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President Donald Trump's decision comes despite a personal appeal from CFPB Director Richard Cordray and veterans groups. | Nicholas Kamm/AFP/Getty Images Trump to sign legislation overturning arbitration rule The rule bans forced arbitration clauses in contracts. President Donald Trump will sign legislation overturning the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau’s mandatory arbitration rule Wednesday afternoon, according to a White House official. The president’s decision comes despite a personal appeal from CFPB Director Richard Cordray and veterans groups, who opposed a congressional vote to overturn the consumer watchdog's rule using the Congressional Review Act. Story Continued Below The rule bans forced-arbitration clauses in contracts, making it easier for bank and credit card customers to sue to settle disputes. A banking industry representative applauded the news. “The CFPB’s rule was never about protecting consumers; rather, it was about protecting trial lawyers and their wallets,” said Richard Hunt, chief executive officer of the Consumer Bankers Association. “The bureau’s own study backs that up and proves trial lawyers would have been the real winners.” |
As a successful, 20-plus-year veteran of the American Institute of Architects, president and CEO Mitchell Classon seemed poised to lead well into the next decade. However, all of that changed in an instant following a recent bombshell announcement: Classon has officially resigned after admitting he is an undercover cop who infiltrated the wrong organization. Oh, how the mighty have fallen. “My friends and colleagues, I’ve made a terrible mistake,” began Classon’s statement. “In an attempt to expose the criminal actions of a criminal syndicate based in Venezuela, I incorrectly placed myself within the walls of this reputable institution. My suspicions were baseless, harmful, and I am truly sorry.” Advertisement Talk about a huge embarrassment for Classon and the institute. The whole charade began as far back as 1993, when Classon joined the AIA believing it to be the epicenter of North American operations for a multi-billion-dollar drug ring. Former coworkers recall that Classon displayed some mild eccentricities from the get-go: taking phone calls on the roof of the building and singling out teammates to ask about any “big jobs” over the weekend. One longtime client of the institute even remembered spotting Classon’s car tailing him after an off-site meeting. “What we do on a day-to-day basis is pretty dry, technical stuff, overall,” said Emily Lancer, a longtime employee of the institution. “So when Mitchell started asking around about a gentleman named ‘El Cubra,’ we figured he was either joking or quoting something from a movie.” Advertisement If he was frustrated by a profound lack of progress in his investigation, Classon didn’t show it, rising all the way to the position of president in 2006. Once there, he balanced the budget, hired key executives, and even designed several widely acclaimed schools, one of which made Classon the 2009 recipient of the Bruner Award for Urban Excellence. So when it finally dawned on him that he was in the wrong place, Classon knew he was going down hard. Game. Over. Following his exit, officials raided the former president’s office to discover box after box of surveillance footage, photographs, and phone transcripts detailing years of entirely above-the-board architecture outreach, development, and professional networking. Further, a search of Classon’s computer yielded over 10,000 emails to the FBI, most containing links to hours of unedited board meetings that he had secretly recorded. Advertisement Wow! Who knows what the future holds for Mitchell Classon, but we wouldn’t want to be there when he walks into the bureau after 20 lost years in the field. Let’s hope this serves as a cautionary tale to all new FBI recruits, so they can avoid another completely humiliating story like this one. |
White-nose syndrome (WNS), an emerging infectious disease caused by the novel fungus Pseudogymnoascus destructans , has devastated North American bat populations since its discovery in 2006. The little brown myotis, Myotis lucifugus , has been especially affected. The goal of this 2-year captive study was to determine the impact of hibernacula temperature and sex on WNS survivorship in little brown myotis that displayed visible fungal infection when collected from affected hibernacula. In study 1, we found that WNS-affected male bats had increased survival over females and that bats housed at a colder temperature survived longer than those housed at warmer temperatures. In study 2, we found that WNS-affected bats housed at a colder temperature fared worse than unaffected bats. Our results demonstrate that WNS mortality varies among individuals, and that colder hibernacula are more favourable for survival. They also suggest that female bats may be more negatively affected by WNS than male bats, which has important implications for the long-term survival of the little brown myotis in eastern North America. 2. Introduction White-nose syndrome (WNS) is an emerging infectious disease estimated to have killed over 5.7 million North American bats [1] in the 4 years following its discovery. It is caused by the psychrophilic fungus, Pseudogymnoascus destructans (Pd) [2] that grows in the skin of affected bats during periods of prolonged torpor, or hibernation [3]. At least seven species of bats are affected, but little brown myotis (Myotis lucifugus) are especially susceptible, with an average 91% decline in northeastern North America [4]. WNS affects hibernation behaviour and survival in bats [2,5]; the role of microclimate factors, such as hibernaculum temperature, on this relationship is mostly unknown, although populations of little brown myotis in warmer WNS-affected hibernacula suffer greater declines than those in colder hibernacula [6]. In healthy bats, hibernaculum temperature plays a significant role in energy balance and survivorship [7]. When a bat enters torpor its metabolism is depressed and body temperature drops to within 1°C of ambient temperature [8]. Hibernators use up to 90% of their stored energy for arousal bouts [9], in which they briefly warm up to euthermic body temperature. Arousing from a warmer temperature uses less energy than arousing from a colder temperature, thus bats roosting at warmer temperatures can arouse more frequently [7]. Sex also plays a role in hibernation energetics; female bats face selective pressure to retain enough fat at the end of hibernation to ovulate upon spring emergence [10,11]. The goal of this study was to determine the impact of hibernaculum temperature and other covariates such as sex and body mass index (BMI) on WNS survivorship in little brown myotis in controlled laboratory studies. Because Pd grows optimally between 12.5°C and 15.8°C, and much more slowly at lower temperatures [12] we hypothesized that WNS-affected bats housed at colder temperatures would exhibit increased survival over those housed at warmer temperatures. We further hypothesized that females infected with Pd would have increased survival rates over males, as healthy female little brown myotis start and end hibernation with greater fat reserves [11], and may be better equipped to deal with an energetically costly disease during hibernation. 3. Material and methods 3.1 Study 1 Little brown myotis were collected from WNS-unaffected (n=58) and WNS-affected (n=49) hibernacula in Pennsylvania on 13 and 15 January 2010, respectively, and transported to Bucknell University's bat vivarium. Every bat from the WNS site had visible fungal growth at collection and was thus presumed to be WNS-affected. Upon arrival at the laboratory, data on weight, sex and forearm length were recorded for each bat and BMI (mass in g/length of forearm in mm) was calculated. Bats were housed following [13] and induced to hibernate by placing them in a darkened environmental chamber. Bats were evenly distributed between six non-adjacent wire mesh cages (46×46×61 cm); one for unaffected bats, one for WNS-affected bats in each of three environmental chambers (set to 4°C, 7°C or 10°C; table 1). Lorch et al. [14], under nearly identical housing conditions, demonstrated that Pd transmission does not occur between cages, and, as visible fungal growth was not observed on the unaffected bats at any time in our study it is unlikely transmission occurred between the groups. Chambers were checked weekly for mortality and dead bats were removed. This provided a relative death date, so survival could be calculated via Cox regression on the following variables: WNS status of a site, chamber temperature, sex and initial BMI. Additionally, a subset of animals from each group were removed once for experimental testing of thermal preferences for a separate study. While these trials were conducted with affected and unaffected bats equally, this disturbance, combined with weekly removal of dead animals, very likely affected overall survivorship for all bats (see Results). Table 1.Factors included in the study 1 final Cox survival regression model. (A hazard ratio of 0.353 indicates a 35.3% lower risk of death. Asterisks indicate significance of p-values.) Collapse effect sample size, n χ2 p-value parameter group with higher risk of death hazard ratio (95% CI) site* WNS site: 58 11.70 <0.001* — WNS-affected — unaffected site: 49 sex female: 55 0.10 0.75 — — — male: 52 sex×site* WNS female: 24 unaffected female: 31 WNS male: 24 unaffected male: 28 4.26 0.04* WNS male versus WNS female WNS female 0.468 (0.253–0.866) unaffected male versus unaffected female n.s. 1.090 (0.647–1.837) unaffected female versus WNS female WNS female 0.152 (0.080–0.287) unaffected male versus WNS male WNS male 0.353 (0.195–0.641) housing temperature* 4°C: 38 7°C: 34 10°C: 35 11.17 0.004* 4°C versus 7°C 7°C 1.986 (1.204–3.274) 4°C versus 10°C 10°C 2.276 (1.360–3.810) 7°C versus 10°C n.s. 0.872 (0.537–1.416) BMI initial 107 3.07 0.08 — — — 3.2 Study 2 To follow up on the results of study 1, little brown myotis were collected from a presumed unaffected hibernaculum in Kentucky (n=40) and from a WNS-affected hibernaculum (n=40) in Pennsylvania on 15 and 21 December 2010, respectively. Collection of animals and research in Pennsylvania was conducted under a Pennsylvania Game Commission permit to DMR (no. 183–2010). Collection of animals from Kentucky was conducted by a state wildlife official (Brooke Hines) on non-endangered bats; thus a numbered permit was not required or issued. Although the presence of Pd was detected on a bat from the unaffected site in April 2011, no mortality was detected at the site through spring 2012, strongly suggesting the bats used in this study were unaffected [13]. In order to avoid disturbing more bats than necessary, bats were collected regardless of sex, resulting in a final dataset that was too heavily male-biased (77%) to include sex in the analysis. Bats were processed and housed as described in study 1, and evenly distributed between 4°C and 10°C chambers (table 2). Each bat was fitted with a temperature-sensitive data logger to record its skin temperature (T skin ; [5]) at 30 min intervals. Because of high mortality during study 1, bats remained undisturbed until 23 March 2011. Dead bats were removed and live bats continued to hibernate until 4 April 2011. As weekly mortality therefore could not be calculated, approximate date of death, defined as date of last arousal bout based on T skin data, was calculated for those bats whose dataloggers did not malfunction (n=70; figure 1c). Survival was calculated via Cox regression on WNS status of a site and chamber temperature. Additionally, a Pearson's χ2 was used to analyse how site and temperature predicted mortality, defined as whether or not a bat survived, for the full dataset (n=80). Figure 1. Cumulative survival by WNS status, temperature and sex. (a) In study 1, bats from a WNS site and bats housed at 7°C or 10°C had the highest risk of death. (b) In study 1, females from a WNS site had a higher risk of death than WNS site males. (c) In study 2, bats from a WNS site housed at 4°C had a higher risk of death than bats from an unaffected site. Sample size, n, in parentheses. Table 2.Factors included in the study 2 final Cox survival regression model. (Asterisks indicate significance of p-values.) Collapse 4. Results 4.1 Study 1 The factors included in the final survival model were WNS status of a site, sex, a WNS status of a site×sex interaction term, housing temperature and initial BMI. Initial BMI did not have a significant impact on survival, nor did it differ between bats from WNS-affected and unaffected sites (table 1). Temperature had a significant effect on survival; bats housed at 4°C had a significantly lower risk of death than those housed at 7°C or 10°C (table 1 and figure 1a). WNS status of a site and the interaction between site and sex also were significant; bats from the WNS site had significantly lower survival than those from the unaffected site, and WNS site female bats had a higher risk of death than WNS site male bats (table 1 and figure 1b), even though females had higher initial BMI than males (two-sample t-test; t 105 =−2.32, p=0.023). 4.2 Study 2 A hibernation chamber temperature×WNS status of a site interaction term was the only factor in the Cox survival model. WNS-affected bats housed at 4°C had a significantly higher risk of death than unaffected bats (table 2 and figure 1c). Likewise, bats from the WNS site had higher mortality than those from the unaffected site (40% mortality in unaffected bats and 65% mortality in WNS-affected bats; χ 1 2 = 5.01 , p=0.025; table 3), which was primarily driven by differences in mortality in bats housed at 4°C (30% mortality in unaffected bats and 65% mortality in WNS-affected bats; χ 1 2 = 4.91 , p=0.027; table 3). Table 3.Study 2 mortality by treatment group. Collapse group sample size, n mortality (%, n) 4°C unaffected 20 30% (7) 4°C WNS 20 65% (13) 10°C unaffected 20 50% (10) 10°C WNS 20 65% (13) 5. Discussion This is, to our knowledge, the first captive study to test how hibernaculum temperature and sex affect hibernation survival in naturally WNS-affected versus unaffected bats. WNS status of a site, housing temperature and sex all significantly influenced survival during hibernation. The role of WNS status in survival was consistent in both studies; WNS-affected bats fared worse than unaffected bats. However, the impact of housing temperature was more nuanced. Study 1 found that bats housed at a colder temperature fared better than those housed at warmer temperatures, whereas study 2 found unaffected bats fared significantly better than WNS-affected bats at a colder temperature but not at a warmer temperature (at which Pd exhibits faster growth [12]). These results suggest that WNS may alter the importance of hibernaculum temperature in surviving hibernation. This could be due to changes in energetic expenditure by WNS-affected bats, perhaps by increasing the amount of time spent grooming and in other expensive behaviours [13], as well as a disruption in physiology [15]. The differences between study 1 and study 2 are probably owing to: (i) the inherent variation in the physiology of captured free-ranging bats, and (ii) the fact while we only collected bats from the affected site that had visible fungal growth on their muzzles and wings, we could not in any way control for infection load or disease stage. Owing to this variation, our results should be interpreted with caution. Truly teasing apart the interaction between Pd growth dynamics and temperature on WNS survivorship requires experimental studies in which initial fungal load is controlled. Indeed, we [16] performed these exact experiments in captivity by inoculating naive bats with known fungal loads and housing them at two hibernation temperatures. As in this study in which bats were naturally WNS-affected, a significant effect of hibernation temperature on survivorship in affected bats was found, even after controlling for the overall benefits of colder hibernacula on survivorship. That we have now demonstrated this effect in at least some naturally affected bats and in experimentally inoculated bats highlights the importance of hibernacula temperature on survival in the face of WNS. The finding that colder temperatures are protective for bats suggests that hibernacula temperature modification (especially of mines) may be a viable mitigation strategy for curbing WNS and that protection of colder hibernacula should be prioritized. This is, to our knowledge, the first study to show that there are sex differences in WNS survival in naturally affected bats, with female bats at greater risk of dying than males. However, these results are not congruent with what would be expected if sex differences in survival were based on differences in energy distribution between males and females. Our study and past studies have found that females start hibernation with higher BMI than males [11,17], which should bias females towards increased survivability. Indeed, our subsequent study under controlled experimental conditions with known Pd inoculation doses found significantly greater survivorship in females [16]. Clearly, additional studies of sex biases in the response to Pd infection are needed, including those that go beyond mortality estimates and focus on consequences such as metabolic and fitness costs in both males and females that survive WNS. Ethics statement This study was carried out in strict accordance with the recommendations in the Guide for the Care and Use of Laboratory Animals of the National Institutes of Health. The protocol was approved by the Institutional Animal Care and Use Committee at Bucknell University (protocol number DMR-04). Research was conducted under a Pennsylvania Game Commission permit to DMR (no. 70–2009). Data accessibility Data are openly published in the Dryad Repository at: [18]. Acknowledgements We thank Scott Bearer, The Nature Conservancy, Brook Hines (Kentucky Department of Fish and Wildlife Resources) and Gregory Turner (Pennsylvania Game Commission) for assisting in animal procurement. We also thank K. B. Boomer for statistical consulting and Megan Vodzak and Chelsey Musante for field assistance. Authors contributions L.E.G. designed the experiment, carried out the statistical analysis and drafted the manuscript; D.M.R. assisted in study design and execution and helped draft the manuscript; S.A.B. helped conduct the research and contributed to the draft; J.S.J. assisted with the statistical analysis and manuscript revision. All authors gave final approval for publication. Funding statement L.E.G. and S.A.B. were supported by Graduate Studies at Bucknell University. D.M.R. and J.S.J. were supported by the Woodtiger Fund and the US Fish & Wildlife Service. Competing interests We have no competing interests. Footnotes |
Mahi Racing Team India is a FIM Supersport World Championship team founded by the former captain of the Indian cricket team, Mahendra Singh Dhoni.[1] The team entered the last rounds of the 2012 season under the name MSD R-N Racing Team India with two Kawasaki Ninja ZX-6R for wildcard riders Florian Marino and Dan Linfoot.[2] Linfoot took the first podium finish for the team in the last round of the season in Magny-Cours.[3] Telugu Film Star Actor Akkineni Nagarjuna is also a key member of Mahi Racing Team India. For the 2013 season the team name changed to Mahi Racing Team India and two new riders were signed, the 2012 World Supersport champion Kenan Sofuoğlu and Fabien Foret.[4] In 2014, the team faced budget difficulties which led to teams withdrawal from the season.[5] |
Email Share +1 109 Shares Administration officials on Friday stressed Cuba’s human rights record that includes the treatment of LGBT advocates who publicly oppose the government remains a serious concern as efforts to normalize relations with the Communist country continue. “It is an issue we continue to raise with the Cubans,” said State Department spokesperson Marie Harf told the Washington Blade in response to a question about a Cuban transgender rights advocate who sharply criticized her country’s government earlier this week during an interview in Havana. “Even while we are working to normalize relations and open and embassy and re-establish diplomatic relations, we know we will still have very serious concerns with what is happening on the human rights front.” White House Press Secretary Josh Earnest acknowledged to the Blade in a response to a question about the same trans advocate — Leodan Suárez Quiñones — that concerns over Havana’s human rights record include the treatment of LGBT Cubans. “You heard the president say many times that he doesn’t believe that people should be treated differently just because of who they love,” said Earnest. “That means that LGBT Cubans, or Americans, deserve the same rights and protections that everybody else gets.” “And that means that the concerns that we have about the way the Cuban government has all too often trampled the universal human rights of the Cuban people,” he added. “There are similar concerns with the way that the Cuban government has failed to protect the basic human rights of even LGBT Cubans as well.” Harf reiterated Earnest’s point, referring to increased contact between Americans and Cubans that could stem from normalized relations between the two countries. “If Cuba’s more open to the world on all these issues, including LGBT issues, we think that’s a net positive,” said Harf. Earnest further elaborated in response to the Blade’s questioning. “The president is hopeful that through greater engagement that we can open up more economic opportunities both in Cuba and the United States, that through that greater engagement, including economic engagement, that we will be able to apply additional pressure to the Cuban government and support the Cuban people in their aspirations for a government that reflects their will and a government that is willing to respect and even protect their basic human rights,” he said. “That kind of support and that kind of effort will continue and we think will be more effective with this policy change.” The administration’s comments came after the fourth round of talks in the process to normalize relations between the U.S. and Cuba that President Obama announced in December. The delegations — led by Assistant U.S. Secretary of State Roberta Jacobson and Josefina Vidal of the Cuban Foreign Ministry — at the end of their two-day meeting in Washington did not announce any agreement on the opening of embassies in D.C. and Havana and allowing diplomats to travel more freely in their respective countries. “We did make significant progress on a number of substantive issues in this round,” said Harf. “This round of talks was a productive one.” This latest round of talks took place less than a week after Mariela Castro, daughter of Cuban President Raúl Castro, led an LGBT Pride march in the Cuban city of Las Tunas. The National Center for Sexual Education, which she directs, organized a series of events in the provincial capital and Havana this month to commemorate the International Day Against Homophobia and Transphobia. Mariela Castro and her organization face frequent criticism from independent Cuban LGBT rights advocates, Cuban-born U.S. Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen (R-Fla.) and others. Juana Mora Cedeño of Proyecto Arcoiris, an independent LGBT advocacy group, is among the Cuban human rights advocates who met with House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) and other members of Congress in February during their trip to Havana. Manuel Vázquez Seijido, a lawyer who works with Mariela Castro’s organization, last month dismissed advocates who continue to criticize the National Center for Sexual Organization and the Cuban government. “Their goal is to simply criticize institutions like CENESEX and of course the Cuban government,” Vázquez told the Blade during a global LGBT rights symposium that took place at Rutgers University School of Law in Newark, New Jersey. Mariela Castro has repeatedly not returned the Blade’s requests for comment about criticism of her organization and her father’s government. Chris Johnson contributed to this article. |
In the age of smartphones and frictionless-dating apps, sex addiction is like being hooked on a drug that's always available in unlimited supply. It's like living with a meth dealer at your side, or a brick of cocaine in your pocket. Worse, you can get a potential high from every person you meet. But unlike other addictions, this one isn't officially recognized. There's no health coverage for it, no medication, and for those trapped in its strange and unrelenting spell, no easy way out. I. AROUSAL SEX ADDICTION— diagnosing it, treating it, portraying it on-screen—is big business. The number of certified sex-addiction therapists has more than doubled since 2008, according to the International Institute for Trauma and Addiction Professionals. Hookup apps like Tinder (26 million matches per day) and Grindr (1.6 million active daily users) are growing wildly and multiplying, like real-life manifestations of the futuristic smartphone imagined by Gary Shteyngart in Super Sad True Love Story, which rates the "Fuckability" of everyone around you. The movie industry, for its part, has released at least five films on sex addiction in the past five years, six if you count both parts of Lars von Trier’s Nymphomaniac. Forty years ago, the term sex addiction didn’t exist. Today it is thoroughly assimilated into the culture. But even now, sex addiction seems to exist in parallel realities: one in which millions of people are struggling with it, and another in which it is barely studied and not even clinically recognized. Research has yet to confirm that extreme sexual behavior really is addictive in the same neuroscientific sense that, for instance, habitual heroin use appears to be. For this reason, many clinicians prefer the term hypersexuality, even though they concede that the distinction is mostly semantic. But the practical effects of such uncertainty are enormous. No drugs exist to treat sex addiction; no health care plan specifically covers it; there’s virtually no funding for studies. Eli Coleman, a psychologist and director of the Program in Human Sexuality at the University of Minnesota, estimates that approximately 19 million Americans—5 to 7 percent of the population—are hypersexual. But estimates like this are controversial. "We’re all blind in this field," says UCLA neuroscientist Nicole Prause. This much is certain: More and more people are seeking treatment. A lot more. In each year over the past decade, the number of groups registered with Sex Addicts Anonymous, one of the nation’s largest twelve-step organizations for sex addiction, has grown by 10 percent. Hollywood is just the latest market to capitalize on this phenomenon, even if filmmakers’ depictions tend to do more harm than good. On-screen, sex addiction tends to be portrayed as glamorous, even fleetingly aspirational—either posey, broody, and existential or chaotically fun in a Warren Beatty-in-the-’70s kind of way. But no two-hour movie can communicate the relentless patterns of thought that persecute sex addicts. If sex is ordinarily a way of dealing with another person, then sex addiction is a way of dealing with yourself. You act out—you can’t not act out—in order to escape from unbearable feelings: depression, severe ADD, bipolar disorders, the scars of family trauma, profound despair. Most addictions require you to extend yourself in some way—go to a particular place, spend a certain amount of money. Sex addiction does not. The fuel for your disease is all around you, invading your senses. The poet and professor Michael Ryan captures this experience in his unsettling, mesmerizing autobiography, Secret Life: "The substance I used," he writes, "was human beings." Jacob, age 28 In recovery since 2012 JACOB* IS A COMPUTER PROGRAMMER, and on the morning he greets me at the door of his and his wife’s Seattle-area apartment, he looks as though he’s been up all night wrestling with code. His eyes are bleary behind rimless steel glasses. His face is drained of color. But when I ask him if he’s tired, he says no, just the opposite: "I sleep too well. It’s the only time I’m able to forget everything." In a wedding photograph on the wall, Jacob holds hands with his wife, Ashley, on a country lane. He smiles hesitantly, his eyes skittering off to one side. If you didn’t know better, you might say he looks like a typical bewildered groom. But what the picture really seems to capture, and perhaps this is why he won’t look directly into the lens, is Jacob at war with himself, trying to erase one terrible thought from his brain: that if his wife knew who he really was—if she knew about the pornography, the explicit online chats, the anonymous sex with other women, with random men—she would get as far away from him as she could. They have been together for nearly half their lives. They met when they were 16, married in the fall of 2009. But they haven’t had sex since June 2012, haven’t even seen each other naked (except by accident) since he told her he was a sex addict. Almost every night, they separately attend meetings or therapy. Aside from a few desultory wall treatments, there isn’t much of a female presence in the apartment: Ikea couch and armchair, long desk by the window, computer screens. It may be that Ashley doesn’t go in for decorating. It may also be that she’s still not sure she’s going to stay here. I’d hoped to talk with Ashley today, but she and Jacob have decided against it. I get the impression that her forgiveness may be so provisional that simply facing a reporter’s questions for an hour could undo it. Four pairs of running shoes, all so worn-out that they’ve lost their shape and turned gray, are lined up inside the front door. In high school, Jacob was all-state three times in cross-country; he still runs six to eight miles every day and competes at least once a month in local events. He has broken this routine only when he’s been lost in the stupor of his addiction. Jacob grew up devoutly Christian in a remote part of a midwestern state. His father worked the late shift in a factory and typically wasn’t home before eleven at night. As a kid, Jacob was shy and introverted. He dreamed of being an astronaut and walking on Mars, of his toys coming to life and being perfect friends to him. When I was in third grade, my teenage cousin sexually propositioned me. She wrote me detailed notes about what we would do. I went to a medical encyclopedia to see if all this stuff was real and figured out that it was. We came pretty close to having sex, but I always felt dirty about it. I pushed her away and said, "I can’t do this." So we never did. But it stuck in my mind. I was preoccupied with it for a long time, fantasizing about it. My dad worked a lot, he was never around, and getting that attention felt good. When Jacob was in ninth grade, someone told him about Internet sex chat: It was a perfect medium for someone who had always lived best in his own mind. The first time he shared a photograph of himself with a girl—or someone who said she was a girl; it didn’t really matter to him—she told him he was cute. "It was intensely affirming," he says. He spent hours at the computer, cybersexing as either a boy or a girl, whatever it took. At the private Christian college where he studied computer science, Jacob would proxy his way around firewalls, risking expulsion to access the chat rooms. Every conversation followed the same script: "Tell me where you’re going to meet me," he would demand. "Tell me when. Tell me what you’re going to do to me." He would plan things out meticulously, bring people right up to the line, to the point at which they were climbing into their cars. Then he would cut off the conversation and block the person’s username. If it was a particularly good chat, he might save the transcript and reread it later. The goal is the high. It’s always about the high. I’d get [his eyelids flutter and his eyes roll back] light-headed. I’d feel euphoric.... Orgasm was never the goal. It was always about: What can we do for as long as we can do it? Amy, age 44 In recovery since 1998 AMY HAS A GAP BETWEEN her front teeth, like Chaucer’s Wife of Bath. She also has a half-dozen piercings, which she asked us not to describe for fear they would be too identifying. She lives in a ranch-style house at the end of a cul-de-sac in the Nevada desert. As we sit down in her living room, the flat-screen, tuned to a soothing New Age radio channel, is playing Enya. Amy and her partner, Patrick, a ponytailed software engineer, exchange I-love-you’s. "I’m going to be watching my show," he says, closing the door of their bedroom behind him. In the living room, we are surrounded by Amy’s two dogs and one of her four cats. I started looking at porn when I was 7 or 8. My father’s magazines: Penthouse and Hustler_. They were hidden under the bed, behind the tray he used to separate the seeds from his pot. When my parents would go away, the whole ritual of pulling the magazines out and having to put them back would get me excited. It was a job to get it all right and put it back properly. I obviously couldn’t have an orgasm at that young age, but I do remember a tingle. I remember thinking God gave me a special gift, that I was the only one who had these feelings._ In conversation, she doesn’t flirt or, as she calls it, "intrigue." In Sex Addicts Anonymous, she has learned to avoid speech and behavior that might trigger someone else’s addiction, or her own. The way she talks, the way she acts, is subdued, modulated: It’s clear that she has higher gears that she won’t use. It’s also clear that when she did use them, years ago, she must have been magnetic. She had sex for the first time when she was 13, on a dare. At a party me and a girlfriend dared each other who would lose their virginity first, and I was going to win that night. My boyfriend and I were both very drunk, stumbled into a bedroom, don’t know whose. He said, "I can’t do this, I’m too drunk." I said, "You will do this." It was not kind and loving. It was "I’m going to win this fucking bet." What I should have noticed is that there was always a boyfriend. It was not okay to not have one. If I didn’t have a boyfriend, what was I? I remember being in gym class after I’d broken up with a guy. I said, "The next guy whose shoes I like, I’m going to date." And I did. One boyfriend had his own apartment. They could have sex there whenever they wanted. It was a kind of freedom any high school couple would envy, and it enabled her precocious discovery of the thing she liked most. She was naked in his bed one day when he pulled out a hunting knife. He was running the knife all over. All over. I just lay there with my eyes closed. It was so titillating. And that started it. Edward, age 71 In recovery since 2005 AS HE PREPARES coffee for us, Edward has the air of awkward officiousness you sometimes see in divorced men who’ve learned their way around a kitchen only in middle age. He’s dressed in a kind of generic well-to-do older gentleman’s casualwear: khakis, a plaid button-down shirt, white sneakers. Leather-bound volumes on medical history fill a glass-fronted bookcase. Later, I’ll see a dozen framed diplomas and awards hanging in his home office. This could be your grandparents’ apartment: the carpet a little thicker than usual, the furniture a little darker, heavier, more ornate. There’s that downsized feeling of pieces that were never meant to be together in the same room. As far as his neighbors know, Edward is a retired surgeon who lost most of his money in a divorce. A decade ago, he ran a network of hospitals in this Sun Belt city and lived with his wife and daughter in a 6,000-square-foot house in a tony neighborhood. He drove a new Mercedes and made $400,000 a year. Then, he says, "the wheels came off my wagon." I grew up in the Deep South, in a home where the word "sex" was never mentioned. I mean, you didn’t even talk about what sex the dog was! But I was 30-plus years old before I engaged in any obsessive thinking or compulsive behavior. The event that precipitated my addiction was the birth of our daughter. My wife was paying more attention to the child than to me, and I felt rejected. It was just happenstance that to avoid horrendous traffic in the city where we lived, the route I took home passed right by an adult bookstore. Bright lights, the whole bit. I wondered what goes on at those places. I picked a time when there were no other cars in the parking lot. Edward sits up straighter in his chair. His voice gets louder. Even in recovery, the vast majority of sex addicts prefer to keep their condition secret. In this regard, they’re different from alcoholics and drug addicts, whose diseases tend not to be as stigmatized. The pressure of secrecy concentrates a memory, intensifying the details. These scenes, decades old, are alive for Edward. The bookstore was brightly lighted, which was a shock. It was physically dirty. In the peep-show area, which was dark and almost creepy, there were spots of semen on the walls. As a surgeon, I was fastidious about cleanliness, and it made my flesh crawl. On my next visit, I got a handful of quarters and went into one of the booths. II. MADNESS THE BODY OF A SEX ADDICT can become his whole world. The urgent messages he receives from his brain—I’m depressed, I’m lonely, I’m frightened, I’m angry—drown out everything else around him. He can’t feel happiness, except as a physical sensation. Arousal and orgasm, as he knows them, are not lived experience but rather a retreat from it. They are a simulation of all that may be absent from his life: joy, intimacy, a feeling of accomplishment. They are a kind of biochemical brute-force attempt to blot out an overwhelmingly bad feeling with an overwhelmingly good one. In the space between arousal and orgasm, he finds a fleeting calm. He strives to prolong it, to escape time, escape his own mind. He lurches between wretchedness and euphoria, looping back on himself endlessly. He wants to be outside himself; instead he becomes his own prison. The pursuit of that elusive high can drive sex addicts to escalate into increasingly risky behavior: from exhibitionism and habitual anonymous sex to, in certain cases, a fascination—even in people who have always preferred adults—with child pornography. Eli Coleman, who has studied this phenomenon, says that some of these men are working out conflicts about their sexuality. But some are not. Instead, he says, they may have other, intricately tangled motives: to express self-hatred through behavior they may regard as debasing, to subjugate a partner they regard as more physically powerful than a woman, to feel desired by and intimate with a father who was emotionally distant. Jacob I WOULD MAKE THESE pacts with myself: I’m going to stop. It would last a day or two and I’d be back at it again. I was acting out with other people, or porn, or masturbation, almost daily. At first there was a baseline level of attractiveness I needed, but later on, it was just anybody and everybody who could and would. I would look for people who I perceived could not get sex because of their looks, their age, or their body size, because I thought those people would be more available. The first guy, I met him on Craigslist my junior year. I remember going over to a seedy little apartment. He was a couple of years older than me, and he was actually a cross-dresser. He asked me if I wanted him to cross-dress for me, and I said no. Not a lot happened that first time. I got some oral sex but didn’t have an orgasm. It was really awkward. I buried that experience from everybody because I was so ashamed. I’ve never really found myself attracted to men. It was truly the most convenient, expedient way for me to get sex, so I took it. Jacob would scrupulously research prospective partners: "Not that it ever fazed me, but you hear the stories about people getting murdered or killed or whatever online." If he couldn’t document a person’s real-life identity, he wouldn’t meet them. He began writing a program for a kind of "dead-man’s switch," a piece of software that, if he didn’t log in within a prescribed period of time, would e-mail to friends the last street address he’d visited. The month before I got engaged to Ashley, I went to see a much older woman, probably forties, who was just looking for sex with a younger guy. I had unprotected sex with her. That was the first time in my life that I had ever had intercourse. I don’t think I’ve ever felt despair like that in my whole life. I remember driving home just screaming, because I knew that I had just destroyed my relationship with my girlfriend. She’s not going to stick around with a guy who’s done this. So there in that car that night, I told myself, "I have to bury it so deep and so far down that no one ever finds it." That really was the fuel, the catalyst, that kept my fire burning long after that. I can’t say that I believed marriage would save me, but I tried to live in this naive little world. Did my wife fulfill me? No, she didn’t. I honestly don’t think that she could’ve. Amy I WOULD BE PREDATORY. They were meat, and I was eating that night. I didn’t even need to know their names. It was just the nearest available person who showed interest. I pretty much got what I wanted back then. I would have sex with people that I normally wouldn’t shake their hand. I had no respect for them. When I was in extreme arousal, my threshold for pain was different. There were times with the S&M stuff when I felt powerful, in that I could get nice guys to do things to me that they didn’t want to do, things that were against their values. That was pleasurable. So the knife became more fun, and I wanted to be cut. You would bleed? I ask her. Yes. My back is where I liked it. What was the most extreme thing you coerced someone into doing to you? I particularly remember one man crying afterward. After being made to do what? I don’t want to say. Things that felt good at the moment. Things I’m terribly ashamed of. Amy was popular in high school, she was a cheerleader. But none of it was enough. She developed an eating disorder, then began using cocaine to suppress her appetite. Eventually she was freebasing. At 19, she went into drug and alcohol rehab, where clinicians raised a separate concern: It was highly unusual, they said, for someone so young to have developed a taste for sadomasochistic sex. They recommended she go to Sex Addicts Anonymous meetings. A group of us from meetings used to go out to a bar and dance. Then I became a little groupie and started dating the lead singer of the house band, who had a daughter a year younger than me. That was Richard, the father of my first child. When I broke up with him, I already had the next guy in sight and was with him when I gave birth. Scott: teardrop tattoo, Levi’s, big boots. Construction worker. Yeah, it was like a porn. He was the father of my second child. I was not a good parent. I lost my temper more than I might have, had I gotten a good night’s sleep and not masturbated to porn all night. Like, "How is the sun possibly coming up right now? I just put the kids to bed." I would leave my children with anyone who would watch them so that I could go act out with whoever I was seeing at the time. When it was time to pick them up, I would call with an excuse, or I wouldn’t call at all. Finally they threatened to take my children away. I never got into anything illegal, child pornography or anything, thank goodness. But I was aroused by snuff films. That was one of those things I would only tell my sponsor. The ones I was watching were probably fake, but I think I saw one real one. I would identify with the woman in them. It’s rape. She’s usually been kidnapped. They’re planning on killing her. Edward AT TIMES, RECALLING the indignities he subjected himself to at adult bookstores, Edward laughs exactly as you might if you were telling a story about the time you drank too much in college. His laughter mis disbelief, self-loathing, and a peculiar kind of nostalgia. The big leap was a booth that had a hole between it and the booth next to it. Somebody came into the booth next door and motioned to me through the hole. That was the first time I realized what the holes were for. I freaked out and left. But the next time I returned, I chose a booth with a hole in it. The other person gave me a blow job. The glory holes are just: I don’t want anything to do with this person, I just want a sexual event and to be done with it. This is part of the shame: I don’t want to be a creep who does this. Hello! I’m a creep who does this! It must be flattering when someone listens attentively to your life story, no matter how grim it may be, but Edward seems to take a private enjoyment in reliving the past. It’s clear that on some level, these are happy memories for him. As far as anyone knew back then, he was "the ideal father, husband, church member, and surgeon," he says. Even now, the pleasure of describing those days seems to make him forget, temporarily, how catastrophically they ended. On a couple of social occasions, I ran into guys I had had sex with. That was terrifying. Can you imagine? You’re in somebody’s lovely home for a cocktail party. You’re with your wife, and he’s with his wife. You act like you’re old friends from way back. You go into performance mode. The mask. Performance mode: Several times during the interview, Edward’s phone rings. In exactly the same courtly, affable drawl with which he has been describing anonymous sex at adult bookstores, he says, "Oh, hi. I’m in a meeting. Can I call you back?" In 2003, I chatted online with a couple of guys who said they were 14. I agreed to meet one. I was morbidly curious. You wonder if this is a real person and, if so, what’s going on that a 14-year-old wants to do this. So I arranged to meet this person. He supposedly lived nearby. I drove out and parked. Nobody showed up, and I left. That was a Thursday, and mid-afternoon Friday at the clinic, somebody came and said someone had bumped my car in the parking lot; could I please come out there? I walked out the back door of the building, and it was an FBI agent. They already had all my chat logs. They had pictures of me. There was no denying it. I resigned on the spot. My daughter found out right away. It was like, "So this is who you are." She didn’t talk to me for ten years. I was so devastated and so terrified of publicity that I agreed to plead guilty, which I should not have, in retrospect. The FBI seized all my computers and went through them, and they found nothing that indicated child pornography. The case hinged on intent, not an act. I was charged with solicitation of a minor, and I spent a year in federal prison. My wife filed for divorce, and I granted it, no contest. I gave her 80 percent of everything I had. Now I wish I’d not done it, because she got remarried to a bad guy, a con artist who apparently preyed on well-to-do women, and he basically stole about half a million dollars from her. It’s just a family fiasco. Occasionally I get really depressed that I caused it all. I’ve never been sexually attracted to children. But let’s say a 14-year-old had showed up that day, and he was a cute kid, and he was relatively mature for his age... I cannot honestly say that I would not have pursued it further. I mean, I’m a sex addict. There’s very few things that I could say, I would not do that, period, ever. III. TREATMENT IN 2010, A GROUP led by Harvard psychiatrist Martin Kafka pushed hard for the inclusion of hypersexual disorder in the DSM, the bible of psychiatric diagnoses, which was about to be updated for the first time in two decades. Kafka’s pitch cited epidemiological data and case studies from nearly 250 books and journal articles, including twenty he had co-authored. But by his own admission, knowledge about the condition still had "significant gaps and shortcomings." The DSM task force flatly rejected Kafka’s proposal. (Meanwhile, they did see fit to approve fifteen new diagnoses, including skin-picking disorder.) "There may have been political reasons for this," says Kafka today. In particular, there was reluctance to equate any kind of consensual sexual behavior with mental illness. (The psychiatric establishment had been through this before: Its long-standing classification of homosexuality as a mental disorder—rescinded only in 1973—caused incalculable harm to gay people and badly damaged the field’s reputation.) There was also some concern that an official diagnosis might provide a kind of loophole for people accused of sex crimes. Says Kafka: "The difference between where is normal and where is abnormal: Where do you draw that line? How do you draw a line like that?" The consequences of exclusion from the DSM were enormous: Inclusion would have meant that health-insurance companies might cover the costs of treatment; that the government, which has provided virtually no money for sex-addiction research, might take an interest in it; that pharmaceutical companies might try to develop medications for it. The study of sex addiction is caught in its own vicious cycle: no funding, no research; no DSM diagnosis, no funding. To fill the treatment void, experienced therapists endorse a combination of one-on-one therapy, medication (usually antidepressants), and a twelve-step program, the last of which seems to provide practical coping strategies and relief from shame. There’s no data whatsoever on the effectiveness of residential rehabs, where treatment can cost tens of thousands of dollars. When a sex addict is married, recovery becomes more complicated by orders of magnitude. Some therapists will guide couples through a process known as disclosure: a controlled accounting by the sex addict, for the partner, of all the secretive behaviors he or she has ever engaged in. It’s not uncommon for sex addicts to take a polygraph test at their partner’s insistence, says Jenner Bishop, an Oakland sex-addiction therapist. The goal is to re-establish trust and to teach the addict how to have sex that isn’t compulsive and selfish. "The partner has to have a lot of their hypervigilance and trauma soothed," says Bishop. "The irony is, it’s by someone who’s typically too narcissistic to come up with the empathy to do it." How often does a marriage survive sex addiction? Not very often, you’d think. Says Kafka, "A lot of these relationships end up either taking a very long time to recover—like, years—or never do." Jacob JACOB CONTEMPLATED killing himself, but never stopped going to church. One day, the pastor delivered a sermon on guilt and shame. Guilt: I have done bad things. Shame: I am bad. The sermon, Jacob says, "just broke me." I’d look at myself in the mirror and think, "What a piece of trash. My face is a lie. Everything about me is a lie." I spent the rest of the month kicking and screaming against what I had to do. We sat on the couch, and I told Ashley everything I could think of. She was actually glad that I had told her rather than her finding it. She said she didn’t know what she was going to do. She was concerned that I might be gay. I told her I would be honest about it if I were attracted to men. I’ve always felt it was about the power dynamic, about being desired. Ashley was furious with him, Jacob says, but she has expressed those feelings only in therapy sessions or in her journal. Why does Ashley need to go to a twelve-step group? I ask. "Ashley got hit by a truck. I was the driver," Jacob says, a bit automatically. "She’s getting help so she’ll never get hit by a truck again." The agreement is that if he ever acts out with another person, she leaves. We decided that we needed to take a break from having sex until we know if this can even be stopped or controlled. The crux of my life is: How do you transition from a point where it’s all about me? That’s what I want to be. I want to be an authentic guy. Most nights, Jacob and Ashley see each other for an hour or so. At the suggestion of their therapists, they do a "daily share" in which they affirm something they appreciate about the other, recount an event from their day, make a request, and describe what’s generally on their minds. It can seem as though they’re spending so much time repairing their relationship that they no longer really have one. For Ashley, these trials are a test of her faith—in God and in Jacob. She trusts that her faith will be rewarded. She and Jacob have no children, no money, no valuable material possessions. They have this.* Amy DURING THE TWO hours that Amy and I have been talking, her two dogs, a graying Lab and a gentle German shepherd, have not stopped pressing us to pet them. I once did something sexual with a dog. I just remember holding it, it trying to get away, and having that control of it against its will. I thought I’d go to the grave with this behavior. I’m terribly ashamed of it. Now I say it at meetings, just because other people have done it, and I want them to know they’re not alone. Obviously I have made my amends to animals. Amy scrutinizes her sons’ behavior for any sign that they might be like her. When she caught them masturbating as teenagers, as mothers are apt to do, she tried to check her anxiety. "This is absolutely normal," she told them, before blurting out, "My fear is that you’re not going to be able to stop!" Sometimes she discovered porn magazines in their rooms. When I found [my son’s] porn, I friggin’ lost it. One, I’m in recovery, and I can’t have porn in my house. Two, I’m terrified he’s going to get addicted. So I would destroy it over and over. I know that he knows if he’s got a problem, there’s a solution. I do the health fairs where I sit at a table: sex addicts anonymous. I’m sure that’s embarrassing, to have your mom do that, but I’m the mom who does that. I met Patrick in SAA, and I’ve been with him for two and a half years. We are in a loving relationship. We pray before we start having sex, or check in. Because either of us can go off into fantasy. Like, in my head I’m in a porn. I used to say that addictive sex is like fireworks, and healthy sex is like sparklers. It just burns less brightly. It’s not really what I want, but it’s the best thing for me. *In the time since this story was originally reported, Jacob and Ashley have gotten divorced, and Amy and Patrick have gotten married. |
Philadelphia Eagles tight end Brent Celek believes that new coach Chip Kelly's fast-break offense will reshape the NFL. "From a communication standpoint, it's going to change the game," Celek told reporters. "Just the way they can communicate plays and get us into the stuff that's pretty cool. It's something I never even thought was possible in the NFL. He has a reason why each play is called what it is. And it all makes sense." Kelly's formations and pace are expected to be vastly different from those of predecessor Andy Reid, who incorporated the West Coast offense in Philadelphia. The Eagles, who went 4-12 in 2012, averaged just 17.5 points to rank 29th in the league. "It's different," Celek said of Kelly's offense. "Things change. And I love what Coach Kelly has brought here so far. I can't say that we're going to be super successful. But from a communication standpoint, it's insane." The New England Patriots under Bill Belichick already use a version of Kelly's high-speed, one-word play calls. Last season, the offense helped New England produce a league-high 557 points. In addition to the offense, Celek also is excited about the energy level that Kelly has created with background music during practices. "It makes it fun," Celek said. "When you're not out on the field doing actual plays, it just keeps you going. It's like sitting in a nice restaurant with some background music." |
“It is quite a big surprise,” Dr. Procktor said. Mercury, not much more than 3,000 miles in diameter, is by far the smallest of the planets, and thus many thought it would have cooled off in less than a billion years. But Mercury’s mantle may not rise and fall in convective patterns as in larger planets like Earth, and that may have kept the heat inside for more than two billion years. By imparting heat and relieving pressure, the impact of the meteoroid that formed the crater may have helped melt rocks that were already close to melting point. Messenger’s measurements also detected rapid fluctuations in Mercury’s magnetic field as it shifted from one side of the planet to the other. Such fluctuations occur around Earth in a matter of hours. Around Mercury, the fields shifted in minutes. Newsletter Sign Up Continue reading the main story Please verify you're not a robot by clicking the box. Invalid email address. Please re-enter. You must select a newsletter to subscribe to. Sign Up You will receive emails containing news content , updates and promotions from The New York Times. You may opt-out at any time. You agree to receive occasional updates and special offers for The New York Times's products and services. Thank you for subscribing. An error has occurred. Please try again later. View all New York Times newsletters. “It looked as though we were seeing a complete collapse of the magnetic field,” Dr. Solomon said. “This is an incredibly dynamic magnetosphere.” The third paper looked at Mercury’s tenuous atmosphere, which consists of atoms knocked off the surface by sunlight, charged particles and dust-size meteoroids. One surprise was that near the equator, the concentration of calcium was higher near sunrise than sunset, but that effect was not seen for sodium or magnesium. Because only calcium and not the other elements exhibits this behavior, “We can’t explain it,” said Ronald J. Vervack Jr., another scientist at the Johns Hopkins laboratory and lead author of that Science paper. “They just don’t look the same, and they don’t look the same anywhere we look,” he said. “Which is a bit puzzling, because we expected there to be some similarities.” A tail of sodium that had been seen behind Mercury during the first two flybys, in January 2008 and October 2008, was much diminished in the third flyby. The reason was that Mercury was in a different part of its elliptical orbit, and the resulting change in velocity diminished the power of sunlight that was sweeping the sodium atoms away from Mercury into the tail. A clearer picture should start to emerge next year. The spacecraft, launched in 2004, has been doing a gravitational do-si-do with the inner planets to slow down as it spirals inward and gets in position to enter orbit around Mercury in March. |
He “could have been a little better, could have been one notch better,” Donald Trump conceded Tuesday, but insisted that “most people say I did a great job.” Trump’s news conference in New Hampshire on Tuesday evening, his first session with reporters since finishing second in the Iowa caucuses to Texas Sen. Ted Cruz, was Trumpian, in many respects, with frequent tangents and references to his own success and how it should be judged. But a key difference was notable: his delivery was subdued. The candidate, who constantly bills himself as the gold standard of winning, seemed annoyed that others were now taking shots at him for falling to second place. “People didn’t talk about my second place. They didn’t talk about it as positively as they should have,” he said, sounding frustrated with the attention given to Florida Sen. Marco Rubio. “And yet with Marco, who was more than 2,000 votes behind me -- that’s a lot of votes, by the way -- they said, 'Oh, he’s surging, he’s surging.' So I don’t know why is the third place doing well.” Trump, who received the endorsement of former Massachusetts Sen. Scott Brown, suggested that his decision to boycott a Fox News debate may have played a role. “I think some people were disappointed that I didn’t go in the debate,” he said. “If I had it to do again, I’d do the exact same thing.” Trump said that his event for veterans raised $6 million, making it worth a second-place finish if that was the cost. He also took a shot at Cruz, some of whose supporters had spread a rumor on caucus day that Ben Carson, the retired neurosurgeon, was dropping out. “That was a disgrace,” Trump said. Cruz has apologized for the incident. Trump insisted he was not feeling pressure to win New Hampshire's primary next Tuesday. He has been heavily favored in polls in the state for months. But perhaps learning a lesson about the expectations game, he took the step -- unusual for him -- of downplaying his chances. “I’d love to finish first,” he said. But if he doesn’t win there, he insisted, “it would still not be horrible because you’re competing against a lot of very talented people that have been politicians all their lives. I’ve been a politician for six months.” |
View the video To avoid a scuffle, a wayward honeybee might do best to stay on a stranger’s left. That’s because honeybees preferentially use their right antenna to distinguish between compadres and intruders, researchers report June 27 in Scientific Reports. Scientists knew that the bees’ left and right antennae picked up different sensory cues, but the new work makes clear that this asymmetry extends into how bees navigate social situations. The study also helps scientists understand a “big and interesting question: Why are our brains asymmetric?” says honeybee physiologist Julie Mustard of Arizona State University in Tempe. “The idea is that asymmetries allow the brain to have more area for processing complex information.” Honeybee antennae are blanketed with a jungle of hairlike sensilla, microscopic protrusions housing neurons that transmit sensory information |
COLLEGE PARK, Md. -- The 11-point halftime lead was long gone, and Maryland suddenly was tied with a surging Wisconsin team that hadn't lost in more than six weeks. In other words, the Terrapins were in perfect position to come away with another tight victory. Dez Wells scored 26 points, and No. 14 Maryland held off fifth-ranked Wisconsin 59-53 Tuesday night, ending the Badgers' 10-game winning streak and ruining their bid to clinch at least a share of the Big Ten title. Melo Trimble added 16 points for the second-place Terrapins (23-5, 11-4 Big Ten), who finished the game with a 12-6 run. "We knew we had the poise and toughness to win the game," Wells said. The Terrapins improved to 9-0 in games decided by six points or fewer, and they've won their last three by a total of 17 points. Although Wisconsin had an opportunity to take the lead in the closing minutes, Maryland coach Mark Turgeon said it wouldn't have mattered. "We've been in so many close games, we'd have just kept doing what we do," Turgeon said. "Our guys were really determined tonight, starting with Dez Wells." Wells went 9 for 17 from the floor, nailed all seven of his free throws and led the team with seven rebounds and four assists. "He was not going to let us lose," Turgeon said. |
GILLETTE, Wyo. — After Kullin Orcutt lost his job at the Peabody coal mine this spring, he knew what he needed to do: join the exodus. “Leave Gillette, leave the state,” he said. Mr. Orcutt is a third-generation miner and one of 592 coal workers who have been laid off here since January. Thousands more job cuts are expected this summer. More people will follow Mr. Orcutt. While many businesses in Gillette are struggling to stay open, a U-Haul dealer has been nearly sold out since the school year ended this month. But 200 miles to the southwest, in Carbon County, where Wyoming’s first coal mine opened a century ago, the mood is different. The last coal mine closed a decade ago, but the county may soon be home to the largest wind farm in North America, if not the world. |
In terms of backwards compatibility support for Xbox 360 games on Xbox One, Xbox fans have been able to look forward to a new batch of games with the support very frequently. There’s now over 250 Xbox 360 games that can be played on Xbox One, and the overall amount of hours that gamers have spent playing Xbox 360 games on Xbox One is truly impressive. However, there are still some big games that have yet to receive the backwards compatibility support, with one of them being Call of Duty: Black Ops 2. Xbox boss Phil Spencer was recently asked by a fan on Twitter when the game would be getting the support, to which he replied with “I like the progress on [backwards compatibility]. We’d like to have all and work on [third-party] games is always a partnership with publisher.” So while he didn’t address when (or if) Black Ops 2 would be getting backwards compatibility support at all, seeing as other earlier games in the series have gotten the support it is likely more a matter of when rather than if. Both Call of Duty 3 and Call of Duty: World At War got the support last month, so it wouldn’t surprise me if the Black Ops 2 support was on the horizon. This week saw 4 more games get backwards compatibility support, though they were definitely less popular games compared to other recent releases. You can learn more about them by clicking right here. |
Nickell is the point person for the school's Graduate Student Organizing Committee (GSOC), which reportedly became the nation’s first officially certified labor union for graduate students in 2000 after partnering with the United Auto Workers. Nickell says the union was created in order to increase the salaries and benefits offered to working NYU graduate students—students who, typically as teaching associates and research assistants, provide the university with a cheap yet indispensable labor force. "Master's tuition, for example, generates NYU a huge amount of money," Nickell said. "We know that NYU made $399 million of revenue over expenses last year, so we think they can probably afford the cost of defraying the tuition of master's students just a little bit." But such claims oversimplify the realities of higher-education economics, said John Beckman, an NYU spokesman. The $399 million number, according to Beckman, is misleading because it is not spendable income and therefore cannot be redirected to tuition remission for master's students. Revenue specifics aside, however, it's clear that university-employed graduate students typically account for a small slice of the schools' total spending. While the salary of a full-time professor at a top U.S. college tends to be upwards of $150,000 a year, graduate workers typically receive little more than a stipend and, depending on the situation, tuition relief. Students in general aren't recognized as official employees by the National Labor Relations Board, so universities aren't obligated to follow standard labor laws when it comes to determining the students' compensation. Now, by creating a formal union, protesting, and entering into talks with the school, NYU’s graduate workers recently became the first such group in the nation to be recognized by their university as official employees. This has allowed them to bargain for higher wages, better healthcare and childcare coverage, and other benefits enjoyed by typical working Americans. "At private schools like NYU there’s a lot of inertia against defining graduate students as workers," Nickell said. If schools define their graduate TAs as workers, he reasoned, it gives the students a better chance of getting recognition by the National Labor Relations Board. This inertia is part of the reason it took GSOC almost a decade to negotiate a new contract with NYU after its first one expired in 2005. After years of strikes, protests, and mediation, the group agreed to a deal with the university last month, according to the union's website. While the final agreement boosted both the salary and benefits of graduate student workers at NYU, arguably one of the greatest legacies of that long-drawn-out negotiations process is that it has sparked similar unionization movements at other schools. The public negotiations at NYU—which saw strikes, protests, and a large public-relations campaign—have spurred graduate students at Columbia, the New School, the University of Chicago, Yale, Cornell, the University of Albany, and, most recently, Harvard to begin their own efforts to organize. There are currently 31 officially recognized graduate-student unions in the U.S. and 18 more that are in the process of gaining recognition, according to the Coalition of Graduate Employee Unions. |
It’s going to get worse for Donald Trump and his Republican party. Much worse. Normal candidates might have realized they were bumping along the bottom of their election – if not, their life – when video emerged of them bragging, as a newlywed, about forcing themselves on women, genitals and all. But not the man who promises to make America great again. No, Donald Trump’s so-called apology video was even more incompetent and incoherent than the rest of his campaign to date. And that’s quite an achievement for a man who has attacked a grieving, Gold Star family. Trump pretended he was a different man. A changed man. A man humbled by meeting real people on the campaign trail. “Anyone who knows me, knows these words don’t reflect who I am,” he said, before dismissing the whole thing as a distraction. But then he dropped the humility and apology shtick for not-so-subtle hint of how he intends to play this. “I’ve said some foolish things, but there’s a big difference between the words and actions of other people,” he said. “Bill Clinton has actually abused women, and Hillary has bullied, attacked, shamed and intimidated his victims.” If you think talk of sex is a distraction, you probably shouldn’t make it clear you’re going to continue the conversation at the next TV debate. And you probably shouldn’t attack a wife for her husband’s affairs if you want to win back a couple of women voters. Even if that wife is your opponent. Then again, this is a Republican nominee who urged the world via Twitter to check out the non-existent sex tape of a former Miss Universe who criticized him for demeaning her. This is a presidential candidate who has made an appearance in part of a soft porn video. This is a supposed leader who takes political advice from Roger Ailes, who was forced out of Fox News after numerous allegations of sexual harassment. This is Donald Trump: a man no longer fit for polite company. His name will be torn off walls just as Ailes’ was. Republican candidates up and down the land will be chased to election day with their previous endorsements and quotes praising the groper-in-chief. Condemning Trump’s words will not be enough to save them. It was just a few days ago that the US senator in New Hampshire, Kelly Ayotte, said “absolutely” when asked if she would tell kids to look up to Trump. She has since said she “misspoke”. But no amount of regret and criticism will erase that foolish misjudgment. Ayotte’s misjudgment is really shared by an entire party establishment that is now stampeding for the doors. Republican leaders thought they could cutely tiptoe between their Trump-loving base and Trump-disgusted moderates. Just as they have tried to appease the Tea Party, Obama-hating fringe for the last eight years. Now they find themselves consumed by their own compromises. You know it when you see it. That moment when an election turns decisively. Not a blip, not a gaffe, not a bad few days. But instead the point of no return for candidates and undecided voters alike. In 2008 you could sense it in the 24-hour period around the first debate: when John McCain suspended his campaign, then revived it, ahead of his big moment on stage with Barack Obama. Erratic was the rap against McCain, and erratic was how he behaved. Four years later, it came with the 47% video of Mitt Romney talking at a private fundraiser. Out-of-touch elitist was the caricature, and that’s how Romney sounded behind closed doors. Now we have the grotesque video of Donald Trump bragging: “Grab them by the pussy. You can do anything.” With it, Trump showed he is indeed the sum of all the sexist snippets we’ve heard so far. The basket of deplorables just found their Mr Universe. There is no point in pretending that Trump can claw his way back from here. He has now confirmed that he disdains women, and many women voters will surely return the favor. Until now, Trump’s defenders liked to justify his remarks about Rosie O’Donnell and Megyn Kelly by saying that the GOP nominee was just an entertainer. That’s not possible any more. Trump’s disgusting comments were made in private, not as a public performance. And that’s precisely why they are indelible. Trump was hardly in good shape with women voters before he slobbered over the prospect of assaulting them. They have represented the majority for almost 40 years of presidential elections, and this cycle will be no exception. Given his disastrous position with minorities, Trump’s sole hope was to win among white voters. But he was already losing to Clinton among white women: a voting group that Romney won. There simply aren’t enough white voters for Trump to win without sweeping the votes of white women. “I pledge to be a better man tomorrow and will never, ever let you down,” Trump said in his half-baked apology video. Of all the unbelievable words that have come out of his pouting lips, these may be the least credible. Donald Trump will let his party down on Sunday, live on national television. The only remaining question in this election is whether his party can rescue anything of its own reputation even as he flushes his own down the sewer. On the campaign trail John McCain liked to quote the bleak joke from Charles Schulz, the cartoon creator of the perennial loser Charlie Brown: “It always looks darkest just before it gets totally black.” It’s time to say good night to the Republican party as we have known it for the last eight years. |
Somerville city officials hung a large banner bearing the words “Black Lives Matter” on the front of City Hall on Wednesday morning in solidarity with the grassroots movement that has spread across the country following the deaths of unarmed black people during police confrontations. Mayor Joe Curtatone said he worked with members of Black Lives Matter Cambridge , a local offshoot of the national organization, to create the banner and show support for their message. “We see this as an important opportunity for an important national conversation” about race, Curtatone said. He said the move was “a very clear statement we are making to the community that we recognize that structural racism exists in our society; it exists in our public and private institutions.” Advertisement By hanging the banner, Curtatone said, he is calling on other cities to foster conversations about improving race relations. Get Metro Headlines in your inbox: The 10 top local news stories from metro Boston and around New England delivered daily. Sign Up Thank you for signing up! Sign up for more newsletters here The 4-foot-by-12-foot banner, a symbol of the beginning of a collaboration with the group, will stay up “as long as it has to” to drive the message home that Somerville is a city determined to strengthen trust between government agencies and people in the community and to treat everyone equally and fairly, Curtatone said. “I have a responsibility as the chief executive of public institutions in this city and our municipality to lead that,” Curtatone said. “If any one group feels that our public institutions are not treating them fairly, or our policies drive a certain structural racial overtone, I have a responsibility to lead that change.” When asked if he thinks racism is a problem in Somerville, he said, “Racism exists everywhere.” “In our public institutions, we can remove it,” he said. Advertisement Stephanie Guirand, lead organizer of Black Lives Matter Cambridge, said the group was honored that Curtatone agreed to hang the banner and work with them closely. “He said all the things we wanted to hear about being on the right side of history,” she said. Curtatone said the partnership is not meant to criticize the work of the Somerville Police Department, which he referred to as a model for community-based policing efforts. He said it was actually a “statement of faith” in the department. “They’re fantastic,” he said, adding that the police chief supports the cause. “This is not just about law enforcement. The goal is to address racism in all of our other public and private institutions. We are in this as a whole city, not with just a focus on police.” Junior Buissereth, a Somerville business owner who is originally from Haiti, stopped to look at the banner as he left City Hall. “It’s a way to see what is going on between police and the black community,” he said, applauding the mayor on his bridge-building efforts. “It’s great to put something up that people can see [that says] whatever your color, all lives matter.” Advertisement Jess Holl, a Somerville resident, walked by and craned her neck to observe the message. “I think it’s powerful knowing we have a mayor who is willing to take a stand on something so important,” she said. Renee Martins pulled up to mail a letter outside the municipal building. She said she didn’t know about the Black Lives Matter movement, but said the banner looked great. “But all lives matter,” she said. Curtatone came out in support of the Black Lives Matter Boston movement in January, just days after protesters formed human barricades on Interstate 93 . The mayor said the activists should have been celebrated for their efforts — not chided by the public for causing traffic delays. Curtatone also recently said that he hopes to equip Somerville officers with body cameras within the next year. In the days following the draping of the banner at City Hall, Curtatone said, there will be educational components to the partnership that will involve both city departments and members of Black Lives Matter Cambridge. The work will include intensive anti-racism training for the Police Department and other front line staff who engage with constituents regularly. Black Lives Matter Cambridge is developing plans for further educational efforts. “The words are empty if we just hang a sign,” Curtatone said. “We have one goal in our community: to make it an exceptional place to live, to work, to play — for everyone.” Steve Annear can be reached at steve.annear@globe.com . Follow him on Twitter @steveannear |
ROGER Moore was the best Bond even if it was never cool to say that, everyone has admitted. Bond fans have always felt obliged to say Sean Connery or Daniel Craig was their favourite, because that is somehow considered to be cleverer. However following Moore’s death they admitted have always been lying to themselves, and Live and Let Die is clearly the best Bond film. Cinemagoer Emma Bradford said: “Roger Moore was the only one who clearly understood that the whole Bond thing was totally absurd, but then just had fun with it rather than being all moody. “But he could also do the tough guy stuff like kicking shit out of Jaws and that guy with the hook.” She added: “Sean Connery was cool too but he’s a bit of a safe choice and never went on a spaceship. “Meanwhile Daniel Craig just seems like a moody, insanely muscular diva and Quantum of Bollocks is absolutely the worst Bond film ever.” Fellow Bond fan Wayne Hayes said: “Sorry this came a bit late, Roger. But you were cool as fuck, especially in that clearly unviable amphibious car.” |
"And I think it's gonna be a long, long, time 'Til touchdown brings me 'round again to find I'm not the man they think I am at home Ah, no no no I'm a rocket man Rocket man Burnin' out this fuse Up here alone" - "Rocket Man" - Written by Elton John/Bernard Taupin - Performed by Elton John Last Thursday, The Blacklist aired its season two finale, "Tom Connolly". I thought it an exceptional episode, which is what you want given how some other show's finales have been this TV season. It closed out most of the questions we were concerned with and paved the way for a season three that, based on that ending, will re-ignite my love for this series. I hope it does the same for other fans, as the ratings have dropped considerably. For a finale, you want more viewers than the premiere and last Thursday was over five million viewers short. The events of the episode continued right where we left off from the previous one, 'Karakurt". Red informs Liz on her precarious situation as Tom Connolly discusses with Agent Cooper that he intends to arrest Liz. Liz is told she has been framed by the Cabal and after Connolly captures her she is interrogated by two agents who, of course, don't believe a word she says. They confirm her birth name as Masha Rostova (which was scheduled to be the finale's title, but changed before airing). Cooper stands up for Liz to Connolly before meeting with Red, where we learn his plan, facilitating Liz's escape from the "Post Office". I enjoyed this part of the episode as we see Red, once again, coming to Liz's rescue with the help of Agent Cooper, who knows the perfect way out of the building without getting caught - until Liz runs into Ressler. I, like many of you, predicted Ressler would let her go because a part of him believes every word she says is true (and he probably has a thing for her...maybe?). In any case, this was the first of the many high energy scenes The Blacklist gifted to us for the finale and it was extremely enjoyable to watch. Red's 'coolness' throughout was a great touch that we expect from his character in these situations and Cooper there to help was the icing on the cake. Red's Quotes Music from the Episode Thoughts and Discussion About the Author - Geo N Geo N is from Detroit, MI. His favorite shows include The Blacklist, Hell On Wheels, The Walking Dead, Game of Thrones, LOST, The Leftovers, The Strain, Sons Of Anarchy, Sleepy Hollow and countless others. When he's not watching tons of TV, he enjoys reading, playing hockey, comic books, weightlifting, and writing. Thanks for checking out my post. All Reviews) Recent Reviews Throughout much of season two of The Blacklist (mostly after the "Berlin-centric" episodes) we were shown how much Liz has been a beacon of light to Red; aof light to guide him out of the darkness. If you noticed in that scene, where Liz was escaping the "Post Office", Liz was in the dark and there was, literally, a 'red' light guiding her way to safety. He is as much her 'ray of light' as she is his.Liz spends most of the rest of the episode trying to clear her name. She goes back and forth with Tom, contemplating whether or not to flee with him on his boat or stay and collect evidence to prove her innocence in the murder of Senator Hawkins. She shares a nice heart-to-heart with Agent Cooper as he comes clean about his involvement with Connolly and also has time for an intimate moment with Tom. It was enjoyable to watch the car chase scene that erupted when Liz and Tom went looking for Andropov and I'm glad she ended up not fleeing with Tom in the end.It's at this point in the episode we get another incredible scene with Red explaining to Liz what he is capable of doing. He tells her he is a "Sin Eater", someone who absorbs the misdeeds of others. He goes on to say that he darkens his soul to keep the ones he is helping pure. As usual, Red quickly changes the subject whenever he doesn't like the line of questioning coming his way as Liz asks the most important question of the episode, "What sin of mine could you possibly have absorbed?". This question is answered before the finale is over. Many other questions are also answered, such as Agent Cooper and his terminal illness. Some of you have speculated that Cooper was never sick to begin with and it was all just a construct of the Cabal to get him to do their bidding. Although, he is now under arrest, I am glad his health is good shape.Red outing the Cabal by kidnapping investigative journalists and informing them of the contents of The Fulcrum was something you would expect only the 'Concierge of Crime' to pull off. It was brilliant how he conveyed the seriousness of it's contents with dangerous situation that accompanies its publishing. "The truth will out, not all of us will live to see that day, but the truth will out" is what he leaves them all with as he hopes their stories about The Fulcrums's contents will save his, but more importantly, Liz's life.The song "Rocket Man" is said to be based on a short story by Ray Bradbury titled "The Rocket Man". The story is about an astronaut who travels into space for three months at a time and comes back to Earth to visit with his wife and son. He wants to quit to spend more time with family. Despite making several attempts to quit, staying at home with his family and his constant absence has nearly destroyed his relationship with his wife. Before leaving for another three-month period, which the father intended to be his last mission as a Rocket Man, the father makes Doug, his son, promise he will never follow in his father's footsteps.The finale was an excellent episode that concluded the season perfectly. Many of our questions were answered, while leaving some for season three. The Cabal, and The Director, are still out there, but our heroes are a little scattered in the wake of finale's events. Liz is on the run with Red, her "Sin Eater", Agent Cooper has been arrested and Ressler is acting director of the Task Force. If there is still a Task Force in season three is something we will have to wait and see. Liz will most likely seek to get more information about her mother, from Red or other sources, but she is determined to know more. Season Three looks to be another great chapter for The Blacklist. Season Two's finale was most definitely a 'game-changer'.After Liz and Cooper meet up with Connolly in the final moments of the episode, Liz finally remembers the night of the famous fire from her youth. She now knows what Red was trying to make her forget. Liz realizes then that Red is her light as much as she is his. Red and Liz talk about that night at the end of the episode as he explains that he never wanted her to be like him. It was a special juncture in their sinuous relationship. After a season of Liz fluctuating and wavering back-and-forth between loving and hating Red it appears she has finally accepted his role in her life, whatever that may be. It doesn't matter if Red is Liz's father or not - like the 'Rocket Man', Red is 'not the man that we think he is at all'. What matters to Liz now, is the harmonious relationship they share; Red is her 'Sin Eater' and occasional guide through life and Liz is his ray of light and beacon of hope in a tumultuous world."Mars ain't the kind of placeTo raise your kidsIn fact, it's cold as hellAnd there's no one there to raise themIf you did"- "You're already in their hands. The only thing they haven't done is close their fist."Red to Liz- "In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king."Red to Cooper- "Black Eunuch" - AlgiersRed & Harold discuss the plan to extract Liz; Harold talks Liz through the escape until she runs into Ressler.- "Rocket Man (I Think It's Going to Be a Long Long Time)" - Elton JohnRed tells Liz he never wanted her to be like him; Ressler watches as Harold is arrested; Tom leaves on his boat; Liz's picture is put on the board for the FBI's Most Wanted List; Liz & Red head out of town.- I love the parallels that were drawn between Red and Liz's life this season. This is made even more apparent as Liz's photo is added right next to Red's on the FBI's Most Wanted List. Their relationship is truly a harmonious one and they are closer to each other than they (and we) think.- After the events of the finale, will Red still work with the Task Force (if there still is one?)- Will Agent Navabi still be on the Task Force as she was on loan from the Israeli government? Will she go back to her previous job? I like her character a lot so, I would love to see her stick around. Especially to see if anything comes of her and Aram.- What will become of Tom and his boat, 'Jene II'? In what capacity will we see him in Season Three? I enjoyed his character this season and look forward to whatever story arc they have in store for him next season.- Did you notice...Red's plan worked as The Director is seen staring at a newspaper with the headline indicating there is the existence of a shadow government.- I am not sure why they changed the title of the episode, but now we know Tom Connolly is number 11 on the blacklist. This means 'Masha Rostova' (Liz) could be a potential blacklister in the future. It also means that we do not know who is number '6' and below on the blacklist with Tom being the lowest known blacklister.- Did you notice...Liz shot Connolly with Tom's gun. She took it from his boat before she left. I wonder if this will play into the events of season three or if it's not going to be a big deal at all. Either way, I think it's neat so many of the people that care about her inadvertently helped her out in the finale.- Did you notice...In the episode, "Leonard Caul", Liz tells Red she wishes he would just lie and say 'Yes' sometimes to the questions she asks to make her feel better. In the finale last week, Red says 'Yeah' when asked about why he blocked her memories from the night of the fire - not to protect himself but to protect Liz. I noticed (as well as some of you - thank you Ashley) he took a lengthy pause before answering her, which makes me think he only said 'Yeah' to Liz to make her feel better even though it was a lie and there is probably a lot more to the events of that night that he wishes to share with Liz at this moment. Hopefully we find out more in Season Three.- What were your thoughts about the finale and the season as a whole? What do you look forward to in Season Three? |
Dear Kickstarter Backers, Please be advised that on December 6, 2016, Pebble Industries, Inc. and Pebble Technology, Corp. (collectively, the “Company” or “Pebble”) entered into an Assignment for the Benefit of Creditors (the “Assignment”). The Assignment is an insolvency proceeding undertaken under state law, in this case the State of California. Pursuant to the Assignment, a company called “Pebble Tech (assignment for the benefit of creditors), LLC” as assignee (“Assignee”) sold certain Pebble assets to Fitbit, Inc. (NYSE:FIT) (“Fitbit”). After this sale to Fitbit (the “Sale”), Pebble devices no longer were manufactured or supported. Pursuant to the terms of the Sale, backers as part of Pebble’s Kickstarter fundraising program who had not received their rewards as of December 6, 2016 were provided a full refund for any unfulfilled rewards. These refunds were issued and processed in December 2016. Any backer who believes that he or she has not yet received a refund for any unrewarded product(s), or has any other question related to the Pebble Kickstarter refund program, should file a proof of claim using the Form and Instructions via www.proofofclaims.com/PebbleTech/documents. In addition to completing the Proof of Claim Form in its entirety, please be sure that your submission includes the following information. Feel free to attach supplemental attachment(s) as necessary. · Your full name · Your original email associated with the account (used to make the pledge) along with your current/active email address (if different) · Your full mailing address · Refund claim amount · Explanation and logic pertaining to your refund claim for the unrewarded product(s) Please mail or fax the completed Proof of Claim to the address/fax number below: Pebble Tech (assignment for the benefit of creditors), LLC P.O. Box 391600 Mountain View, CA 94039-1600 650-412-2521 Fax Thank you, and on behalf of the Pebble organization, your loyal support of the Pebble community and brand is appreciated. |
Image copyright Thinkstock Image caption The lizards were sent into orbit to probe the effect of weightlessness on their sex lives Five gecko lizards sent into orbit on a Russian space satellite as part of a sex experiment have all died, the Russian space agency says. The Foton-M4 satellite returned to Earth on Monday, the Roscosmos agency said in a statement (in Russian). Experts say the geckos may have frozen to death after the heating system broke down, Russian news agencies report. They were sent into space as part of a study into the effect of weightlessness on their sex lives and development. "We can say with confidence that they died at least a week before the landing because their bodies were partly mummified," an official from Russia's Institute of Medical and Biological Problems told Itar-Tass news agency. The Russian space agency has not yet outlined the cause of death. But Interfax news agency, quoting an expert working on the mission, says preliminary data shows the geckos may have died after a malfunction with the satellite's heating system. Drosophila fruit flies that were also travelling on the satellite, however, survived and had reproduced, Roscosmos said. Mushrooms and plant seeds were also being monitored as part of the experiment, while a special vacuum furnace was used to examine the melting and solidification of metal alloys in low-gravity conditions. The six-tonne satellite was launched on 19 July and was meant to carry out experiments over a two-month period. However, it returned after just 44 days in orbit. Soon after its launch, Roscosmos briefly lost contact with the satellite when the Foton-M4's engine stopped responding to ground control. |
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It is Raghad Abada’s first glimpse of her hometown since August 2014, when she and her husband gathered their children, grabbed a few documents, and fled for their lives ahead of the Islamic State (IS) invasion. More than two years later, she stares out the window of a white Hyundai Tucson as her husband’s brother, Nawar Boulis Karomi, steers it gingerly around the debris of a city in ruins. They drive past the main shopping thoroughfare, where storefront after storefront has been torched, the shutters crumpled on the ground next to twisted metal. In residential neighborhoods, some houses have been reduced to piles of rubble. Others were burned. Finally, they turn onto her street. The road is blocked by a charred sedan and trailer, remnants of the defenses IS militants had used against the Iraqi Army, so Mr. Karomi stops the car. Ms. Abada gets out and walks tremulously toward her home. It is apparent that the pink two-story structure had once been stately and elegant. Now, the facade is blackened by flames. As she approaches the gate, Abada puts her hands to her face and weeps. Holly Pickett Raghad Abada, her son Evan Mazen Boulis, and her sister-in-law Huda Yishua try to salvage some belongings from the family’s home in Qaraqosh, Iraq, a Christian community burned and looted by members of the Islamic State group. Inside, the house has been stripped of its furnishings. The expensive Turkish-made chairs are gone. So are the dining table, sofas, and oven. The walls are charred, the smell still acrid, and ash crunches underfoot. Half-melted tiles hang from the ceiling. “There’s nothing. No pictures, nothing,” says Abada, as she and her sister-in-law sort through the debris. They find a piece of traditional Qaraqosh embroidery, and, miraculously, a VHS tape of Abada’s wedding. “I lost even the pictures of my kids,” Abada says. “My life is gone. All our possessions are gone. Everything. Thank God we are safe, but we didn’t expect something like this.” The offensive to retake northern Iraq from the clutches of IS, begun in October, has pushed the militants from most of the historical Christian heartland in the Nineveh Plains, including Qaraqosh, the largest majority-Christian town in Iraq. Now residents face a choice that has confronted many of their persecuted ancestors throughout history: whether to return to their homeland, despite incessant dangers, or to flee permanently. Many of those displaced from Qaraqosh and surrounding cities say they will never feel safe there again, and they prefer to leave Iraq than return to what’s left of their homes. Abada is among them. Like most of the Christians in Iraq, she has relatives who have already escaped to other countries, seeking relief from the recurring violence they endure at home. “No, we don’t want to come back here,” she says. “Our goal is to emigrate abroad. To any country.” “They destroyed our dreams and our memories,” adds Karomi. “They destroyed everything.” Holly Pickett Ammar Habib, a farmer and member of the Nineveh Plain Protection Units, a Christian militia, walks through the bombed-out commercial district of Qaraqosh, Iraq. The choice facing people like Abada may determine the future of Iraq’s Christian community – and shape the diversity and stability of the Middle East. Over the past decade and a half, the Christian population in the region has been in steep decline. The US invasion of Iraq in 2003 unleashed a sectarian bloodletting that saw Christians targeted with violence. Hundreds of thousands left their homeland for safety abroad. The IS capture of northern Iraq in 2014 accelerated the departures. Fewer than 500,000 Christians are now left in the country, down from 1.5 million in 2003. Their exodus threatens to bring an end to a history that goes back millenniums. Most Christians in Iraq identify as Assyrians or Chaldeans and trace their ancestry back to the ancient Assyrian and Babylonian civilizations. They speak a modern version of Aramaic, the language of Jesus. And many worry about the effects on society as Iraq’s population – long ethnically and religiously diverse – becomes less diverse and more divided. To persuade many of those who have fled to return would require much outside help and internal fortitude. Most of the towns are in ruins – buildings destroyed, shops looted, homes burned. Improvised explosive devices must be cleared, and electricity and running water restored. Many of the displaced lost everything and can’t afford to rebuild. Large-scale assistance will be necessary to revive any semblance of civilization. But a more fundamental question is safety. Iraqi and Kurdish forces pulled out in the face of the IS advance two years ago, and many Christians have no confidence in those forces to protect them. They also have lost the desire to live among their Muslim former neighbors, some of whom welcomed IS and pillaged their homes. In an effort some see as the last chance to keep Christians from disappearing from their homeland, Christian leaders are pushing for the creation of a new province for minorities in the Nineveh Plains. With a degree of self-rule, and a security force of their own, they say it could give people the degree of confidence necessary to remain. Whether it can actually come to fruition, and make Christians more secure in an Iraq increasingly fractured on sectarian and ethnic lines, is unclear. The future of the beleaguered minority – and a modicum of religious and cultural pluralism in a crossroads of the world’s three great monotheistic religions – may pivot on the outcome. Holly Pickett Nawar Boulis Karomi holds a wedding photo of him and his wife, Huda Yishua, which he was able to pick out of the rubble from his home in Qaraqosh. When Abada returns to Qaraqosh on this warm November day, the streets are patrolled by soldiers of the Nineveh Plain Protection Units wearing woodland camouflage-patterned uniforms. The NPU is one of several militias set up by Assyrian Christians in 2014 after the IS conquest of their land. Earlier this year the force gained official recognition – along with funding and weapons – from the government in Baghdad. More than 500 men strong, it is now in charge of securing Qaraqosh. Their headquarters in the town is in a one-story building that used to house a government veterinary clinic. Now soldiers serve tea to commanders in a reception room. “We didn’t start this force to fight anyone. We formed this force to help our people, to protect them,” says the NPU’s commander, Gen. Behnam Aboush Abdel Meseeh, a former general in the Iraqi Air Force. “To not allow ISIS or others in the future to come and kidnap our wives and sisters and do what they did to the Yazidis. To return trust to the people,” he says, using an alternative acronym for Islamic State. Most NPU members are from the Nineveh Plains and joined because they want Christian land to be protected by Christians, not the Iraqi Army or Kurdish peshmerga. It’s clear the force has inspired pride in its members. But its capabilities are still limited. It was the Iraqi Army that fought for Qaraqosh, with a handful of NPU members participating. The force has no heavy weapons and depends on help from the Iraqi Army and US forces to defuse the improvised explosive devices left by IS militants. While its soldiers engaged in several light skirmishes with IS fighters in the weeks after retaking the town, it would not have the firepower necessary to withstand a large-scale attack. But it’s important to the fighters that they patrol their ancestral land, instead of leaving it to others. They staff checkpoints, clear neighborhoods of explosives, and sometimes accompany civilians who return to check on their homes. Ammar Habib, a squat middle-aged Qaraqosh native who joined the NPU in 2014, walks down a street where shoppers used to come from surrounding towns to buy women’s clothes. Now, all the storefronts are smashed. Dusty shoes litter the pavement in front of one shop. In another, a wedding dress hangs, coated in grime. Mr. Habib’s farm on the outskirts of town, where he raised chickens and grew wheat, was destroyed by IS – his poultry houses ruined, farm equipment stolen. He plans to return to the city when it’s habitable. But he won’t rebuild his farm unless he has a guarantee that he won’t lose everything again. “If I could be sure that the situation would go back like it was, safety and security for our life, and protection from the international community, then I would go back to farming,” he says. “I don’t trust the central government. You can’t depend on their promises.” This plea for international protection is commonly voiced by Iraqi Christians. “The people of the Nineveh Plain, all the minorities, they don’t trust in any of the authorities, neither KRG [Kurdistan Regional Government] nor Baghdad, to restore the area. That’s why we need the participation of the international community,” says Abdel Meseeh. “I say to the US government: If they want to help us, they should do so while we’re still alive, not after we’re dead.” He doesn’t want an outside force. “Give us weapons,” he says. “We will protect ourselves.” But in the absence of international protection – an unlikely notion given the current political realities – some consider the creation of a province for Christians and other minorities to be a more attainable goal. (In addition to Assyrian and Chaldean Christians, the Nineveh Plains, an area east of Mosul, is home to a number of ethnic and religious minorities, including Yazidis, Turkmen, and Shabaks.) Their push comes as Iraq is increasingly fractured along ethnic and sectarian divides, with struggles between Sunnis and Shiites and the KRG in the north vowing to seek a referendum on independence. Turkmen and Yazidis have also called for their own provinces west of Mosul in Tal Afar and Sinjar, respectively. All three hypothetical provinces would be carved from Iraq’s current Nineveh Governorate, whose capital is Mosul. Advocates of a new province for minorities, such as Kaldo Oghanna of the Assyrian Democratic Movement, a political party with a presence in the Iraqi parliament, says Western countries should pressure Iraq to make it happen. He worries that the Nineveh Plains territory will become just another spoil in the struggle between Kurds, Shiites, and Sunnis. “The three political sharks are struggling over an area that’s not theirs,” he says. “It belongs to the minorities.” Holly Pickett Residents visit the burned altar at Tahera Church in Qaraqosh, Iraq. Islamic State fighters used the Christian church for target practice before burning and looting it. Yet the Nineveh Plains is already caught in the middle of a looming territorial clash between the KRG and Baghdad. After IS captured a large swath of northern Iraq, Kurdish forces moved into or cemented their hold on disputed territory. In the town of Baqofa, 18 miles north of Mosul, an Assyrian Christian militia called Dwekh Nawsha has waited eagerly since 2014 to participate in the battle against IS. The area is part of Iraq’s Nineveh province, but is controlled by the Kurdish peshmerga. The Dwekh Nawsha fighters need approval from the peshmerga for most of their movements. For two years, they waited at their base, taking shifts on the earthen berm that marked the front line, where they peered at IS fighters less than four miles away in the town of Batnaya. But in October, when the moment finally arrived to launch the battle for the majority-Christian town, the peshmerga commanders told Dwekh Nawsha fighters to stand down. “We were ready to attack. They even told us the hour, and we were all preparing to leave the base at 4 a.m. when the order came that we couldn’t go,” says Samir Oraha, a team leader in the militia. “We all became depressed at that moment. We were angry and sad.” Mr. Oraha is from Mosul, but he left in 2007 as Christians were increasingly targeted by extremists in the city. He doesn’t plan to return to Mosul – it’s unlikely that many Christians will, even if it’s fully recaptured from IS. But he also wonders what will become of the territory he’s now trying to protect. “All of these villages, Alqosh to Bashiqa to Karamless and Qaraqosh – it doesn’t belong to the Kurdish Regional Government,” he says. “They want this land, and we don’t know if they will leave.” The Nineveh Plains should not be incorporated into the Kurdish region, he says, but neither should it remain a part of Nineveh province. A new province for minorities and ruled by minorities, he adds, “is the last hope for us.” Holly Pickett A prayerbook is found near the altar in Tahera Church. The militia is a motley crew, with mismatched uniforms and no consistent training. Now, its members spend most of their time at their base, the former home of Baqofa’s mayor. They take turns standing guard, cooking, and cleaning. Under the watchful eye of the peshmerga, they make trips to Batnaya, where they document damage to houses and later post the photos online for village residents. On a sun-splashed November day, the fighters pile into their pickup truck, planning to head into Batnaya. A Russian-made heavy machine gun is mounted to the bed of the truck, though the weapon doesn’t work. As they leave the fortified walls of their base, they receive a call: A peshmerga commander is radioing to tell them American special forces are in the village to defuse improvised explosive devices. The Dwekh Nawsha fighters will have to wait, again. • • • In Erbil, the capital of the semiautonomous Kurdistan region where many of the Christians fled in 2014, Ammar Siman is sorting through a roomful of donated winter clothes for the displaced. The priest of St. George Syriac Catholic Church in the town of Bartalla, he has directed a charity for displaced people since he became one himself two years ago. His church, like those in most of the towns occupied by IS, was burned. It’s difficult to encourage parishioners to return in the current climate, he says. “I think people will go back only if they see hope for the future.” Assyrian and Chaldean Christians remember painfully their long history of tragedy. It includes their mass slaughter a century ago by the Ottoman regime, alongside the Armenians and Greeks. Every time there’s a fresh attack, says Father Siman, “we lose more people to emigration.” Before 2014 the Syriac Catholic Church counted 12,000 families among its flock in Qaraqosh, Mosul, Bartalla, and the surrounding areas. Now they number only 7,000, and he fears the exodus will get worse. “If someone returns to his house and doesn’t see his neighbors and friends there...,” he pauses and raises his hands. “Community to us is very important for living. Maybe if we don’t have that, people will decide to leave.” Two of his parishioners have already resolved not to go back. Jandark Nasi and her son, Ibrahim Matti, weren’t able to escape Bartalla before IS militants took control of the city in 2014. They spent two years enduring terror and intimidation before finally escaping as the Iraqi Army pushed into Mosul. Ibrahim, a quiet and slight teenager who spends his time caring for his mother, recounts their ordeal from the church-run center for displaced people in Erbil where the pair now live. Soon after their capture in August 2014, the militants detained them in a prison full of other Christians and Shiites, all of whom were being beaten, he says. There, militants told Ibrahim and his mother they must convert to Islam. “I said [to them], there is no God but Jesus,” he recalls. The militants then went to the next cell, where they were holding Shiite Muslims, whom they consider heretics. Ibrahim could hear as an IS member demanded a man profess fealty to Islam. “He didn’t accept, so they shot him in the head. Then they took me to his cell, showed me his body, and told me, ‘if you don’t convert to Islam, you will have the same fate,’ ” he says. “I was frightened. I was scared.” When the militants again demanded that the two recite the Islamic profession of faith, they complied. “We said it. But it wasn’t coming from our hearts,” he says. “I have strong faith, but with everything that happened, we were under threats and pressure.” Yet even that did not end their torment. Over the next two years, as they were living in and around Mosul, IS militants regularly visited the two to test their commitment to Islam. “I didn’t memorize their prayers, so they were beating me,” says Ibrahim. “They beat my mother with sticks because she didn’t know how to pray.” Militants would torture them with needles if they answered questions incorrectly, he says, and told him that if he missed three consecutive Fridays at the mosque they would kill him. Whenever he didn’t go to the mosque, they beat him, he says. He was forced to wear the short trousers preferred by the militants, and to grow his beard. At the mosque, Ibrahim listened to the imam proclaim the rest of the world infidels and urge residents to pledge obedience to the leader of IS and participate in jihad. Over the two years, he says he often saw members of IS who were not Iraqi. He also saw public executions, including the stoning of a woman accused of adultery. But some Mosul residents secretly gave them food and supplies, at great risk to themselves. “I was praying in the bottom of my heart, and crying,” says Ms. Nasi. “For the sake of my son, my gift from God.” Eventually Ibrahim and Nasi were able to escape when the Iraqi Army offensive reached the area where they were living on the outskirts of Mosul. “I still don’t believe it,” he says of their flight, smiling for the first time in an hour and a half of talking. In the small room he now shares with his mother, rosaries hang on the wall above the two simple beds. The floor is covered by carpet scraps. A bare lightbulb hangs from the wall. After more than two years without television, they enjoy a Bollywood film on a donated TV. Now out from under the caliphate, Ibrahim says he wants to obtain medical care for his mother and to continue his studies, which stopped at eighth grade. But both see a future outside Iraq. “We spent two years [under IS], two horrible years. We don’t want to go back,” says Nasi. “We want to leave Iraq, to leave this pain.” Holly Pickett Gen. Behnam Aboush Abdel Meseeh, commander of a Christian militia. Still, not everyone is fleeing. Back in Qaraqosh, Wilson Yousef Jallo sweeps up debris at his restaurant and bar, called “Our Nights” in Arabic. Once a cheerful and popular hangout, it had been ransacked by IS militants – broken chairs lie in a pile, kitchen equipment is smashed, and bottles are shattered across the floor. He opened the restaurant in 2003 and is heartbroken to see his dream in tatters. “We spent many years building this, and now we lost it,” says the short Qaraqosh native with a scar next to his eye. Get the Monitor Stories you care about delivered to your inbox. By signing up, you agree to our Privacy Policy This is his first visit back to Qaraqosh since it was retaken from IS, and he’s searching the rubble for the restaurant license, which he didn’t have time to grab when he fled in 2014. Despite the destruction, he’s already thinking about how he can reopen. He’ll need a lot of support to be able to rebuild, he acknowledges. But he’s determined. “God willing, we’ll come back and open it again, against ISIS and against the religious extremists,” he says. |
Work is advancing on a highly anticipated bitcoin project originally proposed by an anonymous cryptographer going under the French name of Harry Potter’s nemesis. Named after one of the book series’ spells, MimbleWimble has quickly became one of the more anticipated bitcoin R&D initiatives, since it is believed it could help improve upon the scalability and fungibility of bitcoin in a unique way. One of the major downsides of the original design, however, was that despite granting greater privacy and scalability, it looked like it might not support many of bitcoin’s more complicated scripts (which allow users to use more advanced transactions). But, it looks to be progressing on that front. Blockstream mathematician Andrew Poelstra provided the update on the MimbleWimble mailing list, where he dives into the possibilities of the proposed change. For the non-technical, the gist is that it might be possible to plug many of bitcoin’s current capabilities into the new style of transactions. (The proposed change amounts to adding support for hash pre-images, a cryptographic tool that could enable a few fancier transaction types). Although, the plan is still likely to implement it as an altcoin or a sidechain. Poelstra went into some more detail about some of the capabilities MimbleWimble could potentially support, such as zero-knowledge contingent payments (which allow users to buy information privately), and cross-chain atomic swaps (which let users exchange cryptocurrencies in a decentralized way). But, it’s a new idea, and none of the details are set in stone yet. Poelstra mentioned that this would require a small change to MimbleWimble, but that it might be worth “a full paper with more detail.” Code image via Shutterstock |
For years, Washington lawmakers on both sides of the aisle have attacked big corporations for avoiding taxes by parking their profits overseas. Last week the European Union did something about it. The European Union’s executive commission ordered Ireland to collect $14.5 billion in back taxes from Apple. But rather than congratulate Europe for standing up to Apple, official Washington is outraged. Republican House Speaker Paul Ryan calls it an “awful” decision. Democratic Senator Charles Schumer, who’s likely to become Senate Majority Leader next year, says it’s “a cheap money grab by the European Commission.” Republican Orrin Hatch, chairman of the Senate Finance Committee, accuses Europe of “targeting” American businesses. Democratic Senator Ron Wyden says it “undermines our tax treaties and paints a target on American firms in the eyes of foreign governments.” P-l-e-a-s-e. These are taxes America should have required Apple to pay to the U.S. Treasury. But we didn’t – because of Ryan, Schumer, Hatch, Wyden, and other inhabitants of Capitol Hill haven’t been able to agree on how to close the loophole that has allowed Apple, and many other global American corporations, to avoid paying the corporate income taxes they owe. Let’s be clear. The products Apple sells abroad are designed and developed in the United States. So the foreign royalties Apple collects on them logically should be treated as corporate income to Apple here in America. But Apple and other Big Tech corporations like Google and Amazon – along with much of Big Pharma, and even Starbucks – have avoided paying hundreds of billions of dollars in taxes on their worldwide earnings because they don’t really sell things like cars or refrigerators or television sets that they make here and ship abroad. Their major assets are designs, software, and patented ideas. Although most of this intellectual capital originates here, it can be transferred instantly around the world – finding its way into a vast array of products and services abroad. Intellectual capital is hard to see, measure, value, and track. So it’s a perfect vehicle for tax avoidance. Apple transfers its intellectual capital to an Apple subsidiary in Ireland, which then “sells” Apple products all over Europe. And it keeps most of the money there. Ireland has been more than happy to oblige by imposing on Apple a tax rate that’s laughably low – 0.005 percent in 2014, for example. Apple is America’s most profitable high-tech company and also one of America’s biggest tax cheats. It maintains a worldwide network of tax havens to park its global profits, some of which don’t even have any employees. Sitting atop this network is “Apple Operations International,” incorporated in Ireland. Never mind that Apple Operations International keeps its bank accounts and records in the United States and holds board meetings in California. It’s still considered Irish. And its main job is allocating Apple’s earnings among its international subsidiaries in order to keep taxes as low as possible. As a result, over last decade alone Apple has amassed a stunning $231.5 billion cash pile abroad, subjected to little or no taxes. This hasn’t stopped Apple from richly rewarding its American shareholders with fat dividends and stock buybacks that raise share prices. But rather than use its overseas cash to fund these, Apple has taken on billions of dollars of additional debt. It’s a scam, at the expense of American taxpayers. Add in the worldwide sales of America’s Big Tech, Big Pharma, and Big Franchise operations, and the scam is sizeable. Over 2 trillion dollars of U.S. corporate profits are now parked abroad – all of it escaping the U.S. corporate income tax. To make up the difference, you and I and millions of other Americans have to pay more in income taxes and payroll taxes to finance the U.S. government. Why can’t this loophole be closed? In fact, what’s stopping the Internal Revenue Service from doing what the European Commission just did – telling Apple it owes tens of billions of dollars, but to America rather than to Ireland? The dirty little secret is the loophole could be closed, and the IRS could probably do what Europe just did even under existing law. But neither will happen because Big Tech, Big Pharma, and Big Franchise have enough political clout to stop them from happening. Ironically, the European Commission’s ruling is having the opposite effect in the United States. It’s adding fuel to the demand Apple and other giant U.S. global corporations have been making, that the United States slash taxes on corporations that move their overseas earnings back to the United States. In other words, they want another tax amnesty. Congress’s last tax amnesty occurred in 2004, when global U.S. corporations brought back about $300 billion from overseas, and paid just a tax rate of 5.25 percent rather than the regular 35 percent U.S. corporate rate. Corporate executives argued then – as they argue now – that the amnesty would allow them to reinvest those earnings in America. The argument was baloney then and it’s baloney now. A study by the National Bureau of Economic Research found that 92 percent of the repatriated cash was used to pay for dividends, share buybacks or executive bonuses. “Repatriations did not lead to an increase in domestic investment, employment or R.&D., even for the firms that lobbied for the tax holiday stating these intentions,” the study concluded. The political establishment in Washington is preparing for another tax amnesty nonetheless. In a white paper published last week, the Treasury Department warned that an American corporation like Apple, ordered by the European Commission to make tax repayments, might eventually use such payments to offset its U.S. tax bill “when its offshore earnings are repatriated or treated as repatriated as part of possible U.S. tax reform.” Rather than another tax amnesty, we need a crackdown on corporate tax avoidance. Instead of criticizing the European Commission for forcing Apple to pay up, American politicians ought to be thanking Europe for standing up to Apple. Get the Monitor Stories you care about delivered to your inbox. By signing up, you agree to our Privacy Policy At least someone has. This story originally appeared on Robertreich.org. |
State House moves to ban texting while driving HARRISBURG -- State legislators from the Pittsburgh area and elsewhere across Pennsylvania will make a major push to to make texting while driving illegal. Why? Because it's dangerous -- both to the drivers who become distracted and sloppy while sending text messages, and to other drivers and pedestrians in the area, said Reps. Joe Markosek, D-Monroeville, Paul Costa, D-Wilkins, and others. "We are all just one text message from eternity," Mr. Markosek said bluntly at a news conference today, as he introduced House Bill 2070. He expects the new measure to be approved by the House Transportation Committee as early as tomorrow and sent to the full House for action. Mr. Markosek is the committee chairman and the bill has bipartisan support, including Rep. Rick Geist, R-Blair, as a co-sponsor. "This is not a Republican or Democratic issue, it's a safety issue," said Rep. Kathy Watson, R-Bucks. The bill would make texting-while-driving a "primary" offense, meaning police could stop a driver merely if police see him/her texting behind the wheel. Failure to wear a seat belt is a "secondary" offense, meaning an officer can't stop a driver just for not wearing a seat belt, but can add that offense if a driver is stopped for another reason, such as speeding. The new bill also would prevent teens with drivers' permits or junior licenses (those age 16 and 17) from talking on a cellphone while driving. Adult drivers -- those 18 and older -- would still be allowed to talk on cellphones while behind the wheel, Mr. Markosek said. There could be an effort to add a ban on drivers using a cellphone when the bill hits the House floor, however. The penalty for texting while driving would be $50. Mr. Markosek called the bill a compromise, meaning the fine wasn't as high as some legislators would like, but he wants to get the bill through the Legislature as quickly as possible to increase traffic safety. The bill also would prohibit insurance companies from increasing a driver's premium if he/she is found guilty of texting while driving. The new state law would supercede all local laws on texting, so "we don't end up with a patchwork quilt of laws around the state," Mr. Markosek said. More details in tomorrow's Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. Harrisburg Bureau Chief Tom Barnes can be reached at tbarnes@post-gazette.com or 717-787-4254. First published on November 9, 2009 at 12:41 pm |
Jeff Bottari/Zuffa LLC/Getty Images Floyd Mayweather Jr. picked up the 50th win of his illustrious career, defeating Conor McGregor by 10th-round TKO on Saturday night in Las Vegas' T-Mobile Arena. With the victory, Mayweather surpasses Rocky Marciano, who retired in 1956 with a 49-0 record. McGregor more than held his own in what was his first professional boxing fight, but the gulf between him and Mayweather grew the longer the fight went on. After the bout reached the halfway point, McGregor began looking visibly fatigued and Mayweather sensed an opening. He showed a level of aggression rarely seen in his previous 49 victories. According to SHO Stats, Mayweather had landed 132 punches compared to 80 for McGregor entering the 10th round. Yahoo Sports' Chris Mannix commented on the stylistic change: In the 10th round, Mayweather really went on the offensive, and McGregor had no answer for the barrage. After Mayweather landed a series of blows without reply from McGregor, referee Robert Byrd called for the bell. Mayweather told Showtime Sports' Jim Gray he had underestimated McGregor's abilities coming into the night, per UFC's official Twitter account: Mayweather also appeared to shut the door on stepping in the ring again, saying this was his last fight, per BBC Sport. Many expected Mayweather to beat McGregor, with the biggest question being whether the fight would last the full 12 rounds. Mayweather's last knockout was against Victor Ortiz in 2011. Although McGregor is UFC's lightweight champion, he was clearly overmatched against somebody who's one of the best defensive boxers in history. The likes of Manny Pacquiao, Canelo Alvarez, Miguel Cotto and Oscar De La Hoya have all tried to take down Mayweather and failed. McGregor stood little chance in what was his boxing debut. Saturday's fight wasn't about putting on a competitive matchup in the ring. Instead, it offered Mayweather what's likely to be one more massive payday and granted McGregor the opportunity to earn more from one night than he had over the entirety of his UFC career to date. ESPN.com's Darren Rovell projected in June Mayweather vs. McGregor could gross a little over $606 million. The two fighters signed a confidentiality agreement, so their full earnings are unlikely to ever be revealed, but ESPN.com's Dan Rafael reported Mayweather will take home a purse of at least $100 million, while McGregor will make a minimum of $30 million. From an aesthetic perspective, Mayweather's victory over Pacquiao in May 2015 was disappointing, but it was a massive financial success for the pair of stars. Rovell and Rafael reported Mayweather took home between $220 million and $230 million, while Pacquiao earned $150 million, which was to be divided between he and Top Rank founder Bob Arum. As long as Saturday's pay-per-view meets its revenue expectations, it's doubtful either Mayweather or McGregor will walk away regretting his involvement. If anything, the two may consider a rematch. |
According to a report in the Financial Times, Deutsche's results included the $4bn intake the bank received from the sale of its stake in Hua Xia. However, the deal for the Chinese lender had not been completed by the end of 2015, which was the deadline for transactions to be included in the tests. The stress tests were carried out in a bid to restore confidence in Europe's banks. The German lender has used the stress test results since then to demonstrate the strength of its finances. The news comes after shares in the bank plummeted off the back of fears it could receive a fine of up to $14bn from the US. The Financial Times reports the bank was granted a special concession, agreed by its supervisor the European Central Bank, to allow the Hua Xia deal, which has still not been completed, to be allowed in the tests. The treatment of the deal was included in the footnotes of Deutche's results, however it was the only bank of 50 to have such a note. Online Editors |
Antibiotic resistance has caused a fall in life expectancy for the first time, the Office for National Statistics has said. Life expectancy in future years has been revised down after the statistics authority said that "less optimistic views" about the future had to be taken into account. Opinions on "improvements in medical science" had declined, it said, and fears of the "re-emergence of existing diseases and increases in anti-microbial resistance" meant people would not live as long as was previously expected. The ONS uses predictions about how medicine and science will improve to model how life expectancy will change. Under the projection made in 2010, a baby girl born in 2016 could expect to live 83.7 years. This has now been revised down to 82.9. Life expectancy for babies born in 2060, the latest year which appears in both models, is now two years shorter than it was in the 2010 data. Baby girls born in that year were previously expected to live to 90.1 - this has now fallen to 88.3. Baby boys are also set to live less long, with children born in 2016 expected to live to 79.2, instead of 79.9, and those born in 2060 expected to live to 85.7 instead of 86.8. |
Cellulosic biofuels can benefit the environment if managed correctly Could cellulosic biofuels – or liquid energy derived from grasses and wood – become a green fuel of the future, providing an environmentally sustainable way of meeting energy needs? In Science, researchers at the U.S. Department of Energy-funded Great Lakes Bioenergy Research Center say yes, but with a few important caveats. “The climate benefit of cellulosic biofuels is actually much greater than was originally thought,” said Phil Robertson, University Distinguished Professor of Ecosystem Science at Michigan State University and lead author on the study. “But that benefit depends crucially on several different factors, all of which we need to understand to get right.” Although not yet a market force, cellulosic biofuels are routinely factored into future climate mitigation scenarios because of their potential to both displace petroleum use and mitigate greenhouse gas emissions. Those benefits, however, are complicated by the need for vast amounts of land to produce cellulosic biofuels on a large scale. “The sustainability question is largely about the impact of using millions of acres of U.S. land to grow biofuel crops,” Robertson said. “Can we do that without threatening global food security, diminishing biodiversity, or reducing groundwater supplies? How much more fertilizer would we use? What are the tradeoffs for real climate benefit, and are there synergies we can promote?” Drawing from ten years of empirical research, Robertson and GLBRC colleagues from MSU, the University of Wisconsin and the University of Maryland identify several emerging principles for managing the complex environmental tradeoffs of cellulosic biofuel. First, the researchers show how growing native perennial species on marginal lands –land not used for food production because of low fertility or other reasons – avoids competition with food security, and provides the greatest potential for climate mitigation and biodiversity benefits. Second, crop choice is key. Native perennial species offer superior environmental outcomes to annual crops, but no single crop appears to be ideal for all locations. In fact, in some cases mixed species crops provide superior benefits. Third, nitrogen fertilizer use should be avoided or minimized because of its global warming and other environmental impacts. According to the researchers, these principles (as well as four more outlined in the paper) are enough to begin guiding sound policy decisions for producing sustainable biofuels. Looking forward, however, the team calls for more research on designing landscapes to provide the optimal suite of energy, climate and environmental benefits. They say that understanding how best to integrate benefits and tradeoffs will be key to the future success of cellulosic biofuels. “With biofuels, the stakes are high,” Robertson said. “But the returns are also high, and if we take key principles into account we can begin shaping the policies and practices that could help make cellulosic biofuels a triple win for the economy, the climate and for environmental sustainability in general. Additional GLBRC scientists contributing to this paper include Bradford Barham, Bruce Dale, Stephen Hamilton, Cesar Izaurralde, Randall Jackson, Douglas Landis, Scott Swinton, Kurt Thelen and James Tiedje. |
Billionaire technology CEO Tom Siebel foresees even more ethical problems—including widespread job losses—if companies continue to evolve with big data. CNBC's Mike Santoli spoke with Siebel in an exclusive interview for CNBC PRO on the sidelines of the Delivering Alpha conference in New York in September. Santoli asked the big data CEO about his outlook for the industry and its impact on the current labor force. "Ethical issues that are very problematic are the implications for the job market...ever since the invention of the mechanical loom at the beginning of the nineteenth century, we've been using technology to replace jobs," he said. "The net effect though—there will be unemployment, jobs will be eliminated. The idea that we're going to train taxi drivers in New York City to be data scientists: I'm not buying it." Siebel is the Chairman and CEO of C3 IoT, a fast-growing computer software company that provides a platform for corporations to develop big data operations, predictive analytics, artificial intelligence, and internet-of-things applications. "Let's think about health care where we can do predictive analytics. We're going to be able to predict disease with very, very high levels of precision: The onset of diabetes, heart disease, different forms of cancer, whatever it may be," said Siebel. "Soon we will have in these datasets the genome sequence for the population of the United States and insurance companies and the people dealing with these data will know things about these patients that, candidly, patients don't want to know." To be sure, Siebel noted that companies must advance with the help of big data, an area he has been working in for years. As founder of Siebel Systems, he built the foundation of the customer relationship management market. "You know, many of these companies that do not make this transition to this new kind of generation of what's going on – candidly, they're going to be out of business," said Siebel. See here for the full CNBC PRO report and interview video . |
A historian has slammed the double standards employed in French schools which present Muslim conquerors as peaceful and brilliant, and Christians as backwards oppressors. Against the backdrop of terror attacks and rising Islamic extremism worldwide, teacher and author Barbara Lefebvre contends that education on Islam has “never been more necessary”. But the historian, who has published several books on the Holocaust, argues that textbooks’ sanitisation of Muslim conquests and their presentation of an Islamic supremacist version of history is completely unhelpful. The historian says textbooks focus on the “peaceful coexistence” of Muslims and Christians and that official guidelines tell teachers not to study “events that tend to emphasise the warlike contacts”. She draws attention to the fact that, incredibly, books use the term “resuming control” when describing Mohammed’s conquests of previously non-Muslim areas. This presents as legitimate “reconquests” the warlord’s bloody takeovers of regions that were never previously Muslim, nor his territory. This directive is ignored, she notes, when it comes to the Crusades, as prominent textbooks title their chapter on the subject of Christian self-defence “Violent Holy Wars”. This period of history, and the Spanish people’s reconquest of their own country, is told through a series of bloodthirsty “crimes”, Lefebvre notes. The focal point of peaceful cooperation between the two religions is exemplified by trading relations in the French curriculum. However, Lefebvre observes that even this narrative follows a Muslim supremacist agenda as textbooks “unanimously describe Islamic civilisation as ‘brilliant’” and claim that all the West is hugely in debt to Arabic science. To hammer home the discredited idea that Muslims were wise educators to Europe’s ignorant cave-dwellers, the professor discloses that textbooks quote a Muslim occupier as saying: “This country does not know what science is and those who lived knew no one here who had made himself illustrious by his love for knowledge.” Lefebvre notes that, to emphasise this one-sided narrative, students are asked to “show that the presence of Muslims in Andalusia helps develop science and Greek philosophy in the West” in their assessment. The professor describes as “disconcerting” the fact that textbooks rely entirely on Muslim sources for accounts of relations between Muslims and non-Muslims. As a result, pupils in French classrooms are taught that non-Muslims welcomed being conquered and invaded as “a blessing”. Several textbooks, Lefebvre notes, claim “[Non-Muslims] opened the gates of their city with the singers and the musicians began to play and paid the poll tax”. “In textbooks, it appears that in Saudi after 632 everyone became Muslim like magic without pressure”, she writes, asserting that so many under Muslim rule had only a “choice between conversion and death”. By focusing on an idealised image of “peaceful coexistence” under Muslim rule, Lefebvre blasts the narrative French schools project by completely neglecting to clarify the conditions under which non-Muslims were forced to live. She notes that “like other ancient or medieval conquests” the Islamisation of non-Muslim areas “meant dispossessing the indigenous of their sovereignty”. For reference, the historian points to how when Christians in Toledo tried to resist this process they were mutilated and crucified by the invading forces. Further, she argues that to summarise the life of non-Muslims living under Islamic rule as being protected in return for a tax is completely dishonest. “If textbooks were willing to describe the humiliating terms of [non-Muslims living under Islamic rule]” Lefebvre contends that it would be clear to students that Christians were “stigmatised” and made third class citizens in every respect under Muslim rule. Lefebvre notes that while textbooks devote whole pages to crimes committed by Europeans, Arab crimes are completely omitted. A clear example of this, she points out, is that textbooks neglect to mention Muslims’ 13 centuries-long enslavement of Africans. Contrasting Islamic slavery with the European slave trade, Lefebvre highlights the fact that Arabs would castrate male captives and that the majority died as a result, which is why African slaves left little genetic trace in Muslim countries. The professor argues that it’s wrong that the issue of Islamic slavery is completely absent from classrooms when children learn that the suffering of Africans throughout the centuries “comes down to the Transatlantic Slave Trade”. Furthermore, she brings up the fact that it’s impossible to find any history of Arab Muslims opposing slavery, “unlike Europeans who fought for the abolition of this inhuman trade against their slave contemporaries”. Lefebvre contends that the reason the government insists on the “glorification” of Islamic history in French classrooms is because multiculturalism “has reached an identity point of tension close to breaking”. The professor argues that textbooks’ sanitising of Islam is counterproductive in that the issue of jihad is never addressed when from the religion’s dawn it has served to justify “imperialist conquest made of looting, killing and settlement”. By employing such obvious double standards, Lefebvre says the history curriculum is failing in its duty to enlighten students, “to make them informed citizens and to develop in them the critical spirit to analyse historical sources and not just learn [an agenda]”. |
When MLS announced that they would be expanding to four more markets by the end of 2020, they put out a list of criteria that must be met in order for the league to go into a that market. Factors taken into consideration include: Committed and engaged ownership; A comprehensive stadium plan; Demonstrated fan support for professional soccer in the market; Support from sponsors, television partners and other constituents; Geographic location; A strategic business plan for the launch and successful operation of the club. So which markets fit these new factors? Let’s take a look at the contenders right now to see where they stack up. Orlando Committed and engaged ownership? Check. Stadium plan? Check. (Though the funding from the state and local side is a little iffy, but their billionaire owner will make it so) Fan support? Check. Support from sponsors, TV, etc.? No official word but I’d assume so, check. Geographic location? League wants a team in the Southeast, so check. Business plan? Check. Outlook: Looks great, they’ll get a club, that much we already know. *** Miami Committed and engaged ownership? David Beckham and his group seem like they will be committed. Check. Stadium plan? Not so much right now. Fan support? Uh, I may give them this one. Check. Support from sponsors, TV, etc.? No official word but TV ratings in this market always do well. Geographic location? League wants a team in the Southeast, so check. Business plan? A billionaire and a massive soccer icon working together, so I’d say yes, check. Outlook: Four out of six so far, I’d imagine a stadium plan will be unveiled when Beckham reveals his plans for his expansion team. *** Atlanta Committed and engaged ownership? If it is Arthur Blank, then yes, check. If it is someone we don’t know, then may not. Stadium plan? Sort of, Blank wants a MLS team to play in his new stadium for the NFL’s Falcons. Meh. Fan support? Dicy one for this. Support from sponsors, TV, etc.? No official word but I’d assume so, check. Geographic location? League wants a team in the Southeast, so check. Business plan? Check. Outlook: Decent but honestly not great. With Orlando’s bid looking as good as it is and the league going to Miami with Beckham and his group, I doubt Atlanta’s chances will remain too high unless Blank comes in with an aggressive bid. *** St. Louis Committed and engaged ownership? None as of today. Stadium plan? None as of today. Fan support? It would certainly be there, so check. Support from sponsors, TV, etc.? Same as the one above, that is a solid market. Check. Geographic location? Big time check. Business plan? None as of today. Outlook: The location makes sense as well as the city’s history with the game. Lots of players want a St. Louis team and if an owner would step up, it certainly would work. *** Minneapolis Committed and engaged ownership? I guess I’ll give them this one since the NFL’s Vikings would be involved. Check. Stadium plan? Same as Atlanta, so, check. Fan support? It would certainly be there in my mind, so check. Support from sponsors, TV, etc.? Hard to assume this one, haven’t see TV numbers for soccer from this market before. Geographic location? Good location for a rivalry with Chicago and even Kansas City. So check. Business plan? Haven’t seen one yet. Outlook: The location is good, the stadium plans are similar to Atlanta. I still don’t like the idea of a new team in a NFL stadium. *** San Antonio Committed and engaged ownership? I think they need more $$ in their corner, other wise this would be a yes from me. Stadium plan? Check. Fan support? Check. Support from sponsors, TV, etc.? I think it would come in, that is a strong market as Toyota is even sponsoring the stadium. So yes, check. Geographic location? Can’t claim this one for the Southeast but another team in Texas sounds favorable to Dallas and Houston fans. Outside of Texas, folks may not like that idea. But given how this is a rivalry driven league, this would work. Check. Business plan? I’m sure one would be there, but haven’t seen one yet from this side. Outlook: I still remain in the camp that says San Antonio will make the leap to MLS before long. Good market for the league to be in and they’ve proven they draw well in the NASL. *** Sacramento Committed and engaged ownership? It sounds like they will be, still want to see the $$ from them though. Stadium plan? I guess you can say they have one. But I’d like to see real commitment for it before I give them a check mark. Fan support? They drew well for a friendly, outside of that we really don’t know. Support from sponsors, TV, etc.? No clue. Geographic location? I do like the idea of another California team but honestly, I’d rather see it in San Francisco. Still, a good rival for the Quakes to have, so check. Business plan? No clue. Outlook: Their folks continue to talk and before long someone will really listen. *** Detroit Committed and engaged ownership? If the right owner steps up in that market sure. Stadium plan? Owners of the Silverdome want a downtown stadium. That would work. Need more on it though. Fan support? I’ll give them this one, Detroit fans support their teams. Check. Support from sponsors, TV, etc.? No clue. Geographic location? A good geographic spot for the league. Natural rivals for Chicago, Montreal, and Columbus. Check. Business plan? No clue. Outlook: This is a market that really could work if all the right pieces fell in place. I’ve always thought highly of market in terms of how well they support their teams. Even the lowly Lions get supported. I know the city is in financial ruins though, which makes it tough for their chances right now. *** Other markets: San Diego, Nashville, Las Vegas, Indianapolis, Birmingham. All could have made this list but there isn’t enough for me to go on with this list of factors to match them up. |
About: Howdy, we are application engineers in Seeed. Sharing projects with maker community is awesome. Hope you like it XD Seeed is the IoT hardware enabler providing services that empower IoT developers to swiftl... Is DIY a device that can monitor the environmental quality condition at any time a problem for you? Actually, it’s not a tough job. Here, on the desk, is a DIY device which can help me get the informant about the air pollution in the room. This device can detect the concentration of dust, gas, alcohol and other organic gas in the room. In order to make this process faster and simpler, I choose to use Seeedstudio’s Grove modules. In addition, its whole shell is made of acrylic and assembled with a few screws. You see, it’s all made by myself. |
Share Twitter’s verification process has always been shrouded in mystery. The site has played its cards incredibly close to its chest when it comes to explaining how one goes about obtaining the elusive checkmark icon. Some recent developments – namely, the loss of our own little blue and white checkmark – has caused Digital Trends to ask some questions about the system of verification and its legitimacy. After noticing our blue and white checkmark was missing from Twitter, we visited the site’s verification sign up page to request getting the icon back. In response, we were told our verification request had been declined and received this brief message: “Twitter currently verifies government accounts, accounts at risk of identity confusion or impersonation, and a select number of business accounts for alpha testing.” “…Please note: Twitter isn’t verifying business accounts yet unless they’re part of the alpha testing program. If you are part of the alpha testing program and your request was denied, please visit your business center page for more information.” Looking for more reasoning still, we contacted Twitter and received further explanation: “Verification is something we offer our active advertisers meeting the $5K/month minimum spend associated with our Platform Partnership.” “…If you were to re-visit Promoted Products further down the road and were able to meet that $5K/month minimum, this verification would be reinstated.” The moment that we stopped advertising with Twitter, the verification mark had vanished, so the chain of events now makes more sense. Other companies have dealt with the same issues at Twitter. Music and art site The Fader has a similar problem with account verification, which was covered by AdAge. And while coughing up the cash isn’t really an issue for our company, the strangeness and hush-hush surrounding how Twitter approaches this system has touched a nerve – and we aren’t the only ones who feel that way. To that end, we have a few questions. Q: What happens if you pay up and then take a break? Welcome to the land of “what if.” So let’s say you are a business of some sort and you pay the $5K a month – actually, let’s say $10K, you really want that Twitter growth – and you get your Promoted Tweets, Promoted Account statuses, and (perhaps after request) your Verified Account badge. You enroll in this program for a year, racking up a bill of $120,000 in total for those 12 months. Your Twitter reach is better, you have more followers, and you also have verified status. Now comes the new fiscal year, and you decide to take a different budget approach for your ad campaigns and you only want to pay Twitter every other month for this service. Your business has grown considerably, you’ve accrued a following, and you don’t necessarily need Promoted Tweets and the like as badly. Well the minute you fail to ante up that $5,000 for the month, you very well could be kissing your Verified Account badge goodbye. Now it seems as it this is on a “case by case” basis, but the fact remains that nowhere does Twitter explain that this is a casualty of failing to abide by the incredibly narrow parameters of its advertising model. It’s just miserably unexplained, and that’s just about the last thing anyone wants from a platform they are spending money with. If during this hypothetical year of advertising with Twitter, your hypothetical business were to skyrocket to incredible fame and hundreds of thousands of followers, it’s possible Twitter wouldn’t revoke your verified status – but this ad hoc format is just ripe for complaints seeing as Twitter refuses to explain the matter anymore than that. Q: When and why do you have to request the verified badge? Because Twitter is so quiet about its verification platform, it’s difficult to know when or if you’re in the position to request the badge. Apparently, and according to sources outside Twitter, you get that status when you spend $5K a month with the company. But Twitter doesn’t tell you that. Nor does it just give you the badge. Only after you snoop around and find that the collective Internet deems it so and you request your badge from Twitter will you get the blue and white icon. It’s like setting goals for employees that come with bonuses – only you don’t tell them that there’s a bonus or what it is. There might be plenty of other benefits from seeking and meeting those goals (in Twitter’s case, the promotion spending ad dollars there provides) but not mentioning that a certain amount gets you a verified badge seems downright deceitful. Which begs yet another question… Q: Why doesn’t verified account information come from Twitter? When we asked about our vanished verified status, we got an interesting message from our account rep at Twitter: “We try to be as transparent as possible with our products and program. Our minimum spend requirement has been made public many times. You can check out this Adage article that was posted back in January. Again, if you wish to become an active advertiser again, verification would definitely be a part of that!” Does anyone else find it strange that Twitter refers its advertisers and potential advertisers to an Adage article instead of its own Terms of Service or marketing FAQ? And that all of this information only came after the fact? The motivation for keeping such a tight lid on this whole mess does make some sense: Twitter doesn’t want people creating accounts with the focus of getting verified or trying to falsely get an account verified in order to impersonate someone. But reveal the secret sauce or not, people have gamed the system. Last year, the fake Wendi Murdoch account infamously slipped through the cracks and someone pretending to be Rupert Murdoch’s wife went on a tweeting rampage. Twitter reacted quickly, but the faux pas once again called our attention to the verification system. And once again, as if on cue, Twitter refused to offer any insight. Verified Accounts were introduced way back in 2009 to give those with clout a way to signify that yes, it’s really them. Here, in Twitter’s words, is why this is needed: “Verification is currently used to established authenticity of identities on Twitter. The verified badge helps users discover high-quality sources of information and trust that a legitimate source is authoring the account’s Tweets.” Twitter asks its users for a great deal of trust. It has repeatedly been at the center over issues regarding free speech, government censorship, and online privacy rights – and generally, I’m willing to say that Twitter’s risen to the occasion. But the unwillingness to be transparent when it comes to its verification process is unsettling, especially considering that by all accounts, the company believes we are who we say we are. Not to mention the fact that the blue and white icon means something now. Q: How does Twitter decide who deserves verification? For better or worse, we’ve given Twitter a lot of power. It’s where people turn to for official (or semi-official) statements from authorities, including politicians, musicians, entrepreneurs, celebrities… the list goes on and on. It’s been crucial to supporting global communication, and was incredibly important during the Middle Eastern uprising last year. So it stands to reason that we want to know who exactly our information is coming from, and that’s why the verified status symbol matters. It’s far too easy to impersonate someone using Twitter, and this tool is supposed to take away that power. Twitter also serves as a communication tool for publications, and given that the site is a playground for parodies, it’s important that the real sites of authority are able to claim as much. This means, again, that verification matters. And Twitter knows it, and it’s wielding its power where it can. Our account rep ran down the list of how to get verification: “One way to receive verification is if you are being impersonated (i.e. celebrity, politician, etc). The other is if you are an active advertiser. When you are running Promoted Products, verification is a value-add similar to analytics and Brand Pages. Digital Trends received verification as an active and engaged partner on our ad platform. Since you are no longer advertising, you no longer have that value-add.” However the notice we originally received about losing verified status said nothing of the sort (nor were we informed about this until after we pulled our Promoted Products campaign). Nowhere in that message does it say anything about payment. The company has something that some of its users want, and it plans to leverage that. Really, Twitter is ruling with an iron fist here, deciding who is famous enough not to pay and deserves verification, and what companies it can squeeze at least $15,000 out of. Twitter, you’ve convinced us of your inherent importance in the social sphere, which is why it’s confusing when you’re so cavalier with denoting who and what are authorities within your service – not to mention the fact that you’re willing to tie titles to price tags. To summarize, it appears you need to spend a minimum of $15,000 ($5K over three months) in order to “buy” verified status from Twitter. Or you need to know someone who’s “in” with Twitter (read: spending ad dollars with them) who wants you or your business to get verified. Only Twitter won’t plainly say so and you aren’t guaranteed that notification from the site itself. After you’ve ponied up $15K, don’t expect a message alerting you that you’ve qualified for verified status. It might just show up or you might need to put in a request with your account manager. There are a lot of “mights” and “maybes” involved here – far too many for an ad platform that wants your money. It’s a very “case by case” system, and it’s messy, disorganized, and untrustworthy. And now that Twitter wants to turn itself into a viable ad platform, it’s just not going to fly. You need to tell people what they get for their money. And you should do so before they pay up, not after they stop. Anything less than that is disingenuous. Twitter’s verified account system should be trusted, transparent, and accessible. If it’s pay-based and celebrity-based, then so be it – but put that in writing. On your own site, preferably. [Note: Before publishing, we informed Twitter of the story and requested answers or comments to the questions you see above. As of press time, we received no reply.] [UPDATE: 5/16/12] We just received the following email from Twitter, explaining what happened to our Verified Account status: “Over the past month, a small number of existing Twitter advertisers were transitioned to our recently-launched self-serve platform. In the process, the Verified badge for these accounts was removed in error. This week, we are restoring Verified status for all of these accounts. There have also been cases in which we removed badges for accounts who had previously advertised with Twitter. We are restoring Verified status to those accounts –including yours– this week as well; your account has been rebadged as Verified.” Obviously this doesn’t quite line up with what our account manager originally told us, which to refresh your memory was: “Since you are no longer advertising, you no longer have that value-add [the verified badge].” But I’m willing to give Twitter the benefit of the doubt and chalk it up to an evolving system, too many hands in the pot, and too little communication down the chain of command within the company — which Twitter seemed to note: “As we have said since we first introduced the Verified account process in 2009, deciding who and when to verify is a complicated issue. Our team is continually exploring ways in which to improve the verification process, in a way that works for people, companies & organizations on Twitter. We appreciate your raising the issue.” If your Twitter account was also affected by the case of the missing verified badge, keep an eye out. It should be returning in the near future. |
Her tiny, pink plastic chair was back in the living room on Monday, looking better suited to a doll than a person. Then 2-year-old Mackensyie zoomed past, proving that her chair was not too big and not too small, but just right. "That's the chair that was on the news," said her dad, Aaron Wallace. Mackensyie, with her chair, was in the courtyard of her East Side apartment when a gunbattle on Wednesday wounded two bystanders who are her friends: 2-year-old Mia Marshall and Mia's 8-year-old brother, Kyle. "She was right in between them," Wallace said. "She froze. She didn't try to run." Read more: ‘Call the police! They shot my kids!’ father yelled as neighbors come to aid Call it luck or fate or God's good grace, but Mackensyie was unharmed in the shooting at 4:20 p.m. in the 400 block of Mayfair Boulevard. Mia Marshall is out of the hospital, but her brother remains there after a series of surgeries to repair the damage wrought by a bullet that struck him in his belly. Their brush with death on the streets of our city occurred less than a week ago and just one day after another of Columbus' children, 9-year-old Maniya Cannon, survived her own close call. On July 4, a bullet was fired into her house and grazed her cheek as she slept. On Sunday morning, a fourth child — this time a 15-year-old girl — was grazed by a bullet that entered her Hilltop home. Four children scarred by random violence, three of them during a week in which we celebrated our nation's birth. That's not counting Mackensyie, or who knows how many other psychologically wounded victims. Not even a week has passed, and this is not being talked about. Not even a week has passed, and it is quiet enough to hear a brass shell casing drop to the pavement. Because in a year rife with killing, these children were only wounded. Since they were shot, four people have been killed in acts of violence in Columbus. That brings Columbus' homicide count in 2017 to 70. There have been 23 more victims than there were at this point last year. If that pace continues, 2017 could rival 1991 as the worst on record. >> Join the conversation at Facebook.com/columbusdispatch and connect with us on Twitter @DispatchAlerts "It's on to the next story, the next shooting," Aaron Wallace, 36, said as he got ready for his shift at the Dr Pepper warehouse near John Glenn Columbus International Airport. "It's never stopping. It never stops." It's been the same wherever Wallace has lived. Detroit. Cleveland. Here in central Ohio. He doesn't place blame on anyone but the young men — and it is almost always young men — who have learned to settle even the pettiest disputes by lethal means. "Senseless, my man," he said. "That's the biggest word I can use. A lot of these kids, they're trying to prove themselves. People be fighting over nothing. The disagreements ain't that serious." He doesn't fault the cops for the glut of violence. "Police are doing their job, in my eyes," he said. He said he even understands the lack of a public outcry. It is human nature to protect your own, he said, and to focus only on the immediate threats to your own. If gun violence seems a distant possibility, more imminent concerns take precedence. "At the end of the day, it don't affect us until it hits home," he said. As it did for him last week. Mackensyie raced down the steps and through the living room, barreling toward the kitchen for a Rice Krispies Treat. On the corner near her apartment building, in view of Fairmoor Elementary School, another child picked up a small rock and launched it toward the street after winding up like a major-league pitcher. Five miles away in Nationwide Children's Hospital, Kyle Marshall hung on as doctors labored to mend what they can. The rest of us averted our eyes. We turned our backs. We looked the other way. tdecker@dispatch.com @Theodore_Decker |
Product Description About the Multiverse Spaceship: Unlike your typical spacecraft, the Multiverse Spaceship is built out of average parts that you might find at home garage. While the craft is rudimentary in design and constantly in disrepair, it contains several unique features including a battery powered by a tiny universe. Designed and built by the mad scientist, the craft is also equipped with artificial intelligence. Armed with a multi-dimensional portal gun and a bottle of booze, the mad scientist drags his cowardly grandson on many adventures through alternate universes in search of a famous discontinued fast-food dipping sauce. Whether turning himself into a pickle or creating a box that will solve most simple problems, you can always expect that the mad scientist will get exactly what he wants. Specifications: Number Produced: Infinite throughout the Multiverse Power Source: Tiny Universe Battery Crew: 2 Armament: Various Operating System: Artificial Intelligence Additional information about this Brickmania custom building kit: The Multiverse Spaceship kit comes with the following features: Opening cockpit bubble canopy Cockpit includes 2 seats with adjustable headrests Two custom-printed minifigures - Mad Scientist Pilot + Grandson Includes Trans-Dimensional portal gun, bottle, and bonus Pickle Brick! 1/35 scale to match other Brickmania models Designed by Jesse Mohler Includes 259 genuine new-condition LEGO® elements Intermediate Skill Level (4-6 years of experience with LEGO is recommended) All Brickmania model kits are made of new-condition LEGO bricks. This model comes disassembled and includes complete printed building instructions and comes packaged in a sealed box. This is a limited-edition kit and production may be discontinued at any time. Video Preview: |
Arkansas has become the first state in the Deep South to qualify a medical marijuana initiative for the ballot. Arkansas Secretary of State Mark Martin on Wednesday certified the Arkansas Medical Marijuana Act has enough signatures to be on the November 6 General Election ballot. The proposal needed a minimum of 62,507 signatures from registered voters to qualify. “Compassionate Care is an important issue for thousands of Arkansans and their families,” said Melissa Fults, treasurer for Arkansans for Compassionate Care. “This is something the people of Arkansas want to discuss. We’ve always been a leader in the South and now we’re the first one to put medical marijuana on the ballot and have a real discussion about it.” If voters approve the Arkansas Medical Marijuana Act, the state will join 17 others and Washington, D.C., in allowing doctors to write recommendations for marijuana to alleviate specified medical conditions. The Arkansas Act is largely based on the medical marijuana law in Maine that passed in 2009 and has become one of the nation’s most successful. |
The chaotic intersection of murder and fire played out on Tuesday in Flushing, Queens, as a call of an apartment fire evolved into a recovery of bodies and, then, a manhunt. Firefighters broke through the door to Apt. 6C in a Roosevelt Avenue building and, dousing flames and peering through thick smoke, found three bodies, eerily stacked. “They thought they were victims of homicide, or they thought, possibly trapped by the fire, they huddled together,” said a police officer at the scene on Tuesday, likewise not authorized to comment for attribution. Two of the bodies had stab wounds, and the third a slit throat, the police said. Rule 5.1 in a fire-training bulletin: “Proceed with caution at crime scenes, the perpetrator may still be on the premise.” The first responders immediately began to work as if a killer was loose. “Is there a perp in the building?” the officer asked. “Is this a hit? How many people live in the apartment? Who comes and goes? Is there video? There’s 40 irons in the fire at this point.” Identifying the bodies was complicated. “You don’t have a positive ID,” the officer said. “You’re not parading neighbors in there in that gruesome situation to get an ID.” Detectives focused on the body with the slash to the throat, identified as that of Jong Lee, 50; the other two dead people were his 54-year-old wife and their 15-year-old son. In Mr. Lee’s pocket was a suicide note that said the family was suffering from troubles and that “we all have to leave,” the police said. The case, seemingly open-and-shut, left the lingering question: Why the fire? “You’re trying to apply logic to illogical behavior,” the officer said. “I don’t think he was looking to cover up the crime scene, because he took his life. I don’t think he was looking to make it look like someone else did it, because he left a suicide note.” |
In our society, the study of language and literature is the domain of poets, novelists, and literary critics. Language is considered a decorative art, fit for entertainment and culture, but practically useless in comparison to the concrete sciences. Just look at the value of a college degree in English versus one in computer science or accounting. But is this an accurate assessment of value? Language is the primary conductor between your brain and the minds of your audience. Ineffective language weakens and distorts ideas. If you want to be understood, if you want your ideas to spread, using effective language must be your top priority.In the modern world of business and politics this is hardly ever the case. In many instances, imprecise language is used intentionally to avoid taking a position and offending various demographics. No wonder it’s hard to make sense of anything! This is hardly a recent problem, and as George Orwell wrote in his 1946 essay, Politics and the English Language, the condition is curable. By following Orwell’s 5 rules for effective writing, you’ll distinguish yourself from competitors and clearly communicate your ideas. 1. Never use a metaphor, simile, or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print. This sounds easy, but in practice is incredibly difficult. Phrases such as toe the line, ride roughshod over, stand shoulder to shoulder with, play into the hands of, an axe to grind, Achilles’ heel, swan song, and hotbed come to mind quickly and feel comforting and melodic. For this exact reason they must be avoided. Common phrases have become so comfortable that they create no emotional response. Take the time to invent fresh, powerful images. 2. Never use a long word where a short one will do. Long words don’t make you sound intelligent unless used skillfully. In the wrong situation they’ll have the opposite effect, making you sound pretentious and arrogant. They’re also less likely to be understood and more awkward to read. When Hemingway was criticized by Faulkner for his limited word choice he replied: Poor Faulkner. Does he really think big emotions come from big words? He thinks I don’t know the ten-dollar words. I know them all right. But there are older and simpler and better words, and those are the ones I use. 3. If it is possible to cut a word out, always cut it out. Great literature is simply language charged with meaning to the utmost possible degree (Ezra Pound). Accordingly, any words that don’t contribute meaning to a passage dilute its power. Less is always better. Always. 4. Never use the passive where you can use the active. This one is frequently broken, probably because many people don’t know the difference between active and passive verbs. I didn’t myself until a few months ago. Here is an example that makes it easy to understand: The man was bitten by the dog. (passive)The dog bit the man. (active).The active is better because it’s shorter and more forceful. 5. Never use a foreign phrase, a scientific word, or a jargon word if you can think of an everyday English equivalent. This is tricky because much of the writing published on the internet is highly technical. If possible, remain accessible to the average reader. If your audience is highly specialized this is a judgment call. You don’t want to drag on with unnecessary explanation, but try to help people understand what you’re writing about. You want your ideas to spread right? 6. Break any of these rules sooner than saying anything outright barbarous. This bonus rule is a catch all. Above all, be sure to use common sense.These rules are easy to memorize but difficult to apply. Although I’ve edited this piece a dozen times I’m sure it contains imperfections. But trust me, it’s much better now than it was initially. The key is effort. Good writing matters, probably more than you think. I hope you find these rules helpful, and through their application we’re able to understand each other a little bit better. If you enjoyed this post, be sure to read Orwell’s original essay. It contains many helpful examples and is, of course, a pleasure to read. |
Sorry about the bad lighting, the hotel bathroom isn't an ideal area for photos, but I had the review ready to go and realized I forgot side/angle photos. I ordered Small Quail a few months, and just haven't gotten around to reviewing it. I like that it utilizes neutral colors in an interesting way. Since discovering proper fitting bras I can't really bring myslef to wear basic "nudes" any more, for whatever reason I always used to just have a couple bras and stick with a "nude" so it could wear it with anything. Needless to say I no longer have just a couple of boring bras. One of my favorite pseudo "nude" bras is my Comexim Sonia.The Small Quail is a light beige color with a light brown lace overlay. It is absolutely stunning in real life (my photos aren't doing a great job depicting the actual shade of brown). For some reason the lace doesn't seem as smooth as that of Sonia or Irish Coffee, although both of those are 3HC's, and I think some of what I'm noticing is wear the seams meet and not so much the actual lace. Since the seams don't meet in a 3HC they seem less noticeable I guess. That being said the lace and the seams could be somewhat visible under a thin shirt. For me I don't think I could pull off wearing this bra as a "nude" under a white or light colored thin shirt as the brown is a bit dark for my skin tone. Regardless I do love how the bra looks and fits.Small Quail normally comes as a deep plunge, like Ginger, which is wider and shallow compared to the normal plunge or the 3HC. For this bra I decided to order it as a standard plunge with the straps moved in 2cm, cups reduced 2cm and gore reduced 2cm. This is the way I had been ordering most my Comexim's before getting the 3HC cut.Somehow both the altered standard plunge and the 3HC work nicely for me, most people seem to have one cut that works better for them than the other. I do think I like the strap placement a bit better on the plunge, but I'm not sure if my 3HC's actually received the 2cm alteration (requested, but it can be hard to tell if it has been done). This bra also has an overlapping gore (I didn't request it), which doesn't seem to hurt the fit for me, I think I get a bit more cleavage and my breasts sit closer together, but for me the overlapping gore isn't a necessity.The band on this one does run quite firm and I do need to wear it with an extender if I'm wearing it for any amount of time (photos are without an extender). This is a 70G (equivalent of a 32 band) and it stretches to 29in which is pretty close to my tight underbust measurement so not very comfortable to wear all day without an extender unless I don't plan on breathing. My other 70 Comexim bands stretch a bit closer to 30-30.5in. The band material for Small quail is quite firm and much less stretchy feeling than Irish Coffee, Sonia, or Dottie , I think it's similar to the Pionson Ivy material if I remember it correctly.I also got the matching panties with the bra and they are incredibly comfortable, the lace being on the sides gives a nice fit with the lace being a bit stretchy. I usually buy thongs and not briefs, but for decided to just try the briefs this time. I got the panties in a medium and they are a very good fit and medium is the same size I get in their thongs as well. The panties do seem to be somewhat lower rise (which I prefer) for Comexim, I can't recall if I requested a lower rise or not, I usually do but forget sometimes. |
Former Oviedo High standout Jenny Simpson won an Olympic medal Tuesday night. Simpson became the first American woman ever to claim an Olympic medal in the 1,500 meters, earning the bronze at the games in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. Simpson finished in 4 minutes, 10.53 seconds. Faith Chepngetich Kipyegon of Kenya won in 4:08.92. Genzebe Dibaba of Ethiopia took the silver in 4:10.27. Simpson held off American teammate Shannon Rowbury (4:11.05) to secure her first Olympic medal. This was Simpson's third Olympics. She set an American record and placed ninth overall in the 3,000-meter steeplechase in 2008 in Beijing. She was eliminated in the semifinals of the 1,500 four years ago in London. Simpson, who will turn 30 on Aug. 23, was the world champion in the 1,500 in 2011 and claimed a silver at worlds three years ago. She won the 1,500 at the U.S. Olympic Trials last month in Eugene, Ore. CAPTION Columnist Mike Bianchi on if Magic will make playoffs Columnist Mike Bianchi on if Magic will make playoffs CAPTION Columnist Mike Bianchi on if Magic will make playoffs Columnist Mike Bianchi on if Magic will make playoffs CAPTION Orlando Apollos will start practicing in Georgia because of Florida workers' compensation laws. Coach Steve Spurrier on the NHL owner's sudden bailout to AAF: Original investor backed out. Orlando Apollos will start practicing in Georgia because of Florida workers' compensation laws. Coach Steve Spurrier on the NHL owner's sudden bailout to AAF: Original investor backed out. CAPTION Nani, the winger, was born in Cape Verde and represents the Portugal national team. He was officially introduced as Orlando City’s new designated player on Monday Nani, the winger, was born in Cape Verde and represents the Portugal national team. He was officially introduced as Orlando City’s new designated player on Monday CAPTION The Orlando Magic welcomed Markelle Fultz on Thursday during a press conference officially introducing their newest player. The Orlando Magic welcomed Markelle Fultz on Thursday during a press conference officially introducing their newest player. CAPTION Orlando City’s season kicks off March 2 against NYCFC, but the Lions have two preseason friendlies that are open to the public with the upcoming Orlando City Invitational. The team’s first match, 7:30 p.m. on Saturday, is against NYCFC. Orlando City’s season kicks off March 2 against NYCFC, but the Lions have two preseason friendlies that are open to the public with the upcoming Orlando City Invitational. The team’s first match, 7:30 p.m. on Saturday, is against NYCFC. Simpson was a three-time NCAA steeplechase champion at Colorado. |
According to The Intercept’s Jeremy Scahill, “We’ve hit all time lows with media coverage in this country.” The journalist appeared on HuffPost Live Wednesday to discuss media coverage of the conflict between Israel and Hamas and issued some sharp criticism to U.S. press outlets that he says are producing nearly one-sided coverage. “When you look at what’s happening right now in Gaza, this is a massive massacre and one epic series of war crime after war crime, child after child being killed,” Scahill told host Alyona Minkovski. “And most news organizations are forced to acknowledge that the Palestinians and its children and whole families are being killed. They’re forced to because cameras are there; they’re forced to because there are reporters on the ground reporting on that.” But, he added, “if you step back and you look at the way that this is always framed over these weeks of Israel’s constant bombardment of Gaza, it’s as though Hamas and Israel are sort of two equal military powers fighting one another.” Considering Israel has its Iron Dome missile-defense system in place to protect its citizens, Scahill said this was a fundamentally incorrect assumption. Scahill described Israel as “a nuclear-powered nation that has a history of systematically killing Palestinians, indiscriminately targeting civilians and civilian institutions.” But if you listen to American media, he said you would think that it is just a “battle between two military powers.” He added, “Israel is gratuitous in its disproportionate use of force against the Palestinians.” The reporter singled out the “great” NBC News correspondent Ayman Mohyeldin as one of the few examples of someone who has shed light on the disproportionality. But when he did, he was quickly removed by the network from Gaza (he has since been reinstated there). “Benjamin Netanyahu and the Israeli propagandists are largely given carte blanche to say what they want on American television with very little push back,” Scahill said. Watch video below, via HuffPost Live: [Photo via screengrab] — — >> Follow Matt Wilstein (@TheMattWilstein) on Twitter Have a tip we should know? tips@mediaite.com |
Israel’s military says the Tel Aviv regime plans to build a new field hospital in Syria to treat what it generally named patients amid international concerns over the regime’s support for the Takfiri militants fighting in the Arab country. Lieutenant Colonel Tomer Koler told reporters in a phone conference on Wednesday that the hospital would be located on the Syrian side of the fence but on the Israeli side of the demarcation line in the Golan Heights, which is Syrian territory occupied by Israel. The fence built by Israel does not always comply with the line precisely. Koler expressed hope that the hospital would be operational in the next month. He noted that Israel had delivered what he called “humanitarian aid” into Syria, including hundreds of tons of food and clothing, as well as fuel and equipment such as generators. Israel reportedly had a field hospital in the area but shut it last year. The file photo shows Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu shaking hands with a wounded Takfiri militant at an Israeli field hospital in Syria’s occupied Golan Heights. Syria has been gripped by foreign-backed militancy since March 2011. The Syrian government says Tel Aviv and its Western and regional allies are aiding Takfiri militant groups, wreaking havoc in the country. There have been reports that Israel offers medical treatment to terrorists, wounded while operating in Syria, in hospitals set up on the Golan Heights. Back on April 9, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said Tel Aviv would continue treating wounded militants from Syria as part of what he claimed to be a “humanitarian effort.” Israel regularly hits positions held by the Syrian army in the Golan Heights, describing the attacks as retaliatory. Damascus says the raids aim to help Takfiri militants fighting against government forces. On several occasions, the Syrian army has confiscated Israeli-made arms and military equipment from terrorists fighting government forces. Last month, United Nations Secretary General Antonio Guterres expressed concerns about a spike in contacts between Israeli armed forces and Syria militants in recent months, saying it could lead to escalation and cause harm to UN observers deployed to the Golan Heights. Moreover, the Wall Street Journal recently reported that Israel has been providing Takfiri terrorists in Syria’s Golan Heights with a steady flow of funds and medical supplies. In September last year, the Israeli daily Ha’aretz quoted Israeli parliament member Akram Hasoon as saying that Israel was directly aiding the Takfiri terrorist group Jabhat Fateh al-Sham, formerly known as al-Nusra Front, another terrorist group operating in Syria. He revealed that an earlier attack by the Nusra group on the Druze Village of Khadr had the support of the Israeli minister for military affairs, Avigdor Lieberman. |
Update below An off-duty cop pulled a gun on bike messengers in Greenwich Village yesterday afternoon. According to the messengers, the incident on West 10th Street near Greenwich Avenue began when the officer cut one of them off with his car. "My friend kind of screamed at him as he’s riding off," Aaron Lawrence, who shot video of the confrontation and uploaded it to Facebook, told the Daily News. "He stops his car, and he’s getting out of the car. As soon as he gets out of the car, I see a gun in his hand." Without identifying himself, the gun-wielding motorist commanded, "Get on the floor, get on the floor!" Lawrence said. Video of the encounter shows a man in shorts and a T-shirt pointing a silver revolver as the four bike messengers object. "Put that away. Put that away. You on camera! I have you on camera, bro!" Lawrence yells. "You almost fucking hit me!" "I didn't hit you," the driver says. Lowering his gun he waves the cyclists off, and momentarily turns away. "You pulled into a fucking bike lane!" Lawrence yells. With the gun pointing in his friends' direction again, he yells, "I have no weapon! I have no weapon!" The cyclists demand to see the man's badge—it's unclear from the video if he states he is a police officer at this point, and he retreats into the restaurant Rosemary's. A man, apparently Dejaune Jones, grows more heated, yelling, "Show me your fucking badge!" and follows the officer, taking off his backpack. Just before the video ends, the man who uploaded the video to Facebook, Aaron Lawrence, seems to try to convince Jones to let it go, saying, "Yo, De, we off this." The standoff prompted a nearby elementary school to go on lockdown, according to ABC 7. On-duty cops eventually arrived, and arrested Jones, letting the off-duty sergeant drive away. Jones is facing charges of menacing, harassment, criminal mischief, and weapons possession. If you can believe it, the police version of what happened is drastically different. Officers claim that Jones punched the sergeant's mirror, kicked his bumper, and came at him with an icepick. The video does appear to show Jones holding something in his right hand. ABC 7 reports that police did not recover a weapon. Jones's friends denied that he committed any crimes, and said the only things they pulled out were their phones. The NYPD did not respond to a request for more information. Update 4:10 p.m.: Jones emailed us this account of what happened: What happened was, I was riding my bike northwest bound towards mighty Quinns on 7th ave and 12th or 13th st with 3 of my friends and co workers, as we are riding up Greenwich ave, the Sergeant proceeds to attempt to go around a car at a stop light by cutting me off in my lane (bike lane). There was a black taxi parked on the corner not in the bike lane, my handle bars are 720mm long, that's big to be riding in the city, but I am very experienced at riding I know how to use my bike. So, the Sergeant created a tight space for me to go through so I closed his mirror inward quick by reaching my hand out and slamming it closed, I also screamed to let him know I was there. A lot of cyclist have died the past 2 damn weeks, I am not trying to f***ing be one of them, not right now. I was in fear for my life when i saw his silver Honda darted out in front of me like that. After I closed his mirror I looked back to see where my friends were at, because they saw how small the gap was for me to go through, so when they saw that I was not going to fit, they went to the middle of the street. I then see the Sergeant doing a hand movement, so I stopped my bike and walked back to his car to see what the problem was, cause on my part, my life was In danger, so the adrenaline was really pumping before the gun came into play. He then got out of his car, walked towards me with his hand in his pocket, I went to pull out my cell phone when I walked back to his car, as I was doing that, one of my tools fell out for my bike, and I went to pick it up and then he pulls out a revolver and points it directly in my face telling me to "get down and drop what was in my hands" according to the police, I had a "8in ice pick" and I "lunged at the officer with it". I didn't find out what they said I had till I got out of the precinct. That had me really at shock. He never identified himself till after the on duty police came. They ran up to me, and tried to cuff me first, when I told them " go after him, he's the one with a fucking gun.* then the cops told me that he was one of them. My heart really fucking dropped when I saw him actually behind the desk when I walked in the [precinct]. There doesn't seem to be a bike lane on Greenwich Avenue, though there is one on West 10th Street at this intersection. I reached out to Jones for clarification on this point and will update if I get clarity on this point. Jones said the tool he dropped was an Allen key. He acknowledged kicking the sergeant's bumper, saying he did it "out of adrenaline and frustration of him pointing a revolver point blank in my face and then just walking away into the restaurant with a loaded gun in his pocket." |
One of the most under-appreciated subjects in World War II history is the issue of post traumatic stress disorder, a condition that was not widely known to the soldiers at the time. Many symptoms were disregarded as personality quirks and eccentricities. In the harsh combat conditions characteristic of Stalingrad, many soldiers suffered from extreme cases of PTSD. Symptoms included talking to, and developing personal relationships with inanimate objects, as in the case of the sniper depicted right, who believes his shovel can provided him with crucial intelligence regarding the enemy's positions. Likewise, the sniper in the background is convinced that the helmet on the wall is able to act as a spotter, helping him locate enemy snipers. Similar cases were common on the other side of the conflict, although the German troops preferred conversing with objects related to efficiency, punctuality and authority (clocks, alarm clocks, megaphones, etc.). |
One of my absolute favorite releases so far this year was The Secret of Chateau de Moreau. It had just about everything one could want in a casual adventure game: a ton of brain busting puzzles, expressive art, memorable characters to interact with, and a sprawling murder mystery to tie it all together. The one thing it lacked was an expert translation. Since our review, I couldn’t help but dream about how awesome it would be to jump into a game with all those elements and perfectly scripted dialogue! If you’re like me, get ready, because Armor Games and The Super Flash Bros. plan on treating us to something special in Detective Grimoire: Secret of the Swamp! Not to be confused with the original Flash game, the iOS version of Detective Grimoire serves up a brand new adventure with much slicker production values and a fully voice-acted plot to boot. Having emerged triumphant from his investigation at the Coils & Co. Fairground, the scruffy and hat-challenged Detective Grimoire is apparently called in to solve another grisly tourist attraction murder — this time in the middle of a swamp. Naturally the elusive creature supposed to reside there is the main suspect, but this being a whodunnit, things are bound to get more complicated as the investigation kicks into full gear. Judging from the first game and a seven minute preview reel of the upcoming title, Detective Grimoire will have the player moving from one site to the next in first person perspective, interviewing witnesses and getting their commentary on pertinent clues picked up during exploration. It appears as if gesture controls will be put well to use in puzzles and minigames that stand between Detective Grimoire and critical evidence. It’s a well worn formula by now, but what’s sure to set Detective Grimoire apart from the crowd are its stylish story cutscenes, where the cast truly springs to life. The game’s soundtrack, composed by Raphael B. Meyer, was nominated for a Jerry Goldsmith Award at the VII International Film Music Festival earlier this summer, and it’s clear Detective Grimoire has superb voice acting to match. With a presentation as exquisite as this, you can bet Detective Grimoire will have iFanzine’s magnifying glass held closely up to it until release day. Our sleuthing so far has uncovered a delicious trail of developer communications packed with concept art and early footage. Check out the game’s official site, the Super Flash Bros. developer blog, and their thread on TIGSource for lots more juicy details. Also, don’t forget to keep an eye on the devs’ Twitter account and Facebook page for the latest news! |
AP Refugees face police blocking the entrance to Slovenia at the border crossing with Croatia Tensions reached breaking point overnight on the Slovenian border with Croatia as thousands of migrants began to gather after rail services travelling north were suspended. Slovenian riot police used tear gas to disperse several hundred migrants - some with children - that were pushing against a police cordon, according to reports. Hundreds of migrants camped overnight in Obrezje, a town just across the border from Croatia. Many put up tents while others tried their best to keep warm as temperatures dipped overnight. Exhausted refugees became increasingly frustrated as authorities only allowed limited numbers of families with women and children continue their journey. “I just want to cross the border,” said a young Syrian student at Harmica wearing a black Iron Maiden T-shirt. The clash happened shortly after Slovenian prime minister Miro Cerar said the tiny country might consider creating safe "corridors" for refugees to pass through the Alpine country. Mr Cerar said in a statement: "If the pressure of refuses becomes too strong, Slovenia will certainly discuss…possible so-called corridors with all the countries that might be concerned." The Slovenian authorities on Friday registered over 1,000 refugees who had entered the country, while more than 700 were still at the Obrezje border crossing - 13 miles east of the Croatian capital Zagreb - waiting to be allowed in. AP Refugees stand behind a fence blocking the crossing from Croatia to Slovenia You are not a parking lot for refugees Johannes Hahn Slovenian police spokeswoman Aleneka Drenek said: "New refugees continuously arrive so it is very hard to have exact figures." She added: "Pepper spray was used by a police officer against a single protester, who was part of a larger group of protesters trying to break through a police cordon. "The group had become increasingly violent and had resorted to throwing sticks and plastic bottles at the police. Individual protesters aggressively pushed officers and rounded upon one police officer, who then used pepper spray against a violent protester. "The use of means of coercion is defined in a regulation, which specifies when a police officer is allowed to use a particular means of coercion. "Pepper spray is one of the milder means of coercion that police may use to maintain public order and ensure people’s safety." According to police officers, no one was injured as a result of the use. Slovenia's ambassador to Germany told a newspaper that his country - with a population of just over 2million - would welcome "up to 10,000" refugees. Slovenia, which is a member of the border-free Schengen zone, halted trains coming in from Croatia after finding 150 migrants on a Zurich-bound train. After attempts to send the train back to Croatia, the passengers were relocated to Ljubljana to await a decision on their fate. Neighbouring Croatia said it has reached saturation point after more than 17,000 people arrived on its soil in the last two days, and began channelling the flow towards hardline Hungary, which has vowed to "defend its borders" from the influx. Hungary sealed its southern border with Serbia earlier this week, prompting thousands of refugees to continue on foot to neighbouring Slovenia while others were taken to reception centres by bus. AP A child sits with other refugees behind a fence between Croatia and Slovenia at the border station The move sparked a fierce diplomatic row between the neighbours as Budapest accused Zagreb of encouraging refugees to break its tough new laws, which include three-year jail sentences for breaching its border fence. Thousands of refugees and migrants, many lacking food and water, remain trapped in southwest Europe after countries began putting up barriers blocking their passage to western Europe. With no lull in the flow of people desperate to find a safe haven in Europe from war and misery, new figures showed the European Union (EU) had received almost a quarter of a million asylum requests in the three months to June. So far 474,000 people have braved the perilous journey across the Mediterranean to reach Europe, according to the International Organisation for Migration. The numbers were revealed as images of the body of another child washed up on a Turkish beach emerged. AP Riot police used tear gas to disperse hundreds of migrants pushing against a corden |
Pensions protest well supported, claim unions, as workers join picket lines outside schools and public buildings, while the government insists more people are turning up for work than expected The leader of one of the four unions involved in a national strike has said that the government will be "proved wrong" in its predictions that few will walkout in protest at an overhaul of public sector pensions. Mark Serwotka, general secretary of the Public and Commercial Services union said "hundreds and hundreds of thousands" were expected to take part in Thursday's strikes because the government was "failing to compromise" over pension reforms that he claimed were unfair and politically motivated. Picket lines were mounted outside schools, government buildings, jobcentres and courts today by striking public sector workers in the biggest wave of industrial unrest since the coalition was formed. Union leaders said early indications were that the 24-hour walkout by the National Union of Teachers (NUT), Association of Teachers and Lecturers (ATL), University and College Union and the PCS, which between them cover 750,000 public sector workers, was being strongly supported. A third of schools are expected to close and two-thirds of universities have cancelled lectures. Benefits will go unpaid, court cases will be postponed, police leave has been cancelled in London and airports are bracing themselves for backlogs at immigration. But the decision to go out on strike while talks with the government are ongoing were criticised both by deputy prime minister Nick Clegg and Labour's Tessa Jowell as members up and down the country joined picket lines. Boris Johnson, the Conservative mayor for London, reiterated his call for strike laws to be tightened to take action to protect the public, as well as those workers who do not vote for strikes. Francis Maude, cabinet office minister, insisted that early indications from airports and ports showed that fewer members were heeding the "inflamed call" for mass walkouts. "More are turning up for work and we are maintaining a much better service than we expected to be able to," Maude told the BBC Radio 4 Today programme. Maude and Serwotka became embroiled in a war of words over the airwaves this morning, as the government claims that the public sector pension schemes were "unaffordable" came under scrutiny. The Conservative minister insisted that Lord Hutton, the former pensions secretary who drew up recommendations for reforms, had said "very clearly" that the status quo was "not tenable". "You cannot continue to have more and more people in retirement being supported by fewer and fewer people in work," said Maude. Long-term reform is needed." Pressed on the fact that Hutton's report made no such claim, Maude insisted that the fact was that the costs of pensions would become unaffordable unless changes were introduced. Yet, Serwotka said that the Hutton report included a graph which clearly shows that the cost of the pension scheme is falling in terms of GDP. Serwotka accused the minister of "floundering" when scrutinised about the government's plans. "The National Audit Office, the public accounts committee, the Institute for Fiscal Studies, everybody accepts that's not the case. The cost is going to fall over the next 40 years. So it's not about affordability, so then they try to move the goalposts and say it's about being untenable," he said. Serwotka said the government's "real agenda" was trying to create a "race to the bottom" on pensions. "This is what it is really all about," he said. "You are trying to cut public sector pensions and the reason you are floundering this morning is that you are trying to mislead people." The cabinet was full of people like Maude, in a "very privileged position", trying to cut the pensions of public sector workers, said Serwotka. "That is why hundreds of thousands of people are on strike, because it is unfair and unjust." Maude condemned leaders taking members out on strike while colleagues were awaiting the outcome of the talks. Serwotka was "writing himself out of the script, when there is so much to talk about," he said. But Serwotka fired back that the government had made clear that its mind was already made up: "Whenever I've asked him, will the government compromise on any of the central issues in the dispute – work up to eight years longer, pay 3% more, get a reduced pension and move the pensions indexation from RPI to CPI, which devalues pensions by 15% – he says on none of those will he move a jot. While we are talking, we are not negotiating." Nick Clegg said he was disappointed that unions had gone ahead with strikes while negotiations were still going on. "I think it's a real shame that there are strike today because there are talks which are actually ongoing between the government and the trade unions, I don't think the strikes help members of the trade union, I don't think it helps the public, I don't think they help the country at large. I think what everybody wants is for us to stick with it, carry on talking and sort this out." Tessa Jowell, shadow cabinet office minister, also criticised the strikes. "We're absolutely with the people of this country who should not have their services disrupted," she told BBC Breakfast. "I'm critical of the way, as Labour is critical, of the way in which the government has handled this dispute, but these strikes today should not be taking place." But ATL general secretary Mary Bousted said unions felt they had no choice because of the government's failure to conduct meaningful talks. "We don't want to be on strike, and we wouldn't be on strike if the government had been prepared to do what they say they're going to do now, and that's negotiate," she told the BBC. The valuation of the teachers' pension scheme (TPS) is two years overdue. "How can I negotiate when I don't know the health or otherwise of my scheme?" she said. "And that's the cavalier and inept way that they have approached these negotiations. My union hasn't been on national strike throughout its history in 127 years. Do you think I would be here now if there was any other way?". Kevin Courtney, deputy general secretary of the NUT, said the early indications were that "large numbers" of schools were affected by the action, around 80%. "We realise that's very disruptive for parents," he said, "and we do regret that. We had hoped to reach a settlement before the industrial action, but the government isn't serious about talks." Among the buildings being picketed was parliament, with strikers saying they hoped some leftwing MPs would refuse to cross the lines. PCS members were stationed outside the Royal Courts of Justice – where the high court and court of appeal judges sit – in central London. Union officials said court staff had joined the strike but they were unsure what affect the action would have on the running of the courts. Unions were also targeting the headquarters of the education and business departments. Police leave has been cancelled in London, where union leaders and thousands of activists will take part in a march, followed by a lunchtime rally in Westminster. The TUC said today that millions of public sector workers were having to pay for the deficit that they did nothing to cause. Brendan Barber, TUC general secretary, who is visiting picket lines in the south-west, will tell a rally in central London later in the day that it is "hardly surprising" that public sector workers' pay has been frozen while it was "bonuses as usual" in the financial sector. "This is gold standard for unfairness." |
Panthers quarterback Cam Newton spoke to the Atlanta media on Wednesday during a conference call. Here’s what he had to say: Q: What is the big point of emphasis as you all prepare for the Falcons? A: “Win. Find a way to win.” Q: What do are some of things y’all need to do better to win? A: “Win, by any means necessary. Just find ways to win.” Q: Running the football? Passing the football? Blocking and tackling? A: “All of that stuff. Win.” Q: Do you feel like players are coming after you differently? More aggressively? A: “I play a physical sport and that requires a lot of hitting. I’m just trying to maximize everything that my coaches are asking me to do.” Q: What differences in the Falcons defense have you seen compared to last year? A: “No really differences outside of the personnel.” Q: What do you see from that personnel? A: “Just different players in different positions. That’s it.” Q: Offensively, what happened with the eight sacks? Were you holding the ball too long? A: “I don’t know. We just have to fix that and make sure that everything is firing on all cylinders come Sunday.” Q: How did Kelvin Benjamin take Kelvin Benjamin away from the offense? A: “Do you really think I’m going to tell you that?” Q: How do you all plan to get Kelvin Benjamin going against the Falcons? A: “Throw it to him.” Q: What’s been the impact of missing running back Jonathan Stewart? A: “In the collision sport everybody is bound to get hurt. It just depends on the severity of the injury. For us to go on a long run we know that everybody is going to have to be firing on all cylinders with personnel from running backs, quarterbacks, myself as well as the offensive line. We know that if an injury does take place everybody has to be aware and know that they have to pick up the slack and be ready to go.” Q: Do you have another hat to wear when you come to the Georgia Dome? A: “You just have to (wait and) see.” Q: A few years into your career now, how are you different in handling things? A: ‘I’m not different.” Q: No interest in talking on Sunday night? A: “Yeah, I’m going to want to talk because we are going to win. I mean that’s the plan. We play this game to win football games. I can’t sit up there and tell you that I’m going to lose and be ready to talk. I don’t like to talk after losing.” Q: After a couple of years, is it easier on a Sunday night or Monday morning to get back to work than it was your first year in the league? A: ‘I can’t say that. There’s nothing that has changed about me. People say, for what it’s worth, losing is still not good. I don’t care how you really cut it. If you want to be labeled a good loser, good luck with that. Nothing has changed about me. …You all have a good day.” |
100 Interesting facts about Russia Geography Russia is a transcontinental country, extending halfway around the northern hemisphere and covering much of eastern and north-eastern Europe and the whole of northern Asia Population In terms of population, Russia is the ninth largest country in the world, even though it's the world's biggest country Culture There are 221 museums, 2,000 libraries, more than 80 theaters, 100 concert organizations, 45 galleries, 62 cinemas and 80 club establishments of culture in St Petersburg Habits Russians never shake hands over a door way, they believe it leads to arguments Language Russian language does not include a word for 'the' or 'a' which is good because these often lead to confusion in other languages Language Russian language uses the Cyrillic alphabet instead of the Latin and is one of the 5 most spoken languages in the world Geography The Urals are the oldest mountains in the world and lake Baikal is the world's deepest lake and the largest reservoir of fresh water on earth Geography Russia covers 1/7th of the total land of our planet and neighbors more countries than any other country on earth. Geography Ladoga lake is the largest one in Europe. Its area makes 18 400 sq km, average depth is 51 m, the largest one is up to 230 m. Moscow population Moscow is the biggest city in Europe. Population is 10.5 million. Statistic says that Moscow population is expecting to be 16 millions by 2020. Moscow Population Moscow actually has more billionaires living in the area than any other city in the world. With a total of 74 billionaires, Moscow beats New York City's statistic by three. Culture The Russian State Library is the biggest in Europe and second in the World after Library of Congress in the USA. The Russian State Library is located in Moscow and was founded in 1862. 123456789 |
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