text stringlengths 0 100k |
|---|
How Long to Keep Records- A Quick Guide Keeping your finances properly organized requires a lot of paperwork. At tax time, you probably pay even more attention to what you should keep, and what you can toss. You can significantly reduce your paper clutter — and save your sanity — when you understand which papers to preserve, and which you can toss. Use this handy guide to determine how long to keep records. Papers you can throw after a year or less Some documents can be discarded rather quickly. Surprisingly quickly in some cases. Credit card bills : After you have checked your credit card statements, and paid what you owe, you can shred your credit card bills. One exception is if you need the statement showing a charge that is under warranty (staple the bill to the warranty and keep in a separate warranty file). The second exception is if you are taking a deduction related to something you charged. Consult your tax checklist, and keep the bill as a way to prove that you can use the deduction. Keep the bill with your copy of your current year tax return. : After you have checked your credit card statements, and paid what you owe, you can shred your credit card bills. One exception is if you need the statement showing a charge that is under warranty (staple the bill to the warranty and keep in a separate warranty file). The second exception is if you are taking a deduction related to something you charged. Consult your tax checklist, and keep the bill as a way to prove that you can use the deduction. Keep the bill with your copy of your current year tax return. Bank account statements : Once you reconcile your statements, they can be shredded. However, as with the credit card bills, you need to keep them with tax documents if you are taking a deduction. : Once you reconcile your statements, they can be shredded. However, as with the credit card bills, you need to keep them with tax documents if you are taking a deduction. Investment statements : Monthly and quarterly statements can be shredded when you get new statements in. Annual investment statements, though, should be kept until you sell the investments. You should also keep annual statements for tax purposes (such as retirement accounts) on hand, and in folders separated by deductible and non-deductible accounts. : Monthly and quarterly statements can be shredded when you get new statements in. Annual investment statements, though, should be kept until you sell the investments. You should also keep annual statements for tax purposes (such as retirement accounts) on hand, and in folders separated by deductible and non-deductible accounts. Pay stubs : Keep your pay stubs for each year. Once you have reconciled them with your W-2, then you can shred them. : Keep your pay stubs for each year. Once you have reconciled them with your W-2, then you can shred them. Receipts : Unless you’re using them for back-up information for taxes and warranties, most receipts can be instantly shredded. Enter them into a personal finance program to help you track your spending, and then get rid of the paper. : Unless you’re using them for back-up information for taxes and warranties, most receipts can be instantly shredded. Enter them into a personal finance program to help you track your spending, and then get rid of the paper. Insurance policies: As soon as you get your insurance policy renewal, you can shred your old insurance policy documents. Documents you can get rid of after a limited time Some documents are only needed until they have served their purposes. Loan documents : Keep these documents someplace secure (fire safe, safe-deposit box) until the loan is paid off. When the loan is paid off, and you have the title or the deed, you can shred the loan documents. : Keep these documents someplace secure (fire safe, safe-deposit box) until the loan is paid off. When the loan is paid off, and you have the title or the deed, you can shred the loan documents. Vehicle records : Store maintenance and repair records for as long as you have the vehicle. They may be needed for warranty information, or the next owner may want them. You should keep titles, purchase receipts and registration information in a secure place for as long as you own the boat, car, motorcycle, truck in question. After ownership is transferred, you can get rid of these documents. : Store maintenance and repair records for as long as you have the vehicle. They may be needed for warranty information, or the next owner may want them. You should keep titles, purchase receipts and registration information in a secure place for as long as you own the boat, car, motorcycle, truck in question. After ownership is transferred, you can get rid of these documents. Investment purchases : When you purchase an investment, you are sent a confirmation. This can help you establish a cost basis. If you get this information in an annual statement, discard the confirmation after you get the statement. Otherwise, keep the document until you sell the investment. But, then, you will need to move the document into your current year tax file as part of your records. : When you purchase an investment, you are sent a confirmation. This can help you establish a cost basis. If you get this information in an annual statement, discard the confirmation after you get the statement. Otherwise, keep the document until you sell the investment. But, then, you will need to move the document into your current year tax file as part of your records. Savings bonds: Keep these secure until you cash them in. Treasury Direct has a handy program that will let you exchange paper bonds for electronic bonds. Records you should keep for seven years For the most part, only tax records need to be kept for seven years. You should keep copies of your tax returns with their supporting documents (statements, receipts, etc.). I like to put all of my tax documents and supporting papers in a manila envelope labeled with the tax year, and then safely stored. If you are suspected of fraud, you can be audited any time, and the government has six years to collect taxes or start legal proceedings if you do not report more than 25% of your gross income. And, of course, any of your tax returns in the last three years are subject to random audit. Never get rid of these papers There are a few papers that you should never get rid of. Obviously, you need to keep birth, marriage, divorce, military discharge, Social Security and death documents in a safe place, and keep them forever. But there are other items that you should hold on to. Life insurance policies : Life insurance policy documents related to permanent coverage should be kept until the covered person dies and you get your payout, or until you cash in the policy. Term life policies, of course, need only be kept until the term expires, or the covered person dies. : Life insurance policy documents related to permanent coverage should be kept until the covered person dies and you get your payout, or until you cash in the policy. Term life policies, of course, need only be kept until the term expires, or the covered person dies. Defined benefit plan papers : If you have a defined benefit retirement plan, keep this information safe, and keep it forever. This goes for documents from current and past employers. : If you have a defined benefit retirement plan, keep this information safe, and keep it forever. This goes for documents from current and past employers. Estate planning: Documents related to estate planning — wills, trusts, powers of attorney, health care proxy, etc. — for as long as they are in effect. Not only should these be kept someplace secure, but you should also have copies for your attorney and for your executor. Physicians should have copies of health care proxy documents. If you are conscientious about organizing your papers, and if you know when you can get rid of certain documents, you will find your entire financial life much better organized. Creating a system, reducing paper clutter and regularly having secure document shredding done for the records that you do not need also dramatically reduces your chances of identity theft. |
The series finished over 13 years ago, but that doesn’t mean there’s any love lost for Buffy the Vampire Slayer fans. In a show where a young woman has been chosen (or cursed depending on your perspective) with the role of the slayer, she tackles the big bad in the fictional town (and Hellmouth) known as Sunnydale, California. Differing from other previous slayers, who are butt-kicking loners, Buffy aligns herself with a close-knit group of friends to help her battle evil. Buffy, along with her friends with varying degrees of powers themselves (with the exception of Xander, who’s got nuthin' and Cordie is popular), fight vampires and other demons in their self-proclaimed “Scooby-Gang.” For seven seasons, which berthed the spin-ff series Angel, people relive their fandom through re-watching the series (now available for binge watching on Netflix), reading the comic series (Season 8 of the comic was even written by Joss Whedon), fan fiction, and attending various Comic-Con(esque) events to celebrate the wonderful Buffyverse created by the brilliant mind of Joss Whedon. The show received critical acclaim and reached an impressive four and six million viewers during the original airings. Many die-hard fans know the ins and outs of the show, and can recite lines and lyrics from the Once More, With Feeling episode as if they were performing themselves, but there are a lot of facts about the series that most of us don’t know. Here are 15 little known facts about the Buffy-verse to help anyone “slay” at trivia night. Continue scrolling to keep reading Click the button below to start this article in quick view Share Tweet Email Copy Link Copied 15 Cast Choices Were Interesting From The Beginning It’s hard to imagine anyone but the existing players in Sunnydale, but not everyone cast was the immediate first choice, except for Anthony Stewart Head; he was the first person they cast because he added a depth of sexiness to Buffy’s watcher Giles that others auditioning didn’t. Actors Katie Holmes and Selma Blair were both up for the role of Buffy, with Holmes turning it down to attend high school. Sarah-Michelle Gellar originally auditioned for the role of the princess of popularity Cordelia Chase, while Charisma Carpenter wanted the role of Buffy. In The Watchers Guide, Marcia Shulman, who worked on Buffy casting said, “Then we went to the network, they knew that Sarah was a star from her previous work, and that she could be Buffy, and that we could do that Buffy.” The role of Xander was offered to Ryan Reynolds, who turned down the role because he had just finished high school, hated it, and didn’t want to play a character in high school. The part of Willow was originally played by actor Riff Regan, but the dynamic didn’t work, so after the pilot they went out in search of a new best friend for Buffy and secured Alyson Hannigan. 14 “Hell’s Bells” Was Performed By An Indie Band via nerfherder.com Joss Whedon didn’t really like the original version of the show’s theme song. It was written by someone in Hollywood and Whedon wanted something a lot more rocking to represent his own take on Buffy the Vampire Slayer following the 1992 film. He decided to hold a contest for a theme song amongst a bunch of local indie bands. It was Alyson Hannigan who suggested working with the band Nerf Herder, who ended up writing and recording the song used for the series, and were offered a pretty small amount of money because of the show’s extremely tight budget. Nerf Herder ended up rerecording the song sometime around the second or third season. Because the initial recording of the theme song was done in such a hurry, it went off-tempo around the middle and needed to be fixed. Perhaps this fix was done at the request of many of the cast members who happen to also be gifted singers and musicians, most notably Anthony Head, James Marsters, and the later cast Amber Benson. 13 There Were So Many Awkward Romantic Scenes For The Actors via buffy.wikia.com Romance was in the air when it came to Buffy and Angel, even though Sarah Michelle Gellar told The Independent how intimate moments alongside leading man David Boreanaz (Angel) were anything but romantic. Gellar said the scenes were, “the unsexiest thing in the world,” and added, “We would do horrible things to each other. Like eat tuna fish and pickle before we kissed. If he had to unbutton my shirt or trousers I would pin them or sew them together to make it as hard as I could. Once I even dropped ice cream on him.” Ever the joker Boreanaz used to test his cast-mates abilities to keep a straight face and remain in character during filming and became known for dropping his drawers between takes to see who could keep it together. Perhaps taking the lead from Gellar and Boreanaz, Anthony Stewart Head placed chili peppers in his mouth (in order to look adequately broken and tortured) when he was tortured by Drusilla. We have to wonder what Juliet Landau has to say about her fiery kiss from Head! 12 Familiar Faces, Spaces, and Voices via newscott.blogspot.com At the end of every episode of Buffy, there is a monster who walks past the Mutant Enemy logo (the name of Joss Whedon’s production company). That monster is voiced by none-other than Joss himself, and the name Mutant Enemy is inspired by the name Joss gave his very first typewriter when he was 15-years-old. There are two other variations of the “Grrrr. Arrgh,” uttered by the monster. One is at the end of the very heated season two finale (the one with Head and the chili peppers) when the monster cries and says, “I need a hug,” and at the musical episode, Once More, With Feeling, he sings his line. Have you ever had the feeling Sunnydale High School seems familiar? It is. The exterior for the show is Torrance High School and was also used in Beverly Hills 90210, The Secret Life of the American Teenager, She’s All That, and Not Another Teen Movie. 11 The Episode Hush Was Whedon's Greatest Challenge via wikedhorror.com Hands down, this has to be one of the creepiest (and best) episodes of the entire series. Hush is the tenth episode of the fourth season and features The Gentleman, who steal everyone’s voices (so no one can hear them scream when their hearts are cut out). It turns out Whedon felt that he was almost coasting as a director and felt telling a story with limited dialogue would be a great exercise. The results: a 44-minute episode with only 17 minutes of dialogue left audiences speechless. Whedon said, “On a practical level, the idea of doing an episode where everybody loses their voice presented itself as a great big challenge because I knew that I would literally have to tell the story only visually, and that would mean that I couldn’t fall back on tricks.” The actual creepy villain, The Gentleman, also came directly from a dream Whedon had, and he focused on the Victorian and fairy-tale aspects of the monster. He drew what he envisioned and gave it to the makeup supervisor and the special effects house who created the prosthetic for Buffy. Whedon said, “I was drawing on everything that had ever frightened me, including the fellow from my dream, Nosferatu, pinhead, Mr. Burns—anything that gave that creepy feel,” He wanted creatures to remind viewers of what scared them when they were young children. Those selected to play The Gentleman included mimes. 10 The Show Had Many Shout Outs & Famous Fans via newsweek.com Fans might remember that Buffy would make positive mentions of Xena: Warrior Princess on occasion. The writers who worked on the show decided they would reciprocate by a shout of their own, when they mentioned a play in the episode The Play’s the Thing entitled “Buffus the Bacchae Slayer. Other fans of the show included the late lead singer of the band Stone Temple Pilots, who became a super fan while watching the show when he was serving time in prison. Sarah-Michelle Gellar was later cast in the band’s music video for their hit song Sour Girl and presented her own speculation as to why Buffy was so popular on the cell block saying, “Hot chicks doing battle. It's like acceptable porn.” Fans of shows outside of the Buffyverse may already know that Jason Behr (Roswell), Amy Adams, Wentworth Miller, and Shane West all appeared on Buffy before securing other, more personally lucrative roles. 9 Willow Made Television History Some of the show’s foreshadowing was purposeful while other items were pure coincidence. Alyson Hannigan’s first television performance was starring on the show Free Spirit, where she played a witch. In the film My Stepmother is an Alien, her character dated Seth Green, who later played Oz on Buffy, Willow’s first real boyfriend. During the show Willow comments she used to write fan-fiction on the show Doogie Howser, MD, and ended up opposite the show’s star, Neil Patrick Harris, a number of years later when they worked together on How I Met Your Mother. In the season three episode, Doppelgangland, Vampire Willow wants to fight, which leads the real Willow to say, “I’m so evil and… skanky. And I think I’m kinda gay.” In season four, Willow falls for Tara and embarks on her first same sex relationship. This relationship wasn't just a first for Willow, it made TV history as the first depiction of a longer-term relationship between a lesbian couple on a US prime time television network. 8 The Writers Were Excellent At Foreshadowing via theodysseyonline.com In season four Buffy, complains about the cost of her college books joking, “I can’t wait till mum gets the bill… I hope it’s a funny aneurism.” The next year her mother, Joyce, dies from an aneurysm. At the end of a dream sequence in the end of season three Faith says, “Little Miss Muffet, counting down from 7-3-0.” Not only does this foreshadow the arrival of Dawn (Miss Muffet), this also is confirmed in season five’s episode Real Me when a deranged man says to Dawn, “I know you. Curds and whey. I know what you are. You don’t belong here.” Oddly enough, this is also how a lot of Buffy fans feel about the character of Dawn to begin with. This dream sequence also occurs 730 days before Buffy’s death which happens two seasons and 730 days later. This must have taken a great deal of planning on the writer’s part. 7 Duality & Demons via buffy.wikia.com Good and evil, light and dark. The minds behind Buffy loved duality and doppelgangers (in addition to demons). This is why the birth names of vampires Spike and Angel are revealed in flashback to be Liam and William. The Irish version of William, is Liam, so basically the same name. Speaking of Demons, just about every main character turns evil at some point or another. Angel becomes Angelus, Giles is turned into a Fyarl Demon, Oz becomes a werewolf, and even Xander and Willow are vampires in the alternate universe that is created in the episode, The Wish. This episode is also the first time viewers meet the Vengeance Demon, Anya, who loses her powers and then becomes one again. Of all of Buffy’s significant exes, Riley is the only one who was never a demon, but he’s awful just the same, but for a variety of other reasons. 6 Hardly Anyone Else Celebrated A Birthday Besides Buffy via playbuzz.com After watching the entire series a viewer might notice only two people’s birthdays are celebrated in the Buffyverse' Tara and Buffy. Tara’s birthday episode, Family, is the sixth in season five, and the only episode in the series where Tara Maclay is the main figure of the narrative, when the Scooby Gang celebrate her 20th birthday and welcome her into their family. Buffy’s birthday is celebrated quite frequently throughout the series, although not consistently. The show celebrated Buffy’s birthday on an episode sometime around January 19 each year; it’s also recorded as other dates. The first time viewers see Buffy’s student records her birthday displays as October 24, 1980, while in another episode, when she’s a senior, her birthday is said to be May 6, 1979. From that point on Joss Whedon decided Buffy’s birthday would be January 19, 1981, and this is the year stated on her tombstone in the episode The Gift. 5 "Buffyspeak" Is A Real Thing Some of the actors had to change their voices and accents, working with coaches to ensure they portrayed their characters just right. James Marsters (Spike) is from California and auditioned for the role using a Texan accent. Everyone loved Marsters for the role, but not the southern drawl, making him learn to speak like a true Londoner (much like actor Anthony Stewart Head who was really born in Camden, London). Fans who hear Marsters speak with his natural accent are often taken aback. Alexis Denisof (known for playing Wesley Wyndam-Pryce in both Buffy and Angel, and for marrying co-star Alyson Hannigan) is another character who puts on a British accent. He’s really from Maryland, USA, although went to the UK for schooling after graduating high school. Sarah-Michelle Gellar reportedly struggled with the show’s dialogue, being from New York and not quite grasping all of the intricacies of playing a California Valley girl. There is a book that explains the slang of the show called, Slayer Slang: A Buffy the Vampire Slayer Lexicon. 4 Buffy Has Spawned Considerable Interest In Academia While Buffy isn’t exactly known for being a straight A student herself, there are a huge number of schools that offer courses on the iconic show. There have also been books and conferences that discuss important themes of the show. An article in the Los Angeles Times revealed that during a 2004 “Buffy Conference,” 190 papers were being presented including themes such as, "slayer slang" to "postmodern reflections on the culture of consumption" to "Buffy and the new American Buddhism." David Lavery, an English professor, gave a talk at Middle Tennessee State University, highlighting the study of Buffy, “as an academic cult.'” In 2012 Slate conducted an informal study which revealed that when pop culture meets academia, Buffy is an A plus student, "More than twice as many papers, essays, and books have been devoted to the vampire drama than any of our other choices—so many that we stopped counting when we hit 200." 3 Some Buffy Characters Charmed Their Way Into Longer Arcs The character Anya was only supposed to appear for two episodes (the original actor cast quit, because she wanted a longer run on the show). Fortunately for Emma Caulfield, Anya became one of the show’s longest-lasting Scooby members. There were plans to kill off Anya in the finale of season five, but she ends up wounded, not dead. When Joss Whedon was asked about changing his mind, he teased it was because Caulfield kept moving in the scene where she was meant to die. Spike was supposed to be killed around the time Angel became Angelus, terrorizing the gang with Spike’s insane girlfriend Drusilla. This changed because fans loved Spike. Angel was also supposed to remain dead after being slayed by Buffy in the second season, however the network liked Boreanaz’s star power, wanting a future for the character, and this future eventually took him to L.A. for the spin-off hit Angel. 2 Angel & Buffy Had A Little Bit Of Crossover via pophub.com Some episodes needed to be re-written and tweaked for various plot developments to work. Most notably, was Graduation, which was due to come out days following the Columbine shooting in 1999. Since the plotline of the episode centred around the annihilation and destruction of Sunnydale High School with explosives, they needed to be very sensitive to the current climate, and remain respectful. Although the central plot elements were kept, specific items of dialogue needed to be removed and reworked. Fans of Buffy probably expected more crossovers between the two series Buffy and Angel, particularly since several characters had left Buffy to star in Angel. Unfortunately, since the show was being run by two separate networks, those networks wanted the shows to have some distance from one another to become a unique, standalone series. This made things more complicated of course. Although they did manage a bit of a reunion a few times. Sarah Michelle Gellar came on Angel for six episodes and Alyson Hannigan for three episodes. 1 Gellar Knew About The End Before Anyone Else Co-star Alyson Hannigan had said that Gellar had grown tired of the role and the show. When asked later at what season Gellar was annoyed with playing the chosen slayer she said, “Uh, three.” Gellar has commented following the end of the show to Entertainment Weekly, “I was 18 when I started the show; I'm 26. I'm married. I never see my husband (Freddie Prinze, Jr.). This has been the longest span of my life in one place. There've been times where that's been difficult -- you want to pick up and go, try other things, live in different places. It feels right, and you have to listen to that." Sources: uselessdaily.com, BuzzFeed, Mental Floss |
TODAY’S COLLEGE STUDENTS HAVE AN “EXPECTATION OF CONFIRMATION”: Have college students gone from believing they have a “right not to be offended” to demanding they have a right to have their views confirmed? I explore this idea in my new essay in the newly published The State of the American Mind: 16 Leading Critics on the New Anti-Intellectualism, a collection of essays by a variety of cultural and educational experts edited by Mark Bauerlein and Adam Bellow. The essays are framed by Bauerlein and Bellow’s theories on the root causes of the decline of the American intellect and “the shift away from the self-reliant, well-informed American.” Some of my fellow authors include E. D. Hirsch, Nicholas Eberstadt, Dennis Prager, Daniel Dreisbach, Ilya Somin, Maggie Jackson, and Richard Arum. Read more about it over at Ricochet. |
Cast your gaze upon Xenoblade Chronicles X and you’d be forgiven for believing that it wasn’t Monolith Soft’s first foray into the realms of HD development. But, it is. The Wii U exclusive has helped to “lay the groundwork for HD game development” according to executive producer Tetsuya Takahashi, the developer not allowing over ambition to dissuade the importance of building key skills. “Xenoblade Chronicles X is the first HD project for Monolith Soft, so instead of setting a number of hard-to-achieve targets, we are working on steadily building up key skills. Our goal with this game is first to lay the groundwork for [our] HD game development, so as to not overreach ourselves and cause problems,” Takahashi discussed with EDGE. He later touched on the scale of the world map in relation to the mechs, revealing: “Dolls, which are what we call these vehicles, are roughly five times the size of a person, so to get the same feel as Xenoblade Chronicles while using a Doll, the map would probably need to be five times as large. It’s actually even bigger than that, but we’ve made sure to design Xenoblade Chronicles X so that players can still feel comfortable navigating the world, despite its vast size.” Monolith Soft have also addressed complaints over the quest log in Xenoblade Chronicles, now indicating objectives and relevant people on the map – which will also be how the developer will integrate the Wii U GamePad. “We decided that it would be perfect to use as a navigation device, in the same way that a lot of tablet computers are,” Takahashi explained. “”We’ve put some important features relating to the game system and your objectives in the game onto the GamePad, so I feel that this should create a very user-friendly experience for players.” Xenoblade Chronicles X will release exclusively for Wii U in 2015. Related |
The title of the new series’ opening episode has been revealed as Asylum of the Daleks. We confirmed back in March that the Daleks would be returning to menace the universe and even posted a few sneaky photos smuggled from set! Since then, Steven Moffat (Doctor Who’s lead writer and Executive Producer) has confirmed that the adventure will feature every kind of Dalek ever faced by the Time Lord – including the legendary Special Weapons Dalek! The title of the new story has already increased the excitement building around it. Could the ‘asylum’ be a place or is it some sort of protection? Or does the word take on a new and sinister meaning in this adventure? It’s too early to say but we’re having fun speculating! In the meantime, we’ll have to wait a little longer to find out the answer to the crucial question: What is the Asylum of the Daleks? Executive Producer Caro Skinner wasn’t giving much away but she did tell us, ‘This is an epic Dalek adventure that kicks off the new series in explosive style! If you think you know all there is to know about the Daleks, think again…’ |
Graphic novelist and screenwriter Frank Miller has posted a excoriating rant on the Occupy movement on his personal blog, accusing it of being an unruly mob of "louts, thieves and rapists" that can "do nothing but harm America". Miller, best-known for Batman: The Dark Knight Returns, 300, and Sin City, introduces his post with the words: "Everybody's been too damned polite about this nonsense" before launching into his tirade. He writes: "Occupy" is nothing short of a clumsy, poorly-expressed attempt at anarchy, to the extent that the "movement" – HAH! Some "movement", except if the word "bowel" is attached - is anything more than an ugly fashion statement by a bunch of iPhone, iPad wielding spoiled brats who should stop getting in the way of working people and find jobs for themselves" it reads. He continues: "Wake up, pond scum. America is at war against a ruthless enemy." "In the name of decency, go home to your parents, you losers. Go back to your mommas' basements and play with your Lords Of Warcraft. Or better yet, enlist for the real thing. Maybe our military could whip some of you into shape. They might not let you babies keep your iPhones, though. Try to soldier on." Miller's comments may not come as a surprise to critics who described his most recent graphic novel, "Holy Terror" as anti-Islamic propaganda. However, if coverage of his anti-Occupy rant amongst the comic community is anything to go by, he has alienated many of his (former) fans. One site Comicbookmovie.com, has published an open letter to Miller, which ends "From what I can tell based on conversations with fellow comic book fans, articles, comments, box office returns, and critical reception of your work in the last 10 years, I am in the majority of folks who want you to just go away now. We are the The Goddamn 99% of people who don't give a goddamn about you anymore." |
IT IS a winter's night in Dublin, I'm sitting in the upstairs room of a nightclub. A few hours earlier Ireland had qualified for their first major tournament in ten years but right now the only thing on my mind is that the floor is going to collapse. IT IS a winter's night in Dublin, I'm sitting in the upstairs room of a nightclub. A few hours earlier Ireland had qualified for their first major tournament in ten years but right now the only thing on my mind is that the floor is going to collapse. Stephen Hunt: Italy in Euro 2012 was the lowest point of my career. All I wanted was five minutes, all I wanted was a bit of loyalty My friend Shane Long is singing 'Little Lion Man'. Jamie Duff, Damien's brother, has accompanied him on guitar but by the end, a squad full of internationals were providing the chorus. There were friends in that room, men I owed a lot to and others who had known me nearly every step of the way. This night feels like a reward for something, for being let go at Palace and scraping by at Brentford. Those thoughts had gone through my head earlier in the night but now I am singing at the top of the voice, yet I'm holding a little bit back in case one lusty verse would be the tipping point for the floor to cave in. Everyone is lost in the euphoria. There were men I trusted with everything and men I considered rivals. At that moment we were all united, joined together by one common bond, belting out the words as if nothing else mattered, believing this was just the beginning. In that nightclub, I felt it was more than the culmination of something, I felt it was a sign that our unity and our team spirit would help us overcome whatever we encountered in the European Championships. I didn't know that would be as good as it got. That I would never feel this happy about qualification again and that the summer to come would be a story of frustration, humiliation and bafflement. The European Championships would leave me with the sense that what should have been the culmination of our careers had come too late for our manager and for some players who saw it as a lap of honour. What was it Steve Archibald said about team spirit being an illusion glimpsed in the aftermath of victory? But it was not your fault but mine And it was your heart on the line I really fucked it up this time Didn't I, my dear? * * * * * THE BUILD-UP BY THE time we reached Krystle nightclub, the evening was beginning to feel special. We were upstairs in the VIP lounge and the bar downstairs was packed with Irish fans. I remember bringing Kevin Kilbane out to the balcony and the fans below went wild. Kevin had been treated callously by Trap but within the squad we knew how important he was and I would always remember him for the kindness he showed me when I first joined up. The moment of qualification at the Aviva had, like the group itself, been a bit of an anti-climax. Looking back the thing that gave me hope was never going to be enough. When we drew in Moscow, there was a feeling of pride that blocked everything out. It didn't matter that we hadn't played or that we had hung on. I thought this is a group of players which will never be steamrolled. I was one of those who wanted big teams so when the draw was made, I was pretty excited. This is what we wanted from a European Championships - Spain and Italy. They were the blue bloods of European football and I felt we would lift our game. Selfishly, I also thought I would have a better chance of playing against the good teams. I had done well against Italy in the past and thought Trap would use me against them. By the time that game came around, everything had gone wrong and I felt lower than I had at any point in my career, including when Palace released me and my whole career was in jeopardy. My problems began in January. One of them had a human face and was called James McClean. On the night we qualified the idea that McClean would take my place seemed outlandish. He had signed for Sunderland from Derry City but he hadn't played a game yet. In December, he came on and turned a match against Blackburn around. On New Year's Day, he made his full debut when Sunderland beat the eventual champions Manchester City. The public face of every sports team is one of happy, grinning unity but only a naive fool believes that is the reality. Maybe it's because I've had to fight through the leagues to get to where I am but I've always enjoyed a rivalry within a team. Which brings me to Bobby Convey. Bobby Convey was a left winger. The year Reading won promotion to the Premier League, Bobby Convey started 45 matches. I started three. In the summer when we were preparing for the Premier League, when the club was gripped with excitement, Bobby Convey gave me some friendly advice. Maybe I'd like to try my luck someplace else. I thought about what he said for maybe two or three seconds and when the moment had passed I was sure that I would be playing on the left for Reading in the Premier League. Bobby Convey couldn't help it. He didn't know that he now embodied every knock, every rejection, every week when I worried about my pay cheque and people told me to see sense and maybe think about something else. Now I was on the edge of the Premier League and Bobby Convey thought I should try my luck somewhere else? This was my luck, this was my roll of the dice. That season in the Premier League, Bobby Convey made eight starts. I made 28. James McClean became a different kind of rival but I knew he was what the media wanted. He was young and new and different. He had a great story and he was fearless. One Sunday morning, I went on Setanta with Paul Kimmage. Things were going well, I thought, and then with one sentence, he finished me. "My son wants James McClean to be in the Ireland squad." I stumbled and tried to think of a riposte. "Well, my daughter wants me to be in it," I said, but this wasn't much of an answer. Hell, it might not have been true. She was two years old at the time. McClean was good too but I wasn't threatened. I knew I would be in the squad, if I was fit, but in January that became a big 'if' and a bigger problem than James McClean. I developed a problem with my groin or with my hip or with my head, I could never be sure. The problem was real but the anxiety was that I would miss the Euros. Around this time, newspapers would start naming squads. Some people left me out of their possible panels but there was no chance of that because I knew Trap liked me and he liked that I knew what he wanted. I was part of the squad for the friendly in February when McClean made his debut. My bigger problem was that I had only played a couple of minutes for Wolves that month and I played only a couple of minutes the weekend following the game and I didn't play again until the end of April. The pressure adds up. Football is ruthless. Every day at training in Wolves, the lads would tell me how well McClean was doing. It was that thing called banter and you can never let it get to you, but it was getting to me, it was always in my head. Wolves were in a relegation battle but I could never contribute and part of me was always worrying that if I did contribute it would jeopardise my chances of going to the Euros and that was warping my thinking. When it was established that it was my hip, I was back playing for Wolves in May, after an operation, but by then Mick McCarthy had been harshly treated and the club was already relegated. I got to play 90 minutes but I worried that I was just going through the motions. I know Trap spent some time the weekend before the squad was named calling the players who weren't going to make it but I never expected a call and I never got one. McClean was in too but the player I felt sorry for was Seamus Coleman. McClean can withstand the ups and downs, he has balls of steel, but Coleman was a player I thought should have been brought along. Trapattoni named his squad on May 7, three weeks before the final deadline. The way things turned out he might have been better sticking with an extended group at that stage but we were doing things Trap's way and over the next month we began to realise that the familiarity we had with Trap's ways bred something which, if it wasn't contempt, could be mistaken for boredom. As I was struggling for fitness, I was one of the players who Trap wanted in for training the week the squad was named. The rest of the players would come in a week later but it was the start of an intense month with very little to do. I have stressed the importance of rest before but without a game and without the ability to fall back on your own routine, rest can turn into tedium and a sense of wishing the days away. That sense would become stronger as time went on. * * * * * MONTECATINI WHEN I am old and grey and weary I would like to retire to Montecatini. Then I might see what Giovanni Trapattoni saw in the place because from the moment we arrived there to begin our build-up to the European Championships, it was clear that time was going to drag. It might have dragged anyway. One problem with the European Championships was something we could do nothing about. By the time the summer came around, Trap had been manager for four years. We knew everything about him and he knew everything about us, or he had an idea of what we could do and couldn't do and he wouldn't budge from it. We knew what the training sessions would be and we knew what they wouldn't be. Trap never budged, things never changed. It was like it was a badge of honour with him, part of his value system that players would adapt and never complain. To be bored was almost a sin but somebody once said that half the problems in the world were caused by boredom. There is another problem and this might be the fault of professional footballers. Give a footballer an excuse and he'll take it. If you have ever gone on a package holiday with a tour group, you might get some sense of what it's like with footballers. There will always be somebody on the holiday who isn't happy with the hotel or the restaurant or the beach. Now a squad of players is like that except they can't go and get drunk every night to forget their problems (well, most of them can't). Instead every problem becomes compounded at close quarters. There was nothing big but that was because there was nothing at all. Every day became the same. When something did happen, it didn't help the mood. On the Monday night, we had all gone to a reception in Montecatini that was put on in Trap's honour. It was a lovely evening and the reminder of his standing in the country was probably the high point of that week. What came next was a reminder of how he'd got there. The decision to leave Kevin Foley out hurt everyone. Of course footballers' sense of humour kicked in - his bags were packed for him and left outside his door - but this was different. Kevin was popular. When something happens in football, most players' reaction is usually 'Fuck it, it wasn't me. Tough luck. Let's get going.' But this was ruthless and it wasn't the right way to deal with a player like that. It left a mark on everyone. There wasn't much else to think about. I was uptight as it was. I was worried about my fitness and I had waited my whole life for this so I could never relax. I didn't do anything except think about the tournament, train and think about the tournament. We'd had a night out in Dublin before we left for Montecatini where the lads had a few drinks. Somebody suggested to me that I should have a drink to relax. Looking back a drink would have done me no harm. I had waited so long for this and I felt I was in the zone and I didn't want anything to jeopardise it. I didn't want to have any regrets. Maybe a few drinks would have relaxed me a little. From the FAI's point of view, it was important there was nothing contentious so Montecatini was the ideal place. I had one last chance to make an impression on Trap when we went to Budapest for a friendly on the Monday night before we flew to Poland. There was a massive thunderstorm on the night and the game was delayed and in doubt at one stage. I would have taken my chances if the lightning was bouncing off the stands, I was desperate to get a chance even if I had doubts about my fitness. I came on with 15 minutes to go and I cleared one ball off the line but I knew I wasn't right. At one stage I went round the goalkeeper and I lost my balance. I knew it was down to a lack of fitness. Should I have said something? Possibly, but I knew I wouldn't. Trap knew anyway, I could see by the way he was looking at me in training. * * * * * SOPOT How do you think you would feel on the eve of your first major tournament? Excited? Probably. Nervous? For sure. A combination of both? Most likely. Or would you find yourself saying 'Thank fuck it's here', grateful that the monotony might be coming to an end, that at last there might be something to do? That's how I felt when we arrived in Poland, it was mainly relief. Sopot was lovely, the hotel was good and the training ground was fabulous. Here we had the buzz I was looking for. Italy had been 4/10 but this was a lot better. Some of our wives had booked into a hotel but there was a problem as there was a lap-dancing club downstairs. So they moved out and checked into the hotel next door to ours, the Grand Hotel, where Hitler had his headquarters when Germany invaded Poland. By this stage, I think we were all pretty fed up with the training. Trap was old school. He would ask us if we'd like a five-a-side and we'd always say yes but it's better if a coach is anticipating everything and keeping things moving. Trap would take us through his tactics. We all knew his tactics. We had known them for about three years and they weren't going to change. When it was a normal international break, your enthusiasm would get you through but this was a month of the same old stuff. There was a bad tension in the squad, the tension that comes from frustration and the feeling that everything was going stale. Modern sessions move swiftly, you go from one routine into another with no hanging around. With Trap, it moved slowly, like time itself. My only experience of tours is hearing stories and watching the films of the Lions on tour. They always had events planned to keep the squad engaged and distracted. We did nothing, as if Trap was testing us to see if we had what it takes to put up with a high level of boredom. Our training sessions were repetitive. The training wasn't too much for us, it wasn't taxing, it was just too long and monotonous. Steve Coppell used to say "racehorses don't race every day" but I think Trap thought they should race every day or else he thought we weren't thoroughbreds. When we finally got a day off, just after we arrived in Sopot, we had to ask him for it, which sounds like a little thing, but it's not. If your boss tells you you've been working hard and you should have a holiday, would it feel different than if you went to your boss and told him you needed a break? The day off helped the players recharge, especially those who knew they wouldn't be playing. Trap was relaxed and said the players just had to report for noon the next day so some people had a couple of drinks in the casino across the road, but it was understood what was expected. IRELAND v CROATIA Poznan, June 10 We all knew what the team for the Croatia game would be. Trap had named it a week before, ahead of the friendly in Budapest. I think Trap had come under pressure to change his ways. He did things in that tournament that I would never have expected but he did them without conviction. I would never have expected Simon Cox to play on the wing but I think Trap felt he had to make an attacking move. We conceded an early goal and that unsettled us so we were always chasing that game. We knew our tournament depended on it, but I got the first signs that maybe this tournament had come too late for some of our players. I remember one player spent what seemed like five minutes picking his family out and waving to them during the warm-up. I wondered about that. Was this a lap of honour or were we here for business? Pick out your family and give them a wave but don't start blowing them kisses for a few minutes like it's a curtain call at a Broadway show. I thought it was unprofessional. The mood after the game was low. There was never much talking with Trap so we were left to think about things for ourselves and what we thought was that we were in big trouble now. IRELAND v SPAIN Gdansk, June 14 Sopot was beginning to transform itself after we returned from the Croatia game but we were flat as a pancake. It had been a sleepy seaside town in the week before the first game but now it became the base for the Irish fans who were heading to the Spain game in Gdansk. I was still obsessively resting so when my wife would suggest joining her for a walk I would always say I couldn't. Sheasy was the same but David Forde was making us look bad. Everywhere the wives went, they'd meet Fordey. "He's a real gentleman," my wife would say. "He's always holding doors open for us." Fordey, or Clark Kent as we started calling him, was out being gallant while we stayed in the hotel, resting. "David Forde's over here having coffee, why can't you have a coffee?" my wife asked. "He's third-choice 'keeper," I told her. "He's allowed go out. Me and Sheasy have to rest." I would love to experience a tournament as a fan, as even though the supporters were right outside the door, we kept away from them. Before the Spain game, my wife went to see Snow Patrol who were playing a special concert. Joanne sent me a video of a moment in the concert when the band got the whole crowd to sing 'Stand up for the Boys in Green'. I watched it and thought 'Wow!' Within the squad, the atmosphere before the Spain game never picked up, everything was a chore, training was a drag. After one game, we knew we were out. We were knocked for six by the Croatia result. Nobody would say that we didn't think we could get something from Spain but I'm not sure how much we believed it. Certainly we needed to do everything possible to get a result. On the morning of the game, one player was playing on the golf simulator in the hotel with his son. I don't know if it was the frustration but it drove me crazy. "What the fuck is he doing?" I thought he should be resting and made my feelings clear. Trap dropped Doyler and played Simon Cox again but he came off at half-time. By then it was too late. I had never done enough but I was desperate for a chance. Trap sent on McClean and Paul Green ahead of me. I knew I was on the back foot when McClean came on. We were out and the tournament I had dreamt of was slipping away from me. In the dressing-room, it kicked off a bit. "The training has been shit," was a common complaint. We were finished in the competition after four days, the anger came tumbling out and a lot of it went in Trap's direction. IRELAND v ITALY Poznan, June 18 This was the lowest point of my professional career. The tournament had come too late for a lot of our players. Some like Richard Dunne had fitness issues and others were a year or two too old. Trap named the same team as he had for the opening game and that was the first sign that things were going to end as they had begun: with a whimper. Everybody wanted to go home and everybody who hadn't played felt they deserved to play. Before he named the team, Trap came to me and said "How are you?" I told him I was good. He said, "You play tomorrow, you start or you come on." The night before the Italy game, Marco Tardelli told me I'd be playing. "You deserve to play." I called the family and told them I'd be playing. I wasn't surprised. I'd played well against Italy whenever we'd played them. After the game in Liege in 2011, Buffon came into the dressing-room and asked for my shirt. I was disappointed when I wasn't in the team but I still thought I'd be playing. I always knew when Trap was going to send me on during his time with Ireland. The lads would look at me like I was crazy when I started putting on my tie-ups and getting ready before he'd given any signal. "What are you doing?" they'd say. "I'll be on in a minute," I'd tell them. I was inside Trap's head. So I knew in that last game, even before he'd used all his subs, that it was over. I never got my tie-ups on, I never started the mental exercises I'd use to get ready. On the bench players were getting angry. Darron Gibson was one of them and I remember thinking he had a right to be angry but so did I. When the last sub was made, I felt my world had ended. It was the lowest point of my career. All I wanted was five minutes, all I wanted was a bit of loyalty. I could deal with James McClean getting on ahead of me in the tournament. He was playing well and deserved it. I hated him for it but when Simon Cox was sent on to play on the wing, it broke my heart. In the dressing-room afterwards, I fell to pieces. Marco came over to me. "Get the fuck away from me," I said and then Duffer walked over and said to me, "If anyone deserved to play, it was you." I will always be grateful to him for that. I had two drinks that night in the hotel but I couldn't even do that. The next day we had a barbecue and Trapattoni came to me and said, "We need you for the next campaign." I haven't played for Ireland since. I respect Trapattoni for everything he did. He broke my heart but I respect him for his ruthlessness, which is a strange thing to say. I had never felt worse in football. When I was released by Palace, I thought it was bad but this was worse because this was the event that would make all of that worthwhile. This was something my daughter would look back on proudly when she was older. Instead it was just a more glamorous place to feel like shit. What's hard to take is how people talk about the Euros. People say "we were rubbish at the Euros", and that team deserve better. It came too late for us. We'll never be known as heroes, we'll never be remembered for the things we did but for the things we failed to do. Physically I made sacrifices which I'm only getting over now. I had an operation immediately afterwards and the recovery from that had a knock-on effect. Now that I am back playing at my best and on the brink of a return to the Premier League with Ipswich, the pain has lessened but it was a long way back. Nobody asked me to take those risks. I could have put my club career first, maybe I should have. My game is about running the extra ten per cent but during the Euros, while I could run like everyone else could run, I couldn't run like I could run. I wanted to play for my country in a tournament and the sacrifices to get there aren't a story of a few months, they are the story of my life. Wherever I go, I tell people I'm unbreakable. I made it the hard way. I joke to my wife, if you ever want to get rid of me, you'll have to kill me. But the European Championships were different. The European Championships came close to breaking me. Win One of Five Pairs of Tickets to Ireland v France - Click here Sunday Indo Sport |
Young Thug and his label head have differing views on how Thugger should handle his career and music. The hip-hop star and Lyor Cohen , the 300 Entertainment head, got into a tense exchange over Thug's reluctance to do interviews and his approach to crafting music. Young Thug has adopted the flood-the-market-with-material approach, and Cohen believes that both factors--interviews and impatience--are hindering the rapper. On Wednesday (April 13) night's episode of CNBC's Follow the Leader , the two got into a back-and-forth about these issues. “I understand that you’re shy and you don’t like doing it, but the fact of the matter is, your fans actually want to hear from you," Lyor says to Young Thug as the two meet about Thug's latest project, Slime Season 3 . "I don't need to," Thugger shoots back. He then announces that he wants 10 number one singles this year. "If you don't freestyle and you actually work on the singles and record great choruses and develop your songs, yes." Cohen says. "You just record so many songs and leave them like little orphans out there. You have to come back to them." "Hell nah," says Young Thug. "The critics come back to them." Of course, disagreements between artists and their labels are nothing new or unique. But does Cohen have a point about Thugger needing to take his time and craft better singles? |
Southern Methodist University has been found in violation of Title IX by the U.S. Department of Education's Office for Civil Rights for “failing to promptly and equitably” respond to reports of sexual assault, harassment and retaliation.The federal law prohibits gender-based discrimination, including sexual violence and harassment on college campuses. It requires universities to investigate all sex crimes and to have an internal grievance procedure to handle sexual assault reports.Universities that receive federal funds must comply with Title IX. If they are found in violation, they could lose their federal funding. Usually, the Office for Civil Rights strikes a resolution agreement with conditions that the university must meet. No university has lost its funding because of a violation."This voluntary resolution agreement with OCR confirms SMU’s commitment to provide a safe and supportive campus environment and to follow the Department of Education’s Title IX guidelines as they continue to evolve," the university said in a statement sent to The Dallas Morning News. "We appreciate OCR’s recognition of the new policies and procedures SMU has implemented prior to and during its investigation, as well as recognition of the work of the President’s Task Force on Sexual Misconduct. Although we take issue with some of OCR’s conclusions and generalizations, we look forward to taking additional actions as outlined. The well-being of our students is our highest priority."Investigators determined that SMU violated Title IX “by failing to promptly and equitably respond to student complaints of gender-based harassment and sexual violence, including sexual assault, and to reports of retaliatory harassment,” according to a Thursday news release In one case, investigators found that SMU did not respond "promptly and equitably" to a complaint of a sexual assault of a male student by another male student. The student withdrew from SMU after other students harassed and retaliated against him.They also found SMU's sexual harassment and sexual violence policies and nondiscrimination notice didn't comply with Title IX requirements, according to the news release.During the investigation, SMU "took steps to proactively address the issue of sexual violence on campus," including new sexual harassment policies, according to the news release. The university also adopted changes from the university's task force on sexual misconduct. Those changes included more education efforts for students and development of a new bystander invention program, among others.In 2012, University President R. Gerald Turner appointed the task force after SMU after the Dallas County district attorney questioned its handling of sexual assault reports.SMU also faces two lawsuits from students who say the university mishandled their sexual assault report.SMU has committed to a resolution (which you can read below) with the Office of Civil Rights, the news release says.“I appreciate Southern Methodist University’s strong commitment in this agreement to provide a safe and supportive educational environment for its students,” said Catherine E. Lhamon, assistant secretary for civil rights in the news release. “I look forward to working with Southern Methodist University in its implementation of the agreement."SMU will take the following actions:-- Revise its Title IX grievance procedures to comply with Title IX-- Provide updates to the Office of Civil Rights on implementation of the task force recommendations-- Develop and implement a procedure to share information between SMU police and the Title IX coordinator-- Notify students and employees about SMU's Title IX coordinators and their contact information-- Track harassment reports, investigations, interim measures and resolutions-- Train staff and students on the revised SMU policies and procedures-- Conduct annual climate assessments-- Review sexual harassment/violence complaints and reports of sexual harassment/violence filed during and since 2012-2013 to determine whether SMU investigated each complaint or report promptly and equitably-- Take action in those reviewed cases to address any problems that are identified-- Provide reimbursement for one student for university-related expenses and counseling U.S. Department of Education letter to SMU SMU agreement with U.S. Department of Education |
User Forum Topic European banks sitting on £16.3 trillion ($24 trillion) of toxic assets may suffer massive losses, according to a confidential Brussels document. A secret 17-page paper discussed by finance ministers, including the Chancellor Alistair Darling on Tuesday, also warned that government attempts to buy up or underwrite such assets could plunge the European Union into a deeper crisis. National leaders and EU officials share fears that a second bank bail-out in Europe will raise government borrowing at a time when investors - particularly those who lend money to European governments - have growing doubts over the ability of countries such as Spain, Greece, Portugal, Ireland, Italy and Britain to pay it back. “Estimates of total expected asset write-downs suggest that the budgetary costs – actual and contingent - of asset relief could be very large both in absolute terms and relative to GDP in member states,” the EC document, seen by The Daily Telegraph, cautioned. “ "It is essential that government support through asset relief should not be on a scale that raises concern about over-indebtedness or financing problems.” European Commission officials have estimated that “impaired assets” may amount to 44pc of EU bank balance sheets. The Commission estimates that so-called financial instruments in the ‘trading book’ total £12.3 trillion (13.7 trillion euros), equivalent to about 33pc of EU bank balance sheets. In addition, so-called 'available for sale instruments' worth £4trillion (4.5 trillion euros), or 11pc of balance sheets, are also added by the Commission to arrive at the headline figure of £16.3 trillion. Banks account for their assets in different ways. Assets put into the “trading book” have to be marked to current market values, while those in the “banking book” are loans and other assets which the institution believes it can hold to maturity. Other assets are classified as “available for sale”, which are also marked to market values. The Commission figure is significant because of the role EU officials will play in devising rules to evaluate “toxic” bank assets later this month. New moves to bail out banks will be discussed at an emergency EU summit at the end of February. The EU is deeply worried at widening spreads on bonds sold by different European countries. In line with the risk, and the weak performance of some EU economies compared to others, investors are demanding increasingly higher interest to lend to countries such as Italy instead of Germany. Ministers and officials fear that the process could lead to vicious spiral that threatens to tear both the euro and the EU apart. “Such considerations are particularly important in the current context of widening budget deficits, rising public debt levels and challenges in sovereign bond issuance,” the EC paper warned. Source: Telegraph UK http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/finan... |
They're back. The hacker gang LulzSec, after declaring retirement last month, cracked the Rupert Murdoch–owned New Times on Monday and used it to host a fake news story declaring that the embattled media mogul had been found dead at his home. The web defacement took the form of a mock article from Murdock's The Sun, with the headline "Media moguls body discoverd" [sic]. The text goes on to claim falsely that Murdoch "ingested a large quantity of palladium before stumbling into his famous topiary garden late last night." "We have owned Sun/News of the World - that story is simply phase 1 - expect the lulz to flow in coming days," the group announced on its Twitter feed. At the same time, some visitors were redirected from The Sun's home page to the fake story, which appeared to have been blocked within an hour. Murdoch's news empire has been badly shaken in the last month by a massive voice-mail hacking scandal involving reporters at the UK-based News of the World, which Murdoch recently shuttered. In May, LulzSec made news for the the first time with a similar attack against the website of PBS Newshour, in which it posted a false news story announcing that deceased rapper Tupac Shakur had been found “alive and well” in New Zealand. By then the gang had already hacked Sony’s Japanese website, and before that Fox.com, where the group stole and posted 363 employee passwords, the names, phone numbers and e-mail addresses of 73,000 people who had signed up for audition information for the Fox talent show The X-Factor. Subsequent hack targets included the Arizona Department of Public Safety. By late June, though, web vigilantes and rival hackers had exposed what they said were the real identities of LulzSec's members, and on June 25 LulzSec announced its retirement. Group leader "Sabu" joined an outfit called AnonymousIRC, which continued targeting corporations and users, including the defense contractor Booz Allen Hamilton. |
Adobe Illustrator’s artboard feature is a powerful tool that artists and designers can use to rapidly create, preview, and iterate on 2D game assets. In this article, I’m going to briefly share how I use artboards and linked files to get things done faster while maintaining a consistent standard. This is especially useful when creating and revising button designs. First, a brief overview: Illustrator’s artboard tool is located in the last group on the standard toolbox, and looks like a box with some bits sticking out from the side: Clicking on it puts the entire screen in artboard mode. Switching back to any other tool (such as the selection tool) automatically exits the screen from artboard mode. Advanced users who are used to hotkeys will find it easy to transition into artboard mode using Shift+O. Artboards are discrete areas in an Illustrator document that represent a “page” of content, almost as if the contents of each artboard were a file all on its own. Doing this allows the user to create different versions of a design, and quickly swap versions for evaluation in another document via the linking feature. Here’s a quick example of this: I have three different artboards in one Illustrator file. By embedding one of these buttons into another document as a linked file, I can add text to it without the risk of altering the button itself. I can also try different text in another version of the linked file on a separate artboard if I so desire: Linking is done using the File > Place comment, or Shift + Ctrl + P on Windows. Linking a file simply places the first available artboard on the source file, so make sure the Show Import Options option is checked: Linked files cannot be edited directly, so there’s no risk of accidentally altering the graphic. Here’s another example. In one Illustrator file, I have a collection of layers for different kinds of soup graphics — the first three in this example are the soups themselves, and the last two are the bowls: In my other Illustrator file, I have these layers assembled to help me visualize how they will appear when the graphic is “assembled” in the game. The files are linked, so any alterations I make to the first Illustrator file will apply on the second automatically: This allows me to preview the entire graphic and edit the individual layers without: Having to keep moving or copy-pasting layers back and forth. The risk of accidentally editing the wrong layer (linked files cannot be edited directly). Worrying about getting the coordinates wrong — replacing a linked image with another preserves its coordinates. When it’s time to create a new soup graphic, I simply have to alt+drag one of the soup artboards in the first Illustrator file to duplicate it, and then make edits (change colors, add elements, tweak gradients) to create a new graphic. Once I’m ready, I simply have to hit Export in the first Illustrator file and I can have all the artboards automatically export as individual pngs, ready to be placed into the game. This is not a new trick, but it’s something that new 2D game artists will find worth learning and integrating into their workflows. The artboards feature has been a part of Illustrator for several years now, so there’s a wealth of further reading that can be done on the subject. It’s been a staple for me ever since I began working extensively with 2D graphics, and I hope you can make the feature work effectively for you as well. |
After watching Brian Boyle score the overtime winner for the Tampa Bay Lightning in Game 3 shortly after he crushed defenseman Thomas Hickey, New York Islanders head coach Jack Capuano said the hit should have been penalized. Hickey nails Drouin...then Boyle nails Hickey and scores OT winner on same play. Questionable hit. pic.twitter.com/xFC8ud2sIG — Pavel Barber (@HeyBarber) May 4, 2016 "It's a direct shot to the head," Capuano said postgame, according to Peter Botte of the New York Daily News. "Probably gonna be suspended for a game ... whole game shouldn't come down to that." Boyle's hit came after Hickey took Tampa forward Jonathan Drouin out for an extended period of time with a punishing hit of his own earlier in the game. Meanwhile, Lightning coach Jon Cooper wasn't too worried about his overtime hero facing any additional discipline: |
WHICH source of renewable energy is most important to the European Union? Solar power, perhaps? (Europe has three-quarters of the world’s total installed capacity of solar photovoltaic energy.) Or wind? (Germany trebled its wind-power capacity in the past decade.) The answer is neither. By far the largest so-called renewable fuel used in Europe is wood. In its various forms, from sticks to pellets to sawdust, wood (or to use its fashionable name, biomass) accounts for about half of Europe’s renewable-energy consumption. In some countries, such as Poland and Finland, wood meets more than 80% of renewable-energy demand. Even in Germany, home of the Energiewende (energy transformation) which has poured huge subsidies into wind and solar power, 38% of non-fossil fuel consumption comes from the stuff. After years in which European governments have boasted about their high-tech, low-carbon energy revolution, the main beneficiary seems to be the favoured fuel of pre-industrial societies. Get our daily newsletter Upgrade your inbox and get our Daily Dispatch and Editor's Picks. The idea that wood is low in carbon sounds bizarre. But the original argument for including it in the EU’s list of renewable-energy supplies was respectable. If wood used in a power station comes from properly managed forests, then the carbon that billows out of the chimney can be offset by the carbon that is captured and stored in newly planted trees. Wood can be carbon-neutral. Whether it actually turns out to be is a different matter. But once the decision had been taken to call it a renewable, its usage soared. In the electricity sector, wood has various advantages. Planting fields of windmills is expensive but power stations can be adapted to burn a mixture of 90% coal and 10% wood (called co-firing) with little new investment. Unlike new solar or wind farms, power stations are already linked to the grid. Moreover, wood energy is not intermittent as is that produced from the sun and the wind: it does not require backup power at night, or on calm days. And because wood can be used in coal-fired power stations that might otherwise have been shut down under new environmental standards, it is extremely popular with power companies. Money grows on trees The upshot was that an alliance quickly formed to back public subsidies for biomass. It yoked together greens, who thought wood was carbon-neutral; utilities, which saw co-firing as a cheap way of saving their coal plants; and governments, which saw wood as the only way to meet their renewable-energy targets. The EU wants to get 20% of its energy from renewable sources by 2020; it would miss this target by a country mile if it relied on solar and wind alone. The scramble to meet that 2020 target is creating a new sort of energy business. In the past, electricity from wood was a small-scale waste-recycling operation: Scandinavian pulp and paper mills would have a power station nearby which burned branches and sawdust. Later came co-firing, a marginal change. But in 2011 RWE, a large German utility, converted its Tilbury B power station in eastern England to run entirely on wood pellets (a common form of wood for burning industrially). It promptly caught fire. Undeterred, Drax, also in Britain and one of Europe’s largest coal-fired power stations, said it would convert three of its six boilers to burn wood. When up and running in 2016 they will generate 12.5 terawatt hours of electricity a year. This energy will get a subsidy, called a renewable obligation certificate, worth £45 ($68) a megawatt hour (MWh), paid on top of the market price for electricity. At current prices, calculates Roland Vetter, the chief analyst at CF Partners, Europe’s largest carbon-trading firm, Drax could be getting £550m a year in subsidies for biomass after 2016—more than its 2012 pretax profit of £190m. With incentives like these, European firms are scouring the Earth for wood. Europe consumed 13m tonnes of wood pellets in 2012, according to International Wood Markets Group, a Canadian company. On current trends, European demand will rise to 25m-30m a year by 2020. Europe does not produce enough timber to meet that extra demand. So a hefty chunk of it will come from imports. Imports of wood pellets into the EU rose by 50% in 2010 alone and global trade in them (influenced by Chinese as well as EU demand) could rise five- or sixfold from 10m-12m tonnes a year to 60m tonnes by 2020, reckons the European Pellet Council. Much of that will come from a new wood-exporting business that is booming in western Canada and the American south. Gordon Murray, executive director of the Wood Pellet Association of Canada, calls it “an industry invented from nothing”. Prices are going through the roof. Wood is not a commodity and there is no single price. But an index of wood-pellet prices published by Argus Biomass Markets rose from €116 ($152) a tonne in August 2010 to €129 a tonne at the end of 2012. Prices for hardwood from western Canada have risen by about 60% since the end of 2011. This is putting pressure on companies that use wood as an input. About 20 large saw mills making particle board for the construction industry have closed in Europe during the past five years, says Petteri Pihlajamaki of Poyry, a Finnish consultancy (though the EU’s building bust is also to blame). Higher wood prices are hurting pulp and paper companies, which are in bad shape anyway: the production of paper and board in Europe remains almost 10% below its 2007 peak. In Britain, furniture-makers complain that competition from energy producers “will lead to the collapse of the mainstream British furniture-manufacturing base, unless the subsidies are significantly reduced or removed”. But if subsidising biomass energy were an efficient way to cut carbon emissions, perhaps this collateral damage might be written off as an unfortunate consequence of a policy that was beneficial overall. So is it efficient? No. Wood produces carbon twice over: once in the power station, once in the supply chain. The process of making pellets out of wood involves grinding it up, turning it into a dough and putting it under pressure. That, plus the shipping, requires energy and produces carbon: 200kg of CO2 for the amount of wood needed to provide 1MWh of electricity. This decreases the amount of carbon saved by switching to wood, thus increasing the price of the savings. Given the subsidy of £45 per MWh, says Mr Vetter, it costs £225 to save one tonne of CO2 by switching from gas to wood. And that assumes the rest of the process (in the power station) is carbon neutral. It probably isn’t. A fuel and your money Over the past few years, scientists have concluded that the original idea—carbon in managed forests offsets carbon in power stations—was an oversimplification. In reality, carbon neutrality depends on the type of forest used, how fast the trees grow, whether you use woodchips or whole trees and so on. As another bit of the EU, the European Environment Agency, said in 2011, the assumption “that biomass combustion would be inherently carbon neutral…is not correct…as it ignores the fact that using land to produce plants for energy typically means that this land is not producing plants for other purposes, including carbon otherwise sequestered.” Tim Searchinger of Princeton University calculates that if whole trees are used to produce energy, as they sometimes are, they increase carbon emissions compared with coal (the dirtiest fuel) by 79% over 20 years and 49% over 40 years; there is no carbon reduction until 100 years have passed, when the replacement trees have grown up. But as Tom Brookes of the European Climate Foundation points out, “we’re trying to cut carbon now; not in 100 years’ time.” In short, the EU has created a subsidy which costs a packet, probably does not reduce carbon emissions, does not encourage new energy technologies—and is set to grow like a leylandii hedge. Correction: We mistakenly referred to Argus Biomass Markets as the Argus Biomass Report. Worse, we muddled our numbers. The index of wood-pellet prices published by Argus Biomass Markets actually rose from an average of €116 ($152, not $116) a tonne in August 2010 to €129 (not $129) a tonne at the end of 2012. These are the delivered prices into the ports of Amsterdam, Rotterdam and Antwerp. Sorry. This was corrected on April 9th. |
The First Fully European Literature on Startup Scaling This post originally appeared on Medium here ‘All told [American VCs] did not [seem to have] a strong impulsion to transfer a new block of cash to an account in London, Paris or Berlin, to dig in.’ This is the picture left by the talks at TechCrunch Disrupt London last Monday by a panel of SV VCs. Despite the stronger attention that Europe is getting from overseas, there are still no strong interests in transferring operations in Europe and increase their presence in the motherland. Several investors want to invest in things that they know, in companies they can drive to or fly to in a day, and that is understandable. However the majority of these players are in the end motivated by returns, and a big part of the motivation for not expanding to Europe is that these returns are not worth the effort. And in the end, companies that truly scale are going to get the US market as well. And are going to pass by their gates at some point. The large return opportunities reside however in early stage investments. That is when a small investment can lead to great returns and that is why, in my opinion, we should see more transatlantic activity at an early stage. As a consequence, probably low investments are motivated by low returns. Low returns caused by obstacles to blitzscaling In the last Stanford class about blitzscaling, Reid Hoffman and John Lilly do an egregious job in showing and discussing the heuristics around startup scaling. Outlining the philosophy of several company stages, and specific challenges and opportunities connected to all of them. And it makes you think. A startup already has an incredible number of risks. Increasing risks by not knowing what are the practices that others have used in the same situation is wrong and not value optimising for entrepreneurs. This experience is either scarce or not present in most European startup networks. Which leads startups to repeat the same mistakes and overall not maximising their growth speed. The first step is knowledge There is a reason to study history and to have monuments. Human knowledge has the amazing characteristic of being transferable through time. And it allows present generations to not repeat errors that were committed in the past, and basically evolve faster. The same should be applied to startups. A whole lot of the innovation that we are seeing today has been pioneered and failed at Xerox park in the 60s. The idea of human intelligence augmented by the machine was the main drive to develop software in the early stage of the computer era. As a consequence, many of the mistakes have been already committed. And knowledge of them is a competitive advantage for your company against competitors or just against failure. As Patrick Collison (Stripe) said, “knowing history of what has been happening in your sector is way to cheat”, it prevents you from make the same mistakes again. A European body of startup knowledge As a European startup that helps other startups in one of the most difficult activities, determining their valuation, we have been thinking a lot about this at Equidam. Determining valuations for companies means truly understanding their risks and potential. And the more we look into our data, and the more we read about these things online, the more we are convinced that the challenges and risks that European startups face are peculiar, unique to their geographies and need unique solution to be resolved. We of course are not the only ones to think that EU problems need EU solutions. However, maybe because of the ever so European fragmentation, nobody is collecting this knowledge and making it readily available. So we decided we’ll do it. Today we are launching the Equidam Weekly. https://www.equidam.com/equidam-weekly-4th-december/ A weekly newsletter that contains articles written by European experts on European startup scaling and challenges. We are gathering articles from VCs, blogs, journals and startups that discuss how is the environment growing in Europe and how to confront these very specific challenges. We strongly believe awareness needs to be raised on these matters, and we’d love to have all European experience and knowledge in it. If you feel you have this experience and knowledge, please reach out to us, we’d love to include you in it or just discuss these issues openly. And of course, here’s the link to register to it! https://www.equidam.com/newsletter-weekly/ This post originally appeared on Medium here |
MUSEUM CAMPUS — After showing Chicagoans the lives of dinosaurs and pharaohs, the Field Museum will now offer guests a glimpse of ancient China. The "Cyrus Tang Hall of China," a new permanent exhibit at Field, will open Wednesday at the Downtown museum, 1400 S. Lake Shore Drive. The new exhibit, which pulls from more than 33,000 Chinese artifacts, is the product of three years of work involving 90 Field staffers and 75 outside scholars. "It's not often we open a new permanent exhibition," Field President and CEO Richard Lariviere said at a media preview Tuesday morning. "When we do, it's something that will educate and entertain a new generation of museum goers." An imperial robe from the Qing Dynasty on display at the exhibit. [DNAinfo/David Matthews] The exhibit includes 350 historic Chinese objects including textiles, rubbings, bronzes, ceramics and sculpture made across thousands of years. Among the highlights: a 27-foot-long hand scroll painting offering a panoramic view of a riverside city. And for the first time, the Field included interactive video boards allowing visitors to choose from an array of stories to read. In a statement, the Field said the "China" exhibit is the only permanent installation in the country to examine Chinese culture and history from an anthropological viewpoint. "While art museums typically highlight the aesthetic and contextual qualities of specific objects, the 'Cyrus Tang Hall of China' will tell the stories of the people who used them, the traditions they forged, and the legacies of that history that underlays and helps us understand the present," Gary Feinman, the museum's East Asian anthropology curator, said. The exhibit also includes a shadow puppet performance, and a meditative indoor "garden" named after late businesswoman Sue Ling Gin. The Sue Ling Gin Gardens. [DNAinfo/David Matthews] A local middle school group was among the first guests of the exhibit. One of the students was Sebastian Reyes, 13, of Pilsen. "I find it real helpful because most of this stuff I haven't learned yet," Reyes said. "It's pretty interactive." The exhibit's namesake, Cyrus Tang, immigrated to the United States from China in 1950 and since became a successful businessman with interests in metals and many other industries. Tang has founded or acquired more than 100 companies in the past 50 years, Field said. Tickets to the exhibit are included in both Field's Discovery ($25 for adults) and All-Access ($31 for adults) passes. Visit the museum's website for more information, and scroll down for more photos. For more neighborhood news, listen to DNAinfo Radio here: |
Yesterday, a Columbus, Ohio police officer shot a man in the neck and cheek and wounded a woman after blindly firing into a closed door. The Columbus Dispatch reports that the officer knocked on the door after a man flagged down police to report that his sister might be doing heroin inside the house. When a resident slammed the door on the officer, it apparently caught the officer’s hand. With his free hand, he reached for his gun and opened fire into the closed door. There were nine people in the home. Yes, the house apparently has a reputation as being a “drug house.” But there are a couple of issues here. First, that the officer’s hand was caught in the door at least suggests that he was attempting to enter the house. It is unclear from the story whether he had a warrant. A police officer can enter a home without a warrant under extreme, “exigent circumstances,” such as the belief that someone is in the process of committing a violent crime. A secondhand tip that someone in a residence might be ingesting illegal drugs is not an exigent circumstance. Second, even if the officer wasn’t trying to enter the home, he obviously had positioned himself in a way that prevented the residents from declining a search and closing the door. The article implies that the residents intentionally tried to slam the door so that it would injure the officer’s hand. Even if that were the case, it doesn’t justify blindly firing into a closed door while unaware of what is on the other side. The case also raises important questions about the Castle Doctrine and home defense. If a police officer is illegally attempting to enter your home, should you be legally permitted to use force to prevent him from doing so? It’s a difficult question. You don’t want to make people think they have license to decide at the scene that a search is illegal, use force against cops and then end up with casualties. Even if it were unquestionably legal, it certainly wouldn’t be advised. But the alternative is to say that citizens should be legally required to submit to illegal searches and hope that the courts will rule in their favor later. Even if the subject of the illegal search were to later win in court, which is hardly a given, an illegal search can have immediate and irreversible consequences. An interesting, somewhat related opinion recently from the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit provides one example of such consequences. In that case, the police got a tip that some stolen guns were being stored in a Nissan Maxima parked in the driveway of a specific address. The police proceeded to the address and then, without a warrant, entered the property, which was surrounded by a fence. They entered the property despite the fact that there was no Nissan Maxima parked in the drive. They also never found any guns. Once in the yard, the police officers were confronted by the Saint Bernard owned by the family who lived in the home. One officer then chased the dog down and killed it, directly in front of the dog’s 12-year-old owner. The trial court judge ruled that the jury should be allowed to consider the possibility that the tip about stolen guns merited an exigent-circumstances exception to the warrant requirement. The Second Circuit court disagreed. Defendants’ assertions that it would have been far more intrusive to “attempt to secure the parcel of property while a warrant was prepared,” given that Harris’s property was surrounded on three sides by other privately owned parcels, are inapposite. The fact that it may have been more tedious to secure the property at 297 Enfield Street while a warrant was obtained does not create exigency. We further note that aside from there being no urgency created by Hemingway’s tip about the firearms in and of itself, there is no evidence that the officers sought to corroborate the tip prior to their entry. The officers did not attempt to “knock and talk” or to learn who lived at 297 Enfield Street prior to arriving on the scene with their weapons out in a “tactical approach.” Trial Tr. Vol. II at 277; Trial Tr. Vol. III at 620. These facts underscore the inappropriateness of the exigent circumstances exception to this case. Accordingly, we conclude that there was insufficient evidence of urgency, and that the exigent circumstances exception to the warrant requirement was therefore not applicable on the evidence presented at trial. Because police officers require “either a warrant or probable cause plus exigent circumstances in order to make a lawful entry,” . . . the invasion of Plaintiffs’ curtilage without a warrant violated the Fourth Amendment. The ruling means that the family will be able to sue the officers for damages. But the dog is still dead. The ruling won’t un-traumatize the girl who saw the dog being killed. And eight years have now passed since the incident occurred. (Thanks to the blog police4aqi for the tip.) |
The year is -2367 DR. The Netherese Empire sits within central-eastern Faerun. Rivers now flow and lakes form from the melting northern glaciers, rainfall level have raised and temperatures are moderate. In some places of Netheril, vegetation is quite lush. Netheril is a land reborn. Hundreds of years ago a Netherese Archwizard named Ioulaum was born, one of the most powerful and oldest creatures in all of Toril, Ioulaum was a master of magic, and lead a massive assault on the orcs plaguing the land that almost lead to their extinction. However his greatest feat was inventing the Mythallar, a device that tapped directly into the weave of magic and gifting the Netherese the level of magic required to create their floating cities. Ioulaum started what would become common practice for Netherese Archwizards. Using the Mythallar, he tore off the top of a mountain, turned it upside down and gifted it with permanent levitation, founding a city atop. Hundreds of years later, we are now in the time known in The Silver Age. The Netherese are now the uncontested masters of magic, their empire is made of a collection of thirteen massive floating cities, powered by a collection of Mythallar. The newest floating city takes its shape high above the Netherese Skies, dubbed “Valstiir” after the Lady Archwizard that created it. As the Empire’s skies grow crowded and resources atop the cities dwindle, the Archwizards began to plan expansion beyond its borders, something they had never attempted before. It was around this time that Lady Valstiir was gifted a vision by a mysterious oracle known as the "Terraseer". The Seer spoke of a rich and prosperous land to the west. Its earth filled with countless precious gems, forests and rivers and snow-topped mountains teaming with life and natural resources, ripe for the taking. The Archwizards, after much disagreement, came to the conclusion that their newest of Archwizards, Lady Valstiir and her city must follow this oracle's guidance and go beyond the borders of Netheril. They are to head far west past the elven empire of Eaerlann and into the region known in modern day Faerun as; “The Savage Frontier”. |
Andreas Scheuer, the secretary-general of the Christian Social Union in Bavaria (the Christian Democrats’ sister party), tweeted , “It is unbearable that in major German cities, women are sexually assaulted and robbed in the street by young migrants” — as if attacks by old Germans were somehow more bearable. For U.S. presidential hopeful Donald Trump, the attacks provided racist fodder for his Twitter refrains . Chancellor Angela Merkel’s Christian Democrats are directing energies to expand social control and harden asylum policies — a very rare moment of mainstream political activation around sexual assault. Meanwhile, right-wing voices — not known for their concern for rape victims — are gurgling with putrid anti-refugee sentiment in Germany and beyond. Its predictable statement reveals the ill-thought debate around the Cologne attacks, which has little to do with protecting women and more to do with scapegoating the Middle Eastern or North African “other” entering Germany. The response should instead focus on tackling the patriarchal context from which such violations against women’s bodies systematically spring, as well as caring for victims. The response, the party contends, should take a specific shape. According to the draft proposal, refugees convicted of a crime would immediately lose their claim to asylum, it would be easier for police to take allegedly suspicious individuals into custody, dragnet spying would expand, and more surveillance cameras would be installed. In Cologne’s city center, scores of women were sexually assaulted and mugged as crowds gathered to ring in the new year. Thirty-one suspects have since been identified by police, at least 18 of whom are asylum seekers , and a draft announcement from Germany’s governing Christian Democratic Union, to be released Sunday, stated that the attacks “demand a strong response from the authorities.” This week German magazine Focus ran a cover story on the attacks with a darkly metonymic image: A white naked woman stands alluringly in monochrome, her pale skin stamped — literally besmirched — with handprints of black paint. But it was the German magazine, not a random refugee, who stripped the woman of her clothes. Germans’ responses the terrible events of New Year’s Eve should not collapse into racist machinations as archaic as the tale of Shakespeare’s “Othello.” It bears mentioning, however obvious, that to stigmatize all refugees on the basis of the actions of a few is pernicious. It’s an extrapolation that is the very definition of racism. One million refugees entered Germany last year, in Europe’s largest movement of refugees since World War II, and to suggest that this entire group is a threat to women in Germany reproduces the worst stereotype of the invading, barbarous moor — a centuries-old trope that has long fostered discrimination without providing any traceable safety for the women it purports to protect. We should be suspicious of any people keen to point out the links between Islam and misogyny if they are not equally concerned with the prevailing violent misogynies in the cultural West. Treating rape as a problem imported from the Middle East and North Africa that can be deported along with refugees grossly ignores and normalizes an already ubiquitous rape culture. Swiss newspaper Neue Zuercher Zeitung warned this week of an “imported macho culture” arriving on German soil with the refugees. The insinuation that Europe does not already have a well-worn macho culture or macho cultures of its own is nothing short of an offense to feminism. Most assaults, after all, take place in German homes: Marital rape was still legal in Germany until 1997. This is not to say the attacks on New Year’s Eve are not deadly serious. A large number of contemporaneous assaults demand an investigation into whether and how each attack is connected; if there is a connection rooted in certain cultural or societal mores, it should not be dismissed. Currently, details about the attacks remain scarce. We know that at least 18 asylum seekers are suspects and that victims described the perpetrators as looking North African or Arabic — which are broad strokes. And needless to say, most people in Germany of that description are not seeking asylum. In opposing the right’s racism, we must be able to countenance that a group of refugees could be responsible for the assaults and that these individuals should not be defended. We engage in our own subtle racism if, in defending the rights of refugees in general, we collapse them all into a homogeneous category, because all racism is predicated on treated an entire group of people as an undifferentiated mass. The key is to take these assaults seriously on their own terms and as part of a generalized scourge of sexual harassment and assault, which is not fought by picking out specific ethnic groups. What’s more, we should be suspicious of any people so keen to point out the links between Islamic culture and misogyny if they are not equally concerned with the prevailing violent misogynies in the cultural West. The key challenge, according Spiegel columnist Sascha Lobo, is differentiation. “To be civilized means to meet nine people in a row with black hair who all turn out to be assholes and then to meet a tenth black-haired person and not punch that one in the face,” he wrote. Thankfully, a number of groups are championing that approach. Kristina Erichsen-Kruse of Weisser Ring, a support organization for victims of crime (not only sexual assault), said, “We worry that after these events, refugees will be unjustly in focus. These generalizations shouldn’t happen.” On Saturday, numerous organizations are calling for a protest under the banner “No to sexual violence, no to racism” and explicitly rallying against right-wing nationalist political parties such as PEGIDA (Patriotic Europeans Against the Islamization of the West). Maja Wegener of Terre de Femmes, a women’s rights nonprofit, told us that “sexism and sexual assaults existed before New Year’s Eve, especially at events like Oktoberfest and other festivals. But there’s no public debate.” Some European nations have taken a specific approach to educate newly arrived male refugees. Norway offers new classes in which sexual norms and related laws are taught to men more accustomed to conservative values. They teach that types of violence perhaps considered honorable in certain spaces are illegal and disrespectful in Norway. Similar classes are being proposed in Denmark. It is, prima facie, preferable to educate in an effort toward integration, as opposed to scapegoating and rejecting. It would be far better still if these anti-rape, respect for women classes were standardized across Europe, offered not just to new and feared brown-skinned arrivals. Men everywhere are in desperate need of such lessons. |
Behind The Battle: The Start (S04E01) Go BEHIND THE BATTLE with the Columbus Blue Jackets exclusively on Jackets TV . Experience what goes on behind the scenes of your favorite hockey team, as the journey is documented! To view Behind The Battle: The Start (S04E01), click here. ARCHIVE August 2014 Behind the Battle: 2014 Development Camp Part 4 August 2014 Behind the Battle: 2014 Development Camp Part 3 August 2014 Behind the Battle: 2014 Development Camp Part 2 August 2014 Behind the Battle: 2014 Development Camp Part 1 August 2013 Behind the Battle, Episode 4 February 2013 Behind the Battle, Episode 3 December 2012 Behind the Battle, Episode 2 November 2012 Behind the Battle Episode 1, Part 3 November 2012 Behind the Battle Episode 1, Part 2 November 2012 Behind the Battle Episode 1, Part 1 |
Brigham Young University's board of trustees has approved a 300-word document that will replace the university's existing Honor Code and Dress and Grooming Standards. For students' wardrobes, a few standards will change: Men no longer have to wear socks, but everyone has to wear shoes. Students can wear knee-length shorts. Men should not wear earrings, and beards still are no-nos.University officials say the new document will not change existing principles, though it is less strict and more general in tone. At one time the university did not allow male students to have facial hair or female students to wear slacks - and socks were required. The new code generally stresses modesty, neatness and cleanliness. Shorter guideline list "The one-page document is about one-third the length of the former code and standards, but it is essentially the same in terms of desired goals," said R.J. Snow, chairman of a 16-member ad hoc honor code review committee. "One difference is that the Code of Honor and the Dress and Grooming Standards are separate and distinct," Snow said. "But both are essentially a reaffirmation of what we have had in the past." While reaffirming the principles, there will be some differences, especially in the area of student involvement. Four Honor Code Councils will be formed with student input to develop programs for implementing the various aspects of the code and standards. Each council will be assigned a specific area to help students understand policies and to handle infractions. Enforcement not yet determined According to Kristen Smith, a member of BYU's Student Advisory Council over the Dress and Grooming Standards, the question of how the code and standards will be enforced is still to be determined. "I am excited that the process is with the students now," Smith said. "But we're not exactly sure what types of things the councils will have to handle." The honor councils will be divided into four specific areas: the freshman class; the sophomore, junior and senior classes; graduate student classes; and off-campus housing. Freshmen cause most problems Smith said the freshman class is separate for a reason. "Most of the problems currently come from the freshman class," Smith said "This is an effort to deal with them at their level and educate them as much as possible about the code and standards." The councils will work with the Honor Code Office, formerly the Standards Office. This Honor Code Office will only work with cases involving a violation of the law and other major infractions. Smith said the councils "will be able to decide which cases they want to deal with and, if they want, they can refer cases to the Honor Code Office." "We are trying to take away some of their load so they won't have to handle lesser infractions like the dress code," she said. Student enforcement best Paul Richards, director of BYU Public Communications, agrees that the change will cut back a great deal on these lesser infractions because problems like plagiarism and violations of the dress code can be handled by the students' peer groups. Richards said the idea to let students be involved at the judgment level came from the students themselves. "After a lot of surveying and questions, two major themes came out," he said. One was to make the code and standards shorter and to allow students to become involved. Public meeting Thursday Members of the committees that reviewed the code and standards will answer questions in a public meeting Thursday, March 14, at 3 p.m. in room 375 of the Wilkinson Center. This is where students can get their gripes, questions and comments out in the open, said Smith, who believes that the new code and standards are a step in the right direction even though they may not please everyone. ***** (Additional information) Code of Honor: "Brigham Young University exists to provide a university education in an atmosphere consistent with the ideals and principles of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. That atmosphere can be preserved through commitment to conduct that reflects those ideals and principles. "As a matter of personal commitment, students, staff and faculty of Brigham Young University seek to demonstrate in daily living those moral virtues encompassed in the Gospel of Jesus Christ, and will: Be honest, live a chaste and virtuous life, obey the law, use clean language, respect others, abstain from alcoholic beverages, tobacco, tea, coffee and drug abuse."Dress and Grooming Standards: "The dress and grooming of both men and women should always be modest, neat and clean, consistent with the dignity of representing Brigham Young University and The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. "Modesty and cleanliness are important values that reflect personal dignity and integrity, through which students, staff and faculty of BYU represent the principles and standards of the church. These members of the BYU community commit themselves to observe the following standards, which reflect the direction of the BYU board of trustees and the (LDS) Church publication `For the Strength of Youth.' "Clothing should be modest in fabric, fit and style, and appropriate for the occasion. Skirts and shorts should be knee length or lower. Clothing which is sleeveless, strapless or revealing is not acceptable. Shoes should be worn in public campus areas. "A clean and well-cared-for appearance should be maintained. Hairstyles should be clean and neat, avoiding extreme styles. Men's hair should be trimmed above the collar, leaving the ear uncovered. If worn, mustaches should be neatly trimmed. Earrings for men are unacceptable, and beards are not acceptable, except for certified medical reasons." |
Virginia Tech lost big on the field - and financially - in the 2011 Orange Bowl. Along with a 40-12 drubbing from Stanford, Virginia Tech's athletic department reported a $421,046 loss. The cost to play in the Orange Bowl, largely based on terms set by the Bowl Championship Series, outstripped the amount of bowl money the team received. Virginia Tech, which receives millions of dollars in public funding like many other college sports programs, would have lost even more money had the Atlantic Coast Conference not spent nearly $1.2 million to help. The team, required to buy a block of tickets as a condition of being in the bowl, was unable to resell all of them before game time; the school's conference bought out 9,500 remaining seats. Going in the red has become more common for universities participating in the Bowl Championship Series, college football's five biggest postseason games: the Fiesta, Orange, Rose and Sugar bowls, plus the national title game that the four bowls rotate annually. The Republic obtained records from the NCAA that disclosed aggregate spending figures for the past three years of all public and private schools that played in BCS bowls. The records did not reveal individual universities' expenses, but averaged those expenses and the allowances that the universities received from their conferences. Those averages, calculated by the NCAA, showed that in all three years, average expenses exceeded average allowances, meaning schools often lost money. The Republic separately obtained records from individual public universities that played in BCS bowls for the past six years to determine, on an individual basis, how many schools lost money. Records dating beyond six years were incomplete. The Republic's analysis showed that 41 percent of public universities playing in BCS games reported losses. The figure would have jumped to 50 percent had conferences not absorbed some of their universities' bowl expenses. Long term, any school playing in a BCS bowl is likely to at least break even. Its conference shares the proceeds from a bowl with all conference schools, so even if a school loses money playing in a bowl, it will get payout money in subsequent years even if it does not go to a bowl. The five bowl games generate millions of dollars from ticket sales, sponsorships and television contracts. Much of that money - nearly 80 percent last year - is handed over to six major conferences that created the championship system: the Atlantic Coast, Big East, Big Ten, Big 12, Pac-12 and Southeastern. Those conferences give each bowl-bound school a travel allotment of about $2 million, then distribute much of the remainder among all of their member schools. Theoretically, a school that spends more than its travel allotment is likely to make up the loss with bowl money it receives in later years. But because all schools in the conferences get an annual cut, schools that have poor football records can actually fare better financially than schools that make it to the bowls. "That is the nature of conference membership," said Bill Hancock, BCS executive director. "If you have a downtime and you are in a conference, you have an insurance policy. You can reap the benefits of having an uptime. It all goes in a cycle." But schools that lose money have complained about the issue, saying while more payouts may come in later years, that doesn't solve the problem of balancing their books for the year of the game. "You cut other expenses or go to the (university) president and say, 'We need help,' " said Mike Enright, a spokesman for the University of Connecticut. "You have to scramble." Some schools lose money in the short term because of how much they spend on travel and because of requirements set by the BCS. One of the biggest costs is tickets. Schools that qualify for a bowl game are required, by contract, to buy thousands of game tickets, helping the bowls generate revenue and market their games while creating an incentive for schools to fill seats. The tickets can then be resold to students, alumni and fans. But frequently, schools are unable to resell all of the tickets. Some schools also must travel long distances to reach the games. Once they arrive, they stay in lodging preselected by the bowls. Under the contracts that create the championship system, bowl organizers arrange the lodging, and the teams pay. No school can negotiate its own lodging costs. For example, Ohio State University was required to take 150 rooms for at least six nights and pay at least $172 a night per room for its team and coaches to stay in the New Orleans Marriott during this past season's Sugar Bowl. The lodging cost at other bowls sometimes exceeds $300 a night. The bowls say they are able to negotiate better group rates and guarantee larger blocks of rooms than a school could at the last minute. The Fiesta Bowl's contract requires its teams to stay in Scottsdale-Paradise Valley hotels, and a recent Scottsdale Convention & Visitors Bureau study shows that during the last Fiesta Bowl, rates there were nearly 85 percent higher than in the rest of the Valley. Schools say they don't take issue with the accommodations, as it's part of playing in a BCS game. "We would have had to pay for the rooms anyway," said Max Corbet, a spokesman for Boise State University, which played in the 2007 and 2010 Fiesta Bowls. "You want to go somewhere and play by the rules so they invite you back next time." Officials from the bowl games note that athletic conferences could cover their schools' entire losses. All BCS conferences get a sufficient cut of the bowls' annual revenues to do so - the six whose champions automatically qualify for a BCS bowl each get roughly $20 million or more each year. Conferences defend the arrangement, arguing that whatever deficit a school suffers going to a bowl is temporary. Universities, meanwhile, are willing to risk financial losses for the national exposure they get from playing in a prestigious bowl. It can increase alumni donations and help recruit athletes and other students, all while giving players and fans a unique experience. Universities turn to gifts from donors, student fees or publicly funded subsidies to cover the losses. But critics say tax-supported public universities should not post losses, especially when the bowls are run by tax-exempt, non-profit groups that have significantly increased their own bank balances and their top executives' pay as the participating teams have lost money. They note that the situation is unique to college football. "Schools don't lose money to compete in other NCAA championships," said Amy Perko, executive director of the Knight Commission on Intercollegiate Athletics, an independent panel of experts acting as a watchdog over college sports that periodically issues reports and recommendations for reforms in collegiate athletics. The NCAA, the governing body of college athletics, does not run the BCS bowls. "When schools are losing money to compete in postseason competitions, it needs more oversight from the NCAA," Perko said. Who loses? When it comes to losing money in BCS games, Virginia Tech is at the top of the heap. The Hokies, as ACC champions, played in the 2008, 2009 and 2011 Orange Bowls. Virginia Tech lost hundreds of thousands of dollars each year it traveled from Blacksburg, Va., to Miami to play. The loss would have been greater had the ACC not absorbed some of the cost of 22,700 tickets the school was required to buy for those games but was unable to resell, university records obtained by The Republic show. Virginia Tech would have lost $1.3 million in 2008, $2.2 million in 2009 and $1.6 million in 2011 had the ACC not stepped in and subsidized a portion of those losses. Even with the ACC subsidies, Virginia Tech lost money all three years. The conference annually receives a BCS payout, which now equals more than $20 million. Much of that money is divided up among all the schools in the conference. The more conference members, the smaller the individual shares. The ACC and other major conferences don't provide specific details of how they split up the BCS money. The funds from the bowls are sometimes pooled with money from other postseason games before being divvied up. If the conference subsidizes losses by a school, that leaves less to share among other conference schools. Lisa Rudd, Virginia Tech's associate director of athletics for financial affairs, said her department sets aside a few hundred thousand dollars every year from the money it receives from the ACC to cover losses in years it plays in a BCS game. While Virginia Tech has posted some of the largest losses, other schools have seen similar shortfalls. From 2006 to 2011, public universities that played in BCS games exceeded the bowl allowances provided by their conferences 23 of 46 times, records obtained and compiled by The Republic show. Eight of the appearances were in the Fiesta Bowl or a national championship it hosted, seven were in the Orange Bowl, four were in the Rose Bowl and four in the Sugar Bowl. Several of these schools that exceeded their allowances did not lose money because their conferences chose to subsidize those losses for them. The losses ranged from tens of thousands of dollars to nearly $2 million per game. The Republic compiled data by filing public-records requests with all public universities that played in BCS games since the 1998-99 season. All but two complied. The seven private schools that had played declined the paper's requests, saying they were not subject to public-records laws, but Stanford University said it "broke even" by playing in the 2011 Orange Bowl. Records dating beyond six years were incomplete. The Republic calculated losses by subtracting each school's bowl expenses from its conference's expense allowance. During the six seasons examined, public schools playing in BCS games posted a profit 27 times, or slightly more than half the time. In several of these cases, the schools had overspent their allowances, but nonetheless posted profits because their conferences stepped in to absorb their losses. That meant less money to share among other conference members. The Sugar Bowl had the most schools - 10 - posting profits when playing in its bowl or a national championship it hosted, while the Fiesta Bowl had nine schools in the black. The Rose and Orange bowls each had four. During that time, the Rose Bowl four times hosted the University of Southern California and once hosted Texas Christian University, private schools that declined to provide financial records. Gains posted by universities ranged from a few thousand dollars to more than $2 million. Those in the black typically had an easier time selling their blocks of tickets, and the few schools that made significant profits received larger expense allowances from their conferences. All universities that play in postseason bowls are required to file a Summary of Postseason Football Institutional Bowl Expenses with the NCAA. Those records detail their expenses and conference allowances. The NCAA would not disclose records pertaining to individual universities, but provided aggregate statistics on bowl participants for the past three years. During those three years, universities - public and private - on average lost $331,137 playing in BCS bowl games. For non-BCS bowls during those same three years, the average loss was $119,631. For the 2010-11 postseason, the average team loss in a BCS bowl was $346,959, reflecting an average expense allowance of about $2.38 million and an average expense of $2.73 million. The average loss in a non-BCS bowl that postseason was $139,604. Records The Republic obtained from individual universities show the cost to participate in the 2011 BCS bowls exceeded conference expense allowances for six of the eight public schools, including: - The University of Connecticut. When the Big East Conference champion played in the 2011 Fiesta Bowl, it received a $2.5 million conference expense allowance. But the team couldn't resell 14,729 of the 17,500 tickets the Fiesta Bowl required it to purchase. The Huskies' bowl expenses quickly piled up: $2.9 million from unsold tickets, $1.1 million for travel and housing, and $210,000 in assorted other costs. The final tally was a net loss of approximately $1.7 million. - The University of Oklahoma. Connecticut's opponent reported a small profit, but only because it did not have to cover the $1.9 million that its home conference, the Big 12, spent to absorb 10,403 tickets that Oklahoma could not sell from its allotment of 17,500. In total, 25,132 tickets were absorbed by the conferences for the 2011 Fiesta Bowl game that had an announced attendance of 67,232 at University of Phoenix Stadium in Glendale. The Fiesta Bowl said the tickets were returned to the bowl and distributed to Valley charities. - Auburn University. The eventual national champion, which played in the 2011 BCS title game at University of Phoenix Stadium, lost $614,106. The loss was attributable to its decision to absorb the cost of 2,456 tickets that it gave away to those associated with the university. That cost the university $781,825. Still, many university officials take the view of Scott Carr, a senior associate athletic director at Auburn: "The experience that the institution, the student athletes and staff members had, you wouldn't trade for the world. At the end of the day, it's the cost of doing business." Losses explained Schools incur losses for various reasons. Nothing bars a conference from using its payout to underwrite the entire cost incurred by the school playing in a BCS game. But that generally has not been the practice in the six primary conferences, mainly because it might encourage schools to spend excessively, discourage them from selling their mandatory BCS ticket allotments and leave the conferences less payout money to distribute among their other members, according to BCS officials. Still, other conferences do just that. Boise State University played in the 2007 and 2010 Fiesta Bowls and posted profits of $2.8 million and $1.8 million, respectively. Boise State at the time was a member of the Western Athletic Conference, a conference that doesn't get a guaranteed bowl berth every year. The WAC and other less-powerful conferences have a shot at a bowl game only if their teams rank high enough in the BCS standings at the end of the regular season. These conferences get smaller payouts from the bowls. But when their teams do make it to a big game, they sometimes cover more of their teams' costs by allotting larger allowances. The WAC used its chunk of BCS money to give Boise State expense allowances of $4.5 million and $3.2 million, respectively, in the 2007 and 2010 Fiesta Bowls. Boise State also sold nearly all of its tickets. "We got done what we needed to get done, and we didn't go crazy on expenses," said school spokesman Corbet. A few schools report bowl losses because they have entered into contracts with coaches that require them to pay large bonuses if their teams play in a BCS bowl. The University of Alabama, for example, reported a $1.8 million loss after playing in the BCS title game in 2010 at the Rose Bowl, and the school paid $1.25 million in bonuses. Other costs are affected by BCS decisions: - The BCS requires schools to buy large blocks of tickets they may not be able to resell. - The BCS decides which bowl a team will attend, regardless of the distance the team must travel. - The bowls, not the schools, decide where and for how long teams will stay and at what cost. Bowls' officials say the ticket purchases, selection process and accommodation requirements are part of BCS contracts that conferences and schools have approved. And they argue that hotel rates the BCS negotiates are lower than market rates during busy tourism seasons. Because schools are not free to negotiate their own deals, it is impossible to know if they could lower lodging costs by going it on their own. Finding a fix That some universities are losing money is a sensitive subject for bowls and conferences, particularly because, as Fiesta Bowl Chairman Duane Woods noted, his bowl generates a lot of BCS revenue. "The conferences are the ones that allocate the money," Woods said. "This is an issue for the conferences to address." Nick Carparelli Jr., the Big East Conference's senior associate commissioner for football and marketing, disputes that any school really loses money. "One of the biggest misconceptions in BCS games is that a school loses money by playing in the game. The Big East takes in nearly $30 million from (all) bowl games," he said. "That is certainly enough money to allow our schools to participate without losing money." Connecticut spokesman Enright doesn't dispute the theory, but insisted Connecticut still lost money playing in the Fiesta Bowl. And, he said, other Big East Conference schools that didn't play in bowl games fared better financially than Connecticut because of the loss it absorbed. Some defenders say it is an expense worth bearing because of the national publicity and accolades that bowl appearances bring. And it can be a once-in-a-lifetime experience for players, students and boosters. "Obviously, the exposure you can't buy," said Dave Williford, spokesman for the University of Oregon. "Then there are all the other things that go with it … in terms of applications from non-athletes going up, and the quality of the applicants is up." Still, critics say change is needed, and the first thing that may be up for review is the requirement that schools buy large blocks of tickets. Hancock, the BCS executive director, said the current ticket arrangement is part of contracts every bowl and conference agreed to. But he knows it will come up in negotiations set to begin in spring 2012 for the next BCS contract. "The way the conferences have chosen to divide their money is their business," Hancock concluded. "It's unfair for anyone to blame the system." But Perko, the director of the Knight Commission, said schools should not lose money to go to bowls. If anyone doubts the problem, she pointed to a recent NCAA study showing that of 120 major U.S. college sports programs that have football, just 22 were profitable. "It's time to go back to the principles of postseason competition, and the financial responsibilities, and really look if the current system is in the best interest of the institutions," she said. Ken Kendrick, managing general partner of the Arizona Diamondbacks, agrees. After publicity that West Virginia University would take a financial hit from its 2008 Fiesta Bowl trip because it couldn't sell its tickets, he donated $1 million to the school and sent 7,500 unsold tickets to Phoenix-area charities. Kendrick, a 1965 West Virginia graduate, said he didn't want his alma mater to face a financial shortfall, particularly after achieving athletic success. "It's a strange system," he said. "There's a lot of money out there. TV is paying a lot of money, and there's revenue from sponsorships. … The bowls themselves, as a matter of looking at public records, make a ton of money. But at the end of the day, it would appear it's at the expense of the schools." |
Basketball legend Shaquille O'Neal appears to have joined the ranks of celebrities who sincerely believe the world is flat. On a recent episode of The Big Podcast with Shaq, co-host John Kincade asked the star about recent comments from Kyrie Irving, a Cleveland Cavaliers player who recently became the subject of controversy in the US by outing himself as a flat-Earther. O'Neal appears to whole-heartedly agree with Kincade, saying: "It’s true. The Earth is flat." "So, listen, I drive from coast to coast, and this s*** is flat to me," he continues. "I drive from Florida to California all the time, and it’s flat to me. "I do not go up and down at a 360-degree angle, and all that stuff about gravity, have you looked outside Atlanta lately and seen all these buildings? You mean to tell me that China is under us? China is under us? It’s not. The world is flat." It's just possible O'Neal was joking with his remarks, but numerous listeners believe he was being sincere. |
Speaking through tears, Justin Bourque apologized in a Moncton, N.B., courtroom Tuesday morning during his sentencing hearing for killing three RCMP officers and wounding two others. Bourque is being sentenced for three counts of first-degree murder and two counts of attempted murder. He previously pleaded guilty to shooting five RCMP officers on June 4, when he wandered through a north end neighbourhood of the city, dressed in camouflage and carrying a high-powered weapon. Transcript of Justin Bourque's statement Been thinking about it a lot, and the families here. I'm scared. Hearing and seeing me on video, talk like some arrogant pissant as if this was nothing to me. I want families to know your husbands', sons', brothers' and friends' death, it does mean something to me. Everything I said was hatred. Feeling sorry for myself. Arrogance.… two to three days later, there's nothing good. [referring to a time after the incident]. No, nothing to be proud of. I'm not a soldier. I took the easy way out. I did nothing good, nothing to be proud of. I... And you have to live with this for the rest of my life. Apology almost useless. But I am, sorry. I can't say more than that. The killer briefly addressed the Moncton courtroom on Tuesday after listening to the Crown prosecutor and his defence lawyer argue over how long he should spend in prison. Bourque, 24, said he took the "easy way out," and the killings are something, "I'm going to have to live with the rest of my life. "I am sorry. There's nothing else to say," Bourque said. With that, the court recessed until 2 p.m. AT Friday, when Bourque will learn his fate. Bourque's comments and demeanour stood in stark contrast to the video statement he gave to police after his arrest on June 6, which was played for the courtroom on Monday. In the video, Bourque sat calmly in his chair at the Sackville detachment and bragged to the RCMP about his tactical skills and how he would have taken down more officers if he'd had the opportunity. But there was no sign of that bravado and confidence as he sat hunched in the prisoner's box, his voice trembling through his speech. Bourque said he had been thinking about his own family and the families of the slain officers having to see him on that police video and how hurtful that would have been. He said he regretted his arrogance. Targeted police to start a rebellion Crown prosecutor Cameron Gunn argued on Tuesday that Bourque committed "one of the most heinous crimes in Canadian history" and should be sent to prison for 75 years without a chance for parole. The Crown prosecutor said the court had to hand down a stiff penalty to "denounce these crimes," and that denunciation must be paramount over rehabilitation. Gunn said Bourque had a twisted view of society and targeted police to start a rebellion, but failed. Previous Next The Crown is seeking the maximum sentence of three consecutive 25-year life sentences. That would mean Bourque would not be eligible for parole for 75 years, and it would be the longest prison sentence in Canadian history. Bourque The Crown also said in court Tuesday that the attempted murders are no less important when deciding on the sentence. Up until 2011, the maximum sentence a multiple killer could be given in Canada was life in prison with no parole eligibility for 25 years. The Crown said a sentence of 25 years would be “wholly inappropriate.” Further, the Crown prosecutor said there is very little case history to rely on in the Bourque sentencing, because the law changed in 2011. The prosecutor referred to the Travis Baumgartner case in which Baumgartner got 40 years with no chance for parole in 2013 after the former armoured guard shot four co-workers, killing three of them. Thought process 'extremely defective' David Lutz, Bourque's defence lawyer, said that while his client did not come across as a sympathetic character in his video statement to police or in his pre-sentence report, he has shown remorse. Lutz said Bourque's first words to him were, "I am pleading guilty." Justin Bourque, 24, of Moncton, could be facing three consecutive life sentences, with no chance of parole for 75 years. (Facebook) Lutz admitted that other than serial killer Clifford Olson's case, this is one of the worst crimes in Canada. Bourque realizes his thought process was "extremely defective," said Lutz, suggesting his client's home schooling led to social difficulties and that he was easily influenced by the rantings he read online about hatred toward authority for trying to take away guns. Lutz said Bourque knows his "life is over" for all intents and purposes. Still, he would like the chance to apply for parole after 50 years, at age 74 instead of 99, he said. "I say anything other than 50 years is academic. He won't be eligible for parole at 99 years because he will be dead [by then]," Lutz said in court. He urged Chief Justice David Smith to look at the case dispassionately. Gas stations initial target The Crown finished its presentation to the court just before 10 a.m. AT. While the Crown took more than a day to lay out its sentencing argument, Bourque's defence lawyer spent very little time. Lutz said his client agreed with the majority of the facts presented by the Crown. But the defence lawyer said Bourque disputed that his client had told a co-worker, “I’m going to pop a couple” of police officers. Lutz said Bourque first intended to set gas stations on fire. The Crown said it's not choosing to prove that comment was an aggravating factor. Bourque was in court throughout the hearing, wearing a grey sweatsuit. He had his ankles and wrists shackled. His face showed little emotion. On Tuesday morning, the courtroom heard about the arsenal that Bourque carried with him during his shooting spree. The RCMP recovered two firearms, an M305 .308 rifle and Mossberg 500 12-gauge shotgun, as well as a gas mask, a pair of binoculars, two knives and survival harness. The rifle was purchased legally from Better Buy Sports in Moncton using a valid firearm possession and acquisition licence. The Crown also detailed the wounds suffered by the RCMP officers and the times of death for the three slain policemen. 'Another step in our healing process' The widows of the three slain officers issued a statement on Tuesday afternoon, after sitting through the sentencing hearing together and supporting each other. Nadine Larche, Rachael Ross, and Angela Gevaudan described the court proceedings as "another step in [their] healing process." The court proceedings over the past day and a half have provided us with a clear picture of the events that took place on June 4, 2014, and showed to us the incredible amount of work done by the RCMP and other police services on that day and the days since. —Statement by widows Nadine Larche, Rachael Ross, and Angela Gevaudan They say they now have a better understanding of what took place during the June 4 shooting and the "incredible amount of work" done by the RCMP, other police services, firefighters, paramedics, dispatchers and people from the community — not only on that day, but in the days since. "We are truly grateful for everything you've done," the women said in the statement. They also offered condolences to the families of Cpl. Nathan Cirillo and Warrant Officer Patrice Vincent, the two soldiers killed last week in separate attacks. Cirillo, 24, was gunned down while standing guard at the National War Monument in Ottawa on Oct. 22. Vincent, 53, was targeted in a hit and run in the parking lot of a commercial plaza in St-Jean-sur-Richelieu, Que., on Oct. 20. "We all share the same grief, that of losing a loved one," the widows of the Moncton Mounties said. Victim impact statements On Monday, the packed courtroom heard 10 emotional victim impact statements, 911 calls from the night of the shootings and the approximately 3½-hour video statement Bourque gave to police shortly after his arrest on June 6. During the statement, Bourque rambles about everything from evolution and socialism to events overseas. He also brags about his "good moral compass," his tactical skills and how he felt "accomplished" following the shootings. At the end of the video, however, Bourque asked if the officers who were killed were married and was told they all had children. He later wrote a note to the families of Const. Doug Larche, Const. Dave Ross and Const. Fabrice Gevaudan, saying he wasn't asking for forgiveness, but that he apologizes. Some people in the packed courtroom, including some of the relatives of the victims and other RCMP officers, shook their heads and wiped away tears. |
If there is one person that got propelled to the front of the film talk this year, it’s editor Margaret Sixel, who turned an impossible task of editing 480 hours of footage filmed by a dozen cameras into one of the most exciting action film in a long time. It was Sixel’s first action film as an editor, and she schooled everybody managing to tell a visual story with fast cuts that could be seen and helped moving the story forward. The loudest illustration of that point being Vashi Nedomansky‘s supercut of 5 action films with an average shot length (ASL) under 2 seconds (when films usually turn around 7.8 seconds. Watching the video below, where the five films have been sped up to 12x their normal speed, you can see that only one of them is still understandable. Guess which one? THE FASTEST CUT: FURIOUS FILM EDITING from Vashi Nedomansky on Vimeo. Sixel, who’s fairly discreet and hasn’t give any masterclass yet, has been interviewed by many outlets and always manages to reveal a bit of her process and personality. In a recent interview with the L.A. Times, she discusses the one rule she follows to make sure the story moves forward and avoid being influenced by the wrong motives. (In Mad Max’s instance: pleasing the fans) The One Editing Rule Margaret Sixel Followed Religiously on Mad Max: Fury Road “I don’t like meaningless cutting. It irritates me. (…) We had a few hardcore fans in the cutting room and they’d [gasp] and say, “You can’t do that!” [cut a shot of the Interceptor out]. I’d say, “Why can’t I?” They’d say, “The fans want to see the Interceptor.” And I’d say, [groaning] “But it just slows everything down. Moving on here!” I wanted every single shot to progress the story. I don’t like repetition. And I think we applied that rule religiously throughout the film. The rule being “No similar shots”? Or ones that have no added information. I watched a film last night and they kept cutting back again and again and the expression on the actor’s face was exactly the same. I felt like, “You’ve used the shot three times already!” That’s what I don’t like. There’d better be some progress.” — What I find particularly interesting here is that Sixel had a line, and an intention she followed and that guided her through the editing. I believe that it’s because she had a vision for what the editing should achieve that she could made choices that took everybody by surprise and in a way renew a genre that has fallen into the trap of cutting for the sake of speed and bombarding the audience with repetitive information. This one rule Sixel follows, adding a shot only if it helps the story progress, is identical to the one a screenwriter and a director should follow to make sure the story they try to tell gets richer as it moves forward. To keep in mind. — You might also like: George Miller’s Fascinating Masterclass Is a Lesson in Storytelling and Filmmaking |
Allyson Michelle Felix OLY (born November 18, 1985)[1] is an American track and field sprinter who competes in the 100 meters, 200 meters, and 400 meters. At 200 meters, she is the 2012 Olympic champion, a 3-time World champion (2005–09), and 2-time Olympic silver medalist (2004–08). At 400 meters, she is the 2015 World champion, 2011 World silver medalist, 2016 Olympic silver medalist, and 2017 World bronze medalist. Felix has won five additional Olympic gold medals as a member of the United States' women's relay teams: three at 4 × 400 meters (2008–16), and two at 4 x 100 meters (2012–16). The 2012 U.S. Olympic 4 x 100 meters team also set the women's 4x100 meters world-record that still stands. Felix is the only female track and field athlete to ever win six Olympic gold medals,[2] and is tied with Merlene Ottey as the most decorated female Olympian in track and field history, with a total of nine Olympic medals. Felix is also the most decorated athlete in IAAF World Championships history with 16 career medals.[3] Felix's 200 meters best of 21.69 secs from 2012, ranks her sixth on the all-time list. In 2013, she broke the world best for the rarely contested 150 meters distance, running 16.36 secs. In the 4 × 400 metres relay at the 2015 World Championships, she ran the fastest split ever recorded by an American woman, and third fastest split ever after Jarmila Kratochvilova and Marita Koch, with 47.72. As a participant in the US Anti-Doping Agency's "Project Believe" program, Felix is regularly tested for performance-enhancing drugs.[4] She is coached by Bobby Kersee. Early life [ edit ] Born and raised in California, Felix is a devout Christian and the daughter of Paul, an ordained minister and professor of New Testament at The Master's Seminary in Santa Clarita Valley, California,[5] and Marlean who is an elementary school teacher at Balboa Magnet Elementary.[1] Her older brother Wes Felix is also a sprinter. Also running the 200 m, he was the USA Junior Champion in 2002[6] and the Pac-10 champion in 2003 and 2004 while running for USC. Wes now acts as the agent for his sister.[7] Felix describes her running ability as a gift from God, "For me, my faith is the reason I run. I definitely feel I have this amazing gift that God has blessed me with, and it's all about using it to the best of my ability."[8] High school [ edit ] Felix attended Los Angeles Baptist High School in North Hills, California, where she was nicknamed "Chicken Legs" by her teammates, because the five-foot-six, 125-pound sprinter's body had skinny legs despite her strength.[1] Her slightness was at seeming odds with her speed on the track and strength in the gym, where, while still in high school, she deadlifted at least 270 pounds.[9] Felix credits much of her early success to her high school sprint coach, Jonathan Patton. Felix began to discover her athletic talents after she tried out for track in the ninth grade. Just ten weeks after that first tryout, she finished ninth in the 200 m at the CIF California State Meet. In the coming seasons, she became a five-time winner at the meet.[10][11] In 2003, she was named the national girls' "High School Athlete of the Year" by Track and Field News.[12] As a senior, Felix finished second in the 200 m at the US Indoor Track & Field Championships. A few months later, in front of 50,000 fans in Mexico City, she ran 22.11 seconds, the fastest in history for a high school girl (though it could not count as a World Junior record because there was no drug testing at the meet[1]).[13] Felix graduated in 2003, making headlines by forgoing college eligibility to sign a professional contract with Adidas. Adidas paid her an undisclosed sum and picked up her college tuition at the University of Southern California.[14] She has since graduated with a degree in elementary education.[15] Professional [ edit ] Early career [ edit ] At the age of 18, Felix finished as the silver medalist in the 200 meters at the 2004 Summer Olympics, behind Veronica Campbell of Jamaica; in doing so, she set a World Junior record over 200 meters with her time of 22.18.[1] Felix became the youngest gold medalist sprinter in the 200 meters at the World Championships in Helsinki in 2005 and then successfully defended her title at Osaka two years later. At Osaka, Felix caught Jamaican Veronica Campbell on the bend and surged down the straight to finish in 21.81 seconds, lowering her own season-leading time by a massive 0.37 seconds. After the final she stated that "I feel so good, I am so excited. I have been waiting for so long to run such a time, to run under 22 seconds. it has not been an easy road, but finally I managed," said Felix. At that time, she addressed her future, saying, "My next goal is not the world record, but a gold in Beijing. I want to take it step by step. I might consider to do both – the 200 and the 400 meters – there." Felix became only the second female athlete after Marita Koch in 1983 to win three gold medals at a single IAAF World Championships in Athletics.[1][16] Felix qualified for the 2008 Olympic Games during the 2008 Olympic trials in the 200 meters, but just missed qualifying for the 100 meter. However, at the 2008 Summer Olympics in Beijing, despite running her season's best time in the 200 meters at 21.93, Felix again finished second to Campbell, who ran 21.74, the best time in the decade,[17] to clinch the gold medal. Felix also ran the 4 × 400 meters relay as a member of the U.S. women's team. The team finished first, giving Felix her first Olympic gold medal. In the build-up to the 2009 World Championships in Athletics Felix was part of a United States 4 × 100 m relay team that ran the fastest women's sprint relay in twelve years. Lauryn Williams, Felix, Muna Lee and Carmelita Jeter finished with a time of 41.58 seconds, bringing them to eighth on the all-time list.[18] In 2009 aged just 23, Felix proceeded to claim her third 200-meter World Championships gold medal, an unprecedented accomplishment in women's sprinting.[19] Felix clocked 22.02 sec to comfortably beat Jamaica's Olympic 200 m champion Veronica Campbell-Brown. Afterwards she said, "It's really special to win a third world title. I wanted to do it in this stadium, represent my country and make Jesse Owens proud." But Felix admitted that she would rather have the one gold medal that she was missing. "I would love to trade my three world championships for your gold," Felix jokingly said to Veronica Campbell-Brown of Jamaica at the medalists' news conference. She referred to the 2008 Olympic gold medal in the 200 m, a race Felix was heavily favored to win. She was distressed over finishing second to Campbell-Brown when it happened in Beijing and still obsessed about it a year later. "I don't think I ever want to get over it," Felix said. "I never want to be satisfied with losing." At the same time she also commented, "I'm just grateful to have had success quickly, and sometimes I do have to pinch myself and realize all this has happened in not that much time." In 2010, Felix focused on running more 400 m races. Running the 200 m and the 400 m, she became the first person ever to win two IAAF Diamond League trophies in the same year. She continued her dominance by winning 21 races out of 22 starts, only losing to Veronica Campbell-Brown in New York. Incidentally, it was there that Brown set the WL time of 21.98 seconds. In 2011, Felix attended the 'Great City Games' held in the streets of Manchester on 15 May. It was there that she set the world leading time in the 200 m, which was 22.12. She also ran a 10.89 in the second 100 m of the race. At the 2011 World Championships in Athletics, Felix participated in the 200 and 400 meter events, as well as the 4×100 and 4×400 meter relays. First up was the 400 meter event, where Felix was placed in lane 3 in the final and finished second in a time of 49.59, 0.03 behind winner Amantle Montsho, who she had beaten throughout the season. In the 200 meter final, running also in lane 3, Felix finished third in an under-par time of 22.42 due to fatigue. Veronica Campbell-Brown won the gold and Carmelita Jeter won silver. In the relay events, Felix ran the second leg in both the 4 × 100 m and 4 × 400 m. Team USA won both events and attained world-leading times in both finals as Felix added two World Championship gold medals to her collection. Felix running second leg in 4 × 400 relay, Olympic games, London 2012 In 2012, Felix returned to the Olympic Trials, the schedule of events virtually requiring she choose between attempting to qualify in the 100 m or 400 m as her secondary event behind the 200 m. She chose the 100 m and advanced to the final, the top 3 finishers were to go on to the 2012 Summer Olympics as part of the 100 m team. In the final, she ran 11.01, good enough for 3rd,[20] but not without controversy. Officials ruled Felix and Jeneba Tarmoh to be in a dead heat for the third and final qualification position after initially declaring Tarmoh ahead. A run off between Tarmoh and Felix was scheduled, but Tarmoh withdrew, conceding the final 100 m spot to Felix.[21] In the 200 m final at the Olympic Trials, Felix ran a personal best and a meet record of 21.69, the third fastest time an American has ever run and the fourth fastest ever. Carmelita Jeter and Sanya Richards-Ross placed 2nd and 3rd respectively. At the 2012 Summer Olympics Felix competed in four events: The 100 m, 200 m, 4 × 100 m relay, and 4 × 400 m relay, placing 5th in the 100 m and winning gold in the other three, thus becoming the first American woman to win three golds in athletics at an Olympics since Florence Griffith-Joyner at the 1988 Summer Olympics. In her first final, the 100 m, she placed 5th, running a personal best time of 10.89 seconds. In the 200 m final; a race she lost at the 2008 Summer Olympics and 2004 Summer Olympics to Jamaican rival, Veronica Campbell-Brown, it proved third time lucky as she beat Campbell-Brown, and also the 2012 100 m Olympic Gold medallist, Shelly-Ann Fraser-Pryce, who finished second. American compatriot Carmelita Jeter took the bronze. Felix after the 4 × 400 m relay in London Felix took to the track again on August 10, 2012 as part of the women's 4 × 100 m relay team with Tianna Madison, Bianca Knight, and Carmelita Jeter. The foursome went on to smash the long-held world record of 41.37, set by East Germany in October 1985. This record was set before Allyson Felix, Bianca Knight, or Tianna Madison were even born. On the final night of athletics August 11, 2012, Felix ran the 2nd leg of the women's 4 × 400 m (in a leg time of 48.20), with DeeDee Trotter, Francena McCorory, and Sanya Richards-Ross, with the winning time being 3:16.87, the 3rd fastest time in Olympic history behind the Soviet Union and United States at the 1988 Summer Olympics, and the 5th fastest time overall.[22] In the 2013 World Championships in Moscow, Felix entered the 200 m and was expected to also appear in the relay finals, but pulled up in the 200 m final with a hamstring injury and was carried from the track. The race was won by Shelly-Ann Fraser-Pryce.[23] After a nine-month layoff because of a hamstring injury, Felix resumed competition in the 400 m at the Shanghai Diamond League meet in May 2014 which she finished fifth with a time of 50.81. She later competed in the Eugene Diamond League meet for 200 m and finished third with a season's best of 22.44. She got back into form short after and in the Oslo Diamond League meet she finished first in the 200 m for her first win of the season with a time of 22.73. Later she also took part in the Paris and Glasgow Diamond League meetings. In Paris, she ran her season's best again (22.34) only behind Blessing Okagbare from Nigeria, who ran a time of 22.32. In Glasgow, she lost to Dafne Schippers from the Netherlands, a hepthalon athlete, which set a national record of 22.34. Felix was just 0.01 second behind her. Felix later took part in the Stockholm Diamond league, where she won the race with a time of 22.85, what became her second win of the season. In a result she took the lead in the Diamond Race standings of 200 m. In the last Diamond League meeting of the season, in Brussels, Belgium, she won the race with a world leading time of 22.02, and also won the Diamond Race. As the winner of the 2014 IAAF Diamond League 200 meter title, Felix received a bye into the 2015 World Championships in Athletics. Obligated to enter the 2015 USA Outdoor Track and Field Championships but not needing to run the 200, she chose the 400 metres. She won the event in 50.19 for her 10th U.S. Championship, coming from 4th place with 100 metres to go to pass Natasha Hastings before the finish.[24] The National Championships also saw then World #1ranked Francena McCorory and #2 Sanya Richards-Ross not qualify for the World Championships should Felix choose to run 400 meters. The schedule for the World Championships had the 400 meter final occur just over an hour after the 200 meter semi-finals, making it virtually impossible to perform to world championship level in both events.[25] As of July 1, she had the fastest seed time in both the 400 (.11 over the fastest competitor) and 200 (.22 over the fastest competitor). This left Felix with a difficult choice as to which event she would put her effort into at the World Championships. Eventually, Felix chose to focus on the 400 metres, going on to win her first gold medal in the event with a personal best of 49.26 in the final. In doing so, Felix became the first woman to win World titles in the 200 m and the 400 m; additionally, she has now won the most World gold medals, and most World medals total, out of any American.[26] Later on, she won silver medals in both the 4 × 100 m relay and 4 × 400 m relay. In the latter race, Felix received a baton while having a huge deficit to leading Jamaica. She then ran her leg in time of 47.72 and regained the lead for the USA before the final handoff. Running the final leg Francena McCorory was not able to hold on the lead and was overtaken by Novlene Williams-Mills in the final meters.[27] Felix got off to an uncharacteristically slow start in 2016. During a gym workout in April, she dropped from a pull-up bar and landed awkwardly, twisting her right ankle and tearing multiple ligaments. As a result, she could barely even walk, and had to switch up her training plan. She was slated to run in a Diamond League meet in Doha as well as the Prefontaine Classic, but pulled out of both meets.[28] In early June, she ran the 400 m in 51.23 at a lowkey San Diego meet.[28] While still injured, she went to the 2016 Olympic Trials in Eugene, Oregon to attempt to qualify for the 2016 Rio de Janeiro Olympics in the 200 m and 400 m on her quest for double gold in those respective races. In the 400 m final, she was in the middle of the pack after 300 meters but sprinted past the entire field the last 100 meters to pull out a world-leading time of 49.68. Then, in the 200 m final, she was narrowly edged out by Jenna Prandini, who dove across the line to take the third spot on the team, beating Felix by 0.01 seconds (22.53 to 22.54) With that, Felix lost the chance to attempt her historic 200 m-400 m double. She took the rest of July and the early part of August to give her ankle more time to heal while she prepared for the Olympics. At the 2016 Rio de Janeiro Olympics, Felix took her overall Olympic haul to nine – six golds and three silvers. Her total matches the six silvers and three bronze medals held by Jamaican sprinter Merlene Ottey in numerical terms but outranks her in terms of precious metal. Felix hopes of winning a 400m gold medal came up short, after she lost by 0.07 to Shaunae Miller of Bahamas, who made a dramatic dive across the finish line.[29] Felix recovered from the disappointing run, to win two golds with 4 × 100 m and 4 × 400 m relays. The first win came after controversy, as Team USA was initially disqualified in their semifinal run, after Felix had lost a baton on a handoff to English Gardner. The replays showed that Felix was bumped by a Brazilian runner just before a handoff, which caused her lose her balance. After the appeal was accepted, Team USA was awarded a solo run on the next day. With a successful time trial Felix and her teammates advanced to the final, which they eventually won.[30] The following year, during the World Championships in London Felix added 3 more medals, making her the most decorated athlete of the World Championships history. Felix equalled Merlene Ottey's and Usain Bolt's 14 medal tally by winning a bronze medal in the 400m final. She admitted though that the result was a bit disappointing, as she was hoping to retain her title in the discipline.[31] Just a month prior to the championships Felix had won the London's Diamond League meet held at the same track with a world leading time of 49.65.[32] Felix added two gold medals by being a part of 4 × 100 m and 4 × 400 m winning relays, bringing her tally up to 16 World's medals.[33] 2018 [ edit ] Felix reduced her schedule in 2018. “In the 19 years that I’ve been running track, I’ve never taken a break,” the 32-year-old champion said. “Never had a year where I took it easy. … Now that this is kind of a year without a championship, I’ve had to force myself to have a different approach because my goal is 2020. … So, if you guys don’t see me at as many of the races as I usually run, don’t worry, I’m fine, I’m just challenging myself to be smarter.”[34] On November 28, 2018, Felix gave birth to her daughter Camryn, accompanied by her husband Kenneth. [35] Achievements [ edit ] Felix celebrating her victory in Osaka Felix is a five-time recipient of the Jesse Owens Award from USATF signifying the Athlete of the Year. She won the award for the first time in 2005, and then again in 2007, 2010 and 2012.[36][37] She is only the second woman (after Marion Jones) to win the award three times. Felix also won the IAAF female athlete of the year in 2012. Personal bests [ edit ] At the 2012 Summer Olympics Felix ran the second leg of the 4 × 400 m relay in a time of 48.2 seconds. At the 2015 World Championships Felix ran the third leg of the 4 × 400 m relay in a time of 47.72 seconds (2nd fastest ever 4 × 400 m split by any woman and fastest 4 × 400 m split by an American woman) National titles [ edit ] 6 Times US National 200 Meters Champion - 2004, 05, 07, 08, 09, 12 2010 US National 100 Meters Champion 3 Times US National 400 Meters Champion - 2011, 2015, 2016 Note: The 2004, 2008, 2012, and 2016 US Championships incorporated the US Olympic Track and Field Trials International competitions [ edit ] Golden League wins [ edit ] 2008 - Rome (400 m), Zurich (200 m) Diamond League wins [ edit ] 2010 - Doha (400 m), Eugene (400 m), Paris (200 m), Stockholm (200 m), London (400 m), Zurich (400 m), Brussels (200 m) 2011 - Doha (400 m), Rome (400 m), New York (200 m) 2012 - Doha (100 m), Eugene (200 m) 2013 - London (200 m) 2014 - Oslo (200 m), Stockholm (200 m), Brussels (200 m) 2015 - Doha (200 m), Lausanne (200 m) 2017 - London (400 m) Diamond League titles [ edit ] 2010 Overall 200 m Diamond Race Title [40] 2010 Overall 400 m Diamond Race Title [40] 2014 Overall 200 m Diamond Race Title [41] 2015 Overall 200 m Diamond Race Title Sports Diplomacy [ edit ] In November 2014, Felix traveled to Brazil as a SportsUnited Sports Envoy for the U.S. Department of State. In this function, she worked with Josh George to conduct clinics, speeches and other events for 510 youth, many of whom had disabilities or came from marginalized communities. The program was designed to remove barriers and create activities that benefit audiences with and without disabilities, whilst speaking with a young, at-risk public about important life and sports values, such as respect, discipline and overcoming adversity.[42] |
red3blog: iwillalwaysbeastorm: nopedotpng: iwillalwaysbeastorm: I was informed tonight that reddit assholes call fat people hamplanets. We need to own that word. It’s cute. Appropriating the world of other people for your own goals. And yet you bitch about anyone else trying it. Wait…making up words to needlessly hate on a body type is part of your “world”? It’s worse than I thought, it seems. There is little that is more insufferable that an asshole troll who thinks they are being clever and pulling out some sort of trump card on you with the most desperately superficial mimicry of social justice. Like, this troll is being serious here. They feel every bit entitled to insist that their bullying of fat women qualifies as their cultural heritage. Which doesn’t just expose the disdain they hold for other people’s cultures, but the priorities they are exercising in their own useless little lives. The social justice mimicry comes a lot from people who try to troll TITP. They just end up sounding even more bigoted and extremely ignorant. It’s like having a conversation about morals and mentioning that you’re both socially tolerant and against murder and having your opponent say, “But you aren’t very tolerant of murderers, now, are you?” like it’s some kind of checkmate debate move. Erm, no. -ArteToLife |
Richard Parker is the author of Lone Star Nation: How Texas Will Transform America. He has covered intelligence, the military and three armed conflicts. Nearly two weeks after Hurricane Maria’s landfall, the Trump administration’s military aid to Puerto Rico may not be too late if it can save lives and ease the suffering of millions. But it is undisputedly arriving in amounts too little and too slowly, in sharp contrast to recent responses around the world and, most recently, elsewhere in the United States during this hurricane season. Over the past few years, the military has conducted textbook operations in Pakistan, Japan, Thailand and Haiti—pumping in massive amounts of aid after devastating earthquakes and hurricanes in those countries, no matter how rough or isolated the conditions. Just weeks ago, the military response to Hurricane Harvey in Texas was rapid and powerful. In preparation for Hurricane Irma, the Trump administration again ordered up an extensive military relief operation. Story Continued Below But when Hurricane Maria struck at full strength several days later—precisely as advertised, and similar in scale to Harvey—the U.S. military simply called off the huge resources it had mustered for Hurricane Irma. An inadequately small military contingent was left on its own for nearly two weeks to help with the damage. If there was a plan for disaster relief it was not publicly apparent. And on-scene commander—crucial in crises this large—was not appointed until nearly 10 days after landfall. No less an authority than the three-star general who reversed the disastrous initial federal response to Hurricane Katrina back in 2005, retired Army Lieutenant General Russel Honoré, said as much. “We’re replaying a scene from Katrina,” he said on NPR about Maria on Thursday. “We started moving about four days too late.” That seems overly generous. *** The voyage of the Amphibious Ready Group (ARG) led by the assault vessel USS Kearsarge helps tell the tale quite starkly. I know the Kearsarge personally; she was my salty, floating home away from home during the spring of 1999, when I covered the Kosovo War. The Kearsarge might be impressive, but it’s important not to overestimate it and the other ships in the group, Wasp and Oak Hill. An amphibious ready group such as this is designed to project a comparatively small amount of power—there are only about 2,400 Marines and a relative handful of aircraft aboard—with stunning precision and speed. It is neither meant to fight a whole war alone nor save millions of people on its own. On August 31, the Kearsarge and company headed for the Texas Gulf Coast—six full days after Hurricane Harvey made its own devastating landfall. That might seem late, but the saving grace, of course, was that other military assets reached Texas first. Indeed, Hurricane Harvey in Houston provided a preview of how the military normally responds to humanitarian disasters. Within six days, military search and rescue filled the skies, as HH-60s flew overhead while C-130s and 17 giant C-17 and two C-5 cargo planes from as far away as Utah and New York, ferried in supplies—despite closed civilian airports. The Coast Guard alone flew in 42 helicopters and seven cargo planes. Medical patients were evacuated to San Antonio. The U.S. Northern Command sent nearly 70 more helicopters. Over 6,000 active duty troops arrived along with 5,000 and then 6,000 more members of the Texas National Guard, maneuvering in nearly 300 high-water trucks, Chinook helicopters and boats. With Hurricane Irma ominously approaching Florida, the Kearsarge and company turned east. The military’s preparations for Irma were as awesome in their scale as they had been for Harvey. Some 8,000 troops of the Florida National Guard were not only activated but, like a wartime army, maneuvered across the state as Irma craftily perplexed forecasters as to where, precisely, it would strike. Other states pitched in thousands of additional guard troops. (All of this information is drawn from Northern Command’s and other public military statements.) At sea and in the air the response built up like a clenched fist. The Kearsarge amphibious group was not only on its way but the carrier USS Abraham Lincoln made for the Keys with the support vessels USS Iowa Jima, New York and San Jacinto. And much of the entire helicopter aviation brigade of the fabled 101st Airborne Division—the world’s largest helicopter army—prepared to deploy, packing its choppers into C-5 cargo planes. The Air Force readied what’s known as an air bridge: A continual flow of big C-17, C-5 and C-130 cargo planes. A U.S. military air bridge can move entire divisions—tanks, 10,000 troops, equipment and all—into combat halfway around the world overnight. This time, though, it would carry 14 million meals, water, fuel and equipment. Indeed, because of the overwhelming response, the Kearsarge was freed up to ferry British marines into the hard-hit British Virgin Islands. But then Irma struck the Keys, spared Miami and spent itself bouncing up Florida’s west coast. And suddenly, the Kearsarge’s group was sailing alone into the Caribbean. It and its sister vessels headed to Dominica to evacuate that devastated island. Wasp stayed, peeled off to the U.S. Southern Command, as the rest of the group headed for Puerto Rico, arriving the day after Maria roared across it and the neighboring U.S. Virgin Islands. Kearsarge and Oak Hill were left to put a small advance party ashore in Puerto Rico to assess the situation the day after the storm and set up air traffic control. Helicopter search and rescue operations were launched and supplies were ferried ashore. And everything else? Vanished. The Lincoln and other vessels left their posts in Florida turned back north. After dropping off fresh water in Florida, the Lincoln turned north and made port in Virginia by September 15. National Guard units returned home. The air armada of what would have been hundreds of aircraft and helicopters bound for Irma never appeared after Maria. An Army photographer captured the 101st offloading its helicopters from the C-5s in the dark, even as Maria approached. *** In Washington, the president has given himself and his administration “A-pluses” for their response to Maria, claiming his administration is “doing a very good job.” At the same, time, the military leadership has come off as brutally slow and suspiciously defensive. For example, testifying on Capitol Hill last Tuesday, General Joseph Dunford, chairman of the Joint Chiefs, reportedly squawked that the ports and airports weren’t readily accessible. Maybe not. A relatively small number of military flights—three to six daily until recently—landed at the international airport in the capital, San Juan, which also serves as the main air base for the Puerto Rican National Guard. Now, those numbers of flights are to ramp up to 10 daily. And yes, the vast majority of old military facilities in the American commonwealth are shuttered. Yet there are 15 airports or airfields in Puerto Rico, including on the smaller and remote islands of Culebra and Vieques. The Culebra airport is short but big enough for large helicopters. The Vieques airport has a runway 4,300 feet long. That’s plenty big enough for a C-130, which needs a runway just 3,000 feet in length and 60 feet in width, according to the Defense Technical Information Center. The U.S. Coast Guard, a far smaller service, has reportedly been ferrying water and food via air into the airport there; if the limited air assets of the Coast Guard can make it, it stands to reason that the Air Force and Navy can, too. On Wednesday, by the Pentagon’s own count, nine airports in Puerto Rico were open. Only Thursday did the Northern Command announce that it was “adjusting” from a small seaborne operation to a larger airlift, emphasizing big cargo planes. Three harbors in Puerto Rico and eight in the Virgin Islands were serviceable to one degree or another, according to the military. And yet in Puerto Rico and the U.S. Virgin Islands, American citizens are waiting for the USNS Comfort hospital ship, which won’t arrive until next week. Ten days after landfall there was no real air bridge. Likely dozens upon dozens of heavy helicopters are needed to move supplies until trucks are offloaded. And reservist units specifically trained for long-term humanitarian relief, water purification, medical care and military police? As of this writing, there is absolutely no sign of them. Ten days in, a few Marines, small Army elements and the Puerto Rican National Guard were ashore on their own. In contrast, the United States eventually put 60,000 federal and reserve troops into New Orleans after Katrina after 2005, Honoré noted. Puerto Rico will need far more, he said. As in all things in the military there is a manual for responding to humanitarian disasters. The most recent version is JP 3-29, geared primarily for foreign operations, but generally applicable. This 203-page volume from the Joint Staff at the Pentagon spells out—in excruciating detail—what to and what not to do in these circumstances. It's this kind of detail that created successes under brutal circumstances from Pakistan to Japan to Thailand—and Haiti in 2010, when the USS Carl Vinson arrived just three days after an earthquake and the Air Force airlifted 15,000 Americans within days. In the case of Maria, at first blush, three things appear to have not been done. The first is adequately preposition forces and assets. The second is the timely appointment of an on-scene commander; the U.S. Northern Command did not appoint combat veteran Brigadier General Richard Kim until 10 days after landfall. The third is a detailed plan. Planning is paramount, according to the manual. And if there was one, it certainly was not publicly announced as were military relief efforts for Irma and Harvey—even though Maria’s strength and trajectory were known a full four days before landfall. The Trump administration has sought, desperately, to shift the blame and claim that this was somehow a surprise—even though a direct hit was forecast days beforehand. Later, Lieutenant Jeffrey Buchanan, the three-star land forces commander at Northern Command, even claimed that the hurricane’s effect was not foreseeable. Again, suspiciously defensive. If the military didn’t think Maria was serious, then why did it evacuate its own aircraft on the island to Guantanamo Bay? For the military, Maria may be a singular stain upon a noble and sterling record built not on taking—but saving—lives. The Trump administration is due a serious reckoning. That’s because for millions of fellow Americans in the Caribbean this is serious, if not deadly, business. |
The Vandal Kingdom (Latin: Regnum Vandalum) or Kingdom of the Vandals and Alans (Latin: Regnum Vandalorum et Alanorum) was established by the Germanic Vandal people under Genseric, and ruled in North Africa and the Mediterranean from 435 AD to 534 AD. In 429, the Vandals, estimated to number 80,000 people, had crossed by boat from Spain to North Africa. They advanced eastward conquering the coastal regions of 21st century Morocco, Algeria and Tunisia. In 435, the Roman Empire, then ruling in North Africa, allowed the Vandals to settle in the provinces of Numidia and Mauretania when it became clear that the Vandal army could not be defeated by Roman military forces. In 439 the Vandals renewed their advance eastward and captured Carthage, the most important city of North Africa. The fledgling kingdom then conquered the Roman-ruled islands of Sicily, Sardinia, and Corsica in the Mediterranean Sea. In the 460s the Romans launched two unsuccessful military expeditions by sea in an attempt to overthrow the Vandals and reclaim North Africa. The conquest of North Africa by the Vandals was a blow to the beleaguered Western Roman Empire as North Africa was a major source of revenue and a supplier of grain (mostly wheat) to the city of Rome. Although primarily remembered for the sack of Rome in 455 and their persecution of Nicene Christians in favor of Arian Christianity, the Vandals were also patrons of learning. Grand building projects continued, schools flourished and North Africa fostered many of the most innovative writers and natural scientists of the late Latin Western Roman Empire.[4] The Vandal Kingdom ended in 534 when it was conquered by Belisarius in the Vandalic War and incorporated into the Eastern Roman or Byzantine Empire. History [ edit ] View from the Gibraltar strait to North Africa where the Vandals crossed into Africa. Establishment [ edit ] The Vandals, under their new king Genseric (also known as Gaiseric or Geiseric), crossed to Africa in 429.[5] Although numbers are unknown and some historians debate the validity of estimates, based on Procopius' assertion that the Vandals and Alans numbered 80,000 when they moved to North Africa,[6] Peter Heather estimates that they could have fielded an army of around 15,000–20,000.[7] According to Procopius, the Vandals came to Africa at the request of Bonifacius, the military ruler of the region.[8] However, it has been suggested that the Vandals migrated to Africa in search of safety; they had been attacked by a Roman army in 422 and had failed to seal a treaty with them. Advancing eastwards along the African coast, the Vandals laid siege to the walled city of Hippo Regius in 430.[5] Inside, Saint Augustine and his priests prayed for relief from the invaders, knowing full well that the fall of the city would spell conversion or death for many Roman Christians. On 28 August 430, three months into the siege, St. Augustine (who was 75 years old) died[9] - perhaps from starvation or stress, as the wheat fields outside the city lay dormant and unharvested. After 14 months, hunger and diseases were ravaging both the city's inhabitants and the Vandals outside the city walls. The city eventually fell to the Vandals and they made it their first capital.[1] Peace was made between the Romans and the Vandals in 435 through a treaty - between Valentinian III and Genseric - giving the Vandals control of coastal Numidia and parts of Mauretania. Genseric chose to break the treaty in 439 when he invaded the province of Africa Proconsularis and laid siege to Carthage.[10] The city was captured without a fight; the Vandals entered the city while most of the inhabitants were attending the races at the hippodrome.[citation needed] Genseric made it his capital, and styled himself the King of the Vandals and Alans, to denote the inclusion of his Alan allies into his realm. Conquering Sicily, Sardinia, Corsica, Malta and the Balearic Islands, he built his kingdom into a powerful state. Averil Cameron suggests that the new Vandal rule may not have been unwelcome to the population of North Africa as the previous landowners were generally unpopular.[11] The impression given by sources such as Victor of Vita, Quodvultdeus, and Fulgentius of Ruspe was that the Vandal take-over of Carthage and North Africa led to widespread destruction. However, recent archaeological investigations have challenged this assertion. Although Carthage's Odeon was destroyed, the street pattern remained the same and some public buildings were renovated. The political centre of Carthage was the Byrsa Hill. New industrial centres emerged within towns during this period.[12] Historian Andy Merrills uses the large amounts of African red slip ware discovered across the Mediterranean dating from the Vandal period of North Africa to challenge the assumption that the Vandal rule of North Africa was a time of economic instability.[13] When the Vandals raided Sicily in 440, the Western Roman Empire was too preoccupied with war in Gaul to react. Theodosius II, emperor of the Eastern Roman Empire, dispatched an expedition to deal with the Vandals in 441, but it only progressed as far as Sicily. The Western Empire under Valentinian III secured peace with the Vandals in 442.[14] Under the treaty the Vandals gained Byzacena, Tripolitania, part of Numidia, and confirmed their control of Proconsular Africa.[15] The Grain Trade [ edit ] Historians since Edward Gibbon have seen the capture of North Africa by the Vandals and Alans as the "deathblow"[16] and "the greatest single blow"[17] to the Western Roman Empire in its struggle to survive. Prior to the Vandals, northern Africa was prosperous and peaceful, requiring only a small percentage of the Roman Empire's military forces, and was an important source of taxes for the empire and grain for the city of Rome.[18] The scholar Josephus in the first century CE said that North Africa fed Rome for eight months of the year, with the other four months of needed grain coming from Egypt.[19] The Roman need for grain from North Africa may have declined by the 5th century because of the diminishing population of the city of Rome and a decreasing number of Roman soldiers. Moreover, the treaty between Rome and the Vandals in 442 seems to have ensured that grain shipments continued.[20] However, that treaty, in terms of halting hostilities between Rome and the Vandals, was honored more in the breach than in the observance and the Romans placed a high priority on recovering North Africa and regaining their control of grain from the Vandal Kingdom.[21] The location of Carthage, the Vandal capital. Sack of Rome [ edit ] The peace treaty of 442 did not halt Vandal raids in the western Mediterranean. During the next thirty-five years, with a large fleet, Genseric looted the coasts of the Eastern and Western Empires. After Attila the Hun's death in 453, however, the Romans turned their attention back to the Vandals, who were in control of some of the richest lands of their former empire. In an effort to bring the Vandals into the fold of the Empire, Valentinian III offered his daughter's hand in marriage to Genseric's son. Before this treaty could be carried out, however, politics again played a crucial part in the blunders of Rome. Petronius Maximus, the usurper, killed Valentinian III in an effort to control the Empire. Diplomacy between the two factions broke down and in 455 with a letter from the Empress Licinia Eudoxia, begging Genseric's son to rescue her, the Vandals took Rome, along with the Empress Licinia Eudoxia and her daughters Eudocia and Placidia. The chronicler Prosper of Aquitaine[22] offers the only fifth-century report that on 2 June 455, Pope Leo the Great received Genseric and implored him to abstain from murder and destruction by fire, and to be satisfied with pillage. The Vandals departed with countless valuables, including the spoils of the Temple in Jerusalem booty brought to Rome by Titus. Eudoxia and her daughter Eudocia were taken to North Africa.[15] Later years [ edit ] As a result of the Vandal sack of Rome, piracy in the Mediterranean, and the Roman need to recover control of the grain trade, the destruction of the Vandal kingdom became a priority for the Roman Empire. The Western Roman Emperor, Majorian, began to organize an offensive in the summer of 458; it was planned that a maritime force - staged from Cartagena in Spain - would take Mauretania and then march on Carthage whilst a simultaneous assault - commanded by Marcellinus - would retake Sicily. The Emperor assembled his fleet in 460 but his plan failed. Learning of the impending assault, Genseric 'put a scorched earth policy into effect in Mauretania - scouring the land and poisoning the wells in advance of the planned imperial offensive'; as well as this, Genseric led his own fleet against Majorian's force and defeated the Romans at Cartagena.[23][24] In 468, both the Western and Eastern empires attempted to conquer Africa again with the 'most ambitious campaign ever launched against the Vandal state'; primary sources suggest that the fleet numbered 1,113 ships and carried 100,000 men but this figure has been rejected by modern historiography, with Peter Heather suggesting 30,000 troops and 50,000 soldiers and sailors combined, based on 16,000 Roman soldiers conveyed on 500 ships in 532. Andy Merrills and Richard Miles have asserted that the operation was undoubtedly extensive and 'deserves admiration for its logistical brilliance'. At a naval battle in Cape Bon, Tunisia, the Vandals destroyed the Western fleet and part of the Eastern through the use of fire ships.[14] Following up the attack, the Vandals tried to invade the Peloponnese, but were driven back by the Maniots at Kenipolis with heavy losses.[26] In retaliation, the Vandals took 500 hostages at Zakynthos, hacked them to pieces and threw the pieces overboard on the way to Carthage.[26] In the 470s, the Romans abandoned their policy of war against the Vandals. The Western Germanic general Ricimer reached a treaty with the Vandals,[14] and in 476 Genseric was able to conclude a "perpetual peace" with Constantinople. Relations between the two states assumed a veneer of normality.[27] From 477 onwards, the Vandals produced their own coinage. It was restricted to bronze and silver low-denomination coins. Although the low-denomination imperial money was replaced, the high-denomination was not, demonstrating in the words of Merrills "reluctance to usurp the imperial prerogative".[28] Genseric died on 25 January 477, 88 years of age. According to the law of succession which he had promulgated, the oldest male member of the royal house was to succeed. Thus he was succeeded by his son Huneric (477–484), who at first tolerated Nicene Christians, owing to his fear of Constantinople, but after 482 began to persecute Manichaeans and Nicene Christians.[29] Gunthamund (484–496), his cousin and successor, sought internal peace with the Nicene Christians and ceased persecution once more. Externally, the Vandal power had been declining since Genseric's death, and Gunthamund lost large parts of Sicily to Theodoric's Ostrogoths and had to withstand increasing pressure from the native Berbers. Gunthamund's successor Thrasamund (496–523), owing to his religious fanaticism, was hostile to Nicene Christians, but contented himself with bloodless persecutions.[29] Conquest by the Eastern Roman Empire [ edit ] Thrasamund's successor Hilderic (523–530) was the Vandal king most tolerant towards the Trinitarian Christians. He granted religious freedom; consequently Catholic synods were once more held in North Africa. However, he had little interest in war and left it to a family member, Hoamer. When Hoamer suffered a defeat by the Berbers, the Arian faction within the royal family led a revolt, and his cousin Gelimer (530–533) became king. Hilderic, Hoamer and their relatives were thrown into prison. Hilderic was deposed and murdered in 533.[30] Byzantine Emperor Justinian I declared war, with the stated intention of restoring Hilderic to the Vandal throne. While an expedition was en route, a large part of the Vandal army and navy was led by Tzazo, Gelimer's brother, to Sardinia to deal with a rebellion by the Gothic nobleman Godas. As a result, the armies of the Byzantine Empire commanded by Belisarius were able to land unopposed 10 miles (16 km) from Carthage. Gelimer quickly assembled an army,[31] and met Belisarius at the Battle of Ad Decimum; the Vandals were winning the battle until Gelimer's brother Ammatas and nephew Gibamund fell in battle. Gelimer then lost heart and fled. Belisarius quickly took Carthage while the surviving Vandals fought on.[32] On December 15, 533, Gelimer and Belisarius clashed again at the Battle of Tricamarum, some 20 miles (32 km) from Carthage. Again, the Vandals fought well but broke, this time when Gelimer's brother Tzazo fell in battle. Belisarius quickly advanced to Hippo, second city of the Vandal Kingdom, and in 534 Gelimer, besieged in Mount Pappua by the Herulian General Pharas, surrendered to the Byzantines, ending the Kingdom of the Vandals. The Vandals' territory in North Africa (which is now northern Tunisia and eastern Algeria) became a Byzantine province, from which the Vandals were expelled. The best Vandal warriors were formed into five cavalry regiments, known as Vandali Iustiniani, and stationed on the Persian frontier. Some entered the private service of Belisarius.[33] Gelimer himself was honourably treated and received large estates in Galatia where he lived to be an old man. He was also offered the rank of patrician but had to refuse it because he was not willing to change his Arian faith.[29] In the words of historian Roger Collins: "The remaining Vandals were then shipped back to Constantinople to be absorbed into the imperial army. As a distinct ethnic unit they disappeared".[31] Culture [ edit ] Religion [ edit ] From the beginning of their invasion of North Africa in 429, the Vandals – who were predominantly followers of Arianism – persecuted the Nicene church. This persecution began with the unfettered violence inflicted against the church during Genseric's invasion but, with the legitimization of the Vandal kingdom, the oppression became entrenched in ‘more coherent religious policies’.[34] Victor of Vita's History of the Vandal Persecution details the ‘wicked ferocity’ inflicted against church property and attacks against ‘many… distinguished bishops and noble priests’ in the first years of the conquest; similarly, Bishop Honoratus writes that ‘before our eyes men are murdered, women raped and we are ourselves collapse under torture’.[35][36] Using these and other corroborating sources, Andy Merrills has argued that there is ‘little doubt’ that the initial invasion was ‘brutally violent’.[37] Additionally, he has argued, along with Richard Miles that, the Vandals initially targeted the Nicene church for financial, rather than religious, reasons – seeking to rob the clergy of its wealth.[36] However, once Genseric secured his hold over Numidia and Mauretania with the treaty of 435 he worked ‘to destroy the power of the Nicene Church in his new territories by seizing the basilicas of three of the most intransigent bishops and expelling them from their cities’.[38] Similar policies continued with the capture of Carthage in 439 as the Vandal king made efforts to simultaneously advance the Arian church whilst oppressing Nicene practices. Peter Heather highlights that four major churches within the city walls were confiscated for the Arians and a ban was imposed on all Nicene services in areas in which Vandals settled; Genseric also had Quodvultdeus (the city's bishop) and many of his clergy exiled from Africa and refused ‘to allow replacements to be ordained . . . so that the total number of Nicene bishops within the Vandal kingdom suffered a decline’.[34] Laymen were excluded from office and frequently suffered confiscation of their property.[39] Diplomatic considerations took precedence over religious policy. In 454 Genseric installed Deogratius as the new bishop of Carthage (a position left empty since Quodvultdeus’ departure) at the request of Valentinian III; Heather argues that this accession was intended to improve relations as the Vandal king negotiated the marriage of his son, Huneric, to the Roman Emperor's daughter, Eudocia.[40] However, with Valentinian's death and the worsening of relations with Rome and Constantinople Genseric persisted with oppressive religious policies, leaving the bishopric empty once again when Deogratius died in 457.[citation needed] Peter Heather has argues that Genseric's promotion of the Arian church - with the accompanying persecution of the Nicene church - had political motivations. He notes a 'key distinction' between 'the anti-Nicene character' of Genseric's actions in Proconsularis and the rest of his kingdom; persecution was most intense when it was in proximity to his Arian followers.[34] Heather suggests that Arianism was a means for Genseric to keep his followers united and under control, where there was interaction between his people and the Nicene church this strategy was threatened. Heather also notes that 'personal belief must have also played a substantial role in Genseric's decision making'.[34] Huneric, Genseric's son and successor, continued and intensified the repression of the Nicene church and attempted to make Arianism the primary religion in North Africa; indeed, much of Victor of Vita's narrative focuses on the atrocities and persecutions committed during Huneric's reign.[41] Priests were forbidden to practice the liturgy, homoousain books were destroyed, and almost 5000 bishops were forced to suffer exile in the desert.[42] Violence continued with ‘men and women . . . subjected to a series of torments including scalping, forced labour and execution by sword and fire.’[42] In 483, Huneric commanded all Catholic bishops in Africa, with a royal edict, to attend a debate with Arian representatives and in the aftermath of this conference Huneric forbade the Nicene clergy from assembling, carrying out baptisms or ordinations, and ordered all Nicene churches and property to be closed.[42] Churches were then confiscated for the Royal Fisc or for Arian use. Primary sources reveal little about Gunthamund's religious policies; yet, evidence does suggest that the new king was 'generally better disposed towards the Catholic faith than his predecessor [Huneric] had been' and maintained a period of tolerance.[43] Gunthamund ended the exile of a bishop called Eugenius and also restored the Nicene shrine of Agileus in Carthage.[43] Thrasamund ended his late brother's policies of tolerance when he ascended to the throne, in 496. He reintroduced 'harsh measures against the Catholic ecclesiastical hierarchy' but 'worked to maintain positive relations with the Romano-African lay elite' - his intention being to split the loyalties of the two groups.[43] Generally most Vandal kings, except Hilderic, persecuted the Nicene Christians (as well as Donatists) to a greater or lesser extent, banning conversion for Vandals and exiling bishops.[44][45] See also [ edit ] Notes [ edit ] |
Ref: 74/2017 On Sunday morning, medical resources at al-Shifa Hospital in Gaza City, declared the death of prisoner (A. S. F), after he was referred to al-Shifa Hospital from al-Shuja’iyia police station. The prisoner was serving a 1-year sentence in jail on grounds of theft. The Palestinian Center for Human Rights (PCHR) expresses its deep concern over repeated death cases in the Gaza police stations and detention facilities in various circumstances. PCHR is also concerned that these cases might be due to torture and degrading treatment that detainees were exposed to or resulting from negligence of providing them protection and security. According to the victim’s brother, who was also arrested with him in the Shuja’iyia police station on grounds of another theft incident, at approximately 07:30 on Sunday, while his brother (A. S. F) was heading to the bathroom and before he entered, he fell on the ground and fainted. His body was trembling and his color changed into red. He added: we called the police, who responded after 10 minutes and took my brother to al-Surani Clinic. The al-Surani Clinic refused to admit him, so he was returned to the police station. The police then brought a doctor, who was detained on financial grounds, to check him up. The doctor confirmed that his health condition is serious, so he was transferred to al-Shifa Hospital, where he succumbed to his wounds. The Forensic Medicine Department at al-Shifa Hospital declared that (A. S. F) died due to Hypertrophic cardiomyopathy (HCM). The victim’s brother added that his brother was exposed to torture several times while he was in the prison. He also said that when my family previously visited my brother, he complained of pain in his chest and being maltreated and tortured by the police officers. The Ministry of Interior and National Security in Gaza published a press statement on its website for Ayman al-Batniji, Spokesperson of the Palestinian Police in Gaza, saying that “the detainee (A. S. F), 30, from Gaza City, died after he fainted while he was in al-Shuja’iyia police station. He also pointed out that the victim received first aid in the prison and was then taken to al-Shifa Hospital, where he succumbed to his wounds. Al-Batniji also said that the victim’s body was reffered to the Forensic Department to find out the death cause. He confirmed that the victim had been detained since March on grounds of theft. It should be noted that this is the third death in Gaza detention facilities. On 22 September 2017, medical sources in al-Quds Hospital in Gaza City, announced the death of M. S. (16) after he stayed in several hospitals due to being in clinical death since 02 September 2017. M.S. was detained in Beit Lahia police station, which is designated for adults, on 02 July 2017 on grounds of a personal dispute. On 02 September 2017, the police stated that M. S. committed suicide in Beit Lahia police station using his undershirt. He arrived in a state of clinical death at the Indonesian Hospital in Jabalia and then was transferred to the Intensive Care Unit (ICU) in al-Shifa Hospital. After that, M. S. was transferred to al-Quds Hospital to be announced dead. The victim’s family said to PCHR that his son complained about the maltreatment he received in the prison when they visited him on the day of his death. They added that they received a phone call from the police informing them that M. S. had a fight and was wounded and transferred to the Indonesian Hospital in Jabalia. They said that their son was not moving and the doctors put him on the cardiopulmonary resuscitation device. There were signs of incised wounds on the abdomen and shoulders and a swelling in the neck. On 19 September 2017, the Public Prosecution announced the death of a detainee after he jumped out of the investigation room’s window in the 4th floor in the Gaza Prosecution building. The Public Prosecution added that KH. H. sustained serious wounds and was then transferred to the hospital to be announced dead. On 17 September 2017, KH. H. was detained in al-‘Abbas police station, after accusing him of stealing. He was brought before the Gaza Prosecution on the next day morning in its head office on al-Shifa Street near al-Shifa building in the center of Gaza City. According to the statement of the victim’s father to PCHR’s field worker, “At approximately 12:00 on Tuesday, 19 September 2017, I received a phone call from the neighbors telling me that my son died. My brother then called me to tell me that there is news spread on the websites about my son’s death. When I headed to see the body, I found a bruise on my son’s left eye and beating signs on his feet and throughout his body. After that, I went to the office of the Attorney General and demanded not to bury my son until I know the circumstances of his death. I told them that my son would never commit suicide. The Attorney General advised me to bury my son. My son was buried, but the Attorney General assured me that he will open an investigation into the incident and will not tolerate any person involved.” This incident and the previous ones require the Attorney General and officials in the Gaza Strip take serious action and reveal the facts, particularly the arrest circumstances and torture cases. The human rights organizations annually receive many complaints of torture, which are only a small part of the torture reality in the investigation centers. PCHR confirms that the Public Prosecution and the detention facilities are responsible for the life and safety of the arrestees. Thus, PCHR calls upon the Attorney General to open a serious investigation into the incident and publish the results on public. PCHR also stresses to take in consideration the tort liability of the Public Prosecution as although it is not the first incident of its kind, no precautionary measures were taken. PCHR calls upon the Attorney General and decision makers in the Gaza Strip to take serious action to end the deteriorating status of the detention and investigation facilities, seriously work to stop using torture in the prisons and comply with the Palestinian Basic law and Palestine’s International obligations, particularly the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR) under which Article 10 stipulates that: “All persons deprived of their liberty shall be treated with humanity and with respect for the inherent dignity of the human person.” |
The new mileage rules are so expensive, in fact, that even if one factors in all the expected gains from the policy — like less damage from climate change and fewer deaths from respiratory disease — many economists think that the costs actually outweigh the benefits. The reason is fairly straightforward. Fuel-efficiency standards do not really change drivers’ behavior in a helpful way. Gas taxes do. Consider how a gas tax would work. Because it would make gas more expensive at the pump, we would drive less. When time came to replace the old family S.U.V., we would be more likely to consider a more fuel-efficient option. As more Americans sought gas-sipping hybrids, carmakers would develop more efficient vehicles. This is not theory. We’ve seen it happen. In 2008, when the price of gas shot abruptly past $4 a gallon, Americans cut back sharply on their driving. Total miles driven on American highways declined for the first time since 1980 and gas use fell more than 4 percent. General Motors ditched the Hummer, and gas-guzzling pickups were briefly dislodged from the perch they had occupied since 1992 as the nation’s most popular light vehicle. Driving levels started creeping back up as soon as gas prices started receding, but a gas tax would be permanent and would lead to even bigger changes in habits. And the cost is lower than it seems. Economists point out that the energy savings would not change if the government returned all the revenue raised by a gas tax to Americans — perhaps through rebates for low-income people who spend a bigger share of their money on gas. The weakness with the fuel-economy rules is that they don’t affect people’s behavior the way higher gas prices do. They apply only to new vehicles — not the ones on the road now — so it takes quite a long time to alter our overall gas use. And they carry perverse incentives: because new vehicles go farther on a gallon of gas, they give us a reason to drive more, leading to more congestion, accidents, pollution and gas consumption. The incentives to carmakers can also be weird. The original standards for fuel economy in the 1970s exempted light trucks, which were a small share of the market. That decision was critical to the explosive growth of the S.U.V. In 1973, light trucks amounted to 3 percent of new vehicle sales. Today they account for half. Newsletter Sign Up Continue reading the main story Please verify you're not a robot by clicking the box. Invalid email address. Please re-enter. You must select a newsletter to subscribe to. Sign Up You will receive emails containing news content , updates and promotions from The New York Times. You may opt-out at any time. You agree to receive occasional updates and special offers for The New York Times's products and services. Thank you for subscribing. An error has occurred. Please try again later. View all New York Times newsletters. Who knows what distortions the new rules will bring? The standards vary according to the footprint of the car — the length between the axles multiplied by the width. So maybe cars will be boxier in the future. Advertisement Continue reading the main story Automakers will make the most efficient cars they can that customers will buy. A gas tax that goads drivers to choose gas-sippers takes advantage of this fact. A mileage standard does not. Christopher Knittel, an energy economist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, estimated that if carmakers had devoted all their technological progress since 1980 to improving fuel efficiency, gas mileage would have improved 60 percent by 2006. Instead, they put most of their effort into more power and weight, and fuel economy gained less than 12 percent. All this makes mileage standards an expensive way to restrain our energy use. According to the government’s analysis, the additional production and maintenance costs made necessary by the mileage rules will rise gradually to about $31.7 billion in 2025 — which will add about $1,900 to the average price of cars and light trucks. There are other costs, too. Some Americans will not be able to afford a new car. Profits of some automakers and dealers are likely to decline. Greater congestion will impose an added burden on health. According to economists crunching the numbers, this makes mileage standards somewhere between 2.4 and 13 times more expensive than a gasoline tax as a tool to reduce our use of fuel. Indeed, by some calculations, raising fuel-economy standards is more costly than climate change itself. The government has to predict how much climate change will cost us in the future — through lost agricultural productivity, poorer health, bigger hurricanes and the like — to figure out how much we should spend today. It does so through a measure called the “social cost of carbon,” which captures the added damage that will be caused by adding one more ton of CO2 into the air. The government’s estimate of the cost to our society covers a wide range of $5 to $68 a ton and increases over time. Several economists have concluded that cutting carbon emissions via fuel-efficiency standards may be even more expensive. Adding in benefits not related to global warming — like less pollution, less reliance on foreign oil, and less time spent filling up — the mileage standards may still cost more than their benefits. The Obama administration will say that mileage standards are the best we can do to limit our gas usage. The president’s proposal to create carbon allowances, which would act like a tax to limit companies’ carbon emissions, withered in Congress two years ago despite the plan to use the money to provide tax credits to low-income families. A tax on gasoline doesn’t stand a chance. And doing nothing about global warming might seem crazy considering how little we really know about the potentially devastating consequences of climate change. Still, we could do much better if taxes were on the table. The United States has the lowest gas taxes by far among the industrialized nations. This includes countries with mandatory fuel-efficiency standards and countries without them. It includes big countries and little ones. Among them, guess who uses the most transportation fuel of all? Advertisement Continue reading the main story Hint: in Britain, where gas and diesel are taxed at $3.95 a gallon, the American automaker Ford sells a compact Fiesta model that will go nearly 72 miles on a gallon. In the United States, where gas taxes average 49 cents, Ford’s Fiestas will carry you only 33 miles on a gallon of gas. |
It is reported that the Gripen of the Royal Thai Air Force defeated the Su-27 or J-11 in 4:0 victory According to China Times Thai Air Force war was defeat Communist forces under review At 22:56 on May 3, 2016 Jiang Feiyu Discussion of recent military zone continental spread a less glorious past, the CPC and the end of 2015. Thailand joint military exercises in simulated air combat project, the CCP main fighter Su-27 and J-11 were Thai Air Force JAS-39 “Griffin “4: 0 result of defeat by the Continental Army fans talk. This air combat simulation called “Eagle -2015” exercise, the CPC operating J-11 pilots, the latest against the Thai Air Force JAS-39C / D type, although at the end of the exercise, the two sides executives publicly say that “the outcome of each.” but the British magazine “Air Force Monthly” the latest was disclosed some details of the exercise, the Thai reporter author wrote to his personal experience as well as communication with the Thai Air Force pilot, insider account of the exercise, including the Chinese Communist Party sent best pilot participation, but also a test of Thailand JAS-39C / D, but the most shocking still air combat simulation results: in some subjects, the “Griffin” with a 4: 0 victory over the J-11. Many military commentators noted that the performance difference between both fighters, to explain the final result, mostly classified as three reasons: 1. This is a 1-on-1 combat singled out, the comparison is purely aircraft performance, so the problem is not the quality of the pilot, but the aircraft performance issues. 2. Thailand operate Western-style electronic digital fighter for a long time, including the F-16 and JAS-39C / D is the most innovative avionics, can be called “fourth generation semi-fighter.” 3. The CCP dispatched J-11 avionics early configuration, although there is also shot from outside the missile, but compared with the JAS-39C / D, operating procedures excessive. Some commentators also believe that, JAS-39C / D small and flexible, this type of heavy long-range J-11 fighter is not unexpected defeat. However, most of the military fans unhappy with this result, even if they think that these J-11 is not the most advanced, but still belong to the first line of the Guangzhou Military Region fighters, even if have to beat Thailand, how on Japan, South Korea, the United States? and Su-27 Flanker fighter series has always been to be able to show “stall maneuver” world-famous, it is difficult to accept that it is not flexible enough. However, some comments are encouraged from the perspective that abroad against its meaning is quite important, purpose of the exercise is to understand their own lack of know opponents strengths, this is the most important. The test of the West’s most superb JAS-39C / D type Griffin, can thus learn better operating system configuration for the Chinese mainland next generation of aircraft development is very informative, and harvest more valuable. (China Times) Translated by Google chinatimes.com ****-END-**** It seems this is not an isolated incident at Red Flag 2013 Saab Gripen flying as Red Force had the highest F-22 kills ! The highest scores of kills at Red Flag 2013 NATO exercise: Link So F-16, F-18, F-15, Su-27, Su-30s beware of the little nibble Gripen ! 挑戰新聞軍事精華版–「殲11」戰機遭泰國０：４完敗，中共空軍戰力被檢討？ Military News Challenge the best version – “F-11” fighters were Thailand 0: 4 defeat, the CCP is to review the Air Force combat capability? Pics from Falcon Strike 2015 Details Saab Gripen RTAF: Details J-11 or Su-27 of the PLAAF: |
The Great Appeal What did Christianity offer its believers that made it worth social estrangement, hostility from neighbors, and possible persecution? Helmut Koester: John H. Morison Professor of New Testament Studies and Winn Professor of Ecclesiastical History Harvard Divinity School A NEW COMMUNITY Why was the Christian community something that people wanted to join? I think that only because at least certain parts of the early Christian mission were intent in creating new community, that only for that reason this movement was successful. Now what does it mean "new community?" Let me talk about this in two different levels. One was certainly that the message that was preached here promised gifts, spiritual gifts, to people that went beyond the everyday life experience and promised also immortality, a future life which would be liberation from sickness and from disease and from poverty, and individual isolation. There is a future for the individual. And the message of the possibility for a human being to be related to something that is beyond the powers of this world was certainly one great attraction. But that alone would not have been enough. I think it's a very important spiritual-religious factor. But it would not have been enough, because, in spite of all the glories of the Roman Empire, people lived in the world in which there was inequality, there was great poverty on the one hand and immense wealth in the hands of a very few people. There were sickness and disease and there were no public health services, and doctors were expensive. Now here's also the question of the inequality which Rome really reinforced through the Augustan system. Rome is a very strict hierarchical system, in which the emperor is at the pinnacle, all the way up and then all the blessings in the world that come to people come down from above. The emperor is the conduit to the divine world. And if you're at the bottom of that social pyramid, not a whole lot of things are coming down to you anymore. Slavery slowly diminished, but continued to exist. Now the Christian community, as we have it particularly in the letters of Paul, begins with a formula that is a baptismal formula, which says in Christ there is neither Jew nor Greek, neither male nor female, neither slave nor free. This is a sociological formula that defines a new community. Here is a community that invites you, which makes you an equal with all other members of that community. Which does not give you any disadvantages. On the contrary, it gives even the lowliest slave personal dignity and status. Moreover, the commandment of love is decisive. That is, the care for each other becomes very important. People are taken out of an isolation. If they are hungry, they know where to go. If they are sick, there is an elder who will lay on hands to them to heal them. WELFARE INSTITUTIONS Now we have increasingly in the Christian churches, in the time up to Constantine, the establishment of hospitals, of some kind of health service, we have a clear establishment of social service - everything from soup kitchens to money for the poor if they need it. We have the very important establishment of the institution of widows, because a widow in the Roman society who had lost her husband and did not have money of her own was at the very bottom of the social ladder. One of the first welfare institutions we find in the church was all the widows who were recognized as virgins of the church, considered particularly precious possessions of the church; they were paid by the church and therefore were rescued from utter poverty in most instances. Christianity really established a realm of mutual social support for the members that joined the church. And I think that this was probably in the long run an enormously important factor for the success of the Christian mission. And it was for that very reason that Constantine saw that the only thing that would rescue the empire is to take over the institutions that the Christians had already built up, [including], by that time, institutions of education in reading and writing, because Christians wanted to have their members knowledgeable and capable of reading the Bible.... We find that in administration of the last pagan emperors, before Constantine, at the very end of the third century, a large number of the people in the imperial administration are Christians, because they could read and write. Which constituted a big problem with the persecution of the Christians because they were thrown out of their office first when the persecution began, and suddenly the government didn't work anymore. One should not see the success of Christianity simply on the level of a great religious message; one has to see it also in the consistent and very well thought out establishment of institutions to serve the needs of the community. L. Michael White: Professor of Classics and Director of the Religious Studies Program University of Texas at Austin Given the intersection between religion and politics that we find so characteristically in the Hellenistic Roman world and especially within these major cities, it does seem incongruous that Christianity could have survived, much less have grown to be the prominent force that it would become by the early fourth century when the Emperor Constantine would make it one of his official religions of the empire. But I think we can see several factors that contribute to that growth and development. For one thing the Roman world was not uniform in its religious beliefs. There were lots of new religions that had come in between the time of the conquest of the Alexander the Great down to the time of the Emperors Trajan and Hadrian, when the Christians become a prominent issue. Within this period we find new religions coming from all over the Eastern Mediterranean world. There are the cults of the Egyptian gods, Isis and Serapis. There is the great mother goddess... from Eastern Turkey.... All of these traditional forms of Mediterranean national religions also come in to the Roman world and have cultic followings. So from the Roman perspective, new cults aren't necessarily a problem. The Romans begin to get concerned about these religious groups, however, precisely when it seems they become subversive or when they will not participate in the public religious life of the empire. Anything that looks like disloyalty to the state raises the concern of governors and magistrates like Pliny the Younger. What is it that is making Christianity prominent in this time? Does it have anything to do with the kind of a sense of belonging? From a historical perspective, the growth of Christianity in the second and third centuries really is a phenomenon to be reckoned with, both socially and religiously. What made it grow? What made it succeed in ways that even other new religious groups of the time did not is a very important question. Now traditionally at least the answer to that question of why did Christianity triumph in the Roman world was answered very simply. It was God's will, of course, but I think we can probably find some other answers as well. Sometimes it's been suggested that Christianity appealed to a kind of higher moral plane. A better form of religiosity than their Roman neighbors, and that's what made people convert to Christianity. I'm not really convinced of that. What we really see in the second and the third centuries is that Christianity is defining its identity precisely in terms of the values of Roman society at large. They say "We're just as ethical as you, or better but in terms of what you Romans think are the ideal virtues of society. We Christians are practicing Roman family values just like you."So there not really holding themselves apart from Roman society in quite the same way as we might have expected. MASSIVE DEMOGRAPHIC CHANGES So why do they succeed? Why do people become Christians? I think there are some important historical observations to make here. One is that we have to realize that the Roman Empire itself was going through some massive demographic changes at this time. Now let's think about it this way... cities are growing but the population itself, at least within cities, was probably not growing easily. There's more people dying than are being born in most major cities. In other words, the old pagan aristocracy is shrinking, not growing. Where are they coming from, these new people in the cities? Probably they're immigrating from the countryside or moving from other countries, but then again that's exactly what we hear about the Christians. They're on the move. They travel to the cities. They're the new population along with a lot of other people, so I think from a kind of social perspective we have to see the growth of Christianity as a product of the changing face of the city life in the Roman world.... On top of all that there are plagues and famine, and it's been suggested by demographers now that if you've got a survival rate of only one tenth more among one part of the population than another segment of population when you have a massive die off... the result will be that at the end of this process [there will be] far more members of that one group relative to the total population. In other words, in a very short period of time you can have a group that was at one point a very small minority seemingly become miraculously now the majority, and I think in part that's what happens to the Christians. That through this period of very turbulent times in the second and third century, the Christians now become a significant proportion of the leading citizens of some of the major cities of the Roman world. A SENSE OF BELONGING Now what are they offering? It's very simple. With new immigrant groups, all of them trying to find their way into Roman society -- to make it in the Roman world, to be a part of the mainstream, to march up the ladder of success -- belonging is one of the key issues, and what I think the Christians offer probably as well or better than anybody else in the Roman world is a sense of belonging. To be part of the Christian community... to be part of the church, is to belong to a society of closely knit friends, brothers and sisters and Christ, and it may be something as simple as that that spells the [basis] of the success of Christianity in the Roman world.... Christianity was beginning to grow in substantial ways by the late second and early third century precisely because it was responding to some basic, deeply felt human needs. It really was probably beginning to answer the questions that people were asking, and we can see that growth in a variety of ways. For one thing, there really is no empire wide persecution of Christianity throughout the entire second century and into the first half of the third century. It was always sporadic; it was always local concerns. The first time the empire as a whole says "We have to eradicate Christianity," is not until the year 249, 50, the persecution of Decius, ... but by that time, the Christians are so numerous that they can't possibly be eradicated; they've already grown that much. So, in the sense, the persecution really doesn't catch up until it's already too late. We have some indication of the basic growth of Christianity at this time, especially in the cities, in terms of the records of the city of Rome. In the year 251, right at the time of the persecution of Decius, we have a register of the church at Rome, which says that they had 46 presbyters and 56 exorcists and doorkeepers and a number of other people that they catalogued; seven of this and seven of that; quite a lot of people are in this catalog. And at the end, it says over 1,500 widows [and needy persons] on the roster of the church at Rome; that is, people, women who are being taken care of by the church. The church becomes, in a lot of ways, a new kind of social welfare agency in the Roman Empire. The leaders of the church are the patrons of society. By the end of the third century, Christian bishops in many places will have taken over the role of the old civic patrons that had led the processions at Ephesus and Corinth and Rome. They've made it into society. Wayne A. Meeks: Woolsey Professor of Biblical Studies Yale University HUMAN APPEAL OF CHRISTIANITY In the final analysis, after we've answered all the questions that the historian has tools to answer, there still remain fundamental mysteries about religious change. Why among all of the movements following prophets in Rome and Palestine did this one survive? Why among all of the varieties of Judaism in the first century did only two survive as world religions? One, the religion of the Rabbis -- the other, the religion of Christianity. And, hidden [in] this is something which we finally don't have the tools, I think, to analyze, and that is that this new message, [this] rather improbable message that the Son of God has come to earth and been crucified, in human form, and risen from the dead ... appealed to a lot of perfectly ordinary people, or so they appear to us, in such a way that they were willing to change their lives and to become initiated into a group which brought them only hostility, estrangement from their families and neighbors, and the possibility of persection to the point of death. What was there about this movement which could make that kind of appeal to people? ...In the final analysis, I think we don't know. We can speculate, we can say it offers a kind of community, which is rare in any society and certainly rare in antiquity. It offers a closeness, it offers a powerful ideology which explains the evil in the world, or at least it provides powerful symbols for understanding that evil, it offers you a sense of the moral structure of the universe.... It has an ideology of justice, which will be guaranteed by God, finally. It offers a community which shapes the basic moral intuitions of its members, which brings that kind of moral admonition, which otherwise, in the Roman world, we find... only in the schools of philosophers, which after all, is an elite phenomenon, limited to a very small stratum of highly educated people. [Christianity] makes this [morality] available to perfectly ordinary folk. So, we can talk about a lot of these factors, which we say must have entered into this, and yet finally there is hidden behind the difficulties of our sources, but hidden more behind, I think our final inability to penetrate the deepest structures of the human personality, there is the fact that countless individual decisions were made that added up to a profound cultural change in the whole Empire.... CHRISTIANS ON LOVE Was love a part of the message or the appeal? One of the key words which we find in many varieties of the earliest literature of the Christians is the word "love" and, okay, people have always talked about love and that's no surprise, but they talk about love in a very strange way. They talk about a God who loves, a God who loves enough that he would send his very son into the world -- never mind how odd the notion of God having a son was to the Jews, who began this movement, but there it is -- and who calls upon people to exercise a similar kind of love, a love which is manifested in this death, of the Son of God. How did Christians write about , talk about, think about [love]? Is it strange? One of the oddest things about Christianity, of course, is that it begins with having to explain a paradox. The one that they think of as Savior, the one whom they come quickly to speak of as the Son of God..., is also the one who was crucified under Pontius Pilate. How do you put that together? One of the ways they do this, is by saying, "What a remarkable thing is this, that the Son of God comes not to conquer the Romans, not to establish a political state in Israel, but he comes to demonstrate the love that the Creator of the universe has for all people?" So that this shaming act that Pontius Pilate used to try to wipe out this little group, is turned about, in the Christian mentality... [into a] manifestation which demonstrates God's approach to us, and therefore sets a kind of model, by which people ought to relate to one another. One of the things that runs through the Pauline letters, is his conviction that what he calls the Word of the Cross, or the reasoning of the Cross, ought to pervade the whole lives of the congregations which he has founded. So, that... the way in which one exercises leadership or authority in the congregation... must somehow tally with the notion that the power of God is manifested in this reversal of things, in which the powerful one comes to be crucified in the most shameful form, that the one who is equal with God, gives that up to take on the form of a slave. This becomes the model of what love is. Or in the Johannine literature and the Johannine letters, you have similar kinds of language, "We love because he first loved us." So that love is in some sense being re-defined as this other-regarding sacrificial act, [choosing] to put oneself on the line for the sake of the good of the other, and this is grounded in the claim about the way the ultimate power and structure of the universe manifests itself in in human society. I think this must have had a very powerful, emotional appeal to people. Elizabeth Clark: John Carlisle Kilgo Professor of Religion and Director of the Graduate Program in Religion Duke University DIFFERENT DEGREES OF DEVOTION What was the appeal of Christianity as opposed to [the appeal] of paganism? Christianity probably appealed to people in several ways. First of all, it did have a very high moral standard that it set forth.... Of course some philosophical sects and groups would also put forth rather similar ways of life for their practitioners. Christianity had an institution that provided material benefits but also had a whole sacramental system that offered to its practitioners, supposedly, repentance from sins and overcoming sin and overcoming death... As the church developed, it allowed for different degrees of Christian devotion. So, that if you wanted to give yourself up to a highly ascetic life and renounce practically everything, you would be much glorified for doing that, but you could be married and have a position in worldly life and have a family, career and so on and that was all right, too. So, Christianity could adjust itself to different types of people, just as it could adjust itself to the highest class of intellectuals but also adjust itself to common people whom the church writers always remind the theologians that Christ died for the lowly, as well as, for the educated. Paula Fredriksen: William Goodwin Aurelio Professor of the Appreciation of Scripture, Boston University SPREAD OF CHRISTIANITY If it weren't for the translation of the Jewish Bible into Greek, and if it weren't for Diaspora Jewish communities living in synagogues, rimming the edge of the Mediterranean, Christianity could not have spread. But Christianity [is] an interpretation of the idea of Israel. And the way Christianity is able to spread as it does is through the lifelines of these Diaspora synagogues. The language of the movement, as soon as we have actual evidence from [it], is Greek. The Bible it refers to is the Greek Bible. The communities that serve as the matrix for the message are synagogue communities, and we get stories in Matthew or stories in John about this particular community being kicked out of the other synagogues. So what do they do? They form their own group. Business as usual, again. But I think it's really because there is an international population that resonates with these great religious ideas of God as the Creator, of righteousness pouring down like waters, of a Kingdom of God and what that would mean in terms of the way a community socially constitutes itself ... it's because of that, because of Diaspora Judaism, which is extremely well established, that Christianity itself, as a new and constantly improvising form of Judaism, is able to spread as it does throughout the Roman world. But doesn't belief have anything to do with it? Why are people attracted? There were so many religious options. I guess I want to know what Christianity offered... Why did people become Christians? Why do people join the movement? Jews joined the movement because it is a particular articulation of Jewish religious hope seen through this one figure of a redeemer. But it's certainly consistent within what we know as the different options of Judaism. The intriguing thing is why did gentiles join? And, here we have, again, the evidence of Paul's letters in 50. He thought it was miracle. These are gentiles, who are going in and out voluntarily from the synagogue, who, on the basis of the message they're getting about the Son of God being on the verge of coming back, are suddenly enabled -- Paul says, through the Holy Spirit -- [to] abandon idol worship. They make a commitment to this particular community. If you look at the way the movement spreads sociologically, as opposed to theologically, if you look [at] what distinguishes Christianity from all the other religious options in the Mediterranean, it doesn't distinguish it from Judaism. Both groups meet at least once a week. Both groups have very articulate ethical norms. Both groups have a tremendous ethic of community charity. Both groups have revealed ethical patterns of behavior.... No promiscuity. Don't kill the kids. Don't worship idols. Don't go to whore houses. This whole thing that serves to build up community and create a kind of support system. Also, there's this tremendous religious prestige, thanks to the antiquity of the Jewish Bible, which by entering into the church, these Christians enter into that history as well. That's tremendously prestigious and important. Judaism itself is, for all its peculiarities, considered prestigious because of its antiquity. And so there are lots of reasons, sociologically and practically, why Christianity would appeal. Elaine H. Pagels: The Harrington Spear Paine Foundation Professor of Religion Princeton University Most people who study the origins of Christianity are curious about how this unlikely movement would have succeeded in such a powerful and dramatic way. And it's not an easy question to answer, why this movement succeeded when others did not. One thing that I always think about is that the gods of the ancient world, if you look at them, their images, if you read about them in the Iliad, and the poetry of Sophocles..., the gods looked like no one more than the aristocrats, the emperor and his court. They looked like the courtiers. But here is a religion which claims that God is made manifest in a peasant, probably a man who didn't write, a man who came from the people, a man who was completely unimpressive in worldly terms and much more like the vast majority of people. And in this astonishingly unexpected place, this movement said, God is revealed to be with us. I think that's a powerful statement in itself.... The Gospel of Mark most people think is the earliest of the gospels of the New Testament. And that book is extraordinary and strange.... If you read it apart from the others, it's a story of this country teacher coming from nowhere with incredible power descending upon him, healing people, exorcising people, speaking strange, bold astonishing things, and startling everyone. And then the end of the story, from Chapter 9 on, moves toward his agonizing and humiliating death. And there's the suggestion of the end of the original book that he will rise from the dead, but the way Mark was originally written, the story of the resurrection isn't told. So it's a devastating story of human pain. And I think that must have deeply appealed to many people then, as it does now, for one thing. When I was working on the book, "Adam, Eve and the Serpent," I was thinking a great deal about why this movement succeeded, and I thought it may have had a lot to do, as well, with the story they told about the creation. Because they told the story about how human beings were made in the image of God.... Now if you think about the gods of the ancient world and you think about what they looked like they looked like the emperor and his court. So those gods looked very different. But this religion is saying that every person, man, woman, child, slave, barbarian, no matter who, is made in the image of God and is therefore of enormous value in the eyes of God.... That's an extraordinary message. And it would have been enormous news to many people who never saw their lives having value. I think that is a powerful appeal of this religion.... The Christian movement seemed to convey a sense of human worth in two ways. Both by the story of Jesus and his simplicity and his humility in terms of social status, in terms of achievement, in terms of recognition during his lifetime. And also in the story of creation; it conveys royal status on every person.... When we think about the appeal of this movement to many people it's certainly clear that some were drawn by the way that this community would take care of people. For example, like other elements of the Jewish community, the followers of Jesus tended to feed the destitute, take care of people who were widowed so that they wouldn't become prostitutes and orphans and so forth. That was a primary obligation of Jewish piety. And Jesus' followers certainly understood that. We know that when people joined the Christian communities in Rome, for example, they would be buried. This is not something anyone could take for granted in the ancient world. And this society was one in which people took care of one another. So that is an enormous element of the appeal of this movement. |
Video: Giant crabs invade Antarctic seafloor Huge crabs more than a metre across have invaded the Antarctic abyss, wiped out the local wildlife and now threaten to ruin ecosystems that have evolved over 14 million years. Three years ago, researchers predicted that as the deep waters of the Southern Ocean warmed, king crabs would invade Antarctica within 100 years. Advertisement But video taken by a remotely operated submersible shows that more than a million Neolithodes yaldwyni have already colonised Palmer Deep, a basin that forms a hollow in the Antarctic Peninsula continental shelf. They are laying waste to the landscape. Video footage taken by the submersible shows how the crabs prod, probe, gash and puncture delicate sediments with the tips of their long legs. “This is likely to alter sediment processes, such as the rate at which organic matter is buried, which will affect the diversity of animal communities living in the sediments,” says Craig Smith of the University of Hawaii at Manoa, whose team discovered the scarlet invaders. Hungry invaders The crabs also appear to have a voracious appetite. Echinoderms – sea urchins, sea lilies, sea cucumbers, starfish and brittle stars – have vanished from occupied areas, and the number of species in colonised areas is just a quarter of that in areas that have escaped the invasion. “[Echinoderms] constitute a significant proportion of the large animals on the seafloor in many Antarctic shelf habitats,” says Smith. The crabs come from further north and moved in as Antarctic waters have warmed, probably swept into Palmer Deep as larvae in warm ocean currents. They now occupy the deepest regions of Palmer Deep, between 1400 and 950 metres. In 1982, the minimum temperature there was 1.2 °C – too cold for king crabs – but by last year it had risen to a balmier 1.47 °C. Melting ice sheets tend to make shallower waters in Antarctica cooler than deeper ones. There were no king crabs at depths of 850 metres or less, suggesting that these waters are still too cold for them. But with waters warming so rapidly, they could spread to regions as shallow as 400 metres within as little as 20 years, says Smith. Onwards “Several years ago, my colleagues and I predicted that warming sea temperatures off the west Antarctic Peninsula would allow predatory sea crabs to invade and disrupt the completely unique marine bottom fauna,” says Richard Aronson of the Florida Institute of Technology in Melbourne. “Craig Smith and his team have now discovered a population in a deep basin gouged into the continental shelf off the western peninsula,” says Aronson. “What’s exciting, new and a bit scary about their find is that somehow, the crabs had to get from the deep sea over part of the continental shelf and then into the basin that is the Palmer Deep.” “That means they’re close to being able to invade habitats on the continental shelf proper, and if they do the crabs will probably have a radical impact on the bottom communities.” The best long-term solution? To slow the rate of global warming, says Smith. Journal reference: Proceedings of the Royal Society B, DOI: 10.1098/rspb.2011.1496 |
"Among the conventional wisdoms of our contemporary art, there is a notion that it's only being made in New York or L.A.," said Don Bacigalupi, board member, Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art. "But art is being made everywhere. It always has been." Your groups don't have to traverse the entire country to find works of art from vibrant communities nationwide, however. State of the Art: Discovering American Art Now, a momentous survey of art from across the United States, will be on view at the Frist Center for the Visual Arts from May 26 through September 10, 2017. First displayed in 2014 by the Crystal Bridges, the exhibit features artwork from diverse studios and creative communities across the United States. The Crystal Bridges curatorial team logged over 100,000 miles, crisscrossing the country to visit nearly 1,000 artists in rural communities, small towns and urban centers—a year-long project that resulted in an exhibit at the forefront of ongoing discussion about art in the United States. The Frist Center will present works by 45 of the artists from the original exhibition. The works represent artists with an impressive diversity of worldviews, styles and mediums, and are grouped thematically to demonstrate connections between artists and ideas across the country. Common themes found throughout the exhibition include racial tension, economic inequity and the urban-rural political sphere. "No single exhibition can provide a true sense of a nation's art—the aesthetic variety is too vast for any cohesive context to emerge," said Mark Scala, chief curator, Frist Center. "Yet State of the Art begins the process of mining the abundant creativity that exists across the United States. As a national selfie, it is impressionistic and incomplete, but endlessly open to and brimming with possibility." For more information on State of the Art: Discovering American Art Now, visit fristcenter.org. Photo: John Douglas Powers (b. 1978).Ialu, 2011. Wood, steel, plastic, electric motor, and video projection, 57 x 80 x 108 in. Courtesy Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, Bentonville, Arkansas. Photo: courtesy of the artist. Written by Cassie Westrate, staff writer for Groups Today. |
India successfully test fires nuclear missile Lebanon, news ,lbci ,أخبار nuclear,fires,test,successfully,India, LBCI News Lebanon India successfully test-fired for a third time a nuclear-capable missile on Saturday (January 31) that can reach Beijing and Eastern Europe, bringing a step closer production of a weapon designed to strengthen its nuclear deterrent. advertisement Footage showed the Agni-V rocket, with a range of more than 5,000 km (3,100 miles), blasting off from an island off Odisha. It was not immediately clear how far the rocket flew before reaching its target in the Indian Ocean. This was third developmental trial of the surface-to-surface missile. The first test was conducted on 19 April, 2012 and the second test on 15 September, 2013 from the same base. Defense Minister, Manohar Parrikar, welcomed the achievement. "There should be more success from the DRDO - more activity and more final solutions," said Parrikar in New Delhi. Almost entirely Indian-made, the Agni-V is the most advanced version of the indigenously built Agni, or Fire, series, part of a program that started in the 1960s. Earlier versions could reach old rival Pakistan and western China. It will not be operational for at least two years, the government has said. Only the U.N. Security Council permanent members - China, France, Russia the United States and Britain - along with Israel, are believed to have such long-range weapons. |
Pan Am Flight 1736 from Los Angeles via New York and KLM Flight 4805 from Amsterdam had been scheduled to land at Las Palmas, the capital of the Canary Islands, on the afternoon of March 27, 1977. However, Canary independence group Fuerzas Armadas Guanches set off a bomb at the Los Palmas airport, forcing incoming flights to land at the much smaller Los Rodeos Airport in Tenerife , the largest island of the Canaries.The two 747s waited at Los Rodeos along with several other large planes until Las Palmas was reopened. The airport’s taxiways were overcrowded, forcing airporrt officials to use the lone runway as both a runway and a taxiway After several hours, Los Palmas was reopened, and the Pan Am and KLM planes prepared to take off. KLM 4805 went first, taxiing up the runway and turning around to take off. Pan Am 1736, meanwhile, was instructed to taxi halfway down the runway and park at a taxiway; however, pilot Victor Grubbs missed the intended taxiway and continued down the runway toward the next one.Due to a misunderstanding with flight control, KLM pilot Jacob Veldhuyzen van Zanten decided to takeoff before receiving proper clearance . In a heavy fog, he was unable to see that Pan Am 1736 was still turning left into the taxiway. |
Ten years ago this month, Jeff Bezos announced Amazon Prime to the world. "It's simple," he wrote in a letter posted to Amazon.com. "For a flat annual membership fee, you get unlimited two-day shipping for free." It's funny to look back and see how Bezos baked a little marketing sleight-of-hand right into the product launch—the shipping is not really free, after all, if you're paying a fee. But one piece of what Bezos promised has held true for the past decade: For customers, Prime turns out to be dead simple. But if Prime is simple, it's also weird. For the first six years, Prime was about shipping. Then, in 2011, Amazon decided to add a service that had nothing whatsoever to do with shipping: unlimited streaming video became another perk of Prime. At least "perk" was how I thought about it at the time, a little bit of icing to make the 2-day-shipping cake taste even better. But it also seemed random—another experiment in Amazon's workshop of "misfit toys." Instead, this strange combo—which has expanded to include streaming music, an e-book library, and photo storage—has been an unvarnished success. After raising the annual fee last year by $20—from $79 to $99—some of us argued Prime was too good to be true, that the costs of its big promises had caught up with Amazon. Instead, Bezos announced late last month that in the fourth quarter of 2014, paid Prime memberships had climbed 50 percent in the US and at an even greater clip worldwide. Prime's seemingly random hodgepodge is, it turns out, a finely tuned engine that drives the consumption of physical and digital goods in a seemingly unstoppable cycle optimized for the 21st-century economy. Jeff Bezos' letter announcing Amazon Prime. Amazon Value Added Just how much extra business Prime drives to Amazon is one of the company's most closely guarded secrets. It won't say how many Prime members it has or how much more they buy from Amazon than everyone else. This has turned educating guessing into an obsessive parlor game for journalists and stock analysts. In late 2013, Amazon went so far as to reveal it had "tens of millions" of Prime members. Some interpreted this morsel to mean Amazon had just hit 20 million Prime members, or just enough to claim "tens," plural. In a report released in September, RBC Capital Markets analyst Mark Mahaney said the results of a survey his firm conducted suggest Prime membership was in the 40 million to 50 million range and on track to hit as many as 85 million in 2016. Why do these numbers matter? At 40 million members, the $99 membership fee alone would mean $4 billion in revenue. Still, that figure no doubt doesn't make up for the billions Bezos said Amazon spent on Prime shipping in 2014, especially adding in the $1.3 billion he says his company spent on Instant Video. The most convincing case for why Amazon pushes so aggressively on Prime is that members just spend a lot more. Analysts have found Prime customers spend somewhere in the realm of three times as much on Amazon every year as their non-Prime counterparts. Even factoring in the extra costs, this spending makes Prime members much more valuable to Amazon's bottom line. The value of Prime customers to Amazon is evident in all the additional services the company keeps layering on top of the basic shipping benefit, says Mahaney. "They wouldn't be putting this much effort into making the Prime program more attractive if it didn't work," he says. Amazon Fire TV Amazon Video In But the additional Prime services by now appear to be more than a driver for people to buy more physical stuff on Amazon. Mahaney says that in his most recent survey, 10 percent of Prime members said they signed up primarily for the video. Even if video isn't what Prime members came for at first, it appears to be a big reason why they stay. In a call with analysts following the release of its third-quarter results in October, Amazon Chief Financial Officer Tom Szkutak revealed a striking bit of Prime-related data. He said that Prime members who stream video renew their memberships at "considerably higher rates" than those who don't. Similarly, customers who sign up for Prime's 30-day free trial are more likely to convert to paying members if they watch the video service during that month. In that light, Amazon's decision to go beyond its already ambitious move into original television to produce original movies begins to make more sense. Netflix makes original shows and movies to get more people to pay to watch its videos. Amazon makes original shows and movies to get more people to pay to watch its videos—and to make them more likely to buy toilet brushes and laundry detergent and shoes and diapers. Even some of Amazon's moves into hardware, especially Fire TV, make more sense as vehicles for locking customers into Prime than as devices meant to generate significant revenue streams in themselves. "Our devices work better with Prime and Prime works better with the devices," Amazon vice president Greg Greeley, who leads Prime, said in an interview with WIRED. Bizarrely Good As the failure of the Fire Phone demonstrated, those devices have to strike the right balance between creating value for users and value for Amazon. But as a product, the value of Prime is hard to dispute. Greeley calls the decision to raise the price of Prime "painful" but argues that each individual service offered through the program is alone worth $99 per year. The math mostly seems to bear him out. At $8 per month, a streaming video membership on Netflix comes to $96 per year. A Spotify premium membership is $10 per month, or $120 per year. One terabyte of storage space on Dropbox for photos (or whatever else) also costs $10 per month. But all of these would seem to pale compared to what a Prime membership saves customers in shipping. The standard rate for two-day shipping on UPS comes in at a little below $15 per package. In 2014, I made 16 orders that were eligible for Prime shipping—$240 at that standard UPS rate. In a recent article, New York Times columnist and Prime power user Farhad Manjoo said he had made 90 purchases from Amazon in 2014. If all of those were shipped 2-day, those orders at the standard UPS rate would come to a minimum of $1,350, and likely much more taking their total weight into account. >Even if video isn't what Prime members came for at first, it appears to be a big part of what makes them stay. Amazon has immense leverage to negotiate massive volume discounts with carriers. But from the customer's point of view, that doesn't matter—instead of trying to squeeze a few extra bucks out of each order on shipping, Amazon is doing everything it can to make shopping online feel like shopping in the store. As analyst Mahaney puts it, Prime is a way for Amazon to build a "competitive moat," a way of "really locking customers in." Compared to its tech rivals, Amazon's profits are tiny. But Bezos describes Amazon as a business playing the long game, not seeking short-term gains. Of all Amazon's long bets, Prime seems to be the one that's most paying off, second only to the initial gamble that people would want to shop online. History now sees that idea as so obviously right that it no longer warrants discussion. Prime is etching itself in the annals of corporate lore as one of the most bizarre good business ideas ever. |
Wow, seriously, Wow. Someone did some stalking of my profile and could not have pegged me better. I received practically a whole library! My SS got me the first TWO books in Jum Butchers Codex Alera serious which I have been debating buying but did not know anyone who had read them well now I have no excuse to not read those! I got the Four Novella Series featuring my favorite author. This would have been MORE than enough, but my SS was not done there, oh MY SS found out that I have a love of American History and got my Wagon Wheel Kitchens: Food on the Oregon Trail which looks EXTREMELY interesting (Yes, I am that kind of Geek) and gets bonus points for it being a Hard Cover. But sit tight were not done yet I ALSO got Mystic Warrior: Book one of the Bronze Canticles which looks amazing. I cannot thank my SS enough. Seriously, this was over the top and right up my alley. The time and energy put into finding out EXACTLY what I like and then somehow getting me what I needed is amazing. MUCH LOVE. |
In November, Michael Dunn and Jordan Davis got into an argument at a Jacksonville gas station. Dunn was upset over the volume of what he called the “thug music” Davis and friends were playing in their Dodge Durango. Dunn fired six shots into the SUV after he claimed he saw Davis reach for a gun. No weapon was found in Davis’s vehicle but he died of his wounds. Dunn’s response after shooting up a stranger’s SUV was to get a hotel room with his girlfriend and order a pizza. This weekend, Dunn was not convicted of murdering Davis. The jury could not come to a unanimous agreement as to whether Dunn should be held accountable for murdering Jordan Davis, on the strength of Florida’s infamous Stand Your Ground law. He will most likely spend the rest of his life in jail after being found guilty of several lesser, ancillary murder charges. But with George Zimmerman a free man, it’s hard not to think Dunn might have avoided jail time were he a better shot. The “thug music” in question was Lil Reese, Lil Durk and Fredo Santana’s “Beef.” To the untrained ear, drill music sounds alienating. But one could say the same thing about Slayer; I doubt Dunn would have sprayed an SUV full of white teenagers pumping “Reign In Blood”. In fact, the music itself is irrelevant. What mattered to Michael Dunn is that it was unfamiliar and coming from a car full of black teenagers. A decade ago, it might have been G-Unit or Three 6 Mafia. Go back further and it could have been Biggie or Master P, or Nas, NWA, LL Cool J, Marvin Gaye, James Brown, Ray Charles, etc. Every generation has their “thug music” and it is the de facto soundtrack to getting harassed for being a young minority. Hip-hop has filled that role since its inception three decade ago, and thus has a lot to say on the topic. In pretty much every case, those doing the harassing are the police. At this point, it's as much an element of hip-hop as breakdancing or graffiti. From NWA’s “Fuck the Police” to Too $hort’s “I Wanna Be Free” to KRS-One’s “Sound of the Police” to J. Dilla’s “Fuck the Police” to Chamillionaire’s “Ridin Dirty” to Murs’s “The Night Before”, the list of anti-cop rap songs is very long and transcends time and location. It’s one of the few constants in a genre that quickly adapts to new trends and ideas.Hip-hop’s anti-police sentiment is less explicitly about police than it is about how the law of the land does not provide equal protection to every American. In rap, cops are the blunt edge, the business end of institutional racism. Sure, myriad faceless suits in other cities are downgrading property values for Black neighborhoods and denying immigrants small-business loans. But it’s the local police that make that shit a daily operation, arresting squeaky clean rappers for being too successful, beating down bystanders caught up in poorly targeted gang task force operations, and unloading their clips into innocent civilians. Michael Dunn was not a police officer and George Zimmerman only thought he was, but they both played the role perfectly. Even if Dunn dies in jail and Zimmerman is broke and living on the street, their trials set a precedent. The Stand Your Ground laws have essentially deputized any white person to carry out vigilante justice on any black teenager whose “thug music” threatens their sense of cultural superiority (as well as any other number of criminal acts). Follow Skinny on Twitter - @skinny412 |
In the election of 2010, the year of the Tea Party, Republican candidates for the House of Representatives won sixty-three seats that had previously been held by Democrats. This was the largest gain the Party had made since 1938, the year of New Deal weariness. The rout had a geographic dimension, giving Republicans new territory to govern. A third of the new seats came from four states: New York, Pennsylvania, Ohio, and Illinois. The new territory was heavily concentrated in older industrial towns. These areas were once thought of as union country, then they seemed emblematic of the Tea Party; now, as much as any place does, they belong to Donald Trump. The changing geography of the conservative grass roots gives some clues about why the Party has been so receptive not just to Trump’s candidacy but to his message, an almost out-of-time economic nationalism. One reason that Trump’s campaign was so broadly ridiculed when it launched was that he could not seem to shake the concerns of the time when he first became a national figure. His campaign, with its loud talk of tariffs and foreigners ripping us off, seemed steeped in the “Red Dawn” sensibility of the mid-nineteen-eighties. The Trans-Pacific Partnership would be a “disaster,” Trump said. He could sound obsessed with, of all nations, Japan. “When was the last time you saw a Chevrolet in Tokyo?” he asked in the speech that launched his campaign. “It doesn’t exist, folks. They beat us all the time.” This of a country that has spent most of the new millennium in a deep economic malaise. But if Trump picked a strange example, it now seems that he picked the right anxiety. Political scientists have found that if you know a single position that a voter holds (on abortion, for instance, or gun control) you can with great reliability predict the rest of his or her views. Polarization is that powerful a force. Trade, that atavistic issue, is an exception. As Alan Abramowitz of Emory University, among others, has demonstrated, when you know a voter’s position on one other issue, guessing his or her position on trade is essentially a coin flip. This idiosyncrasy persists in public-opinion surveys. The Pew Foundation sent me the results of surveys dating back to 1997 in which they asked about trade, and there is little consistent difference between the opinions of Republicans and Democrats. Interestingly, both groups tend to respond to the changing economic climate in the same way, their views of trade fluctuating together. But the ambivalence of Republican voters has not had much influence on how their representatives have voted: in Congress, Democrats have been mixed on trade deals (supporting some and not others) while Republican support has been close to unanimous. According to Jeffrey Kucik, a political scientist at the City College of New York, more than ninety-one per cent of Republican votes were cast in favor of every single trade deal between 2001 and 2014. If the Pew data is right, then the ambivalence about trade among Republican voters has not changed much since 2010. But the support for free trade among influential leaders of the Party and the conservative movement no longer seems so uniform. This summer, more than fifty Republicans opposed giving President Obama the fast-track authority to close the Trans-Pacific Partnership deal, the first major trade vote in the Tea Party era. “I don’t like the idea of ceding American jobs,” Duncan Hunter, the right-wing California Republican, who is now one of two sitting congressmen to endorse Trump, said. “It’s all about favors for their buddies,” a spokesman for one of the leading Tea Party groups told Slate, explaining his group's opposition. Viewed from a certain angle, you could detect a political transformation in motion. The Republican Party, Kucik’s colleague and collaborator Daniel DiSalvo told me, has inherited not only some of the white working-class voters who have been abandoning the Democrats but also some of their economic nationalism. It is hard to imagine that Trump saw this coming — that through the past half decade he was diligently tallying congressional votes, in his oversized scrawl, or filing away quotes from Tea Party notables skeptical about free trade. But the shift in the conservative movement on trade does seem like one suggestion that Trump does not represent an insurgency from outside the Party but an evolution within it—that some rough version of Trumpism already existed, and was part of how some Republicans were meeting a new demographic of voters. |
Organisers hoped summit would mark new era in Afghanistan but talks are set to focus on eastern Europe, Iraq and Syria Nato leaders have descended on the Welsh resort of Celtic Manor for a two-day summit, which formally starts with a meeting about Afghanistan but will be dominated by discussion on Ukraine and the threat of Islamic State (Isis) extremists in Iraq and Syria. Ukraine's president, Petro Poroshenko, will brief leaders on Thursday on his agreement with the Russian president, Vladimir Putin, on the outlines of a peace agreement in Ukraine. A British official said: "The meeting will provide leaders with the opportunity to hear president Poroshenko's assessment of the latest situation on the ground and his discussions with President Putin. It will also send a clear signal of their support for Ukraine's sovereignty and that the onus is on Russia to de-escalate the situation." The Russian foreign minister, Sergei Lavrov, warned on Thursday that Ukraine's Nato ambitions were threatening to derail peace talks in eastern Ukraine. In televised remarks, Lavrov said statements by senior government officials in Kiev that they would be seeking to join Nato were "a blatant attempt to derail all the efforts" to seek a peaceful solution to the crisis. The organisers had hoped that summit would help mark a new era in Afghanistan at the end of the alliance's combat mission, by welcoming Hamid Karzai's successor as the country's new president. But the result of April's election is still a matter of dispute between the rival candidates Abdullah Abdullah and Ashraf Ghani, amid growing insecurity in the country. The failings of Nato's mission in Afghanistan were underlined by more violence on Thursday as Taliban insurgents detonated two truck bombs in the central town of Ghazni, killing 18 people. The first item on the formal agenda at the summit is a heads of government meeting on Afghanistan, where leaders will discuss how Nato can support the country after the last troops leave at the end of this year. Speaking before the meeting the Nato general secretary, Anders Fogh Rasmussen, said it was "vital to see a conclusion to the electoral process in Afghanistan". He also tried to put a positive gloss on Nato's campaign. "We will prepare a new chapter in our relationship with Afghanistan, as our combat mission draws to a close," he said. Rasmussen added: "We have done what we set out to do. We have denied safe haven to international terrorists. We have built up capable Afghan forces of 350,000 troops and police. So our nations are safer, and Afghanistan is stronger. "We have planned a new mission to train, advise and assist the Afghan forces from next year and it will be launched once we have the legal arrangements in place. Later in the summit Nato is expected to agree to bolster its eastern defences and buttress support for Ukraine. It is set to approve the setting up of a "spearhead" rapid reaction force, potentially including several thousand troops, that could be sent to a hotspot in as little as two days, officials say. Eastern European members, including Poland, have appealed to Nato to permanently station thousands of troops on its territory to deter any possible Russian attack. But other members have spurned that idea, partly because of the expense and partly because they do not want to break a 1997 agreement with Russia under which Nato committed not to permanently station significant combat forces in the east. Instead Nato leaders will agree to pre-position equipment and supplies, such as fuel and ammunition, in eastern European countries, with bases ready to receive the Nato rapid reaction force if needed. Nato has said it has no plans to intervene militarily in Ukraine, which is not a member. The crisis in Iraq and Syria is not on the formal agenda but is expected to dominate discussions at the sidelines, as Barack Obama and David Cameron attempt to build an international coalition for tackling Isis militants. Writing in the Times on Thursday they said: "When the threats to our security increasingly emanate from outside Nato's borders, we must build more partnerships with others who share our values and want a tolerant and peaceful world. That includes supporting the partners who are taking the fight to Isil [Islamic State] on the ground, as we have done by stepping up support for Kurdish and Iraqi security forces." They added: "We meet at a time when the world faces many dangerous and evolving challenges. To the east, Russia has ripped up the rulebook with its illegal, self-declared annexation of Crimea and its troops on Ukrainian soil threatening and undermining a sovereign nation state. "To the south, there is an arc of instability that spreads from north Africa and the Sahel, to the Middle East." |
“We can’t wait for federal changes in order to save people’s lives,” BC provincial health minister told the Georgia Straight at the time of the announcement. “And so in the face of this crisis, we really just wanted to do more.” British Columbia, which is the only Canadian province to declare a public health emergency in response to opioid overdoses, took the radical step this week of opening a number of new supervised injection sites without Health Canada’s approval. But the province is getting around the regulations by referring to them as “overdose prevention sites,” not “supervised injection sites.” Under federal law, jurisdictions must submit lengthy applications to Health Canada for exemptions to open supervised injection sites, an arduous process that has no strict timeline. It took two years for Health Canada to approve the country’s second and last safe injection site, located in Vancouver, and Montreal has been waiting on its application for more than a year — although it submitted incomplete applications. The city’s situation is not unusual. While there’s wide consensus among all levels of government in Canada that safe injection sites are needed to curb the fatal opioid crisis, roadblocks persist in the form of funding or bureaucracy. Six months after Toronto city council approved three supervised injection sites, officials are still waiting on legal approval from Health Canada and funding from the Ontario government necessary to open their doors. Read more Six months after Toronto city council approved three supervised injection sites, officials are still waiting on legal approval from Health Canada and funding from the Ontario government necessary to open their doors. The city’s situation is not unusual. While there’s wide consensus among all levels of government in Canada that safe injection sites are needed to curb the fatal opioid crisis, roadblocks persist in the form of funding or bureaucracy. Under federal law, jurisdictions must submit lengthy applications to Health Canada for exemptions to open supervised injection sites, an arduous process that has no strict timeline. It took two years for Health Canada to approve the country’s second and last safe injection site, located in Vancouver, and Montreal has been waiting on its application for more than a year — although it submitted incomplete applications. British Columbia, which is the only Canadian province to declare a public health emergency in response to opioid overdoses, took the radical step this week of opening a number of new supervised injection sites without Health Canada’s approval. But the province is getting around the regulations by referring to them as “overdose prevention sites,” not “supervised injection sites.” “We can’t wait for federal changes in order to save people’s lives,” BC provincial health minister told the Georgia Straight at the time of the announcement. “And so in the face of this crisis, we really just wanted to do more.” Health Canada is currently reviewing eight applications for supervised injection sites in three cities, according to data provided to VICE News from the department. Montreal is waiting for an answer from its four applications submitted in May of 2015. The department said that a number of criteria were incomplete, and that it is reviewing the completed information for one application. Toronto submitted applications for two sites a couple weeks ago. But even if Health Canada does approve its safe injection sites, the city still hasn’t heard whether Ontario will provide the funding. A spokesperson for the Ontario health minister confirmed to VICE News that the department has no timeline to approve the request for funding, and has no desire to follow BC’s lead. “I don’t believe that there has been a slowdown in deaths, and so there’s urgency to get these services up and running as soon as possible.” “Considering the rapidly escalating overdose crisis and the fact that these sites will save lives, that is an unacceptable response,” Councillor Joe Cressy, who spearheads the city’s drug strategy efforts, told VICE News on Thursday. He added that if the funding were to come through before the federal exemption, the city might consider moving ahead without federal approval, like British Columbia. “We would cross the bridge when we got to it,” he said. “We can start saving lives today, but we need the money.” The city needs $400,000 from the province to build the safe injection cubicles, as well as $1.8 million for ongoing operations, Cressy explained. “That’s not a lot of money in the context of the provincial budget or saving lives.” The situation looks slightly different in Alberta, the province that’s seen a spike in fentanyl-related deaths over the last year — more than 338 so far this year — but refuses to declare a public health emergency. Just this week, the province announced that 15 people there died from carfentanil, the elephant tranquilizer that’s said to be 100 times more potent than fentanyl. Alberta’s health ministry recently announced $730,000 in funding for supervised injection sites, however no city has made an application for one. Elaine Hyshka, a professor at the University of Alberta’s who is helping lead Edmonton’s efforts to open supervised injection services, said the city’s application for the services won’t be ready to submit to Health Canada until next summer. And she admits it could be more than a year after that before it’s approved. In the meantime, she would welcome any effort by the Alberta government to move forward with supervised injection services, even if that happened without federal approval. “I don’t believe that there has been a slowdown in deaths, and so there’s urgency to get these services up and running as soon as possible.” She added that British Columbia is likely better equipped to get creative and move quicker because it’s under a public health emergency. “We don’t have that same context here,” she said. Andrew MacKendrick, spokesperson for federal health minister Jane Philpott, said the department “remains committed to the process” that exists to open safe injection sites, but recognizes that British Columbia is “at the edge of the crisis … and is facing an extraordinary situation” compared to other provinces that have not seen as many overdose deaths. He added that the health department is looking closely at BC’s unprecedented approach, and “that it would be too early to evaluate it right now.” He said the minister is going to implement legislative changes to make it easier for cities to get exemptions to open supervised injection sites. The Globe and Mail reported Saturday that the government is set to introduce a bill on Monday to ease restrictions around opening injection sites. However MacKendrick told VICE News he couldn’t confirm that due to parliamentary procedure, but pointed to the schedule for that day that states the minister of health is going to introduce a bill entitled “An Act to amend the Controlled Drugs and Substances Act.” |
"This wasn't a mess! It was organized chaos!" -Rarityand here we are. Just look at how organized he is. LOOK AT IT.Yeah, I know this is a bit late, but college and skyrim got in the way. Man, discord was a lot of fun to draw. I'm going to have to do more of him sometime in the future.Edit: oops, almost forgot. credit for the alliteration on the diploma goes to (psst, you should encourage him to post some writing on his DA. He makes some good stuff).In case you want to know, here are the bits partially blocked out by the antler: Deeply Disturbed Denizens of Discord, Damaged Dynamics, and Dashing Dis-assembly of Dynasites.EditDos: Wow, I normally thank for faves, but you guys are ridiculous. seriously, thanks so much. And I know the hands/horns are backwards, but they were like that in the reference I used. By the time I noticed it was much too late to fix it(I suppose I could, but the thought of redrawing those hands makes me cringe).Edit3: Someone on ponibooru pointed out that I forgot his beard. added it for him and the poster |
(CNN) -- Two Comedy Central funnymen are apparently entering into the partisan political fray with rallies of their own in the nation's capital. Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert have set October 30 as the date for their respective rallies. On Thursday night's airing of "The Daily Show With Jon Stewart," the comedian announced plans for a "Rally to Restore Sanity." "See you October 30 on the National Mall to spread the timeless message, 'Take it down a notch for America,' " he said. Stewart dubbed the event a "clarion call for rationality." "A million moderate march, where we take to the streets to send a message to our leaders and our national media that says, 'We are here! We ... are only here until 6 though, because we have a sitter,'" he said. On "The Colbert Report," which airs immediately after Stewart's show, Colbert fired back with plans for his "March to Keep Fear Alive." "Now is not the time to take it down a notch. Now is the time for all good men to freak out for freedom," Colbert said. Stewart said on his Thursday show that he had reserved a spot on the National Mall. "The forms have been filled out, the checks have been written," he said. Stewart and Colbert have submitted one application for a permit for the Washington Monument grounds on October 30, National Park Service spokesman Bill Line confirmed Friday. "A permit is not finalized yet, and they are still working through a resolution as for any event," Line added. Stewart is known more for commentaries on his 30-minute show than publicity stunts. But Colbert has engaged the public several times outside his show's New York studio, filing papers to run for president in South Carolina and shaving his head while taping his show in Iraq to show support for troops. In a nonscientific online poll after the death last year of Walter Cronkite, Time magazine named Stewart "America's most trusted newscaster." Stewart captured 44 percent of that vote, with NBC's Brian Williams finishing a distant second at 29 percent. See the poll results here Actual scientific polling in 2007 by the Pew Research Center for People and the Press found Stewart tied for fourth place as viewers' favorite news person, ranking alongside Dan Rather, Tom Brokaw, Brian Williams and CNN's Anderson Cooper, and just behind Katie Couric, Charles Gibson and Bill O'Reilly. See the Pew poll results here In a separate Pew survey, 16 percent of Americans said they regularly watched "The Daily Show" or "The Colbert Report." Those numbers are comparable to some major news programs. For instance, 17 percent said they regularly watched Fox News' "The O'Reilly Factor," and 14 percent watched PBS' "NewsHour With Jim Lehrer" regularly. See the full survey results The announcements come less than three weeks after conservative talk-show host Glenn Beck hosted a much-publicized "Restoring Honor" rally on the National Mall, urging large crowds to "turn back to God" and return America to the values on which it was founded. That event drew criticism for its timing and location -- on the 47th anniversary of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.'s "I Have a Dream" speech, delivered in the same place. The Rev. Jesse Jackson told CNN at the time that Beck was mimicking King and "humiliating the tradition." And other civil rights activists gathered nearby with the Rev. Al Sharpton and his National Action Network in a "Reclaim the Dream" rally. Stewart first publicly floated the idea of a counter-rally in a profile in the September 12 edition of New York magazine. "Maybe we would do a 'March of the Reasonable,' on a date of no particular significance," Stewart says in the article. Read the New York magazine profile The website logos and icons created for the Colbert and Stewart rallies mimic Beck's, using identical typography and similar stylized images. "We're looking for the people who think shouting is annoying, counterproductive, and terrible for your throat; who feel that the loudest voices shouldn't be the only ones that get heard," the website for the "Rally to Restore Sanity" says. The "March to Keep Fear Alive" site takes a more alarmist approach: "Never forget -- 'Reason' is just one letter away from 'Treason.' Coincidence? Reasonable people would say it is, but America can't afford to take that chance." CNN's Jim Kavanagh and Bob Kovach contributed to this report. |
DreamWorks Buys Roald Dahl’s ‘The BFG’ Apparently it’s a big week for DreamWorks, and it’s only Monday. With the animation side of the mega-studio teaming with Netflix for a new streaming deal, the studio proper is still looking to make a splash, as The Wrap is reporting that they have bought up the rights to Roald Dahl’s beloved book, The BFG. The book tells the story of a big friendly giant and a child who befriends him, and is one of Dahl’s most iconic works, along with books like Charlie And The Chocolate Factory and Fantastic Mr. Fox. As a huge fan of the book, I think that this could easily work as a family film, but the landing would have to be stuck with some real class. Given the issues Dreamworks has had so far this year, save for The Help a film like this could do wonders for their slate. What do you think? |
Soil: America’s Greatest Resource A recent project looks to catalog the earth beneath us. We were fortunate to have had a middle school teacher (when middle school was still called “junior high”) who when teaching American history gave a lot of attention to the the dust bowl years of the 1930s. This fine instructor — if only we could remember his name! — not only discussed the destruction of farmland, the migration of displaced farmers from Texas, Oklahoma, and other states, and the huge black clouds that rolled into cities as far away as St. Louis, but the causes of the disaster; not just drought but the wrong-headed, unsustainable farming practices that turned once verdant farm and pasture land into what today would be called an environmental disaster area. We lived in a farm state. Our teacher defined our soil as a resource and a valuable one. It was the thing that grew our food and powered our economy. It was easy to forget the value of dirt as we went through our lives. Our teacher made sure we knew just how valuable it was. A bevy of recent news pieces on the U.S. Geological Survey project (PDF) begun in 2001 that’s taken soil samples from places across the county in an effort to catalog and understand the very ground beneath our feet has brought new attention to our soils. The actual digging began in 2007 and went on for three years. One place was sampled in every 600 square miles of land. Three samples were taken at each spot, beginning at the surface and going to a depth of three feet. While sampling a place in 600 square miles doesn’t seem so comprehensive, it resulted in 5,000 samples and the most comprehensive look at the dirt beneath our feet ever attempted. While the article tends to trivialize the study and the uses for its results — check the mud on that murder suspect’s boot! — it also points out its uses in better farming techniques, measuring the effects of drought and climate change, and regional difference in soil composition in regard to mineral and chemical content, as well as the organisms that bring our soil to life. The article tells of a professor of environmental chemistry in Virginia who has used the studies to compare organic carbon and nitrogen levels, critical to crop growth, of various soils. Another researcher is using the data to study acid rain’s effect on forests in Pennsylvania. The list goes on. We’ve often addressed the importance of soil to the organic gardener at Planet Natural. It’s the key to everything when growing — successful germination, vigorous growth, great harvests, weed, pest, and disease control. These immediate gains depend on things that aren’t necessarily visible in themselves, like nutrient composition and water conduction and retention. Once we’ve established great soil in our gardens, once we’ve learned to maintain it, everything else comes naturally. While we gardeners know the importance of soil, not everyone else does. Like water, we tend to take it for granted. That often leads to its degradation. More knowledge of our soils and their value will aid in their preservation and restoration. We must realize that the soil that we stand on, build on and grow things in is alive. We must understand the role soil plays in water conservation. We must realize how easy it is to lose (PDF) and the costs when we do. We need to remember that ultimately it’s the source of the food we eat. When we spray pesticides and herbicides on our yards, our parks, and our farmlands, we degrade water, air, and soil. The immense use of chemical fertilizers to keep farmlands productive is like keeping a patient alive on life support. Soil with its microbes (PDF) and soil enzymes must be able to sustain itself without our adding the chemicals that plants need to produce harvests. Let’s make it our cause to treat soil everywhere — on our farms, in our forests and grasslands, in our yards and public spaces — as we do it in our gardens. Let’s keep it healthy, naturally. Let’s remember it’s one of our most important resources, along with water and the air we breathe, and treat it accordingly, with respect. The generations to come, our children, their children and grandchildren, will thank us. |
By DANNY PENMAN Last updated at 20:57 05 January 2008 The smiling children giggled as they patted the young goat on its head and tickled it behind the ears. Some of the more boisterous ones tried to clamber onto the animal's back but were soon shaken off with a quick wiggle of its bottom. It could have been a happy scene from a family zoo anywhere in the world but for what happened next. Scroll down for more A man hoisted up the goat and nonchalantly threw it over a wall into a pit full of hungry lions. The poor goat tried to run for its life, but it didn't stand a chance. The lions quickly surrounded it and started tearing at its flesh. "Oohs" and "aahs" filled the air as the children watched the goat being ripped limb from limb. Some started to clap silently with a look of wonder in their eyes. The scenes witnessed at Badaltearing Safari Park in China are rapidly becoming a normal day out for many Chinese families. Scroll down for more Baying crowds now gather in zoos across the country to watch animals being torn to pieces by lions and tigers. Just an hour's drive from the main Olympic attractions in Beijing, Badaling is in many ways a typical Chinese zoo. Next to the main slaughter arena is a restaurant where families can dine on braised dog while watching cows and goats being disembowelled by lions. The zoo also encourages visitors to "fish" for lions using live chickens as bait. For just £2, giggling visitors tie terrified chickens onto bamboo rods and dangle them in front of the lions, just as a cat owner might tease their pet with a toy. Scroll down for more During one visit, a woman managed to taunt the big cats with a petrified chicken for five minutes before a lion managed to grab the bird in its jaws. The crowd then applauded as the bird flapped its wings pathetically in a futile bid to escape. The lion eventually grew bored and crushed the terrified creature to death. The tourists were then herded onto buses and driven through the lions' compound to watch an equally cruel spectacle. The buses have specially designed chutes down which you can push live chickens and watch as they are torn to shreds. Once again, children are encouraged to take part in the slaughter. Scroll down for more "It's almost a form of child abuse," says Carol McKenna of the OneVoice animal welfare group. "The cruelty of Chinese zoos is disgusting, but think of the impact on the children watching it. What kind of future is there for China if its children think this kind of cruelty is normal? "In China, if you love animals you want to kill yourself every day out of despair." But the cruelty of Badaling doesn't stop with animals apart. For those who can still stomach it, the zoo has numerous traumatised animals to gawp at. A pair of endangered moon bears with rusting steel nose rings are chained up in cages so small that they cannot even turn around. One has clearly gone mad and spends most of its time shaking its head and bashing into the walls of its prison. There are numerous other creatures, including tigers, which also appear to have been driven insane by captivity. Predictably, they are kept in cramped, filthy conditions. !Zoos like this make me want to boycott everything Chinese," says Emma Milne, star of the BBC's Vets In Practice. "I'd like to rip out everything in my house that's made in China. I have big problems with their culture. "If you enjoy watching an animal die then that's a sad and disgusting reflection on you. "Perhaps we shouldn't be surprised by their behaviour towards animals, as the value of human life is so low in China." East of Badaling lies the equally horrific Qingdao zoo. Here, visitors can take part in China's latest craze — tortoise baiting. Simply put, Chinese families now gather in zoos to hurl coins at tortoises. Legend has it that if you hit a tortoise on the head with a coin and make a wish, then your heart's desire will come true. It's the Chinese equivalent of a village wishing well. To feed this craze, tortoises are kept in barbaric conditions inside small bare rooms. When giggling tourists begin hurling coins at them, they desperately try to protect themselves by withdrawing into their shells. But Chinese zoo keepers have discovered a way round this: they wrap elastic bands around the animals' necks to stop them retracting their heads. "Tortoises aren't exactly fleet of foot and can't run away," says Carol McKenna. "It's monstrous that people hurl coins at the tortoises, but strapping their heads down with elastic bands so they can't hide is even more disgusting. "Because tortoises can't scream, people assume they don't suffer. But they do. I can't bear to think what it must be like to live in a tiny cell and have people hurl coins at you all day long." Even worse is in store for the animals of Xiongsen Bear and Tiger Mountain Village near Guilin in south-east China. Here, live cows are fed to tigers to amuse cheering crowds. During a recent visit, I watched in horror as a young cow was stalked and caught. Its screams and cries filled the air as it struggled to escape. A wild tiger would dispatch its prey within moments, but these beasts' natural killing skills have been blunted by years of living in tiny cages. The tiger tried to kill — tearing and biting at the cow's body in a pathetic looking frenzy — but it simply didn't know how. Eventually, the keepers broke up the contest and slaughtered the cow themselves, much to the disappointment of the crowd. Although the live killing exhibition was undoubtedly depressing, an equally disturbing sight lay around the corner: the "animal parade". Judging by the rest of the operation, the unseen training methods are unlikely to be humane, but what visitors view is bad enough. Tigers, bears and monkeys perform in a degrading "entertainment". Bears wear dresses, balance on balls and not only ride bicycles but mount horses too. The showpiece is a bear riding a bike on a high wire above a parade of tigers, monkeys and trumpet-playing bears. Astonishingly, the zoo also sells tiger meat and wine produced from big cats kept in battery-style cages. Tiger meat is eaten widely in China and the wine, made from the crushed bones of the animals, is a popular drink. Although it is illegal, the zoo is quite open about its activities. In fact, it boasts of having 140 dead tigers in freezers ready for the plate. In the restaurant, visitors can dine on strips of stir-fried tiger with ginger and Chinese vegetables. Also on the menu are tiger soup and a spicy red curry made with tenderised strips of big cat. And if all that isn't enough, you can dine on lion steaks, bear's paw, crocodile and several different species of snake. "Discerning" visitors can wash it all down with a glass or two of vintage wine made from the bones of Siberian tigers. The wine is made from the 1,300 or so tigers reared on the premises. The restaurant is a favourite with Chinese Communist Party officials who often pop down from Beijing for the weekend. China's zoos claim to be centres for education and conservation. Without them, they say, many species would become extinct. This is clearly a fig leaf and some would call it a simple lie. Many are no better than "freak shows" from the middle ages and some are no different to the bloody tournaments of ancient Rome. "It's farcical to claim that these zoos are educational," says Emma Milne. "How can you learn anything about wild animals by watching them pace up and down inside a cage? You could learn far more from a David Attenborough documentary." However pitiful the conditions might be in China's zoos, there are a few glimmers of hope. It is now becoming fashionable to own pets in China. The hope is that a love for pets will translate into a desire to help animals in general. This does appear to be happening, albeit slowly. One recent MORI opinion poll discovered that 90 per cent of Chinese people thought they had "a moral duty to minimise animal suffering". Around 75 per cent felt that the law should be changed to minimise animal suffering as much as possible. In 2004, Beijing proposed animal welfare legislation which stipulated that "no one should harass, mistreat or hurt animals". It would also have banned animal fights and live feeding shows. The laws would have been a huge step forward. But the proposals were scrapped following stiff opposition from vested interests and those who felt China had more pressing concerns. And this is the central problem for animal welfare in China: its ruling elite is brutally repressive and cares little for animals. Centuries of rule by tyrannical emperors and bloody dictators have all but eradicated the Buddhist and Confucian respect for life and nature. As a result, welfare groups are urging people not to go to Chinese zoos if they should visit the Olympics, as virtually every single one inflicts terrible suffering on its animals "They should tell the Chinese Embassy why they are refusing to visit these zoos,' says Carol McKenna of OneVoice. "If a nation is great enough to host the Olympic Games then it is great enough to be able to protect its animals." |
Hats off to researchers in California. They've taken what appears to be a big step toward the development of a cure for hair loss, a condition that affects 50 million men and 30 million women in the U.S. alone. The scientists, working at the Sanford-Burnham Medical Research Institute in La Jolla, Calif., showed that stem cells derived from human skin can be used to grow hair--at least in mice. "The method is a marked improvement over current methods that rely on transplanting existing hair follicles from one part of the head to another," Dr. Alexey Terskikh, an associate professor at the institute and a member of the team of researchers who demonstrated the experimental technique, said in a written statement. "Our stem cell method provides an unlimited source of cells from the patient for transplantation and isn't limited by the availability of existing hair follicles." In other words, unlike conventional hair transplantation and other hair restoration treatments now in use, the technique could--at least in theory--grow lots of hair on the heads of men and women who are completely bald. That would be a very big deal. "If this approach is proven to work in humans, it will change existing treatments radically," Dr. Nicole Rogers, a dermatologist and hair transplant surgeon in New Orleans, told The Huffington Post in an email. Dr. Marie Jhin, a dermatologist in San Francisco and an adjunct clinical instructor at Stanford University, echoed that assessment. If the treatment pans out, she told HuffPost Science in an email, it "absolutely would be a breakthrough." But Rogers said there have been many "fits and starts" over the years as researchers have worked on other promising hair-restoration techniques, adding that the Sanford-Burnham researchers face many challenges--including replicating their results in large-scale human trials. The technique exploits the ability of human pluripotent stem cells to turn into almost any other cells in the body. Terskikh and his collaborators turned these cells into the dermal papilla cells that regulate the formation and growth of hair follicles, and showed that these grew hair when injected into mice. Human dermal papilla cells are unsuitable for conventional hair transplants because they cannot be obtained in necessary numbers and they quickly lose their hair-growing potency, according to the statement. Terskikh wouldn't hazard a guess as to when, if ever, the experimental technique might be available for use in humans. The next step, he said, would be to find a partner to fund future research. |
Fowler says that she was lied to and was being pushed out of the book to bring back original artist Roc Upchurch, who left the book after a domestic violence arrest in 2014. Yesterday on Twitter, artist Tess Fowler confirmed what some feared: that her departure from Rat Queens was related to the impending return of series co-creator Roc Upchurch, who left the series after being arrested for domestic abuse in November of 2014 and has more or less stayed away from comics since then. After Upchurch's arrest, co-creator Kurtis J. Wiebe announced that Upchurch would no longer be drawing the book. In July of 2015, Tess Fowler joined as regular series artist, replacing Stjepan Sejic. Fowler's addition to the book, aside from her considerable talent as an artist, was a relief to fans who struggled with supporting the book after Upchurch's arrest because she's well known for being an outspoken critic of abuse and harassment in comics. However, Fowler departed the book in April, telling fans to direct any questions about the book's future to its "creators." This led some fans to worry that Fowler's departure could be related Upchurch's involvement. Rat Queens was put on hiatus by Wiebe at the same time. Yesterday on Twitter, when asked directly about the reason for her departure by Claire Napier of Women Write About Comics, Fowler tweeted in depth about the situation (recapped on Bleeding Cool): Fowler repeatedly asked that the media not paint her statements as a vendetta, noting that she was simply answering questions. When she first departed the series, she specified that she held no ill will toward the creators. Despite this, asked by Christian Hoffer if news of Upchurch's return was true, Wiebe responded, "The news about Roc Upchurch being back on the book is utterly false." But Fowler disputed that, tweeting: We do know that Upchurch has been planning a return to comics for some time, as he did an interview with CBR about the subject in 2015 in which he claimed: It's finally getting things back on track -- things with my kids, things with my ex-wife. I'm getting back into a workflow. I'm picking up the pieces and putting things back together. But Upchurch's ex-wife told a different story over the course of many blog posts, recapped in part here. As recently as last month, she posted: I'm sure many of you have seen this self portrait that he recently drew with the three bleeding hearts and his face blurred out in red. When I first saw it pop up on our T.V. screen I thought oh great what is he up to now and at least he got his face right because that's exactly how I imagine it when I have the slightest thought of him. Don't be fooled by such illustrations. He wouldn't be able to tell you what his children are going through, doing, feeling, or anything for that matter on any given day. That illustration is how he knows HE left his children and not how they really are. The hearts he drew reflect the children he left in pain. They reflect a young man who is about to turn 16 in just a few weeks. A young black man who he left fatherless. A young man who he left the responsibility of the world on. A young man who he told was a fat chubby kid who would never play football. They reflect a young man who waited at the window just as he did as a child for his father. A young man who thought illnesses would bring his father back. A young man who wanted more then anything for his father to see him score his first point at his first basketball game. They reflect a little girl who doesn't understand why she doesn't get to see her father each day. A little girl who says her Dad threw her away like trash. A little girl who most days just simply wants to hug her father. The true hearts are the ones I take care of each day. Their hearts are whole. Peaceful hearts. Those hearts are complete by their heavenly father whom they've learned would never leave nor forsake them. A heart of a young man who wakes up and gets to football practice at 6:30 in the morning and then attends that afternoon. A heart of a young man who loves and cares for his younger siblings well being as if they're his own children. A heart of a young man who no longer waits at the window because he's outside hooping with his big brother. A heart of a little girl who fights everyday to find comfort in the fact that she has two awesome brothers, a grandfather, and uncle who give her so much love so that she is never in search for it. Don't be fooled by someone who lives hundreds of miles away from his children because he drew three broken hearts on his shirt. If I could draw I would have drawn three possums chewing his face off and ripping his heart out. Ha!! He hates possums. I started this blog by being completely honest. I'll always be honest no matter how it makes me look or how it comes off to anyone. With that being said...I can't stand that man. I don't wish him well. I really don't wish him anything. No, that's a lie sometimes I wish he'd just disappear but then I wouldn't get child support and these kids snacks are expensive!! That man abandoned his children, his responsibilities. And not to brag or anything, but they are awesome kids. Seriously, the most beautiful, coolest kids on the planet. He is truly an idiot to have walked away from his blessings. Though Fowler has not called for retribution, and in fact literally asked fans to "put down the torches" and stressed that she's okay, it's difficult not to view Fowler, an outspoken champion against abuse and harassment, being pushed off a popular title with an all female main cast in order to make way for the return of an abuser who claims to have changed despite ongoing reports to the contrary from his victim, as a metaphor for the overall sickness that inflicts the comics industry as a whole. But we want to make clear that that's our personal reaction, and that Fowler has not called for any action against the creators of Rat Queens or the book itself. Asked for further comment by The Outhouse, Tess Fowler told us: I was asked via Twitter pointed questions after folks saw Upchurch art being promoted by Kurtis on social media. I answered with what I knew via my experience. I'm fine. This happened weeks ago. It's a creator owned book and therefore I respect the rights of the creators. It's not my book. What happens with it is their right and their business. It would have been nice not to be left holding the bag. It would also have been nice not to be lied to. But hey, this is comics kids. You take it on the chin and you move on. [Update] Kurtis Wiebe made the following statement on Twitter after this article was originally posted: |
Subsets and Splits
No community queries yet
The top public SQL queries from the community will appear here once available.