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SOUTH HOLLAND, Il. (WGNTV) -- A suburban police department says it is investigating a video posted online in which an officer confronts a driver after pulling him over. Police say the video, which has been retweeted 22,000 times, doesn't tell the whole story. Jordan James hit record Thursday as he was dropping off his cousin and the police pulled them over. "As she was exiting the vehicle, two officers walked to the vehicle and they said, 'Open the door,' and I said 'No," James told WGN News. "They just pulled up and turned their lights on." "When he opened the door I told him don't touch anything in the car," James said. "He still refused and ... he started in my backseat. Touching and moving stuff around when I told him not to do that because I wasn't under arrest. They didn't even tell me why I got pulled over. They just said it was because I'm me." Lt. David Pedric of South Holland Police Dept. told WGN News, "What he did was basically bait the officer into making some answers on there and then edited the clip to make a 37 minute traffic stop into a short clip that's gone viral." Police say even though the officer may have lost his cool there are two sides to every story. "Once the truth comes out I'm sure everyone will see that the officer was conducting himself properly," Lt. Pedric said. For Jordan, who admits has a history with this department, he says the one short clip online is just the start of the problems he and others have dealt with. |
Please enable Javascript to watch this video CHICAGO -- Classes will be held at Lane Tech High School Friday after the school was evacuated due to a bomb threat Thursday night. The school received the bomb threat earlier Thursday. Police were on scene at the school, located at at 2501 W. Addison St., for a time Thursday night. A Chicago Public Schools spokesman issued the following statement about the incident: "CPS is thankful for the quick response from law enforcement following a bomb threat earlier this evening at Lane Tech College Prep. Law enforcement officials conducted a thorough sweep of the building and determined it is safe to occupy. The safety of our schools is our top priority, and we will continue to work with law enforcement on the ongoing investigation." 41.945431 -87.690618 |
Includes Video + Audio 1080p available English Subtitles I developed and prepared this material over the last year or so, mostly in comedy clubs. This special kind of goes back to when I used to just make noises and be funny for no particular reason. It felt right to shoot this special in a club to give it that live immediate intimate feeling. The show is about an hour long. The opening act, who is seen at the beginning (good place for an opening act) is Jay London. One of my favorite club comics going way back to the late 80s when I first started in working in New York. I hope you like it. Please PLEASE don’t torrent this special. If you want to share it, direct people here. It’s so easy to drop the 5 dollars. We don’t make you join anything. We let you use the file any way you want. It costs a shitload of money to make these specials and I do it myself. I love offering it to you directly for so cheap and so easily. I would like that to continue to be a good idea. Okay. Enjoy the show. Also, this is the first show I'm offering in 1080p HD. The video is H.264 and the audio is MP3 or FLAC. Both are available for stream or download. The cost is $5.00. |
Hello my fellow deviants! I decided that it's about due time to update this here journal. Y'know, you remind you that I'm not dead yet.Well, if you're reading and you've come this far, before you click off due to boredom, please read a little further and check out some of these here links.This one has been around for awhile, but I thought I'd remind you guys of two things. One, I have a second deviant art account soley for cosplay: which has recently been updated with a BUNCH of new Harley Quinn cosplay photos! Check them out if your mom wasn't a hamster and your dad didn't smell of elderberries.On another note, but the main purpose of this particular paragraph: My 'like' page on facebook: Trini as Harley Quinn ! www.facebook.com/triniquinnste… I only post my HQ cosplay pictures on that page. I'm really amazed at the sheer amount of likes I have on that page. Over 400+!Holy Shmowzow! I've updated it recently with new HQ pictures and a 'gift' section, where I post any drawings or gifts that people have made for me that somehow relates to me dressed as Harley.This next one is fairly new! I decided that sometimes my dA can be a bit confusing for those who aren't active members here and just want to look at my artwork with no confusion or hassle. Since facebook is more popular, I made a 'like' page for my artwork! "Trini Quinn's Artwork". www.facebook.com/triniquinnsar… Feel free to check that out!This final link is kinda important to me. Recently, I've admitted to being an 'open Hiddles' fangirl and I'd really be ultra thrilled like whoa if Tom Hiddleston ever came to D*C as a celebrity guest. I created a facebook group that is aiming to get his attention. My goal is 200+ members. Once we reach this goal, anyone who has a twitter in that group will then tweet it to him to show him: hey, look, people want you at Dragon*Con. I understand that that is not the way to actually *get* someone to come as a celeb guest, but it may grab his attention and make him think: 'hmm, maybe I should consider attending'. Like, ya never know! SO! If you're down and you'd like to join the army, add yourself! It's an open group and anyone who requests to be added WILL BE. It's also a place for fans to show off your Loki/Hiddles fan art, too. Here's the link!----------xSo that wraps up this journal! I hope everyone had a lovely Halloween...now brace yourselves for Thanksgiving and Christmas!CSS made by |
"This installation is the perfect opportunity to explore the many different ways in which Oaklanders take pride in this city and legendary team.” —Associate Curator, Contemporary History and Trends Suzanne Fischer Relive all the energy and excitement. Celebrate the Golden State Warriors’ 2015 NBA Championship and 2015-16 record-breaking season with 73 wins in Warriors Pride, Oakland Pride, a new installation in the Gallery of California History. Get up close with authentic 2015 championship memorabilia and items worn by individual players. View a 2015 Championship Ring, a jersey signed by the entire 2015 Championship team, a signed basketball by this year’s incredible 73-9 team, and sneakers worn by players Klay Thompson, Harrison Barnes, and Festus Ezeli. Send a message to your favorite Warrior and engage in conversation with the team on social media. Snap a selfie with large-scale images of Warriors players and celebratory snapshots from the 2015 championship parade. Embrace a momentous time for Dubs fans and Oakland and show Strength in Numbers as you share your own memories and hopes for the history-making hometown team. |
Péché Day 2017! Time to Celebrate This Amazing Beer with a Brand New 4-Pack An Article by Noah Forrest If you are unfamiliar with Péché Mortel, I suggest you change that – you’ve been missing out. Let’s bring you up to speed. Péché Mortel is a coffee infused Imperial Stout brewed by Dieu du Ciel! It’s been around for close to two decades, is generally rated as the best beer in Canada, and is basically beer-crack. Oh, and it gets it very own day! Journée Péché – March 11th 2017 – 2pm – Montreal & St. Jerome locations – Event details right here. I would argue that Péché is the most iconic and important craft beer in Québec, maybe even Canada; at the very least among beer-geek fanboys. It’s one of the only Québec craft beers that is celebrated worldwide. Whether it’s the standard, readily available edition, or the infamously rare “double barrel” Péché, I get excited whenever I see that iconic and mesmerizing label. This year, to celebrate Journée Péché, there will be eleven (wait, Eleven?!) different versions of Péché Mortel available on tap at both DDC’s Montreal and St. Jerome locations. On top of that, 39 bars from Québec and all around the world will be celebrating Péché day as well, with many carrying several versions of the iconic beer. On top of all this amazingness, they are doing something new this year and releasing a special mix pack with four different versions of Péché Mortel! Three of these have never been bottled before. Given that I’m a bit of a parental hermit at the moment and won’t be able to attend the event, this fares very well for me. I was extremely fortunate to get my hands on a case ahead of time so that I could tell you all about it! It contains the following: Péché Véniel Péché Mortel Édition Spéciale Péché Mortel Bourbon (2016) Peach Mortel This box set will be available for purchase at many local Montreal beer stores starting on Péché Day (Saturday, March 11th). All retailers have strict orders not to sell it beforehand. If I were you though, I’d get there quickly as availability is low and it will sell out fast! With that said, let’s get onto the tasting! *Please not that I will not be reviewing Péché Mortel Bourbon 2016 as I’ve already done so in an earlier article this year. Click here to read it if you are interested. Péché Mortel – Véniel Ever thought, “I really want a Péché, but it’s 8am on a Tuesday and 9.5% ABV is a bit too much for me right now?” No, me neither, it’s never too early for Péché Mortel. However, if this highly unlikely situation ever occurred, Péché Mortel Véniel now exists in bottles! A baby sister of sorts, Véniel is 6.5%, and brewed with Colombian coffee. Joking aside, I’m pretty damn excited to have this “session” Péché available in bottles for the first time. It pours out a bit thinner than your standard Péché, but it’s still jet black, carrying a frothy tanned head. The nose is, well, coffee forward, but with some smokey and ashy undertones. Light caramel malts come though, alongside nutty components and subtle cocoa. Because of the lighter body, sweetness, and alcohol content, the bitter coffee notes comes through that much more, lending a long dry finish that echoes earthy coffee beans and bitter espresso. It’s less fruity than regular Péché, and instead has an amped-up caramel and toffee presence. It’s lighter and coarser as well, but still carries a round flavour profile that brings everything together. Overall Véniel is quite drinkable, light and holds a sharp and resinous bitter finish from the coffee. It’s very much its own thing while still very much being Péché Mortel. I’d love this to be available year round. Although, I’m going to say this about every one of these. Péché Mortel – Édition Spéciale Édition Spéciale is Péché Mortel made with a different type of coffee. This year, they chose a lighter roasted bean from Kenya called M’Beguka. Being that I’m obsessed with light roasted coffees right now, I’m particularly excited to see the effect it will have on Péché. The nose wafts even more coffee than usual, carrying a rich fruity backdrop. Chocolate comes through as well, lending a huge mocha presence. I’m getting Black cherries, chocolate candies, tiramisu, and lots of berries. The nose is basically amplified Péché, in the best possible way. On the palate, the coffee lends a huge fruity character when compared to the original. Lots of cherry and strawberry comes though, even rhubarb. The acidity seems more pronounced, sharpening things, but also works perfectly with the rich dark roasted malts. It feels a bit lighter on the mouthfeel than usual, with some sharp edges, but everything is still in balance, hitting all the usual amazing notes, but with augmented coffee presence that carries a fruity punch. Peach Mortel Peach Mortel, really? Yes, really! We can thank all the silly anglos for this bizarre peach infused concoction. You see, English speaking patrons would often get péché mixed up with pêche, and order a “Peach Mortel.” So, the good folks at DDC up and decided to brew it! The nose wafts big jammy peach notes, alongside loads of coffee and chocolate aromatics. It’s reminiscent of fruit infused dark chocolate, likes those chocolate oranges you buy around Christmas. The peach fruitiness is bright and apparent, but this still smells like Péché Mortel. Peach Mortel is fruity up front, as you might presume, lending bright stone fruit flavours to the beer. The coffee still plays a huge role though, and is the dominating component to the overall flavour profile. Although the sweet peach essence is there, the beer still drinks quite dry, with a lingering hop and coffee bitterness in the finish. This is the most acidic Péché variant that I’ve tried; it lightens the beer and the mouthfeel, brightening the flavours while still retaining its rich “Péché” base. When I thought about the combination of peaches and coffee, I can’t say it made too much sense to me. However, this really works well. The malt roastiness didn’t feel as dark in this one, which allowed the peach and coffee to really shine bright, creating a whole new drinking experience, while at its base still very much remaining Péché Mortel. I want more! Well, there you have it, three brand new Péché Mortel bottles for you to fall in love with, as if it was your first time all over again. Sometimes variants can be a bit gimmicky – and Peach Mortel certainly felt like it could fall into that trap – however, each and every one of these beers was interesting, delicious, and simply worked well. Being a big coffee fan, I really appreciated examining the different nuances you get with each type of bean used. Thank you Dieu du Ciel! for putting this together, especially for those who can’t make the event! An Article by Noah Forrest Photography by Noah Forrest Advertisements |
Notice 2595-D1: As of ██/██/199█, the actual characteristics of SCP-2595-D are to be redacted from the main SCP-2595 database file. Direct access to the original description of SCP-2595-D should be restricted to Level-4/2595 or higher personnel connected to ongoing research. Item #: SCP-2595-D Object Class: Keter Still frames from Exploration 2595-1 upon the enacting of Special Containment Protocol Theta-4 Special Containment Procedures: I. ORIGINAL CONTAINMENT PROCEDURES Isolated Containment Unit 2595-A is to be built around the original facility containing the instances of SCP-2595-D. Any inhabited housing facilities within a 30 meter radius of SCP-2595-D are to be gradually evacuated with the usage of Foundation-operated shell company "Progress Engineering" . As a disinformation countermeasure, a covert construction site is to be built in previously occupied areas around the containment unit. Given the effects of SCP-2595-D when in close proximity with a human being or livestock, the security measures to prevent intrusion of the original site are to be made effective with the usage of preventive assessments and remote monitoring. Further activity of SCP-2595 that breaks the original perimeter defined by the containment unit is grounds for immediate revision of the aforementioned containment procedures in order to preserve the population currently living on the Russian shore of the █████ River. II. [29/08/████]: ABRANOVÍC-GAINSBOROUGH REVISION In an attempt to cease the effects of SCP-2595-D upon human life around its original containment area, Special Containment Protocol Theta-4 is to be enacted immediately upon the cityscape of ██████, Russia. The resulting submerged land plot is to be isolated and guarded by Foundation-operated armed vessels and submarines. The original enclosure of SCP-2595 is to be fixated on the ground with the usage of several reinforced steel counterweights. Disinformation Campaign Корчева́-4-2595 ("Leviathan") is to be spread within accessible mass communication systems to prevent the circulation of civilian watercrafts within the area. The creation of Mobile Task Force Sigma-19-04 ("Drill In Progress") is to be immediately organized in order to prevent any land approaches to SCP-2595-D with the usage of covert security perimeters in cooperation with the Ministry of Defense of the Russian Federation (MOD). III. [17/01/20██]: CARTWRIGHT-BALLANTINE REVISION The spreading of Disinformation Campaign Корчева́-4-2595 ("Leviathan") is to be ceased immediately to favor a new approach to the containment of SCP-2595. As a substitute, Disinformation Campaign Саратов-1-2595 ("Underwater Art") is to be disseminated within mass communication systems auxiliated by the usage of a reproduction of the original structure of SCP-2595-D currently located underwater and opened for visit in ██████, █████████. As of ██/██/████, all watercraft boarded by personnel should keep a safe distance of at least ten kilometers from Isolated Containment Site 2595-A to avoid spontaneous triggering of the anomalous properties held by SCP-2595-D. Description: SCP-2595-D is a spatial anomaly currently submerged at a height of 15 meters from the nearest surface within the ██████ Reservoir, █████ River, Russia. Visually, the anomaly consists of a collection of 473 statues made primarily of limestone that is directly connected to the society that composes SCP-2595. When approached by any sentient organism within a ten kilometer radius, SCP-2595-D will undergo a spontaneous modification. This modification is constituted of the complete disintegration of a standing statue located within SCP-2595-D and the simultaneous creation of a new structure resembling a figure of the original organism that came in contact with the expanding radius of the entity. Supplementary analysis of the phenomena taking place on the structures of SCP-2595-D has unveiled that the creation of a new instance is concurrent with the disappearance of adult human beings located around the area of the ██████ Reservoir. Additionally, it has been recognized by further observation that the creation of new human-shaped structures within SCP-2595-D coincides directly with the death of a senior member of the society designated as SCP-2595 and the following birth of a new component holding several characteristics that resemble the newly created limestone formation, including body shape, facial complexion and dressing amenities. Interview Excerpt: SCP-2595-399 Interviewer: Dr. Armand ████████ Interviewed: SCP-2595-399 Date: ██/██/████ Foreword: This transcript has been elaborated after SCP-2595-399 willingly submitted itself for interrogation within Foundation headquarters. It is hypothesized that this submission was a direct consequence of the triggering of Special Containment Protocol Theta-4 and the subsequent submerging of the ghost town of ███████ where SCP-2595-D was initially located. <Begin Excerpt> An initial feminine vocalization made by SCP-2595 using an unknown dialect is heard. Immediately after, a short audio transmission made by Foundation linguist Gregory █████ informs Dr. ████████ of the nature of the phrase. The following lines registered as spoken by SCP-2595-399 are a direct translation from Arcadocypriot Greek to Modern English. Gregory █████: This is a greeting, doctor. Please continue. SCP-2595-399: I apologize, hominid. I should have known the fact that your species is quite unfamiliar with these words. Dr. ████████: You do seem to understand me. SCP-2595-399: Why wouldn't I? Your vocabulary was structured by a language quite similar to the one I use. Dr. ████████: Why have you chosen to speak to us at this time? SCP-2595-399: My visit has no purpose but that of a warning. Dr. ████████: A warning? SCP-2595-399: We have noticed your newest experiment to try and hide our existance from your own people. We have felt it. Dr. ████████: It is not my intent to hide your people. You should see, however, that we must also protect ourselves before we attempt to welcome a new civilization. SCP-2595-399: We are not a new civilization, doctor. We have been here before you, and we will be here after you. We foresee your destruction in your own hands. Dr. ████████: What do you mean by "destruction in our own hands"? SCP-2595-399: You treat the unknown with such ignorance and arrogance. You do not fear us, but you do feel the need to showcase your superiority by attempting to sink something that is not even yours. Dr. ████████: It was not our intent to "showcase superiority", however, the presence of SCP-2595-D has compromised a range wide enough to petrify a large amount of citizens. We cannot let that happen, no matter the legitimacy of your ideals. SCP-2595-399: It is far from petrification, doctor. We are but a display of your own evolution. We mean to aid, not to harm. Do not refer to us using a number. We are not one of your daily amenities, doctor. And you will realize that. In time. <End Excerpt> After the last transcripted vocalization, SCP-2595-399 refused to communicate any longer with Foundation personnel and was escorted back to its original group in the proximities of █████████, Rostov Oblast, Russia. At of time of writing, no further attempts of communication made by instances of SCP-2595 have been registered. Addendum 2595-A and Incident Log 2595-A |
The vast majority has no clue what economic science is. To them economics is about political ideology or practical business. There are no laws of economics. We economists have permitted this to occur. We have allowed politicians and the public to demand of our discipline results which the discipline cannot produce but which nevertheless if we pretend we can produce those results will provide power and prestige. Hayek argued in the early 1930s that the fate of the economist was to be called upon to address questions of pressing political concern only to have his advice discounted as soon as it was uttered. Why? Because economics as a discipline puts parameters on people's utopias. It gives us primarily "negative" knowledge --- we live in a scarce world, there is no such thing as a free lunch, we cannot assume what it is we hope to prove, ought cannot presuppose can, and can doesn't mean we ought, etc. In the 1980s, Hayek wrote that: "The curious task of economics is to demonstrate to men how little they know about what they imagine they can design." But that is not the "economics" we heard about last night from President Obama. The economics is a POLITICAL economics. It is an economics that at the service of political parties in power --- either right or left. Conservative Keynesianism and Liberal Keynesianism, but it is still Keynesianism however you slice it. And as Deirdre McCloskey has put it, when your intellectual range is from M-N you think you are being open minded when you look at M and you look at N, but you certainly don't see A or Z. President Obama actually argued that no serious economist has argued against the need for government action with respect to the stimulus package. The leading economists, he argued, for Bush I and Bush II, as well as his team of economists all agree that only government can break the economy out of this vicious spiral downward. He must not have read the Christian Science Monitor yesterday. Robert Higgs's op-ed is best on his historical research, which is among the best on the subject, dealing with the 1920s-1940s. President Obama presents himself as a pragmatist who wants us to get beyond the stale ideological debates of the past. But he is simply trapped in the conventional wisdom of Keynesian economics. Why not take a few minutes --- since we are talking about actions which will transform the economic landscape of the US --- and think in a "non-Whig" fashion about economic ideas. Consider once again the arguments that "lost" due not to intellectual defeat, but political expediency. What were those pre-Keynesian ideas regarding the economy and the proper role of monetary and fiscal policy? President Obama said he cannot take seriously criticisms of fiscal irresponsibility from politicians that when they were in power doubled the national debt. Good point. But does that mean that fiscal irresponsibility is off the table as a concern? How pragmatic is thtat, as opposed to how politically convenient is that excuse? If President Obama wants to break from the stale ideology of the past, then he should start with breaking with the policy path of the past. NOTHING he is doing is radically different from what President Bush did before him. It is the same strategy being pursued just on "steroids" (and he is disappointed with A-Rod?!). No answer has yet been given as to why President Bush's bailout package didn't work while his stimulus package will. In fact, when pushed on that question President Obama really just said, we might even need to spend more down the road when this doesn't give us the result we want. And the claim is just that confidence has to be restored to the market and only government can do that. The belief that only government can do this is the real stale ideology of the past. What is really causing the problems in this economists opinion, is that government action has produced an uncertain investment environment. The rules of ownership and control are unclear, or clear but counter-productive for indiviudual initiative; monetary policy guided by the rhetoric of fighting inflation, but fearing deflation has been so loose that long term inflation that threatens the viability of the dollar should be a real concern to investors; and fiscal policy which is so out of control that US public debt will bankrupt the future generations with an astronomical tax burden and/or a monetization that will destroy the currency through hyper-inflation. Whatever way you slice it, our current policy path is the PROBLEM not the SOLUTION. But if your intellectual range is from M-N (lets say Larry Summers to Paul Krugman), then don't be surprised when in being "rational", examining the "evidence", weighing the "arguments" and assessing the "theories", you fail to consider the fiscal arguments of a James Buchanan, the monetary and capital theories of F. A. Hayek, the comparative institutional analysis of law and politics in Ronald Coase, and the monetary and fiscal policy arguments of Milton Friedman. Each of these gentlemen, President Obama, won the Nobel Prize in Economic Science. Their ideas may have been used by politicians in rhetoric, but none have been political appointees (well Friedman served as an economist during WWII, Hayek and Buchanan fought for their countries in WWI and WWII respectively) and their ideas have not been used in political practice --- no denationalization of money; no balanced budget ammendment; no full scale school voucher program, drug legalization, monetary rule, etc.. Friedman had more success than the others in carrying the day, but compare the policy prescriptions in Capitalism and Freedom and Free to Choose with the reality of public policy that we got even under Ronald Reagan, and compare the policy prescriptions in Hayek's The Constitution of Liberty with what was achieved under Margaret Thatcher. There is a far distance from the ideas in these books to the reality of the policy world. A really radical notion of hope and change might be to get government out of the business of attempting to manage the economy, stop demanding of economics results that it as a discipline cannot produce, and lets depoliticize political economy. Economics is NOT social engineering, it is instead a phiosophical science. Political economy is the best label for it, but at its best it is not political in the ordinary meaning of that term. And the intellectual range is not limited to M-N, but instead travels at least from A-Z. Because President Obama has failed to grasp this, to him economics disagreements are inherently political, economics science is Keynesian, and economic policy is pro-active. |
While the Apple masses continue to bask in the glory of the iPhone’s much improved camera, not to mention its new ability to record video, a recent development might shed some light on what features Apple might include in future iterations of the iPhone. Imagine shooting 1080p quality video right from your iPhone. Done salivating? OmniVision, the company that supplies Apple with the 3 megapixel cameras it uses in the iPhone 3GS, announced on Thursday that its latest 5 megapixel OV5650 Image Sensor for mobile phones is capable of capturing HD video in 1080p quality at 30 frames per second. At 720p, still HD mind you, the sensor can capture video at 60 frames per second. As it stands now, the current iPhone 3GS records video in VGA quality at 30 fps, but as was reported last week, an examination of the iPhone 3GS processor revealed that it was in fact capable of capturing video in 720p. Apple presumably didn’t enable 720p because doing so would put the processor through the ringer and obliterate battery life in the process. Also, HD video isn’t too storage friendly, and with the maximum capacity iPhone coming in at 32GB these days, concerns about the practicality of 720p were probably taken into consideration as well. Luckily, by the time the new sensors begin shipping, the above issues will undoubtedly be less of an impediment. Also, if Apple ever gets around to releasing its much rumored tablet, storage space and room for a decent sized battery will be even less than an issue than it is for the iPhone. We should point out that while the difference in quality between 720p and 1080p is negligible on HDTV’s smaller than 42 inches, the potential to record full HD quality video from an iPhone and upload it to your computer for editing and/or send it directly to your >40 inch HDTV is particularly intriguing. OmniVision expects that production of its new sensor will commence towards the end of 2009, and anticipates that mobile phones will begin sporting them sometime in 2010. As a point of interest, OmniVision noted in a recent presentation that while the current trend in mobile phones is 2 megapixel sensors, 5 megapixel sensors will begin to emerge as a “volume leader in 2011”. |
A FEW years ago, I attended a party at a nightclub in the meatpacking district of Manhattan with about 10 young women, most of them models, and two club promoters, men whose job was to bring beautiful women to exclusive parties. Beyoncé’s hit single “Run the World (Girls)” boomed, and the girls danced to the beat, singing, “Who run the world? Girls! Girls!” One promoter joined in, with his own twist on the chorus: “Who run the girls? Boys! Boys!” The men high-fived, and everyone laughed. Many of the models who walked the Fashion Week runways this month in New York, London, Milan and, starting this week, Paris, are the same women who pass through these clubs. The fashion shows and the international circuit of V.I.P. parties — Miami in March, Cannes and St.-Tropez in May and July, August weekends in the Hamptons — serve as case studies in an old debate. Does the celebrated display of female beauty and sexuality empower or exploit women? V.I.P. night life is an industry run by men, for men, and on women, who are ubiquitously called “girls.” The girls are brought in to attract big-spending clients from among the young global elite, willing to spend thousands of dollars on alcohol. Hence the V.I.P. party is sometimes half-jokingly described as “models and bottles.” The girls are seen as interchangeable; one club owner calls them “buffers” because rows of them frame his Instagram party pictures. They are recruited through friends of friends, scouted on the streets of SoHo, with its clusters of fashion agencies, or tracked down at model castings. During the week I was a sociology professor. But during my weekends and summer vacations, I became one of these girls. In exchange for showing up at their parties, the promoters let me study them. I was what they call a “good civilian” — close enough in physique but not as valuable as a fashion model. |
Members of social network platforms often choose to reveal private information, and thus sacrifice some of their privacy, in exchange for the manifold opportunities and amenities offered by such platforms. In this article, we show that the seemingly innocuous combination of knowledge of confirmed contacts between members on the one hand and their email contacts to non-members on the other hand provides enough information to deduce a substantial proportion of relationships between non-members. Using machine learning we achieve an area under the (receiver operating characteristic) curve ( ) of at least for predicting whether two non-members known by the same member are connected or not, even for conservative estimates of the overall proportion of members, and the proportion of members disclosing their contacts. Funding: EAH and KAZ are supported by the Heidelberg Graduate School of Mathematical and Computational Methods for the Sciences ( http://www.mathcomp.uni-heidelberg.de/ ), University of Heidelberg, Germany, which is funded by the German Excellence Initiative (GSC 220). FAH and KAZ were supported by a fellowship of the Marsilius Kolleg ( http://www.marsilius-kolleg.uni-heidelberg.de/ ), University of Heidelberg. The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript. Copyright: © 2012 Horvát et al. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. Inference of undisclosed, unobserved, or future contacts (the “edges”) between people or agents (the “nodes”) is known as the “link prediction” problem [5] – [7] . It is a difficult problem mainly because the imbalance between possible and realized future edges is extremely high in most cases [8] , [9] . In contrast, the prediction of some properties of given links, e.g. the sign of the weight on a link [10] is simpler because the problem is typically more balanced. Link prediction was mostly approached with unsupervised [11] and recently also with supervised learning methods [12] – [14] . Inference was done both using solely structural measures based on the network topology [15] , [16] but also by additionally taking into account the nodes’ attributes [17] – [19] . The most common setting of the link prediction problem is, given an evolving network at an early stage, to predict newly acquired edges at a later stage. The success of link prediction has usually been estimated by cross-validation within the same network [20] , [21] . This typically implies a dependence between training and test data and, hence, an overly optimistic estimate of the accuracy of an algorithm. To our knowledge, we present the first link prediction work where learning and testing are performed on entirely independent networks. Some individuals prefer to keep intimate details such as their political preferences or sexual orientation private. Recent results suggest that such details can nonetheless be inferred with high probability if a sufficient number of confirmed contacts in a social network chooses to reveal their details [1] – [4] . As a consequence, some of the more circumspect choose to stay away from social network platforms such as Facebook in the belief that this will help protect their privacy. In this article, we show that such an assumption is no longer valid: with the help of machine learning, social network operators can make predictions regarding the acquaintance or lack thereof between two non-members with a high rate of success. To our knowledge these are the first results on the potential of social network platforms to infer relationships between non-members. Methods The Problem All members of society can be seen as nodes in an unobservable social graph. This latent social graph is dynamic and extremely complex, with edges of widely differing quality (two people may be kindred, or engaged, or work together, they may like or dislike each other, etc.). From the point of view of a social network platform like Facebook, the set of all people can be divided into a fraction of members and of non-members. The multi-faceted relationships between people are much simplified, in an extreme case into mere binary form: two members may declare a “friendship” which is then represented by an edge in the set . In reality, social networks typically have access to more information that allows to estimate the quality of an edge (its strength, its asymmetry, etc.) especially if they integrate a messaging service. Additionally, a fraction of all platform members may also share their contacts to non-members, e.g., by uploading their email address book (Figure 1). Social network platforms then have direct access to two different sets of relationships: on the one hand, the mutually confirmed contacts between platform members ( ); and on the other hand, their members’ unilateral declarations of their acquaintance with non-members ( ). The edges in both and are an abstraction and a subset of the edges in the latent social graph. The central question of this article is to what extent the acquaintance of two people who are both non-members can be predicted. PPT PowerPoint slide PowerPoint slide PNG larger image larger image TIFF original image Download: Figure 1. Definitions and examples. Any social network platform divides society into two sets: the set of members (black nodes) and of non-members . In our toy example of individuals, i.e. a fraction of , are members. The relevant subset of non-members (red nodes) that are in contact with at least one member is distinguished from other non-members (gray nodes). of the members, i.e., a fraction of , have disclosed their outside social contacts. The knowledge of the set of edges between members (black, bi-directed) and the set of edges (green) to non-members is enough to infer a substantial fraction of edges between non-members (red edges). https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0034740.g001 For the very reason that the latent social graph is fundamentally unobservable, both we and a social network operator with similar aims as described here needs to impute the missing information to admit a machine learning procedure. The approach we choose is to use the observed part of a social network – say, the Facebook network of all students at a given university – and presume it represents the complete (and unobservable) social graph of a hypothetical community. In other words, the edges in this social graph are considered the ground truth. We then proceed to partition this community into a set of members and non-members by a number of member recruitment models outlined below which represent a broad range of potential strategies by which people choose to become members. Finally, we predict the existence or otherwise of an edge between any two non-members and evaluate the accuracy of these predictions with respect to the ground truth. Ground Truth Imputation In line with what would be available to a social network operator, we use real social networks, in this case real-world Facebook friendship networks representing the students from five different US universities [22]. Figure 2 shows a comparison of their number of members, their average degree (the average number of friends a member has), their density where is the number of friends, and their average clustering coefficient (the average probability that two friends of a member are friends themselves [23]). PPT PowerPoint slide PowerPoint slide PNG larger image larger image TIFF original image Download: Figure 2. Comparison of basic network analytic statistics of the five data sets obtained from Traud et al. Comparison of basic network analytic statistics of the five data sets obtained from Traud et al. [22] https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0034740.g002 The ground truth imputation comprises three steps. In the first step the platform penetration percentage is modeled. The percentage of members in a given population varies strongly with the type of social network platform and the social community of interest. According to Facebook, it had more than 800 million active users in November 2011 [24], while the number of internet users worldwide is estimated at over 2 billion [25]. Thus, roughly of all internet users are active Facebook members. Around of all Facebook users are US citizens. Assuming that each Facebook account represents one individual, we can estimate that over of all North American internet users are members of Facebook. For certain social strata the percentage of Facebook users is known exactly: one study showed that already back in 2005 over of the undergraduates of the Carnegie Mellon University were members of the platform [26]. Later, in 2009 around of all interviewed students of the University of Illinois of Chicago [27] and of a polled contemporary Canadian sample [28] were Facebook members. The platform penetration parameter thus reflects different membership densities and allows to model different social network platforms and their acceptance in different communities. Given a real Facebook friendship network and a choice of , the second step of the ground truth imputation is to partition the nodes of the network into members and non-members. For this we need models for how people choose to become members of a platform which we call member recruitment models. An analysis of the evolution of online social networks [29] suggests that a network platform recruits its members through a mixture of online mediated invitations by friends who already are members, and independent decisions by individuals who are not yet friends of a member. Since the actual member recruitment process is unknown and probably also depends on the group of people that is considered (e.g. college students vs. employees), we have emulated the growth of social network platforms using processes ranging from strongly dependent to purely independent decisions. All models start with labeling a node chosen uniformly at random as the first member. Strongly dependent decisions are modeled by processes in which only people who know at least one member will join the network. In a breadth first search (BFS) model all friends of the first member are labeled as members after which all their friends are labeled and so on. In a depth first search (DFS) model a randomly chosen friend of the first member joins the platform after which a randomly chosen friend of the new member joins and so on recursively. Less dependent decisions are modeled by a random walk (RW) which is restarted from a new node as soon as a friend of a new member is chosen which is already a member. The ego networks selection (EN) model joins the independent decision of some randomly chosen seed members with the dependent decision of their direct friends. Purely random selection of members (RS) is based entirely on independent decisions modeled by the random selection of a set of members. These member recruitment models are described in more detail in Text S1. For an analysis of the structural properties of the partitions obtained with different member recruitment models see Figures S1, S2, and S3. Figure 3 shows the resulting partitions of a toy graph under all five models. We show below that our main findings are robust with respect to the specific choice of the member recruitment model. PPT PowerPoint slide PowerPoint slide PNG larger image larger image TIFF original image Download: Figure 3. Membership propagation in a toy example according to different propagation models. Note that real social networks exhibit more long-range edges. Examples for the platform penetration value show the nodes from which the propagation started (black nodes with white core). Other members are marked black and relevant non-members red; for ease of reading arrows are not displayed, but black edges are bidirectional while green edges point from black to red nodes. With BFS and DFS the network is explored starting from one node (denoted by a white circle); with RW and EN there are more nodes from which the propagation is launched; and finally, for RS all selected nodes can be seen as starting nodes. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0034740.g003 In the third step, a so-called disclosure parameter is chosen to model the probability with which a member opens her email address book to the platform, e.g. through revealing her email contacts. We consider that a member who revealed her email contact list shared thereby all of her contacts justified by the feature of the platform allowing for easy automatic uploading of the entire email address book. governs the fraction of connections between the member and non-member sets. As such, it is a key ingredient of the ground truth imputation. Given an underlying graph with nodes and edges , the simulated member recruitment model results in a subset of nodes that are considered members, and a set of non-members . We will only focus on the set of relevant non-members whose email address has been disclosed by at least one member (see Figure 1). These node sets induce the edge sets and as defined above, and additionally the edges between non-members, which are not directly accessible to the platform, and are at the core of our interest and prediction efforts. Let denote the new graph containing all the structural information that is assumed to be known by a given social network platform (black and red nodes, and black and green edges in Figure 1). The ground truth imputation is thus determined by the choice of the percentage of individuals deciding to become members of the social network, the member recruitment model (BFS, DFS, RW, EN, RS), and the choice of , the propensity of members to disclose their contacts with non-members. Feature Extraction To predict whether two non-members are connected, we compute topological graph features of the network around and in on which the prediction is based. We deduce the features from relational knowledge because the data at hand is anonymized and therefore no node attributes are available. The exact choice of features is rooted in the known structural properties of (online) social networks [30], [31]. The intuition that two people sharing common friends are likely to be friends themselves motivates including a feature that counts the absolute number of common neighbors and have. However, the absolute number of common neighbors might be misleading if has just a few neighbors, while has many. Thus, we add three normalized versions of the number of common neighbors where the normalization is done by the smaller degree, the larger degree and the number of nodes which are neighboring at least one of the two nodes (the so-called Jaccard coefficient). The typically high assortativity (measuring the likelihood for nodes to connect to other nodes with similar degrees [32]) and the significant local clustering [33] of nodes in online social networks justifies focusing on the average degree and the clustering coefficient of the common neighbours of and . The community structure of social networks [34] leads us to construct several features that reflect the interconnectedness of the member side neighbors of the two nodes as illustrated by Figure 4. Finally, we count the absolute number of distinct paths between and in with exactly three edges. For a precise description of the features see Text S2. For each pair of non-members these scalars are stored in a dimensional feature vector. A feature vector relating to two connected non-members is called a positive sample, and one describing unconnected non-members is a negative sample. Based on this vector, supervised machine learning is used to predict which pairs of non-members are connected (acquainted) and which ones are not. PPT PowerPoint slide PowerPoint slide PNG larger image larger image TIFF original image Download: Figure 4. Features based on different edge sets between the exclusive, joint, and common neighborhoods of v and w. All left-hand nodes belong to the joint neighborhood of and . is exclusive to , while are exclusive to , and are common neighbors of both. Our features comprise the absolute number of edges between common neighbors (black, dashed edges), exclusive neighbors (black, straight edge), joint neighborhood (all black edges between nodes ), and an exclusive and a common neighbor (black, dotted edges). For each of them we also added their normalized value. Normalization was done by the number of possible edges between the neighbors they have. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0034740.g004 The Prediction Algorithm Supervised learning requires a training set on which the classifier’s parameters are adjusted. Its performance is then evaluated on an independent test set. We restrict our predictions to those pairs of non-members with at least one common neighbor among the members. In this respect we follow similar approaches which restricted link predictions to pairs of nodes with a maximum distance of two [9], [12]. Our focus is thus on predicting whether two non-member friends of a member are friends themselves, i.e. whether a pair of non-members is contained as an edge or not. We employ the random forest classifier [35], an ensemble of decision trees that has previously been used for link prediction in dynamic networks [9], [11], [12]. For a more detailed description see Text S3. Once the random forest has been trained it can be applied to the test set, and edges with a probability higher than some threshold are predicted to exist. This prediction can then be compared to the ground truth. Accuracy Measures for Prediction A good classification result is characterized by a high sensitivity (probability of predicting an edge that truly exists) and high specificity (probability of predicting the absence of an edge that truly doesn’t exist). In the following we use two classic accuracy measures for the link prediction problem, the and the which combine sensitivity and specificity [13], [36]: Varying the threshold allows to trade-off sensitivity vs. specificity. The receiver operating characteristic ( curve) shows the against plot. The area under this curve ( ) is a scalar performance measure that aggregates the prediction accuracy over all possible settings of this threshold. A perfect predictor achieves an of while random guessing in a two-class problem yields a value of . While the measures the accuracy over the full range of possible thresholds, the is based on a specific threshold: let denote the number of positive samples in the test set, i.e., the non-member pairs connected by an edge, and let all samples of the test set, i.e., all non-member pairs having at least one common member friend, be ordered non-increasingly by their prediction value. The introduced by [11] is defined as the percentage of correctly classified positive samples among the first samples in the ranking, and is thus also equal to the sensitivity achieved by predicting these samples to be edges. It can be shown that the specificity is linearly dependent on and thus both measures are captured by it. The higher the value the more the number of positive samples is enriched among the highest-ranked samples. Note that the should always be at least as large as the overall fraction of positive edges among all edges. Otherwise, the prediction algorithm performs worse than a naive algorithm in which samples are drawn uniformly at random from all samples and predicted to be edges. PPT PowerPoint slide PowerPoint slide PNG larger image larger image TIFF original image Download: Figure 5. Prediction accuracy (AUC) of samples based on all member recruitment models in the cross-validation training scheme applied to UNC data. The white square denotes a data point where there was not enough data to make the prediction. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0034740.g005 PPT PowerPoint slide PowerPoint slide PNG larger image larger image TIFF original image Download: Figure 6. 4 → 1 cross-prediction accuracy. Minimal (lower triangle) and maximal (upper triangle) prediction accuracy for all five member recruitment models are shown as a function of platform penetration and the disclosure parameter . Upper row: ; lower row: ; black triangles denote data points where was smaller than the according fraction of positive samples among all samples. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0034740.g006 PPT PowerPoint slide PowerPoint slide PNG larger image larger image TIFF original image Download: Figure 7. 1 → 1 cross-prediction accuracy. values for each of the five member recruitment models at . The and -axis show on which network the random forest was trained and tested, respectively. The white field indicates that there were too few edge samples to reasonably train the classifier. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0034740.g007 |
Image copyright Getty Images Image caption Tim Waterstone set up the book shop chain in 1982 and sold it in 1993 Tim Waterstone, the founder of the Waterstone's book shop chain, has predicted that the "e-book revolution" will soon go into decline in the UK. He told the Oxford Literary Festival printed books would remain popular for decades, the Daily Telegraph reported. "E-books have developed a share of the market, of course they have," he said. "But every indication - certainly from America - shows the share is already in decline. The indications are that it will do exactly the same in the UK." For the first eight months of 2013, e-book sale were worth $800m in the US, down 5% on the same period the previous year, according to the Association of American Publishers. Meanwhile, hardback book sales rose 11.5%. Full sales data for 2013 are not yet available. In the UK, 3.3 million e-books were sold in April 2013, according to Nielsen research - down 0.1% on the same month the previous year. It was the first year-on-year decline since e-books appeared, The Bookseller reported. Image copyright Getty Images Image caption Tim Waterstone is developing a new e-book short story subscription service Mr Waterstone said: "I think you read and hear more garbage about the strength of the e-book revolution than anything else I've known," the Telegraph reported. He set up the book shop chain in 1982 and sold it in 1993. It is now owned by Russian billionaire Alexander Mamut. 'Immovable' product Mr Waterstone added: "The [physical] product is so strong, the interest in reading is so deeply rooted in the culture and human soul of this country that it is immovable. "The traditional, physical book is hanging on. I'm absolutely sure we will be here in 40 years' time." His comments come a year after he announced the development of Read Petite, an subscription service for short stories on e-book. "I am certain that if more people acquire the habit of reading, the more they'll stick with it and the more they'll read," he told The Guardian last April. "And if that's going be entirely digital in 50 years' time, so be it." He also said during the interview: "Anyone who tells you they know the future is telling you the most grotesque lie, because none of us do." |
Can you sue the police if they arrest you on false charges? 11Alive Chief Investigator Brendan Keefe discovered the chances of winning are slim because officers and their departments enjoy special immunity – even when they arrest innocent people. Keefe spoke with three individuals arrested by police departments in metro Atlanta -- Michelle Pierce, Princess Mbamara and Katelyn Ebner. Each of them turned out to be innocent. They all went to jail on charges that were later dismissed. “For him to tear our lives up like that and take the trust and all we had in police officers, and faith in people being good...” Michelle Pierce is talking about Detective Randy Brashears – a Clayton County Police investigator who arrested her and her husband Michael for auto theft. The couple had purchased a car at an auction – a car that had been stolen long before they bought it. RELATED | From auction block to handcuffs: Why did a legal car auction put a couple in jail? The Pierces lost the car -- and their freedom -- when Detective Brashears arrested them for multiple felonies over a paperwork error. “Because he failed to do his job, I guess he just had an attitude, and he thought, ‘Well, I’m a cop; I’m covered,’” Michelle Pierce said. “Well, this wasn’t a mistake. He was malicious enough to come and arrest us because he failed to put a hold on something -- and we were asking for our money back, and I guess that made his life uncomfortable, so he thought he would tear our lives apart. And … he done it.” “Ultimately, what happened, is Clayton County made a mistake in releasing her vehicle,” said the Pierces’ attorney, Darryl Scott. Scott filed a federal lawsuit against Detective Brashears and another police officer from the same police agency – Clayton County Police Officer Grant Kidd -- who was caught on tape offering to get the couple’s charges dismissed, for a price. “So here’s the charge, 750 for each of you that bonded out – 750. And you pay a thousand up front then, and the rest you pay after it goes away,” Kidd said in an audio recording secretly taken by the Pierces that was eventually used against Kidd. “If it don’t go away; if it go out to the grand jury, and then you get your money back.” “This is the same police department,” said Keefe. “A detective who arrests you on charges that we now know are dropped with prejudice, and another officer who offers to you to get rid of those charges if you’ll just pay him money?” “Yeah,” replied Pierce. “But yet in the eyes of that police department, you were the criminals?” Keefe asked. Pierce laughed. A federal judge dismissed the Pierces’ civil lawsuit against the officers and their department; rejecting the claim they acted maliciously and ruling, “a police officer is protected by qualified immunity if a reasonable officer in the same situation would have believed there was probable cause to make the arrest.” “There are protections in place for an officer who makes a reasonable mistake,” Scott said. “Sometimes they have to make difficult decisions under difficult circumstances. But the immunity law is not designed to protect an officer who acts maliciously." “Is there a way you can test me right now?” asked Princess Mbamara. She had been pulled over in a traffic stop on Interstate 75, and falsely accused of being under the influence of marijuana. Arrested for DUI-Drugs, college student Mbamara thought a blood test would clear her name. RELATED | The Drug Whisperer: Drivers arrested while stone cold sober “Oh, I don’t know, wait, wait – one second. This is a lot right now,” she said on the dashcam video. “I understand you have a job to do, but let me process this in, because this is a lot.” The blood test did come back negative for marijuana, but not before she spent a night in jail, and months fighting the DUI charges against her that were eventually dropped. “If I’m that police officer, and I’m deciding whether or not to arrest you, there’s really no downside risk for me as a police officer to arrest you,” Keefe said in an interview. “No, there’s no consequences,” the falsely accused Mbamara said. “If this can happen to you, it can happen to anybody?” Keefe asked. “It can happen to anybody,” she replied. “You’re going to jail, ma’am, okay?” said Cobb County Police Officer T.T. Carroll on another dashcam video, speaking to Katelyn Ebner after pulling her over and falsely accusing her of being under the influence of marijuana. “I don’t have a magical drug test that I can give you right now.” It happened to Ebner – one of three people arrested by Carroll, who later had their DUI-Drug charges thrown out for lack of evidence. “And they never gave you the benefit of the doubt?” Keefe asked Ebner in an interview. “Ever,” Ebner said. “But they gave Officer Carroll the benefit of the doubt in his internal affairs investigation,” Keefe said. “He was exonerated.” “Yes, yeah,” she replied. “He got praised. He got promoted. He got a raise – he got all those things, and I’m here still trying to pick my life back up.” Officer Carroll’s last performance review lauded him as a drug recognition expert and the ‘go-to officer’ among Cobb County’s DUI Task Force members when it comes to DUI-Drugs. He got a medal from Mothers Against Drunk Driving for the number of DUI arrests – that included at least three innocent drivers. “Even if you wanted to, you couldn’t sue this police officer or this police department,” Keefe said. “They’re immune from civil suits, except in the most egregious cases, and this barely reaches that.” “Yes,” Ebner said. “If he was exonerated in his internal affairs investigation and you really can’t sue him, why would officers stop arresting innocent people?” Keefe asked. “They wouldn’t,” Ebner said. “This is just going to keep going on and on and on, until someone steps up and realizes that these officers aren’t doing the right things. They’re getting credit for arresting innocent people. They’re getting raises for it.” “If you know that if you do something wrong and you don’t get punished, or reprimanded for it, you’re going to keep doing it,” Mbamara said. “You’re gonna keep doing it. Who cares if someone speaks out on it. You’re gonna keep doing it because you have that little badge of honor that you’re an expert. Who can tell you otherwise?” It’s not impossible to sue the police for wrongful arrest – but it’s difficult to get a civil attorney who will take the case on contingency when they have to overcome these immunity hurdles. Two bills currently pending in Congress would make it even more difficult by restricting lawsuits and limiting the recovery of legal fees. |
Welcome back to Love and Comics! This week we are taking a bit of a break from the Spider-Man covers to bring some romantic issues from the Black Panther series. This weekend was the world premiere of the Black Panther teaser trailer and with just over 4 million views and counting, it release has blown up the hype surrounding the Black Panther movie. As fans anticipate and wait for more footage, there is already speculation as to which characters will make their MCU debut into the Black Panther universe. Between friends, foes, and most certainly lover, there are so many characters that the series can bring into the cinematic world. This week we will take a look at the many covers and lovers of the King of Wakanda, T’challa aka The Black Panther. Black Panther Vol 3 #14 (Black Panther and the Bride of the Panther) Black Panther Vol 3 brought King T’Challa to the front line in 2005. With the last solo titled book making it’s run from 1998-2003, Vol 3 sets up the Black Panther for modern comic readers and fans. This series featured the Black Panther in story lines such as Civil War and Secret Invasion, but none as life-changing for King T’Challa as the “Countdown to the Wedding of the Century”. In this issue, King T’Challa reminisces about how he fell in love with his one true queen, the Goddess of the desert, Storm. In a beautiful and heart-breaking re-telling, the Black Panther gives us a short synopsis of how he fell in love with the desert thief of his heart. More details to their first encounters can be found in Storm Vol 2 so be sure to check out that series if you want to see some young versions of Ororo Munroe and King T’Challa. Black Panther Vol 3 #15 (King T’Challa and Ororo Munroe) Continuing the story line of the “Countdown to the Wedding of the Century” issue #15 follows the major cliff hanger left in the last issue. Last issue, the Black Panther reminisces about their break-up on the streets of Africa. Although those scars are still healing, the Black Panther knows in his heart that his true love is Ororo Munroe, aka Storm. He left Storm with a very important question last issue, “Ororo Munroe, will you marry me?” Just as Ororo is about to respond they are attacked by the Arabian Knight. In an almost hilarious battle sequence, King T’Challa begs and pleads his case for marriage to Munroe all while kicking the Arabian Knight’s ass in every other panel. She agrees to spend more time with him and soon enough they are off to Wakanda. She even meets his mother to which his mother explains to Ororo why she should wed her son, “Wakanda is a warrior culture. It takes a strong woman to lead and breed these strong men and here you are. A princess, street-tough. A warrior on a galactic scale. I have followed your adventures closely. You are a hero worthy of my son. There’s only one outstanding question: Do you love my son enough to be with him — forever?” Her answer is “Yes”. Black Panther Vol 3 #16 (King T’Challa and Ororo Munroe) In this issue the Black Panther and Storm make their “save the date” announcements to the entire world. They sent invites to the Avengers, the X-men, friends, and family. Unfortunately not everyone is excited for the Wedding of the Century, as ex’s of King T’Challa are now hell bent on stopping this wedding. One such ex is Princess Zanda of Narobia. Also on the list of surprised and baffled ex’s are Ororo Munroe’s past lovers: Wolverine, Nightcrawler, and Forge. Another hilarious build-up with the theme of weddings, this issue shows the little details to a super-hero wedding, including the Fantastic Four’s The Thing worrying about whether he’ll fit in a tux. The issue ends with both Black Panther and Storm gathering one of the very few blood relatives that Ororo has, her grandparents. A heart warming reunion, Storm’s grandparents are a couple of tough retirees willing to kick the asses of some Hydra agents coming to kidnap them. Luckily for all parties, the two had no problem with using necessary force to incapacitate the would-be kidnappers. Black Panther Vol 3 #17 (King T’Challa and Ororo Munroe) The Wedding of the Century gets closer and closer as the story continues between King T’Challa and Ororo Munroe. In this issue the Black Panther and Storm hold a press conference in hopes of holding off the coverage during the day of their wedding. Amidst the conference are the events of Civil War, so news crews are hungry to find out what side either of them fall on. In the most politically peaceful way, they both answer by stating that they hope that their marriage shows peace between the two different parties and acts as a symbol for being united amongst differences. Also in this issue the respective bride and groom have their own versions of a bachelorette/bachelor party. During Ororo’s shopping night out, they discover that Princess Zanda has been going around New York posing as Black Panther’s fiancee and stating that she is to marry the young King. Storm definitely puts her in her place. Meanwhile, King T’Challa is out to Rio for a bachelor party. As an honorable King he decides not to partake in the usual festivities of a Bachelor party but tags along to support the men that have supported him in his decision to marry Storm. Black Panther Vol 3 #15 (The Wedding of King T’Challa and Ororo Munroe) Finally the time has arrived for the “Wedding of the Century”. Some major events are happening in this issue and such cosmic events cause high profile guests to arrive including Oprah, Prince, and the Watcher to name a few. As the guest begin to arrive King T’Challa tells Ororo one of the most important traditions of the Wakandan wedding: The journey into the celestial plane. The celestial plane is the reason why the Black Panther has his powers. In this moment both the Black Panther and Storm will come face-to-face with the cosmic entity that imbues him with his powers, The Panther God. Here, the Panther God will judge whether Ororo Munroe is worthy to be the bride and Queen to the King of Wakanda. Another great thing about this issue is the wedding dress design by Frank Cho. The issue goes into details into how they decided to design the famous wedding dress in an article titled “Divining the Design”. Also in this issue the Black Panther attempts to make a peaceful truce between Captain America and Ironman over the neutral soil of Wakanda. It does not end well and both parties must give their apologies for not being able to attend the “Wedding of the Century.” Black Panther Vol 4 #5 (King T’Challa and Ororo Munroe) Following volume 3 of the Black Panther is the continuation of the story between King T’Challa and now Queen Ororo. In this series the Black Panther faces death as he remains trapped in limbo. The Queen and T’Challa’s mother are on a mission to save their King from the confines of death and have enlisted the help of a witch doctor named Zawavari. Meanwhile, the major mantle of the Black Panther needs to be fulfilled and the person to step-up to such occasion is the sister of the Wakandan King, Shuri. Making her first appearance in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, Shuri is being played by actress Leticia Wright. Director Ryan Coogler commented on the appearance of Shuri on EW.com stating that Shuri’s character will be a brilliant scientist and on par with the likes of Tony Stark. According to comicbook.com Leticia Wright is excited to showcase a young, black, and female scientist in her character giving new fans a refreshing hero to follow. Black Panther: The Most Dangerous Man Alive Vol 1 (Lady Bullseye and King T’Challa) At some point in Daredevil’s history, the mantle of protector to Hell’s Kitchen was taken over by King T’Challa. The series prior to the featured one above was titled Black Panther: The Man Without Fear. In this series T’Challa abdicated his throne and left his country of Wakanda. He was stripped of his power, wealth, and influence, and decides to take his remaining skills to the streets of Hell’s Kitchen. In an effort to prove himself as a guardian, the Wakandan King protects a board member of the Bank of Wakanda from an assassination attempt from Wilson Fisk. One of those assassins sent to kill said board member is the dangerous and deadly, Lady Bullseye. Although not an official romance exists between the two, Lady Bullseye and the Black Panther are drawn by famous artist Francesco Francavilla. Known for his work on After Life with Archie, Francavilla is one of the best artist across the comic medium. Known for his pulp-noir style, Francavilla has many accolades for being a NYT best-selling writer and artist and a comic influence throughout the medium. Marvel Knights vol 1 “4” #21 (Black Panther and Susan Storm) In an issue titled “Desperate Housewife”, Susan Storm gives a break down of what her typical day looks like. In this issue Susan Storm retells the story of her midnight skinny dip with the T’Challa the night they visited Wakanda. Told in the fashion of a Jack Kirby flashback, Susan Storms retells her secret story to a group of super-heroine gal pals. In her story Susan finds that Reed is too busy being a nerd and into his scientific work that she sets out to explore the Wakandan kingdom on her own. While exploring the palace of the Black Panther she is greeted by the handsome and mysterious King T’Challa. He takes her around to show her the natural beauty of the country. They both decide to jump in a natural pool where they are just on the verge of flirtation and intimacy when Susan Storm decides that there are some things she would regret if she had continued. After the flashback, Susan Storm returns to her normal life and comes home to her awaiting husband, Reed Richards. Even if Reed was too busy to call her all day, he arrives with flowers for their anniversary. Black Panther Vol 3 #20 (King T’Challa and Medusa) King T’Challa and Medusa are never actually a couple. The following 3 issues after the Wedding of the Century, put King T’Challa and Ororo Munroe on a diplomatic journey to Latveria, the Moon, and Atlantis. All of these events occur following Civil War, and as a Wakandan King and new Queen, their goal is to create as much diplomacy as they can. Unfortunately the Inhumans had other plans for the King. As they arrive they are greeted by the royal family. They attempt their best at a small talk dinner as Black Bolt is sent to investigate a ruin that the Black Panther had mentioned. Ororo and T’Challa find themselves unknowingly offending the royal Inhuman family and a battle breaks out until it is broken up by King Black Bolt himself. They were requested to be there by King Black Bolt himself and despite their different beliefs in ruling, the Inhumans ask the Wakandan leader to help them develop a chamber to allow Black Bolt to speak without destroying entire worlds. Their hope is to utilize the precious metal of Adamantium. Black Panther Vol 2 #24 (Malice and T’Challa) Definitely one of the many loves of the Black Panther is a character that might be unfamiliar, Nakia aka Malice. Nakia was a teenager when she was picked to be one of the future wives in training for King T’Challa. Obsessed with prince T’Challa, her passion for him only grew. Although not completely promised to be a wife to T’Challa, Nakia became very jealous of the Black Panther’s American Ex-girlfriend, Monica Lynne. This issue also featured another character making their debut into the Marvel Cinematic Universe, Killmonger. The main bad guy for the upcoming Black Panther film is none other than Killmonger and is being played by Michael B. Jordon while Nakia is being played by Lupita Nyong’o. Black Panther Vol 2 #24 (Storm and T’Challa) Ending this series of Black Panther romances with where we started is none other than the one true love and Queen to Wakanda, Ororo Munroe aka Storm. The Black Panther and Storm are a comic couple that represents so much power, intimacy, and love. Between being two of the most powerful heroes in the Marvel Universe, they found each other’s drive for justice and strong ties to culture to be their most attractive qualities. With a movie like Black Panther on the horizon, the amount of diversity and cultural awareness in movies is something that needs to be handled with respect and celebration. From the teaser trailer alone, fans are excited to see what Marvel will do right in the way of the fictional Wakandan culture and in general to Black culture and representation in the MCU. Be sure to check out the film which is scheduled to be released February 16th, 2018. Until then re-watch the trailer below and thanks again for checking out Love and Comics! Thanks for the love and be sure to write in suggestions, comments, questions, or PDA’s here and on our Instagram @loveandcomics |
This morning, DC Comics shared some excerpts from July 2017’s solicits exclusively with the Comics Beat. If you’re like Kyle or myself and you’ve fallen in love with Benjamin Percy’s and Otto Schmidt’s work on Green Arrow, then you’ll be happy to know we have an exclusive cover reveal of issue 27. If you’re a fan of Injustice, we’ve got that cover too. Suicide Squad? Yup. Bombshells? Double yup. Check it all out after the jump! GREEN ARROW #26 (Cover NA) Written by BENJAMIN PERCY—Art and cover by OTTO SCHMIDT—Variant cover by MIKE GRELL “HARD TRAVELING HERO” part one! Unwilling to let another city suffer the same fate as Seattle, Green Arrow kicks off a new quest to hunt down the Ninth Circle across America! To stop disaster before it can happen, the (in)famously hot-headed Oliver Queen must mend fences with those he’s alienated in the past, starting with THE FLASH! The second epic year of GREEN ARROW REBIRTH begins here! On sale JULY 5 • 32 pg, FC, $2.99 US • RATED T+ GREEN ARROW #27 Written by BENJAMIN PERCY—Art by JAMAL CAMPBELL—Cover by OTTO SCHMIDT—Variant cover by ESAD RIBIC “HARD TRAVELING HERO” part two! Oliver Queen is a pillar of morality. A champion of ethics. The essence of truth. Or at least he thought so. The self-described people’s hero Green Arrow crosses paths with the Justice League’s real paragon of virtue, Wonder Woman, when his cross-country fight against the Ninth Circle puts both heroes’ muscle and mettle to the ultimate test. On sale JULY 19 • 32 pg, FC, $2.99 US • RATED T+ SUICIDE SQUAD #21 (Cover NA) Written by ROB WILLIAMS—Art by GUZ VAZQUEZ—Cover by EDDY BARROWS and EBER FERREIRA—Variant cover by WHILCE PORTACIO “KILL YOUR DARLINGS” part one! Devastated by Rustam and his Burning World, the international conspiracy known as the People reveal themselves to Amanda Waller in a desperate move to secure their mysterious endgame for Planet Earth! Meanwhile, the walls tighten for Boomerang as Harley Quinn gets closer to discovering the traitorous murderer within Task Force X… On sale JULY 12 • 32 pg, FC, $2.99 US • RATED T+ SUICIDE SQUAD #22 Written by ROB WILLIAMS—Art by GUZ VAZQUEZ—Cover by EDDY BARROWS and EBER FERREIRA—Variant cover by WHILCE PORTACIO “KILL YOUR DARLINGS” part two! Face to face with the Russian mastermind she’s been tracking since SUICIDE SQUAD: REBIRTH #1, Amanda Waller is horrified to find the Suicide Squad commanded by her own dark mirror, the enigmatic Direktor Karla, who’s surpassed the Task Force X leader in the one game she cannot afford to lose: control. On sale JULY 26 • 32 pg, FC, $2.99 US • RATED T+ INJUSTICE 2 #5 Written by TOM TAYLOR—Art by BRUNO REDONDO and JUAN ALBARRAN—Cover by BRUNO REDONDO Batman pays a visit to Ted Kord, beseeching him to become part of the team that rebuilds the world—not as Blue Beetle, but as Ted Kord, inventor and industrialist. But Batman’s not the only one who has designs on Ted. A trusted old friend pops in, as does someone else—someone with less noble intentions. On sale JULY 5 • 32 pg, FC, $2.99 US • RATED T+ • DIGITAL FIRST Digital First DC COMICS BOMBSHELLS Ch. 95 (Cover will be used for DC COMICS BOMBSHELLS #32) Written by Marguerite Bennett—Cover by Mirka Andolfo While the Bombshells are distracted fighting the Soviets, Killer Frost unleashes her mythical army into Leningrad and the supernatural Nazi invasion begins! Alex is the Managing Editor of the Comics Beat. He is also a freelance comics editor with previous credits at Papercutz. He is your go-to fella for creator interviews, conversations about comic book structure, and general DC Comics nerding. Currently geeking out over movies, too. Like this: Like Loading... |
BattleTech - The Crescent Hawks Inception Battletech - the Crescent Hawk’s Inception (CHI) is the first of many computer games set in the Battletech universe. Based on the Battletech pen-and-paper tabletop game by FASA, CHI lets the player take command over a number of Battlemechs fighting other Battlemechs or infantry. If you would like to find out more about the pen-and-paper version, check this site out. Battlemechs are gigantic war-machines up to ten meters tall that supposedly cannot be destroyed by anything other than another Battlemech. In the game you play Jason Youngblood, son of Jeremiah Youngblood, chief of the security forces on Pacifica. Jason has recently started his training to become a Battlemech pilot himself and this is where the game starts. CHI has two different modes of play. One plays like a role-playing game in real time and the other is a turn-based combat system. This is the same system seen in Fallout, another tabletop pen-and-paper game ported to computer. The main portion of CHI plays in real time; you use the arrow keys to move around the world and enter buildings. As Jason your immediate concern is to finish your pilot training. For this you will need to take courses, manage your income by investing in stocks, buy a personal weapon and of course follow Battlemech lessons. One point of critique about the game is that having to wait before you can buy the best weapons and take part in the more advanced courses means you frequently have to walk around the map doing absolutely nothing. This is only the beginning of the game, though. Once you have finished your lessons, Pacifica is invaded, and the real game starts. You are one of the few survivors of the invasion, and the task of liberating Pacifica falls to you. To accomplish this task several subplots need to be resolved, usually by fighting but also by exploring and some puzzle-solving. Technically, CHI is anything but a marvel, even by 1988 standards. Sounds are all but absent but since only PC-speakers are supported, this is not a bad thing. Graphically, only the weapon-firing sequences are pretty; unfortunately these are repeated ad nauseam. The menu controls are awkward (I had to struggle even to find a way to exit the game in the change settings menu). CHI has a high degree of backwards compatibility but that is useless today. The game runs in DOSBox, but the sounds, which are already sparse, are then inaudible. Now for the verdict: Battletech - the Crescent Hawk’s Inception is a game which tries to incorporate the Battletech combat game with the storytelling of a role-playing game. Although not a complete failure, this game tries to be a Jack-of-all-trades; fans of the Battletech game fail to see the relevance of exploring the world and solving puzzles and people new to the Battletech universe are frustrated by having to fight yet another battle when they really don’t want to. All in all, CHI remains a game worth playing, especially for fans of the Battletech universe, but a game that can become a little boring towards the end. |
The surface of Venus is a notorious hell-hole. If an atmospheric pressure roughly 90 times greater than Earth isn’t enough for you, try the surface temperature, which can grow to almost five times the boiling point of water. Got a nice pressure suit to keep you cool? Make sure it’s resistant to the effects of corrosive substances dissolved into the “air,” which is itself up to 95% carbon dioxide, as it is packed with the remnants of concentrated acid rain that mostly evaporates several kilometers above the surface. Venus has violent volcanism, earthquakes, and lightning of a sort we Earthlings can hardly comprehend — little wonder that our few Venus-bound probes and satellites have all died shortly after entering the atmosphere. But what if we redefine the term “entering the atmosphere” to mean “just barely entering the atmosphere,” without descending to the hellish surface, itself? That’s the idea behind a new report from NASA’s Systems Analysis and Concepts Directorate, which argues that long-term crewed missions, even permanent installations, could float on the clouds above our sister planet. Called the High Altitude Venus Operational Concept (or HAVOC), the proposed space balloons would sit in a much more hospitable environment. At roughly 50 kilometers, astronauts living in a cloud city would be subject to about 85% Earth gravity, and the temperature peaks below 80°C — still higher than you could find anywhere on Earth, but low enough that NASA scientists can deal with it via the super-materials of modern astrophysics. On average, Venus is less than half Mars’ distance from Earth, while its thick atmosphere would both protect astronauts from intense radiation and allow enough solar radiation through to make solar power a real option. In summary, the team argues that we ought to focus on the upper atmosphere of Venus, and not the surface of Mars, for our first manned mission to an alien world. The plan would unfold in 5 blunt stages: robotic exploration, a 1-month orbiting mission, a 1-month atmospheric mission, a 1-year atmospheric mission, and finally a semi-permanent installation with rotating crew. This would be far easier to keep going than a Mars missions since, first of all, it’s so much closer, and since docking with a cloud facility wouldn’t require as much fuel/power as landing and taking off from the surface of Mars. In the clouds, you don’t have to worry about dust getting into any motors, or a rover falling into a crack in the ground. You don’t run into such problems with communications either, as an installation 50km over the surface will spend significantly less time obscured from Earth’s view. Of course, there are downsides to the plan as well, relative to the much more likely Mars mission. Leaving aside the sheer, likely insurmountable momentum of a crewed mission to Mars, there’s still the fact that we know so little about Venus that we have a much shakier idea of why it might be worth the effort and expense of long-term crewed exploration. Exploring our least understood neighbor is intrinsically interesting of course, but if we know Mars will return some interesting data, there’s little excuse to go with the version we’re not sure of, at all. Of course Venus would yield interesting results for astronomers and paleontologists, but the Mars mission is being sold as a more comprehensively useful mission, one that will provide results for all manner of scientific fields; if Venus scientists can’t even gather geological samples from the surface, it’ll be hard to compare its utility to that of Mars. Additionally, we’ve already landed several delicate things on Mars, while we’ve yet to even put a permanent sky base over our own world. It might be hypothetically easier to rest on the clouds, but given that we’re already so many steps down the Mars path, it seems backwards to refer to this as the “simple” approach. A huge array of new technologies would need to emerge to make this a feasible option, and much of the equivalent work has already been done in reference to Mars. HAVOC vehicles would inflate shortly after entering the atmosphere, decelerating from about 7,500 meters per second to a nearly zero, where they could bob gently on the surface of the thick carbon dioxide atmosphere; that’s hardly a well-tested process, and it seems to me that NASA needs at least one more major, publicity-generating win before attempting something so completely novel. It’s nice to see NASA dreaming big, though. The administration spent decades meekly accepting the public’s inattention, but now has a much more strident understanding of itself and its own necessity to the American public. NASA would never have considered publishing something so obviously pie-in-the-(Venusian)-sky, back before it found its organizational spine, but today it trusts the public to be excited by, not fearful of, bold new ideas. It has basically no chance to scuttle the mission to Mars — but that doesn’t mean that we couldn’t ever wreak HAVOC on Venus. The idea might just need a little more time in waiting. |
Cryptographers aim to future-proof protocol Queensland University of Technology’s Douglas Stebila and his team are upgrading encryption protocols. Source: Supplied The need to secure today’s communications from the powerful quantum computers of the future has propelled new research aimed at upgrading the internet’s core encryption protocol. Read Next This work is being led by a team of cryptographers, including Queensland University of Technology’s Douglas Stebila, that has tested some new techniques and found promising steps towards future-proofing internet encryption. Internet communication presently is protected by encryption using the Transport Layer Security protocol, which uses mathematical techniques to protect information. However, Dr Stebila, a senior lecturer in information security, contends that the protocols may not be robust enough to counter the eventual advent of quantum computing. Quantum computers could be able to solve complicated scientific problems, such as simulating complex chemical reactions much faster than today’s supercomputers. Their enhanced capabilities also could be harnessed to break much of the public key cryptography in use today to protect internet, mobile telephones and other electronic communication. “One of the things quantum computers can do faster, if and when they get built, is solve the mathematical techniques that protect information right now,’’ Dr Stebila said. “If one exists in 30 years, or however many years, then any communication that is recorded today could be decrypted retroactively.’’ The team, which also includes Joppe Bos from chip maker NXP Semiconductors and Craig Costello and Michael Naehrig from Microsoft Research, has developed upgrades to the TLS protocol that would prevent quantum computer users from intercepting internet communications. The new quantum-proof version of TLS incorporates a mathematical technique called the “ring learning with errors problem’’, which is believed to have the potential to resist quantum attacks. Dr Stebila said the technology would compete with other techniques such as NTRU. “Our technique chooses different types of mathematics to try and come up with things that are easy for you to compute but hard for an attacker to try to break,’’ he said. The team, which has released the software for their new protocol under an open source licence for further research and development at https://github.com/dstebila/rlwekex, wants to make it faster and with less overhead. The team’s research paper was published at the IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy in San Jose, California, this year and has been supported in part by an Australian Research Council Discovery Project grant to QUT. Dr Stebila said the main standardisation body, the Internet Engineering Task Force was aware of the work. “There has been some interest in making sure that future versions of their standards will adopt something in this vein, but this has not been standardised yet,’’ Dr Stebila said. This article was first published in The Australian Business Review. |
.- Despite Turkey's claim of religious freedom, Christians there have faced ongoing hostility, including government oppression and murder – but a new legal status ignites hope that things will improve. As far as the Turkish government is concerned, “Islam is the only possibility,” said Nikos Tzoikos, analyst of the Ecumenical Patriarchate of Constantinople. Tzoikos spoke with CNA in November of 2014 before Pope Francis' visit to Turkey that month. He said that an embedded relationship between Islam and the local government have rendered Christians in Turkey “without any rights.” However, a new foundation established by the Armenian patriarchate could signal a change in the right direction for Christians and the Turkish government. Officially established in January of this year, the foundation is called “Hovagim 1461” after the first Armenian patriarch Hovagim and the date when he was appointed to the position. It marks a significant step in securing more breathing room for the community, who, according to Tzoikos, have had “difficulty” with the government in terms of civil rights. Even though Turkey claims to have religious freedom nationwide, Christians still face discrimination, and their presence often goes unrecognized by the country's Muslim majority. There are believed to be only 100,000 Christians permanently living in Turkey, a small fraction of the country’s total population of 75 million, which is majority Sunni Muslim. Although Catholics are recognized as a religious minority, Christians have “always been segregated,” Tzoikos said, noting that prior to this January neither Jews, Orthodox nor Armenian Orthodox were recognized by the government. Even if members of the patriarchate are Turkish citizens born in Turkey, “they aren't protected,” he said, explaining that even popes have met resistance with the government ahead of apostolic voyages. Despite the fact that Turkey welcomed Pope Francis in November after he was invited by the Patriarch of Constantinople, Bartholomew I, and later by Turkey’s president Recep Tayyip Erdo?an, Tzoikos revealed that government channels for such visits haven't always been open. He recalled Benedict XVI's visit to Ankara and Istanbul in 2006, explaining that the then-Pope's visit “wasn’t wanted.” Even though Bartholomew had invited his “brother” Benedict to visit, “a pope can't personally go to meet the patriarch simply. He can't. He has to pass through Ankara for an official state visit. The Turkish government insists on this,” Tzoikos said. When Pope Francis visited the country last November Bartholomew I advised him to take diplomatic channels and make the same route, going to Ankara first for an official state visit, which Francis did. Tzoikos revealed that Benedict's trip should have originally taken place in 2005, but was blocked. With the change in Turkish government in 2006 the visit was blocked again. It was finally approved with the assassination of Italian priest Father Andrea Santoro, who was serving as a missionary in Turkey and was shot twice in the back while praying before Mass Feb. 5, 2006. It 's believed that the murder was committed in retaliation for cartoons printed against the Prophet Mohamed. After the priest's death Tzoikos said the Turkish government became fearful and finally approved Benedict XVI's visit. Such violence toward priests are not an uncommon occurrence in Turkey, and many have been attacked in recent years. In 2010 Bishop Luigi Padovese, who was overseeing the apostolic vicariate of Anatolia and had been outspoken on challenges facing Christians in Turkey, was stabbed to death outside of his residence by his long-term driver. The bishop's driver was a Muslim, however it's reported that the man, who had been suffering from depression, was unstable and that the bishop’s murder was not politically motivated. Tzoikos said that Christians also face difficulty in the area of education, and explained that although religion – which was previously allowed to be taught only in churches – is now a part of Turkey’s educational system, only teachers paid by the state are allowed to lead the courses. Mons. Georges Dankaye, rector of the Pontifical Armenian College in Rome, expressed his hope that the new foundation for the Armenian patriarchate will help in solidifying an awareness of the presence of Christians in Turkey, and obtain greater governmental support. “The foundation is a recognition of a reality. It’s not a foundation or creation of nothing. There is a reality that exists. It’s a recognition on a judicial level but also on a civil level. And this is also very good, because it’s the recognition of a community,” Mons. Dankaye told CNA Feb. 9. Turkish agency Hurriyet Daily News reports that the foundation has officially been registered in Istanbul's 22nd civil court. With a board of trustees composed of 10 members of the patriarchate, the foundation will be headed by the deputy Armenian Patriarch, Archbishop Aram Ate?yan, and will be able to make decisions financial matters. The list of activities for foundations in Turkey are listed in the law as: organizing seminars, conferences and workshops, providing information, documents and data, publishing magazines, newspapers and articles in line with the goals of the patriarchate and accepting donations both from Turkey and abroad. Hovagim 1461 also has the right to own property either by inheritance, purchase or donation. It will also have the ability to make investments through cooperation with other foundations. Mons. Dankaye said that this step is also “a democratic thing, that is, to recognize a community that has its specificities, its rights, its nuances, its special way of life, also social and religious. These are the first phenomena of a democracy.” Democracy, he said, doesn't mean “to standardize or homogenize” everyone, but rather to recognize and respect social and religious differences. He recalled the time of the Armenian genocide, the centenary of which takes place this month, saying that the mass killings perhaps came out of the Ottoman’s fear of recognizing these differences. The refusal to accept these differences, he said, stems from the idea that “we should all be the same, and whoever is not the same, whoever doesn’t think like us, needs to go or needs to die.” Also referred to as the Armenian Holocaust, the genocide took place in 1915 when the Ottoman Empire systematically exterminated its historic minority Armenian population who called Turkey their homeland, most of whom were Christians. Roughly 1.5 million Armenians lost their lives. In honor of the genocide's centenary, Pope Francis will offer his April 12 liturgy for Divine Mercy Sunday, the first Sunday after Easter, for faithful of the Armenian rite. During the Mass, which will be celebrated inside St. Peter's Basilica at 10 a.m., Francis will also proclaim Armenian-rite Saint Gregory of Narek a Doctor of the Church. The 10th century priest, monk, mystic, and poet will be the first Armenian to receive the title. Mons. Dankaye stressed the importance of remembering events such as the genocide specifically because of the witness of the martyrs, who serve as “a prototype,” and also to prevent future violence. If the genocide and other similar events are not kept tucked away in our memories, history will repeat itself, he said, noting that 100 years after the genocide “the same scene repeats itself: decapitating. Crucifixions. Slaughter. Burning people. Starve them and block zones…It repeats itself.” Pope Francis, although he refrained from making any political statement on the still-sensitive topic, mentioned the genocide during his trip to Turkey in November. He expressed hope that the border between Turkey and Armenia would be re-opened as a sign of reconciliation. Even if things don't change right away, Francis' words will help, the priest said, because the Pope is able to express his message in “a very intelligent, very simple and very courageous way.” “This is difficult to find in diplomacy,” he said, but “Pope Francis unifies everything: the courage of the politician, the simplicity of the message. He does not offend but he also does not leave his audience in peace.” |
Shipping All items go via First Class. Items are shipped within 5 business days of payment. If you would like insurance, tracking, or to upgrade to priority or registered mail for an additional fee please contact us prior to checkout International Shipping: We do ship international but buyers are responsible for any customs/related fees. How do we Package our items? We do our best to securely package our items to prevent breakage we use all recycled materials so you can expect to see newspaper, bubble wrap, plastic bags, shredded paper, or a number of other materials in your package. What to do if an item arrives broken? Since we ship a lot of glass we expect that sometimes things will break in transit. If this happens please send us a message using the conversation button here on Etsy and if possible send us a picture of the broken piece. We will do our best to replace it with the same or comparable item at no additional cost to you. What happens when an item is returned to us as "adress undeliverable"? If an item is returned to us under these circumstances we will send you a message to confirm your address, if you respond with the same address that we already sent the package to we will ship it again at no additional cost because it was either a post office mistake or we addressed it incorrectly. However, if you respond with an address that is not the same as the one on the invoice we will ask you to confirm the new address a second time and you will be responsible for the additional shipping costs. |
A group of Chinese scientists have joined their North American peers in warning that North Korea’s Punggye-ri nuclear site could be on the verge of a dangerous collapse that could send a dangerous bloom of radiation floating over the border into Northern China. As we’ve previously reported, China has stepped up its radiation monitoring on the border after detecting unsettling seismic activity surrounding the test site. Two weeks ago, a team of American scientists warned that the mountain above Pyungge-ri appeared to be suffering from “tired mountain syndrome” - a phenomenon commonly observed around Soviet Nuclear test sites. And now in an effort to dissuade the North from carrying out another potentially destabilizing test, the South China Morning Post is reporting that a team of Chinese geologists warned their North Korean counterparts of a potentially catastrophic collapse of an underground nuclear test site on China’s doorstep during a briefing in Beijing last month. A day after North Korea said it detonated a hydrogen bomb at the Punggye-ri facility on Sept. 3, a senior Chinese nuclear scientist warned North Korea that future tests could blow the top off the mountain, causing a massive collapse with radiation bleeding from cracks or holes in the mountainside. Meanwhile, a researcher studying the radioactive risk from the North Korean nuclear programme at Peking University said China could no longer tolerate another land-based explosion. “China cannot sit and wait until the site implodes. Our instruments can detect nuclear fallout when it arrives, but it will be too late by then. There will be public panic and anger at the government for not taking action,” the researcher said. “Maybe the North Koreans themselves have realised that the site cannot take another blow. If they still want to do it, they have to do it somewhere else.” This could be one reason why the North hasn’t moved forward with another test, like it has repeatedly threatened to do, since then, even as North Korean Foreign Minister Ri Yong-ho announced at the United Nations that Pyongyang might consider detonating a “most powerful” hydrogen bomb over the Pacific Ocean. The Sept. 20 briefing covered a range of issues but North Korea’s nuclear tests topped the concerns for the Chinese government, according to Zhai Mingguo, a senior Chinese geologist who helped organise the meeting. “This is a big, sophisticated problem requiring multiple, systematic approaches. Our [meeting] is only a part of [the efforts],” he said. The North Korea delegation was headed by Lee Doh-sik, director of the Geological Research Institute at the State Academy of Sciences. “He is a top government geologist in North Korea, but he is not involved in the nuclear weapons programme,” said Professor Peng Peng, one of the Chinese geologists who met the delegation. The atmosphere was reserved but friendly, according to several scientists who attended the meeting. North Korea has conducted five of the six nuclear tests it has carried out since 2006 at Punggye-ri. The most recent blast set off low level tremors and dangerous landslides that alarmed scientists observing the site. Should the mountain collapse, the radiation released could threaten the entire hemisphere. It could even become a global threat. |
Following a story in the Evening Standard that suggests Nick Clegg’s wife’s firm is lobbying for Libya, Labour MEP Richard Howitt has written to the Deputy Prime Minister to clarify the position: Rt. Hon Nick Clegg MP Office of the Deputy Prime Minister 70 Whitehall London SW1A 2AS 22 February 2011 Dear Nick, I have known you over a long period and apologise for having to write in these terms, but I wanted to write to you directly concerning the information provided to me and which appears in today’s London Evening Standard, about the company in which your wife is a partner. The article claims that your wife’s firm is lobbying on behalf of the Libyan government during negotiations with the EU and, as a Member of the European Parliament serving on the parliamentary committee responsible for overseeing current negotiations between the EU and Libya, of course I have a direct responsibility myself for this question. I understand that your wife’s employment is recorded in the list of Ministers’ Interests published by the Cabinet Office. But given the sensitivity concerning human rights abuses in Libya at present, I would like you to clarify on whether the company’s representation of Libyan interests has been fully disclosed to the Cabinet Secretary in full compliance with the spirit of the Ministerial Code, section 7.3. Furthermore, as I am sure you are aware, the European Commission has established its register of Interest Representatives as part of the European Transparency Initiative, and it appears that your wife’s company has not been registered according on this register or to comply with its associated code of conduct. I would ask for this to be fully investigated, again with the objective of avoiding any suggestion of conflict of interest. In light of your own personal ministerial responsibility to introduce a statutory register of lobbyists, I believe it is imperative for the maintenance of public trust that a thorough investigation into this matter is conducted and concluded as soon as possible. I would be grateful if you could reply to me at your earliest convenience. Yours sincerely Richard Howitt Member of the European Parliament for the East of England |
Publication - May 17, 2016 - By Ian Campbell, Michelle Edwards, Tom Pedersen, Matt Horne, Merran Smith, Tzeporah Berman, Nancy Olewiler Seven members of B.C.'s Climate Leadership Team released the following open letter on May 17, 2016: May 16, 2016 The Honourable Christy Clark, MLA Premier of the Province of British Columbia Box 9041 Station PROV GOVT Victoria, B.C. V8W 9E1 Dear Premier, One year ago, you asked us to serve on the Climate Leadership Team and provide your government with advice on how to advance B.C.’s climate change plan. The motivation for the new plan was clear: while B.C. had been a leader on developing climate policy in Canada, and in fact around the world, the province’s carbon pollution was rising and stronger policy would be needed to get the province on track to meet our legislated emissions reduction targets. You asked us for recommendations that would enable the province to meet its 2020 and 2050 climate targets, maintain a strong economy, and provide support to the British Columbians most in need. You asked us to reach consensus across a group that included leaders from First Nations, business, academia, local government, the provincial government and environmental organizations. The process we worked through last year was difficult, but it was also successful. We managed to deliver in six months. Our work resulted in 32 recommendations that we provided to your government last November. The package of recommendations represents a mix of innovative thinking and compromise that fulfills our mandate and respects the different perspectives represented on the team. The recommendations provide a blueprint to help get the province back on track for our climate targets, stimulate innovation, create jobs, protect B.C. businesses and support rural communities. We advised your government to commit to the package of recommendations this year so that British Columbians and B.C. businesses have time to plan. This is particularly true of our recommendations to strengthen the carbon tax, which were central to the overall package. Committing to a next schedule of increases, closing gaps in its coverage and explaining how the revenue will be used will help reduce uncertainty, ease the transition to a low-carbon economy for emissions-intensive and trade-exposed sectors and families, and support investments in clean energy across the province. The reasons to move forward with this plan are stronger than ever. Climate change threatens our economy, our communities and our environment. To confront those threats, we need to increase our efforts to reduce fossil fuel use and better prepare ourselves for a changing climate. And as the world increasingly begins to act, the demand for clean energy is accelerating. The actions we take to increasingly shift to clean energy in the province will also help position B.C. businesses to provide the solutions the world needs. We want to see the province reach its climate targets; delay only increases the costs and makes it harder to succeed. We are thus concerned about the shifts in deadlines. You initially committed to having a draft plan in advance of the Paris climate talks last December and a final plan by this March. The draft plan was cancelled and the deadline for the final plan was pushed to June. B.C. is in no position to delay or scale back its efforts. The rest of Canada and the rest of the world have been taking action since B.C.’s initial climate plan in 2008, and B.C.’s increasing carbon pollution is taking us in the wrong direction. B.C. can’t be a climate leader if its carbon pollution is rising. As the federal government places a renewed emphasis on climate action, now is the time for B.C. to be articulating its next steps. The new federal-provincial relationship on climate change will be defined by the jurisdictions taking actions to significantly reduce their carbon pollution and B.C. should be among them. The Climate Leadership Team recommendations, implemented in their entirety, provide the blueprint for a B.C. climate plan to put the province back on track for the 2050 and interim 2030 targets. Anything less is not climate leadership. Sincerely, Chief Ian Campbell, hereditary chief, Squamish Nation Chief Michelle Edwards, Cayoose Creek Band Tom Pedersen, professor of oceanography, University of Victoria Matt Horne, B.C. associate director, Pembina Institute Merran Smith, executive director, Clean Energy Canada Tzeporah Berman, adjunct professor, Faculty of Environmental Studies, York University Nancy Olewiler, professor, School of Public Policy, Simon Fraser University CC: Honourable Catherine McKenna, Minister of Environment and Climate Change Honourable James Carr, Minister of Natural Resources Mr. Jonathan Wilkinson, Parliamentary Secretary Honourable Mary Polak, Minister of Environment Honourable Bill Bennett, Minister of Energy and Mines Honourable Shirley Bond, Minister of Jobs, Tourism and Skills Training Honourable Rich Coleman, Minister of Natural Gas Development Honourable Mike de Jong, Minister of Finance Honourable Peter Fassbender, Minister of Community, Sport and Cultural Development Honourable Todd Stone, Minister of Transportation and Infrastructure Mr. Jordan Sturdy, Parliamentary Secretary |
Google Street View sees the Almighty, fights crime, and even does self-portraits. It's a busy, relentless lifestyle. I guess what I'm getting at is... dude gets hungry once in a while, and you're coming along for the ride. Advertisement Wait. What happened to West Pacheco? Why does it say I'm still on it?! And how did Google Street View know I loved the Colonel's delicious fried chicken?! Advertisement And now the Street View driver is helping me park, all while continuing to screw with my directions by saying I'm still cruising peacefully down West Pacheco. Well, we're parked and ready for some finger lickin' goodness (and still "on" Pachero). Let's just hope no one actually uses Street View for, you know, legitimate directions—it's no wonder that people are "directed" of a cliff every now and again. [Google Street View - Thanks, Eric] |
This story is about Published Dec. 2017 Jason Garrett has to go! Why Cowboys should fire coach Share This Story On... Twitter Facebook Email / Illustration by Michael Hogue/The Dallas Morning News By Tim Cowlishaw , Staff Columnist Contact Tim Cowlishaw on Twitter: @TimCowlishaw ARLINGTON -- Jason's got to go. After the Cowboys' fifth home loss of 2017, one that decisively buried the club's playoff hopes, somewhere in between "How ya doin' guys" and "Merry Christmas," Jason Garrett was sweating. He was defensive about what had transpired in a 21-12 loss to Seattle, too effusive in praise of the visitors who produced more yards in penalties than in total offense and predictably uninterested in a discussion of his future. But the worst thing Garrett said was the same as the worst thing Garrett (and coordinator Scott Linehan) did Sunday, which is fail to give Ezekiel Elliott the ball on first-and-goal at the 3. Or on second-and-goal at the 2. Those misguided decisions produced a holding penalty that threw things in reverse and then -- a different kind of inexplicable -- Dan Bailey missed a 34-yard field goal attempt that would have cut Seattle's lead to six points with 5:40 to go. This game and this lost-cause season were over. Vernon Bryant/Staff Photographer Dallas Cowboys head coach Jason Garrett exits the field after losing to the Seattle Seahawks 21-12 at AT&T Stadium in Arlington, Texas on Sunday, December 24, 2017. (Vernon Bryant/The Dallas Morning News) Jason's got to go. On first down, the Cowboys went with the run-pass option, and Dak Prescott was stopped at the 2. Given a reprieve, the club stayed away from Elliott one more time (he finished with 97 yards on 24 carries in his return) and when Prescott threw incomplete on a rollout, Jason Witten was called for holding. It all went south, and it was all so completely unnecessary and flat-out wrong given that this game was all about Zeke's return and the man had 73 yards in the first half, and you better get stopped taking your best shot instead of a weak alternative, but Garrett didn't see any of that. "Those are easy [calls] afterwards, obviously Zeke is a very good player, we like him and we give him plenty of opportunities," Garrett said. "In that particular case, it didn't work out for us, and that was a big part of the game." Somewhere in the middle of his answer, I mentioned that those were easy calls right at the time, too, but he was oblivious either to me or to that as having been a reasonable option. Unbelievable they don't give it to Zeke on either of last 2 plays. Idiotic. — Tim Cowlishaw (@TimCowlishaw) December 24, 2017 Deserved booing after 1st-and-goal at the 3 becomes 4th-and-goal at the 17 without Zeke getting near the ball... — Tim Cowlishaw (@TimCowlishaw) December 24, 2017 As for whether taking a 13-3 team down to the 8-7 level and whether that could impact his future, Garrett said, "My job is to do the best job for this football team." It's his job until Jerry Jones says it isn't, and the Cowboys owner wasn't interested in even entertaining that discussion Sunday, despite the fact this team will have one playoff win after seven full seasons with Garrett in charge. Only Marvin Lewis maintains employment with a similar record, and even his days seem to be numbered in Cincinnati. Jones said he understood the feelings of frustration after losing a meaningful game, adding, "But I get to look at a lot of different things and have been around a lot of head coaches and coordinators. So I feel good about our head coach." Do I need to tell Jerry that all he's really saying there is that he has too often settled for mediocrity at the important coaching positions, a fundamental reason it's now 22 years and counting without an NFC Championship Game appearance for his once-storied franchise? Garrett isn't a bad person and he isn't an awful coach, but that's a pretty low bar for keeping someone around. There is nothing special on his résumé after 11 seasons as either the coordinator or head coach, mostly the latter. He has now coached four elimination games on either the final or next to last game of the season (2011, 2012, 2013, 2017) and lost all of them. In fact, if the Cowboys lose to Philadelphia, this will be Garrett's fourth 8-8 team in seven seasons. That is spectacularly average. Jones at least acknowledged what most of the 92,150 in the stadium and millions elsewhere were thinking at the critical moment in the fourth period of the critical game. "On hindsight, I wish, we all wish that we'd tried Zeke in there," he said. Not even Ezekiel Elliott's return could drag the Cowboys and their broken passing game into the playoffs Yet he indicates he plans to stay with a coach who did not view that goal line play-calling as anything more than good calls that failed to work. His focus is to get his team prepared for a worthless game in Philadelphia, one that will mean absolutely nothing to the Eagles, too, as long as they defeat the Oakland Raiders on Monday night. "Finish is a really important word for us, each play, each day, each game and we certainly have to finish the season the right way, and we have the right kind of guys to do that," Garrett said. Yeah, finish is a heck of a word when it comes to Jason Garrett and the Cowboys. There's always a chance in the coming weeks Jerry Jones will figure that out as well. Jason's got to go. With that loss, the #DallasCowboys won't be in the postseason. Do you think Jason Garrett is on the hot seat? RT for yes ❤️ for no pic.twitter.com/q0DqPgUpLv — SportsDay Cowboys (@dmn_cowboys) December 25, 2017 This Topic is Missing Your Voice. |
Thursday, July 23, 2015 TRENTON, S.C. (WRDW) -- The Edgefield County EMA Director say the clean-up at the train derailment in May is on schedule. Officials say the cars still left will be cut up for scrap metal. They say all hazardous materials are now gone from the site. Officials expect all rail cars and scrap metal will be removed by mid-August, and all clean-up should be done by September. UPDATE | Tuesday, May 26, 2015 TRENTON, S.C. (WRDW) -- The Edgefield County EMA says the clean up on all waste from the train derailment in April has nearly been completed. All grading and resurfacing in the area for proper drainage has also been completed. EMA says all that is left to do is to cut up or transfer the remaining train cars and clean underneath them. 24/7 security is at the train derailment scene until those remaining cars are completely removed. UPDATE | Friday, April 24, 2015 TRENTON, S.C. (WRDW) -- Edgefield County Emergency Management officials have said crews are still cleaning up after a Norfolk Southern train derailed earlier this month. Environmental workers are monitoring air quality and making sure there are no lasting environmental effects. Edgefield County EMA said they do not believe there will be long-term effects. Norfolk Southern is paying for off-duty Edgefield County deputies to monitor the area, where the derailment happened, around the clock. It's to make sure no one tampers with the area, Edgefield County EMA said. Crews plan their work on the tracks while trains aren't running. The work has not affected the schedule of trains traveling through the area. There is no definite timeline on when the clean-up will be finished. An end date is pending the weather and how fast work can get done. Sunday, April 12, 2015 TRENTON, S.C. (WRDW) -- Norfolk Southern said the track is open again after the train derailment Friday. Rick Harris with Norfolk Southern said all the cars derailed in Friday night's derailment are upright. The first train ran through the site of the derailment around 7:00 p.m. Sunday, Harris said. The evacuation for the four homes on Salters Pond Road was lifted as of 6:00 p.m. Sunday, Harris said. Saturday, April 11, 2015 TRENTON, S.C. (WRDW) -- Norfolk Southern crews have arrived in Edgefield County to assess the train derailment. Rick Harris with Norfolk Southern confirms there are 36 trains derailed and investigators are unsure of the amount of damage. Officials hope to get the cars off the track by late Saturday night to assess the damage to the track. There are about fifty to sixty people, including contractors working in shifts on scene. Harris said about 1,300 feet of roadbed and track will be rebuilt. The four homes on Salters Pond Road remain evacuated while crews bring in big equipment to fix the derailment, according to Norfolk Southern's Director of Corporate Communications Rick Harris. The train was coming from Savannah to Linwood, North Carolina and traveling the line from Augusta to Columbia, South Carolina, Harris tells 12. The derailment held off some trains in Augusta and Columbia but it is not a busy route so they did not shut it down, Harris said. Saturday, April 11, 2015 TRENTON, S.C. (WRDW) -- Emergency Management Director of Edgefield County said 36 cars are off the track where a train derailed Friday night. According to Suzy Spurgeon, Edgefield County director of Emergency Management, two locomotives are back on the rails, they never overturned, they just jumped the track. There are about 36 cars where six cars should be. Spurgeon calls that the 'crumpled' effect. Clean-up could take a few days. All tanker cars are secure and there are no leaks detected. However, an emergency plan is in place if they do start to leak, Spurgeon said. Four homes on Salters Pond Road are still evacuated while crews investigate, Spurgeon said. Saturday, April 11, 2015 TRENTON, S.C. (WRDW) -- Norfolk Southern officials have said 31 cars derailed when a train struck a tree across the railroad tracks Friday night. The train hit a tree at 8:45 p.m. Friday. It got lodged in the lead locomotives wheels and caused the train to jump the tracks, Rick Harris with Norfolk Southern said. Originally, South Carolina Emergency Management reported 39 cars derailed but Norfolk Southern confirms it was 31 cars. The train had two locomotives, 52 loaded cars, and 30 empty cars. It weighed 7,722 tons and was 5,405 feet long, Norfolk Southern officials said. The train was traveling from Savannah to Linwood, North Carolina. Some of the derailed cars were carrying ammonium nitrate, which is used as a fertilizer. Other cars were carrying anhydrous ammonia, which can be dangerous, according to Rick Harris with Norfolk Southern. Between 25 and 30 homes within a one-and-a-half mile radius of the derailment were evacuated and residents were sent to Mt. Canaan Baptist Church. By 1:00 a.m., it was determined there was no chemical leakage and all but residents of the three homes closest to the derailment were allowed to return home, Harris said. Norfolk Southern has said they don't know if there is damage to the tracks. Three “re-railing” companies are set to arrive Saturday to get the cars back up on the tracks. They should be able to determine the extent of the damage once the cars are re-railed, Harris said. No injuries were reported. Friday, April 10, 2015 TRENTON, S.C. (WRDW)- Crews on the scene said a Norfolk Southern train derailed on Salters Pond Road at Highway 121 Friday night between 9:00 p.m. and 9:30 p.m. A total of 39 cars derailed, according to South Carolina Emergency Management's Twitter account. No leaks have been reported and the scene has been turned over to Norfolk Southern. Earlier in the evening, Derrec Becker with the South Carolina Emergency Management Division confirmed 15 cars derailed. One car carrying ammonium nitrate spilled and another car carrying anhydrous ammonia did overturn but nothing spilled, Becker said. The other cars are not dangerous and have no spills, Becker said. Becker said there is no danger to citizens at this time. The anhydrous amonia could be dangerous if it spilled, but there is no evidence of a leak, Becker said. Becker said the ammonium nitrate that spilled is dry fertilizer and does not pose a risk. According to OSHA, exposure to ammonium nitrate could cause irritation of eyes, respiratory tract and skin. It could also cause a cough, sore throat, headache, eye redness and pain. It does not list any severe risks. Edgefield County Emergency Management issued an emergency evacuation. Residents living one and a half miles around Salters Pond Road at the intersection of Highway 121 were asked to evacuate immediately to Mount Canaan Church on Highway 25 in Edgefield County. Thirty people were evacuated as a precaution, according to SCEMD. At approximately 2:00 p.m., SC Emergency Management began allowing everyone, except those living on Salter Pond Rd., to return home. The Red Cross is on scene assisting anyone who was evacuated. Aiken County Hazmat was called to the scene for an unknown chemical spill. Massey also tweeted, "Emergency responders believe the scene is stable, but they will continue to monitor overnight. No plan to expand evacuation area." No injuries or fatalities were reported. |
NiteshadeSC2 Profile Joined August 2012 Canada 98 Posts Last Edited: 2012-12-13 07:18:24 #1 The 12 Days of Niteshade is Underway! I am an amateur caster, and I have a lot of fun doing it! I want to thank my fans for watching and to help promote the show during these holiday seasons so I decided a contest is in order where the winner will receive a prize. I have purchased a Razer Blackwidow Keyboard (the same one pictured) that the lucky winner shall receive. The fancy new 2013 model with the 10 key rollover. How do you win a free Razer Blackwidow keyboard? Easy. 1. Subscribe to my 2. Watch my Starcraft 2 videos from the 8th to 19th December 2012 3. During the 12 days of Niteshade, write down the 10 keywords I announce in the shows 4. After the last show on the 19th - submit an email to:giveaway@niteshade.tv The email must contain: 1 .Your Youtube username (to verify you subscribed) 2. The total of 10 Keywords I announced. 3. A mailing address where I can mail your keyboard should you win. On the 20th of December 2012 at 9pm EST, Submissions will be closed. On the 21st of December 2012, at 9pm EST - I will draw, at random a winner from the submissions. I will be doing this live on I mail you your keyboard (if you won). Start Watching! TL:DR - Watch Niteshade Website with rules PS: Since this thread is later than the start date of the contest: There May be Keywords in Epsiode #33, 34, and 35.... Just saying... Also, One last caveat. Thanks to WOOHOO! I am an amateur caster, and I have a lot of fun doing it! I want to thank my fans for watching and to help promote the show during these holiday seasons so I decided a contest is in order where the winner will receive a prize. I have purchased a Razer Blackwidow Keyboard (the same one pictured) that the lucky winner shall receive. The fancy new 2013 model with the 10 key rollover.How do you win a free Razer Blackwidow keyboard?Easy.1. Subscribe to my Youtube Channel 2. Watch my Starcraft 2 videos from the 8th to 19th December 20123. During the 12 days of Niteshade, write down the 10 keywords I announce in the shows4. After the last show on the 19th - submit an email to:giveaway@niteshade.tvThe email must contain:1 .Your Youtube username (to verify you subscribed)2. The total of 10 Keywords I announced.3. A mailing address where I can mail your keyboard should you win.On the 20th of December 2012 at 9pm EST, Submissions will be closed.On the 21st of December 2012, at 9pm EST - I will draw, at random a winner from the submissions. I will be doing this live on Twitch.tv I mail you your keyboard (if you won).Start Watching!TL:DR - Watch THIS VIDEO ON YOUTUBE Get keywords. 12 days. Email words. Enter to win in Draw.NiteshadePS: Since this thread is later than the start date of the contest: There May be Keywords in Epsiode #33, 34, and 35.... Just saying... Also, One last caveat.Thanks to Team Razer the Razer Blackwidow keyboard will be shipped worldwide! ANYONE CAN ENTER!WOOHOO! www.niteshade.tv LovE- Profile Blog Joined September 2010 United States 1961 Posts #2 I love Fee stuff! LovE.311 (NA) || @LovE_Sc2 EzZzZzZz Profile Joined August 2012 Canada 24 Posts #3 On December 12 2012 11:16 LovE- wrote: I love Fee stuff! Thats all fine and dandy... but i find it taxing.. + Show Spoiler + I tried Thats alland dandy... but i find it taxing.. I love potatoes MysteryMeat1 Profile Blog Joined June 2011 United States 3115 Posts #4 On December 12 2012 11:19 EzZzZzZz wrote: Show nested quote + On December 12 2012 11:16 LovE- wrote: I love Fee stuff! Thats all fine and dandy... but i find it taxing.. + Show Spoiler + I tried Thats alland dandy... but i find it taxing.. lol, that wasn't bad. lol, that wasn't bad. "Cause ya know, Style before victory." -The greatest mafia player alive Grimmyman123 Profile Joined January 2011 Canada 935 Posts Last Edited: 2012-12-12 02:37:01 #5 I've already noted it to Niteshade for correction, will be corrected in 1 hours time. Moderator, if you read this, can you change title to read Free not Fee please? Thanks! Win. That's all that matters. Win. Nobody likes to lose. NiteshadeSC2 Profile Joined August 2012 Canada 98 Posts #6 LOL Thanks guys www.niteshade.tv Grimmyman123 Profile Joined January 2011 Canada 935 Posts #7 On December 12 2012 11:19 EzZzZzZz wrote: Show nested quote + On December 12 2012 11:16 LovE- wrote: I love Fee stuff! Thats all fine and dandy... but i find it taxing.. + Show Spoiler + I tried Thats alland dandy... but i find it taxing.. Oh god... its ooozing with puns... lol Oh god... its ooozing with puns... lol Win. That's all that matters. Win. Nobody likes to lose. Freezd Profile Blog Joined April 2012 United States 139 Posts #8 Like my dad always said, if it's free... its for me. "I can't help it if I seem homophobic when the only gay people I know have pink highlights, wear hundreds of colorful bracelets and live at the local arcade playing DDR." - Youngminii aka_star Profile Blog Joined July 2007 United Kingdom 1543 Posts #9 hardly free, requires quite a bit of time FlashDave.999 aka Star NiteshadeSC2 Profile Joined August 2012 Canada 98 Posts #10 Niteshade A little... But not too much I hope! Can't make it too easyNiteshade www.niteshade.tv Daumen Profile Joined July 2011 Germany 1019 Posts #11 sweet ! ;D President of the ReaL Fan Club. MyTHicaL Profile Joined November 2005 France 987 Posts #12 On December 12 2012 19:49 aka_star wrote: hardly free, requires quite a bit of time Totally agree... I'm all for someone promoting their show but this requires subscriptions and watching it for what 10 days? z_z seems over excessive. Totally agree...I'm all for someone promoting their show but this requires subscriptions and watching it for what 10 days? z_z seems over excessive. StreetWise Profile Joined January 2010 United States 592 Posts #13 nsz.nightshade? Watched one episode. Still a lot of watching to do for this contest. I will not be poisoned by your bitterness Pucca Profile Blog Joined January 2012 Taiwan 1270 Posts #14 Well this will be an interesting night. I get to watch some casts, gain some codes and hopefully win myself a keyboard. Furthermore, I'm glad college is next year as I would be in Hawaii at this time next year @ Hilo. Master Chief Harrad Profile Blog Joined October 2010 999 Posts Last Edited: 2012-12-12 17:49:00 #15 On December 13 2012 00:33 MyTHicaL wrote: Show nested quote + On December 12 2012 19:49 aka_star wrote: hardly free, requires quite a bit of time Totally agree... I'm all for someone promoting their show but this requires subscriptions and watching it for what 10 days? z_z seems over excessive. Totally agree...I'm all for someone promoting their show but this requires subscriptions and watching it for what 10 days? z_z seems over excessive. True, time is money, but this guy is not a rich corporation, so it's vital for him to he get an exponential return on his investment (the keyboard + sponsored thread) True, time is money, but this guy is not a rich corporation, so it's vital for him to he get an exponential return on his investment (the keyboard + sponsored thread) Steelo_Rivers Profile Blog Joined January 2011 United States 1964 Posts #16 On December 12 2012 11:19 EzZzZzZz wrote: Show nested quote + On December 12 2012 11:16 LovE- wrote: I love Fee stuff! Thats all fine and dandy... but i find it taxing.. + Show Spoiler + I tried Thats alland dandy... but i find it taxing.. It took a toll out on me too... now i'm spent. It took aout on me too... now i'm spent. ok lyrlian Profile Blog Joined January 2011 Netherlands 257 Posts #17 I wish you goodluck with the promotion of your SC2 casting but I doubt this is the best way to spend your money. Most people will find it's WAY too much trouble to watch 10ish videos over a long time span to have a small chance of winning a keyboard. @lyrlian on twitter! Caster for ESET, WCS and various other events. NiteshadeSC2 Profile Joined August 2012 Canada 98 Posts #18 The goal behind this was twofold - to promote the show, but also to give back something cool to the guys who really like SC2 and esports. I think this will do it. I also hope that down the road I can continue to do contests and such depending on how things go. I hope you guys will watch, and get an entry into the contest - and if you do - I sincerely wish you all the best of luck! I really wish I could afford an even bigger prize pack - I really do. I put a great deal of thought into how I could make it interesting - but not so easy every single person in north american would enter. Watching video's is low effort, and aside from the last day (the 19th) - you can watch them in batches if your schedule permits. Ultimately, I had to find a balance. I know not everyong is going to like it, but hey - I tried.The goal behind this was twofold - to promote the show, but also to give back something cool to the guys who really like SC2 and esports. I think this will do it. I also hope that down the road I can continue to do contests and such depending on how things go.I hope you guys will watch, and get an entry into the contest - and if you do - I sincerely wish you all the best of luck! www.niteshade.tv Rainman5419 Profile Joined January 2011 United States 92 Posts #19 Thanks Niteshade. A lot of us understand you're not exactly rolling around in cash as an amateur caster, but the contest is cool and fun nonetheless. Member of UNT CSL, Season 5 CSL Champs! "The true test of a man’s character is what he does when no one is watching." -John Wooden Demicore Profile Joined October 2011 France 502 Posts #20 I won't be trying to get the Blackwidow either but the "Free Blackwidow" title on the left attracted my attention and prompted me to read the OP and check out some of your vids so good job on that at least. I think you're doing a good job, a better one than many of the more established casters out there. I don't know about everyone else but I never heard of you before simply because I never see your name on the TL bar listing the streams on the right. Perhaps trying to land a few casting gigs with the daily / weekly cups could be a good way to get your name out there some more? Cheers and good luck. "I love male nipples in starcraft; the two go together so well." ~Tasteless 1 2 3 Next All |
UPDATED Still griping about that Black Lives Matter op-ed Wesleyan University protesters want the school to create an anonymous system for students to report incidents of “bias, including microaggressions, perpetrated by faculty and staff.” It’s among five demands that the group handed to Wesleyan President Michael Roth after marching through campus to his office Wednesday. The group, which says it represents “students of color,” calls itself “Is This Why?” That’s a reference to Wesleyan’s current alumni fundraising drive, “This Is Why.” Like his New England colleague Carolyn Martin at Amherst College, Roth didn’t answer the specific demands of protesters but said he shares their “major goals.” UPDATED: Wesleyan president defends free speech, swats down demand for microaggression reporting system Reaction to the protesters and their demands on Wesleyan’s Yik Yak page was all over the map, with some commenters wondering how the school would judge a “microaggression” and whether professors could be retaliated against for giving out poor grades. That fear is very real among faculty, according to a state college professor who wrote in Vox this summer that his “liberal students terrify me.” ‘Mandatory Social Justice Workshops’ Is This Why’s demands start with a vague plea to be “holistically included” and not used to simply fill Wesleyan’s “diversity quota,” but they get more specific from there. They demanded Roth and other officials apologize for “perpetuating the vilification of students of color,” failing to “reach out” to them when The Wesleyan Argus published a controversial op-ed with a racial theme, and staying silent when “international tragedies occur outside of Europe,” such as November’s terrorist attack in Lebanon. The group wants Wesleyan to create a “transparency” website on its diversity initiatives like that at the University of Missouri, which preceded the racial unrest there last month. The school should hire an “equity advocate” who hosts “mandatory social justice workshops” for everyone but students, including public safety officers, so they know how to “appropriately interact with students from marginalized backgrounds.” Protesters demanded the establishment of a Multicultural Center within three years that would also provide funding for multicultural programs. Though it set today as the deadline for the apology statement and Roth’s promise to hire an equity advocate to start next year, Is This Why is giving Wesleyan until month’s end to say how “student input” will be incorporated into the bias-reporting system it envisions. The reporting system would apparently be included in end-of-semester professor evaluations by students. The group said it wants the proposed system to launch this spring. (Revisions to the professor evaluation system have been in discussion for the past two years.) The demand gives no direction on what qualifies as “bias” or a “microaggression,” or what the threshold should be for reporting, and such a system may not please the protesters in practice anyway. Conservative students at the University of Pennsylvania were rebuffed this spring by the school’s Committee on Open Expression, a watchdog on campus speech issues, when they complained that they could not safely express themselves in class because of biased professors. The committee explicitly cited “academic freedom” as the reason why it wouldn’t recommend creating a “course review” feature in which students could view professor-bias ratings submitted by their peers. Has the administration caved already? President Roth was present at the protest and responded Wednesday in a blog post, explaining that he “decided to join in their call for justice and community.” Though he agreed “there have been times when I or members of my administration have contributed to the perception that we didn’t understand the challenges” faced by the protesters, Roth didn’t directly address any of their demands. Roth did list initiatives already under way: “increase faculty diversity, support low-income students, add faculty in African-American Studies, diversify the population of undergraduates majoring in the sciences, [and] improve representation in the student support services staff.” Is This Why has yet to issue a formal response to Roth’s statement – the president said he’ll be responding to their demands “soon” – but the protesters kept up the drumbeat against Roth on its Twitter page. (Like Amherst College protesters, Is This Why didn’t reserve its Twitter handle in time to prevent another user from apparently impersonating its voice. The “IsThisWhy” Twitter profile is “suspended” – one of the triggers for which is “impersonating other accounts.”) Student Caroline Liu, The Huffington Post’s campus editor-at-large for Wesleyan, suggested protesters would secure at least a partial victory in a tweet Thursday allegedly quoting Chief Diversity Officer Antonio Farias. "We ARE working on the demands. You WILL hear from us shortly." – Chief Diversity Officer Antonio Farias #isthiswhy #studentblackout — Caroline Liu (@caroqliu) November 19, 2015 The Office of Equity and Inclusion, which Farias leads, did not respond to a College Fix inquiry. Funding questions One of the biggest outstanding questions about the list of demands is how they would be funded. One Yik Yak poster said the required money might result in cuts to other sensitive budgetary areas. The proposed Multicultural Center in particular would require the renovation of an existing building or the construction of a new building, on a campus with limited space. Financial aid grants could also be cut if the demands are met. One Twitter user shared a 2012 article with Is This Why on Wesleyan’s decision to end need-blind admissions because of “financial pressures.” Without need-blind admissions, “Wesleyan is far less open to working class kids, particularly [people of color] who want to attend,” wrote the user, an editor for an American socialist journal. Wesleyan’s endowment, which ensures stability during economic downturns, could also be tapped for the demands. DEVELOPMENT: Wesleyan president defends free speech, swats down demand for microaggression reporting system Like The College Fix on Facebook / Follow us on Twitter IMAGE: Cheryl Casey/Shutterstock, Yik Yak screenshots |
The American Motorcyclist Association announced today that they have fined Rockstar Energy Husqvarna’s Zach Osborne $7,500 for his last lap move on Monster Energy/Pro Circuit Kawasaki’s Joey Savatgy at the final round of Monster Energy Supercross in Las Vegas. After the race, in which Osborne clinched the 250SX East Region Championship, a protest was filed in regards to the incident. According to an AMA press release, after a complete review of the incident, including video and eyewitness accounts it was determined by the race director that Osborne was in violation of the rule Appendix A.2.c.17, which states: A2 General Offenses and Penalties i. The following offenses will be subject to disciplinary action by the Race Director and/or the competent bodies. This list is provided as guidance to licensed competitors and event credential holders but does not restrict AMA from invoking penalties for other actions detrimental to the sport that are not specifically contemplated herein. 17. Riding on or off the track at any time in such a manner as to endanger the life or limb of other riders, officials or the public. According to the AMA, an appeal was filed and the decision was confirmed. The protesting party did not agree with the severity of the penalty and chose to appeal the Race Director’s decision. An appeal hearing was then convened and all evidence presented by both parties were reviewed. It was determined by the appeals panel that the penalty was justified. The decision of the Race Director was confirmed and the decision of the appeals panel is final. No further appeal is possible. The penalty has no bearing on points, so Osborne is still the 250SX East Region Champion. Below is video of the incident in question. |
Oops. That’s what a Bowling Green State University student should be saying after she mistakenly and falsely identified a cover for a piece of equipment as a member of the Ku Klux Klan Yes, you’re reading that right. Red Alert Politics reports: After seeing a white, pointy figure in a classroom window at Bowling Green State University, a frightened student took to Twitter to post the image and dramatically state there was an “ACTIVE KKK group” at her school. The student’s tweet, posted on Sunday morning, apparently led to “concern among the student community demanding answers as to how the pointy white sheets made their way onto their hallowed grounds.” It even spurred a campus inquiry, which found there’s no presence of the hate group on campus. The university’s president, Mary Ellen Mazey, took to Twitter on Monday to debunk the KKK claim: We looked into this. We discovered it’s a cover on a piece of lab equipment. Red Alert Politics reports “the student who shared the original video was promptly mocked online for her paranoia.” Thanks for sharing, @autumpatrice. We looked into this. We discovered it’s a cover on a piece of lab equipment. pic.twitter.com/plkQTBr9HC — Mary Ellen Mazey (@PresidentMazey) January 23, 2017 Maybe next time she won’t be so quick to take to Twitter. Read the story. MORE: Oberlin College: Alleged ‘KKK Figure’ Possibly Just ‘a Person Wrapped in a Blanket’ Like The College Fix on Facebook / Follow us on Twitter IMAGE: Twitter screenshot |
The following is an exclusive excerpt from conservative columnist and 11-time New York Times bestselling author Ann Coulter’s upcoming book, In Trump We Trust: E Pluribus Awesome , in stores August 23: Everything that seems like a disability with Trump always turns out to be an advantage. If we were in the laboratory, designing the perfect presidential candidate, it’s unlikely we would have produced a tasteless, publicity‐seeking, coarse, billionaire, reality TV star. Ha! Look at how wrong we were. It turns out, that is exactly what we needed. The Miss Grundys of the party all say, I’ll tell you this, Donald Trump frightens me. He’s a vulgarian, a loudmouth, a boor. If the GOP’s real complaint with Trump is that they think he can’t win because of the trophy wives, the divorces, the bad grammar, and the gold fixtures, then why haven’t they been able to produce another candidate without those problems but with Trump’s issues? They claim they don’t mind Trump’s positions on immigration and trade—they just wanted a candidate more like Mitt Romney to take them. That’s a creature that doesn’t exist in nature. Close your eyes and try to imagine Romney saying the things Trump has said. He couldn’t survive two minutes of the abuse. The problem with trying to find an old‐school WASPy, understated, dry, less‐is‐more, antique leather, sturdy wood‐and‐brass type to take Trump’s positions is that all those people agree with NPR on everything. Their good taste is their undoing. Only someone who brags about his airline’s seatbelt buckles being made of solid gold would have the balls to do what Trump is doing. Being crude is an indispensable requirement. It gives him resistance to the opinion of Manhattan sophisticates. It’s extremely rare for people to take positions that will hurt them with their friends. Being pro‐choice in Hollywood: not brave. Being pro‐choice in Mississippi: brave. Trump lived among fancy Manhattanites. What he was saying on immigration—to say nothing of eliminating the carried interest deduction for hedge fund managers—was going to cost him friends. Trump didn’t care. He has no nerve endings for peer pressure. The standard riposte to someone who wants to restrict immigration is: You don’t understand—your positions are very gauche, very déclassé. They’re not shared by the people you want to impress. These are the opinions of ethnics in the outer boroughs. Other people would say, “Oh, my gosh—did anyone see?” Trump said, Yeah, I think I still want to build a wall. The sophisticates didn’t have a comeback. They’d never gotten that far with anyone else. The media successfully smeared Romney as an out‐of‐touch multimillionaire, whacking working‐class Americans with his polo mallet. He was helpless. Tasteful people don’t talk about themselves, and they certainly don’t talk about money. Not Trump! Early in Trump’s campaign, journalist Mark Halperin asked him about the “backlash against rich candidates like Mitt Romney—any chance of that with you?” Trump said, “First of all, he wasn’t rich.” And that was that. How do you attack someone for being rich who is constantly bragging about how rich he is? Yes, yes, I’m a WASP, too—it’s appalling, embarrassing, awful—but oh, my gosh, does it work! Luckily, voting machines register only yes or no—not yes, but I hate myself. Trump is like a Shakespearean “fool”: he seems crass because he speaks the truth. Fashionable people might cringe when Mike Tyson shows up at the inaugural ball as a guest of honor, but nobody else is giving us a wall. The Trump candidacy puts Democrats in an extremely awkward position. They are the party of elegance and fabulosity, but also claim to be the party of the “blacks and browns”—who see absolutely nothing wrong with Trump’s taste. Jay Z and Beyoncé may not like Trump’s positions, but, boy, they like his style. They’re asking themselves, How can a person of such taste be a Republican? He’s P. Diddy in the Hamptons, disturbing the neighbors with his parties. The more you think about it, the more you realize Trump has an awful lot of useful tools in his toolbox: he has all that on‐camera experience; he’s perfectly comfortable walking into a gaggle of microphones; he loves being in the limelight and he’s gotten really good at it. If Trump hadn’t been a “narcissist”—or, as we now see it, a self‐confident alpha male—he would never have raised all those awesome issues, and certainly would have backed down at the first yelp from the press. Americans would have had to watch in horror as he clarified that what he meant was that Mexico was sending us its David Livingstones and Niels Bohrs, to do the jobs Americans won’t do. In Trump’s first week running for president, he lost tens of millions of dollars for the “Mexican rapists” line alone. Univision dumped Trump’s Miss USA pageant; NBC dumped both the Miss USA and Miss Universe pageants; Macy’s dumped his ties; and ESPN dumped his Trump National Golf Club for the Celebrity Golf Classic. Asked about the lost businesses, he said, “I had disloyal people like Macy’s, and like others, ‘Oh, Donald, you’re a little controversial, we’re going to have to drop you, we’re going to have to’—I said, ‘I don’t care. The ties, what do they mean to me? [Motions to the moderator] He’s wearing one of my ties, by the way, it’s very nice. Very nice. I never liked them that much because they were made in China, so it never mattered that much.” If it takes a narcissist to do that, we need more narcissists running for public office. |
Little Roald was born in 1916, in Wales, where his father had started a lucrative shipping business. (He was named Roald after a famous Norwegian explorer; the proper pronunciation, apparently, is like RuPaul without the P.) Dahl had an idyllic childhood until the age of 3, when his older sister suddenly died and was followed, weeks later, by her heartbroken father. This was the beginning of a toxic tsunami of bad luck that would toss Dahl around for the rest of his life. When he was a boy, his nose was cut off in a car accident. (A doctor sewed it back on.) Then he was shipped off to boarding school in England, where he suffered all the traditional miseries. In World War II, he became one of the RAF’s most promising pilotsonly to crash his plane, on his first official day of flying, in the Libyan Desert. As he lay there fighting for consciousnesshis skull fractured, his spine wrenched out of place, his eyes swollen shut by burns, his poor reattached nose driven back into his facehis airplane’s machine guns, stoked by the heat, started shooting at him. (Dahl later mythologized this, telling people he’d been shot down.) After he’d recuperated, Dahl was sent to fight in the notorious Battle of Athens, in which twelve or so RAF fighters took on roughly 150 German planes. He managed to survive, but was plagued by health problems forever after: chronic stomachaches, numb fingers, debilitating back pain, and finally cancer. Strangely, the one thing Dahl never had trouble with was his teethbecause he had all of them removed, preemptively, when he was 21. He thought they were more trouble than they were worth and tried to talk everyone he knew into having theirs pulled, too. It’s hard to know whether to root for Dahl or for whatever hell-demon seemed so determined to bring him down. When Dahl became a parent, the bad luck continued. In New York, his 4-month-old son was hit so hard by a taxi that his baby carriage flew 40 feet and slammed into a parked bus, shattering his skull. (He survived, barely.) Two years later, Dahl’s 7-year-old daughter died of a rare brain inflammation after getting measles. Then his 39-year-old wife, the actress Patricia Neal, had an aneurysm and fell into a coma for three weeks. The man who emerged from this vortex of misfortune was excruciatingly complexit’s sometimes hard to know, reading Storyteller, whether to root for Dahl or for whatever angry hell-demon seemed so determined to bring him down. He could, at times, be thoughtful and charming. Sturrock reports that Dahl once wrote his daughters’ names on the front lawn, at midnight, with weed killer, then told them in the morning that it was the work of fairies. He gave much of his time and massive literary profits to charity. And he responded to family crises with almost incredible courage and ingenuityvirtues he assigned, not incidentally, to all the heroes of his stories. After his son’s accident, when most parents would have been catatonic with worry, Dahl helped invent a new valve that kept spinal fluid from pressing on his son’s braina tool that turned out to be so effective and cheap (Dahl refused to profit from it) that it was eventually used in thousands of other patients. When his wife emerged from her coma, Dahl coached her through a grueling (some said cruel) rehabilitation regimen that went on to revolutionize modern stroke treatment. But Dahl was also, much of the time, world-historically unpleasant. As a boy he wrapped his sister in pillows and shot BBs at her. As an adult he picked loud fights at dinner parties just to create a spectacle. He bullied editors, sold out friends, and insulted his children. Neal once recounted a charming moment from their first date: I remember his taking a sip of wine and looking at me for a long moment through the candlelight. I would rather be dead than fat,’ he said. He was, in many ways, a stereotypical mid-century wealthy imperial Brita bullhorn of prejudice and entitlement whose gaffes could be almost touchingly clueless. Even a stinker like Hitler didn’t just pick on them for no reason, he once said about Jews, while attempting to defend himself from accusations of anti-Semitism. In his stories, however, Dahl’s mean streak got translated, somehow, into a kind of edgy warmth. He was a control freak of delight. Dahl, who’d been a mediocre student, came to believe that his desert plane crash had literally changed his brain in a way that made him start writing stories. Early in his career, he was determined to be the next Hemingway or Fitzgerald. He published twistedly addictive short stories in Collier’s, Harper’s, and The New Yorker. These caught the eye of legendary editor Maxwell Perkins, who wanted to publish Dahl’s first novel. But Perkins died, days later, with the manuscript on his desk, and Dahl’s career as an important novelist never took off. Finally, he gave up on it and channeled his big ambition into minor forms: short stories and, later, children’s books. |
Remember Ian McElroy's Kickboxer? That was a really wild concept powered by the Subaru WRX engine. Well, Ian's at it again, he had been tossing around the idea of a diesel bike for some time and thought, "Hey, Subaru makes a diesel, it's more compact than the gasoline engine, it's powerful, gets great mileage, why not?" So he sat down and got to work. He says making the engine fit was relatively easy, but he also decided to differentiate the diesel bike from the original with new bodywork, swingarms, and a different turbo layout. Then, just for fun, he figured with all of that diesel power available, why not all wheel drive? So he worked up a second design with power going to both wheels. The standard bike features lightweight composite bodywork, under seat radiator, front mounted intercooler, LED lighting, and under engine turbocharger. For the AWD version power is transmitted to the front wheel by way of two chains, a jack shaft, idler sprocket, and a drive axle with a U-joint. Ian is a stickler for detail, on his first Kickboxer design, Ian said, "I designed the model to be accurate and realistic enough to build a real bike from. If I had the money I could take the CAD files straight to a machinist, and have the parts made today." I assume, this diesel model was created to the same standards. Wouldn't it be interesting to see someone with the funds, pick this up and build it? Here's an additional closeup image of the steering: |
China has reportedly summoned the US ambassador after Washington launched a direct military challenge to Beijing’s territorial claims in the South China Sea with naval manoeuvres near two artificial islands. State television reported that the Chinese vice-foreign minister, Zhang Yesui, had branded the move “extremely irresponsible” when meeting with the US ambassador to China, Max Baucus. Chinese authorities said earlier they had monitored, followed and warned US warship USS Lassen as it “illegally” entered waters near the disputed reefs, and urged Washington to “immediately correct its mistake”. The US defence secretary, Ash Carter, confirmed under questioning from the Senate Armed Services Committee on Tuesday that the warship had passed within 12 miles of a Chinese artificial island. The USS Lassen began its mission through waters near the disputed Spratly archipelago at about 6.40am local time on Tuesday. “The operation has begun … It will be complete within a few hours,” a senior US defence official told Reuters. US manoeuvre in South China Sea leaves little wiggle room with China Read more The guided-missile destroyer reportedly received orders to travel within 12 nautical miles (22.2km, or 13.8 miles) of the Spratlys’ Mischief and Subi reefs, which are at the heart of a controversial Chinese island building campaign that has soured ties between Washington and Beijing. Chinese officials were not informed of Tuesday’s mission, US officials said. Addressing journalists in Beijing on Tuesday afternoon, Lu Kang, a foreign ministry spokesman, said China was strongly dissatisfied with America’s actions, which he described as a threat to China’s sovereignty. But he refused to be drawn on whether China would consider a military response. “I will not answer hypothetical questions,” Lu said. “We hope that the US side will not take actions that will backfire.” Lu warned that further “provocative actions” might lead to accelerated Chinese construction in the South China Sea: “It would be a pity for us to realise that we have to strengthen and speed up relevant construction activities.” The Chinese embassy in Washington said the concept of “freedom of navigation” should not be used as an excuse for muscle-flexing and the US should “refrain from saying or doing anything provocative and act responsibly in maintaining regional peace and stability”. Earlier, as reports of the freedom of navigation operation emerged, China’s foreign minister, Wang Yi, warned Washington to “act prudently to avoid provocation”. Tensions and territorial claims in the South China Sea – the Guardian briefing Read more China’s official news agency, Xinhua, said Wang had urged the US to “think twice, and not act rashly and make trouble out of nothing”. Ian Storey, a South China Sea expert at Singapore’s Institute of South East Asian Studies, said Washington’s decision to deploy a warship rather than a smaller vessel underlined its determination to issue a powerful signal of intent. “They’ve gone in heavy. There is not much else heavier than that except an aircraft carrier,” he said. “They want to send a very clear message to China that they are serious about this.” Facebook Twitter Pinterest This image from the US navy purportedly shows Chinese dredging vessels in the waters around Mischief reef in the disputed Spratly archipelago in May 2015. Photograph: Reuters Rory Medcalf, the head of the National Security College at the Australian National University, said the operation was “a warning for China not to overplay its hand in signalling that America is not welcome in the South China Sea”. Storey said the “$64,000 question” was how Beijing would respond to the long-anticipated US move, which follows months of escalating tensions in the region, where Beijing has overlapping territorial claims with countries including Vietnam and the Philippines. “China will have to react – it cannot not react to this,” Storey said. “Nationalism in China is such that China will be expected to make a robust response to this. What’s behind Beijing’s drive to control the South China Sea? | Howard W French Read more “This is why the US has had to consider these operations very carefully,” he added. “They’d have to take into account how China would respond. And if China does move to challenge these operations using coastguard operations or naval ships then that raises the risk of a collision or worse.” China’s military buildup in the South China Sea – including the construction of a 3km runway capable of supporting fighter jets and transport planes – has become a major source of tension between Beijing and Washington. Subi and Mischief reefs were submerged at high tide before China began a massive dredging project in 2014. It now claims a 12 nautical mile territorial limit around the artificial islands, although the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea says such limits cannot be set around man-made islands built on previously submerged reefs. The US president, Barack Obama, said he had held “candid discussions” with his Chinese counterpart, Xi Jinping, over the issue during Xi’s recent state visit to the US. However, Medcalf said Tuesday’s operation, for which the navy had been preparing for months, indicated Washington was unsatisfied with the outcome of those talks. “Clearly there was a decision to wait until after the Xi Jinping visit and I suspect to base American behaviour on the outcomes of that visit,” he said. Map Areas of South China Sea claimed by surrounding nations Speaking earlier this month, officials in Beijing cautioned the US against “provocative” actions in the South China Sea. “China will never allow any country to violate China’s territorial waters and airspace in the South China Sea,” foreign ministry spokeswoman Hua Chunying said. China claims most of the South China Sea, one of the world’s busiest sea lanes, although Vietnam, Malaysia, Brunei, the Philippines and Taiwan have rival claims. Beijing says the islands will have mainly civilian uses as well as undefined defence purposes. But satellite photographs have shown the construction of three military-length airstrips by China in the Spratlys, including one each on Mischief and Subi reefs. Facebook Twitter Pinterest Satellite image of airstrip construction on the Fiery Cross reef in the South China Sea. Photograph: Reuters Pentagon officials have spent months lobbying for the White House to take a harder line on China’s actions in the South China Sea, which is a key global shipping lane, through which more than $5tn of world trade passes every year. “There are billions of dollars of commerce that float through that region of the world,” White House spokesman Josh Earnest told a news briefing. “Ensuring that free flow of commerce … is critical to the global economy.” Carter has accused Beijing of constructing “massive outposts” in the South China Sea that increase “the risk of miscalculation or conflict” in the region. “Make no mistake, we will fly, sail and operate wherever international law permits,” the US defence secretary said this month. “We will do that in the time and place of our choosing.” Pentagon officials said Tuesday’s mission, the first such operation since 2012, would followed by many others. Earlier reports said the ship would likely be accompanied by a US navy P-8A surveillance plane and possibly a P-3 surveillance plane, which have been conducting regular surveillance missions in the region. “The United States’ credibility is at stake here,” said Storey. “If it just did a one-off symbolic drive-by then US credibility suffers in the region so this I think is going to be the first of many such operations in the future.” If US relations with China turn sour, there will probably be war | Timothy Garton Ash Read more Pentagon officials say the US regularly conducts freedom of navigation operations around the world to challenge excessive maritime claims. In early September, China sent naval vessels within 12 miles of the Aleutian islands off Alaska. China said they were there as part of a routine drill following exercises with Russia. The Australian defence minister, Marise Payne, said her country had not been involved in Tuesday’s manoeuvres but indicated support for the US move. “It is important to recognise that all states have a right under international law to freedom of navigation and freedom of overflight, including in the South China Sea. Australia strongly supports these rights,” Payne said in a statement. |
Dear Reader, As you can imagine, more people are reading The Jerusalem Post than ever before. Nevertheless, traditional business models are no longer sustainable and high-quality publications, like ours, are being forced to look for new ways to keep going. Unlike many other news organizations, we have not put up a paywall. We want to keep our journalism open and accessible and be able to keep providing you with news and analysis from the frontlines of Israel, the Middle East and the Jewish World. The New York Times on Friday revealed the details of a compensation package Israel is set to receive from the United States after world powers and Iran agreed to a historic nuclear agreement in early July. Laid out in a letter dated August 19 to US Congressman Jerrold Nadler (D-NY), the president promised to increase American military aid for Israel in developing new anti-missile systems and tunnel detection technologies. "Our governments should identify ways to accelerate the ongoing collaborative research and development for tunnel detection and mapping technologies to provide Israel new capabilities to detect and destroy tunnels because they could be used to threaten Israeli civilians," Obama stated in writing. The Obama administration also promised to increase cooperation with Israel and its Arab neighbors to help fight the Islamic Republic's influence in the region, specifically Tehran's funding of the Houthis in Yemen, Hezbollah in Lebanon and Syrian President Bashar Assad.Obama: Netanyahu is wrong, the facts support Iran deal"My administration is prepared to enhance the already intensive joint efforts underway to identify and counter the range of shared threats we face in the region, as well as increase missile defense funding so that Israel and the United States can accelerate the co-development of the Arrow-3 and David's Sling missile defense systems," Obama added.Obama also emphasized Israel's new, unprecedented access to American weaponry, giving the Jewish State a strategic military advantage over its neighbors while stressing that if Iran does not live up to its commitments, force will not be off the table.While Israel has "unparalleled access to some of the most advanced military equipment in the world, including the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter, which will be delivered in 2016," assured Obama, he added "all of the options available to the United States - including the military option - will remain available through the life of the deal and beyond."Iran deal in a nutshellAs it stands now, 26 Senate Democrats have declared their support for the accord, and five others are leaning toward supporting it. As a result, it is becoming increasingly difficult for opponents of the deal in the Senate to find the 67 votes needed to override a veto, according to The New York Times. Join Jerusalem Post Premium Plus now for just $5 and upgrade your experience with an ads-free website and exclusive content. Click here>> |
A 21 year old woman attending Tory conference says that an anti-austerity protester threatened to rape her as she waited for a taxi outside the secure zone. The woman, a young Tory student who has asked Guido not to name her, tweeted from her private account: “Been outside the secure zone an hour and been threatened 3 separate times for walking down a road. Had to get a taxi 5 minutes up because some guy was threatening to rape me.” Speaking to Guido on condition of anonymity, the woman said: “I was on Oxford Road, I’d been at an event in the Palace Hotel. I was waiting for a taxi. He came up to me, barked in my face (don’t know why) I told him to get f**ked, he continued to stare at me and lick his lips/make actions and said “I’ll shag you” and then walked up the road backwards staring at me and continuing to bark. He just looked a bit scruffy and he barked at me (no idea why) and then was making threatening sounds and actions. I’m 21, 5 foot 3. As you can imagine: scared. There are others who feel threatened. The girl who I’m sharing a room with ran home in tears because she felt that threatened walking home.” “A kinder politics…” |
(CNN) DACA has brought hundreds of thousands of young people out of the shadows -- allowing them to live without fear, go to school, work, and contribute to America in countless other ways. These young people's dreams are part of the American Dream. And they make it more real for all of us. Today's decision by the White House to terminate DACA -- and that is effectively what it attempts to do -- will crush their dreams and weaken the American Dream for the rest of us. It's wrong because it's bad policy that solves no pressing problem and raises new ones. It's wrong because it's irresponsible, passing the buck instead of offering sensible solutions for immigration reform. Most of all, it's wrong because it's cruel to send these young people to places many of them have never lived and do not know. For them this is home. The United States is their home. Instead of punishing them, we should find ways to openly embrace them and to empower them to make their own contributions, as previous generations of immigrants have done. Congress should act immediately to protect their status and pave the way for their future and America's future. |
Kevin Resop did not grow up in an area well known for developing hockey players, but the warm climate of St. Petersburg, Florida didn’t keep the Mooseheads rookie goaltender from learning how to play the game he loves. “I initially started playing roller hockey when I was like six or seven-years-old and then there were tryouts at the rink for ice hockey and my brother and I decided to try it out and we ended up really liking it.” He admits Florida is not exactly a hockey hotbed compared to other states like Minnesota or Massachusetts but the sport is gaining popularity. “Probably like 10 years ago if you said the word hockey in Florida not everyone would know what you were talking about, but over the years it’s really been growing there especially since Tampa Bay won the Stanley Cup.” As it turns out, a member of that 2004 Stanley Cup Championship team is responsible for helping the Mooseheads netminder get his start in the game. “Pavel Kubina was my neighbour back in Florida and he actually bought me and my brother our first sets of equipment. He got me my first goalie pads and all that.” Having the star NHL defenseman living next door certainly had its perks for the Resop family. “We would go to almost every single Lightning home game and when they won the cup in 2004 we got to go in the locker room with him and celebrate with the team afterwards.” He says it’s a relationship that has lasted for many years. “My family still hangs out with him and we skate with him in the summer. He’s just been a huge help for me and my brother.” Resop played bantam and midget hockey at a highly regarded hockey prep school in Minnesota that has produced such high profile players as Crosby and MacKinnon. “I grew up playing in Florida until I was about 14 and then I went to Shattuck St. Mary’s for a couple of years and after that I played one season for the Boston Junior Bruins under-18 team.” His statistics were impressive last season in Beantown, posting a 1.84 goals against average and a .921 save percentage in 15 regular season games, leading to the Mooseheads selecting him in the 9th round of the QMJHL Entry Draft in May. “I was hanging out with some buddies at a lake near Boston when I got the call that Halifax had drafted me and I was pretty excited. It was great to share that with all of my friends that day.” The 17-year-old is a towering presence between the pipes, measuring 6-foot-2 inches tall and says that helped him earn the available roster spot with the Herd. “I think I showed that I could play in this league during training camp and used my size to my advantage and just made the saves I had to make.” Resop was the Mooseheads starting goalie in each of the first four games of the season, and was able to gain some valuable experience while Zach Fucale was away at Montreal Canadiens training camp. He has gone 1-2-1 with a goals against average of 3.95, stopping 90 of 106 shots fired in his direction. Kevin plans to soak in as much information from the 19-year-old Habs prospect as possible. “I just want to see how he goes about his business and handles everything, his work ethic and take pointers from him along the way.” He says even though his parents live in another country, they were still able to make it for the home opener against Moncton at Scotiabank Centre last week. “They came up for the home opening weekend and plan to be here every once in awhile to watch the games. They’re pretty excited.” ARCHIVES: KELLY BENT CONNOR MOYNIHAN DANNY MOYNIHAN BRANDON VUIC VINCE WATT MAX FORTIER JESSE LUSSIER JIM MIDGLEY AUSTYN HARDIE MATT MURPHY ANDREW SHEWFELT RYAN FALKENHAM |
May 13, 2014 I have some abiding memories of Kodi Burns ' playing days at Auburn. I remember the dazed look in his eyes as he tried to talk about Auburn's 14-13 loss at Vanderbilt in 2008. "This isn't what I came to Auburn to do," said Burns, who had split time at quarterback with Chris Todd. I remember the following April when Burns was told Todd would be the starting quarterback. Burns moved to wide receiver. Clearly facing the biggest disappointment of his athletic career, he stood before his teammates and told them he supported Todd and they should, too. I remember the ferocity with which he blocked for Cam Newton and Auburn's running game in 2010. And I remember the unbridled joy when he caught the first touchdown of his career and Auburn beat Oregon 22-19 to win the BCS national championship. It wasn't by accident that Burns was chosen by his teammates to present President Obama with an Auburn jersey when the team visited the White House. In the end, Burns finished his career as one of the more popular players in Auburn history. He was beloved not because of statistics but because of the kind of teammate and kind of man he showed himself to be. When Gus Malzahn , who as offensive coordinator chose Todd as the starter in 2009, went to Arkansas State as head coach, he hired Burns as a graduate assistant. And Burns followed Malzahn back to his alma mater. He has been a favorite of Auburn players, a confidant in stormy times. Friday, Burns was named running backs coach on Pat Sullivan's staff at Samford. It's his first fulltime coaching job. He'll be back in Auburn next November on the opposite sideline when the Bulldogs visit Jordan-Hare Stadium. I don't know anyone who has spent much time around Burns that expects him to have anything less than a stellar career as a coach and mentor of young men. Speaking of Samford's visit to Auburn next November, that game will have some interesting story lines. Samford coach Pat Sullivan, of course, is a former Heisman Trophy winner and an Auburn icon if ever there was one. He was on the committee that hired Malzahn. He spoke to the team at the SEC Championship Game. Texas A&M system regent Jim Schwertner told reporters on Monday during an update of the ongoing renovation of Kyle Field that he wants the stadium to be officially renamed "Kyle Field: The House That Johnny Built." He really said that. Until next time … Phillip Marshall is a Senior Writer for AuburnTigers.com. Follow Marshall on Twitter: Follow @PMarshOnAU |
"Cornwallis" redirects here. For other uses, see Cornwallis (disambiguation) Charles Cornwallis, 1st Marquess Cornwallis KG, PC (31 December 1738 – 5 October 1805), styled Viscount Brome between 1753 and 1762 and known as The Earl Cornwallis between 1762 and 1792, was a British Army general and official. In the United States and the United Kingdom he is best remembered as one of the leading British generals in the American War of Independence. His surrender in 1781 to a combined American and French force at the Siege of Yorktown ended significant hostilities in North America. He also served as a civil and military governor in Ireland and India; in both places he brought about significant changes, including the Act of Union in Ireland, and the Cornwallis Code and the Permanent Settlement in India. Born into an aristocratic family and educated at Eton and Cambridge, Cornwallis joined the army in 1757, seeing action in the Seven Years' War. Upon his father's death in 1762 he became Earl Cornwallis and entered the House of Lords. From 1766 until 1805 he was Colonel of the 33rd Regiment of Foot.[1] He next saw military action in 1776 in the American War of Independence. Active in the advance forces of many campaigns, in 1780 he inflicted an embarrassing defeat on the American army at the Battle of Camden. He also commanded British forces in the March 1781 Pyrrhic victory at Guilford Court House. Cornwallis surrendered his army at Yorktown in October 1781 after an extended campaign through the Southern states, marked by disagreements between him and his superior, General Sir Henry Clinton. Despite this defeat, Cornwallis retained the confidence of successive British governments and continued to enjoy an active career. Knighted in 1786, he was in that year appointed to be Governor-General and commander-in-chief in India. There he enacted numerous significant reforms within the East India Company and its territories, including the Cornwallis Code, part of which implemented important land taxation reforms known as the Permanent Settlement. From 1789 to 1792 he led British and Company forces in the Third Anglo-Mysore War to defeat the Mysorean ruler Tipu Sultan. Returning to Britain in 1794, Cornwallis was given the post of Master-General of the Ordnance. In 1798 he was appointed Lord Lieutenant and Commander-in-chief of Ireland, where he oversaw the response to the 1798 Irish Rebellion, including a French invasion of Ireland, and was instrumental in bringing about the Union of Great Britain and Ireland. Following his Irish service, Cornwallis was the chief British signatory to the 1802 Treaty of Amiens and was reappointed to India in 1805. He died in India not long after his arrival. Early life and family Cornwallis was born in Grosvenor Square in London, though his family's estates were in Kent. He was the eldest son of Charles Cornwallis, 5th Baron Cornwallis. His mother, Elizabeth, was the daughter of Charles Townshend, 2nd Viscount Townshend, and niece of Sir Robert Walpole. His uncle, Frederick, was Archbishop of Canterbury. Frederick's twin brother, Edward, was a military officer, colonial governor, and founder of Halifax, Nova Scotia. His brother William became an Admiral in the Royal Navy. His other brother, James, eventually inherited the earldom from Cornwallis's son, Charles. The family was established at Brome Hall, near Eye, Suffolk, in the 14th century, and its members would represent the county in the House of Commons over the next three hundred years. Frederick Cornwallis, created a Baronet in 1627, fought for King Charles I, and followed King Charles II into exile. He was made Baron Cornwallis, of Eye in the County of Suffolk, in 1661, and by judicious marriages his descendants increased the importance of his family. Early military career Cornwallis was educated at Eton College and Clare College, Cambridge. While at Eton, he received an injury to his eye by an accidental blow while playing hockey, from Shute Barrington, later Bishop of Durham.[2] He obtained his first commission as Ensign in the 1st Foot Guards, on 8 December 1757.[3] He then sought and gained permission to engage in military studies abroad. After travelling on the continent with a Prussian officer, Captain de Roguin, he studied at the military academy of Turin.[4] Upon completion of his studies in Turin in 1758, he traveled to Geneva, where he learned that British troops were to be sent to the Continent in the Seven Years' War. Although he tried to reach his regiment before it sailed from the Isle of Wight, he learnt upon reaching Cologne that it had already sailed. He managed instead to secure an appointment as a staff officer to Lord Granby.[5] A year later, he participated at the Battle of Minden, a major battle that prevented a French invasion of Hanover. After the battle, he purchased a captaincy in the 85th Regiment of Foot. In 1761, he served with the 12th Foot and was promoted to Brevet Lieutenant-Colonel. He led his regiment in the Battle of Villinghausen on 15–16 July 1761, and was noted for his gallantry. In 1762 his regiment was involved in heavy fighting during the Battle of Wilhelmsthal. A few weeks later they defeated Saxon troops at the Battle of Lutterberg and ended the year by participating in the Siege of Cassel.[6] Parliament, politics, and marriage In January 1760 Cornwallis became a Member of Parliament, entering the House of Commons for the village of Eye in Suffolk. He succeeded his father as 2nd Earl Cornwallis in 1762, which resulted in his elevation to the House of Lords.[6] He became a protege of the leading Whig magnate, and future Prime Minister, Lord Rockingham.[7] He was one of five peers who voted against the 1765 Stamp Act out of sympathy with the colonists.[8] In the following years, he maintained a strong degree of support for the colonists during the tensions and crisis that led to the War of Independence.[9] On 14 July 1768 he married Jemima Tullekin Jones, daughter of a regimental colonel.[10] The union was, by all accounts, happy. They settled in Culford, Suffolk, where their children, Mary (28 June 1769 – 17 July 1840), and Charles were born. Jemima died on 14 April 1779.[11] American War of Independence During the postwar years, Cornwallis had remained active in military matters. He became colonel of the 33rd Regiment of Foot in 1766.[8] On 29 September 1775 he was promoted to major general. With the outbreak of the war in North America, Cornwallis put his previous misgivings aside and sought active service; proposing an expedition to the southern colonies.[12] Early campaigns Promoted to lieutenant general in North America, he began his service in 1776 under General Sir Henry Clinton with the failed Siege of Charleston. He and Clinton then sailed for New York City, where they participated in General William Howe's campaign for New York City. Cornwallis was often given a leading role during this campaign; his division was in the lead at the Battle of Long Island, and he chased the retreating George Washington across New Jersey after the city fell.[14] Howe recognized the successful close of the campaign "much to the honor of his lordship and the officers and soldiers under his command."[15] General Howe granted Cornwallis leave in December 1776; however it was cancelled after Washington launched his surprise attack on Trenton on 26 December. Howe ordered Cornwallis to return to New Jersey to deal with Washington.[15] Cornwallis gathered together garrisons scattered across New Jersey and moved them towards Trenton. On 2 January 1777, as he advanced on Trenton, his forces were engaged in extended skirmishing that delayed the army's arrival at Washington's position on the Assunpink Creek until late in the day. Cornwallis was unable to dislodge Washington in the battle that followed.[17] Cornwallis prepared his troops to continue the assault of Washington's position the next day, but critically failed to send out adequate patrols to monitor the Americans. During the night, Washington's forces slipped around Cornwallis's and attacked the British outpost at Princeton. Washington's success was aided by a deception: he had men maintain blazing campfires and keep up sounds of camp activity during his movement.[18] Cornwallis spent the winter in New York and New Jersey, where the forces under his command were engaged in ongoing skirmishes with the Americans. Cornwallis continued to serve under Howe on his campaign for control of the rebel capital, Philadelphia. Cornwallis was again often in an advance role, leading the flanking manoeuvre at the Battle of Brandywine,[20] and playing key roles at Germantown and Fort Mercer.[21][22] With the army in winter quarters in Philadelphia, Cornwallis finally returned home for leave.[23] Upon his return in 1778, Howe had been replaced by Clinton as commander in chief, and Cornwallis was now second in command.[24] The entry of France into the war prompted the British leaders to redeploy their armed forces for a more global war, and Philadelphia was abandoned. Cornwallis commanded the rearguard during the overland withdrawal to New York City and played an important role in the Battle of Monmouth on 28 June 1778. After a surprise attack on the British rearguard, Cornwallis launched a counter-attack which checked the enemy advance.[25] Even though Clinton praised Cornwallis for his performance at Monmouth, he eventually came to blame him for failing to win the day.[26] In November 1778, Cornwallis once more returned to England to be with his ailing wife Jemima, who died in February 1779.[27] Southern theatre Cornwallis returned to America in July 1779, where he was to play a central role as the lead commander of the British "Southern strategy" (which was to invade the south on the assumption that a significantly more Loyalist population would rise up and assist in putting the rebellion down).[28] At the end of 1779, Henry Clinton and Cornwallis transported a large force south and initiated the second siege of Charleston during the spring of 1780, which resulted in the surrender of the Continental forces under Benjamin Lincoln.[29] After the siege of Charleston and the destruction of Abraham Buford's Virginia regiments at Waxhaw, Clinton returned to New York, leaving Cornwallis in command in the south.[30][31] The relationship between Clinton and Cornwallis had noticeably soured during the Charleston campaign, and they were barely on speaking terms when Clinton left.[32] The task Clinton left Cornwallis with was to, first and foremost, preserve the gains made by taking Charleston, and only then engage in offensive moves.[33] Clinton's orders gave Cornwallis wide latitude in how to achieve the goal of pacifying both South and North Carolina, after which Clinton expected Cornwallis to move into Virginia. Clinton wrote, "I should wish you to assist in operations which will certainly be carried on in the Chesapeake as soon as we are relieve from our apprehension of a superior fleet and the season will admit ..."[34] However, Clinton provided Cornwallis with a relatively modest force of British, German, and provincial (Loyalist) regiments—about 3,000 men—with which to accomplish all of this.[35] The forces he was given to accomplish this were limited by the necessity of keeping a large British force in New York under Clinton to shadow Washington. Cornwallis was expected to recruit more Loyalists, who were believed to be more numerous in the southern colonies.[36] Cornwallis established a series of outposts in South Carolina, but keeping communication and supply lines open was an ongoing challenge. Supplies not available locally (like uniforms, camp gear, arms, and ammunition) were delivered all too infrequently, supply ships were frequent targets of local privateers, and bad weather impeded the work.[37] In order to help provide fresh food and forage for his troops, Cornwallis established two commissioners. The first was responsible for administering goods confiscated from Patriots (he avoided confiscating supplies from Loyalists since he depended on them for manpower and intelligence), and the second for administering land that was confiscated. A chronic shortage of hard currency (another supply only infrequently delivered to Charleston) made it difficult to purchase supplies from any source, either Patriot or Loyalist.[38] Cornwallis also attempted to reestablish civil authority under British or Loyalist oversight. Although these attempts met with limited success, they were continually undermined by Patriot activity, both political and military, and the indifferent abuses of British and Loyalist forces. Patriot militia companies constantly harassed Loyalists, small British units, and supply and communication lines.[39][40] In August 1780 Cornwallis' forces met a larger but relatively untried army under the command of Horatio Gates at the Battle of Camden, where they inflicted heavy casualties and routed part of the force.[41][42] This served to keep South Carolina clear of Continental forces, and was a blow to rebel morale.[43] The victory added to his reputation, although the rout of the American rebels had as much to do with the failings of Gates (whose rapid departure from the battlefield was widely noted) as it did the skill of Cornwallis.[44][45] In London, Cornwallis was perceived as a hero, and was viewed by many there as the right man to lead the British forces to victory over the rebels.[46] As the opposition seemed to melt away, Cornwallis optimistically began to advance north into North Carolina while militia activity continued to harass the troops he left in South Carolina.[47] Attempts by Cornwallis to rally Loyalist support were dealt significant blows when a large gathering of them was defeated at Kings Mountain,[48] only a day's march from Cornwallis and his army,[49] and another large detachment of his army was decisively defeated at Cowpens.[50] He then clashed with the rebuilt Continental army under General Nathanael Greene at Guilford Court House in North Carolina, winning a Pyrrhic victory with a bayonet charge against a numerically superior enemy.[51] In the battle, he controversially ordered grape shot to be fired into a mass of combat that resulted in friendly casualties but helped break the American line.[52] Cornwallis then moved his forces to Wilmington on the coast to resupply. Cornwallis himself had generally been successful in his battles, but the constant marching and the losses incurred had shrunk and tired out his army.[53] Greene, whose army was still intact after the loss at Guilford Courthouse, shadowed Cornwallis toward Wilmington, but then crossed into South Carolina, where over the course of several months American forces regained control over most of the state.[54] Cornwallis received dispatches in Wilmington informing him that another British army under Generals William Phillips and Benedict Arnold had been sent to Virginia. Believing that North Carolina could not be subdued unless its supply lines from Virginia were cut, he decided to join forces with Phillips.[55] Virginia campaign On arrival in Virginia, Cornwallis took command of Phillips' army. Phillips, a personal friend of Cornwallis, died one week before Cornwallis reached his position at Petersburg.[56] He then sought to fulfil orders Clinton had given to Phillips, and raided the Virginia countryside, destroying American military and economic targets.[57] In March 1781, in response to the threat posed by Arnold and Phillips, General Washington had dispatched the Marquis de Lafayette to defend Virginia.[58] The young Frenchman had 3,200 men at his command, but British troops under Cornwallis' command totalled 7,200.[57][59] Lafayette skirmished with Cornwallis, avoiding a decisive battle while gathering reinforcements. It was during this period that Cornwallis and Clinton exchanged a series of letters in which Clinton issued a number of confusing, contradictory, and not entirely forceful orders.[60] Cornwallis eventually received firm orders from Clinton to choose a position on the Virginia Peninsula—referred to in contemporary letters as the "Williamsburg Neck"—and construct a fortified naval post to shelter ships of the line.[61] In complying with this order, Cornwallis put himself in a position to become trapped. With the arrival of the French fleet under the Comte de Grasse and General Washington's combined French-American army, Cornwallis found himself cut off. After the Royal Navy fleet under Admiral Thomas Graves was defeated by the French at the Battle of the Chesapeake, and the French siege train arrived from Newport, Rhode Island, his position became untenable.[62] He surrendered after about three weeks' siege to General Washington and the French commander, the Comte de Rochambeau, on 19 October 1781.[63] Cornwallis, apparently not wanting to face Washington, claimed to be ill on the day of the surrender, and sent Brigadier General Charles O'Hara in his place to surrender his sword formally. Washington had his second-in-command, Benjamin Lincoln, accept Cornwallis' sword.[64] Return to Britain Cornwallis returned to Britain with Benedict Arnold, and they were cheered when they landed in Britain on 21 January 1782.[65] His surrender did not mark the end of the war, though it ended major fighting in the American theatre. Because he was released on parole, Cornwallis refused to serve again until the war came to an end in 1783. An attempt failed to exchange him for[66] Henry Laurens, an American diplomat who was released from the Tower of London in anticipation that Cornwallis would be freed from his parole.[67] His tactics in America, especially during the southern campaign, were a frequent subject of criticism by his political enemies in London, principally General Clinton, who tried to blame him for the failures of the southern campaign.[68] This led to an exchange of pamphlets between the two men in which Cornwallis had much the better of the argument.[69] Cornwallis also retained the confidence of King George III and the government of the earl of Shelburne, but he was placed in a financially precarious state by his inability to be on active duty.[70] In August 1785 he was sent to Prussia as an ambassador to the court of Frederick the Great to sound out a possible alliance.[71] He attended manoeuvres along with the Duke of York where they encountered his old opponent Lafayette.[72] In October of 1785, Cornwallis wrote dismissively of Prussian military manoveures while in Hanover, writing that: ''Their manoeuvres were such as the worst General in England would be hooted at for practising; two lines coming up within six yards of one another, and firing in one another's faces till they had no ammunition left: nothing could be more ridiculous.''[73] Governor-General of India In 1786 Cornwallis was made a Knight Companion of the Most Noble Order of the Garter.[74] The same year he accepted appointment as Governor-General and commander in chief in India. He had in 1782 been offered the governor-generalship only, but refused the post until he also received military command as well.[75] Reforms Cornwallis engaged in reforms of all types, that affected many areas of civil, military, and corporate administration. According to historian Jerry Dupont, Cornwallis was responsible for "laying the foundation for British rule throughout India and setting standards for the services, courts and revenue collection that remained remarkably unaltered almost to the end of the British era."[76] He also enacted important reforms in the operations of the British East India Company and, with the notable exception of the Kingdom of Mysore, managed to keep the company out of military conflicts during his tenure. Prior to Cornwallis's tenure, company employees were allowed to trade on their own accounts and use company ships to send their own goods back to Europe. This practice was tolerated when the company was profitable, but by the 1780s the company's finances were not in good shape. Cornwallis eliminated the practice, increasing employee salaries in compensation. He also worked to reduce nepotism and political favouritism, instituting the practice of merit-based advancement.[77] Criminal and civil justice systems in the company's territories were a confusing overlay of legal systems, jurisdictions, and methods of administration. Cornwallis had the company take over the few remaining judicial powers of the Nawab of Bengal, the titular local ruler of much of the Bengal Presidency, and gave some judicial powers to company employees. In 1790 he introduced circuit courts with company employees as judges, and set up a court of appeals in Calcutta. He had the legal frameworks of Muslim and Hindu law translated into English, and promulgated administrative regulations and a new civil and criminal code. This work, introduced in 1793, was known as the Cornwallis Code. One consequence of the code was that it instituted a type of racism, placing the British as an elite class on top of the complex status hierarchy of caste and religion that existed in India at the time.[78] Cornwallis held racist views, in a manner common at the time; of mixed European-Indians he wrote, "...as on account of their colour & extraction they are considered in this country as inferior to Europeans, I am of opinion that those of them who possess the best abilities could not command that authority and respect which is necessary in the due discharge of the duty of an officer."[79] Cornwallis's attitude toward the lower classes did, however, include a benevolent and somewhat paternalistic desire to improve their condition. He introduced legislation to protect native weavers who were sometimes forced into working at starvation wages by unscrupulous company employees, outlawed child slavery, and established in 1791 a Sanskrit college for Hindus that is now the Government Sanskrit College in Benares.[80] He also established a mint in Calcutta that, in addition to benefiting the poor by providing a reliable standard currency, was a forerunner of India's modern currency.[81] Part of the Cornwallis Code was an important land taxation reform known in India as the Permanent Settlement. This reform permanently altered the way the company collected taxes in its territories, by taxing landowners (known as zamindars) based on the value of their land and not necessarily the value of its produce. In the minds of Cornwallis and its architects, the reforms would also protect land tenants (ryots) from the abusive practices of the zamindars intended to maximize production. Cornwallis, a landed gentleman himself, especially believed that a class of landed gentry would naturally concern themselves with the improvement of the lands, thus also improving the condition of its tenants.[82] Nevertheless, the Permanent Settlement effectively left the peasants at the mercy of the landowners. While the Company fixed the land revenue to be paid by the landowners, the zamindars were left free to extract as much as they could from the peasantry[83] Diplomacy and war with Mysore General Lord Cornwallis receiving Tipoo Sultan's sons as hostages, by , by Robert Home , c. 1793 Cornwallis had been sent to India with instructions to avoid conflict with the company's neighbors. Early in his tenure he abrogated agreements with the Maratha Empire and the Nizam of Hyderabad that he saw as violating the 1784 Treaty of Mangalore that ended the Second Anglo-Mysore War. This ensured the company's non-involvement in the Maratha-Mysore War (1785–1787).[84] He was, however, manouevred into the establishment of a new company based at Penang (in present-day Malaysia), where conflict was avoided when he agreed to pay a stipend to the local rajah for use of the base. Fort Cornwallis in Penang is named for Cornwallis.[85] The King of Nepal appealed to Cornwallis in 1792 for military assistance. Cornwallis declined the king's request, sending instead Colonel William Kirkpatrick to mediate the dispute. Kirkpatrick was the first Englishman to see Nepal; by the time he reached Kathmandu in 1793, the parties had already resolved their dispute.[86][87] The company was unavoidably drawn into war with Mysore in 1790. Tipu Sultan, Mysore's ruler, had expressed contempt for the British not long after signing the 1784 Treaty of Mangalore, and also expressed a desire to renew conflict with them.[84] In late 1789 he invaded the Kingdom of Travancore, a company ally according to that treaty, because of territorial disputes and Travancore's harbouring of refugees from other Mysorean actions. Cornwallis ordered company and Crown troops to mobilize in response. The 1790 campaign against Tipu was conducted by General William Medows, and it was a limited success. Medows successfully occupied the Coimbatore district, but Tipu counterattacked and was able to reduce the British position to a small number of strongly held outposts. Tipu then invaded the Carnatic, where he attempted unsuccessfully to draw the French into the conflict. Because of Medows' weak campaigning, Cornwallis personally took command of the British forces in 1791.[88] Political cartoon by James Gillray making fun of Cornwallis after his retreat from Seringapatam When the war broke out, Cornwallis negotiated alliances with the Marathas and Hyderabad.[89][90] Cornwallis ascended the Eastern Ghats to reach the Deccan Plateau in February 1791.[91] After successfully besieging Bangalore, Cornwallis then joined forces with Hyderabadi forces that he described as "extremely defective in almost every point of military discipline", and their presence in the army ultimately presented more difficulties than assistance.[92] These forces then marched toward the Mysorean capital at Seringapatam, compelling Tipu to retreat into the city at the Battle of Arakere on 15 May. Dwindling provisions, exacerbated by Tipu's slash-and-burn tactics, forced Cornwallis to abandon the idea of besieging Seringapatam that season, so he retreated to Bangalore.[93][94] In January 1792 the army, now well provisioned, set out for Seringapatam. Arriving before the city on 5 February, Cornwallis quickly eliminated Tipu's defensive positions outside the city, and then began siege operations. Tipu requested negotiations on 23 February, and peace was agreed on 18 March. Cornwallis and his allies demanded the cession of half of Mysorean territory, much of which went to the allies. As a guarantee of Tipu's performance, two of his sons were delivered to Cornwallis as hostages.[95] Cornwallis and other British commanders, in a move appreciated by their soldiers, donated prize money awarded them to be distributed among the rank and file.[96] For his success in conducting the war, Cornwallis was created Marquess Cornwallis in 1792,[97] although he did not learn of it until the following year.[98] He returned to England the following year, and was succeeded by Sir John Shore.[99] Master of the Ordnance Upon his return to Britain in 1794, he found it militarily engaged in the French Revolutionary Wars. After he was sent on an ultimately fruitless diplomatic mission to stop the fighting, he was appointed master of the ordnance, a post he held until 1798.[100] In this position he was responsible for much of the British Army's military infrastructure, overseeing its storage depots and supply infrastructure, as well as commanding its artillery and engineering forces. He oversaw improvements to Britain's coastal defences, and was able to expand Woolwich Academy's artillery training program to address a significant shortage of qualified artillery officers. His attempts to significantly reform the military were hampered by the ongoing war.[101] Lord Lieutenant of Ireland In June 1798 he was appointed Lord Lieutenant of Ireland and Commander-in-Chief, Ireland. His appointment, which had been discussed as early as 1797, was made in response to the outbreak in late May of the Irish Rebellion of 1798.[102] His appointment was greeted unfavourably by the Irish elite, who preferred his predecessor Lord Camden, and suspected he had liberal sympathies with the predominantly Catholic rebels. However, he struck up a good working relationship with Lord Castlereagh, whom he had appointed as Chief Secretary for Ireland.[103] In his combined role as both Lord Lieutenant and Commander-in-Chief of the Royal Irish Army Cornwallis oversaw the defeat of both the Irish rebels and a French invasion force led by General Jean Humbert that landed in Connacht in August 1798. Panicked by the landing and the subsequent British defeat at the Battle of Castlebar, Pitt despatched thousands of reinforcements to Ireland, swelling British forces there to 60,000.[104] The French invaders were defeated and forced to surrender at the Battle of Ballinamuck, after which Cornwallis ordered the execution by lot of a number of Irish rebels.[105] During the autumn Cornwallis secured government control over most of the island, and organised the suppression of the remaining supporters of the United Irish movement. Cornwallis was also instrumental in securing passage in 1800 of the Act of Union by the Parliament of Ireland, a necessary step in the creation of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland.[106] The process, which essentially required the buying of Parliamentary votes through patronage and the granting of peerages, was one that Cornwallis found quite distasteful: he wrote "My occupation is now of the most unpleasant nature, negotiating and jobbing with the most corrupt people under heaven. I despise and hate myself every hour for engaging in such dirty work, and am supported only by the reflection that without an Union the British Empire must be dissolved."[107] Although Cornwallis recognised that the union with Ireland was unlikely to succeed without Catholic emancipation, he and William Pitt were unable to move King George on the subject. Pitt consequently resigned, and Cornwallis also resigned his offices, returning to London in May 1801.[108] Treaty of Amiens Coin commemorating Cornwallis' role in negotiating the Treaty of Amiens , 1802 Expecting an opportunity to relax at home, Cornwallis was instead despatched not long after his return to take command of Eastern District with orders to lead the defences of eastern Britain against a threatened French invasion.[109] Cornwallis was then sent to France to finalise peace terms with Bonaparte. The peace negotiations were made possible in Britain by financial pressure brought on by the ongoing wars and by Bonaparte's desire to consolidate his hold on the Continent. Pitt's resignation brought Henry Addington to power, and he appointed Cornwallis as plenipotentiary minister to France.[110] The negotiations resulted in the Treaty of Amiens, which Cornwallis signed on behalf the United Kingdom on 25 March 1802.[111] The treaty ended the War of the Second Coalition, but the peace was short-lived. Actions by Bonaparte over the next year alarmed the other European powers, and the United Kingdom refused to withdraw forces from Malta as specified in the treaty. By May 1803 war was again declared. Cornwallis is often seen as being partially responsible for conceding too much in the negotiations, although much had already been granted to France in the preliminary negotiations.[112] Death and legacy In 1805 Cornwallis was reappointed Governor-General of India by Pitt (who had again become Prime Minister), this time to curb the expansionist activity of Lord Wellesley (older brother of Colonel Arthur Wellesley, later Duke of Wellington).[113] He arrived in India in July 1805, and died on 5 October of a fever at Gauspur in Ghazipur, at that time in the Varanasi kingdom.[114] Cornwallis was buried there, overlooking the Ganges River,[115] where his memorial is a protected monument maintained by the Archaeological Survey of India.[116] His son Charles became the 2nd Marquess. Having five daughters but no sons, the marquessate became extinct on his death, but he was succeeded in his remaining titles by his uncle, the brother of the general, the Right Reverend James Cornwallis.[117] Cornwallis appears in the 1835 novel Horse-Shoe Robinson by John Pendleton Kennedy, a historical romance set against the background of the Southern campaigns in the American War of Independence, and interacts with the fictional characters in the book. He is depicted as courtly in manner, but tolerant, or even supportive, of brutal practices against those found deficient among his own forces, and against enemy prisoners. In the 2000 film The Patriot about the events leading up to Yorktown, Cornwallis was portrayed by English actor Tom Wilkinson.[118] In Ireland his legacy also includes the Wicklow Military Road (now the R115) through the Wicklow Mountains.[119] Fictional accounts of the rebellion, such as The Year of the French by Thomas Flanagan, feature Cornwallis. In India he is remembered for his victory against Tipu Sultan in the Mysore war and his promulgation of revenue and judicial acts. Fort Cornwallis, founded in 1786 in George Town, Prince of Wales Island (now the island part of the Malaysian state of Penang), is named for him.[85] He is remembered for his deeds in England. A building is named after him at the University of Kent, as are boarding houses at The Royal Hospital School and Culford School in Suffolk. Statues of Cornwallis can be seen in St. Paul's Cathedral, London, Fort Museum, Fort St. George, Chennai, and in the Victoria Memorial, Kolkata.[120][121] The public house "The Marquis of Cornwallis" in Layham, Suffolk, was named after him.[122] Cornwallis was the recipient of the first British commemorative statue sent to the Indian subcontinent. On his retirement in 1792, and in celebration of his victory over Tipu Sultan, the British residents of Madras (renamed Chennai in 1996) voted in May that year to commission a portrait in oils, and a statue, for their city.[123] A request was sent, through Sir John Call, to the Council of the Royal Academy in London to hold a competition. Only one artist submitted a model, and that was Thomas Banks, RA. The statue was unveiled on the Parade Grounds of Fort St. George, Madras, on 15 May 1800, after being exhibited at the Royal Academy. The eight-foot tall marble with its pedestal base depicts the children of Tipu Sultan being handed over to Cornwallis as part of the treaty to end the war. Cornwallis wears the robes of a Garter Knight. .[124] After Independence, the statue was moved to the Reading Room of the Connemara Library, Madras, before it was transferred to the entrance of the Fort Museum in 1948.[125] The first British statue to be erected in Calcutta, the capital of British India, was also to Cornwallis. The marble portrait statue, with figures of Fortitude and Truth on each side of the plinth's base, was completed by John Bacon, Jr., and was a variant of the statue finished by John Bacon Sr. for East India House in London. In this work Cornwallis appears as a hero wearing a Roman kilt and carrying a sheathed short sword. A cornucopia symbolizing the abundance pouring into the coffers of the East India Company (EIC) is behind the left foot.[126] A third statue, for Bombay, was commissioned from the studios of John Bacon Jr. Bacon was paid £5250 for the standing figure, which portrayed Cornwallis wearing an officer's tailcoat, breeches, brocade and an immense cloak. The statue was covered by a protective cupola on Elphinstone Circle, before it was damaged in August 1965 and removed to the grounds of the Bhau Daji Lad Museum, Byculla, Bombay.[127] The last memorial erected to Cornwallis in British India was his mausoleum at Ghazipur, completed in 1824 and funded by a public subscription raised by the people of Bengal. Designed by Thomas Fraser, the free standing marble cenotaph, topped by a funerary urn, was created by John Flaxman, RA. It was commissioned by the Court of Directors of the East India Company at a General Meeting held in February 1822. Flaxman completed the work in March 1824 and it was shipped to India in April. Flaxman received £525 for his portrait medallion of Cornwallis, carved in relief for two of the four panels. The two others have a figure of a Hindu and Muslim, heads bowed in mourning (a typical motif for Flaxman). The reverse has a figure of a British soldier and an Indian sepoy, also in mourning.[128] Arms Coat of arms of Charles Cornwallis, 1st Marquess Cornwallis References Sources |
There’s a bit of a mystery unfolding on Mars. Late last year, Curiosity drilled into the surface of the Red Planet and unearthed something unexpected, a mineral called tridymite. An analysis of this find has just been published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences explaining that the presence of tridymite could completely change our understanding of Mars’ past. Tridymite is a silicon dioxide (silica) mineral that crystallizes at low pressure and high temperatures in excess of 800 degrees Celsius (1,472 degrees F). As far as we know, it is only associated with the high temperatures and conditions seen in silicic volcanism — volcanoes with magma containing a large proportion of silica. These geological processes are the result of plate tectonics and flowing water on Earth, but Mars doesn’t have either of those. The tridymite on Mars was found in Gale Crater after Curiosity drilled down in search of interesting minerals, which were identified via x-ray examination. After confirming a high concentration of tridymite in the samples, NASA began looking at terrestrial processes that might provide an alternative way of producing the mineral — something that Mars does have. According to the paper, they’ve come up with no alternative. Other researchers are sure to begin looking for a lower temperature processes that can produce tridymite now, but maybe we’re just wrong about Mars’ past. It’s possible the planet was once much more geologically active than we thought. These levels of tridymite would also mean that Mars had more water available on the surface as well. There’s only so much we can learn here on Earth, though. Mars is a very different environment, and it’s possible there are processes active there that we don’t yet understand. We might not have an answer to this mystery until we get another rover to the planet with new instruments. |
Gold prices ended higher Thursday, to recoup a portion of the losses of the past three sessions, but a snapshot of consumer-level inflation came in hotter than expected, limiting the precious metal’s rise. “After a series of subdued readings, even with today’s pick up, inflation is still well below the 2% target,” said Adrienne Murphy, chief market analyst at AvaTrade. “This key economic factor will obstruct the [U.S. Federal Reserve’s] plans to hike rates.” Data Thursday showed the consumer-price index rose 0.4% in August for the biggest rise since January. The rise lifted the yearly increase in inflation to 1.9% from 1.7%. The ICE U.S. Dollar Index DXY, -0.35% remained lower after the report, on track to end a three-session climb—likely helping gold, which is primarily priced in the U.S. unit. Gold futures extended their modest decline initially after the report, then climbed. Gold for December delivery US:GCZ7 tacked on $1.30, or 0.1%, to settle at $1,329.30 an ounce. On Wednesday, the futures settled at $1,328—the lowest since Aug. 31, according to FactSet. The SPDR Gold Shares ETF GLD, +0.17% was trading 0.6% higher. Read: Gold bulls are looking for a ‘major breakout’ above $1,400 an ounce The Fed raised interest rates twice this year in response to steady growth and falling unemployment, but mostly soft inflation data have tempered market expectations for another hike before the year. Higher rates also boost the dollar, in which gold is priced. The Fed has been concerned with the weak readings, raising some doubts that the central bank will hike rates again this year. However, if inflation starts to pick up again in coming months, expectations for a December rate increase are likely to be rekindled, as select Fed members have insisted they want policy to be a step ahead of inflation. “While interest rates in the U.S. remain so low, equity markets will continue to overheat while gold’s gains will continue to be capped,” said Murphy. “The Fed are notoriously optimistic with its inflation expectations, so investors could be surprised with how slow the body actually raises the cost of borrowing which is good news for gold.” The S&P 500 SPX, -0.08% looked to be in a holding pattern after scoring its latest record highs. Stock weakness could limit the downside for safe-haven gold. The retreat in gold so far this week followed its finish Friday at its highest since Sept. 6, 2016, chiefly driven by concerns that North Korea was preparing to conduct another missile test. In comments Thursday, made after tighter United Nations sanctions, the reclusive regime said it would reduce the U.S. to “ashes and darkness.” Haven demand should continue to underpin precious metals, said analysts at Capital Economics, in a note. “The latest leg-up in the net-long position in gold futures does not appear to have been driven by a revision of expectations of Fed tightening,” said Caroline Bain, chief commodities economist at Capital Economics. “Instead, we think that the surge in net longs and the inflows into gold ETFs reflect safe-haven demand on the back of an escalation of the North Korean crisis.” Among other metals, December silver US:SIZ7 fell 7.8 cents, or 0.4%, to $17.789 an ounce, while December copper US:HGZ7 declined by 2.4 cents, or 0.8%, to $2.958 a pound. October platinum US:PLV7 settled at $980.90 an ounce, down $2.30, or 0.2%, and December palladium shed $19.40, or 2.1%, to $914.30 an ounce, extending its loss of 1% from Wednesday. Providing critical information for the U.S. trading day. Subscribe to MarketWatch's free Need to Know newsletter. Sign up here. |
Head Coach Vern Cotter has sought continuity in the rotated Scotland squad named for this Sunday’s Rugby World Cup round two Test against USA at Elland Road, Leeds (27 September, kick-off 2.30pm) – live on ITV. The entire bench from Wednesday’s win over Japan (45-10) has been promoted into the starting line-up meaning that – despite making ten changes to the starting XV – there are just four new faces in the 23-man squad; Tim Visser and Alasdair Strokosch who start at wing and back-row respectively, and replacements Tim Swinson (lock) and Duncan Weir (stand-off). Cotter said: “We said from the start that we’d need the whole group of 31 players for this campaign. We’ve known this schedule for a long time and have tried to keep continuity in selection, while also introducing fresh legs to what will be another very physical challenge this Sunday. – Scotland Head Coach Vern Cotter Scrum-half Henry Pyrgos – who captained against Ireland and scored twice in the summer Tests – will lead the side as one of four changes to the starting backs. He comes in to partner try-scoring stand-off Finn Russell, who made his debut against the Eagles in last summer’s 24-6 win in Houston, Texas. The Glasgow Warriors duo begin a club connection that is continued by the introduction of centre Peter Horne alongside Mark Bennett, who scored twice against Japan. The changes to the back division are completed by the introduction of Sean Maitland and Visser alongside full-back Stuart Hogg. In the pack Ryan Grant, Fraser Brown and Jon Welsh make a straight swap for front-row colleagues Alasdair Dickinson, Ross Ford and Willem Nel. Lock Richie Gray starts in place of brother Jonny – with Swinson taking the vacated place on the bench – and, in the back-row, Strokosch and Josh Strauss come in for Ryan Wilson and David Denton. Cotter added: “I was pleased with both the commitment and composure against Japan, particularly towards the end of the game, however we are always working and looking for things on which to improve. “Hopefully we’ll see the result of that this Sunday in another very important Test match in our Pool.” Scotland team to face USA at Elland Road, Leeds this Sunday (27 September), kick-off 2.30pm – live on ITV 15 Stuart Hogg (Glasgow Warriors) – 34 caps; 9 tries, 1 pen, 48 points 14 Sean Maitland (London Irish) – 17 caps; 2 tries, 10 points 13 Mark Bennett (Glasgow Warriors) – 10 caps; 5 tries, 25 points 12 Peter Horne (Glasgow Warriors) – 11 caps, 1 try, 1 con, 1 pen, 10 points 11 Tim Visser (Harlequins) – 21 caps; 9 tries, 45 points 10 Finn Russell (Glasgow Warriors) – 12 caps; 2 tries, 2 cons, 14 points 9 Henry Pyrgos (Glasgow Warriors) CAPTAIN – 16 caps; 4 tries, 20 points 1 Ryan Grant (Glasgow Warriors) – 24 caps 2 Fraser Brown (Glasgow Warriors) – 11 caps 3 Jon Welsh (Newcastle Falcons) – 8 caps, 1 try, 5 points 4 Richie Gray (Castres) – 47 caps, 2 tries, 10 points 5 Grant Gilchrist (Edinburgh Rugby) – 11 caps, 1 try, 5 points 6 Alasdair Strokosch (Perpignan) – 46 caps, 2 tries, 10 points 7 John Hardie (unattached) – 3 caps, 1 try, 5 points 8 Josh Strauss (Glasgow Warriors) – 1 cap Substitutes 16 Ross Ford (Edinburgh Rugby) – 90 caps; 2 tries, 10 points 17 Alasdair Dickinson (Edinburgh Rugby) – 48 caps, 2 tries, 10 points 18 Willem Nel (Edinburgh Rugby) – 4 caps 19 Tim Swinson (Glasgow Warriors) – 13 caps 20 Ryan Wilson (Glasgow Warriors) – 12 caps 21 Greig Laidlaw (Gloucester) – 42 caps; 3 tries, 48 cons, 92 pens, 387 points 22 Duncan Weir (Glasgow Warriors) – 19 caps, 1 try, 6 cons, 9 pens, 1 drop, 47 points 23 Matt Scott (Edinburgh Rugby) – 30 caps, 3 tries, 15 points |
Ivanka Trump faces backlash for pro-LGBT tweet after father announces trans military ban CLOSE President Trump's announced ban on transgendered individuals in the military has sparked backlash for Ivanka Trump. Buzz60 Twitter never forgets. On the same day her father announced a ban on transgender people from serving in the U.S. military, Ivanka Trump is taking heat for a tweet sent more than a month ago expressing her support for the LGBTQ community. In June, Ivanka Trump tweeted, "I am proud to support my LGBTQ friends and the LGBTQ Americans who have made immense contributions to our society and economy." The tweet received some initial backlash when Twitter users called Ivanka Trump out for supporting "the most anti-LGBTQ+ presidential ticket in recent times," as one Twitter user put it, adding, "Your words mean nothing to us." I am proud to support my LGBTQ friends and the LGBTQ Americans who have made immense contributions to our society and economy. — Ivanka Trump (@IvankaTrump) June 2, 2017 You openly supported and campaigned for the most anti-LGBTQ+ presidential ticket in recent times. Your words mean nothing to us. — Jordan (@jordansdiamonds) June 2, 2017 After President Trump announced the transgender military ban Wednesday, his daughter's statement faced even more scrutiny for what some saw as hollow words. Words without actions mean nothing. https://t.co/40WZm0p6N0 — Sara Lang (@SaraLang) July 26, 2017 Your father is trying to keep trans folk from making immense contributions to our society and economy. You want to be an ally, DO something. https://t.co/k03j1esvbw — postcon hangover Amy (@spooloflies) July 26, 2017 Looking forward to the behind-the-scenes "Ivanka disagreed with her father's decision and tried to change his mind" articles https://t.co/VzU0iSBsUS — Nathan McDermott (@natemcdermott) July 26, 2017 Hey Ivanka, James here. Hope all is good, quick question, can you... Erm... Call your dad and have a talk. X https://t.co/yiiL89J3Ap — James Corden (@JKCorden) July 26, 2017 President Trump faced backlash of his own for the ban, which was announced on the same day as the anniversary of former president Harry Truman desegregating the armed services, and many active transgender service members expressed dismay over the decision. Follow Ryan Miller on Twitter @RyanW_Miller Read more: Read or Share this story: https://usat.ly/2w19KhN |
She’s an amazing young woman with straight As and a college scholarship lined up for when she graduates from high school this spring at age 17. She’s a peer tutor who runs programs at school for at-risk youth using some of what she learned at a summer arts program last year. And, she volunteers 20 hours a week. She’s also homeless. Unsurprisingly, the principal and teachers at her school describe her as “exceptional” and “very, very special.” But she’s locked in a battle with the Ministry of Children and Family Development. Afraid to go home, this exceptional girl may be the only teen in British Columbia who has ever begged to be taken into government care only to be repeatedly rebuffed. I’m not using her name or any identifying details because she is a minor and because she needs and deserves protection, not attention. Because of privacy laws, I can’t identify anyone connected with her case. For now, the First Nations teen is staying at a youth safe house. But any day, she could be turned out because she’s already overstayed the shelter’s seven-day limit by several months. The ministry could even order the government-supported shelter to turn her out because of a social worker’s contrarian thinking that the best place for the teen is at home with a family that she and those familiar with her case describe as worse than chaotic. She has asked for her own social worker, not the one assigned to her family. The representative for children and youth has appointed an advocate for her, but the advocate works 775 kilometres away from where the teen lives. Because she has no phone, their primary means of communication is via email. Neither the ministry nor the representative could comment, citing privacy laws. What she’s asked is to be placed into a foster home or a semi-independent living situation with other youth who get daily support from counsellors. Unlike many teens in care who want to be put on a youth agreement and given the freedom to live on their own, she fears that. She’s afraid that the “black monster” whose voice encouraged her to cut herself at 12 and attempt suicide at 15 might come back if she were living alone in some basement suite. “The ministry is doing nothing to help me,” she says. “As teens and young kids we see posters and ads saying if you’re feeling unsafe to call and you’ll get help. It takes guts to leave. But I did that and I’m still waiting for someone to help me ... My life is crumbling and nobody is helping me.” The irony is not lost on either of us that we first met on Family Day. More than anything else, what this teen wants is to break the cycle of addiction, violence and sexual abuse that is a hallmark of her family. Her biological father is an addict living on Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside. Her first stepfather had a penchant for violence and was eventually diagnosed as paranoid schizophrenic. |
VIDEO=> HOLLYWOOD ELITES Call on GOP Electors to Dump Trump Hollywood elites released a video on Wednesday calling on all GOP electors to ignore the will of the people and vote against Trump. Democrats are not graceful losers. Debra Messing, who campaigned with Hillary at many of her small rallies, makes a cameo in the video. The Hillary supporters are hoping to get 37 electors to switch their vote. Then the election would go to the House where they could start harassing and threatening lawmakers to vote for Hillary or get a bullet in the mouth. The Hollywood elites call their group “United for America” instead of “Fascists for America” which would be more appropriate. The video includes Martin Sheen, Debra Messing, James Cromwell, BD Wong, Noah Wyle, Freda Payne, Bob Odenkirk, J. Smith Cameron, Michael Urie, Moby, Mike Farrell, Loretta Swit, Richard Schiff, Christine Lahti, Steven Pasquale, Dominic Fumusa, Emily Tyra, Talia Balsam and many more. Many of these elites are the same actors who released a pro-Hillary ad before the election. That didn’t work either! Th elites are also offering free legal support to any GOP turncoat who flips. |
Between the usual Art Basel madness and the gala opening of Pérez Art Museum Miami, the Magic City enjoyed more than its fair share of fantastic exhibits in 2013. Only one, however, featured Game of Thrones star Peter Dinklage dressed in drag portraying a 17th-century German dwarf. That honor goes to Eve Sussman's "Rufus Corporation," a blockbuster at the Bass Museum that not only reaffirmed Sussman as one of the most important contemporary artists working today but also marked the museum's growing profile on the local scene. The stellar exhibit boasted a series of films, photos, installations, and videos, including the star turn by Dinklage. Sussman cast him in her 89 Seconds at Alcázar, a 12-minute film that garnered international attention when it debuted at the 2004 Whitney Biennial. Dinklage took the part — as Mari Barbola, a German dwarf made famous in Diego Velázquez's enigmatic opus Las Meninas, a scene from the Spanish court of King Philip IV in 1656 — before he catapulted to Hollywood fame. The movie re-envisioned what transpired among the Spanish royal family, their servants, a dog, and the painter at their summer palace more than 350 years ago, transporting Bass visitors to an opulent age. But for all of Dinklage's star power, the show stealer was Sussman's feature-length video-musical The Rape of the Sabine Women, which reinterpreted the founding of Rome in an unforgettable way. Originally shot for the big screen, the 80-minute movie was transformed by Sussman into a five-part installation that turned spectators into actors in an epic production. Sussman presented the haunting imagery shot in the Mediterranean with modern actors on 30 screens, including sprawling wall projections; a stand-alone, house-like construction near the rear of the museum; several postcard-size video monitors; and a massive installation of TV sets piled randomly on the floor, reminiscent of a technological junkyard. |
Organizers of a rally in Canada, to protest the Ferguson grand jury decision over the police shooting of Michael Brown, have urged white people, as well as other people of color (POC), to exercise restraint and allow black people to speak up instead. The move has sparked a debate on social media about the rally's underlying purpose. “While we appreciate the solidarity shown by White and Non-Black POC, we want to remind folks of some things…Please refrain from taking up space in all ways possible. Remember that you are there in support of black folks, so should never be at the centre of anything,” Bilan Arte, one of the organizers, wrote on the vigil’s Facebook page. “Refrain from speaking to the media. Black voices are crucial to this.” One of the rally organizers in Ottawa wrote on the Facebook page that white people should stay in the background and intervene only when they see police “harassing” black people because they are “least likely to arrest you.” The message was also conveyed through a post on the Facebook page of a similar event in Toronto. The posts sparked debate on social media as some users questioned if the rally was “anti-racist” or “pro-segregation.” The rally is being organized to protest a grand jury decision not to indict Officer Darren Wilson in the shooting death of Brown, a black teenager, in Ferguson, Missouri, on Aug. 9. The decision, which was announced Monday night, has triggered protests across the United States. A social media user wrote in response to Arte’s post: “I'm not sure why white people would have to refrain from taking up space…. won't that push them away from coming to support and won't it help to have support from the whole world, not just the black community…? I think it would be a terrible idea to ask non-black people to not talk to the media.” However, others argued that it was necessary to ensure that black people were seen to be leading the protests. “It's not about us. It's about showing solidarity with people whose lives are affected by Ferguson — and that's not really us. That's not really white people,” Rebecca Macintyre told CBC News. Peaceful demonstrations were held in Ottawa and Toronto Tuesday following a night of violent protests in Ferguson, which saw several buildings and vehicles being burnt, while angry protesters clashed with police. The incident also forced the deployment of the National Guard and several people were arrested. Police also had to use tear gas to disperse unruly crowds. People across the U.S. demonstrated under the banner “Black Lives Matter” and “Emergency Response Protests to Ferguson Grand Jury Decision.” St. Louis County police said late Tuesday that they had confiscated two guns, Molotov cocktails and other items that were thrown at officers in Ferguson. The department also posted a photograph of the items on its Twitter account. What appears to be urine filled bottles thrown at police. pic.twitter.com/Jt5H3TfGWI — St. Louis County PD (@stlcountypd) November 26, 2014 |
Last night, Jon Stewart ripped through all the GOP bullshit about how they're upset Obama doesn't seem to want to work with them anymore. BARACK OBAMA (1/28/2014): I'm eager to work with all of you. But America does not stand still, and neither will I. So wherever and whenever I can take steps without legislation to expand opportunity for more American families, that's what I'm going to do. And of course, the Republican response. 1/29/2014: REP. KEVIN BRADY, R-TX: We're willing to work with the President. You know, we're hopeful maybe he'll sit down and work with us. SEN. JOHN THUNE, R-SD: We would all love to have the President be willing to work with us. REP. CATHY McMORRIS RODGERS, R-WA: I think the President, unfortunately, continues to divide the country. SEN. MITCH McCONNELL, R-KY: It's an opportunity for the two parties to come together with the President. ... Instead, it was the same tired boilerplate we hear year after year. They're really hurt! They're hurt! Their feelings are hurt! The President has hurt their feelings! The only problem with their "we just wanna work with him" is that it's total bullshit. It's bullshit. Premium Grade A grass-fed free-range bullshit. (wild audience cheering and applause) Collected and packaged by hand. No, hear me out! It is bullshit collected and packaged by hand from the polished anuses of award-winning Texas longhorns that have been bred for peristaltic perfection so that each individual dookie meets the exacting standards of the American Bullshit Association! (wild audience cheering and applause) It is bullshit! Listen to Rand Paul. SEN. RAND PAUL, R-KY (1/28/2014): You can't just say, my way or the highway. ... That's not the tone of somebody who wants to work with Congress. Forget about that, during this year's State of the Union, Congressmen from the very welcoming opposition party were tweeting things such as "Kommandant-in-Chief", or "Chef", as he put it... and a socialistic dictator. They were tweeting "dictates from a king #LawLess". Forget that Republican Congressman Steve Stockman got up in the middle of the speech and just walked out! I mean, even the guy who shouted "You lie!" sat through the fucking thing! (audience laughter) And forget that these Republicans have filibustered more than any Congress in the history of our republic, while accomplishing less than any Congress in the history of our republic, while attempting to block more nominees than any other Congress in the history of our republic, defunding initiatives. Forget all that. Here's all you need to know about these sensitive Republican souls, so hurt by the President's newfound lack of interest in bipartisanship. Before Obama was even inaugurated, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell — the one who was complaining about the boilerplate — gathered the entire Senate Republican Caucus and said, make a public show of wanting to work with the President, but block him at every turn in order to deny him any bipartisan victories, for which Obama will be blamed, because he's the guy who ran on bipartisanship. "Ah-yup." And as Senator Voinovich said, "If [Obama] was for it, we had to be against it." So! REP. PAUL RYAN, R-WI (1/29/2014): If he gives it sort of the "my way or the highway, and you don't do it I'm going to go around Congress", then we're going to have a big problem. All right, this notion that Republicans are interested in working with the President is a game that they play. It's a play that they put on for the cameras. But who are they, really, when they think the cameras aren't on? Perhaps Republican Congressman Michael Grimm of Staten Island can clue us in. 1/28/2014: MICHAEL SCOTTO: And just finally before we let you go, since we have you here, we haven't had a chance to kind of talk about some of the.... REP. MICHAEL GRIMM, R-NY: "I'm not speaking about anything that's off-topic, this is only about the president. MICHAEL SCOTTO: Well what about....? REP. MICHAEL GRIMM, R-NY: Thank you. (walks away) MICHAEL SCOTTO: All right, so Congressman Michael Grimm does not want to talk about some of the allegations concerning his campaign finances. We wanted to get him on camera on that, but he, as you saw, refused to talk about that. Back to you. MICHAEL SCOTTO: (to Grimm) What? REP. MICHAEL GRIMM, R-NY: (walking towards Scotto) Let me be clear to you, you ever do that to me again I'll throw you off this fucking balcony. To be fair, "I will throw you off this fucking balcony" is a relatively standard traditional Staten Island goodbye. (audience laughter and applause) It is in some respects considered — if I may, I've been there quite frequently — it is considered their "Ciao". Or, you know, "Take care, good to see ya, I'll throw ya off a fucking balcony." "Hey, hey, how ya parents doin'? I can't wait to throw them off a fucking balcony!" (audience laughter) But you know what's almost more upsetting than knowing that Republicans from day one planned to sabotage the administration in every way that they knew how? Or that the guy threatening to hurl a New York 1 reporter off a balcony is not a thug in a Batman film, but someone we elected to Congress? Or that the public persona these folks display is so radically different from how they behave otherwise? It's that he went after a New York 1 reporter. New York 1! (Jon fans himself) New York 1 is the pulse of our city! From the latest theater openings to the latest subway closings, to them just literally sitting there reading you the paper! They read it to you! Like you're a little baby. New York 1 is always there for us. It's the channel my cable box reboots to. (audience laughter) So that no matter what I was watching, it says, "Hey, guess who was just murdered in Brooklyn?" (audience laughter) It gives us Weather on the 1s. The 1s! Not the 2s! Because the 2s is for suckers, for losers, for fucking Philadelphia, that's who it's for! (wild audience cheering) It's the 1s! So before you throw that reporter off a balcony, Congressman, just know that once we hear about it from New York 1's The Balcony Murder Report, we're coming after you. Because if it wasn't for the greatness of New York 1, we could've canceled our Time Warner subscriptions a long time ago. (audience laughter) We'll be right back. |
Former leader of Islamic Council Norway, Shoaib Sultan (right) with its new leader, Senaid Kobilica. Photo: Berit Roald / Scanpix Shoaib Sultan, a Green Party politician and the former head of Norway's Islamic Council, is set to run for mayor of Oslo, it was announced on Tuesday. Sultan wants to challenge Fabian Stang of the Conservative Party to become Oslo mayor. The nomination committee of the Green Party chose Sultan as its candidate for Oslo's top position, reported Aftenposten. Sultan said: “I think it is an exciting challenge. Oslo is an exciting city with great challenges and also great opportunities.” The politician believes Oslo needs a Muslim mayor and does not see his religion as a barrier to the position. Sultan said: "I think that sometimes we give people in comment fields and anonymous bloggers too much attention. My experience is that most people are in a completely different place. They are interested in someone who can do something about the problems they struggle with and do not care about their ethnic or religious background.” The Green Party is aiming for ten-percent support in Oslo at the municipal election next autumn. If the Greens achieve a new red-green majority together with Ap (Labour Party), SV (Socialist Left Party) and Rødt (Red Party), and assuming the Greens get m,ore votes than SV, then Sultan could be in a strong position to get the nod as mayor of Oslo. |
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