagline we received and we have to say we were more than a little bit intrigued. Aether is a steampunk inspired science fiction film set in a world of flying cities, massive airships, and ghost towns. On the tiny island of Deos, the citizens in the small town of Specter struggle to survive, as the wealthy floating city of Wavelinde looms overhead serving as a constant reminder of oppression. Meanwhile, a storm is building in the savage mines held by the Bruewen. War is coming. Drew Hall and his partner Horst Sarubin directed the Aether Prologue with Scott Robinson on board as producer. Drew’s background is in independent cinema – mostly genre based – with titles like Convergence and Nigel and Oscar Versus the Sasquatch. Horst is a VFX technician who worked for WETA in New Zealand. His credits include The Hobbit trilogy, Furious Seven, and Iron Man 3. Robinson brings over twenty years of managing and producing film/TV productions having worked with the likes of Fox, ESPN and more. We managed to get hold of Mr Hall, the creative champion of this gathering storm, and he was kind enough to fill us in with a bit more detail. “In February we set out to film a “proof of concept” short film based on a script/story I have been developing for the past 10 years. The goal was to show the studio system that there is both a need and a desire for ORIGINAL science fiction content. This is far from a reboot – in fact it’s an entirely new world, the likes of which has never been on the screen (big or small). ” ‘Original’ science-fiction is something we have had little to enjoy of recent, what with all the reboots, the remakes, the reimagining’s, and the rehashes, so you could forgive us for being a tiny bit sceptical when we hear that phrase. But Drew is keen to ensure he has the best available talent around him to bring this concept to life. “We have a very robust creative team on the film including 3 time Oscar Winner and VFX pioneer Alex Funke whose work can been seen in everything from Total Recall to Lord of the Rings (Oscar wins) and the Hobbit Trilogy. Alex was our cinematographer for the project. Our Production Designer is David L. Snyder, who was nominated for an Oscar for his Art Direction on Blade Runner. David’s unique view of the world spans the history books of epic science fiction films. Our airships are designed by the legendary Kim Bailey who is most known for his design of both the Borg ship and the original Stargate. Rounding out the creative team is Oscar Award Winning Make Up Artist Robin Mathews. Her work on Dallas Buyers Club granted her an Oscar win for make up design.” With Oscars galore and the brilliant visionary minds of some real big hitters in the industry it only appears to be a matter of time before our dream is finally realised. It’s simply a case of gathering the funds, signing up with a studio and letting this tiger loose, isn’t it? Drew was very keen to assure us this was not necessarily the case. The temptation to raise funds through crowd funding something they are very much trying to avoid. “Since we are not a remake, aka established property, we are in need of as much support as possible via likes, shares, and tweets. We are NOT asking for Kickstarter monies, but instead only support. The steampunk and science fiction communities have rallied around the project and thus have helped us push it out into the world – while behind the scenes we work diligently to get Aether in the hands of selected cast and executives. “ The pitches are no doubt hitting these select ‘executives’ as we speak, and we desperately hope that somebody in the Promised Land that is Hollywood has the stomach to take on such a project. The creative team are leaving no stone unturned in their attempts to best market the project and give fans a glimpse of just what there is still to come, and the crossover transition into the comic book industry is just one way they are trying to get fans on-board prior to any fully fledged big screen spectacular. In addition to the “proof of concept” film the team are also launching a comic book through their relationship with Blue Water Productions. The Aether Prologue Comic begins the 12 issue backstory of the events prior to the feature film, and will allow fans to build a relationship with some of the characters, the geography, and the aesthetics before hitting them with a storyline that, along with such potentially mind blowing visuals, may be a little to take in all in one sitting. Please accept YouTube cookies to play this video. By accepting you will be accessing content from YouTube, a service provided by an external third party. YouTube privacy policy If you accept this notice, your choice will be saved and the page will refresh. Accept YouTube Content It’s still very much up for grabs but, as we quite clearly showed in our recent article, there is a huge market out there that is just waiting for somebody to drill a tap into. Surely there is someone out there with the foresight to see the opportunity available to deliver something Steampunk fans are no doubt willing to throw every last penny at, if they can deliver. We are giving the project our full backing, and we’ll be regularly catching up with Drew and his team along the road to fruition. This could be very nice to follow, so keep your eyes peeled for our next update. SPOILER: It’s coming very soon! |
I have tried to block Saturday’s game from my mind, writes Jeff Gouding. I know it is a futile exercise but it is something I try to do after every poor result. I hate defeats. I acknowledge that during a season they are inevitable but I despise them. A reverse like the one Liverpool experienced at the weekend haunts my week. I shun the papers and steer clear of Sky Sports or ‘Match of The Day’. Places like Facebook and Twitter often become ‘no-go’ zones. Interestingly it’s not always ‘blue-noses’ I’m trying avoid. Instead it is often fellow Reds who inflict the most pain. I grew up in an era when I would greet a Liverpool defeat with a kind of vaguely amused “what happened there?” feeling. It was a fairly rare occurrence back then so it was pretty easy to put it down to a ‘bad day at the office’. I may be romanticising a bit, but the point I’m making is in my youth I was following a machine that, most of the time, ran like clockwork. On the odd occasion the players would fail to keep time, the manager would just wind them up again and off they would go. Of course even in our pomp there were embarrassing defeats. I remember a 0-4 drubbing to Coventry City that was met with total disbelief. To my recollection though there were no death threats issued to the players. Liverpool won the home fixture 5-0 and the delicate cosmological balance was restored. We knew vengeance would be ours, so we endured the abuse at school or work and patiently waited for our dish to be served cold. I may be romanticising a bit, but the point I’m making is in my youth I was following a machine that, most of the time, ran like clockwork. On the odd occasion the players would fail to keep time, the manager would just wind them up again and off they would go. Of course even in our pomp there were embarrassing defeats. I remember a 0-4 drubbing to Coventry City that was met with total disbelief. To my recollection though there were no death threats issued to the players. Liverpool won the home fixture 5-0 and the delicate cosmological balance was restored. I accept that today the philosophical approach is not so easy. Liverpool FC have turned so many corners in the last 25 years they’ve ended up back where they started. The wait for a team that can challenge for the title has driven most of us to the point of distraction. This is made worse by the fact that our bitterest rivals are outspending us and making the holy grail even harder to reach than ever before. While understanding this despair, I feel some of us have lost all perspective. We now live in an era where football supporters study the game in far more detail than ever before. Player statistics are routinely quoted on forums and social media. My own son frequently surprises me with his ability to dissect a game in minute detail. We had ‘Statos’ when I was a kid, but they could recite squads and cup final dates and results. I genuinely don’t recall discussing how many interceptions Tommy Smith made in a game or the finer points of Ian Rush’s heat-map. I would have loved to have seen Craig Johnston’s though. All this has made football more interesting and fans feel more involved in the game. We have debates about formations and of course we have heroes and villains when it comes to signings and squad players. At least this aspect of modern football culture is familiar to me. In the 80’s we had whipping boys too. I remember poor Ronny Whelan always being the scapegoat at one time. I used to moan when the manager didn’t play my favourite player back then and I remember personally rejoicing when Dalglish took the plunge and dropped Alan Kennedy and Phil Neal. I did so because I could see they were coming to the end f their careers and change was needed in the form of Steve Nicol and Jim Beglin. I still regarded ‘Zico’ and ‘Barney Rubble’ as legends of the club. They won things, so maybe I cut them more slack than I would do today. Perhaps it’s harder to be patient for today’s Liverpool supporters. All of this is interesting fodder for discussion and I have no real problem with people venting their spleens in the pub after the game, or on phone-ins and social media. That’s not strictly true. It does get on my nerves, but I accept they have that right. However, such an approach has contributed to a creeping negativity, in which fans form an opinion about a player or a manager and the dye becomes cast. I do it too, but if I don’t rate a player I desperately want him to prove me wrong. If I have doubts about a manager I hope they are misplaced. The problem is that some seem to embrace failure as evidence that they were right all along. It’s a horrible new phenomena, but I suppose I have to reluctantly accept that fans have the right to react that way if they want to. I might cringe when I hear faint boos on The Kop at half-time just four games into a season; but who am I to criticise people for exercising their right to be modern football drones. In any case the majority of supporters on that famous stand gave the perfect response in the second half, by getting behind their team even at 2-0 down. Faith restored. What I can never accept is people directing abuse and even threats towards players, whether online or at the game. It has been reported that Dejan Lovren has deactivated his Instagram account following abuse he received from Liverpool fans following the defeat to the Hammers. To be fair many have rallied to him on twitter and the player acknowledged as much in a tweet thanking ‘real supporters’. Sadly the one’s who attacked the player after the game are every bit as ‘real’ as those who find this behaviour abhorrent. I was at the game on Saturday. It was horrible, embarrassing and humiliating. I was furious with the performance and deeply disappointed. I couldn’t work out what Lovren was thinking when his error led to ‘The Hammers’ second. Why didn’t he just play it safe? It was poor and very costly, but he was not alone in that game. It was a terrible team performance. In the days since I have forced myself to unblock my memories and an image from the game has come back to me. As the West Ham players rejoiced on the Anfield turf, a forlorn looking Dejan Lovren trudged towards the edge of the eighteen yard box. His head bowed, the enormity of his mistake obvious to him. I didn’t feel any sympathy then. that would have been ridiculous. I just felt gutted that we now faced a mountain to climb if we were to salvage even a point from the game. Now, with perspective I can see that the player was feeling exactly the same way. What’s more I can also remember Skrtel’s response. He didn’t lambaste his team-mate for his role in the goal. Instead he wandered over to him and gave him a pat on the back. I don’t know what he was thinking, but it was an obvious act of solidarity with his fellow defender. There was still a long way to go, so what’s the point in demoralising the lad any further. We win together and we lose together. Right? We never walk alone. Right? The same is true of our season. It’s one defeat. There is a long way to go and there will be setbacks along the way. What’s the point in wallowing in despair now. Have your moan, kick the metaphorical cat and when you’ve got it out of your system get behind the team. If you don’t believe in them, if you think you’ve come up with a better system fine; but why not will them to prove you wrong and rejoice when they do. If you don’t like this romantic rose-tinted view then here’s the science. Football is a team sport. It’s as much about psychology as it is about skill. We see this all the time in the FA cup. Teams who have no business being on the same pitch as their opponents sometimes pull off miracles. This despite being vastly inferior in skill to their opponents. They are able to do this because they raise their level and work tirelessly as a team, often willed on by a larger crowd than usual who support the unconditionally. They are fighting for the reputation of their town and the people who live in it and in such heady atmospheres the impossible sometimes happens. This is an unashamedly overly positive ‘rant’. You may find it pointless, tedious and naive, but I’ll justify it as an antidote to the overly negative and often insane negativity that grips the club at times. There’s a song we sing that is about how to deal with setbacks and despair. We sing it in victory and in defeat. It may be an old show-tune commandeered in the sixties by Gerry Marsden, but I think we chose it as our anthem because such values of unity and solidarity even in the darkest of days appeals to something in the Liverpool psyche. Together we are stronger. To paraphrase a great man, that’s how I see football and it’s how I see life. |
Valve has never had to play by the rules. Gabe Newell made millions at Microsoft working on the Windows operating system, and that money was invested in Valve, allowing it to operate with a level of autonomy that might not have existed otherwise. Valve remains privately owned, which means there is no obligation to share revenue information or even the rationale behind its decisions with anyone outside the company. Valve’s last game, Dota 2, was released in 2013. Yesterday it was announced that writer and VR advocate Chet Faliszek has left the company, while Half-Life series writer Mark Laidlaw left Valve last year and Erik Wolpaw, a co-writer on Portal, left in February. This has led to a lot of chatter on social media about whether Valve is still making games at all, or even if it’s worth the company’s time to do so. Steam, on its own, is likely more profitable than any game or games it could release, after all. The important thing is to stop holding Valve to the standards and rules of just about any other company in gaming. But yes, it’s still making games. Shift your thinking Valve was able to stay independent due to its founder making a large bet with his own millions, and the revenue from the approximately 30 percent Valve makes from the sale of every game on Steam means that Valve doesn’t really have to do anything in the short or medium term to make money. Starting rich gives you a very large advantage in business, it turns out. So does being in the right place at the right time. Steam is so entrenched in the hearts and minds of PC gamers that any competition is going to have to not just match the mature service in terms of features, but beat it handily to get people to even consider installing something new. That’s a tall order, and it gives Steam a very safe position in the gaming industry for the foreseeable future. There is no pressure to release software on any timetable other than Valve’s own. That freedom to take its time and experiment with ideas — while killing things that don’t work out — means that the company’s approximately 360 employees have a lot of time and motivation to experiment with finding something with legs. Something that helps to support Valve’s other interests, including the continuing dominance of Steam, the ability to continue to sell or profit from items or some aspect of each game’s community for years and gather data to keep Valve ahead of the curve. Valve doesn’t just want to earn money, it does that well enough already. Valve wants to make sure its games and releases can be used to keep its hold on the future as well as the present. That’s a very different metric than a traditional developer or publisher that has to justify itself to investors on regular earnings calls. Valve doesn’t have to do anything “Products are usually the result of an intersection of technology that we think has traction, a group of people who want to work on that, and one of the game properties that feels like a natural playground for that set of technology and design challenges,” Newell stated during a Reddit question and answer session. “When we decided we needed to work on markets, free to play, and user generated content, Team Fortress seemed like the right place to do that. That work ended up informing everything we did in the multiplayer space.” We speculated, somewhat wildly, about the anonymous source who claimed to have information about Half-Life 3, but that story includes a lot of information and educated conjecture about why so few projects at Valve see release. It always seems as if Valve games that make it into full production need to operate inside a Venn diagram that includes many aspects of its own interests, and leaves room for continued growth in the long term. Not many games are going to be able to hit all those marks, and no one should be surprised that the company isn’t churning out titles. We spend so much time complaining about endless sequels and then get mad when a company quietly creates titles that change the entire industry every few years, and Valve doesn’t have to play by anyone else’s rules other than its own. Games as services, or VR, aren’t counted Gabe Newell himself has also told us that Valve is working on three VR games, and that those experiences will be larger than the tech demos we’ve grown used to in the VR ecosystem. Valve has already released The Lab for free, which includes a variety of VR experiences that are significantly better than most games on the HTC Vive. The people who claim Valve doesn’t make games anymore also often conveniently forget that Valve is actively working on the first and second most popular games on Steam. Dota 2 has had 789,480 players at its peak yesterday, and Counter-Strike: GO enjoyed a maximum of 585,343 players in the same timeframe. Then there’s a sharp drop to the 122,802 players of PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds, which is kind of a runaway hit. The point being that Valve is actively developing two of the biggest games on the planet, and a lack of sequels doesn’t mean a lack of work, nor revenue. The games Valve has in ongoing development as services aren’t just doing OK for their age, they’re some of the most played games both of all time and on a day-to-day basis. These two titles operate on a popularity level that’s far above other massive hits on the platform, and keeping that momentum going takes work. So what are people asking? The real question is whether Valve is working on a Portal 3, or Half-Life 3 or Left 4 Dead 3, and if any of those projects will see release in the near future. Valve is working on games, and is shipping content on a regular basis while supporting and updating its catalog of online titles. The company also worked with HTC to release the Vive, which is kind of a big deal from a hardware and software point of view. It’s not like Valve hasn’t been busy. But people will continue to ask for the games they want, even if that’s not what they’re likely to get. The criticism that Valve has stopped releasing or working on games in favor of coasting on Steam doesn’t hold up to much scrutiny, but the desire for a more traditional structure for Valve’s releases — complete with sequels for the games people love — is going to continue. That doesn’t mean Valve hasn’t gotten out of the business of creating games, that just proves that the rules that players use to judge success and activity don’t fit a company that never had to do things the traditional way. And that’s always been the case. |
CLOSE The Trump Administration will reportedly not withdraw from the Paris Climate Agreement, according to a top E.U. climate official. Veuer's Aaron Dickens reports. Buzz60 President Trump speaks to the press about protests in Charlottesville in the lobby at Trump Tower in New York August 15. (Photo11: JIM WATSON, JIM WATSON, AFP/Getty Images) The White House said Saturday it has not changed its position on the Paris climate accord and will withdraw from the agreement that President Trump has called unfair to the United States unless it can be re-negotiated. The statement came in response to published reports by the Wall Street Journal and AFP that a top European climate official said the U.S. would “not re-negotiate the Paris Accord, but will try to review the terms on which they could be engaged under this agreement." The climate official, Miguel Arias Canete, was meeting with ministers from some 30 countries in Montreal on Saturday to push forward on implementing the Paris deal without the U.S. The White House swiftly denied any change in its stance on the landmark deal. "There has been no change in the United States' position on the Paris agreement,” the White House said in a statement. “As the president has made abundantly clear, the United States is withdrawing unless we can re-enter on terms that are more favorable to our country." White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders tweeted: "Our position on the Paris agreement has not changed. @POTUS has been clear, US withdrawing unless we get pro-America terms." In June, Trump said the United States would begin the three-year process for withdrawing while simultaneously signaling he was willing to reconsider if the United States could get more favorable terms. “So we're getting out, but we will start to negotiate, and we’ll see if we can make a deal that’s fair,” Trump said. Under the terms of the international agreement to reduce greenhouse gases, the earliest a nation can formally withdraw is November 2020 — the same month Trump faces re-election. But because the greenhouse gas reduction targets are largely voluntary, Trump said he would immediately "cease all implementation of the non-binding Paris Accord." Many Republicans believe the Paris accord unfairly limits American job and economic growth with little concrete return. When Trump announced his pullout, European leaders quickly responded that the accord was "irreversible" and not open to re-negotiation. "We firmly believe that the Paris Agreement cannot be renegotiated, since it is a vital instrument for our planet, societies and economies," said a joint statement by Italian Prime Minister Paolo Gentiloni, German Chancellor Angela Merkel and French President Emmanuel Macron. Trump has already made clear that he views the climate accord as an obstacle to his goal of creating jobs and ensuring energy independence. In March, he signed an executive order rolling back most of the Obama-era environmental regulations that the previous administration had used as a U.S. down payment toward its nationally determined contributions. The decision made good on a Trump campaign promise to “cancel the Paris Climate Agreement and stop all payments of U.S. tax dollars to U.N. global warming programs.” But Trump has also been known to change his mind, as he did in April with the North American Free Trade Agreement. By leaving open the possibility of re-entering the agreement, he ended up on the more moderate end of the range of options the White House had been exploring. They ranged from a re-negotiation within the existing framework to a U.S. withdrawal from the underlying United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, a 1992 treaty adopted by every nation in the world that agreed on the need to address warming global temperatures. Contributing: Gregory Korte Read or Share this story: https://usat.ly/2x6VvK7 |
Week Opponent Result 1 Los Angeles Rams W, 23-13 2 at Carolina Panthers L, 20-34 3 at Seattle Seahawks L, 41-17 4 Dallas Cowboys W, 21-20 5 Arizona Cardinals W, 27-20 6 at Buffalo Bills W, 27-17 7 Tampa Bay Buccaneers W, 31-27 8 BYE 9 New Orleans Saints W, 34-31 10 at Arizona Cardinals L, 13-34 11 New England Patriots L, 20-38 12 at Miami Dolphins L, 21-24 13 at Chicago Bears L, 17-27 14 New York Jets W, 30-22 15 at Atlanta Falcons W, 24-21 16 at Los Angeles Rams L, 14-20 17 Seattle Seahawks L, 20-30 NFC West Standings Seattle Seahawks 11-5 Arizona Cardinals 11-5 San Francisco 49ers 8-8 Los Angeles Rams 5-11 We're not often ones for season predictions, especially those that occur prior to the NFL Draft, but there isn't much else going on this weekend. Steven Ruiz of USA TODAY's For The Win went through the effort of creating a lengthy piece predicting the score of all 267 NFL regular season and playoff games Within the prediction, Ruiz had the San Francisco 49ers finishing the season at 8-8, which is better than most analysts and writers are predicting these days. Within his prediction, that record is good enough for third in the NFC West behind the division winning Seattle Seahawks and playoff-bound Arizona Cardinals. Again, better than most analysts are predicting these days. He has the Los Angeles Rams, who now own the first pick in the NFL Draft , finishing last in the division.So which teams does Ruiz have the 49ers beating this coming season? He has them coming out on top against the Rams at home during Week 1, hosting the Dallas Cowboys in Week 4, a shocker home win over the Arizona Cardinals during Week 5, at the Buffalo Bills during Week 6, hosting the Tampa Bay Buccaneers during Week 7, hosting the New Orleans Saints during Week 9, hosting the New York Jets during Week 14, and finally at the Atlanta Falcons during Week 15.In this scenario, the 49ers are winners of five straight from Weeks 4 through 9. However, they then lose four straight before winning again during Week 14. Ruiz also has them 6-2 at Levi's Stadium but just 2-4 against the NFC West. Of course, one of those divisional losses is a Week 3 41-17 blowout to the Seahawks.He caps off the season with the New England Patriots owning the best record in the AFC and the Green Bay Packers owning the best record in the NFC by way of a tiebreaker over the Carolina Panthers. His prediction for Super Bowl LI? The Patriots over the Packers by a score of 29-23.Of course, we'll have to wait and see if Ruiz revamps his prediction following the draft, but it's refreshing to see someone within the media believing that the 49ers can make progress under Chip Kelly.How do a couple of the local beat writers feel the 49ers will do this season? Matt Maiocco of CSN Bay Area has them finishing at 5-11 while Grant Cohn of the Press Democrat believes they will go 4-12 Do you feel Ruiz's prediction to be overly optimistic? Is it not optimistic enough? Let us know by leaving a comment below. |
What happens when Sarge's at command and Donut and Caboose are baking muffins in the kichen? xDEXACTLY! The OTHER kind of red vs blue battle - a gaming nightGrif, Simmons, Church and Tucker somehow managed to get some beer and chips and yeeeah.... *grins* that's what they doIn the background are posers of the games they probably playOh and the RT-logo for the lulz :3(Do you know the RT-Let's Plays to Assassins Creed? XD Just imagine Grif plays it like Geoff does XDDD)Since they're playing some shooter atm (Halo I guess xD) Church is losing and Simmons is playing liiiike a BOSS xDGrif (who has 2 left hands .___.) is just laughing at the blues cause they suck so bad, and Tucker's just like: -___-'Yeah... I must say that I love the situation of this.... I can totally see that happening somehowLet me know what you think(This is a gift art for all my awesome friends who know RvB....they will probably find their fave video game in the backgroundOh, and my dear sister of course, but she doesn't really game so much :3) |
A Google sign at the company's headquarters in Mountain View, Calif. (Photo: Marcio Jose Sanchez, AP) SAN FRANCISCO — Google plans to put security guards for all of its Northern California offices on its payroll and part ways with the company that used to supply them. Google will hire about 200 security guards at its Mountain View, Calif., headquarters, San Francisco office and at YouTube in San Bruno, Calif., the company said. The jobs come with the same benefits as other Google employees. Google already brought its security operations personnel, who perform a different function than the guards, onto its staff. "Building an in-house security team is something we are excited to do," Google spokeswoman Meghan Casserly said in a statement. "A year ago we insourced the Google security operations center and we are looking forward to making these valued positions both full- and part-time Google employees." Security Industry Specialists, or SIS, is the outside contractor that employees Google security guards. Tom Seltz, co-president of SIS, declined to comment. The shift comes as the growing use of outside contractors by major Silicon Valley companies has become increasingly controversial. Companies from Facebook to Apple outsource service jobs such as janitors and shuttle bus drivers to outside contractors to lower costs. Even though they work inside companies famous for showering workers with six-figure salaries, stock options and perks, many work for low pay and few, if any, benefits. Studies show that the trend of outsourcing these positions has led to declining wages, eroding health and safety conditions and a lower standard of living for workers, most of whom are black and Hispanic. Blacks and Hispanics account for a tiny fraction of the professional workforce at major Silicon Valley companies. Labor unions have been protesting the treatment of Google security guards. The Service Employees International Union held a protest of SIS at Google headquarters in June. MORE FROM USA TODAY Read or Share this story: http://usat.ly/1vBNd72 |
Looking for news you can trust? Subscribe to our free newsletters. GOP front-runner Donald Trump has been getting hammered by his rivals over Trump University (later named the Trump Entrepreneur Initiative). His embattled education venture is being sued for fraud by the New York state attorney general and by a handful of former students who allege they took on thousands of dollars in debt to attend real estate seminars that made false promises of future riches. (Trump promoted the company’s courses by saying they offered a better education than top business schools.) Trump has fought back—both against his Republican opponents and in court—insisting the company was on the up-and-up and beloved by students. During his victory speech on Tuesday night, following wins in the Michigan and Mississippi GOP primary elections, he vowed Trump University would come back, better and more successful than ever. “If I become president that means Ivanka, Don, Eric and my family will start it up,” he said. “We have a lot of great people who want to get back into Trump University. It’s going to do very well, and it will continue to do very well.” But how big a moneymaker was this school—supposedly designed to teach students to be successful in business—for its namesake? As a presidential candidate, Trump only has to file disclosure forms revealing his income of the previous year, and Trump University started in 2005. So there’s no telling what he made from the venture in its first years—unless he releases his tax filings going back a decade. But the personal financial disclosure form he submitted last summer showed that he had earned a whopping $11,819 from the education company in the previous year. That’s not too yooge, but it is sort of impressive. The school has been defunct since 2011. |
The turn-based space 4X game project M.O.R.E. (Military, Organization, Research, Economy) is currently on Kickstarter with 4 days to go. IdeaLcenter has managed to raise about 68K from their intial goal of 50K. Not bad, not bad indeed. Now, it’s time for stretch goals. I contacted the people responsible for MORE to get more info about their game. Not exactly more info about MORE’s gameplay concept itself, which was already presented and largely discussed, but to know more about some aspects I consider of key importance when defining a great space 4X game. That and more on why should we all support their vision. Here’s what Marcin Bednarski, MORE’s lead designer and basically the guy running the show, and who’s idea for MORE was in the beginning, had to say about his vision. Enjoy! SS: What’s different about MORE? Marcin: Almost everything. Starting from the game box which can be delivered to you, to the in-game content, to some features which are skipped in nowadays games even by big companies. We will give our players over 10 hours of epic music, 20 alien races – every with different User Interface and characteristic obtained by race picks and dedicated tech branch. In M.O.R.E. there will be huge galaxies which will contain 1500 different sizes and colors of stars. There will be ships created from ship-blocks. Every race will have 50 ship blocks, so there will be plenty of different combinations. Maybe I’ll stop here because we will introduce so many new or redesigned features like spying, diplomacy or economy that I could tell you about them all in a new kickstarter update in a few hours. SS: Micromanagement can be a pain in many 4X games. I understand that you propose the use of Dysonion Spheres to aggregate colonies in order to mitigate this late-game problem. Could you please elaborate how these Dysonian Spheres will work, and how will they achieve reducing micromanagement tedium? Marcin: At some point of a game (around middle) in many 4X games there is too much micromanagement due to the large number of colonies to manage. We want to avoid this problem and let Players focus on the game and have fun, not on managing vast empires. To do so, we will introduce advanced building queues and Dyson Spheres. If your star is suitable for this, and if you have proper technology and resources, you will be able to “destroy” all planets in the star system and create a Dyson Ring or Dyson Sphere. Instead of some planets and moons you will have a Dyson Structure which will provide better conditions for work and development for people living there. Dyson Sphere/Ring will be treated from now on as a single vast colony and its quality will depend on the quality of the planets present in the Star System from which it was built. Also, a smart queues system will help players to manage colonies. For example you will create “Industrial” building queues. Then, when you discover a planet you can assign a queue type and that’s all. Planets will be developed by this “Industrial” plans which you will be able to modify later. In this way, by changing only 5-6 building plans you can manage all your colonies in your entire empire. SS: All 4X in general are faced with a somewhat unsatisfying game-end phase, the eXtermination phase, where everything seems done before the game actually ends. How do you plan to tackle this issue? In other words, how do you expect to keep gamers engaged till the end of your game and give them a satisfying end? What sort of victory conditions are envisaged? Marcin: We want to create military, diplomatic, research and cultural victory. Yes, in late games, when game is already won, you always get bored. Our job is not “what to do then?” but “how to avoid players reach that point?”. This is where diplomacy gets in. If your empire will grow too strong, other smaller empires will often make cease-fire and unite against you. If you defeat them… it’ll be over. We want to let the AI empires use the “Surrender” option, so players don’t have to conquer all the last remaining colonies. SS: I find curiosity and surprises to be key factors for having fun with a game, especially a space 4X game. What would you say MORE has to offer regarding these two aspects? Marcin: A huge load of random events. I played Master of Orion 2 many years, and there always was something new! We want to extend this idea. Besides that, we want to introduce interesting planets. In almost everyone of us there is something from “explorers”. We want to move to the stars and check how this universe looks. So yes, you will get plenty of different kinds of planets and star systems. There will be many regular star system which looks different, but sometimes you will find among them a system or a planet which will have other features. And that’s something we like in games. Don’t forget that we are players too, and we want to create a game which will be fun, even to its creators :) SS: One of your recently achieved stretch goal is the “periodic consultation of an experienced game developer”. Do you have someone already in mind? Can you tell us who it is? Marcin: We don’t have anyone in mind, but there was some people working as developers in different companies who want to help us create M.O.R.E. and they gave us some advices. And this is great, that experienced developers want to help us! It’ll allow us to avoid many mistakes and help us develop this game faster and better. We will also want to consult with experienced developers for the game engine which we are using – UNITY. SS: Your initial 50K budget doesn’t seem compatible with the efforts and costs required to develop a game of this magnitude. How do you reply to that? Marcin: We’ve already managed to raise $67.000. We know that even twice as many wasn’t going to be enough for experienced game devs to create this game. You would need at least 1 million dollars. We know that we won’t be paid by Kickstarter, and even if we are working for other companies we will invest into this game from our own time and money – but all the team wants to prove something and create this game. It’s our mission, and if we create a great game – and we know that we will – we will get our reward later. SS: I understand that you plan to release to Win PC, Linux and Mac. What’s your current release plan for all those platforms (alpha, beta, release)? Marcin: Yes, we will release our game to PC, Linux and Mac. At the moment our plan is to give you the Alpha version in July, Beta in September and the full game in December 2013. SS: Do you plan to do post-release support (patch work)? Are you envisioning expansions or DLCs? Marcin: Yes, we will release patches and we want to go back to the good old days. For example add a little game content for free to our players (like additional spaceship blocks or planet surfaces). With that our game will become even better. We have plans for 4 DLCs for M.O.R.E. but for now it’s far too early to discuss them. SS: Let’s imagine that for any reason you will not be able to release the game. Would all the backers be allowed for a full refund for their pledges? Marcin: We don’t think about such turn of events. We will create this game, we don’t imagine other situation than the full release of M.O.R.E. without bugs. All what we’ve done during these last 2 months, and earlier, proves that we are capable of doing this game. But if for any reason we won’t be able to release the game we will make a full refund. SS: Now that we are a few days from the end of your Kickstarter campaign please take your time to tell us why we should all support you in your quest. Marcin: Because we want to create great game which can be a tribute to Master of Orion 2. Because M.O.R.E. will be great game, and the more kick we get from the start from our backers the better this game will be! Because we want to prove that there are still devs who cares about gameplay, about players and their needs! Because games can be deeper, richer and better! We want to remind older players and teach the younger ones, that the essence of games is on its gameplay, not great graphics or effective advertisements in TV. SS: Thank you for your time. Godspeed on your quest and good luck on your final days on Kickstarter. MORE is currently on Kickstarter with 4 days to go, having raised about 68K at the time of this interview. For more details on this space 4X game project check the MORE’s kickstarter page and our small preview. 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Gender-Neutral Title Mx Added to Oxford English Dictionary The Oxford English Dictionary announced today that the title Mx (a gender neutral form of Mr., Ms., Mrs., or Miss) has been inducted into its official lexicon. Its addition is intended to reflect "today’s more thoughtful conversations about gender identity." The definition reads: "Mx (noun): a title used before a person’s surname or full name by those who wish to avoid specifying their gender or by those who prefer not to identify themselves as male or female." Earlier this year, Sweden added the gender neutral pronoun hen ("han" means "he," and "henne" means "she") to its dictionary. Already, it is reportedly used widely in media and schools. Cisgender has also been a recent addition to the Oxford English Dictionary. [H/T Gay Star News] |
An intense area of rain has crossed South Australia, bringing relief to the farming community. By 4pm local time on Monday (06:30 GMT), Adelaide had received 12.6mm of rain. This might not sound like much rain but it is easily the heaviest rainfall this year. Other parts of the state saw even more significant rain. The coastal town of Ceduna, 800 km to the west of Adelaide, reported 24mm of rain in the 24 hours up until 9am on Monday. This is their heaviest rainfall for over two years. The town of Clare just to the north of Adelaide, recorded only 10mm of water in the same time period, but this was still their heaviest April rainfall in four years. This goes to show that the rain doesn’t necessarily have to be torrential in order to be newsworthy. Australia has long been a land of droughts and flooding rains, with the effects of climate change already being felt in parts of the country. Southern Australia has noticed a reduction in winter and spring rainfall in the last few decades. This year the rain in the state of South Australia has been more scanty than usual, and the rainfall to date has been approximately half of the long-term average. The reduction of rain is expected to continue as the world continues to warm and the impact of this decline in rainfall will be magnified by increased temperatures. This means the South Australian farmer’s obsession with rain is not going to end any time soon. |
MOSCOW, Dec 27 (Reuters) - One of two freed members of punk protest band Pussy Riot, Nadezhda Tolokonnikova, said on Friday their release was aimed solely at improving Russia's image before it hosts the Winter Olympic Games and was not a humanitarian gesture. Tolokonnikova, 24, and Maria Alyokhina, 25, walked free under a Kremlin amnesty on Monday after serving more than 21 months of a two-year prison term for performing a profanity-laced "punk prayer" protest against President Vladimir Putin in Moscow's main Russian Orthodox cathedral. Tolokonnikova said the Winter Olympics, due to be held in February in Russia's Black Sea resort of Sochi, were Putin's pet project and that anybody attending them would be supporting him. "With the Olympics approaching, Vladimir Vladimirovich (Putin) does not want his favorite project ruined," Tolokonnikova said. Last week, Putin also pardoned former oil tycoon Mikhail Khodorkovsky, viewed by Kremlin foes as a political prisoner, after he spent more than 10 years in jail. "The thaw has nothing to do with humanism. The authorities only did this under pressure from both Russian and Western society," Tolokonnikova told a news conference with Alyokhina at her side, adding she feared "there could be more repression after the Olympics". "Whether one likes it or not, going to the Olympics in Russia is an acceptance of the internal political situation in Russia, an acceptance of the course taken by a person who is interested in the Olympics above all else - Vladimir Putin," Tolokonnikova said. Alyokhina said the Russian Orthodox Church, whose leader has cast their February 2012 protest in Christ the Saviour Cathedral as part of a concerted attack on Russia's main faith, had played a role in the jailing of three band members. The third jailed woman was released last year. Both amnestied women said they would remain in Russia and would shift their focus to efforts to improve prison conditions in Russia. (Reporting by Alexei Anishchuk; Writing by Steve Gutterman; Editing by Alissa de Carbonnel and Gareth Jones) |
NYC Transit Employees at a Coney Island facility keep subway cars in working order. Flickr / MTAPhotos The New York subway system is celebrating its 110th birthday this month. When you get right down to it, everyone basically loves the subway. It has moved millions for more than a century. But celebrations aside, when it comes to New York's subway system, New Yorkers — being New Yorkers — have often had plenty to gripe about. For example, the Metropolitan Transportation Authority (MTA) closed a major tunnel for more than a year to make repairs after Hurricane Sandy hit in 2012. But problems like that obscure the fact that most of the time the trains run just fine. It wasn't always this way. In 1984, trains averaged just 9,000 miles traveled between mechanical failures. That's about when the MTA began putting real work into keeping trains running. Now, the MTA's Scheduled Maintenance System has the agency fixing aging components before they fail, improving that number to 160,000 miles. That's thanks to the NYC Transit employees who work at facilities in Coney Island, repairing, replacing, and rebuilding the key components that keep the 40-ton subway cars in working order. [An earlier version of this article was written by Alex Davies.] |
The Chinese buy much of the world's elephant ivory The UN has given China the green light to bid in a one-off sale of ivory. The Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species (Cites) voted in favour of China's request during a meeting being held in Geneva. China joins Japan as approved buyers of government-owned ivory from South Africa, Botswana, Namibia and Zimbabwe. In 2007, Cites authorised the four nations to sell off stockpiles of legally held elephant ivory. In order to gain approval, China had to present evidence to members of the Cites standing committee that it had put in place measures to tackle any illegal domestic sales of ivory. "China has acted rather successfully against its own illegal domestic ivory market," said Tom Milliken, a director for Traffic, the wildlife trade monitoring network. "Now China should help other countries to do the same, especially in central Africa where elephant poaching is rampant." But Robbie Marsland, UK director for the International Fund for Animal Welfare (Ifaw), condemned the decision, saying it could prove disastrous for the world's elephant populations. "We are deeply disappointed that Cites has backed China as an ivory buyer, a decision that plays Russian roulette with wild elephants. "Allowing new ivory to be imported into China will stimulate demand and create a smokescreen for illegal ivory to be laundered into the legal market, to be sold in stores or online to Chinese citizens or foreigners." However, Mr Milliken said Cites monitoring systems would track whether the sale would lead to an increase in illegal ivory. "Following the last one-off ivory sale under CITES in 1999, it is encouraging to note that the illicit trade in ivory progressively declined over the next five years," he explained. "We hope a similar result is achieved this time." Under an agreement reached in 2007, Cites gave permission for the four nations to make a single sale of all government-owned stocks of ivory that have been registered by January of that year. South Africa declared the largest amount, making 51 tonnes available, while Botswana's stockpile was almost 44 tonnes. The other two countries declared much smaller amounts; Namibia total was just under 10 tonnes, and Zimbabwe stockpile was almost four tonnes. In March and April, the Cites secretariat conducted audits in each of the four nations to ensure the ivory had been properly registered and had been obtained legally. The 2007 agreement also stipulated that once the one-off sale had been completed, no further sales from these countries would be considered during a "resting period" of nine years that would begin as soon as the new sales had been completed. E-mail this to a friend Printable version Bookmark with: Delicious Digg reddit Facebook StumbleUpon What are these? |
An artist rendering of the Schiaparelli lander on the surface of Mars. Click to enlarge. Credit: ESA The full-scale qualification model of the parachute for the Schiaparelli lander undergoes the pyrotechnic mortar deployment tests in the world’s largest wind tunnel, operated by the United States Air Force at the National Full-Scale Aerodynamic Complex, NFAC, in the Ames Research Center, California. Tests of how the parachute will inflate at supersonic speeds were carried out with a smaller model in a supersonic wind tunnel in the NASA Glenn Research Center. Click to enlarge. Credit: ESA Artist depiction of the separation between the TGO orbiter and the Schiaparelli lander in October 2016. Click to enlarge. Credit: ESA Schiaparelli is being installed at the top of the Trace Gas Orbiter, at Thales Alenia Space, in Cannes, France, for final integrated tests in 2015 . Click to enlarge. Credit: ESA The author of this page will appreciate comments, corrections and imagery related to the subject. Please contact Anatoly Zak . |
Academics around the country are embracing the relatively new trend of using trigger warnings to shield students from ideas that might be discomforting or trauma-inducing. These ideas often include topics that touch on “racism, classism, sexism, heterosexism, cissexism, ableism, and other issues of privilege and oppression." Though there is some debate surrounding how widespread the use of trigger warnings actually is, a survey conducted last year by the National Coalition Against Censorship found that a majority of educators had used trigger warnings at one time or another. Similarly, many universities are creating “safe spaces” where students can relax free from ideas that might be stressful or anxiety-inducing. Among these is Brown University, which last year created a room “with cookies, coloring books, bubbles, Play-Doh, calming music, pillows, blankets and a video of frolicking puppies” because a debate on sexual assault was taking place on campus. Others universities have canceled “controversial” speakers—Condoleezza Rice, George Will, Jason Riley, and Michelle Malkin, among them—under pressure from faculty or students. Apparently not all universities are on board with this trend. The University of Chicago recently made it clear to its crop of incoming students that academic freedom and inquiry remain pillars at the institution, and that the university does not support "so-called" trigger warnings or offer safe spaces that allow students "to retreat from ideas and perspectives at odds with their own. Here is how the university welcomed its incoming class of 2020: Welcome and congratulations on your acceptance to the college at the University of Chicago. Earning a place in our community of scholars is no small achievement and we are delighted that you selected Chicago to continue your intellectual journey. Once here you will discover that one of the University of Chicago’s defining characteristics is our commitment to freedom of inquiry and expression. … Members of our community are encouraged to speak, write, listen, challenge, and learn, without fear of censorship. Civility and mutual respect are vital to all of us, and freedom of expression does not mean the freedom to harass or threaten others. You will find that we expect members of our community to be engaged in rigorous debate, discussion, and even disagreement. At times this may challenge you and even cause discomfort. And then, the coup de grace: Our commitment to academic freedom means that we do not support so called ‘trigger warnings,’ we do not cancel invited speakers because their topics might prove controversial, and we do not condone the creation of intellectual ‘safe spaces’ where individuals can retreat from ideas and perspectives at odds with their own. You can read the entire letter below. (CLICK HERE to see how students and alumni responded.) -- [Image Credit: Public Domain] |
by David Broder For many mainstream commentators, the clashes following the coup against soft-left Honduran president Manuel Zelaya fit into the usual analysis of a continent-wide battle between pro-US conservative parties and a radical “pink tide”. It is indeed striking how prominently supporters of the Honduran military coup allege interference in the country by Venezuelan leader Hugo Chávez, a theme also particularly commonplace in the political discourse of the right in Nicaragua, Ecuador and Bolivia. The Times[1] this week approvingly quoted one observer to the effect that “Chávism versus anti-Chávism is a new version of Communism versus anti-Communism”. However, while the Venezuelan president is evidently an influential and controversial figure and the focus of much attention, we must go beyond the typical media epithets about his personality – ‘firebrand’, ‘outspoken’, and so on – and ask: what dynamics and social forces do these conflicts represent? Why has Chávism and anti-Chávism generalized across Latin America, how irreconcilable are the divisions, and to what extent are these questions of anti-imperialism and class struggle? To understand what is taking place, it is important to contextualize the supposed “pink tide” led by Chávez in the history of Latin America, and in particular the continent’s many examples of ‘populist’ governments with supposedly ‘anti-imperialist’ and statist agendas. This article looks in particular at the case of the ‘Revolutionary Government of the Armed Forces’, which governed Peru from 1968 to 1975. Peru’s Revolutionary Government The Peruvian colonels came to power amidst a period of significant change in US imperialism[2]’s relationship to Latin American countries, almost all of whom had won their independence from Spain (in Brazil’s case, Portugal) in the 1810s-20s. Broadly speaking, the traditional relationship of foreign capital to the continent had been one of “enclaves” of imperialist control of enterprises autonomous from the local ruling class, focused on extracting primary resources such as in the agricultural, mining and oil sectors and based on steeply unequal balance of trade. The 1960s industrialization process demanded state machines play an increasingly important role in building infrastructure and laying the foundations for ‘modernisation’, with US imperialism changing its mechanisms of domination from simple resource-plundering to more complex integration with ‘local’ ruling classes’ development projects and efforts to become ‘equal partners’ rather than simply subordinate agents of US policy . Although not identical, to a certain degree some of the same realignments are being attempted today (where the primary development is certain states’ backtracking from the full-on IMF-backed neo-liberal reforms which characterized the 1990s). The Peruvian economy was a typical example of this developmentalist dynamic, while the 1968 coup d’état in Lima against centrist president Fernando Belaúnde and the end of civilian rule also ensured the ‘Revolutionary Government’s’ credentials as one of the military juntas presiding across most of the continent. However, the manner in which the Peruvian colonels – led by President General Juan Velasco Alvarado – went about reforming the economy and their relationship with US imperialism, as well as how they presented their actions and how they were received by the left and workers’ movement, is what makes Peru a particularly interesting case study from today’s standpoint. After its 1968 seizure of power the new régime took sweeping measures to reorganize the economy in its so-called Peruvianisation programme: the ‘revolution’ was to be both anti-capitalist and non-communist but would build a ‘nationalist’, ‘humanist’ and ‘communitarian’ social order. The régime was not afraid to violate the rights to private property even of multinationals, for example the military occupation of the La Brea and Pariñas installations of the International Petroleum Company (a subsidiary of Standard Oil) and the expulsion of the company from the country without compensation; and the expropriation of the British-owned sugar cane plantations of WR Grace & Co.. An April 1970 speech by the president outlined terms whereby all multinational investments would have to proceed via contracts with the Revolutionary Government under strict terms. Contracts would last for a fifteen to twenty-year period, with foreign capital typically limited to 30% of investment in an enterprise and the state taking the bulk of control (less so in the case of supplementary private domestic investment) and then winning full ownership of the company upon the expiry of the contract. Co-management and ‘Industrial Committees’ Moreover, any workplace with six or more employees (or smaller firms with an annual gross income of at least one million soles) was governed by a corporatist Industrial Committee (IC) whereby all of the personnel – whether managers or employees – were represented on boards in a co-management system. In such cases a full 50% of stock in the firm would be made available to the workforce to buy, each of them as individual shareholders. The IC system also forced companies to reinvest profits (the first 15% tax free), and as with the restrictions on the major landowners, the state sought to force the pace of development by promoting new industries and technological innovation as against the rather more lethargic traditional oligarchic families. Furthermore, since such a ‘nationalist’ system of redistributing ownership supposedly tended to the abolition of classes, workers now became ‘owners’ in their ‘co-operatives’, with the spin that the shares allocated to each ‘worker’ (including management) were tied to their existing salaries. State interventionism coupled with these elements of ‘workers’ participation’ in management had the clear objective of co-opting the labour movement into the heart of the capitalist apparatus and to muzzle the working class by tying them in to responsibility for profitability. For that very reason, the flip side of ‘co-management’ and the ICs was repression: while the trade union leaderships welcomed the ICs, as did the Peruvian Communist Party, in the agro-industrial co-operatives the unions were abolished and collective bargaining outlawed. There was supposedly no need for workers to organise to defend themselves from their employer, when they themselves were among the ‘co-managers’. The result was that despite sustained high growth rates the state in fact pressured wages downwards relative to inflation – this at the same time as Velasco was denouncing imperialism “sucking money out of our country”, as Quijano explained in 1971[3]: “The workers of Talara did not get the 25 percent wage increase they demanded and were obliged to accept the mere 12 percent proposed by [state energy controller] PETROPERU, with no pay for days not worked. The workers in factories which closed down did not win any of their demands. The mining workers, too, got only the increases offered by the imperialist Toquepala, Cerro de Pasco, and Marcona companies, and other smaller ones. In all these cases of demands for higher wages the regime argues that the cost of living went up only 5.6 percent in 1970 and that wage increases above this percentage are not justified. It should be remembered, however, that this 5.6 percent comes on top of the rise in the cost of living between 1967 and 1969, and that workers have had their wages practically frozen during all these years, since the only wage increase allowed during this period was a 1969 increase of 10 percent over the 1966 level.” The workers supposedly represented on ICs and in control thanks to their co-operative status proved to have little opportunity to use such channels to assert their interests, since effectively they operated similarly to any company reacting to market imperatives and with traditional capitalist hierarchy in the workplace and wage differentials kept in force. Such participation and taking responsibility for someone else’s profits is much unlike workers’ control, whereby workers are able to veto management decisions by asserting their strength on the shop-floor, and still less akin to workers’ self-management, when individual workplaces and communities are run collectively with no state apparatus, market relations or managers. The Peruvian experience made clear that the state was not a ‘neutral’ arbiter of relations between the American mining companies and Italian banks and the working class in a ‘humanist’ economy, but in fact was firmly on the side of the former. Precisely the goal of the state-capitalist measures undertaken by the régime was to rationalize the economy to allow more efficient imperialist penetration, state capital and state power guaranteeing profitability in general. The Revolutionary Government’s apparently daring measures to expropriate certain elements of the bourgeoisie in no way implied affinity with the working class or opposition to capitalism. At this point we might digress and note that the Peruvian colonels’ clever attempt to identify the interests of the working class with that of the benevolent ‘revolutionary’ state machine was far from unique. It has been also been a hallmark of state socialism from the stage in the Russian revolution where it was determined that the working class needed no defence from ‘their’ state and thus no organizing rights were necessary (Lenin’s opposition to Trotsky’s very explicit position on this score in the 1920 ‘trade union debate’ was rather at odds with what had already happened to the factory committees) through to Hugo Chávez’s Venezuela, where another ‘co-operative system’ plays the same role, as Charles Reeve discussed with El Libertario[4]: “C.R. – Now let’s talk about the co-operatives movement. A Venezuelan friend said that the government’s cooperatives movement, in the last analysis, amounts to a sort of institutionalisation of labour precarity and black market work. He mentioned the recent (2007) strike by dustmen in part of Caracas, during which the strikers asked for Barreto, mayor of Caracas, to intervene – he who quotes Foucault and invited Toni Negri over. The mayor told them that he could do nothing, since they had accepted the transformation of the old company into a co-operative. Which meant that there was no collective bargaining, since the workers were considered to be associates of the co-operative on the same level as the administrators! “M. – Of course, we have a totally different idea of cooperatives. For us, a co-operative is an initiative which comes from below. For the Chavistas, on the contrary, enterprises in what they now call the “social economy sector” must operate in the form of state-aided cooperatives. Every day people start organising cooperatives – people who are totally foreign to the spirit and practice of co-operativism… because it is the quickest way of getting contracts and state credit! In many industries the law obliges the state to give priority of tenders to “co-operatives” above private enterprises. So many malign people have started creating cooperatives in order to win contracts with government bodies. That was the case with the public roads initiative. A private enterprise was thus transformed into a co-operative to win the tender, and at a stroke the workers lost all their rights and bonuses. They now have three-month renewable contracts, such that the “co-operativist” (in reality, the new name for the boss!) has no duties towards them. Thanks to this lie, after a few months it could be said that there were 200,000 co-operatives… All this in order to make propaganda showing that society has changed. But it is all artificial, created by decree. “I. – I would add that, after the oil workers’ strike, the government learned that it had to control the world of work. First it explained that the state would create a new form of organisation based on solidarity and where all workers would benefit from the same privileges. The co-operatives! At a stroke the government broke the services contracts it had with private companies (particularly for cleaning), which by law had to pay workers ‘social bonuses’. The workers were laid off and forced to seek temporary work with these co-operatives now dealing with the state. They lost the bonuses and rights which they had previously (in theory at least) had. Moreover, many of these co-operatives disappeared as soon as they were created. So we are witnessing, as your friend is right to emphasise, the casualisation of work.” State capitalism and development Indeed, in the summer 1971 edition of Monthly Review referred to above, devoted entirely to Peru, Quijano’s study basically asserts that the populist and left-nationalist rhetoric used to generate support for ‘Peruvianisation’ was shallow, with the régime not even following a consistent course of taking over multinational interests: the ‘Peruvianisation’ of the wholly-foreign-owned car industry, which saw price controls and restrictions on importing locally available materials, along with the new structures of finance via the establishment of state holding firm COFIDE, could not and did not seek to actually push back imperialist ownership as such but all the better to integrate it with state capital while modernizing industry. The Peruvian colonels were ‘anti-imperialist’ only in the sense that they wanted to establish a more equal status in partnership with US capital rather than serve as its direct agents. Some Trotskyists in Latin America might criticize such leaders, as well as the likes of Chávez in Venezuela or Evo Morales in Bolivia for ‘not going far enough’ – being reticent or unwilling to carry through ‘the revolution’ to its full course, they vacillate and accommodate to imperialist interests, and have to be pushed further. This type of analysis of left nationalists as an ally who need to be pressured along (as put into action with disastrous effect by the mass Partido Obrero Revolucionario in the 1952 Bolivian revolution) has two central flaws conceptually speaking. Firstly, we would of course object to any notion that the state machine can implement socialism from above given sufficient determination to carry out a reform process, an idea clearly counterposed to the working class overthrowing the state apparatus via their own self-activity (to which many such left nationalists are overtly hostile). Secondly, it misunderstands the project of the partisans of statified capitalism, which is not a ‘mistaken’ or ‘misdirected’ attempt to abolish capitalism but rather to rationalize and re-organise it in the interests of different sectors (e.g. the prioritization of light industry as against agriculture under Velasco), combat underdevelopment and to support domestic capital, even if these things may cause some degree of antagonism with US capital. Surely, however, when we say that state capitalism in Latin America in fact rationalizes investment and develops infrastructure for the sake of serving the interests of capital in general, this merely begs the question: why is it so polarizing, and why does it provoke such strife within the bourgeoisie itself? If the nationalization of most of the Chilean economy by Salvador Allende in 1970-73 only had the intention of better organizing the exploitation of the working class, or if the Peruvian colonels were laying the basis for greater profitability (and if Chávez, Morales, Zelaya and Correa are doing the same today), why such strong opposition from the majority of the capitalist class? Why did it take so long for ‘ordinary’ parliamentary-civilian rule to stabilize in almost every country in Latin America, and why does that seem under threat today? Clearly underlying class relations in a country like Peru is the importance of foreign investment and imbalance of trade, the dependence of the whole economy on the United States (including the orientation of production and technology to the demands of western capital) and therefore a relatively small, super-rich and ‘outward-facing’ domestic bourgeoisie desperate to hold onto an alliance which guarantees its own privileges and at the same time subordinates the interests of the national economy’s development to those of imperialist exploitation. Although there is a ‘local’ bourgeoisie with different objectives than the working class, it appears that across the 19th and 20th centuries underdevelopment has been the direct product of the domination of foreign capital: “In Latin America, the international monopoly corporation uses [its] technology to compete with and eliminate or absorb local rivals, who lack the funds or suppliers to buy, or cannot get import licences for similar equipment… The international corporation which controls this technology thus increases its monopoly power over its Latin American associates in their common mixed firms, over its Latin American rivals in other firms, and over the Latin American economy in general. In the latter, as a result, the capital/labour ratio rises, excess capacity grows, and the general wage level declines. Fore these reasons and because this foreign investment has a largely foreign multiplier and does not increase domestic purchasing power correspondingly, periodic over-investment crises become more frequent and prolonged, while cyclical and structural unemployment increases in Latin America.”[5] Of course, this is not uniformly the case on the continent, particular in the wealthier south. Chile until 1973 was a longstanding bastion of parliamentary democracy, “from the beginning the republic was ruled by a domestic ruling class, that of the great conservative landowners like Portales and then the industrial bourgeoisie from Manuel Montt onwards. A country of mining enclaves, Chile was nonetheless ruled by a united ruling class with a strong capacity for integration. By the early 20th century the separation between finance and rural capital had almost disappeared.”[6] For the most part, however, the local ruling classes in the region are highly vulnerable both to struggle by an immiserated working class with no stake in the dependent bourgeoisie’s profits, and to crises in the world’s main capitalist centres. For their part, state capitalists prioritise economic development, seeking to build ‘national unity’ and blunt class antagonisms by sinking roots in society for domestic capital. But an effort to rationalize ‘ordinary’ ‘national’ class relations would mean curbing the monopoly of power belonging to oligarchs and the dependent ruling class. Although such a path may assist capital accumulation in general terms, the old oligarchic families are forced to confront the would-be state capitalist ruling class for fear of not being integrated into the new order. Nationalist movements in Latin America who set themselves against oligarchs and US imperialism – or ‘populists’ – have long been able to find support among the working class and peasantry but also significant sections of the administrative and professional middle class and the non-dependent ‘national’ bourgeoisie’. Because they rest on more than one class force, such régimes talk out of both sides of their mouth, insisting on their ability to manage capitalism (we need only recall Chávez’s “I will deactivate the bomb of revolution” speech[7]) at the same time as denouncing imperialists and oligarchs. They do however have a contradictory relationship with the workers’ movement: breaking down the old state apparatus and economic hierarchies, and indeed splits in the military, may rouse the working class into more assertive action, as has undoubtedly taken place in Venezuela since the defeat of the 2002 coup against Chávez. Moreover, for want of the support of a socially weighty domestic ruling class, such ‘populists’ may desire to harness the strength of the working class via co-option of trade unions and leftist rhetoric. Zelaya, upon coming to power in Honduras 2005 – much like Chávez in Venezuela in 1999 – was a Third Way centrist, and yet thanks to the vociferous opposition of much of the traditional ruling class, was pushed to the left. Zelaya, leader of the long-standing major conservative force, the Partido Liberal, was faced with crisis as oil prices soared and the IMF exerted pressure, and therefore he adopted a ‘populist’ course: “…a classic situation started to come about: a bourgeois government, which is opposed by the majority of the bourgeoisie, tries to survive on the basis of mass-movement support. In Honduras the rise of struggles led by the [Coordinadora Nacional de Resistencia Popular] gave substance to this option. “This “left turn”, seeking support among the mass movement, was done without making significant material concessions to the working class or peasantry. Beyond small increases in the minimum wage, suspension of water privatisation and other small concessions, Mel [Zelaya’s] populist turn was more a matter of speeches, embracing Chávez and the Castro brothers and meetings with the CNRP.”[8] Ultimately, the aforementioned behaviour towards the working class of Peruvian Revolutionary Government type régimes and machine politicians pushed to the left, like Chávez and Zelaya, is not substantially different to those populists with origins in the traditional left – like Salvador Allende in Chile, 1970-73 or Evo Morales today. In each one of these cases the government at once tries to elicit mass support and mobilisation and at yet at the same time effectively smother working-class forces with integration into the state and the breaking up autonomous movements which go too far. Throughout his rule Allende repeatedly attempted to broker compromise with the military, bringing numerous officers into his cabinet and sending soldiers into factories and poor barrios in weapons raids to stop revolutionary organization on the part of the working class, which culminated in a right-wing coup. In August 2008, at the same time as the Bolivian oligarchy’s forces were marching through the streets of provinces like Beni, Pando and Santa Cruz in an effort to split the country in two and re-establish their cosy relations with western energy firms, Evo Morales, proclaiming the need for national unity, sent police to break up miners’ picket lines near Oruro as evidence of his ability to keep the working class in line (he calls his desired system ‘Andean capitalism’). Such opposition to revolutionary working-class struggle is not in itself a sufficient guarantee of the stability of any given government, since the ruling class is sharply differentiated amongst itself. Other elements of the ruling class may well be wary of moves which create space for the workers’ movement or threaten alliance with US capital even if they are not anti-capitalist as such; as we have seen, that in no way implies that the working class has a particular interest in supporting the ‘left-nationalist’ section of the ruling class or that it can use state channels to advance resistance to capitalist austerity. Conclusion Populism in Latin America has continually re-emerged, expressing the desire of certain local ruling classes to build ‘national’ economic development and lessen dependence on US imperialism and also relying for support on its perceived resistance to the traditional structures of capitalist rule. In certain ways the struggle between state capitalists basing themselves on popular movements hostile to oligarchs and US imperialism, and traditional conservative forces has in some countries appeared to substitute itself for direct struggle between classes with clearly delineated interests. For want of an ‘independent’ domestic bourgeoisie class lines can be blurred and left nationalists are able to position themselves as if advocates of the masses, whether from a traditional left background, forced to seek working-class support by the resistance of oligarchs or determined agents of state-capitalist development. Superfically radical measures may thus be taken to restrict the power of certain elements of the bourgeoisie. Yet it is clear that whatever the importance of ‘populism’ in the context of a Latin America dominated by foreign capital, it is illusory to believe that the working class can develop its own fight for socialism via alliance with such forces: in fact, to back state-capitalist development is precisely to support the project with the strongest strategy for rationalizing the rule of the domestic bourgeoisie and battening down the hatches of class struggle. [1] ‘Cold War fears sparked by Venezuelan diplomats’ stand-off in Honduras’, The Times, 23July 2009 [2] The United States of America had been the dominant power in its ‘backyard’ ever since the 19th century collapse of Spanish colonialism – culminating in the 1898 Spanish-American War – and to a certain extent, thanks to the early 20th century decline of the long-time British influence over Argentina and Chile. It was also the case that this period saw re-emerging European interests in much of the continent, as well as the rise of Japanese finance projects, and therefore a “multi-lateralisation” of foreign investment. [3] Aníbal Quijano, ‘Nationalism and capitalism in Peru’, Monthly Review July-August 1971, p. 113 [4] ‘Charles Reeve interviews El Libertario’, The revolution delayed: a decade of Hugo Chávez, The Commune, February 2009, pp. 13-15 [5] Capitalism and underdevelopment in Latin America, Andre Gunder Frank, Pelican, London, 1973, pp. 332-333 [6] Vie et Mort du Chili Populaire, Alain Touraine, Seuil, Paris, 1973, pp. 64-65 [7] “I said this before becoming president: Venezuela is a kind of bomb. We are going to begin to deactivate the mechanism of that bomb. And today, it’s not that it is totally deactivated, but I am sure that it is much less likely that this bomb will explode today.” – Hugo Chávez speaking to a conference of US and Venezuelan business leaders, 2005 [8]‘¡Movilización de masas hasta derrotar a “Pinocheletti”!’, Roberto Ramírez, http://socialismo-o-barbarie.org/centroamerica_y_caribe/090702_entre_consolidacion_y_rebelion.htm Advertisements |
While Tesla is about to officially unveil the production version of the Model 3 on Friday, we have already some good looks at the first few production units and release candidates. Aside from the final production specs, there shouldn’t be too many surprises. Nonetheless, there could always be ‘one more thing’ moment, especially when you recall that CEO Elon Musk said that he expected reservations for the Model 3 to spike after the final reveal. Over the past year, Tesla has engaged in what Musk called “anti-selling” the Model 3. After the original unveiling in March 2016, Tesla received a lot more reservations for the vehicle than expected and it created a year-long backlog of orders. Almost 300,000 people placed reservations with 1,000 deposits within the first three days and while Tesla stopped updating the official number after the first 3 months, we estimate it’s now at around 500,000 reservations. Musk expected only a fraction of that: @34thrain Maybe 1/4 to 1/2 of what happened. No one at Tesla thought it would be this high before part 2 of the unveil. — Elon Musk (@elonmusk) April 2, 2016 But he also implied on a few occasions that he expected to get more orders from another unveiling event “closer to production”. He has been hyping the event even before the original unveiling: Tomorrow is Part 1 of the Model 3 unveil. Part 2, which takes things to another level, will be closer to production. — Elon Musk (@elonmusk) March 30, 2016 And right after the unveiling: Thanks for tuning in to the Model 3 unveil Part 1! Part 2 is super next level, but that's for later… — Elon Musk (@elonmusk) April 1, 2016 He later alluded that it had to do with the Autopilot 2.0 hardware announced in October 2016, which is also on the Model 3. As we previously reported, Musk confirmed that Tesla designed the Model 3’s user interface with self-driving in mind. The company has been promising a demonstration of its latest self-driving capacity with a drive across the country by the end of the year – likely in November or December, Musk said. So will there be something new on that at the Model 3 unveiling? Something that could spark even more orders as Musk implied last year? Electrek’s Take While Tesla has been frequently updating its Autopilot software on Model S and Model X vehicles equipped with second generation hardware since last October, it’s only barely now reaching performance parity with the first generation Autopilot. At first glance, it’s difficult to imagine what new could come with Model 3 since Model S and X already have been leading on that front and they are expected to continue to lead as Musk reinforced the idea that the two vehicles will remain Tesla’s flagship premium cars even after the Model 3 hits the roads. But the fact that Model S and Model X don’t have new Autopilot features enabled by the new hardware suite yet doesn’t mean that they are not testing those new features in “shadow mode” inside the vehicles, something Tesla has confirmed to test in the past. Therefore, I wouldn’t be surprised by new Autopilot features being demonstrated on the Model 3 at the event in order to be soon released on all of Tesla’s vehicles equipped with the second generation Autopilot hardware. Furthermore, Tesla will need to sell those features to Model 3 reservation holders looking to convert their reservations into orders. The automaker has been including the expensive Autopilot hardware on all vehicles in order for its whole fleet to benefit from the safety features that it enables, like automatic emergency braking and collision alerts, but it counts on customers buying the “convenience feature packages” (‘Enhanced Autopilot’ and ‘Fully Self-Driving Capability’) in order to pay for them. With Model S and Model X starting at over $70,000, it has less of an impact if the buyers decided not to take those features, but that’s more significant for Tesla with the Model 3 starting at $35,000. It’s something to think about. What do you think? Let us know in the comment section below. |
Round 3 Hey Guys,And so one of the mighty has fallen. The X-Files, some nine years after it ended gave everything it had got to try and beat one of the largest on-line fan based shows of the present time in Chuck but just fell short after a day of to-ing and fro-ing. Gone are the chances in 2011 of an 'X-Files vs. Supernatural' re-match (which had a huge 7648, the second highest STV poll ever behind the 14480 that LOST vs. Supernatural produced last year) but what could be disappointing on one front is exciting on another as the two shows that fought for the TV Guide cover earlier in the year square off in the first of this years quarter-finals... Of course, Supernatural deserves credit that on a day where it breezed past the miserable performance of Charmed managed to earn a haul of over 1,300 votes. The question now remains; can Chuck beat last years champion? The answer is only a few days ahead of us...Today finds NCIS and 24 in showdown for supremacy on the action-thriller-drama side of the competition in a battle sure to split opinion, whilst the most mouth-watering of clashes occurs in the other poll, as STV-Founding show and last years Semi-Finalist LOST takes on last years Runner-Up in The Vampire Diaries. Today could be huge!The rules for, for anyone new to the competition are very simple. There will be new sets of shows against each other every day in a new set of polls... simply vote for your favourite and the show with the most votes will win that days poll and head into the next round.Don't forget to spread the word, and tweet out the competition to friends as well as facebook liking the post...Also if you are taking part in the prediction competition, don't forget to follow your scores HERE Long time leader Sergey Sevostianov has extended his lead after guessing both Chuck & Supernatural as ydays winners and sits on 64 points. Dance is now tied in second on 59 points with Yvonne Damon after dropping 4 points on the king of the competition (so far :P)All that's left to say, is good luck to every show...... and let the battles begin!Seasons: 8 (2003- )Major Awards: 2 Emmy Nominations2010 Competition Placing: 9thSeasons: 8 (2001-2010)Major Awards: 20 Emmy Wins, 48 Emmy Nominations & 2 Golden Globe Wins, 9 Golden Globe Nominations2010 Competition Placing: 34th(Thanks to Thomas for emailing me the tribute video)Seasons: 6 (2004-2010)Major Awards: 10 Emmy Wins, 41 Emmy Nominations & 1 Golden Globe Win, 5 Golden Globe Nominations2010 Competition Placing: 3rdSeasons: 2 (2009- )Major Awards: N/A2010 Competition Placing: 2nd1. Chuck vs. The X-Files - R3 - 2925 votes2. Breaking Bad vs. The Vampire Diaries - R1 - 2046 votes3. Dexter vs. Supernatural - R1 - 1922 votesAs always, enjoy the competition and don't forget to comment on who you voted for below so we can all agree/disagree with you! Also stick in some tribute videos which I may use next round! :DAny queries email me at adamdharris@spoilertv.comAlso, you can keep up to date easily with the competition by following me on Twitter @AdDHarris Good Luck!Adam |
Fitzroy's 1898 premiership team An example of a premiership medal, awarded to Norm Clark in 1907. Geelong players holding premiership cup after their Grand Final win in 2009 The Australian Football League (AFL), known as the Victorian Football League (VFL) until 1990, is the elite national competition in men's Australian rules football.[1] The inaugural premiership was awarded to Essendon as a result of a round-robin finals system, where the club won all three of their games in the competition.[2] This format was replaced after the first season, and a Grand Final has been held every season since 1898 to determine the premiers,[3] with the exception of 1924 when a modified round-robin system was used.[4][5] The formation of a national competition, beginning in 1987,[6] has resulted in the League attempting to develop "an even and stable competition"[7] through a range of equalisation policies, such as a salary cap and draft (introduced in 1985 and 1986 respectively).[7][8] This has had a significant impact on the spread of premierships: since 1990, thirteen clubs have won a premiership,[9] compared with only five clubs between 1967 and 1989.[10] Two clubs, Essendon and Carlton, have won the most VFL/AFL premierships with sixteen each.[11] There are only three teams currently competing in the AFL that are yet to win a premiership: Fremantle, Gold Coast and Greater Western Sydney—three of the competition's four newest teams.[12] Variations in format [ edit ] Most conventional grand finals are a single match at the end of a finals series where the winner of the match wins the premiership. Under the early VFL finals systems in 1898-1923 and 1925-1930, the circumstances of the grand final were often different: in twenty-nine of these thirty-two years, the minor premiers had the right to challenge the winner of the finals series for the premiership, meaning the grand finals of this era were a mixture of challenge matches, non-challenge matches (which would have been followed by challenge matches had the minor premier been defeated), while in 1901, 1903 and 1906 there was no right of challenge. Regardless of the circumstances at that time, all of these games are now recognised as grand finals. Table key † Premiership decided without a grand final being required. ↔ Premiership decided by a challenge final under the Argus finals system or similar. ∞ Premiership decided without a challenge final being required under the Argus finals system or similar; in these cases, had the other team won the match, a rematch would have been played the following weekend. ‡ Premiership decided by a grand final replay, after the scheduled Grand Final was drawn. VFL/AFL premierships [ edit ] Minor grade premierships [ edit ] In addition to the seniors, VFL/AFL clubs have competed in premierships in three minor grades: VFL/AFL Reserves premierships: 1919–1999 VFL/AFL Under-19s premierships: 1946–1991 VFL/AFL Night premierships: 1956–1971, 1977–2013 VFL/AFL Reserves premierships [ edit ] The reserve grade premiership was held in various formats between 1919 and 1999. It was known as the Victorian Junior Football League from 1919 until 1923, the Seconds from 1924 until 1959, the VFL Reserves from 1960 until 1989, and as the AFL reserves from 1990 until 1999.[13] Until 1991, the competition was run by the VFL/AFL, and from 1992 until 1999 it was administered by the Victorian State Football League. 1950 Essendon (3) 1951 Carlton (4) 1952 Essendon (4) 1953 Carlton (5) 1954 Richmond (3) 1955 Richmond (4) 1956 Melbourne (8) 1957 North Melbourne (2) 1958 Hawthorn (1) 1959 Hawthorn (2) 1960 Geelong (7) 1961 St Kilda (3) 1962 Footscray (3) 1963 Geelong (8) 1964 Geelong (9) 1965 Collingwood (6) 1966 Richmond (5) 1967 North Melbourne (3) 1968 Essendon (5) 1969 Melbourne (9) 1970 Melbourne (10) 1971 Richmond (6) 1972 Hawthorn (3) 1973 Richmond (7) 1974 Fitzroy (2) 1975 Geelong (10) 1976 Collingwood (7) 1977 Richmond (8) 1978 North Melbourne (4) 1979 North Melbourne (5) 1980 Geelong (11) 1981 Geelong (12) 1982 Geelong (13) 1983 Essendon (6) 1984 Melbourne (11) 1985 Hawthorn (4) 1986 Carlton (6) 1987 Carlton (7) 1988 Footscray (4) 1989 Fitzroy (3) 1990 Carlton (8) 1991 Brisbane Bears (1) 1992 Essendon (7) [15] 1993 Melbourne (12) [16] 1994 Footscray (5) [17] 1995 North Melbourne (6) [18] 1996 North Melbourne (7) [19] 1997 Richmond (9) [20] 1998 Western Bulldogs (6) [21] 1999 Essendon (8)[22] Source where unlisted[23] VFL/AFL Under-19s premierships [ edit ] The VFL/AFL's Under-19s competition was held between 1946 and 1991. It was known as the VFL Thirds until 1959, and as the Under-19s thereafter.[13] 1950 Essendon (1) 1951 Carlton (3) 1952 Essendon (2) 1953 Melbourne (2) 1954 Footscray (1) 1955 Fitzroy (1) 1956 South Melbourne (1) 1957 St Kilda (1) 1958 Richmond (1) 1959 Essendon (3) 1960 Collingwood (1) 1961 Essendon (4) 1962 Geelong (1) 1963 Carlton (4) 1964 Melbourne (3) 1965 Collingwood (2) 1966 Essendon (5) 1967 Richmond (2) 1968 Richmond (3) 1969 Richmond (4) 1970 Richmond (5) 1971 Melbourne (4) 1972 Hawthorn (1) 1973 Richmond (6) 1974 Collingwood (3) 1975 Richmond (7) 1976 North Melbourne (2) 1977 Richmond (8) 1978 Carlton (5) 1979 Carlton (6) 1980 Richmond (9) 1981 Melbourne (5) 1982 Fitzroy (2) 1983 Melbourne (6) 1984 North Melbourne (3) 1985 Richmond (10) 1986 Collingwood (4) 1987 North Melbourne (4) 1988 North Melbourne (5) 1989 Richmond (11) 1990 North Melbourne (6) 1991 North Melbourne (7) Source[23] VFL/AFL Night premierships [ edit ] The pre-season and night premiership covers three competitions which are considered historically equivalent in status: VFL Night Series, a consolation competition played amongst non-finalists between 1956 and 1971. Australian Football Championships Night Series, a mid-season knock-out competition played concurrently with the premiership and involving teams from interstate, played between 1977 and 1987. Australian Football League pre-season competition, played before each season from 1988 until 2013. For a list of premiers in these competitions, see list of Australian Football League pre-season and night series premiers. Premierships by team [ edit ] Essendon has won 16 premierships, including the inaugural premiership in 1897. Carlton has won 16 premierships, with the first win coming in the 1906 season. Collingwood's premiership win in 1930 was the club's fourth successive premiership, a record for the league. See also [ edit ] |
News Gamers Rejoice! Top Up Your Steam Account Using Bitcoin Gamers can now begin having marathon gaming sessions again as Bitrefill is now allowing gamers to buy Steam vouchers with Bitcoin and Litecoin. With the recent news that the Steam games platform would no longer be accepting Bitcoin as a payment option, many gamers erupted into rage over the decision by Valve. However, Valve did say that the use of Bitcoin as a payment option had become “untenable” for them. Yet it’s always darkest before the dawn, and a new hope has emerged to keep gaming addicts comfortably ensconced in front of their TVs and monitors. Fans of the Steam platform can now buy globally redeemable vouchers from Bitrefill using Bitcoin. The vouchers are denominated in EUR but the company promises that the vouchers can be used globally. The announcement was made on the Bitrefill blog, which reads: We’re happy to announce that you can now again pay for your Steam gaming with Bitcoin–buying Steam vouchers directly through Bitrefill! The vouchers are denominated in Euros (€) and are valid all over the world — the voucher amount will instantly be converted to the currency on your Steam account. Steam Gaming Platform Steam’s game platform dominates the gaming world, selling digital keys for games and other software. They have also diversified into the hardware field as well when they launched their own gampad and Linux-based SteamOS console. Their support for Bitcoin, as few other retailers had accepted it, was widely seen as a boon for the cryptocurrency when they announced they would be begin accepting it as payment in 2016. Steam’s decision to withdraw Bitcoin payment was announced earlier in the week as Bitcoin’s price moves were, within hours, rising or falling by thousands of dollars. Such volatility in a currency is hard to accept from a business as a certain small profit could easily turn into a significant loss within minutes. It should be noted, though, that Steam added in their statement that they were not ruling out using Bitcoin as a payment option in the future. Game On! You can now buy Steam vouchers with LTC! Thanks @bitrefill for supporting Litecoin! https://t.co/U2C1Nd5wck — Charlie Lee [LTC] (@SatoshiLite) December 8, 2017 For those looking to use the new vouchers, they are available for purchase from Bitrefill in denominations from 5 – 100 Euros. Payment can be made from your wallet of choice, including Xapo and Coinbase. Are you on the Steam games platform? Have you purchased with Bitcoin before? Will you now use Bitrefills vouchers? Let us know in the comments below. Images courtesy of Bitcoinist archives, Twitter/@SatoshiLite, and Pexels. |
Thearon W. Henderson/Getty Images Stephen Curry became a fan favorite quickly in his career, much to the chagrin of some of the NBA's biggest stars. According to Marcus Thompson II, author of The Miraculous Rise of Steph Curry, LeBron James, Chris Paul and Russell Westbrook are among the players who dislike the Golden State Warriors star, per Jason McIntyre of The Big Lead. As Thompson explained on McIntyre's podcast, Curry looked up to James and the two were close until he "challenged LeBron’s status," which has led to friction between the two. "[Curry] leapfrogged a whole lot of people," Thompson noted. "There's a whole lot of people who never got the adoration Steph gets. ... They don't like that. Players who were probably Hall of Famers [were saying] 'Nobody ever anointed me like this.'" Paul and the rest of the Los Angeles Clippers also disliked the Warriors taking over in the Western Conference when they were "next in line to win a championship." "That's another relationship where [Curry] was like, 'Oh, I look up to you,' and suddenly there is this disdain versus Steph. There's a lot of those." Thompson, who is a beat writer for the Warriors with the Mercury News, summed up the Westbrook relationship by saying the Oklahoma City Thunder guard "simply doesn't like Curry." Curry, 29, has been an All-Star in each of the last four years and won the last two MVP awards. His unanimous win in 2016 and his No. 1 ranking in jersey sales show his tremendous support from both media members and fans. For more news, rumors and related stories about Stephen Curry, the Golden State Warriors and the NBA, check out the NBA and Warriors streams on Bleacher Report's app. |
GETTY Andrei Karlov was shot dead on Monday afternoon by a gunman According to unconfirmed reports, a man’s body, believed to be one of the department heads within Russia's foreign ministry, was found dead early this morning. Two shells were allegedly found alongside a gun under the kitchen sink. The wife of the man, who has not been named, is said to have been at the apartment. The Kremlin has not confirmed or denied the reports. Meanwhile speculation abounds over whether the alleged incident could have been murder or suicide. The shocking news comes after Russia’s ambassador to Turkey, Andrei Karlov, was gunned down at an art gallery in the capital, Ankara. Footage from the incident shows a gunman, in a suit, pointing his gun at the crowd and shouting “Allah Akbar” before adding, “You Russians destroyed Aleppo and Syria”. GETTY Karlov's body shortly after he was gunned down The gunman then fatally shoots Mr Karlov, who had been delivering a speech, in the back five times. The 22-year-old gunman was then shot down at the scene. Vladimir Putin responded to Karlov's death and said it was “clearly a provocation” and vowed to make those responsible “feel the heat”. He said: “This murder is clearly a provocation aimed at undermining the improvement and normalisation of Russian-Turkish relations as well as undermining the peace process in Syria promoted by Russia, Turkey, Iran and other countries interested in solving this conflict in Syria. ASSASSINATED: Andrei Karlov, Russia's ambassador to Turkey shot dead Mon, December 19, 2016 Andrei Karlov, Russia's ambassador to Turkey has been shot dead while visiting an art exhibition in the capital, Ankara Play slideshow PA 1 of 16 Photograph of Andrei Karlov AHABER.COM Karlov's killer was police officer Mevlut Mert Altintas |
Please enable Javascript to watch this video Please enable Javascript to watch this video ROCKFORD, Mich. - A popular West Michigan winter sports park has been sold. Pando Winter Sports Park in Rockford has just been sold to the operators of Cannonsburg Ski Area. The deal was just finalized Friday afternoon. According to Alycia Choroszucha, Marketing and Development Coordinator of Cannonsburg, the owners had heard that Pando was for sale and they did not want the area to be added to a growing list of closed ski areas in Michigan. “We know the history of the property, and believe it would have been a disservice to the community not to step in," Choroszucha told FOX 17 Friday. "A lot of ski areas are getting added to the 'closed ski areas list' in Michigan, to us, Pando should not be added to that list.” Pando Winter Sports Park opened in the early 1960's as the first ski area in Kent County. "We didn’t want to see it fall in the hands of someone who doesn’t understand, who doesn’t know the rich history Pando holds and their very strong presence in the community," said Choroszucha. According to Pando's website, the park hosted the World Championships of Snurfing in the late 1970's, including 1979 when Jake Burton Carpenter won the first competitive snowboard race ever run. It's that rich-history West Michigan skiers and snowboarders say they'll miss most, but Alycia maintains that history won't die. "Nothing is going to be missing from the West Michigan winter sports community. We're going to have skiing, we're going to have snowboarding, we're going to have tubing. We just ask for patience as we figure out the plan right now," Choroszucha said. Pando will likely be closed for the upcoming winter season and will be prepared for the 2016-2017 season. As for Cannonsburg, we're told they will have ten tubing slopes this winter and hope to start making snow by Thanksgiving. |
The Clovis people first crossed the icy land bridge between Asia and North America about 13,500 years ago, bringing stone-tipped hunting weapons with them. But it wasn't until they arrived in North America that they discovered a way to make more durable, reliable arrow and spear tips, marking the first human innovation on American soil. The innovation was a small change to the stone tips of arrows and spears, thinning out the base with a narrow groove, called 'fluting'. The discovery could well have been made by accident, say the authors of a study on Clovis fluting technology published in the Journal of Archaeological Science. "It was risky and couldn't have been easy to learn how to do this effectively," study author Metin Eren of Kent State University said in a statement. Narrowing the base of the stone tip can make the tip more brittle rather than more robust if done incorrectly. Even the process of chipping the narrow groove is difficult to do without accidentally destroying the stone tip entirely. "Archaeological evidence suggests that up to one out of five points break when you try to chip this fluted base, and it takes at least 30 minutes to produce a finished specimen," said Eren. Eren and his colleagues used computer models to test the effects of fluting on the stone tips, and then attempted to recreate the tips themselves using materials that would have been available to Clovis people. But the effort pays off if the fluting is done just right. Carefully fluted stone tips are more likely to stay in one piece after colliding with their target. For the Clovis people, this would have been prehistoric beasts that roamed North America, such as mastodons and mammoths. A stone point that could be reused had the potential to revolutionise Clovis hunting. They could allow hunters to travel for much greater distances in the knowledge that their weapons would last for several kills. "Though it was a time-consuming process and risky technique, successfully fluted Clovis points would have been extremely reliable, especially while travelling great distances into unknown regions on a new continent. They needed points that would hold up and be used over and over again," said Eren. "It's amazing to think that people 12,000 years ago were flaking shock absorbers and engineering stone weapons in a way that it took 21st century modern engineering to figure out." |
Image caption Seattle residents celebrated election day with marijuana-fogged street parties This month, two US states voted to legalise, regulate and tax marijuana. From advertising and marketing to drugged-driving enforcement, we ask what's ahead. The 6 November votes in Colorado and Washington left a lot of marijuana users happy and a lot of police officers nervous. And they set the two states up for a confrontation with the federal government, as marijuana is still illegal under federal law. Marijuana is the most widely used illicit drug in the US. Legalisation advocates say the recent votes mark the beginning of the end of the drug's prohibition. "It's a tipping point for sure," says Sanho Tree, director of the drug policy project at the Institute for Policy Studies. "If these two states go ahead and legalise recreational use and the sky hasn't fallen, that opens up more political space." But authorities are wary. "The Colorado chiefs of police are incredibly concerned with regard to public safety as a whole," says Chief John Jackson of the Greenwood Village police department, and legislative chair of the Colorado Association of Chief of Police. Nearly 80 years after the US ended the prohibition of alcohol, we aim to answer just a few of the questions raised by the movement. Image caption Fancier packaging will help win new marijuana smokers, advertising experts say How will retailers and growers market and advertise marijuana? The laws forbid under-21s from possessing marijuana, and Washington bars marijuana adverts from within 1,000 ft (305m) of schools, playgrounds, parks and other places children gather. To the uninitiated, different kinds of marijuana look and smell pretty much the same and when smoked, have more or less the same effect. Once it becomes a legal consumer product, how can Washington and Colorado companies in the marijuana business build brand identity and expand their market? "Whether it's socks or weed the first thing you have to do is look at who's your target," says Rahul Panchal, an advertising creative director in New York. Panchal says the core market is well established: "Mid-twenties stoner guys". Those people are already comfortable smoking marijuana and are happy to buy it with minimal packaging or advertising effort. Successful marijuana entrepreneurs will try to expand that market, for example by tapping into existing subcultures or identity groups, for example outdoors enthusiasts, health-conscious suburbanites or stressed out professionals. An enterprising grower or retailer could develop a premium marijuana brand using high-design packaging to project an aura of exclusivity. "Gold leaf, black background," imagines Peter Corbett, chief executive officer of iStrategyLabs, a Washington digital marketing and advertising agency. "The packaging has a matte finish, so it's tactile and feels expensive. It would never come in a plastic bag - it comes in a linen sack." Entrepreneurs in search of big profits should look at the dairy industry, says Panchal. "The lowest margin is to just sell milk," he says, while the real money is in processed products like cheese and yogurt. "I would sell pot products: cookies, brownies and such. That's where the money's going to be." Image caption Police do not need blood tests to catch stoned drivers, says a Colorado police chief Can your boss still make you take a drug test? An evening joint around a camp fire in Colorado, though perfectly legal in that state, could still threaten your job, because the new Colorado law specifically lets employers forbid marijuana use among workers. "This isn't forcing any kind of change," says Mason Tvert, co-director of the Campaign to Regulate Marijuana like Alcohol, which advocated for the Colorado initiative. Washington's law does not specify either way. But workplace drug testing is already on the decline, says Lewis Maltby of the National Workrights Institute. He and Tvert predict employers in Colorado and Washington will now be even less inclined to test employees or prospective hires. Most drug testing, including pre-employment screening, is based on the perception that off-duty drug use among workers is bad for business, not on hard evidence, Maltby says. Most people who fail workplace drug tests are what he calls "Saturday night pot smokers", not people who smoke before work and are simply unable to get the job done. "Since it was fear that drove the testing in the first place, when marijuana becomes less scary a few less employers will test," he says. How can police officers prevent drugged driving? Both state referenda forbid driving while under the influence of marijuana. But a driver can have marijuana in his blood and not necessarily be too stoned to drive, since marijuana remains detectable in the body days and even weeks after use. The Washington law sets a threshold of five nanogrammes of THC, the active ingredient in marijuana, per litre of blood, and Colorado's legislature is expected to enact a similar threshold. Sheriff Ozzie Knezovich of Spokane County, Washington says officers who suspect a driver has smoked too much will have to summon a paramedic to draw blood for a test. "How much of an added expense is that going to be to our agencies?" he asks. Police have plenty of other ways to detect drug driving, says Chief Jackson: "I don't need a toxicology test on the side of the roadway." If officers see motorists driving erratically, they can stop and interview them and ask them to perform field sobriety tests. The encounter will likely be filmed from a dashboard camera. If the officer believes a driver is impaired, the officer will make an arrest and later testify in court, Chief Jackson says. "You don't need breathalyser tests to convict drunk driving," he says. "People refuse to blow all the time but we still convict them in the state of Colorado." Image caption Alcohol use was widespread during US prohibition, even though authorities did their best to rid the country of it The US once prohibited alcohol. Do these laws portend the nationwide end to marijuana prohibition? Daniel Okrent, author of Last Call: The Rise and Fall of Prohibition, sees two parallels between today's legal and cultural marijuana environment and the late 1920s and early '30s when the move to end America's experiment with prohibition of alcohol gained steam. Prohibition of alcohol, which took effect nationwide in 1920 after the passage of a constitutional amendment, utterly failed to keep Americans from drinking alcohol. Instead, it enriched criminal "bootleggers" and starved the government of tax revenue. Similarly, Americans have stubbornly resisted millions of dollars spent on anti-drug education. Despite decades of law enforcement efforts, marijuana remains widely available just about everywhere. In 2002, 6.2% of Americans over the age of 11 reported using marijuana within the past month, according to a Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration study. By 2011 that figure had risen to 7%. The public rhetoric in today's marijuana legalisation movement takes the same tone as anti-temperance forces in the mid- to late-1920s, says Okrent. "It's not 'we want to have fun and give us our freedom'," he says. "There's a sense it's not working, it's enriching criminal syndicates, it's establishing a hypocritical view of law enforcement and let's be honest with ourselves." Today, as in the last years of prohibition, state, local and federal governments are desperate for tax revenue, he says. One major difference between then and now: alcohol and drinking had long been ubiquitous in American life, from sacramental wine at mass, in Jewish rites, and at the dinner table, to beer at the pub and spirits made in backwoods distilleries. Marijuana, meanwhile, is a relative newcomer to mass American culture and is not deeply ingrained. Many, if not most, Americans still frown on it. Nevertheless, since election day, lawmakers in at least two more states - Maine and Rhode Island - have promised to introduce marijuana legalisation laws. Will people stop distinguishing between "recreational use" and "medical use" of marijuana? Neither the Washington nor the Colorado laws refer to recreation, but the media uses the term to distinguish the new movement from medical marijuana legal in at least 16 states. Yet no-one talks about "recreational use" of beer, wine and spirits. Some people use marijuana aside from a desire to have a good time: to relax, in a religious rite, to spark creativity, to feed an addiction. Others insist it has medicinal benefits. In some states medical marijuana is tightly controlled, but in California, it is widely viewed as a farce. Just about anyone - even BBC correspondents - can get a marijuana prescription by paying a fee to a doctor and taking a minimal walk-in examination. In other states rules are stricter. In the 1920s, during prohibition, Americans could pay a doctor to write a prescription for a weekly allotment of whisky, to be dispensed by a pharmacy, says Okrent, the prohibition scholar. "It was an equally dishonest racket," he says. "There's a very clear parallel." |
Local Democratic parties are confronting a problem in the Trump era that is as confounding as it is unexpected: space. All across the country, party meetings that had once been sleepy affairs, dominated by Robert’s Rules of Order and a handful of graying activists, have become standing room only. The overflowing crowds have sent stunned party regulars scrambling to find new venues, while the surge in interest, and the coinciding fundraising boost, is enabling local chapters to hire staff and build infrastructure in previously unthinkable ways. On the national level, Democratic politicians have been rushing to respond to the sudden outpouring. “I’m as busy this year as I was at any time last year in the heat of a huge election,” said Mark Fraley, chairman of the Monroe County Democratic Party in Indiana. Fraley said he received 65 emails in a single weekend from people requesting to become precinct chairs, a thankless job that normally requires begging and pleading to get someone to fill. The county party has restructured and added five deputy chairs to channel all the energy, and created six new committees. “What’s very different is that it’s made the party younger. Young people never really wanted to have as much of a meaningful part in the Democratic Party infrastructure. Now that doesn’t seem true anymore,” he said. The resistance to President Donald Trump has taken a variety of forms, all of them well chronicled by the media. The Women’s March, which saw some 5 million people take to the streets in a single day, helped fuel the growth of Indivisible chapters around the country, and has itself continued organizing meetings and protests since. The groups Swing Left, Flippable and The Sister District Project are routing people to swing districts where they can be most effective, and groups are forming to challenge Democrats in primaries. Amid it all, observers and participants alike have wondered what the name is for this nascent movement. The Resistance? The Opposition? But if the swelling ranks of county-level meetings are an indication of things to come, the grassroots movement underway already has a name. It’s called the Democratic Party. Interviews with activists in 24 states ― red, blue and purple ― reveal a strikingly similar pattern: Shocked by the outcome of the election and fearful for the future of the country, people of all ages, some of them Democrats, some independents, some Greens, found the time and location of a local party meeting and showed up. Here are a few of their stories: COLORADO Andy Cross/Getty Images Protesters showed up at Denver International Airport on Jan. 28, to protest President Donald Trump's ban on refugees and travelers from a number of predominantly Muslim countries. Carol Cure had been an active member of the Democratic Party more than two decades ago in Arizona ― even running unsuccessfully for Congress ― but she thought those days were behind her. She’s now back in the game. Just recently, Cure found her way to the local La Plata County Democratic Party organizational meeting and was named a “bonus member” of the Colorado House District 59 committee. “I really thought, until now, that I had done my part and was content to enjoy my retirement and all of the great activities available to us here in Southwest Colorado,” she said. “Many new people are getting in the game, many of them young, recent college graduates. We just had our two-year reorganizational meeting last Saturday, and two recent graduates were elected to the County Executive Committee. Now that the Dems are fired up and involved, it has become apparent that many of us are Progressives and may have been when no one noticed.” GEORGIA Ilene Johnson, a veteran party member, said a recent meeting in Greensboro was standing room only. And at a breakfast meeting there, 70 people showed up. “Fulton County, Cobb County and Dekalb County Democratic meetings are packed. But Dekalb and Fulton are majority Dem. [Greensboro is] not, neither is Cobb. My mailbox is full. I have more volunteers. I’m swamped,” she said. ILLINOIS Oak Park Democrats usually get maybe 80 people at a meeting. But at their most recent gathering, they had more than 120. “Our meetings are bursting at the seams these days,” Oak Park Democratic Party Executive Director Karen Fischer said. “We literally couldn’t get them in the door. There were people out on the street who actually couldn’t get in.” Fischer emphasized that so far, the party hasn’t yet increased its advertising in the new year; all these new folks are finding their way on their own. People are walking in off the street every day and asking how to get involved. “We’re planning to [step up outreach], in part because organizations are popping up all over the place,” she said. We’re kind of looking at it and going, ‘Wait a minute! We’re here! You don’t need to invent the wheel!’” INDIANA At the last meeting of the women’s caucus of the Monroe County Democratic Party ― normally a sparsely attended affair ― people spilled out the door onto the street. For the party’s upcoming reorganization meeting, county chairman Mark Fraley said they’re looking for a new venue, because the courthouse room that had always been more than sufficient is now too small. If they can’t find a new room, he said, they’ll put speakers outside the door so the spillover crowd can still hear. Democrats here have seen such an outpouring of new members, they’re on track to raise enough money to hire an executive director for the first time. “Right after the election, we were just inundated with emails [asking], ‘What can I do?’” said Fraley, 37, who works at Indiana University Bloomington. Fraley said the county party has restructured and added five deputy chairs and created six new committees. The influx of new people is making the party younger, he said: About two-thirds of them came through Sen. Bernie Sanders’ (I-Vt.) campaign, many of them encouraged by his organization Our Revolution to do so. “If we can maintain 30 percent of this energy, that’s a huge increase in our local Democratic capacity,” he added, arguing that Republican House seats that were 9-point wins in the past could soon become competitive. IOWA The Winneshiek County Democratic Party had its largest central committee meeting ever in January, with a third of the 40 attendees being people who had never attended a meeting, according to the county correspondence secretary. Polk County, which includes Des Moines, is bursting too. Tamyra Harrison, the county party’s executive director, said that over the last decade, around 50-60 people have shown up for central committee meetings. On Nov. 14, however, they had 177. The committee has 359 elected positions and at this time two years ago had 120 open seats. That number will soon be 80, now a record low, and is falling fast. “Every post-election meeting I have attended has been crowded and humid,” Thomas Henderson, the party’s county chair, said. Down in Page County, in rural Southwest Iowa, party member Christine Adcock said that four times the normal crowd showed up to the first county meeting after the election ― “a whopping 20 people!!” Adcock followed up a week later with an update: The February meeting drew 30. MARYLAND In Montgomery County, a standing-room-only crowd showed up to hear freshman Rep. Jamie Raskin talk about “threats to democracy in the Trump era.” “Just since this past election, a number of friends have quite suddenly expressed interest in becoming more involved in the party ― many of them have been activists with local environmental groups and in some cases the Green Party,” said Sylvia Tognetti. Raskin told HuffPost there were some 900 people at the Trump event. It was one of eight events he did that day and all of them, he said, were bursting. MASSACHUSETTS A group affiliated with Sanders’ Our Revolution ran a slate of eight people to be delegates to the June state party convention, and all eight won, said Jordan Weinstein, one of the eight. Several are also moving to become members of the town Democratic Party committee in Arlington. Weinstein said he’s running for a seat on the town council, known as the Arlington Town Meeting. The ages range from 30s to 60s, he said. “Most of us have been registered Democrats forever but just so we could vote in the primaries. Since Trump, we all see the need to get involved with the goal of trying to move the Dems toward more progressive positions,” he said. Alice Trexler, a veteran member of the Arlington Town Democratic Committee, witnessed the same bursting attendance at the convention meeting, but did so with the perspective of somebody who’s been to many of them. “It was roughly triple the size of the past three to four I have attended. There were many new folks who were, on balance, younger than many of us on the Town Committee,” she said, adding that a later Indivisible meeting downstairs “was overfilled with people backed up in the hallway and into the lobby.” “Our town is hopping with resistance. I know, it’s Massachusetts, but it’s still extraordinary to see the number of young parents and those new to protest and to politics,” she added. “Believe me, I haven’t seen this before.” MICHIGAN Rachel Woolf/Getty Images In January, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) joined with members of the Michigan congressional delegation and local elected officials for a rally at Macomb Community College in Warren to save Obamacare. The spring conventions of the Michigan Democratic Party don’t usually attract too much notice, described by the Detroit Free Press as “sleepy affairs filled with party regulars giving speeches and calls to action.” This year, however, was different. Nearly 5,000 people came to the convention, with longtime attendees saying they had never seen anything like it. “That blew the doors off previous conventions, especially considering it’s an off-year,” said Herb Helzer, a member of the Northville Democratic Club. “Sure, plenty of people showed up for the midterms in 2014 or 2012. ... But this is winter 2017 after the biggest trouncing we’ve gotten.” Helzer said the meeting of the progressive caucus was especially popular at the convention, with about 600 people showing up. Chris Savage, chair of the Washtenaw County Democrats, said he usually gets about 50-60 people at a meeting, if he’s lucky. But at their last meeting, on Super Bowl Sunday, 225 people showed up. “I could not believe it,” he said. “Our email list since Election Day has grown by about 20 percent, and I’m getting new people signing up every day.” People are particularly interested in pushing their legislators on policy. He used to have a “legislative programs” team, which mostly consisted of one staffer from a congressional office who would help be a liaison between the party and government officials. Now, that team has 120 people who signed up to do twice-weekly phone banks and engage people in other counties. OHIO Martha Viehmann, of Anderson Township near Cincinnati, said the state, after falling badly to Trump, has come alive. Sen. Sherrod Brown, one of the stronger progressives in the Senate, faces a critical re-election bid in 2018. “The January meeting had a phenomenal turnout,” said Viehmann, a precinct executive in Anderson. “The resurgence of the Democratic Party is very clear here in my eastern suburb of Cincinnati, Ohio. Lots of new people are not only turning out to protests. They are also learning about our local and state elections and swamping our elected officials in D.C. with postcards and phone calls.” One of those is Aileen Peters, 72, who joined a Dayton Democratic club in the wake of the election. “I have always voted, but not been active politically” with the party, she said. “I was a fellow in Hillary’s campaign. Volunteered in the local office, phone banks, etc. Now I’m a member of the South of Dayton Democratic Club, I’m organizing a No Hate group, I have a group I email to keep them informed of opportunities to be involved. The first thing I do every morning is send emails to Congressmen and make phone calls to [Sen. Rob] Portman and [Rep. Mike] Turner.” SOUTH CAROLINA Greenville is “the reddest part of a very red state,” according to Kate Howard Franch, the chair of the local Democratic Party. Rep. Trey Gowdy (R-S.C.), who led the Benghazi committee, is their congressman, if that gives any indication of the area’s leanings. Franch usually gets about 20 people at her monthly meetings ― 40 on a good day. But at the end of January, she had 120. Franch said that in her nine years there, she’s never seen this sort of engagement. They had a gathering at Furman University after the Women’s March to build upon the momentum and figure out next steps. Even though the meeting took place on Super Bowl Sunday, there were about 1,000 people in the audience. Over in Charleston, the local party had 130 people show up at its January meeting, a big jump from the 20 or so they usually see. Chair Brady Quirk-Garvan said they’ve also tripled the number of monthly donors to the party. TENNESSEE The Davidson County Democratic Party in Tennessee maybe gets 10 people, beyond the executive committee, at its regular meetings. But in January, it had nearly 200 people show up, and 180 people filled out forms to start volunteering. “We had so many people we had to leave the conference room that we were supposed to be in and move out to the lobby of the building because there was no room to fit everybody,” said Whitney Pastorek, a member of the executive committee. “They’re self-identifying and self-gathering,” Pastorek added, stressing that all this energy is organic. “They’re not waiting for the Democratic Party to tell them what to do. They’re doing it themselves, and it’s great.” TEXAS Typically after an election, Carisa Lopez notices that people just want to take a deep breath and relax before mobilizing again. But not this time. “We put together an event that was kind of an open mic type of event, less than two weeks after the election,” Lopez, executive director of the Travis County Democratic Party, said. “We had about 400 people in attendance, and that was right before Thanksgiving. So even around the holidays, when ... people usually aren’t paying attention, they definitely were.” Her organization also had a training in early February that they expected about 100 people to attend. But they ended up having nearly 500 people and had to change venues three times just to keep up with the demand. They also streamed it on Facebook Live because there was so much extra interest. UTAH The state party is hosting a candidate training in March. When officials opened up registration, they sold out 50 tickets in the first day. A week later, the party expanded it to 200 spots ― and again immediately sold out. VIRGINIA Democrats have already won two special elections in Virginia since November, and the state House and governor’s mansion will be up for grabs this fall. (More on that below.) Mike Freeland, co-chair of the local Democratic party in Manassas and Manassas Park, said the party is being flooded with new members. “We had our largest attendance ever at our regular monthly meeting last week,” he said. “We are averaging 4-5 signups per week on our website and are having events like new member breakfasts in an attempt to capture the momentum and find a place for these new folks to help out.” The same, he added, is true for other local officials he’s talked to recently. WASHINGTON Alison Dennis, 30, just started going to her local Democratic Party meetings in Wenatchee. At her first meeting last month, the hosts were overwhelmed, with about 85 people overflowing the room that was supposed to hold only 53 people. “Folks consider the area I’m in to be a deeply red area, but I think it’s more purple than folks give it credit. I think there’s a lot of potential here, but we need to ramp up the leadership quickly,” she said. David Turnoy has been involved with the San Juan County Democratic Party for the last five years and was recently elected chair. He said turnout was huge for their meeting in December, and their email list has grown significantly. “People are energized in ways that they have never been before,” he said. “And our Democrats group normally only meets once a quarter, but we have been meeting monthly since December and look to continue that for the foreseeable future.” SHIFTING TO THE BALLOT BOX Mark Kauzlarich/Reuters None of it means anything if the energy doesn’t become power, if it doesn’t translate into electoral success. One major test of how potent the new movement is will come on Saturday, when Delaware holds a special election for a vacated state Senate seat. Whichever party wins will control the state Senate. The district leans slightly Democratic, but special elections with low turnouts are often the party’s Achilles’ heel, just as midterms are. But if the grassroots energy is real, turnout won’t be a problem. Sonia Sloan, 88, has been a First State Democratic activist all her life and said she hasn’t seen this much excitement in a race since Eugene McCarthy, whose presidential bid she chaired in Delaware in 1968. This year, she’s co-hosting a fundraiser for the Democrat in the race, environmental attorney Stephanie Hansen. “Our field operation is off the charts, as is volunteer activity. Organizers and volunteers have already knocked on over 30,000 doors, and they’ve made over 28,000 phone calls as of” Wednesday, said Carolyn Fiddler of the Democratic Legislative Campaign Committee, adding that they’d knock on another 30,000 doors before the campaign is over. With only about 31,000 registered voters in the district, that means they’ll be hitting voters repeatedly. The Republican in the race, a retired cop, John Marino, is running as a Trump-esque candidate. “We deserve to be ‘First’ again,” he says. If special elections are a sign of things to come ― and they may or may not be ― signs are good for Democrats so far. In two specials in Iowa, in December and January, on the eastern border in Davenport, Democrats won by larger-than-expected margins. Iowa allows absentee balloting, which allows organizers to go door to door to make sure those ballots are being filled out and mailed in. In the state Senate race in December, Democrats collected 2,163 ballots. On Election Day, the Democrat won only 1,640 votes, meaning more people voted absentee than in person, suggesting an extraordinarily high level of organization and energy on the ground. The same pattern held for the House race. Iowa More Democrats voted absentee than on Election Day. In mid February, Republicans won their only special election since November in a district outside Minneapolis. But Trump had carried it by a 61-32 margin, DailyKos reported, and the Republican winning by just 6 points was a huge collapse. The question, then, is whether the momentum can carry into 2018. Along the way will be the November 2017 elections in Virginia and New Jersey. The Garden State should be easy to pick off for Democrats, given their statewide advantage and the cellar-level popularity of Gov. Chris Christie (R). But Virginia will be interesting to watch. If populist-progressive Tom Perriello can channel the new grassroots energy into his candidacy, there’s every reason to believe he can knock off the establishment candidate, Ralph Northam, who is lieutenant governor and was Gov. Terry McAuliffe’s (D) hand-picked successor. If Perriello can get past Northam in the June primary, he’ll likely face GOP lobbyist and operative Ed Gillespie, who is perfectly ill-suited for the moment ― particularly with Trump regularly attacking federal workers, who make up a significant chunk of the Virginia electorate. Democratic committee meetings in Virginia, Perriello told HuffPost, “are absolutely bursting out of the room in the hallways with crowds.” Governor and state House races like the one in Virginia are more critical than ever because the redistricting process follows the 2020 Census. If Democrats can ride a new wave into power, the gerrymandering of 2010 can be rolled back. Local officials nationwide say they’re focused on creating a positive vision and a constant stream of activities to keep these new activists engaged. “If we stop giving them things to do, I’m worried that people will get apathetic,” said Lopez, the executive director of the Travis County Democratic Party in Texas. “It’s only February, but typically after an election, this is the time when people are apathetic.” Savage, who runs the Washtenaw County Democratic Party in Michigan, said he’s been making a point of reaching out not only to his new members, but to many of the people in the outside activist groups, to let them know that the party has resources that can help them organize. “We’re going to be here whether they’re here or not,” he said. “But if we can activate them, help them have some successes ― you’ve got to have a success now and then, otherwise it becomes too demoralizing.” Next year is key for Michigan as well; every state legislative seat and every single statewide office is up for election. Even without a to-do list from local party leaders, Trump is managing to be liberals’ greatest organizer, with one extraordinary move after another drawing public outrage. With his Muslim ban on hold, his popularity plummeting, national security adviser Mike Flynn fired, Obamacare repeal looking less and less likely and Labor Department nominee Andy Puzder defeated, Democrats can start to point to wins that keep newly engaged activists fighting. And they’re hoping to pick up one more in Delaware this week. Even if they don’t, Republican John Marino, making a bid for the seat, appears to have his finger on the new public pulse. Theresa Kudlick, a district voter, said Marino came by her neighbor’s house and she was left with the impression he was the Democrat in the race. None of his material mentioned what is becoming an inconvenient fact: He’s a Republican. Want more updates from Amanda Terkel? Sign up for her newsletter, Piping Hot Truth, here. |
Jay Famiglietti, a senior water scientist at the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California, made a dire warning last month — there is only one year’s worth of water left in the state’s reservoir storage and river basins. Not only that, Famiglietti said, but even nature’s oldest water backup supply — groundwater — could be gone soon after the reservoirs dry up. Some 38.8 million people live in California — or about one of every eight people in the US. California also produces many of the food products that make it to people’s tables across the country and the world. So people are rightfully fearful. The California drought is throwing the ecology of the state and the region into crisis, and ordinary people are scrambling for ways to help. Many restaurants have stopped serving table water unless requested by customers. People have stopped flushing toilets willy-nilly, are taking shorter showers, and aren’t washing their vehicles as often. The media is filled with advice about how individuals can change their lifestyles and personal habits to help alleviate the water crisis, one gallon at a time. But this avoids the bigger questions about what is causing this drought — and what can be done to improve the situation. Scientists recognize that the “mega-droughts” of the Western US are the result of climate change, which is producing record-high temperatures on the West Coast along with historic cold winters and “mega storms” on the East Coast. In a 2014 article assessing the history of droughts in California, NASA research scientist and oceanographer Bill Patzert explained how global warming is intensifying the effects of cyclical climate events: A phenomenon known as a “negative Pacific decadal oscillation” is underway — and that historically has been linked to extreme high-pressure ridges that block storms. Such events, which cause pools of warm water in the North Pacific Ocean and cool water along the California coast, are not the result of global warming. But climate change caused by the burning of fossil fuels has been linked to longer heat waves. That wild card wasn’t around years ago. This year is looking like it will be even worse than 2014. Rainfall in California is at a record low. Scientists, using tree ring data going back hundreds of years, have calculated this year will be the driest in 434 years. Snowfall has also been abysmally low. The California Department of Water Resources reported that snowpack in the Sierra Nevada Mountains, which naturally refills reservoirs when it melts in the spring and summer, is at between 16 and 22 percent of normal levels. That isn’t the end of the problem, by any means. Less snow means more wildfires, which are already sweeping across the state at higher-than-average rates. Fires have destroyed 3,200 acres since the start of the year, with the main fire season of the year still to come. All this will continue to have an impact on crops that are central to industrial food production in the US. As the US Department of Agriculture reported in 2014: The ongoing drought in California— with the driest year on record for the state following several prior years of drought — is likely to have a major impact on the state’s agricultural production in 2014. Despite a relatively recent series of major storms, long-term moisture deficits across most of the state remain at near-record levels. Because California is a major producer in the fruit, vegetable, tree nut and dairy sectors, the drought has potential implications for U.S. supplies and prices of affected products in 2014 and beyond. Unsurprisingly, most of these reports emphasizing the effects of the water shortage on agriculture production ignore what Sonali Kolhatkar recently pointed out: the water conservation measures are aimed at individuals and small businesses, not big agriculture, which sucks up 80 percent of California water to grow crops in a desert. Kolhatkar argues that the ecological crisis is directly linked to the process of market-driven food production: That desert is irrigated with enough precious water to artificially sustain the growing of one-third of the nation’s fruits and vegetables, a $40 billion industry. Think about it. A third of all produce in the United States is grown in a desert in a state that has almost no water left. That produce is trucked from the West Coast all over the country in fossil-fuel-consuming vehicles, thereby contributing to the very mechanism of climate change that is likely to be driving California’s historic drought. Until last year, California hasn’t had any statewide regulations on drilling deep into ancient aquifers for farmer’s fields. As the water levels have dropped, Central Valley growers have sucked these wells dry in order to produce commodity crops like nuts. Just how much does it take to grow one almond? About a gallon of water. One walnut takes almost five gallons of water. Other types of produce grown in California are equally dependent on exorbitant amounts of water to grow — one head of broccoli takes more than five gallons. Another industry to blame for bringing the crisis to a head is oil and gas. The energy giants have swooped into California over the last couple years to get in on the hydraulic fracturing boom — which, of course, pumps huge amounts of water into the earth to release pockets of natural gas and oil. Despite reports that land in California is sinking by one foot per year due to reservoirs drying up, investigative reporting has revealed that oil companies have been pumping wastewater from fracking into groundwater reservoirs and wells. There is even talk of pumping this contaminated water into the sea. As the San Francisco Chronicle recently reported, there are further consequences to oil production: Companies often flood oil reservoirs with steam to coax out the valley’s thick, viscous crude, which is far heavier than petroleum found in most other states. They pump high-pressure water and chemicals underground to crack rocks in the controversial practice of hydraulic fracturing. They use acid and water to clear up debris that would otherwise clog their oil-producing wells. All of that leftover water, laced with bits of oil and other chemicals, has to go somewhere. Pumping the liquid — known in the industry as produced water — back underground is considered one of the most environmentally responsible ways to get rid of it. According to the Chronicle , California regulators allowed oil companies to fill 170 aquifers that could be suitable for drinking or irrigation with fracking waste product. Companies drilled into close to another 253 wells that the EPA had considered protected because they were potentially usable aquifers. Another investigation by NBC News in the Bay Area found that “state officials allowed oil and gas companies to pump nearly three billion gallons of waste water into underground aquifers that could have been used for drinking water or irrigation.” California Gov. Jerry Brown is expected to sign a bill authorizing $1 billion in spending aimed at alleviating the crisis, and the California Senate approved legislation for spending on infrastructure and aid to communities hit hardest by the water crisis, and for fines punishing the illegal diversion of water that hurts fish. And on Wednesday, Brown announced a mandatory reduction of water use for towns and cities. But the governor and California lawmakers are talking out of both sides of their mouth when they say they punish illegal “diversions of water,” but refuse to go after oil corporations for contaminating the reservoirs and groundwater. Brown portrays himself as a political leader in improving environmental practices and pursuing renewable energy. In January, in his inaugural address, Brown proposed an expansion of California’s renewable energy goals, from one-third by 2020 to one-half by 2030. But at the same time Brown boasts about such measures, the California economy has become more integrated than ever in a national boom in fossil fuel extraction. While Brown does press conferences touting his green credentials, he and other Democratic Party politicians remain in bed with energy corporations that are driving CO2 emissions, and therefore global warming. What does all this mean for people living in California? There is a struggle ahead, and we need to prepare for it by uniting forces that can take on the corporate leaders and politicians who only think about the bottom line while California burns. Supporters of ecological justice need to envision and fight for sustainable food production, workers’ health and safety, and indigenous rights. It’s estimated that farmers and the agriculture industry as a whole lost $2.2 billion in profits due to the drought in 2014, and 17,000 people were thrown out of work. Rural towns with populations in the thousands, predominantly the working poor, are having to make hard choices about their water usage, while their groundwater and wells are being contaminated by pollution from fracking. The rights of indigenous peoples on the Klamath-Trinity basin, including the Yurok and Hoopa Valley tribes, are coming into the crosshairs as well. California tribes have been fighting for years to protect fisheries and salmon populations — warmer shallower waters cause fish to die off. Recently, 595,000 acre-feet of Trinity Reservoir water was diverted to the Sacramento Valley and San Joaquin Valley, drawing the reservoir down to near-record lows. This is despite a 1979 federal court ruling that entitles tribes to “as much water on the Reservation lands as they need to protect their hunting and fishing rights” for “time immemorial.” Threats to the river system will increase as California lawmakers push to build new dams, which have devastated salmon populations. |
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