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DJ Shadow has announced a new album, The Mountain Will Fall, out June 24 via Mass Appeal. It's the follow-up to 2011's The Less You Know, the Better, the 2012 box set Total Breakdown: Hidden Transmissions From The MPC Era, 1992-1996, and the 2014 EP Liquid Amber. The album features guest appearances from Run the Jewels, Nils Frahm, and others. Find the tracklist, the album art, and a stream of the title track, below. (The previously-shared "Swerve" appears as a bonus track.) Last week, Pitchfork chatted with Shadow (real name: Josh Davis) about the making of the album. "Sometimes records are a struggle," he said. "This record I knew exactly what I wanted to get across." "Every record I've ever made is a response to certain aspects of the prior record," Davis told Pitchfork. He said he considered The Less You Know, the Better something of a "parting gift" to those fans who only identified with the sample-based sound he pioneered on his classic Endtroducing... LP. After two years of touring, The Mountain Will Fall started to take shape after Davis took his first DJ gig in a decade, at the influential L.A. club night Low End Theory. From there came festival DJ sets, performances with Diplo, and a shift from samples toward Ableton Live software as Davis immersed himself in contemporary music, launching the Liquid Amber label. Davis said the DJ gigs gave him new ideas to which he could apply his vision, much as, say, hearing drum'n'bass had done in the '90s. "Endtroducing... in 2016 would not sound like Endtroducing... in '96 by design," he added. "The same way I was trying to push the boundaries then, I'm trying to push my own boundaries now." The title The Mountain Will Fall comes from a tweet Davis sent on the day he announced he was starting work on his new album. "It's like being at base camp and looking up at an unconquerable mountain; can't dwell on the difficulty, you have to just start the journey," he wrote, adding: "One step follows the next which leads the way to the next. There will be missteps but as long as the vision is whole, the mountain will fall." Davis hasn't done away with sampling entirely. The title track includes a sample of Italian musician Dario Baldan Bembo's 1975 orchestra-laden work "Prima Alba." He happened to pull the record out of one of the storage units where he keeps his vast trove of recordings. "Obviously, people have used classical music ever since Coldcut used it on 'Beats + Pieces' in 1987," Davis told Pitchfork. "It's not like there's anything inherently groundbreaking about using classical music. But for me, I wanted to utilize aspects of it that were unusual. I felt like it would give me an interesting springing-off point." As for "Nobody Speak," the collaboration with Run the Jewels, Davis said he thought of the duo of El-P and Killer Mike as soon as he had made the "boom-bappy, kind of hip-hop rap" instrumental. "I was just like, that's it, they're the only people I want on this track," he said. "I've known El for almost 20 years." Though the two have collaborated in various ways over the years, this was the first time they've recorded together in the studio, with all three performers meeting in Los Angeles before the holidays last year. When it comes to the other collaborations, Davis told Pitchfork that "Bergschrund" is actually one of two tracks he worked on with Nils Frahm, so the other one might be finished at some point. "I realized I was familiar with his music but didn't even really know it," Davis told Pitchfork. He said he was looking for someone who was "working in the instrumental space, but anything we do together is going to sound completely different than anything we could do on our own." Elsewhere, "The Sideshow," with Ernie Fresh, is meant as an old-school scratch track without the familiar tropes of the form. "I wanted to create an alternative universe where you find a rapper who's really, really dope, he's not known to anybody, none of the breaks are known, none of the scratches are known, although at some point they will be known," he said. Davis said the number of guests on the album was limited on purpose. "I don't really want it to be one of these records where it's this hot rapper, this hot rapper, this feature," he says he told his manager. "I didn't want to have to convince anybody that it was worth their time to be on my records. [Laughs] I just didn't want to make that kind of record." The Mountain Will Fall: 01 The Mountain Will Fall 02 Nobody Speak [ft. Run the Jewels] 03 Three Ralphs 04 Bergschrund [ft. Nils Frahm] 05 The Sideshow [ft. Ernie Fresh] 06 Depth Charge 07 Mambo 08 Ashes to Oceans [ft. Matthew Halsall] 09 Pitter Patter [ft. G Jones & Bleep Bloop] 10 California 11 Ghost Town 12 Suicide Pact 13 Swerve (iTunes Bonus Track) DJ Shadow: 06-24 Strasbourg, France - Artefact Festival 07-02 Amsterdam, Netherlands - Pitch Festival 07-08 Liege, Belgium - Les Ardentes 07-14 Sesimbra, Portugal - Super Bock, Super Rock 07-16 Paris, France - The Peacock Society Festival 07-17 Benicassim, Spain - Benicassim 07-23 Cheshire, England - Blue Dot Festival 07-28 Sibenik, Croatia - Island of Obonjan

Depending on one’s particular line of longitude (Or is it latitude?), winter cycling means either putting on a long-sleeve shirt instead of a Tee or swapping out slicks for a set of studded tires. In Toronto, for instance, the number of cyclists seen on the road once the snow flies drops like a rock by more than 70 per cent. But, there are still many who manage to make their daily commute down the icy avenues, or even a weekend ride if there if the temperatures and sun climb high enough the clear the pavement. For that hardy brood and others looking to give it a try, here are a few tips when it comes to actual snow, ice and slush winter cycling. Winter overhaul: Don’t even think of hitting the streets without making sure the old two-wheeler is ready to roll. Switch up the lube to a winter synthetic, make sure the chain is in good shape and not ready to freeze up on you. And for the love of Pete do a brake service. If you can, use an old bike during the winter as all the slush and road crud can do serious damage. The road less travelled: Sure, we all want to take the most direct route possible, but those might not always be the safest in winter. Pay attention to snow levels, windrows etc. The busiest roads are cleared of snow first, but the quieter roads might just be the safest when things get icy. Of course, many progressive and wonderful cities now clear separated bike lanes of snow during the winter, and those are best. The feet: Obviously, don’t bother with clip-in pedals, and only use flats, the larger the better. With big flat pedals, cyclists can consider big fat (read: warm) shoes or boots. Tires: There are always plenty of options when it comes to winter tires. Treads and puncture resistance are the key factors to consider. The chunkier the treads and the more puncture resistance the safer the bike. There are full-on winter tires with metal studs for those who don’t want to mess around. And remember, with puncture resistance, nobody wants to swap out a flattened tube in the dead of winter, but keep spare tubes and a pump handy, as always. Clothing: We all know layering clothes is the best option for doing anything sporty during the winter. The important thing to remember is that even when it is quite cold, once out riding, the sweat will come and any kind of moisture is bad news so having a base layer that wicks sweat away from the body is essential. And, having some protection against icy winds on the outside of the body is also key. Head and helmet: Invest in a skull cap for under the helmet as well as a full balaclava for the coldest of days that covers the entire head and neck. Merino wool is always best when talking keeping warm in the damp and cold of winter. Hands: Obviously, there is some degree of manual dexterity involved in operating a bicycle, especially in winter, so don’t opt for the largest most cumbersome winter mittens on the market. Find a good quality pair of winter gloves that offer both warmth and wind protection. Locks: Just like car doors, bike locks can freeze up, expect the worst if commuting for an hour in the snow and carry a wee bottle of lock de-icer in your bag. Can you imagine how bad it would be to go all that way only to realize you can’t even lock up the bike? Ouch. Fender it up: Biking in the city during winter invariably involves a hefty amount of slush. If you can keep the general dampness at bay, all the better. Do yourself a favour and fashion some serious fenders for the front and back wheels. After Care: After the ride, do not even think of stuffing that bike in the shed without giving it a good wipe down with a rag from your handy-dandy sack of rags that you’ve left for just such an occasion. Otherwise, expect a rusty bucket in a matter of weeks. The Darkness: Yes, it is dark in the winter. Leaving at 5pm means biking home in darkness alongside cars not used to looking out for cyclists in the winter. Consider a flashing red light on top of your helmet! Or, if not that, at least a strong LED lighting system front and back as well as reflective and bright clothing. Purchase a rechargeable lighting system that can be taken with you and not left on the bike. Ice Ice Baby: Slippery surfaces come in all shapes and sizes, so just expect to slide. See something shiny on the road in the distance? That’s ice, so be prepared. Don’t swerve into the road, but if you can avoid it, then do so. Otherwise, keep as straight as possible and if you have to break, make it the rear. If you’re just scared, stop and walk around. It might appear hard-packed, but underneath that freshly fallen snow is just more ice. Steering: Getting out of trouble takes additional seconds in the snow as bikes are generally less responsive. Snowbanks and windrows impinge on cycling lanes giving riders less room to operate and the margin of error between bicycles and cars is that much smaller. Watch turns, especially easy right turns that might be taken for granted in snow-free months as it is easy to hug the curb to avoid oncoming traffic. Don’t fall for it: Make all the preparations possible, and follow all the rules. But, one day it just won’t happen. And, if you end up losing control and know you’re going to fall, do yourself a favour and try and fall into a snowbank. Advertisements

Cuban infielder/outfielder Randy Arozarena has been declared a free agent, Ben Badler of Baseball America reports. The 20-year-old joins fellow standout Lazaro Armenteros as intriguing prospects who are now free to join an MLB organization. According to Badler, Arozarena will hold a showcase in Mexico on January 22. Expectations appear to be that he’ll sign in relatively short order after that occurs. Notably, Arozarena will be subject to international bonus limitations. In its last ranking of young Cuban talent, BA listed Arozarena as the ninth-best prospect who was (then) still on the island. Calling him a “quick-twitch athlete,” Badler praises Arozarena for his speed and says he could play up the middle and feature at the top of a big league lineup — if he reaches his potential. While it doesn’t seem as if there’s a lot of power projection for the youngster, Badler does say he’s got enough pop to be a double-digit home run threat despite generally featuring a “line-drive approach.” And he’s said to have good contact skills, bat speed, plate discipline, and pitch recognition, making for an appealing overall package. Defense remains something of a question, as Arozarena has moved around quite a bit in recent years. He has a history at shortstop and has featured there in showcases, but as Badler explains he has also been utilized quite a bit in the outfield in recent years. It’s not clear yet where Arozarena will end up, but it appears likely that he has a good shot at being able to handle a challenging defensive assignment in the long run, adding to his value. Though he’s a fair bit older than Lazarito, Arozarena is still not a player who’ll be pursued for his immediate impact. Badler guesses that he’d be likely to open at the High-A level to start the 2016 campaign, suggesting it could be a few years until he factors at the major league level.

Five weeks after being released from a hospital following a near-death, two-week bout with pneumonia, University of Miami baseball coach Jim Morris is definitely feeling better these days. How can you tell? The 63-year-old skipper spent all of last week doing what he always does at this time of year — agonizing over Friday’s 5 p.m. deadline for Major League Baseball draft picks to sign with their pro teams. “We’ve got six guys, counting two guys on our team, we’re waiting on,” Morris said Tuesday before rattling off the list of names. “You just don’t know. I can give them a scholarship and tell them I love them. But the pro people can give them a scholarship plan, tell them they love ’em and give them a million dollars. I don’t have to tell you which one they’re going to choose.” Sign Up and Save Get six months of free digital access to the Miami Herald The fact Morris is talking shop is a welcome sign for his players, who ended their season — Morris’ 20th as UM coach — last month in Louisville, Ky., in the NCAA tournament unsure if they would ever see their coach again. “It’s definitely good to see him,” said freshman All-American third baseman David Thompson, who, like many of his teammates, didn’t know how ill Morris actually was until weeks later. “Each time I’ve seen him since he’s been back, he seemed to be a lot better with a lot more energy. He got real sick there. It’s nice to see him back at work.” Morris was so stricken by the illness that he said he doesn’t remember anything about how the Hurricanes’ season ended — even though he spoke on the phone to his players and assistants and supposedly watched them play in the NCAA regional from his hospital bed on an iPad. “You can see how stupid I was — I almost died in the hospital,” said Morris, who added that he spent 13 days inside Duke University Hospital in Durham, N.C., before his release June 6. “It was the medication, I guess. I got something — a bacteria — in my bloodstream, too. It was the combination of the two, that and pneumonia. It knocked me down in the dirt.” Source of it all Morris said it all started about a month before the team took off for the Atlantic Coast Conference tournament in Durham. A little cough he kept ignoring grew to severe chest pains as the team bus was about 10 minutes away from the stadium before UM’s tournament finale against Clemson. “I told [assistants] Gino [DiMare] and JD [Arteaga] to get the guys off the bus. When everybody was off the bus, I told our trainer to call 911,” Morris said. “It was probably dumb because I was having chest pains. But I didn’t want to affect anything on game day at the ACC tournament. I won’t do that again.” Morris said he doesn’t remember anything from the time he got off the bus that day until about the time he got out of the hospital and made the long drive home from Durham with his wife. Although Morris feels better, his health remains a concern. He said doctors still don’t want him getting on a plane for another few weeks because of the amount of water in his lungs, and the potential for blood clots in his legs. Morris said he goes in for chest X-rays and to have blood drawn every Wednesday. He said doctors have told him it probably will be another few weeks before he feels completely recovered. He said he has regained about eight of the 20 pounds he lost throughout the ordeal. Be more proactive Morris, who has battled other health issues in the past, said he no longer will try and be a tough guy and wait to see a doctor. But he also has no plans to slow down or walk away from the game. He loves it too much. “Most of our guys are coming and most of our position players are back,” Morris said. “I thought we would lose [outfielder] Dale Carey, but we didn’t. He’s back. Tyler Palmer, our leadoff hitter, is back. We’ve got to replace Chantz Mack in right, but our catcher Garrett Kennedy is back. Kennedy is maybe our most improved player or MVP for last year. Our pitching rotation, the strength of our club, should be back. B-Rad [Bryan Radziewski], [Chris] Diaz, [Andrew] Suarez, [Javi] Salas, our closer. “You can tell I’m excited. I think we’re going to have a good club next year with these guys and our recruiting class.” Morris lost two high-end picks who signed with their respective teams early in the signing period: outfielder Matt McPhearson (fourth round, Arizona Diamondbacks) and right-hander J.D. Underwood (fifth round, Los Angeles Dodgers). But of the six players Morris was waiting on at Friday’s deadline, none ended up signing pro contracts. The players the Canes were sweating out most Friday were power hitting Hialeah Mater Academy outfielder Willie Abreu (14th round, Cincinnati Reds) and Derik Beauprez (25th round, Boston Red Sox), a 6-5, 210-pound right-handed pitcher from Cherry Creek, Colo., who can hit 95 mph on the radar gun. Other Hurricanes signees who were drafted include C/1B Zack Collins, Plantation American Heritage (27th round, Reds) and OF Jacob Heyward, McDonough, Ga. (38th round, Atlanta Braves). And Morris said he already expected Radziewski (29th round, St. Louis Cardinals) and Salas (39th round, Minnesota Twins) to return. With all six players in the fold, you’ll have to forgive Morris for being so enthusiastic about the team’s outlook for next season. Indeed, the first game does not even arrive until 2014, but being knocked out of commission during the climax of a season and facing your own mortality can make anyone yearn for the next season to come quickly. “I feel like I missed the season,” Morris said. “There was no closure.”

Trevor Noah: ‘I Have Been Stopped by Police 8 to 10 Times’ in 6 Years in US (Video) "I've been stopped in a Tesla. Like, a Tesla, people," host says. "I don't know what silent crime you think I'm on my way to... Trevor Noah addressed the Philando Castile verdict on "The Daily Show." Trevor Noah addressed the Philando Castile verdict on "The Daily Show." Image 1 of / 13 Caption Close Trevor Noah: ‘I Have Been Stopped by Police 8 to 10 Times’ in 6 Years in US (Video) 1 / 13 Back to Gallery “The Daily Show” is usually about the jokes, but in a behind-the-scenes clip, host Trevor Noah got serious to talk about his experiences as a black man living in the U.S. “I’ve only lived in the United States six years on and off. I lived on the West Coast two-and-a-half years, I’ve lived on the East Coast now for two-and-a-half years,” he explained. “In that time, I sh– you not, I have been stopped by police maybe, I would say going on at least eight-to-10 times I’ve been stopped by the police, which always blows peoples’ minds, which I didn’t know was a thing.” “I’ve been stopped in a Tesla. Like, a Tesla, people,” he added. “I don’t know what silent crime you think I’m on my way to commit.” Also Read: Trevor Noah on His Post-Trump Ratings Bump: 'We're Benefiting From a Bit of Turbulence' His rant was in response to the death of Philando Castile, who was fatally shot by police officer Jeronimo Yanez in July 2016 at a stop. He was in the car with his girlfriend, who streamed the aftermath of the shooting on Facebook. Yanez claimed that he thought Castile, who was a legal gun owner and had a gun in his glove compartment, was reaching for it, although Castile’s girlfriend disputes this. Yanez was recently acquitted on all charges. Noah talked about Castile on his show, but took a moment in between segments to address the audience about his thoughts both on the case and as a black man. Also Read: Police Dashcam Video of Cop Shooting Philando Castile Released for First Time (Video) “This story is interesting because there’s something different and that is Philando Castile wasn’t just a man shot at a traffic stop. He was a legal gun owner whose family was in the car and who had committed no crime at all,” Noah said. “In a story about a man being shot because he was lawfully armed, you would think that one group, one powerful group in America would say something about it. This is a group you’d expect to be losing their goddamn minds about this: the NRA. But for some strange reason, on this particular case, they’ve been completely silent…and yet, according to their rhetoric, this is everything that they stand against.” Noah has been open about the racism he’s experienced both on the show and in his stand-up act. While he grew up in South Africa under Apartheid — a different kind of experience to most black people in America — his time in the States has given him some more perspective. He added that he believes “the conversation gets caught up in racism as it pertains to black and white,” but “it’s not the conversation” we should be having. “I believe that the police force as a whole is trained in such a way that it creates state racism,” he said. “That is different.” Watch the full clip above. Read original story Trevor Noah: ‘I Have Been Stopped by Police 8 to 10 Times’ in 6 Years in US (Video) At TheWrap

The snap resignation of Lebanese Prime Minister Saad Hariri over the weekend reflects a push by Saudi Arabia to openly confront Iran, its longtime regional adversary, and Iran's Lebanese ally, Hezbollah, analysts say. It will also likely plunge Lebanon into a fresh political quagmire, as the country's fragile coalition government suffers a severe blow and general elections set for May appear increasingly uncertain. Joseph Bahout, a visiting fellow with the Middle East Program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, noted that tensions between Saudi Arabia and Iran have been building for some time, and the Saudis have recently shown "a will [to confront] Iran and Hezbollah in Lebanon". Hariri, a Lebanese Sunni politician and longtime ally of the Gulf kingdom, announced his resignation from Riyadh, the Saudi capital, on Saturday. {articleGUID} In a televised speech, Hariri said he believed he faced threats to his life. He called out Iran for sowing "disorder and destruction" in Lebanon, and criticised Hezbollah, a Lebanese political and armed resistance movement allied with Tehran, for building "a state within a state". "I say to Iran and its allies - you have lost in your efforts to meddle in the affairs of the Arab world," Hariri said, adding that the region "will rise again and the hands that you have wickedly extended into it will be cut off." Questions over Saudi's role Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, who was appointed last June, has recently taken a harsher line on Iran. The long-standing power struggle between the two regional rivals has been playing out in Syria, where Hezbollah is fighting with Iran's backing alongside Syrian President Bashar al-Assad's forces, and in Yemen. "The Saudis feel that it's time for them to be much more aggressive against what they perceive or describe as Iran's expansion in the region," Bahout told Al Jazeera. "The new thing is that they have decided to throw Lebanon into this kind of fire." Saudi Arabia, however, has denied being behind Hariri's resignation. Saudi Minister of State for Gulf Affairs Thamer al-Sabhan told Lebanese television station LBC on Saturday that it was entirely Hariri's decision to step down. Nonetheless, the resignation comes amid increasingly hostile rhetoric from Sabhan himself, who recently posted several tweets condemning Hezbollah, which he described as a "terrorist" force. "Those who cooperate and work with it politically, economically and through the media should be punished," Sabhan wrote on October 26. "There should be serious work to curb it internally and externally and to confront it with force." Hariri's resignation speech mirrored Sabhan's language. And just days earlier, on October 31, Hariri posted a photo to Twitter of himself with Sabhan, captioned: "Long meeting with His Excellency my friend Thamer al-Sabhan." Tawfiq Shuman, a Lebanese journalist and analyst, told Al Jazeera Arabic that, because Hariri delivered his statement from Riyadh, "he had to use the same tone and language the kingdom uses when speaking about Hezbollah." This language "is one of war, military and confrontation", Shuman said. Bahout maintained that Saudi Arabia appears to be behind Hariri's decision to resign, noting that the Saudis would not have made such a move unless they felt they had the blessing of the United States, another longtime ally. "They feel the climate is right now," Bahout said. "In the longer run, I think the real question is, how far are the Saudis willing to go? What's their aim?" US pressure In recent months, the Trump administration has been increasingly critical of Hezbollah, which the US has listed as a "terrorist" group since the late 1990s. US President Donald Trump has also spoken out against Iran and the nuclear deal signed between Tehran and Western nations. Last month, the US Congress unanimously approved additional sanctions on Hezbollah and foreign states that support the group. Israel also used Hariri's resignation as an opportunity to speak out against Iran. {articleGUID} Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu tweeted late Saturday that the resignation was "a wakeup call to the international community to take action against the Iranian aggression that is trying to turn Syria into a second Lebanon". The resignation comes amid "a very heightened, anti-Hezbollah discourse", said Carmen Geha, an assistant professor of public administration at the American University of Beirut. Hezbollah Secretary-General Hasan Nasrallah is expected to comment on Hariri's resignation on Sunday. Geha told Al Jazeera that she expects Nasrallah's speech to accuse Hariri of defecting to the Saudis and to proclaim the importance of Hezbollah's role in the region. "I don't think it is going to be conciliatory at all," she said. What are the next steps? Internally, Bahout said Hariri's resignation plunges Lebanon into what could be "a very long governmental crisis". General elections are set for next May, but a vote would be unlikely to go ahead if a government is not in place, he said. Officially, Lebanese President Michel Aoun must accept Hariri's resignation. Aoun, who is allied with Hezbollah, will then be tasked with appointing a new prime minister, who, under Lebanon's sectarian political system, must be a Sunni Muslim. However, that will be far from easy, as the Hariri-led coalition government was put in place last year after several years of political deadlock in Lebanon. Geha told Al Jazeera that while the Lebanese cabinet can continue on an operational basis, it appears more likely that the Lebanese political system "will go into complete paralysis". "Either there will be an indication of a will to have a minimum of socioeconomic stability at least, or not, which I feel is more likely," said Geha, who added that she expected political polarisation to deepen as a result of Hariri's resignation. Geha said there is no lack of Lebanese Sunni politicians who can replace Hariri, but if his resignation is tied to Saudi Arabia, a regional consensus over a potential successor may be necessary. "I think this time, it will be difficult" to replace the prime minister, she said. "If this is Saudi-led … it will take a lot of regional consensus-building." Additional reporting by Zena Tahhan

Rosanna Di Paola is the associate assistant deputy minister responsible for the federal government's Phoenix pay system. (supplied) IBM is being paid for its work on the multi-million dollar contract for the new public service payment system, even as hundreds of federal public servants have been left without paycheques or underpaid for weeks or months at a time, according to a senior federal manager. "The system is working. So they got paid for work done," Rosanna Di Paola, the associate assistant deputy minister responsible for the federal government's problem-plagued Phoenix pay system told CBC Radio's Ontario Today on Thursday. "The issues we're having are more procedural than they are technical. Phoenix will only pay out what it knows about, so the system itself is functioning as designed. We've tested the system inside and out." Meanwhile a temporary federal payment centre is up and running in Gatineau, Que., to deal with a big backlog of requests from government employees who aren't being paid properly. The issues we're having are more procedural than they are technical. - Rosanna Di Paola, senior federal manager The federal government's main public service payment centre, in Miramichi, N.B., couldn't handle the volume, Di Paola said. "We've set up the satellite centre with very experienced compensation advisors who can help us muddle through the backlog and get people paid," Di Paola said. "We do want people to be paid and we're doing the utmost we can to put mechanisms in place for people to get paid." The bulk of the backlog relates to employees who aren't receiving their pay increments, she said. However CBC News has heard from dozens of federal employees experiencing a variety of pay problems ranging from underpayment to overpayment to no payment at all, sometimes for months. Employees in special circumstances such as those returning from maternity leave and sick leave are reporting long delays in getting their pay back on track. And many employees complain the system set up to help them through the mess is unresponsive and ineffective. "These stories are frightful and they're not what we're about in the federal public service," said Di Paola.

Mrs. Clinton, these people said, expressed impatience with the current policy, which is based on ever more stringent economic sanctions and joint American-South Korean naval exercises — both in response to the sinking in March of a South Korean warship, for which South Korea blamed the North. Among those advocating a fresh overture is Stephen W. Bosworth, the special envoy for North Korea. He visited Pyongyang, the North’s capital, in December to explore the prospect of talks, but the administration could not decide whether to schedule a follow-up meeting, and then the warship was torpedoed. “The question is, what are we going to do now?” said Joel S. Wit, a former State Department negotiator with North Korea who founded a Web site, 38 North, which follows North Korean politics. “The answer is re-engagement. There aren’t any other tools in the toolbox.” Far from abandoning pressure tactics, officials said, the United States is likely to increase them. In July, it announced new measures aimed at choking off sources of hard currency for the government and its allies. Mrs. Clinton sent a senior adviser, Robert J. Einhorn, to Asia to drum up support for the sanctions. The military, defying threats from North Korea and anger from China, has held several days of joint drills with South Korea in the Yellow Sea. 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. “We don’t want to go down the old road and repeat the experiences of the past,” said Jeffrey A. Bader, senior director for Asian affairs at the National Security Council. “We are looking for behavior change by the North Koreans.” Still, there is growing concern, even among hawkish analysts, that pressure, without any dialogue, raises the risk of war. Some critics also contend that there is little evidence the sanctions have forced the North to retreat from its nuclear program or its belligerence toward South Korea. Mr. Kim’s deteriorating health, and the succession struggle it has set off, have increased the pressure on the administration to reach out, in the view of some analysts. While some officials argue that the United States can wait out the political transition, others fear that heightening the confrontation with North Korea could foreclose future opportunities for contact. As Victor Cha, a former Bush administration official who was responsible for North Korea, put it, “If they look like they’re preparing for war, there’s no opportunity to talk to the new leadership.” Advertisement Continue reading the main story The administration, analysts said, is also losing confidence in China’s willingness to press the North. During a visit to Beijing in May, Mrs. Clinton invested a lot of energy in trying to persuade Chinese officials to accept the South Korean government’s finding that the North had sunk its ship. Her efforts were futile: Beijing never accepted the North’s culpability and it blunted Seoul’s drive for a United Nations statement condemning the attack. Symbolically, analysts said, Mr. Kim’s choice of a trip to China over a meeting with Mr. Carter highlighted North Korea’s economic and political dependence on Beijing. China has long pushed for the United States to talk to the North, and reopening a dialogue could help ease the tension between Beijing and Washington. One problem for the administration is the form and content of talks. Few analysts have much enthusiasm for the six-party format, under which North Korea has negotiated over its nuclear program with the United States, South Korea, China, Japan and Russia. But the talks are probably necessary to retain support of allies like South Korea and Japan. Another problem is that the administration has been uncompromising in its demands. Officials have repeatedly said that the United States will not negotiate until North Korea agrees to dismantle its nuclear weapons. Their fear is that the North will extract concessions, as it did during the Bush and Clinton administrations, only to test another nuclear bomb. An option, experts said, would be to engage North Korea on issues other than the nuclear program. But others said the issue was unavoidable. For now, the administration offers a more pragmatic strategy. “Americans should heed our travel warning and avoid North Korea,” said the State Department’s spokesman, Philip J. Crowley. “We only have a handful of former presidents.”

Cryptology ePrint Archive: Report 2010/594 In this paper we analyze the case of AES and present an attack which is capable of recovering the full secret key in almost realtime for AES-128, requiring only a very limited number of observed encryptions. Unlike most other attacks, ours neither needs to know the ciphertext, nor does it need to know any information about the plaintext (such as its distribution, etc.). Moreover, for the first time we also show how the plaintext can be recovered without having access to the ciphertext. Further, our spy process can be run under an unprivileged user account. It is the first working attack for implementations using compressed tables, where it is not possible to find out the beginning of AES rounds any more -- a corner stone for all efficient previous attacks. All results of our attack have been demonstrated by a fully working implementation, and do not solely rely on theoretical considerations or simulations. A contribution of probably independent interest is a denial of service attack on the scheduler of current Linux systems (CFS), which allows to monitor memory accesses with novelly high precision. Finally, we give some generalizations of our attack, and suggest some possible countermeasures which would render our attack impossible.

Mr Mousa's sons were left orphaned after his death British soldiers who abused an Iraqi detainee who died in their custody were not just "a few bad apples", a public inquiry has been told. There was "something rotten in the whole barrel", Rabinder Singh QC said. Troops in Iraq routinely used banned interrogation methods they did not think were illegal, lawyers told the inquiry into the 2003 death. The inquiry, led by Sir William Gage, is focusing on Baha Mousa's death, detainees' treatment and army methods. Mr Singh, counsel for Mr Mousa's family and the other Iraqis detained alongside him, said: "This case is not just about beatings or a few bad apples. "There is something rotten in the whole barrel." TIMELINE OF KEY EVENTS 14 Sep 2003 Baha Mousa and nine other Iraqis arrested at Haitham Hotel in Basra by members of the 1st Battalion The Queen's Lancashire Regiment 16 Sep 2003 Mr Mousa dies in British army custody in Iraq with multiple injuries 30 April 2007 Cpl Donald Payne jailed for a year and dismissed from the Army for inhumanely treating civilian detainees 27 March 2008 MoD admits breaching the human rights of Mr Mousa and others 14 May 2008 Defence Secretary Des Browne announces public inquiry to be held into Mr Mousa's death 10 July 2008 MoD agrees to pay £2.83m compensation to mistreated detainees 13 July 2009 Public inquiry begins in London Q&A: Baha Mousa inquiry His comments came as legal teams for key parties were allowed to read statements to the inquiry. It has already heard of the abuse Mr Mousa and his fellow detainees suffered. A short video showing Cpl Donald Payne shouting obscenities at the hooded Iraqi prisoners calling them "apes" has also been played. In 2007, Cpl Payne was jailed for a year and dismissed from the Army after being convicted of war crimes charges related to the death. On Monday, Mr Singh told the inquiry: "The official version of events was that nothing on that video was in fact illegal. "What we saw was a soldier trying to implement official policy, forcing detainees to get back into stress positions when they were clearly moaning and unable to maintain those positions. "They are all shown hooded, again in accordance with orders, again illegally." Hotel arrest Mr Mousa and nine other civilians were arrested at a Basra Hotel on 14 September 2003 by soldiers from the former Queen's Lancashire Regiment who found weapons on the premises. Staff insisted the weapons were kept for security, but they were taken to a detention centre at the Battle Group Main camp, under suspicion of being insurgents. Two days later Mr Mousa was dead. A post-mortem examination showed he suffered asphyxiation and had at least 93 injuries to his body, including fractured ribs and a broken nose. Please turn on JavaScript. Media requires JavaScript to play. Mr Singh said: "One of the striking features of the terrible events is that the abuse did not take place in a secret location behind closed doors. "The temporary detention facility (TDF) was open to the outside. Many people must have seen or heard what was going on. Many seem to have visited the TDF. "This gives rise to serious questions about the professionalism of the outfit and whether the culture was one of impunity, [and] about the capacity of the regiment's members to question and challenge abuse." Convicted war criminal A six-month court martial saw seven soldiers facing war crimes charges relating to Mr Mousa's death. In April 2007, all but Cpl Payne, 36, were cleared on all counts at Bulford Camp in Wiltshire. He became the UK's first convicted war criminal under the International Criminal Court Act. The brutality was completely unacceptable. It has stained the reputation of the British army David Barr MoD counsel In July 2008 the MoD agreed to pay £2.83m in compensation to the families of Mr Mousa and the nine other detainees. David Barr, counsel for the Ministry of Defence, said the "appalling" behaviour of British soldiers in the case "disgusted" the Army. He told the inquiry: "It is with huge regret that the Ministry of Defence acknowledges the way in which some of those techniques were used on Baha Mousa and those detained with him. "The brutality was completely unacceptable. It has stained the reputation of the British army." Public apology Cpl Payne's barrister, Michael Topolski QC, said the former soldier hoped the inquiry would provide a "clearer and fuller picture" of events. Mr Topolski said: "Donald Payne has accepted and he does accept that he violated his duty to those detainees. "For that, through us, now without hesitation he wishes to publicly apologise to each of them and in particular to the family of Baha Mousa." The inquiry later adjourned for the day and will reconvene at 1000 BST on Wednesday when the first witness will be Mr Mousa's father. Bookmark with: Delicious Digg reddit Facebook StumbleUpon What are these? E-mail this to a friend Printable version

Old video games are notorious for being insanely difficult. As a child I was astonished to discover a magical item appropriately named Game Genie that allowed me to beat certain games. “Cheating” to make games easier was great, but some Game Genie codes made things more fun rather than just providing infinite lives. Some of these codes manipulated the games in absurdly interesting ways such as making all enemies throw hammers in Super Mario Bros. As a hacker, I love doing crazy things with code not only because it’s fun but because it’s a great way to learn new things. I was ecstatic to discover that many video game emulators offer an API for the Lua programming language granting access to all sorts of functionality like saving states and editing the game’s memory. Imagine opening these classic games up to the power of the Internet. Today we are going to do just that by using the memory manipulation API to build a Game Genie that operates via text messaging with Twilio. Power Ups that we will need A version of the FCEUX Nintendo emulator that has Lua API access. We will be using the 2.2.2 Windows binary. You can also use other emulators as long as they have the same Lua API. The same code should work for Visual Boy Advance(gameboy games), SNES9X(SNES games) and others. Wine to run Windows applications if you are a Linux or Mac user like me. Unfortunately right now, the Lua API and debugging tools are more commonly found on Windows versions of these emulators. A free Twilio account and one Twilio phone number with SMS capabilities. Python with the Flask and Twilio libraries installed. These can be installed with pip. A ROM file for The Legend of Zelda that we will use for testing purposes. If you own the game there are devices you can buy online that allow you to use the ROM file from your cartridge. An insatiable hunger for manipulating old school video games and bringing them to life with the power of the internet. And so, our journey begins Experienced adventurers know that the first step on a quest is stocking up for dangers that lie ahead. This is true whether you are item shopping in Corneria before heading out to battle Garland or if you are a hacker trying to setup your environment for a new project. The first item in our inventory will be our emulator of choice, FCEUX. Download FCEUX and extract the files to a directory of your choosing where our project will live. If you are a Windows user then you’re good to go. Linux or Mac uses will need to install Wine. If you are a Mac user with Homebrew installed, then you can also use your terminal to get Wine (you also need to install XQuartz as a dependency as shown below). You may need to run brew update before installation. brew install caskroom / cask / brew - cask brew cask install Caskroom / cask / xquartz brew install wine Now that we are well-equipped, let’s sling some Lua code to fend off our enemies. Open a new file called “nesms.lua” in your favorite text editor. Let’s write some code to take over the emulator’s execution. -- Infinite loop to take control over frame advancing . while true do emu . message ( 'Hello World!' ) -- Print hello world to the screen on every frame emu . frameadvance () -- This essentially tells FCEUX to keep running end emu.frameadvance() tells the emulator to advance exactly one frame which is the basic unit of time on an NES. The emulator usually does this itself, but allows our script to do whatever we want before each frame is rendered. Now it’s time to open up FCEUX with Wine. If you installed it with brew or another package manager, you can navigate to the directory where fceux.exe is sitting and run wine fceux.exe otherwise you can double click the file itself. You need to be playing a game for code to run. So open up your Legend of Zelda ROM and run your code by clicking “File -> Lua -> New Lua Script Window” and navigating to the script. Cue the famous victory fanfare as we have won our first battle. These experience points will be useful. Now that we know how to get Lua code to execute let’s cut to the chase and get to the real hacking. Jump higher, punch harder, live forever Our Hello World script is nice but it’s hardly as magical as my childhood experiences with the Game Genie. Let’s dig into some of the basic tools we’ll need to emulate Game Genie’s functionality. FCEUX comes with a host of awesome debugging utilities. One of the most important things in this toolbox is a hex editor. With this we can look at the contents of the game’s memory in the form of hexadecimal addresses and values. The hex editor is the main tool that ROM hackers use to open up a game’s Read Only Memory and edit the hex values to change what is in the game. Cleverly editing memory addresses can result in some crazy gameplay modifications or even completely new games. Let’s open the hex editor and see what we can do with it. All of the two digit hex numbers you see represent a value in the game’s RAM at a specific location. You can change any value to see what happens in-game. You can also search for specific consecutive values. Check out this example to see the hex editor in action to find the bytes corresponding to the timer in Super Mario Bros and then changing the time to zero to kill Mario. ROM hacking can be a pretty daunting task. We are about to discover that you don’t need to be an expert to do some really cool stuff. ROM represents the unchanging contents of what you’d find on a game’s cartridge whereas RAM represents the actual memory of the game as the program is running. Changes made to RAM appear immediately allowing you to make real time changes. There are NES RAM maps here and here that will tell you which memory addresses correspond to specific things in-game. Let’s try to mimic the Game Genie by “enhancing” games with Lua scripts. As an example, let’s mess around with one of my all time favorites, the original Legend of Zelda. Using this RAM map we will edit certain values to make some funky stuff happen. Open up a new file in your text editor and add some of these one liner example scripts to change RAM values and see what happens. You will need to have your Legend of Zelda ROM running in FCEUX have a new game started for these scripts to work. -- Change the current music to the dungeon music -- 0x0600 is the memory address to play music -- 0x40 is the value representing the dungeon theme . memory . writebyte ( 0x0600 , 0x40 ) -- Give Link the sword without even entering the cave -- 0x0657 is the memory address for Link ’ s current sword -- 0x01 is the value representing the regular sword memory . writebyte ( 0x0657 , 0x01 ) -- Give Link a bunch of rupees -- 0x066D is the memory address for your current number of rupees -- 0xFF is the maximum number of rupees ( 255 ) memory . writebyte ( 0x066D , 0xFF ) It’s dangerous to go alone… You’ve seen what we can do with a bit of Lua. But it is getting lonely in here so let’s equip ourselves. Instead of a sword, our weapon will be the power to communicate with other programming languages. I am not a very good Lua developer, but I love me some Python. Wouldn’t it be rad to manipulate the game’s memory with Python instead? Our Lua scripts run in an environment provided by the emulator but we can open them to the outside world in a couple of different ways. We could use sockets or implement an HTTP server, but let’s just use text files for now. Hop back to “nesms.lua” and add a function for reading text files: -- A function to read text files function read_file ( filename ) input = io . open ( filename , 'r' ) -- Open this file with the read flag . io . input ( input ) -- Set the input that the io library will read from . input_content = io . read () -- Read the contents of the file . io . close ( input ) -- Close the file . return input_content end We’ll use this function in our frame loop to listen for changes in two text files: “address.txt” and “value.txt” On every frame advance we will read a hexadecimal string from each of these files and write the contents of value.txt to the memory location in address.txt. Let’s add this to nesms.lua as well. -- A function to read text files function read_file ( filename ) input = io . open ( filename , "r" ) -- Open this file with the read flag . if input ~= nil then io . input ( input ) -- Set the input that the io library will read from . input_content = io . read () -- Read the contents of the file . io . close ( input ) -- Close the file . end return input_content end prev_address = '' -- Variable to keep track of the address . prev_value = '' -- Variable to keep track of the value . -- Infinite loop to take control over frame advancing . while true do address = read_file ( 'address.txt' ) value = read_file ( 'value.txt' ) -- Only write to memory if the value has changed . if address ~= prev_address or value ~= prev_value then hex_address = tonumber ( address , 16 ) hex_value = tonumber ( value , 16 ) -- Check to see if the entered strings are valid . if hex_address == nil or hex_value == nil then emu . message ( 'Invalid address or value. Please use valid hex numbers.' ) else memory . writebyte ( hex_address , hex_value ) -- Base 16 for hex values emu . message ( address .. ': ' .. value ) -- Print address and value being changed . end end prev_address = address -- Update the address to keep track of changes . prev_value = value -- Update the value to keep track of changes . emu . frameadvance () -- This essentially tells FCEUX to keep running . end Let’s see if this code works. Run the new version of our script in your emulator and throw some hex numbers in them using the previously linked RAM maps for your game of choice. Let’s try another Zelda example: Load your Zelda ROM if it was not already open. Get past the file select screen and make sure you have Link on the overworld. Open “address.txt” and write “0600” (and nothing else) in the text file. Open “value.txt” and write “40” (and nothing else) in the text file. Save both files and run “nesms.lua” in FCEUX. Listen to the music change to the dungeon tune. “Get equipped” with Twilio and Flask Now we can receive input from other programs including the terminal output from Dr. Wily’s robots. The idea is to leave our nesms.lua script running and manipulate the game’s memory whenever those text files change. Let’s make this way cooler by setting up a Twilio phone number that will receive text messages with memory addresses and values to write to these text files. First you need to create a Twilio account if you haven’t before and purchase a phone number. We will set up a Flask app to receive requests from Twilio once we configure our number. Here’s how you buy a phone number: In order to receive messages, let’s make a web app on our local machine that will respond to HTTP requests. We will use the Flask web framework for Python because it’s lightweight and easy to get running. First install Flask and Twilio using pip. We’ll do it in a virtualenv to avoid messing with anything else on your machine. If you’re unfamiliar with pip and virtualenv you can check out this awesome guide to setting up your Python environment. Navigate to your project’s directory, create a virtualenv and activate it. virtualenv venv source venv / bin / activate Then install Flask and Twilio so we can write some code. pip install flask pip install twilio == 5.7 . 0 Open a file called “app.py” in the same directory as your Lua script and try this out: from flask import Flask , request app = Flask ( __name__ ) @app.route ( '/' , methods = [ 'GET' ]) def hello_world (): return 'Hello World!' if __name__ == '__main__' : app . run ( host = '0.0.0.0' ) Now that we have a hello world Flask app, lets run it: python app . py Visit http://localhost:5000 on a web browser to make sure things are working. Let’s make a route in our app to respond to the webhook Twilio sends when messages are received. We will expect messages in the form of a four digit hex address and a two digit hex value separated by a space. This will involve using Twilio’s Python library to generate some TwiML to respond to the message. from flask import Flask , request from twilio.twiml import Response app = Flask ( __name__ ) @app.route ( '/' , methods = [ 'POST' ]) def sms_reply (): # Retrieve the body of the text message. message_body = request . form [ 'Body' ] print ( message_body ) # Create a TwiML response object to respond to the text message. resp = Response () message_response = 'Message received! Manipulating memory now.' error_message = ( 'Please enter a 4 digit hex address and a 2 digit ' 'hex value separated by a space. ' 'For example: "066D FF"' ) # Create a list of all words in the message body. message_list = message_body . split ( ' ' ) # Create a regex for matching hex Strings. hex_pattern = re . compile ( '^[0-9a-fA-F] $' ) # Make sure the message is in the right format. if not len ( message_list ) == 2 : message_response = error_message else : # The first word should be the hex address. address = message_list [ 0 ] # The second word should be the hex value to write to the address. value = message_list [ 1 ] # Check to see if the address and value are valid hexadecimal numbers. if hex_pattern . match ( address ) and hex_pattern . match ( value ): # Write the address and value to their respective text files. with open ( 'address.txt' , 'w' ) as f : f . write ( address ) with open ( 'value.txt' , 'w' ) as f : f . write ( value ) else : message_response = error_message resp . message ( message_response ) return str ( resp ) if __name__ == '__main__' : app . run ( host = '0.0.0.0' ) Now we need to expose our local environment to the Internet so Twilio can see our web app. Ngrok is a great tool for this. I would explain how ngrok works, but my buddy Kevin already wrote an awesome (and thematically relevant) post detailing this process. Once you have ngrok set up, you can run it to listen to the port that your Flask application is running on, which in our case is the default 5000. You should see a screen that looks like this with a generated link that we can visit to access our Flask app: We need to add this URL to our Twilio phone number in the account phone numbers dashboard so Twilio knows to send us an HTTP request when a text is received. Your phone number is configured, your Flask server is listening for text messages and your emulator is running with our Lua script listening to these text files. We can finally shoot a message to this Twilio number to make some real time changes to the game you are playing. To keep with our example from earlier open up your Zelda ROM in the emulator and make sure all of your code is running. Text “0600 10” to your Twilio number and this should change the music to the ending credits theme. Here is an example of a message being received and making changes to Super Mario Bros to show that this works with any game. But our princess is in another castle Here’s a twist: We didn’t just implement a Game Genie. You may have noticed that all of these arbitrary hex values don’t look like those beloved 8 character codes of days long past. All of this was just having fun hacking with low level memory manipulations. With the actual Game Genie, the gamer enters a 6 or 8 digit code of seemingly arbitrary letters. This goes through a cipher and is translated to a hex address and value. The Game Genie hardware intercepts the memory reads from the game console and responds with the value that the code represents. Here is a pretty good explanation of this process with example bits of C code. The Game Genie works by intercepting reads to the ROM. It actually isn’t messing with the RAM like we were. But idea is still the same: manipulating memory locations in the game and replacing the contents with different values to get the results we want. The Lua API actually gives us a way to bypass manually doing this. We can interact with Game Genie codes directly using emu.addgamegenie Sure we can directly add Game Genie cheats to our emulator but aren’t you glad you learned the basics of hex editing and RAM manipulation first? The journey is satisfying in the same way that playing through every level of Mario is despite the princess only being in the last castle. But now let’s get through that final castle by adding the ability to accept Game Genie codes directly via SMS. Hop back into nesms.lua and make these changes: function read_file ( filename ) input = io . open ( filename , "r" ) -- Open this file with the read flag . if input ~= nil then io . input ( input ) -- Set the input that the io library will read from . input_content = io . read () -- Read the contents of the file . io . close ( input ) -- Close the file . return input_content end return nil end prev_address = '' -- Variable to keep track of the address . prev_value = '' -- Variable to keep track of the value . prev_cheat = '' -- Variable to keep track of game genie codes . -- Infinite loop to take control over frame advancing . while true do address = read_file ( 'address.txt' ) value = read_file ( 'value.txt' ) cheat = read_file ( 'cheat.txt' ) -- Only write to memory if the value has changed . if address ~= prev_address or value ~= prev_value then hex_address = tonumber ( address , 16 ) -- Base 16 for hex values hex_value = tonumber ( value , 16 ) -- Check to see if the entered strings are valid . if hex_address == nil or hex_value == nil then emu . message ( 'Invalid address or value. Please use valid hex numbers.' ) else memory . writebyte ( hex_address , hex_value ) emu . message ( address .. ': ' .. value ) -- Print address and value being changed . end end -- Only add a game genie code if the file exists and has changed . if cheat ~= prev_cheat and cheat ~= nil then -- The emulator will already display a message if the code is invalid . cheat_added = emu . addgamegenie ( cheat ) -- Add our new Game Genie code . if cheat_added then -- cheat_added will be true if the code was valid . emu . message ( 'Cheat added: ' .. cheat ) -- Print address and value being changed . end end prev_address = address -- Update the address to keep track of changes . prev_value = value -- Update the value to keep track of changes . prev_cheat = cheat -- Update the cheat code to keep track of changes . emu . frameadvance () -- This essentially tells FCEUX to keep running . end Now our Lua script is checking cheat.txt to see if any new Game Genie codes have been added. Let’s take care of the rest by hopping back into our app.py and adding this to the Flask app: import re from flask import Flask , request from twilio.twiml import Response app = Flask ( __name__ ) @app.route ( '/' , methods = [ 'POST' ]) def sms_reply (): # Retrieve the body of the text message. message_body = request . form [ 'Body' ] print ( message_body ) # Create a TwiML response object to respond to the text message. resp = Response () message_response = 'Message received! Manipulating memory now.' error_message = ( 'Please enter a 4 digit hex address and a 2 digit ' 'hex value separated by a space. ' 'For example: "066D FF"' ) # Create a list of all words in the message body. message_list = message_body . split ( ' ' ) # Create a regex for matching hex Strings. hex_pattern = re . compile ( '^[0-9a-fA-F] $' ) # Check to see if the message is in the right format for Game Genie codes. if len ( message_body ) == 6 or len ( message_body ) == 8 : # FCEUX will determine if the code is invalid by default. with open ( 'cheat.txt' , 'w' ) as f : f . write ( message_body ) # Make sure the message is in the right format. elif not len ( message_list ) == 2 : message_response = error_message else : # The first word should be the hex address. address = message_list [ 0 ] # The second word should be the hex value to write to the address. value = message_list [ 1 ] # Check to see if the address and value are valid hexadecimal numbers. if hex_pattern . match ( address ) and hex_pattern . match ( value ): # Write the address and value to their respective text files. with open ( 'address.txt' , 'w' ) as f : f . write ( address ) with open ( 'value.txt' , 'w' ) as f : f . write ( value ) else : message_response = error_message resp . message ( message_response ) return str ( resp ) if __name__ == '__main__' : app . run ( host = '0.0.0.0' ) And with this we should be done. Run our Flask app and our Lua script again and try texting “IZLZZZ” to your Twilio number while playing Zelda. This will make it so that when you walk into walls, enemies appear. This may not end well for Link. The morning sun has vanquished the horrible night When hacking old games I feel the excitement I felt in my younger days using Game Genie to have fun with my Nintendo cartridges. Now that we’ve went over the basics of ROM/RAM hacking, I hope you can derive this same enjoyment. Like Simon Belmont as the sun rises and his hostile enemies disappear, you are now able to equip yourself. With a small Lua script running in your emulator you can hack classic games using any programming language. There are endless possibilities now that we’ve hooked up old video games to the power of the Internet. You can: Have Mario send phone calls to your ex. Exchange Bitcoin for rupees in Zelda. Have Mike Tyson order you a pizza. What crazy ideas can you think of? Check out the entire documentation for the FCEUX Lua API to get started on your own hacks. If you are curious about more of the hex editing stuff you can also see their hex editing guide. I cannot wait to see what awesome emulator extensions you build. Drop me a line if you have any questions or if you just want to show off your hack. Email: sagnew@twilio.com Twitter: @Sagnewshreds Github: Sagnew Twitch (streaming live code): Sagnewshreds Authors Sam Agnew Please enable JavaScript to view the comments powered by Disqus.

The American Family Association’s Tim Wildmon was the guest on “WallBuilders Live” today, discussing his organization’s “bigotry map,” which it recently released in response to the Southern Poverty Law Center’s decision to designate his organization as an anti-gay hate group several years ago. The AFA released this map in a desperate attempt to brand the organization’s critics as “bigoted anti-Christian zealots” for daring to point out the AFA’s own unrelenting stream of vitriolic bigotry, with Wildmon explaining that it is necessary for the AFA to fight back against the “sexual anarchists” who attack them simply because they “represent God’s message of a moral standard having to do with sexuality” in America. “One of the things that the secular humanists, secular progressives like Obama and others want to push is sexual anarchy,” he said. “They really want to force GLBT, homosexual politics on America because they hate the Christian moral standard having to do with sex because it judges some things as moral and immoral and they can’t stand that. They can’t stand God telling them how to behave. And we, as Christians in this country, represent God’s message of a moral standard having to do with sexuality and God’s word teaches that homosexuality is a sin and they can’t tolerate that. So they go after us as the messenger”

Colorado’s lenient police discipline system allows rogue officers to jump from department to department despite committing transgressions that would bar them from law enforcement jobs in many states. Michael Jimenez resigned from the Denver police force in 2008 after he allegedly had sex with a prostitute he picked up in his squad car. But that did not stop the Custer County Sheriff’s Office from hiring him in 2009. He lost that job, too, in less than a year. Then the Fowler Police Department, whose chief knew Jimenez from Denver, hired him. Jimenez never showed up for work and was later fired after pleading guilty to driving while ability impaired. Still, his certificate to work as a police officer remained active. It was not until he pleaded guilty again, this time to vehicular assault while driving drunk, that the panel that decides who can and cannot work in law enforcement in Colorado finally revoked Jimenez’s certification. Jimenez had plowed his van into a car driven by a 27-year-old man, leaving the man temporarily in a medically induced coma with a shattered pelvis and broken left leg. Jimenez, who declined comment, got pass after pass because Colorado requires a felony conviction or a conviction of one of 44 misdemeanors specified in statute to bring an end to an officer’s career in law enforcement. RELATED: How Colorado laws give fired police officers from other states a second chance here In Colorado, a police officer can be fired or resign for egregious violations of moral turpitude, such as destruction of evidence, lying under oath or excessive use of force. But so long as there is no conviction of a felony or one of the misdemeanors, the officer is free to seek employment at another agency. Small towns, eager to find officers willing to work for low pay, sometimes will hire them despite their past. “You’ve got to remember with smaller jurisdictions, down south or out east (in the state), it’s tough to get cops when you’re paying less than 20 bucks an hour,” said Tony Webb, the former Fowler police chief who hired Jimenez. “Everyone deserves one screw-up.” RELATED: Colorado Rep. to push bill against second-chance cops The Denver Post reviewed a decade of state police personnel findings as well as discipline logs at the Denver Police Department and hiring records at select agencies and found officers still working in Colorado despite serious transgressions. In some instances, these problem officers went on to commit crimes or cause harm. The extent of the problem is unknown. The Colorado attorney general’s office refused to release to The Post a state database that tracks the employment history of officers and would provide only limited information on hundreds of officers the newspaper submitted for review. The database contains information on about 9,000 law enforcement officers actively working at agencies and an additional 6,000 who are certified but are not employed in law enforcement. Colorado is one of only a handful of states to have such a high threshold for bringing an end to a career in policing. Most states will take that step for reasons short of a conviction, such as ethical violations, personnel issues or fitness for duty. Even training failures or alcohol abuse can bring an end to a law enforcement career elsewhere. At least 39 states have rules that make it easier to ensure a rogue officer never polices again. At least 18 of those states also require agencies to inform state review panels when an officer is fired or resigns — something Colorado does not do. Former Aurora Police Chief Dan Oates, now chief of the Miami Beach, Fla., Police Department, said Colorado needs to make it easier to get rid of bad officers and should do a better job tracking those with past issues. Many rural agencies in Colorado do not do thorough background checks on applicants, which takes up to 80 hours, Oates said. In Florida, Oates must inform the state review panel when an officer leaves his department and give the reason, and that information is public. Colorado only requires police agencies to annually report their rosters to the state. Colorado will not even share the employment history it does have with chiefs wanting to know about an applicant’s background. “Your employment decisions are everything, and knowing everything you can about a candidate is crucial,” Oates said. “All you have to do is look at the scrutiny on American policing in the past year to know that your people are everything.” Roger Goldman, a nationally recognized expert on officer misconduct who has helped write laws establishing state police review panels, said Colorado’s lenient rules allow unfit officers to continue doing harm. “A lot of people think, ‘Well, we have a decertification system in place, and we’ve done what we need do,’ and that’s very misleading,” Goldman said. “You have to have a vigorous statewide agency that can protect people because there are these small, underfunded police agencies that are willing to hire these cops who are not fit to be on the streets. If you can just decertify for criminal convictions, that’s worthless. You need to broaden it.” Among The Post’s findings: • At least six Denver officers who were fired or resigned amid allegations of wrongdoing in the past decade found work at other smaller agencies. • Rogue cops can negotiate to keep past transgressions secret. Nadia Gatchell was fired from the Denver police force in 2012 for lies she told superiors during an investigation into abuse of off-duty secondary employment. The officer, who previously had been disciplined in Denver for destroying marijuana evidence, was able to keep the decision to fire her out of her personnel file by agreeing to drop a Civil Service appeal. The city’s safety manager at the time, Alex Martinez, agreed to remove her dismissal letter from her personnel file and have her file reflect that she had resigned. Gatchell, who declined to comment, went on to work at the Elizabeth Police Department for about a year after her firing. Now she’s working as a parole officer for the Department of Corrections, her fourth law enforcement job. • Officers who have their certificate for police work revoked often are repeat offenders. Of the nearly 280 officers who have been decertified in the past decade in Colorado, at least 29 had past serious personnel issues or arrests. Many more likely are repeat offenders, but how many could not be determined because many agencies in the state won’t release discipline or personnel files for public review. • About a third of those 280 decertified for police work in Colorado had worked at more than one police agency. Seven of those officers had shuffled to four or more police agencies before they ended up with a conviction that brought a final end to their careers in law enforcement. • The state’s review panel, the Colorado Board of Peace Officer Standards and Training, does not always keep up with those who aren’t employed by a police agency but remain certified for law enforcement work. Patrick Strawmatt, who resigned from the Lafayette police force in 1987, was arrested at least 10 times, including one that led to a felony conviction for animal cruelty after he shot a dog to death. It wasn’t until Strawmatt was convicted in 2007 of killing two teenagers while fleeing police in a drunken-driving homicide that the state review panel revoked his certificate for police work, records show. “Second-chance cops” Some police agencies have become havens for what officials call “second-chance cops.” At the tiny Mountain View Police Department, west of Denver, The Post found six current and former officers, including the chief, who have had past personnel issues at other departments. Chief Mark Toth was charged with assault, false reporting and official misconduct as a Westminster police sergeant but was acquitted. He said he retired from Westminster after the accusations but declined to say whether he was forced out. “Because of my experience in Westminster, do I have empathy for officers? Yes,” Toth said. “In my opinion, I have a better understanding of what they went through and what they’re going through. But that’s where I draw the line. I don’t use that as an excuse to hire anyone.” Toth hired Randy Hurst, an officer fired from Denver, after he admitted to having sex with a woman in a Taco Bell restroom while on duty. Denver agreed to pay $5,000 to settle a federal lawsuit by the woman, who accused Hurst of rape. Hurst said the sex was consensual, and no criminal charges were brought. Hurst resigned from the Mountain View force in 2013. Mountain View employs Kirk Firko, fired from the State Patrol after the 2010 shooting death of a Grand Junction man. Firko kicked in the door of the home of a drunken-driving suspect, and his partner fatally shot the man. Both officers were charged, but Firko’s charges were dropped after a jury acquitted his partner. The state paid $1 million to settle a wrongful-death suit. Toth also hired Luis Rivera, fired from the Denver police force in 2010 for his involvement in a stomping that left a 16-year-old Latino with a lacerated liver, broken ribs and an injured kidney. Officials in Denver concluded Rivera and two other officers used excessive force and failed to timely disclose that force to superiors. Denver agreed to pay $885,000 to settle a lawsuit filed for the teen. Rivera no longer works in Mountain View. The state legislature tried to address the issue of police shuffling this year. A new law requires police departments to disclose to agencies seeking to hire their former officers in instances in which they had sustained violations for making “knowing misrepresentations” during their employment. But the law has loopholes. It deals only with officers who lie during internal investigations in court or on arrest affidavits. Disclosure wouldn’t be required for violations of excessive force or destruction of evidence or other violations, unless the agency found the officer lied about those acts. It will not prevent smaller agencies from hiring officers when they know about a troubled past but choose to ignore it, said one of the sponsors, state Sen. John Cooke, a Republican and former Weld County sheriff. “There are a lot of smaller agencies that will overlook a few things, unfortunately,” he said. “Shame on them for doing it.” Cooke said giving the review panel more authority could be costly for the state and burdensome to local agencies. “Arizona has 11 people who do state review investigations,” he said. “It would be a huge fiscal note to do something like that here and add people here and do hearings.” This year’s Colorado legislative efforts to add new misdemeanors to the list of offenses that could result in revocation of an officer’s certificate went nowhere. Officials at the state review panel had hoped to broaden the list of disqualifying misdemeanors, but nobody took up the cause. That means officers convicted of second-degree arson, invasion of privacy for sexual gratification, certain theft charges, some child abuse charges, patronizing a prostitute and abuse of a corpse, as well as dozens of other criminal offenses, still won’t be in danger of losing their certificate for police work in Colorado. List of rogue officers Meanwhile, the list of rogue Colorado officers getting second and third chances grows. Christopher Pinder was able to find work in law enforcement after his firing from Denver, where he had a long, troubled history. As a recruit at the Denver police academy in 2007, Pinder got in an altercation outside a bar and fled the scene, personnel records show. In 2012, he was suspended twice — both for drinking-related problems. In one case, he got drunk and ridiculed and struggled with a homeless person. Denver authorities placed Pinder on leave that year after a doctor found him unfit for duty because of depression, panic attacks and alcohol dependence. The next year, a Jefferson County sheriff’s deputy found a drunken Pinder slumped over his Jeep Wrangler’s steering wheel around midnight, records show. “Bro, I’m a cop,” Pinder told the deputy. On the way to booking, Pinder continued to plead for special treatment he said he would have given the deputy if their roles were reversed. Denver fired Pinder in 2014, but the Park County Sheriff’s Office still hired him as a deputy. “We were aware of his history in Denver, and we decided to give him a shot,” said Park County Undersheriff Monte Gore. In one instance, a mayor pleaded with the state review panel to decertify an officer, to no avail. John Cullyford, then mayor of Calhan, wrote in a 2002 letter to the board that Todd Vecellio, then chief of police of Calhan, was “not fit to be on the street” and could leave “tragedy in his wake” if allowed to remain a cop. The officer had been reprimanded three times and had once violated policy in Calhan. He had refused orders to return a $1,500 submachine gun he purchased, The Gazette in Colorado Springs reported. He had been convicted of abusing a 4-year-old girl, a conviction that earlier had cost him a job at the Pueblo Sheriff’s Office. He also had been arrested twice for domestic violence, cases that were dismissed. But the review panel was powerless to act. He had done nothing sufficient to decertify him under Colorado law. Vecellio went on to get hired as a campus police officer for the University of Colorado at Colorado Springs. During his employment there, he was arrested in an Internet sex sting in 2007. He had tried to set up sex with someone he believed to be a mother and her 13-year-old girl. It took four felony convictions on child-sex charges for the state review panel to finally revoke Vecellio’s certificate for police work. The past warning from the mayor was prescient. “We can terminate Vecellio and we will very soon,” the mayor told the state’s review panel in the letter. But other communities, the mayor said, should be kept from hiring wandering cops such as him and “becoming victimized by the Todd G. Vecellios of this world.” Christopher N. Osher: 303-954-1747, cosher@denverpost.com or twitter.com/chrisosher

This afternoon TUV launched a policy initiative entitled A Path to Making Stormont Work which can be found in full here. This is an intervention set against the backdrop of ongoing crisis – deadlock over Welfare Reform; ever increasing NHS waiting lists; rolling resignations of DUP ministers mockingly labelled as the hokey cokey; and most importantly for any democrat – murder on the streets. TUV has set out our vision – Plan A is already well known to most: “TUV has a clear vision of what will work and provide good and durable government. It is voluntary coalition with an Opposition. Such does not deny cross-community government. Indeed, the strategic use of weighted majority voting would guarantee same. “With no party big enough to govern on its own, coalition is inevitable. As elsewhere, for it to work, it must be a coalition of the willing. Those, after an election, who can agree a programme for government on the key economic and social issues and who together can command the requisite majority in the Assembly, they govern – whoever they are. Those who can’t agree – whoever they are – they form the Opposition, challenging and presenting an alternative at the next election. “To assure cross-community involvement TUV would accept a weighted majority of 60% in an Assembly vote to approve the new government and its programme. As politics further normalise it should be possible to reduce the threshold to 50 % over succeeding elections. The much abused Petition of Concern procedure should be banished, along with designations which entrench the sectarian basis of the present system.” – Jim Allister MLA, TUV Party Leader Plan B is of interest to those who foresee constant crisis, and wish to have an accountable alternative to what they are being told is the only show in town: “Today we are also putting forward a second – or Plan B – proposal, as a stop gap till parties realise voluntary coalition is the way to go. “The key to preventing the collapse of the present failed Stormont meaning the end of devolution is to salvage that which has worked and jettison that which has failed. “By its nature devolution embraces two distinct aspects: legislative devolution (exercised by the Assembly) and executive devolution (exercised by ministers). Analysis of the failure of the present Stormont throws up the obvious conclusion that it is the dimension of executive devolution which has failed. “Legislative devolution has been reasonably successful, both in processing such Bills as have been presented, including Private Member’s Bills, and in performing the scrutiny function through its committees. “Thus, in moving forward, there may be merit in building on what has succeeded, by preserving legislative devolution, while giving time for executive devolution to evolve into something workable. “The practical outworking of such an approach would be that the elected Assembly would be preserved as the legislature for transferred Northern Ireland matters, along with its important scrutiny function, but without a local executive. Executive functions would be exercised by British ministers, but with the vital distinction from the past that they would be accountable to the Assembly and their legislative programme would pass, not through Westminster, but through the Stormont Assembly. “Such a form of power sharing is not untried. Though the EU has little to recommend it, for decades the European Parliament has exercised a shared legislative function with the Council of Ministers (now, formal codecision on many matters). Indeed, there a further complicating dimension is that it is the European Commission which initiates legislation, but it processes through the Parliament and the Council of Ministers. “In practice how such would work is that the British ministers would introduce their legislation to the Assembly, it would pass through the normal processes of second stage, committee state, consideration stage and final stage, before being signed off by the Secretary of State and given Royal Assent by Her Majesty. “To cope with policy conflicts between the Assembly and Westminster and incompatible expenditure demands there would have to be a procedure of conciliation between the Assembly and the British ministers. Again such has existed for years in the EU between the Parliament and the Council of Ministers. Here the Chair of the relevant committee could act as rapporteur for the Assembly in any negotiations with the minister, with both sides statutorily bound to make determined efforts to reach consensus. “Individual MLAs would continue to have unfettered opportunity to introduce Private Member’s Bills. “As for the British ministers exercise of executive functions, these would be subject to all the scrutiny powers of the Assembly and its statutory committees, with their powers to command witnesses and papers.” – Jim Allister MLA, TUV Party Leader This policy paper is to engender debate and discussion, to demonstrate that there are alternatives that must be duly considered and even tested. The Belfast Agreement with the St Andrews Agreement tweaks have led to this point. How much longer must Northern Ireland be lumbered with the most unworkable form of government?

Sen. Amy Klobuchar Amy Jean KlobucharBernie Sanders Town Hall finishes third in cable news race, draws 1.4 million viewers Woman to undecided Biden: 'Just say yes' to 2020 bid Hillary Clinton says she 'can't imagine' running for president again MORE wants the Senate Rules Committee to get a classified briefing on allegations that Russia hacked a U.S. voting systems manufacturer ahead of the 2016 election. The Minnesota senator, who is the top Democrat on the committee, sent a letter to H.R. McMaster, President Trump's national security adviser, requesting that he meet with the panel. "As the Senate continues to investigate the full extent of Russia’s attack on our election system, it is vital that we have all of the information necessary to ensure that future elections are safeguarded from foreign interference," Klobuchar wrote in the letter. ADVERTISEMENT She added that in addition to the closed-door meeting, McMaster should consider "making information that could be helpful to protecting critical infrastructure publicly available immediately." The Intercept reported on Monday that Russian intelligence agents hacked a U.S. voting systems manufacturer in the weeks leading up to the 2016 election. Klobuchar called the report "deeply concerning" and that it "goes beyond what was outlined in the December 2016 report from 17 U.S. intelligence agencies on Russian interference in our election." [T]he extent of the attacks is much broader than has been reported so far," Warner told USA Today . "None of these actions from the Russians stopped on Election Day." The Senate Intelligence Committee is currently conducting its own investigation into Russia's election interference, including any contacts between the Trump campaign and Moscow.

NGOs and the media management Feature oi-Vicky Media strategy probably is the most important wing of any NGO which is planning on carrying out a smear campaign against a country. Apart from stage managing protests against developmental activities, the funds that pour in from the NGOs for media strategy is normally very high. After Greenpeace, the Home Ministry of India placed under watch Ford Foundation which has made some very generous donations in India including a major one to the Sabrang Communication and Publishing Private Ltd. [Why was this Greenpeace activist "offloaded"?] In fact it has been alleged that that the Ford Foundation had made two grants of 5.4 lakh dollars to Sabrang Trust and 2.9 lakh dollars to Sabrang Communication and Publishing Private Ltd respectively. Under the scanner of the Home Ministry following a complaint from the Gujarat government is how these funds were used. The probe by the Gujarat government had observed that the trust has used 80 per cent of its funds for office expenses and some objectives that are unclear. Managing the media For any NGO the media management was key. Several NGOs have used funds extensively for media conferences, the material attached to it. [Ford Foundation under watch, has a lot to answer] The intention was to convey the propaganda through the media. For instance NGOs that staged stage managed protests in areas were projects were being undertaken regularly had people to interact with the media through which they carried forward their propaganda. The material passed on to several media houses included putting up false human interest stories and also defaming the government. In journalistic banter, this stories are termed as "plants." There have also been several instances where NGOs have called many journalists and awarded them in gala functions. All this was part of the propaganda that was used by the NGOs. Fancy parties, gifts, trips abroad, facilitation and expensive gifts are all part of the modus operandi which the NGOs used to get journalists onboard. The lure of these luxuries attracted many journalists to write these NGO propagated stories and in the bargain boasted of winning awards for the same which ironically was given out by the same NGO. Everything under probe The Intelligence Bureau says that each and every aspect is under probe. The modus operandi was a big one. Like journalists, several NGOs even roped in politicians and the police. Politicians and police officials were sent invites to speak at conventions and they went ahead without realizing that this was the bait. It was important for NGOs to be in the good books of powerful and influential people. The general idea was to make it look that there was a voice of consent from powerful quarters for their propaganda. All these press clips, the speeches by politicians were part of a docket which these NGOs would prepare and circulate it. Such clippings were even taken by the volunteers of these NGOs on their trips abroad. Over there these clippings and material would be presented before Parliamentary panels and also circulated among the business class so as to show India in very poor light. Oneindia News

Indian regulators from the newly formed virtual currency committee will meet to discuss the fate of virtual currencies within the week. Ever since their initial influence on the Indian market was publicized in December 2013, virtual currencies have been a hot topic of persistent debate within the country. As a result, Indian regulators have struggled to come to a resolution about the technology. This has led to repeated denouncements of virtual currency use by the Reserve Bank of India (RBI), but it finally appears that Indian regulators are getting closer to reaching a crypto compromise. According to news publication DNA India, key members of the fledgling virtual currency committee will hold a meeting within the week to discuss the future of its regulation. In attendance will be a number of prominent figures from the committee, including vice chairman of Niti Aayog Arvind Panagariya, RBI governor Urjit Patel, Indian Securities Exchange Board chairman Ajay Tyagi, and others. The publication reports that the meeting, which was originally scheduled for Monday, will revolve around various topics regarding virtual currency use within the country, such as consumer protection and money laundering. The meeting follows the announcement of a consensus issued by the Indian Ministry of Finance that sought opinions from the public concerning the future of virtual currencies on the citizen engagement platform MyGov. The panel was open for discussion until May 31, 2017. ETHNews will continue to provide coverage on this story as it further develops.

British Columbia energy projects are in danger of missing out on billions of dollars in annual revenue owing to delays in launching exports of liquefied natural gas, a new study warns. The Fraser Institute, an economic think tank, forecasts that B.C. LNG proponents stand to reap revenue totalling $22.5-billion in 2020, if the fledgling industry were to start construction of export terminals in the province within a year or two. Getting even one project to the construction stage is proving to be difficult because of regulatory delays and a range of other factors such as protracted consultations with First Nations and project changes to address environmental concerns, said Kenneth Green, co-author of the report. Story continues below advertisement "We're hoping this study helps focus the mind on what's at stake. The B.C. government can think of what it means for royalties and First Nations can think in terms of compensation for projects passing over their lands," Mr. Green said in an interview. The B.C. Liberal government used its majority in July to push through a bill allowing the province to sign LNG agreements. The bill's passage also resulted in the ratification of a project development agreement between the government and Pacific NorthWest LNG, which is led by Malaysia's state-owned Petronas. Pacific NorthWest LNG received clearance from the B.C. Environmental Assessment Office in November, 2014, subject to certain conditions. The Canadian Environmental Assessment Agency's review of the project has been marked by delays. The federal regulator is expected to issue its final decision by early 2016. The Fraser Institute's study said that annual export revenue for LNG companies could rise to $24.8-billion in 2025, so the opportunity cost is huge. "The magnitudes of these prospective losses are substantial, a reality that should encourage policy makers to streamline the regulatory process," according to the report co-written by economist Benjamin Zycher and Mr. Green, who is the think tank's senior director of natural resources studies. Fierce global competition and weak LNG prices in Asia are other factors that could result in B.C. projects being squeezed out of starting production by 2020, Mr. Green said. The study assumes steady LNG production in the province over the long term, but it does not predict which of the 20 B.C. proposals might be the first to swing into operation. Industry analysts caution that four projects at most might come to fruition, though the province is at risk of missing the window of opportunity to enter the LNG game. Pacific NorthWest LNG, considered by analysts to be the B.C. front-runner, faces opposition from the Lax Kw'alaams, one of five Tsimshian First Nations consulted during a provincial environmental review last year. The export terminal is to be located on Lelu Island, which is next to the ecologically sensitive Flora Bank. Story continues below advertisement Story continues below advertisement Lax Kw'alaams Mayor Garry Reece said his members are adamant that Flora Bank is off-limits for development because the sandy area contains juvenile salmon habitat. Two Tsimshian groups, the Metlakatla and the Kitselas, signed term sheets that precede impact benefit agreements with Pacific NorthWest LNG in December. Metlakatla chief councillor Harold Leighton said his First Nation has concerns about the project, but the relationship with the Petronas-led group remains constructive. "We're trying to work with Petronas," he said. "There are a number of outstanding studies about the impact on fish that need to be completed." The Metlakatla invited the Lax Kw'alaams to join the newly created Tsimshian Environmental Stewardship Authority to work co-operatively on issues of concern in northwest British Columbia, but so far, the Lax Kw'alaams have declined, Mr. Leighton said. "I hope they will join," he said.

Op-Ed: Silly Sex Laws Give Rise to Laughter By By Sandy Sand Mar 21, 2009 in Lifestyle This is a fun one, and up front, I have to give credit to Thom Hartmann, who I heard read off this list of silly sex laws on his radio show, and was immediately able to find the list with a super quick Google search. Collectively, Blue Laws, orginated in the Colonial era, and were designed to regulate Sunday activities and morals. Some of the bluest of the blue were enumerated by Phil Dotree in an article in Health and Wellness. To preface his list of silly sex laws, Sex is silly. It really is. Even sillier in light of how humankind has tried to repress its own sexuality since, well, pretty much the birth of civilization. America's been one of the worst offenders. Here are some dumb-ass sex laws, complete with the dumb-ass cities and states they’re from. The opinions and comments after each law are mine. Utah has one encompassing law that should make it unnecessary to have any other sex laws, which means they might as well build a wall around the Beehive State, making it one huge jail for the entire population, because adultery, oral and anal sex and masturbation are considered sodomy and imprisonment can result in committing any of those acts. That not being enough for Utahans, in the town of Tremonton, they have a law making it illegal to have sex while in an ambulance. Even if it’s a dying request? Colorado has a law that says there shall be no kissing a sleeping woman. That must mean no playing Sleeping Beauty or hungry kids kissing mom to waken her rather than rudely jumping on the bed. In San Francisco, California, prostitutes are not obliged to make change for bills larger than $50. In today’s economy when everyone is looking for a bargain, that would be a boon for any working girl lucky enough to have a client with more than that in his pocket. In Connorsville, Wisconsin, no man can shoot off a gun while his female (note the emphasis on female) partner is in the middle of an orgasm. Whoa! You’re on you own with this one. It might get the horses all hinky in the Bay State, therefore there shall be no having sex with a rodeo clown in Massachusetts if a horse is present. They have rodeos in Massachusetts? Oh my god, no! There shall be no cursing while having sex with one’s wife in Willowdale, Oregon. I hope Sally of When Harry Met Sally salacious fame doesn't hear about that one. Here’s one to prickle the imagination. In Florida it is illegal to have sex with a porcupine. Ouch! It hurts to think how they even came up with that one. In Merryville, Missouri, there a law prohibiting women from wearing corsets, because -- and get this -- because in The Show Me state, "the privilege of admiring the curvaceous, unencumbered body of a young woman should not be denied to the normal, red-blooded American male." Ha! Must have been written by a man who never stuffed his girth into a girdle. And in Arkansas, condoms can only be sold by physicians and other medical practitioners. If Arkansas is as cash-strapped as every other state, they can start fining all the drug and convenience stores for selling them. Had enough? Or if you want more, check out Most of us know that there are laws on the books dating back to before we became the USA. Some are really silly, some are down right dumb, while others don’t come close to applying to anything regarding our modern lives, yet they remain on the books and are still enforceable.Collectively, Blue Laws, orginated in the Colonial era, and were designed to regulate Sunday activities and morals. Some of the bluest of the blue were enumerated by Phil Dotree in an article in Health and Wellness.To preface his list of silly sex laws, Dotree said:The opinions and comments after each law are mine.Utah has one encompassing law that should make it unnecessary to have any other sex laws, which means they might as well build a wall around the Beehive State, making it one huge jail for the entire population, because adultery, oral and anal sex and masturbation are considered sodomy and imprisonment can result in committing any of those acts.That not being enough for Utahans, in the town of Tremonton, they have a law making it illegal to have sex while in an ambulance. Even if it’s a dying request?Colorado has a law that says there shall be no kissing a sleeping woman. That must mean no playing Sleeping Beauty or hungry kids kissing mom to waken her rather than rudely jumping on the bed.In San Francisco, California, prostitutes are not obliged to make change for bills larger than $50. In today’s economy when everyone is looking for a bargain, that would be a boon for any working girl lucky enough to have a client with more than that in his pocket.In Connorsville, Wisconsin, no man can shoot off a gun while his female (note the emphasis on female) partner is in the middle of an orgasm. Whoa! You’re on you own with this one.It might get the horses all hinky in the Bay State, therefore there shall be no having sex with a rodeo clown in Massachusetts if a horse is present. They have rodeos in Massachusetts?Oh my god, no! There shall be no cursing while having sex with one’s wife in Willowdale, Oregon. I hope Sally of When Harry Met Sally salacious fame doesn't hear about that one.Here’s one to prickle the imagination. In Florida it is illegal to have sex with a porcupine. Ouch! It hurts to think how they even came up with that one.In Merryville, Missouri, there a law prohibiting women from wearing corsets, because -- and get this -- because in The Show Me state, "the privilege of admiring the curvaceous, unencumbered body of a young woman should not be denied to the normal, red-blooded American male." Ha! Must have been written by a man who never stuffed his girth into a girdle.And in Arkansas, condoms can only be sold by physicians and other medical practitioners. If Arkansas is as cash-strapped as every other state, they can start fining all the drug and convenience stores for selling them.Had enough? Or if you want more, check out weirdsexlaws.com This opinion article was written by an independent writer. The opinions and views expressed herein are those of the author and are not necessarily intended to reflect those of DigitalJournal.com More about Sex laws, Silly laws, Outdated laws More news from sex laws silly laws outdated laws

A Russian soldier has died a 'hero' after wiping out a band of ISIS fighters by calling in airstrikes on himself. The special forces officer was on a one-man mission to track down ISIS militants in the area around Palmyra, when he found himself surrounded by enemy fighters. Caught in a hopeless situation, he directed Russian aircraft to bomb his location, killing himself and the ISIS fighters that surrounded him. A Russian soldier died in an airstrike that he directed on himself after finding himself surrounded by ISIS militants near Palmyra. Pictured, Iraqi soldiers fire a rocket toward ISIS fighters on the outskirt of the Makhmour south of Mosul, Iraq The special forces officer was on a one-man mission to track down ISIS militants in the area around Palmyra, when he found himself surrounded by enemy fighters ‘An officer of Russian special operations forces was killed near Palmyra while carrying out a special task to direct Russian airstrikes at Islamic State group targets,’ said a spokesperson for the Russian military. ‘The officer was carrying out a combat task in Palmyra area for a week, identifying crucial ISIS targets and passing exact coordinates for strikes with Russian planes. ‘The officer died as a hero, he drew fire onto himself after being located and surrounded by terrorists.’ The Russian campaign began on September 30, but few details of the soldiers on the ground have emerged since. ISIS media claimed last week that five Russian special forces officers had been killed near Palmyra, sharing images and videos of a body. But Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov denied at the time that Russian officers were participating in the advance on Palmyra, which has been under ISIS control since May 2015. He instead claimed 'the advance is carried out by contingents of the Syrian army', with support from Russian warplanes and allied militia on the ground. ISIS have been forced into a retreat across Iraq and Syria having lost some major sections of territory Iraqi troops have launched a major offensive to recapture the strategically important town of Mosul, after Syrian forces successfully marched into Palmyra following a desert offensive Iraqi forces have won back much of the territory seized by the terror group during their 2014 blitzkrieg Moscow’s defence ministry said Russian aircraft carried out 146 strikes on ‘terrorist targets’ in the Palmyra area between Wednesday and last Sunday. It comes the day after Syrian troops entered Palmyra, with photographs emerging of Bashar al-Assad's forces within the ancient city itself. Meanwhile, the ISIS second-in-command Abdul Rahman Mustafa al-Qaduli has been killed in bombing raids in Syria. The ISIS finance minister had a $7million bounty on his head, and US defence officials have claimed his death will make it more difficult for ISIS to operate and pay its fighters. US Defence Secretary Ash Carter said US forces are 'systematically eliminating ISIL's cabinet. We killed several key ISIL terrorists this week'. Syrian troops today recaptured a mansion belonging to a member of the Qatari royal family in Palmyra Members of the Syrian Amry celebrated their victory over ISIS in the city of Palmyra earlier today He said: 'They will be replaced but we will continue to go after their leadership.' The U.S. military has killed numerous ISIS leaders in recent months. Earlier this month the Pentagon said it killed Omar al-Shishani, described as the Islamic State's 'minister of war', in an airstrike in Syria. In November, the Pentagon said an airstrike in Libya killed Abu Nabil, another top ISIS leader. The Iraqi army said Thursday its troops and allied militia had launched what is expected to be a long and difficult offensive to retake the second city of Mosul, ISIS's main hub in Iraq. The army did not say how long this phase of the operation was expected to take and Iraqi forces still look far from being in a position to take the city itself. The joint operations command is coordinating the battle by Iraqi security forces to retake the large parts of the country seized by ISIS during a lightning offensive in 2014. It comes as US Defense Secretary Ash Carter (right) announced the death of ISIS second-in-command Abdul Rahman Mustafa al-Qaduli (left) Joint Chiefs Chairman Gen. Joseph Dunford listens at left as Defence Secretary Ash Carter announced the death of the ISIS finance minister Iraqi forces have spent the last 12 months training and rearming before beginning the major offensive to retake Mosul, a key strategic hub for ISIS It includes representatives from the US-led coalition that has provided air support, training and military advisers for the Iraqi army in its fightback. Iraqi forces have scored important recent gains against ISIS, including by last month retaking Anbar provincial capital Ramadi. But Mosul - which along with Raqqa in Syria is one of the jihadists' two main hubs - would be a major prize. Experts have warned that any battle to retake the city will be difficult, given the significant number of jihadists and civilians in the city and the time ISIS has had to prepare defences.

Kevin Winter/Getty Images A white person I know and love once sent me a Bitmoji that said “Bye, Felicia,” and I stared at it for a minute, wondering what I had done wrong. The blonde cartoon posed with hands sassily on hips, the catchphrase spread playfully beneath. I felt my stomach freeze up. Slowly, it dawned on me that my friend thought she was just saying “goodbye.” I asked her about it. She had no idea at all where the phrase originated. Not knowing where something comes from is not a crime. But before responding, I spent some time thinking about how moments like this come to be. A person who never saw Friday, whose relationship to black culture is tangential at best, uses an app that furnishes lots of cute sayings. Maybe she’s seen #byefelicia in a comment on Facebook or Instagram, typed by a black woman she knows from college under a particularly ridiculous Trump quote. It seems fun and harmless, so she starts using it herself and never thinks about it again. "Bye, Felicia" is no longer a pointed moment from a meditation on hood life. It is no longer from anywhere. By the time it reaches her, it’s just something from the internet. This is what happens when bits of a culture are snatched up, repackaged, and separated from their context. It’s as though people are buying stolen goods from a reputable store. The initial crime of theft is scrubbed away, hidden behind whimsical fonts and bright colors. It is, in essence, the fencing of pilfered intellectual property. And it’s a key part of how our cultural order is maintained. If everyone in America started being really honest about how and where the language we use came from and how it got here, where would it end? What else would we have to admit was stolen? This thought came back to me the other day when I heard Meghan Trainor’s megahit single “NO” in my car. It starts with a sung intro setting up the song's narrative theme, namely that the dude fixing his face to holler at Trainor in the club is about to get all types of rejected. In fact, the scrub can’t even get a word out before she sings, “But let me stop you there.” Trainor delivers this line in a noticeably weird tone. She actively chooses to leave off the “t” sound in “but” and replaces the “th” in “there” with a “d,” making the line sound closer to bu lemme stop you dere. It sounds forced coming from her, as though she were practicing a language she just recently learned. These may come across as random and idiosyncratic vocal choices, but they are not. They are the recognized phonic conventions of African American Vernacular English (AAVE), a variety of English spoken largely, though not exclusively, by working-class and middle-class African-Americans. AAVE has been studied by linguists who cite it as a correct and complete language system with consistent internal logic and grammatical complexity. Society at large, however, still persists in treating AAVE as a sign of low intelligence, which means that people who speak it naturally are regarded as less worthy of jobs and respect. Later in the song, Trainor goes all in, straight-out singing, "I be like, nah” — that's the habitual/continuative aspect, a common feature of AAVE, for all you linguists out there. Trainor, who hails from Nantucket, noticeably loses these linguistic tics in her interviews. “Stop you dere” is such an awkward-sounding sentence coming from her that it can’t possibly be an accident. She doesn't sound like a black person when she sings; she sounds like a white person trying to talk black. Part of Trainor’s appeal is her relatability. She’s a charismatic vocalist with a knack for catchy songs full of personal empowerment and a wholesome kind of self-love. She makes the kind of music that you can imagine a drunken bachelorette party having a transcendent sing-along to in the back of a rented stretch Hummer. We return to artists like Trainor because they act and sing in ways that we wish we could; they give us the voice we wish we had. But what does it mean that Meghan Trainor’s voice is, technically, an approximated black one that comes from a white body? “NO” has more than 250 million views on YouTube. Is a black voice coming from a white face what 250 million people want? Skimming the comments raises further questions. In them, one comes across the typical bullshit — men body-shaming Trainor as though that were somehow funny or original, earnest comments thanking her for her voice and inspiration — but virtually no mention of her stilted use of black English. It makes me wonder if no one notices this kind of thing anymore in pop music, or if people notice but have concluded that it doesn’t matter. Or maybe people literally don’t know the roots of this song's style, cadence, or tone. Maybe they just think it came from the internet. Trainor isn’t the first person to suddenly develop a blaccent when the recording light comes on. (Who can forget R&B Pink?) The practice has roots so deeply woven into rock history that we usually don’t notice it. Mick Jagger, Elvis Presley, Joe Cocker, Roger Daltrey, Sting, and countless others have all been doing black imitation voices so long that in the collective imagination those sounds belong to them rather than to the blues, R&B, and reggae musicians they took them from. Perhaps no one in recent memory has gone more dramatically from white in life to black on wax than the late Amy Winehouse. The five-time Grammy winner was among the most notable of a long line of British singers (Lisa Stansfield, George Michael, Sam Smith, Adele) who not only make black music, but often enjoy crossover success with black audiences. Winehouse was recognized for her smoky soul vocal style, but more than that, she was taken seriously as a soul and R&B acolyte. Her delivery was honest and understated; her backing band was the soul-steeped Dap-Kings; her pre-show mixes were made up almost entirely of Motown and other black R&B artists. All this combined to give Winehouse perceived bona fides that largely insulated her from accusations of appropriation, or at the very least prevented such accusations from gaining traction. Her life story helped, too: Winehouse was a working-class Jewish artist from a family of musicians. Her vivid heartbreak and death by addiction resonated with our popular imagination of Billie Holiday: aching, mysterious, and indelibly blue. She seemed like someone who was honoring black culture and living its pain and beauty as part of her own truth, rather than someone cynically plundering it for financial gain. Music is a business, and the underlying issue in discussions of appropriation is frequently one of credit and ownership. Beneath one of fledgling white rapper Chris Miles's videos on YouTube, I found a commenter who understands this: “Damn,” the viewer joked, “white kids evolving." It’s darkly funny because it draws a parallel between white artists learning how to competently mimic blackness and artificial intelligence cyborgs threatening to gain sentience. There is an existential anxiety many black artists have about how long they can hold on to their work. We know, instinctively, and through centuries of experience, that America prefers black culture most when it is presented with a white face. Elvis was crowned the king of a kind of music that he took from black people. The Rolling Stones have forged a seemingly 3 billion–year career out of playing black music. And the first rap video that MTV ever allowed to air was a Blondie song. We worry that, like a dystopian clone army, once it is determined that we are not needed, once all the patterns have been learned, we will be exterminated. Another commenter on the Chris Miles video put it more directly: “Damn. Now black people have to invent a whole new genre.” For this commenter, the young MC's imitation of blackness is so spot-on that the game is now effectively over. Concerns of cultural appropriation frequently run into resistance from the “who’s the real racist” camp. For many, bringing race into a discussion of musicians just doing what they love — or taking issue with Meghan Trainor, who sings positive songs that empower people — is nothing more than haterism, or, worse, so-called "reverse racism." Implied in this is the unexamined assumption that good people don’t do racist things, which is a flawed conflation of impact and intent. Taken a step further, one might be tempted to ask, who really owns anything? I recently wrote an article about my enduring love for Sonic Youth, a band that pretty much everyone would consider to be white music. I’ve played guitar in noise bands, and probably about 80 percent of my speech, even among other black people, is not in AAVE. Am I culturally appropriating whiteness? How is my interest in things that are typically found outside of black culture any different from Meghan Trainor replacing her th’s with d’s? These kinds of defensive smokescreen arguments make it difficult to talk about race in a substantial way. There is a generous middle ground between making choices that are racially problematic and being a cross-burning Klan member. But the abject fear most people have of being called racist at all renders that middle ground inaccessible. And so racist behavior continues to take place, even at the hands of people who are basically decent. Imitating black language for the sole purposes of making money is an act of erasure. This might not be true in every single case, but it’s certainly true in the context in which artists like Trainor operate: an industry where countless black artists throughout the 20th century have had their intellectual property stolen and used to make others rich. The problem isn’t the enjoyment or even use of ideas outside of your natural milieu; the fact that people learn and grow from one another and enjoy each other’s cultures is, to state it plainly, beautiful. But black people have reason to fear that this will turn out to be an uneven trade. Some people will benefit from that exchange more than others. “NO” continues an industry tradition, going at least as far back as Janis Joplin, of white women borrowing the attitudes and style of black women as a tool for their own empowerment. And it works. The song’s message is simple: The thing you want from me is something I’ll give you if and when I feel like it. But make no mistake. You are not entitled to it. A lot of black people are left wondering what it would be like to be able to say that and have it be true.

Until relatively recently, generation of electricity with wind and solar has not been cost competitive. Growth has largely been due to subsidies and renewable energy mandates. Due to decreasing cost, wind and solar are now cost competitive with fossil fuels in favorable locations. The continuing decrease in wind and solar costs is a very positive development. However, this trend may reverse as the percentage of variable renewable energy (VRE) – energy that isn’t available on-demand but only at specific times, such as when the wind is blowing – reaches high levels. Countries such as Germany that have integrated significant amounts of wind and solar have already seen price increases. The levelized cost of electricity Comparisons of electrical generation cost are usually based on the so-called levelized cost of energy (LCOE), an estimate of the total cost of generation expressed in dollars per megawatt hour ($/WMh). The calculation includes capital costs, operating and maintenance costs and fuel cost. It is affected by assumed utilization rate and interest rates. The most widely cited levelized cost estimates are those of the U.S. Energy Information Agency (EIA) and the investment firm Lazard. Although these estimates are useful for comparison, they exclude such costs as network upgrades, integration and transmission, which can become significant as renewables penetration increases. As the International Energy Agency (IEA) put it in the context of integrating variable renewable energy, “comparison based on LCOE is no longer sufficient and can be misleading.” Levelized cost estimates are based on a large number of assumptions, not least of which is the future cost of fossil fuels. There are some differences in these estimates, with Lazard showing unsubsidized utility scale solar and onshore wind as competitive with natural gas and the EIA not. The table shows national averages. For wind and solar, location is very important; they are in places locally cheaper than natural gas combined cycle. For the purposes of this discussion, these differences are not significant. The more important point is the added cost of factors not included in the levelized cost. The sources of integration costs As described by Mark Delucchi and Mark Jacobson, “any electricity system must be able to respond to changes in demand over seconds, minutes, hours, seasons and years, and must be able to accommodate unanticipated changes in the availability of generation.” Traditionally, this is handled by base load and peak load plants, which handle the minimum load and increases above that level, respectively. This is an oversimplification, since supply is managed by the minute using a variety of sources with different response times. Wind and solar are non-dispatchable, meaning that they are not under the control of the operator. They only generate electricity when the wind blows or the sun shines. This adds integration costs, shown conceptually below. When variable sources are a small fraction of electricity supply, the cost of integration is low. The current level of deployment is below thresholds where the cost of dealing with intermittency becomes significant. There are numerous possible solutions to intermittency. These include diversification, redundancy, storage and demand shifting. That redundancy and storage add cost is obvious. Diversification also adds cost in control equipment and transmission capability between geographically separated sources. Demand shifting can theoretically lower cost by reducing the peak capacity needed. It is often discussed jointly with efficiency improvement under the term demand-side management. One issue in demand management is illustrated in this graph of daily load for a location in Australia. Solar is only available when the sun shines and peaks around midday. As solar generation increases, the average load on the remainder of the system decreases, but the peak is barely affected. Dispatchable sources must make up the difference between the midday low and the evening and morning peaks. This relationship is called the “duck curve.” Measures to shift usage from peak periods include education, jawboning, differential pricing and control of end use by the utility through the smart grid. Education, jawboning and even differential pricing have had limited success to date. Time of day pricing and end-use control require a smart grid, with attendant cost. Wind power typically will generate throughout the day, but it has its own limitations. It is less predictable, more variable over short periods than solar, may be seasonal and may need to be shut down when the wind is too strong. The graph below shows generation for one day on the island of Crete. Renewables penetration reaches a peak of 60%, accommodated by curtailment of diesel and gas generation. Even so, average annual renewable share is only 20%, and some difficulties were encountered during peak renewables generation periods. The Crete example is typical of existing systems in that balancing is done with fossil fuels. Balancing may also be done by dispatchable renewable energy, primarily hydroelectric and biomass, and with storage. What’s the best generation mix? Due to the wide variety of generating sources and unique local circumstances, there is considerable flexibility in the design of generating systems. The trade-offs in cost and environmental benefit are complex. Hundreds of studies which address increasing the share of renewables have been published. These vary greatly in scope and sophistication. Some do not include cost analysis or ignore integration costs. Adequate analysis of high levels of variable generation requires that balancing demand within short time frames be included. The sample of published scenarios below illustrates the wide range of possible combinations. Wind and solar range from less than 20% to over 80%. The mix is influenced by availability of other sources, and by ideology. Big differences result from design choices, such as whether expansion or retention of some fossil fuels are included. Accepting periods of inadequate capacity is also a factor. Most scenarios with high percentages of renewables rely on substantial reduction in growth of electricity demand. It’s questionable how realistic this is, particularly if strong growth in electric automobiles is anticipated. What is the integration threshold? There is no threshold, per se. The cost of managing intermittency is nonlinear and depends upon the mix and location of dispatchable and non-dispatchable sources, the match of local demand patterns with variable source pattern, and various other factors. Based on model studies of Germany and Indiana, Falko Ueckerdt found integration costs began to become significant at 20%. As of 2015, only four countries have variable renewable energy over 20%. Hawaii Electric recently approached 50% renewables; however, the share of wind and solar was only about 15%. Even so, they have requested a 6.9% rate increase based partly on the cost of renewables integration, and estimate the cost of grid upgrades necessary to reach 100% renewables as $8 billion. Champions of wind and solar have characterized integration cost estimates as ploys to discourage renewable energy, but integration costs are real. Isn’t it being done already? The poster child for variable renewable energy is Denmark, reported to be over 50% in 2015. Denmark’s success is often used to illustrate that high levels are readily achievable. This is misleading in that Denmark is a small country tied into the European grid. Variable wind power is balanced with hydroelectric and other sources in adjacent countries. De facto share for the system is lower. Denmark’s installed wind capacity ranks ninth among EU countries and represents less than 4% of EU. Germany’s combined wind and solar has the largest capacity in Europe and is second highest per capita. Despite Germany’s progress, the share of variable renewable energy for electrical generation is less than 25% and has been achieved at significant cost. The renewable energy surcharge is 22% of household electricity price. Even at relatively low levels of renewables share, there is a clear correlation between the share of variable renewable energy and the retail price of electricity. This is largely due to feed-in tariffs and net metering, which transfer renewable subsidies costs to the retail customer. The range of published integration cost estimates at higher shares of wind and solar is very broad and dependent upon both parameter assumptions and model structure. I will discuss these in a later post. Earl J. Ritchie is a retired energy executive and teaches a course on the oil and gas industry at the University of Houston. He has 35 years’ experience in the industry. He started as a geophysicist with Mobil Oil and subsequently worked in a variety of management and technical positions with several independent exploration and production companies. Ritchie retired as Vice President and General Manager of the offshore division of EOG Resources in 2007. Prior to his experience in the oil industry, he served at the US Air Force Special Weapons Center, providing geologic and geophysical support to nuclear research activities.

I told my best friend for years how much I hate it when females advocate against feminism because “they don’t need it” and she looked at me a bit confused and said “We dont?” As in we don’t need feminism. I thought about finding new friends… No. I will not let her go down like that. I will educate her. It may be rocky and slow at first, but I will not let her suffer from blind inequality. Just today she said she wanted to work at a store that sold construction supplies or something like that because she’s studying to be an engineer and she wanted to familiarise herself with that industry. They told her no outright because she was a girl. I had to open her eyes at how serious that was by telling her to call the police on them. It’s illegal to not hire someone because of his/her gender - at least where I’m from; I know my rights. Sure you can say that you’d prefer a male, but you can’t tell me no because I’m not a male. That’s like me telling a boy he can’t work in my retail clothing store because he’s a boy. Sure, boys don’t usually wear “girl’s” clothes so they can’t help my customers, and I can assume that he has no idea how to fold a shirt for the shelf, but that doesn’t mean I shouldn’t hire him based on those assumptions. Still waiting for this world to change.

DETROIT — Eugene Melnyk has shared more details about his life-saving liver transplant. Melnyk has written a piece for The Players’ Tribune, posted Monday, about the shock of learning he needed a new liver from Dr. Atul Humar at the Toronto’s University Health Network, and what he went through when he first arrived at the hospital in January, 2015 until he had the procedure in May, 2015. Melnyk told The Players’ Tribune the thought of needing a transplant never crossed his mind when he was told by the doctors how ill he really was. “Liver transplant. Those were two words that I just never expected to hear. There wasn’t much room for interpretation anymore,” Melnyk said in the article. “My first thought — my immediate gut reaction —was to dismiss it all. Like, come on, this has to be some kind of joke.” Melnyk said he didn’t want to do the public plea for a liver that was launched in late-May and resulted in the anonymous donor that save his life. “At that point, I had only a matter of days left, which is when my associates told me that my options were to either make a public plea for a living donor or die,” Melnyk said. “To me, it didn’t seem worth it to ask. I’d kept everything private up to that point, and I didn’t want to court sympathy. The whole process had taken such a toll on me physically and emotionally that it had sapped me of my will to live. “So I prepared to die. I began making arrangements to sort out my estate with my lawyer. And for the first time, I thought about how I was going to say goodbye to the people I loved. All of this was taking place at the same time that my beloved Ottawa Senators went on a wild winning streak to make the playoffs in 2015. Did I care? Absolutely. Could I stay up to watch the games? No. All my focus was on getting a liver.” Melnyk said his daughters, Anne and Olivia, changed his mind about whether the club should go public or not. “If all the decisions had been left up to me, I probably would have died shortly after that. But my life wasn’t just about me,” Melnyk wrote. “As I said before, my kids are smart. They knew what was going on, and they knew that their dad was ready to quit. And my daughters, Anna and little Olivia, weren’t going to accept that. “When they found out I wasn’t going to go public searching for a donor, they did something that made me very proud. They took control of the situation. I’ll never forget lying there while a 12-year-old girl was admonishing me. Olivia said, with tears in her eyes, ‘Dad, you can refuse to ask for help and die, or you can try to live and raise us. You need to choose to be our dad.’ ” Part of the reason Melnyk penned the article was to bring attention to The Organ Project he launched in February. He has worked hard to bring more awareness to organ donation so that people aren’t forced to go through what he had to endure. He held a fundraiser for the cause in Toronto last week with singer Carrie Underwood as a special guest and by all accounts it was a huge success. He also sent a message to the anonymous donor. “Before the surgery, I was informed that my donor had told the surgeon to send me one (remarkably Canadian) message: ‘I’d like to remain anonymous, but please tell Eugene I want him to bring a Stanley Cup to Ottawa,’ ” Melnyk said. “To whoever saved my life, I just want you know that your kindness has touched me in a way that I feel I can never repay. “But I’m working on it.”

Acunetix AcuSensor Technology is a new security technology that allows you to identify more vulnerabilities than a traditional Web Application Scanner, whilst generating less false positives. In addition it indicates exactly where in your code the vulnerability is and reports also debug information. Acunetix is a proprietary (and expensive) web application scanner, than can uses a server-side injector to improve vulnerabilities discovery. Burp has a similar feature called the Infiltrator, but unfortunately, it only works on Java and .Net, by patching the bytecode. This made me wonder how could Acunetix instrument php code, since it's not possible (by default) to override functions in php. This article is about the acusensor from Acunetix 10.5, but it should work for newer versions, since it seems that it isn't updated (nor maintained) that often. To use the Acusensor, one just has to obtain a file named acu_phpaspect.php from Acunetix, somewhere in its options, put it somewhere accessible on the filesystem by the php process, add the auto_prepend_file="/path/to/acu_phpaspect.php" directive to the php.ini file, and that's it, Acunetix will take advantage of server-side code-instrumentation. The acu_phpaspect.php code is lightly obfuscated (variables and functions are all a variation of _AAS\d+ , no spaces nor comments, …), and it looks like it isn't really maintained, since it didn't changed that much between Acunetix 9 and the latest available version. It's also missing a lot of potentially dangerous functions, and doesn't support modern (as in "OOP") SQL drivers (With the sole and notable exception of the MySQLi->query method.). I think that I have found a couple of logic bugs that could prevent proper vulnerability discovery, some DoS, but nothing remotely exploitable to pop the server (otherwise I won't be publishing this articles ;)). Contrary to Burp Infiltrator, there is no bug notice about not deploying this kind of black-magic on production system on one's website. To prevent unintended access, it's using a simple password protection: <?php if ( strtolower ( basename ( $_SERVER [ "SCRIPT_FILENAME" ])) === strtolower ( basename ( __FILE__ ))) { header ( "HTTP/1.0 404 Not found" ); die (); } $_ENV [ '_AAS0' ] = ( isset ( $_SERVER [ "HTTP_ACUNETIX_ASPECT" ]) && $_SERVER [ "HTTP_ACUNETIX_ASPECT" ] === "enabled" ); if ( $_ENV [ '_AAS0' ]) { $_ENV [ '_AAS0' ] = false ; if ( isset ( $_SERVER [ "HTTP_ACUNETIX_ASPECT_PASSWORD" ])) { $_AAS1 = fopen ( __FILE__ , 'r' ); fseek ( $_AAS1 , - 32 , SEEK_END ); $_ENV [ "_AAS2" ] = stream_get_contents ( $_AAS1 , 32 ); unset ( $_AAS1 ); $_ENV [ '_AAS0' ] = $_SERVER [ "HTTP_ACUNETIX_ASPECT_PASSWORD" ] === $_ENV [ "_AAS2" ]; } } [ … ] __halt_compiler (); 9065 ce82caa61f599de0745ee6191abd So to trigger its activation, you have to send the right headers ( HTTP_ACUNETIX_ASPECT: enabled and HTTP_ACUNETIX_ASPECT_PASSWORD: password ). It would seem that versions 11 and above automatically issue a password for you (in the demo version, it's always password , or acunetix ). If you do possess the non-demo version, feel free to send it to me check how the password is generated ;) The password is stored at the end of the file, as an md5. Surprisingly, the sent password isn't passed to the md5 function before being compared to the expected value: the client is directly sending the hash. The comparison is done in non-constant time, likely allowing intelligent bruteforce attacks, but since php uses a lot of black magic caching, I didn't manage to come with a reliably working proof of concept, on both php5 and php7, but I would be happy to be proved wrong. There is a third header that can be used to retrieve additional information about the application: ACUNETIX-ASPECT-QUERIES . It takes options separated by ; , currently only two: filelist : to get a list of every single file (not only .php ones) under the current root. It doesn't check for upward symlinks, and works in a recursive manner. : to get a list of every single file (not only ones) under the current root. It doesn't check for upward symlinks, and works in a recursive manner. aspectalerts : to get a list of security-sensitive configuration options: display_errors , register_globals , magic_quotes_gpc , allow_url_fopen , allow_url_include , session.use_trans_sid , open_basedir , enable_dl and php_version . The acu_phpaspect.php file is prepended to every php file, and will, for each file: Get its content Check if the file is already present in the acusensor's cache (more about that later), and if it is, it'll simply return the content of this cache, instead of pursuing any further. Use the token_get_all php function to tokenize the whole file. For each token, in a switch-case loop, inject wrappers around interesting tokens, like T_INCLUDE / T_INCLUDE_ONCE / T_REQUIRE / T_REQUIRE_ONCE (for arbitrary includes), T_EVAL (for arbitrary code execution), and so on, to monitor when and where they are called, and to inspect their parameters. The later being set to various variations of ACUSTART and ACUEND , with variations to detect file creation/suppression, so that the acusensor can detect how much they are mangled/controllable. The file is eval 'ed, and the output is printed. The execution stops here: the original file is never interpreted. The acusensor is instrumenting something like 70 functions, from classic ones like preg_replace exec , or system , to exotic ones like sybase_query , sesam_query or maxdb_real_query , but doesn't care about assert , proc_open , extract , ini_set , … it seems that the developers aren't aware of what one can inadvertently do with those function ;) Lets take an example. A script like this: <?php if ( isset ( $_GET [ 'a' ])) echo system ( $_GET [ 'a' ]); will be instrumented like this: <?php if ( isset ( $_GET [ _AAS91 ( "/tmp/acusensor/test.php" , 2 , " \$ _GET" , 'a' )])) echo _AAS86 ( "/tmp/acusensor/test.php" , 3 , "system" , Array ( $_GET [ _AAS91 ( "/tmp/acusensor/test.php" , 3 , " \$ _GET" , 'a' )])); return true ; Communication between the acusensor and acunetix is done by means of embedded comments of the form <!--ACUASPECT:the_data_encoded_in_base64--> , with the payload encoded in a len \| value or type_len \| type \| len \| value serialization format: $ ~/dev/acusensor curl '127.0.0.1:8080/index.php?a=uptime' -H 'Acunetix-Aspect: enabled' -H 'Acunetix-Aspect-Password: 9065ce82caa61f599de0745ee6191abd' <!--ACUASPECT:MDAwMDAwMDRQT05HbjAwMDAwMDAwMDAwMDAwMDBu--> 15 :32:27 up 5 :17, 9 users, load average: 0 .55, 0 .40, 0 .39 15 :32:27 up 5 :17, 9 users, load average: 0 .55, 0 .40, 0 .39<!--ACUASPECT: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 = --> The first encoded part is simply to signal to Acunetix that the Acusensor is here and working, it decodes as 00000004PONGn0000000000000000n . This part is only used by the wizard: it's completely ignored (and doesn't even have to be present) for the actual scan. The second one is a bit more complex; a concatenation of structures, indicating the type of alert, the filename, human-readable message, the line number, parameters, … 0000000AVar_Accessa0000000200000003GET00000001a00000025/home/jvoisin/dev/acusensor/index.php00000003n0000000AVar_Accessa0000000200000003GET00000001a00000025/home/jvoisin/dev/acusensor/index.php00000004n0000000BSys_Commanda0000000100000006uptime00000025/home/jvoisin/dev/acusensor/index.php00000005a0000000100000014"system" was called.0000000AVar_Accessa0000000200000003GET00000001b00000025/home/jvoisin/dev/acusensor/index.php00000007n0000000AVar_Accessa0000000200000003GET00000001c00000025/home/jvoisin/dev/acusensor/index.php0000000An A simple state machine implementation to decode this mess format is provided at the end of the article. Since Acunetix is written (mostly) in Delphi, it shouldn't be prone to buffer-overflow, but I haven't checked what's happening when some fields are longer/shorter than what they're supposed to be. To avoid systematically reparsing every file, the acusensor stores instrumented files in a cache folder, either the return value of sys_get_temp_dir , realpath($_ENV['TMP']) , realpath($_ENV['TMPDIR']) , realpath($_ENV['TEMP']) , tempnam(md5(uniqid(rand(), false)), "") (also know as military-grade randomness generation), and in files named _AAS166 .md5($source_code . $filename) . Those files are never removed, aren't ending with .php , and are readable by everyone. I wrote a simple'n'stupid Python client to play around with the acusensor, which was greatly improved by nextgens. It is able to bruteforce the acusensor password, grab directory listing, show php configuration variables, and of course, find some vulnerabilities: $ python client.py http://127.0.0.1:8080/ [ + ] Checking if the acusensor is enabled on http://127.0.0.1:8080/ [ * ] Acusensor detected ( password: 9065ce82caa61f599de0745ee6191abd ) [ + ] Trying to get controllable variables at /: - $_GET [ "a" ] - $_GET [ "b" ] [ + ] Sending payloads for each variable... - $_GET [ "a" ] - $_GET [ "b" ] [ + ] Vulnerabilities: - "unserialize" was called. in /home/jvoisin/dev/acusensor/index.php:8 with $_GET [ "b" ] set to "ACUSTART" as parameter ( Unserialize ) - "system" was called. in /home/jvoisin/dev/acusensor/index.php:5 with $_GET [ "a" ] set to "ACUSTART" as parameter ( Sys_Command ) $ when run on this file: <?php $c = 'id' ; if ( isset ( $_GET [ 'a' ])) $c = $_GET [ 'a' ]; echo system ( $c ); if ( isset ( $_GET [ 'b' ])) echo unserialize ( $_GET [ 'b' ]); You can download the deobfuscated version of the acusensor for research purposes here. It would also be a great idea to write some (public) Burp integration for it. This is an update of the blogpost, since I gave a quick (private) talk about the Acusensor, I checked if anything changed in two years. The only changes are related to the configuration settings checks. For example, display_error used to trigger an alert if it was set to 1 , now it does if it's different from 0 . Issues about on / On / 1 not being correctly detected have also been fixed. I'm a bit disappointed that Acunetix doesn't invest a bit more into this technology, because I'm quite sure that with some improvements, it could become a game-changer.

Hooooooooooly moly this made my head hurt so muuuuch. Originally I was just going to draw Rikku. I often do when I'm bored. I ended up drawing the whole YRP team and things just sort of spiralled out of control. ~;; I guess my subconscious really wanted to celebrate the remastering of FFX and FFX-2!!A-anyway. I got scared when I thought about inking it since there are so many things I could mess up. I'm not usually all that happy with what I draw but I really liked this. The paper isn't what I would normally use either (it's coarser and more like construction paper). I figured I should at least scan the lineart first. I had to use the office scanner and everything.Sorry, coworkers... ;;orzHopefully I'll be able to ink and colour soon, so... wish me luck!EDIT: Realized I'd made a pretty embarrassing error on Yuna's right hand, so I fixed it. Enjoy.EDIT 2: The very excellent has uploaded a shiny happy lineart version of this! You can see it here:

“This is a very serious conflict of interest,” said James A. Thurber, a former Congressional aide who has helped revise ethics rules and is now director of the Center for Congressional and Presidential Studies at American University. “There is an official use of power here to help him and the family — and I think that is unethical.” Ms. Berkley declined an interview request for this article. But in a statement, she said she was an advocate for a broad range of health care causes and had never acted specifically to help her husband’s practice. “I won’t stop fighting to give Nevadans access to affordable health care just because my husband is a doctor, just like I won’t stop standing up for veterans because my father served in World War II,” she said. Dr. Lehrner, though, said he was unabashed about pressing his wife on issues that were important to his practice. “She is definitely aware of my positions, and the R.P.A.’s positions,” he said in an interview, referring to the Renal Physicians Association, the trade group he has helped run. “We talk politics all the time. We talk medicine.” Congressional ethics rules are murky — lawmakers can take steps that financially benefit a spouse as long as the benefit is broadly available and there is no “improper exercise of official influence.” Lobbying of lawmakers by their spouses is prohibited, but there is no ban on spouses’ informally acting as industry advocates, like Dr. Lehrner, who is not a registered lobbyist. Photo The intermingling of Ms. Berkley’s public and private life, though, is striking even among her peers on Capitol Hill, and surfaced in an examination by The New York Times of how lawmakers forge particularly close ties to industries with an agenda in Washington. Advertisement Continue reading the main story As Ms. Berkley has pushed the cause of kidney care in Congress, her husband’s practice has boomed, thanks in part to his joint ownership of dialysis centers with DaVita, a giant in the industry and one of Ms. Berkley’s biggest campaign contributors. She is one of the richest members of Congress, as she or her husband hold assets valued from $7 million to $23 million, according to her most recent financial disclosure forms. Now running for the Senate seat held by John Ensign until his resignation this spring amid an ethics scandal, Ms. Berkley drives around Nevada in a white Ford Fusion (“ United States Congresswoman 1” reads her license plate, referring to her Congressional district). She often talks about her modest upbringing, in which she ate at Taco Bell while scraping by as a cocktail waitress at a casino resort hotel here. She also frequently mentions her husband’s work — she delivered a “certificate of Congressional recognition” at the ribbon cutting of his latest dialysis center last year — and cites his experiences as evidence for why Congress must act to change federal laws or policy. “I’m sure he didn’t think in medical school that in his 60s he still would be taking calls on the weekends, but that’s the reality of the situation when you don’t have enough nephrologists to care for the population that you’re living in,” Ms. Berkley said at a House hearing in 2009, at which she pushed for higher federal reimbursements for medical specialists like her husband. Concerns About Care Shawn Rowlett, 40, showed up at the University Medical Center with his wife, pale and weak, four days after he had been discharged from the hospital’s transplant center with a new kidney in February 2008. But now he was hemorrhaging, medical records show. After seeing the hospital’s chief transplant surgeon, Mr. Rowlett was left in the emergency room for five hours before being admitted, according to his wife, Dionne Rowlett. He died less than two hours later, court records show. “The care was just horrible,” Ms. Rowlett said in a recent interview, shortly after the hospital settled a malpractice suit for $77,500 — the maximum amount allowed in Nevada because of a cap on malpractice payments from public hospitals. (Dr. Lehrner and his practice were not named in the lawsuit.) Mr. Rowlett’s death and four recent others in the first year after the surgery, as well as 10 transplant failures, were part of a troubling pattern — the death and failure rates were more than twice the expected level. That led the federal Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services to issue an order to revoke the certification for the hospital’s transplant program — which does about 50 transplants a year — and cut off Medicare financing, effectively shutting the program down. Advertisement Continue reading the main story Brian G. Brannman, the medical center’s chief executive, acknowledged that the program was in disarray back then. In a recent interview, he said the hospital was mostly to blame, as its lone transplant surgeon had not been provided with a sufficient support system. Federal regulators also questioned the qualifications of the physician whom Dr. Lehrner and his partners had assigned to help screen transplant patients, leading the hospital to acknowledge in writing that he “was not formally trained in transplantation.” Desperate for a second chance, hospital officials appealed to members of the Nevada Congressional delegation. Ms. Berkley sent a letter, signed by two other lawmakers, warning that cutting off money would “jeopardize the health of hundreds” of constituents. She and the other lawmakers helped set up a series of conference calls between hospital and Medicare officials. Photo Soon after, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, for the first time, agreed to override provisions that would have required decertifying the program. In exchange, the hospital promised to remedy the problems. “I spoke to the head of C.M.S. yesterday,” Ms. Berkley told local television reporters in announcing the breakthrough. “When I got off the phone, I had a good-faith belief that we were going to come up with a compromise that works for everybody.” Kerry Weems, then the agency’s acting administrator, said he recalled speaking with Ms. Berkley and Jon Porter, then a Republican House member from Nevada, about the program. Mr. Weems could not recall if Ms. Berkley mentioned her husband’s ties to the hospital. But he said he would have approved the agreement anyway. 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. “You want to find a way to ‘yes’ — not based on any individual stake that a Congress person might have,” said Mr. Weems, who recently left the agency. “But this really was the only transplant center in Nevada.” Part of the deal involved significantly expanding the staff of kidney specialists. The hospital turned to Ms. Berkley’s husband to recruit two transplant nephrologists, who, Mr. Brannman said, work more directly with the hospital’s new transplant surgeon. Mr. Brannman said the selection of Dr. Lehrner’s practice — it was the sole bidder for the contract renewed in December 2010, which increased annual fees by 25 percent — had nothing to do with Ms. Berkley, whom he said he did not know well. The various staffing changes have significantly improved the transplant program’s performance in recent years, according to Mr. Brannman and federal officials. Jessica Mackler, Ms. Berkley’s campaign manager, said the congresswoman had no conflict of interest when she intervened, because the money the hospital uses to pay her husband does not directly come from the federal government, and other members of the state’s Congressional delegation were involved in the effort to save the transplant program. Advertisement Continue reading the main story “There really is no issue here,” Ms. Mackler said. But Mr. Reems, the former Medicare official, is not so sure, given Ms. Berkley’s record of interventions on kidney care issues. “You never want questions being raised,” he said, “and that means you need to try to avoid any move that makes you seem anything less than an impartial public servant.” Overlapping Agendas At the annual conference of the Renal Physicians Association in Austin , Tex., in 2008, Dr. Lehrner showed a slide of a smiley-faced doctor with a screw being forced into his mouth, and then ticked off a list of steps the group could take to fight cost control efforts in Washington. “We have been screwed by our policy makers for 20 years,” he told the crowd. “Only you can prevent the destruction of our profession.” Photo The doctors, he said, could donate money directly to members of Congress, volunteer on their campaigns, contribute to the political action committee that he had helped build at the Renal Physicians Association and travel to Washington to personally appeal to lawmakers, as he himself does. Dr. Lehrner added one more option to the list. “Marry an elected official,” he said, evoking laughter. He may have been joking, but Ms. Berkley, 60, who was first elected in 1998 — a year before she and Dr. Lehrner married — has been largely sympathetic to the doctors’ cause. The Medicare system spends an estimated $27 billion a year, or about 6 percent of overall Medicare spending, to help some of the approximately 550,000 Americans who have so-called end-stage kidney disease . It is the only chronic disease in which the most severely ill patients get nearly free care, regardless of age. Advertisement Continue reading the main story But Congress and federal regulators, alarmed over the surging costs, have sought to control spending in recent years, provoking protests from Dr. Lehrner and the physicians’ association, as well as the drug companies and dialysis operators that dominate the industry. When Dr. Lehrner assumed a series of leadership roles at the renal physicians group, Ms. Berkley’s agenda in Washington started to overlap with her husband’s. He became the single biggest contributor to the association’s political action committee, while also serving as its chairman. And she has received the largest share of its contributions, totaling $7,000 since 2007. Over all, kidney care doctors, companies and lobbyists have donated at least $140,000 to Ms. Berkley’s Congressional campaigns. Dr. Lehrner’s flourishing practice now includes 21 doctors who work out of seven offices in the Las Vegas area, as well as 11 dialysis centers, 10 of them run in a joint venture, started in 2003, with DaVita. He is a paid national speaker for and has received research grants from Amgen , a major supplier of drugs to dialysis centers. The activities of these interest groups are closely aligned at times. In early February 2008, for example, Ms. Berkley received a series of campaign contributions, first $1,000 from Amgen, then $2,000 from Kidney Care Partners, a trade group backed by Amgen and DaVita, then $3,000 from DaVita, and then $1,000 from Dr. Lehrner’s group, the Renal Physicians. The day that two of those checks were delivered, Ms. Berkley sent a letter to Representative Pete Stark, Democrat of California , then chairman of the House Ways and Means subcommittee with jurisdiction over Medicare, warning him to move carefully in considering changes in compensating doctors who provided dialysis treatments. Echoing concerns raised by the industry, the congresswoman said she worried that patient access to care could be affected. “While I support initiatives to improve quality and efficiency in Medicare, I do not believe that these efficiencies should come at the cost of patient well being,” Ms. Berkley wrote, without mentioning her husband’s interest in the matter. Regulators moved ahead with the new reimbursement system, although it was adjusted in a way that the dialysis and drug companies ultimately embraced. This year, after Medicaid threatened to cut 3.1 percent of the money for dialysis — to save an estimated $250 million annually — Ms. Berkley led an effort in the House to oppose the cut. Less than a month later, the agency reversed its position, winning Ms. Berkley a personal thanks from industry leaders in press releases and new campaign donations. “She is highly knowledgeable about this complicated and critical area of health care that impacts millions of Americans,” Skip Thurman, a DaVita spokesman said in a written statement, of the company’s donations — which have accelerated as Ms. Berkley runs for the Senate. “The kidney community’s support of her is entirely appropriate.”

Across the Middle East and South-East Asia, Islamic financial institutions hold aggregated assets estimated to be worth $50 billion. To some, this cash-rich sector represents a huge opportunity for growth and investment. But perhaps, what Islamic banks can really offer is a set of guiding principles that can enhance financial stability, four years after the crisis. Given they are barred from charging interest and must abide by a strict religious code, Islamic financial institutions are often dismissed by sophisticated western bankers as living in the dark ages. However, according to a couple of recent major reports, shariah-compliant financial institutions are not only coming of age, but also have much to teach their western counterparts. In a report, Empowering Risk Intelligence in Islamic Finance: Managing Risk in Uncertain times, Deloitte’s Islamic Finance Knowledge Center said that the approach to risk management used in Islamic finance has more in common with the western approach than is often assumed. The report – based on a survey of 20 Islamic financial institutions located across the Middle East and South-East Asia, which have aggregate assets of $50 billion – suggested that Islamic finance, a cash-rich sector, has much to teach the west's financial system, which has yet to fully recover from the near-death experiences of 2007-09. The Empowering Risk Intelligence report found that Islamic financial institutions came late to adopting formal approaches to risk management. 79% of respondents had established their risk-management departments in the past five years, with only 5% having a risk management department prior to 2002. But things are changing, and fast. The report found that 83% of Islamic finance firms today have both a formal risk-management function and a risk committee responsible for overseeing all risks. Related: Islamic Finance Related: Islamic Banking and Islamic Banks Yet Deloitte acknowledged there is room for improvement in the risk management area. Key risk-management and regulatory challenges facing the Islamic sector include that two-thirds of Islamic financial institutions don't have any external credit rating, and that only 25% have considered or received an external rating from a specialist Islamic rating agency such the Bahrain-based Islamic International Rating Agency. The report said: This constitutes a real challenge posed to industry participants and standard-setters such as the [Kuala Lumpur-based] Islamic Financial Services Board, [Bahrain-based] Accounting & Auditing Organization for Islamic Financial Institutions (AAOIFI), [Bahrain-based] International Islamic Financial Market (IIFM) and the Islamic International Rating Agency (IIRA), to enforce best practices. This constitutes a real challenge posed to industry participants and standard-setters such as the [Kuala Lumpur-based] Islamic Financial Services Board, [Bahrain-based] Accounting & Auditing Organization for Islamic Financial Institutions (AAOIFI), [Bahrain-based] International Islamic Financial Market (IIFM) and the Islamic International Rating Agency (IIRA), to enforce best practices. The report suggested that the main causes of shariah-compliance risks include non-standardized practices, diverse interpretations of shariah law, and the fact shariah laws are unenforced in many jurisdictions. Dr Hatim El Tahir, director of Deloitte’s Middle East Islamic Finance Knowledge Center, said: One thing is certain – the traditional operations and management of Islamic finance will need to change. Institutions offering Islamic financial services around the globe will not only need to deal with risk management but will also need operational effectiveness and a skilled workforce to empower risk intelligence in Islamic finance. One thing is certain – the traditional operations and management of Islamic finance will need to change. Institutions offering Islamic financial services around the globe will not only need to deal with risk management but will also need operational effectiveness and a skilled workforce to empower risk intelligence in Islamic finance. The Deloitte findings came as an op-ed published by Project Syndicate, The Challenge of Islamic Finance, sang the praises of Islamic finance and suggested it has an important role in counter-balancing the bonus-fuelled procyclicality and morally hazardous nature of western finance. Authors Andrew Sheng, ex-chairman of the Hong Kong Securities & Futures Commission (and one of the voices of sanity in the movie Inside Job) and Ajit Singh, emeritus professor of economics at Cambridge University, said there is growing convergence between Islamic and western finance. Despite skepticism regarding accommodation between Islamic and global finance, leading banks are buying Islamic bonds (also known as sukuk) and forming subsidiaries specifically to conduct Islamic finance. Special laws have been enacted in non-Muslim financial centers – London, Singapore, and Hong Kong – to facilitate the operation of Islamic banks and associated financial institutions. Despite skepticism regarding accommodation between Islamic and global finance, leading banks are buying Islamic bonds (also known as sukuk) and forming subsidiaries specifically to conduct Islamic finance. Special laws have been enacted in non-Muslim financial centers – London, Singapore, and Hong Kong – to facilitate the operation of Islamic banks and associated financial institutions. Read the full story by Andrew Sheng and Ajit Singh here on EconomyWatch. Sheng and Singh argued that Islamic finance, already a $3 trillion sector, has an important role to play in improving the ethical framework of western-style finance (which, as everyone other than bankers and financiers recognizes, seriously lost its way during the credit bubble of 1999-2007). They suggested that if the ethical values in Islamic finance, rooted as they are in shariah religious law, could: "further deter moral hazard and the abuse of fiduciary duties by financial institutions, Islamic finance could prove to be a serious alternative to current models of derivative finance." The test of any alternative financial system depends ultimately on whether it is – or can be – more efficient, ethical, stable, and adaptable than the prevailing system. For now, there is no Islamic global reserve currency and no lender of last resort. But the Islamic world is the custodian of huge natural resources that back its trading and financial activities. The test of any alternative financial system depends ultimately on whether it is – or can be – more efficient, ethical, stable, and adaptable than the prevailing system. For now, there is no Islamic global reserve currency and no lender of last resort. But the Islamic world is the custodian of huge natural resources that back its trading and financial activities. If the scenario outlined by Sheng and Singh is correct, prepare for the centre of gravity of global finance to shift from London and New York to the Gulf and Kuala Lumpur. Related Story: Can Consumers & Taxpayers Be Saved From The Bonus-Crazed Financial Sector? Related News: EU Agrees To Stricter Bank Rules By Ian Fraser Ian Fraser, a journalist since 1988, is working on programmes about the banking and financial crisis for the BBC. He writes about business and finance for the Financial Times, the Sunday Times, the Independent on Sunday, the Daily Mail, and the Mail on Sunday. The West has much to learn from Islamic finance is republished with permission from the QFinance Blog. Get the QFinance Dictionary of Business and Finance iOS app for a comprehensive guide to financial terms and expressions. Get more special features from the world's top economists in your inbox. Subscribe to our newsletter for alerts and daily updates.

Click to email this to a friend (Opens in new window) Click to share on Twitter (Opens in new window) Click to share on Facebook (Opens in new window) LuAnn de Lesseps’ marriage to businessman Tom D’Agostino is over after just seven months, Page Six has learned exclusively. We’re told the pair filed jointly for divorce in Sag Harbor, Long Island, on Thursday after a tumultuous romance. We reported last month that the pair had got into a physical confrontation in a New York restaurant — during which de Lesseps slapped her husband — and that the marriage was hanging by a thread. (De Lesseps denied slapping D’Agostino, calling it a “love tap” amidst the blowout fight.) De Lesseps, 52, claimed that they just have a passionate relationship and that they were working through their issues. A source tells us that D’Agostino, 50, who founded a printing business, quickly tired of the “reality TV lifestyle.” “He used to live this really nice life in the city,” we’re told. “He’s a private person and all of a sudden he was living this crazy celebrity life.” “He loved the nurse from Connecticut [De Lesseps was once a nurse], not the reality TV star,” said the source. “Countess” LuAnn wed D’Agostino, her second husband, in a glitzy New Year’s Eve ceremony in Palm Beach amid much media attention. But we’re told that since the beginning of the marriage — which began in the shadow of D’Agostino’s infidelity — they have broken up and gotten back together a number of times. We’re told the twosome has been fighting a lot and that D’Agostino is getting sick and tired of the drama. Her relationship with D’Agostino got off to a bumpy start after it was revealed — shortly after they began dating in late 2015 — that he had previously dated “Real Housewives” co-stars Ramona Singer and Sonja Morgan. Many were surprised that de Lesseps went through with the wedding after co-star Bethenny Frankel showed de Lesseps photographs of D’Agostino kissing his ex-girlfriend at the Regency Hotel on the night before their February 2016 engagement party. She later told People, “It felt like someone ripped my heart out of my chest.” But “I’m not going to let a stupid kiss ruin the rest of my life … He screwed up. What he did was wrong. But this wasn’t premeditated. It wasn’t an affair. It was a mistake.” A rep for de Lesseps did not return a request for comment, while a rep for D’Agostino declined to comment. De Lesseps tweeted the news on Thursday afternoon. Tom and LuAnn in happier times:

The state government has been accused of diluting a promise to replace thousands of existing trees lost to be uprooted for Westconnex with saplings no taller than ballpoint pens. While it is yet to provide final designs, the government plans to link the M4 and M5 tollways with an interchange up to 65 metres deep and with three levels of tunnels in the inner-west. A contractor removing trees at Sydney Park to make way for the WestConnex motorway. Credit:James Brickwood But an unreported change to the 7.5-kilometre tunnels between Haberfield and St Peters, or the third stage of Westconnex, has been a dilution of a promise to replace the vegetation lost to construction. "The replacement trees are to have a minimum pot size of 75 litres," the community was told about the project last year. The government had promised to plant 3500 replacement trees of that size.

Cheick Tiote meets the Newcastle women’s team (Picture: North News & Pictures) Newcastle’s women footballers insist they want to forge more of a link with the men’s team after receiving a boost in their battle to survive. Wonga have become the first company to sponsor both teams after coming on board as Magpies backers this season. Their investment in the ladies’ team has proved a lifeline for the club, who ply their trade in the Premier League North Division, the third tier of the women’s game. Players pay to play and the club’s home matches are held at Northumbria University in front of just a few hundred fans – a lifetime away from the men’s team’s 52,000-capacity St James’ Park home. However, the team – now managed by former Leicester striker Trevor Benjamin – see a positive future after having their kit, matchday travel and training costs paid for. Cheick Tiote hands out Wonga T-shirts to the Newcastle ladies team (Picture: North News & Pictures) Midfielder Natalie Henderson said: ‘A lot of people don’t even know there is a Newcastle United women’s team. But this help from Wonga has meant that as players we don’t need to worry about the money side, we can get on with playing.’ Advertisement Advertisement Fellow midfielder Hannah Marshall said: ‘A lot of the girls are local and are Newcastle fans. We pay to play while at clubs like Sunderland the women’s team come under the wing of the men’s club. ‘What we’d like, in an ideal world, is to be part of the men’s club here and this help from Wonga is a big boost to us.’ Magpies midfielder Cheick Tiote turned up at the women’s team’s training session last night to surprise them with T-shirts from Wonga bearing the slogan ‘Howay the Lasses’.

YEAH. I'M STILL HERE, DA. Please hold your applause.It's ONLY been...just over 3 years since I last did a journal thingy. Bit of a jump from posting more or less yearly as I had up to now. ANYWAY. I've been drawing a lot of stuff and not really making much of an effort to keep my DeviantART updated with much of it. The biggest reason for that is I've been using Tumblr more. If you are so inclined, you may find said Tumblr atI'm thinking about overhauling my DA, though. I'll separate all the stuff I have into more organized folders and relegate the older, less good junk to its own special folder. And then I'll get around to posting new stuff a bit more regularly. So yeah. Look forward to that.BUT YEAH THERE'S ALSO THE SPRITE-O-VERSE REBOOT THAT IS DEFINITELY AN ONGOING THING. I probably mentioned it when I posted that one episode here just out of the blue. I do that hoping someone might see it and be curious/confused enough to go check out the comic and read the rest of it. Anyway, that link's gonna be riiiiiiight.... here. And that YouTube channel thing me and have been doing? It's still going. To check that out, you need only follow the link at the end of this sentence. This one. Right here. So that's pretty much what I've got for now. Might just go ahead and start working on fixing up my gallery now.

Buy Photo The Legacy Tower in downtown Rochester. A group of top business leaders have urged that the photonics business headquarters be located there. (Photo: CARLOS ORTIZ / staff file photo 2013)Buy Photo Top Rochester-area business leaders said Wednesday that the business headquarters for a $600 million photonics center should be located at the former Bausch & Lomb building in downtown Rochester. The announcement, set to be made official Thursday, comes after some local leaders, particularly University of Rochester president Joel Seligman, urged that the headquarters be located at the nearby Sibley's building. The business leaders, including the heads of Wegmans, Eastman Kodak and Paychex, wrote in a lengthy statement that the iconic former home to Bausch & Lomb, now called the Legacy Tower, should be the place for the photonics center's business operations. More: Photonics coverage The group, called the Rochester Business Leaders Photonics Working Group, said the goal is to have the headquarters in downtown Rochester. "The former Bausch and Lomb building is a turnkey facility that would require almost no infrastructure upgrades, allowing the public's investment to go toward its intended scientific and job creation purposes," the statement, obtained by Gannett's Albany Bureau, said. "Placement of the headquarters at Legacy Tower will also benefit other downtown buildings as new companies and facilities come to Rochester looking for space." “This headquarters, if all goes well, they want to be up and running by the end of 2015.” Bob Duffy Robert Duffy, the president of the Rochester Business Alliance and the former lieutenant governor, said the business leaders viewed the Bausch & Lomb building as the best option for downtown Rochester. He said the leaders of the project hope to have operations in Rochester by year's end. "This headquarters, if all goes well, they want to be up and running by the end of 2015," Duffy told Gannett. "So they want to be moving quickly on this, and Sibley's is going to be a work in progress." The business group urged the SUNY Polytechnic Institute, based in Albany, and "the photonics award decision makers" to put the headquarters at the Bausch & Lomb building. The business headquarters is expected to be among the locations in the Rochester area where the work of the photonics center will take place. SUNY Poly already has operations in Canal Ponds in Greece and the nearby Eastman Business Park, as well as in Canandaigua, Ontario County. After Bausch & Lomb was sold in 2013, the building was bought by Buckingham Properties and renamed the Legacy Tower. Larry Glazer, founder of Buckingham Properties, and his wife died in a plane crash last September. The company, along with Pittsford's Morgan Management, jointly own the tower. Built at a cost of $70 million in 1995, the local companies bought it for $15 million. The state, led by SUNY Poly, is investing $250 million into the photonics center after the federal Department of Defense picked Rochester and Albany for the Integrated Photonics Institute for Manufacturing Innovation. Vice President Joe Biden announced the deal in Rochester on July 27; it includes $110 million in federal aid, as well as pledges of private investments. NEWSLETTERS Get the ROC60 newsletter delivered to your inbox We're sorry, but something went wrong Rochester in 60 seconds: Get all the news you need to know in less than a minute. Please try again soon, or contact Customer Service at 1-800-790-9565. Delivery: Invalid email address Thank you! You're almost signed up for ROC60 Keep an eye out for an email to confirm your newsletter registration. More newsletters In a statement, SUNY Poly praised the business leaders' announcement and said officials from the college expect to tour the Bausch & Lomb building by week's end, saying it is "committed to maintaining a productive relationship and open dialogue with business stakeholders." "SUNY Poly commends and thanks Rochester's business leaders for their proactive engagement on the location of the photonics institute's business headquarters," the college said. "Clearly their voice carries tremendous weight, and we look forward to meeting with them and touring this facility before the end of the week to assess its exciting potential." Seligman has been bullish on the Sibley's building as the business headquarters. UR and the Rochester Institute of Technology are among the partners in the project. "There's a high likelihood that the business headquarters will be located in Sibley," Seligman told the Democrat and Chronicle editorial board last month. "They've got the space, and if we're going to revitalize Rochester, it starts on Main Street. Literally, it starts with the Sibley Building." In a statement, Seligman said: "The most important point is that AIM Photonics be located in downtown Rochester. I look forward to an orderly process to determine the most appropriate location in Rochester." There has been growing concern about the viability of the Sibley's Building for the business headquarters because major renovations might be needed. Duffy said he expects Seligman would be on board with the business leaders' recommendation, saying all of downtown would benefit from the project. "Joel has been a champion of having it downtown, and my sense is if that were picked, we'd have unanimous support," Duffy said. "I think all the buildings would benefit." The working group includes: Wegmans Food Markets CEO Danny Wegman; Eastman Kodak CEO Jeff Clarke; Paychex CEO Marty Mucci; Home Properties CEO Ed Pettinella; and The Pike Companies Chairman Thomas Judson, Jr. JSPECTOR@Gannett.com www.twitter.com/gannettalbany STATEMENT FROM ROCHESTER BUSINESS LEADERS PHOTONICS WORKING GROUP The entire Rochester region is excited and rallying around our combined photonics future. As business and community leaders and highly interested parties in this transformative endeavor, we pledge our collective support, expertise, and voice as the process of launching the institute moves forward in earnest. Rochester offers many assets, including a highly skilled workforce, a supportive business community, and top tier academic institutions including the University of Rochester, Rochester Institute of Technology, and SUNY Polytechnic Institute. Appropriate and proactive business support of this public investment is critical to maximizing economic growth and job creation. To that end, we believe there is a clear choice for the photonics institute's business headquarters and incubator facilities. One that meets its needs, goals, and mission in the most cost-effective manner while maintaining our commitment to downtown Rochester. Therefore, we are calling on the leadership of SUNY Polytechnic Institute and the photonics award decision makers to pursue its business headquarters at Rochester's Legacy Tower. The former Bausch and Lomb building is a turnkey facility that would require almost no infrastructure upgrades, allowing the public's investment to go toward its intended scientific and job creation purposes. Placement of the headquarters at Legacy Tower will also benefit other downtown buildings as new companies and facilities come to Rochester looking for space. Now is the time to roll up our sleeves, make the smart decisions, and show the country and the world what we already know – that Rochester is up to any challenge and is ready to participate in making this award a resounding success. The working group consists of leaders interested in the future impact of the photonics institute on Rochester and the Finger Lakes region. Members include Wegmans Food Markets CEO Danny Wegman, Eastman Kodak CEO Jeff Clarke, Paychex CEO Marty Mucci, Home Properties CEO Ed Pettinella, The Pike Companies Chairman Thomas Judson, Jr., and Rochester Business Alliance President and CEO Bob Duffy. Read or Share this story: http://on.rocne.ws/1NrBdfj

The Infinite Quest is an animated serial based on the British science fiction television series Doctor Who. It was made by BBC Television, but does not share the same producers as the live-action series. It was aired in twelve weekly parts (three and a half minutes each) starting 2 April 2007 as a segment of the children's spin-off show Totally Doctor Who. The final instalment (after episode 12) was shown at the end of the "Omnibus" episode, thus increasing the total to thirteen parts, making the compiled series the equivalent length of a standard episode of Doctor Who.[1][2] The compiled story was broadcast on 30 June 2007, coinciding with the finale of Series 3.[3] Synopsis [ edit ] The Tenth Doctor and Martha Jones set off on an adventure through space to find the datachips to unlock The Infinite, a huge spaceship that can grant people their heart's desire. However, the evil Baltazar is also searching for the ship. Plot [ edit ] An alien named Baltazar has set his sights on Earth, planning to compress its population into diamonds. The Tenth Doctor and Martha Jones arrive on his ship, which he hand-crafted himself, to stop him. The Doctor threatens him with a spoon, which Baltazar cuts in half with his metal claw hand. The spoon happens to be made of a special fungus, which when introduced to the metal ship quickly begins to rust it. As the ship falls apart, the Doctor frees Baltazar's huge metallic bird, Caw, who carries Baltazar away. The Doctor muses that Baltazar will end up on the ice prison planet Volag-Noc at some point. Some time later, Caw takes the Doctor and Martha to his home planet, where he gives Martha a brooch as a gift. He also spits up a datachip, explaining that it and three others like it hold the location of The Infinite, an ancient spaceship that can grant people their heart's desire. Each datachip leads to the next one. At first unwilling to search for it and about to destroy the chip, the Doctor is forced to when Caw notes that Baltazar has a copy of the datachip. As the two set off on their quest, Caw is revealed to be working for Baltazar. The first chip leads to the planet Boukan, where the pirate captain Kaliko is raiding the living oil rigs they find there. She is wearing the next datachip as an earring. Assuming the Doctor and Martha to be spies for the oil companies, Kaliko tells her crew of skeletons to throw them overboard, unaware that her first mate, Mr. Swabb Mate, is in fact the spy, as he has been promised a new body. Swabb stages a mutiny and has the oil rigs shoot down the ship, but their poor aim causes them to scatter the crew in doing so. After Swabb is knocked out by being knocked off the ship, the Doctor reveals the reason for their visit to Kaliko. She tries to escape in a pod, but is found murdered after landing near the TARDIS. With nothing left to do, the Doctor and Martha take her datachip and follow it to the next one. The next chip is on the planet Myarr, being used as a necklace by a lizard alien named Mergrass. Mergrass has been hired to advise the Mantasphids, alien bugs, on military strategy against the humans attacking them, but in reality is little more than a gun-runner. During an attack by the humans, a pilot is captured. He reveals that the Mantasphids invaded the planet for its fertile dung, and that the humans were there first. To rid themselves of the bugs, the humans have decided to bomb the entire hundred-mile area. The Mantasphid Queen turns to Mergrass for help, but is unwilling to pay him for it, and as such he refuses to arm the weapons he provided her with. As Mergrass leaves, the Doctor is forced to defuse the situation by impersonating the supposed pirate-master, Doctor Vile, of the Mantasphid, which proves successful. Quickly telling the pilot to work with the Mantasphid for the benefit of both species, he follows after Mergrass. By this point, Mergrass has also been killed, so again the Doctor and Martha take the left-behind datachip and head for the next planet. The final datachip is on the ice prison planet Volag-Noc. Upon arriving, the Doctor is quickly identified as a wanted criminal, sentenced to 2,000,000,000 yrs and dumped in a cell with a damaged robot. Martha is taken to the Governor of the facility, a human named Gurney. He has the final datachip locked in a safe. As they discuss things, both Martha, when Gurney says nobody was to be locked in the cell where the Doctor is, and the Doctor discover that Gurney isn't the Governor, but one of the prisoners. Locke, the robot with whom the Doctor is sharing a cell, is in fact the Governor. The Doctor apparently shouldn't have been put in the cell in the first place. Upon being fixed by the Doctor, Locke decides that all the prisoners are irredeemable and orders their execution, giving Gurney a chance to shoot Locke and escape with the datachip. The Doctor manages to prevent the prisoners' execution. On the surface, Martha catches up to Gurney, but can do little to stop him without a weapon. At the same time, however, Baltazar arrives riding Caw. Gurney shoots down Caw, but is apparently dispatched by Baltazar off-screen. Caw dies from the damage caused by Gurney's shot while the Doctor and Martha comfort him, claiming he was promised "all the gold he can eat". Baltazar then takes the two hostage, forcing the Doctor to show the way to The Infinite. He also reveals that Martha's "brooch" is actually Squawk, Caw's child, which flies to the body of his parent. Once the Doctor locks in The Infinite's location, Baltazar takes control of the TARDIS – as flying the TARDIS involves little more than a button-press, he no longer needs the Doctor, and knocks him out with a blast. He leaves the Doctor to perish in the snow. On The Infinite, Baltazar orders Martha to find the hold, which she does by accidentally falling through the deck. In the hold, Martha finds the Doctor waiting for her, but quickly realises that it is a creation of the ship: the ship is doing as promised. The real Doctor is close by, however, riding a matured Squawk. He quickly knocks Baltazar out and comes to Martha's aid. The Doctor informs her she just has to reject the vision, which she does, causing it to fade away. The Infinite tries to find the Doctor's heart's desire but he wards it off. He explains that for him it has been nearly three years, in which time he weaned Squawk and helped re-establish Volag-Noc, making sure to tone down the somewhat homicidal Governor. He further explains that the desires granted by The Infinite are little more than illusions, the last spark of whatever powerful being died within its walls. Baltazar has not yet realised this; he is standing in a treasure room, oblivious to Martha's warnings about the illusion. The Doctor uses his sonic screwdriver to vibrate the wreckage, causing the ship to fall apart. He and Martha flee in the TARDIS, leaving Baltazar to rely on Squawk, who has been trained by the Doctor to take Baltazar back to Volag-Noc to be imprisoned. With the day saved, the Doctor and Martha resume their adventures. Continuity [ edit ] As Martha is traveling freely with the Doctor, the story may be set somewhere between the series three episodes "42" (which follows directly on from Martha's invitation to long-term travel in "The Lazarus Experiment") and "Utopia" (which begins the series finale). However, the Character Bios on the DVD release state that Martha is traveling with the Doctor for one more trip, which seems to set it before "The Lazarus Experiment". The Doctor states in both the first and third segment that the serial takes place in the 40th century. Caw indicates that many years have passed between the first and second episode, in which time Baltazar has gone to prison, supposedly sold out by Caw, and has since got out again.[4] The Doctor names various other beings from the same time as The Infinite including the Nestenes (Spearhead from Space, Terror of the Autons, "Rose", "The Pandorica Opens"), the Great Vampires (State of Decay) and the Racnoss, ("The Runaway Bride"), all of which he has met. While walking the ice cold wastes of the prison planet in his regular clothes, the Doctor seems quite unaffected by the cold. This was a trait shown by the Second Doctor in The Tomb of the Cybermen, the Fourth Doctor in The Seeds of Doom and The Hand of Fear, the Ninth Doctor in "The Unquiet Dead" and the Tenth Doctor in "Planet of the Ood", and an improvement over how the First Doctor responded to cold – not just subzero cold – in The Space Museum. Outside references [ edit ] The Doctor compares Baltazar to Napoleon Bonaparte, Boudica, and Blackbeard. The former appeared in The Reign of Terror while the latter appears as a fictional character in The Mind Robber. The Doctor also refers to Delia Smith, Fanny Cradock, and Madame Cholet from The Wombles as among Earth's greatest chefs. Martha refers to Bill Oddie, who played the pirate captain Red Jasper in the Big Finish audio adventure Doctor Who and the Pirates. Pilot Kelvin describes the final weapon to be deployed on Myarr using the phrase "kills all known bugs, dead." This is similar to the UK advertising slogan for the bleach Domestos.[5] Baltazar's promise to Caw of "as much gold as he could eat" is a reference to Monty Python's Life of Brian in which the same promise is given by Naughtius Maximus to Brian's mother.[citation needed] DVD release [ edit ] The serial was released on DVD in its compiled state on 5 November 2007. This release included deleted scenes, interviews and behind-the-scenes documentaries. This story was released in Australia and New Zealand on 6 June 2008. BBC Worldwide Americas, BBC Video, and Warner Home Video jointly announced on 31 July 2008 that The Infinite Quest would be released in North America on 18 November 2008 as a single disc (also the same release date for the live-action series' The Complete Fourth Series on DVD for North America). As in Australia and New Zealand, this serial was never broadcast in North America. Production [ edit ] One segment of The Infinite Quest was shown each week during Totally Doctor Who from 2 April to 29 June 2007. The serial, animated by Firestep, was the second officially licensed, animated Doctor Who serial, the first being the flash-animated Scream of the Shalka (2003). Missing episodes of the 1968 serial The Invasion were also animated for that serial's 2006 DVD release. Both of these animations were produced by Cosgrove Hall. The BBC describes Firestep as "the creative team behind previous Doctor Who animated adventures for the BBC."[1] The Firestep website attributes the name to former Cosgrove Hall animators Jon Doyle and Steve Maher. An earlier animated series based on Doctor Who, to be produced by Nelvana for CBS, was planned in the 1980s, but fell through.[6] Production art had been drawn up by Ted Bastien.[7] Three limited animated webcasts – Death Comes to Time, Real Time, and Shada – were made and "cast" on the BBC Website before Scream of the Shalka.[8] A second animated serial, Dreamland, was produced and aired and released in six part on BBC Red Button from 23 November 2009, and was broadcast in full on BBC Two on 5 December 2009.[9] The title sequence for the omnibus version is identical to that for the television series, except that the photorealistic model of the TARDIS is replaced with a cel-shaded version as it appears in this story. Cast notes [ edit ] Anthony Head previously appeared in the Series 2 episode "School Reunion" as Mr Finch. He was also the Doctor's adversary in the Excelis Dawns, Excelis Rising, and Excelis Decays audio dramas produced by Big Finish and appeared in the webcast Death Comes to Time. Head had auditioned for the role of the Eighth Doctor in the 1996 Doctor Who television movie. Head narrates series 3 and 4 of Doctor Who Confidential and the BBC Audio release Doctor Who: Project Who?. Freema Agyeman's voicing of Martha Jones in the first episode of The Infinite Quest was her second televised appearance in the role, airing two days after her first appearance in the main series.

Do you find yourself checking email, news feeds or your social media channels first thing in the morning and last thing before you fall asleep? Do you find yourself constantly interacting with mobile devices when you’re away from the home and office, and then asking yourself where the last hour went? Do you find yourself unable to get the most important tasks for the day completed because of [insert here: messages, Facebook posts, Twitter updates, etc] you had to check? If so, then you might be a Digiholic! I read an article recently, which mentioned that virtually every second of the average person’s day is spent with their smartphone within arm’s reach and that their phone is checked every six-and-a-half minutes. In other words, 200 times a day! That’s a lot of time spent staring at screens and away from the world around us. And just to show how important ‘being connected’ is for our modern society, 73% of those asked in that survey, said they would struggle to go a whole day without access to phones and computers. Another study conducted in 2010 by the University of Maryland on a group of 200 students, even found the majority describing their dependence on the Internet as an addiction. While I believe it is unrealistic to go completely technology-free, especially since so many businesses in this modern day and age rely on access to the Internet, I have found it important to disconnect once in a while. To go on a ‘digital detox’ or ‘digital vacation’ so to speak. My aim is for my partner and I to go at least one day a week without technology (we started with one evening a week) and last Thursday was our most recent one. We booked a day trip to the English seaside town of Eastbourne and had our mobile phones switched off from the moment we were awake until after we had dinner that evening. It was beautiful. We explored. We connected. We experienced clarity and saw our creativity explode (lucky we had a pen and paper handy to note some of these ideas and thoughts down!). Allocating time for a digital detox can be beneficial for you on a number of levels. And here’s a few reasons why you might want to consider taking regular time away from technology: Time will appear to pass more slowly. When you are disconnected, you avoid being distracted by the constant stream of notifications on your phone and demands by other people of your time. You can enjoy the freedom of setting your own agenda, focusing your full attention on the things that excite you and being present to what is happening around you. When you are disconnected, you avoid being distracted by the constant stream of notifications on your phone and demands by other people of your time. You can enjoy the freedom of setting your own agenda, focusing your full attention on the things that excite you and being present to what is happening around you. Opportunity to reconnect with yourself, people and the world around you. This is a natural and wonderful benefit you can experience when you disconnect. Away from screens, you are able to really listen to your inner wisdom and to the people you are having a conversation with. Time spent outdoors also helps to clear your mind. This is a natural and wonderful benefit you can experience when you disconnect. Away from screens, you are able to really listen to your inner wisdom and to the people you are having a conversation with. Time spent outdoors also helps to clear your mind. Your creative thinking will spike. It’s no surprise that one of the times that we find ourselves at our most creative is when having a shower or bath. The answers we seek, more often than not, tend to come from the mind that is still and not busy. It’s no surprise that one of the times that we find ourselves at our most creative is when having a shower or bath. The answers we seek, more often than not, tend to come from the mind that is still and not busy. You will create more fulfilling experiences. As humans, we are social creatures who thrive in community and there is only so much of a connection you can make with people through digital devices. We might just be a click, a swipe or a voice command away from anyone with an online presence, but real bonds between people are forged through face-to-face interactions. As humans, we are social creatures who thrive in community and there is only so much of a connection you can make with people through digital devices. We might just be a click, a swipe or a voice command away from anyone with an online presence, but real bonds between people are forged through face-to-face interactions. You will feel like a productivity ninja. Take a moment to think about how much time you spend online and in front of a screen (this includes televisions!) in an average week. Now think about what you could be doing instead if you were spending far less time doing so. Perhaps you would catch up with all those books you said you were going to read. Or even attend social events and gatherings related to your interests. How would that feel? What you will come to realise, is that in such a connected world, taking the time to be disconnected can do wonders for your wellbeing. Think of it as a process of rebooting yourself. And upon your return, you will have downloaded a happier and more productive version of yourself. Start small and begin embracing time away from technology. Here’s a couple of ideas to get you thinking: No access to digital devices until after breakfast. No digital devices allowed in the bedroom. Leave your digital devices in your hotel room during the day when on holiday. In essence, you want to be in control of how you use technology, rather than letting it dictate your life and time.

Jeans are — more often than not — the character actors of our wardrobe. They're used to complement what's going on up top, to make the lead actor (i.e: you) look that much better. If they're great, you're great. Denim staples such as the ubiquitous Levi's 501 have been around for so long because they're simply dependable. This mentality, though, hasn't exactly led to "fun" jeans, even on the luxury end. $2,000 for a pair of special Japanese Momotaro Gold Label Jeans? Unless they come with a special pocket full of money to cover rent for the next two months or so, perhaps not. Fortunately, Montreal-based brand Naked & Famous is the antidote to boring denim, creating some of the most out-there jeans available while still maintaining a spectacular cut. Kevlar, rainbow, raspberry scratch-and-sniff: You name it, they've probably made it. What's even more impressive is that they're made from ultra-premium Japanese denim and that they're selling them for an unheard of price – most of their pairs are under $200. Even in that sense, Naked & Famous are truly originals. I talked to N&F impresario Brandon Svarc to get a better idea of what drives the mad scientists of denim. Esquire.com: First things first: Why Canada? How does that country influence you and your creative process? Brandon Svarc: I was born and raised in Canada, and we love being different. My family has been in the denim and workwear industry here for over 65 years, and so it's my duty to continue our family business here. Don't get me wrong. I enjoy America. But I also love that as Canadians we are quite different, and so I try to make products and a brand that are very different from what any American brand is doing. ESQ: You're a kind of mad scientist of denim. You've done everything from "rainbow" denim to camo corduroy, denim with Kevlar woven in, and you've even done a raspberry scratch-and-sniff jean. It makes the entire brand wonderfully interesting. I guess my question is: Why? Why the fk would you do that? BS: Often I answer this question with, "Because I can." But the true answer is because I want to create things that are unique and rare. I want to create something that nobody has seen before. If I will only be alive for 80 or 90 or whatever years, then I must do something special and unique to leave my mark. How boring would it be to simply make one or two indigo denim fabrics and just cut it up in a few fits like most brands? ESQ: Can you let us in on any secrets on how you make the special pairs? And what do you have coming up that you can tell us about? BS: Well for us the mainstream idea of "design" is bullshit. I don't care about fancy design; we just develop new and unique fabrics. We think of crazy fun ideas ourselves, or often when we're in Japan, over dinner with the managers and owners of the mills. Our next crazy fabric is a Barneys exclusive which comes out in a few weeks: Hologram Denim! ESQ: You could easily sell these jeans for at least twice the price, I'm betting. Why sell them for $130-$250, instead? BS: We sell our jeans for a fair price because we, well… We have this crazy new concept called "not ripping off the consumer." Offering a fair price and having amazing value in our products is what has allowed us to grow over the past six years into a brand that is distributed in over 30 countries worldwide. ESQ: OK, so final question: Why Japanese denim? And, more specifically, why Japanese denim in Canada? BS: The first part of this question could take me a long time to answer properly, so my super-short, three-part answer is: a) The special shuttle loom machines that make our great selvedge denim fabric, b) The unique rope-dying methods which lead to the best fading jeans, and c) The unique water quality in Okayama. Why Japanese denim in Canada? Well, because Japanese denim is our favorite and because we're the Crazy Canadian Denim Nerds!

“You’ve got it! Now let’s look at the next…” The students look at me perplexed, as I stop mid sentence. My head cocks to the side to free up my dominant hearing side so I can be sure. The yard of my local Australian school is the most unusual place to hear it. What is more confusing to me is the warmth that has suddenly flooded my body. I know this peace from somewhere. Looking back at the wondering eyes of my students, who do not seem fazed, I shake my head. “Sorry about that. I want you to listen carefully as I read the next paragraph and see if you can work out what the principal’s argument for wearing school hats is.” “Errrt-uh-errr-uh-errrrrrrrr” there it goes again, cutting through the mid morning air. The students don’t flinch. Again, I feel as if I have just taken a deep breath and oxygen reaches through to my fingertips and toes, cleansing me. My eyes close in hopeful anticipation, I breathe in deeply and I open the window to look outside expecting to see orange clothed monks walking down a dusty road collecting alms in the rising light of the new day. There are no monks, no prostrating women, and no children running with naked bottoms down the lane. The bottom of a white and black flecked rooster walks behind the shrub that encircles the base of the gum tree in the center of the paved courtyard. “It’s just a rooster Miss”. “A rooster? Here in Woy Woy? Where did it come from?” “Dunno, but they’re always here.” Just a rooster, perhaps. But its crow brings something much more to me. I continue on with the lesson and immediately the restlessness nudges me. Inside me I feel once again as if my soul is scratching around to find that phantom itch. I just can’t seem to settle my skin. I sit with Helen and some other teachers at lunch. We talk about travel. Of Hitler’s Lair, Iceland, and Ocktoberfest. We laugh at the drunken debauchery on display there and how the steins- heavy with their golden nectar- bruise our hands as we comfort them. I feel light and free with the joys of laughter and memories. The bell rings and as I stand to go back to class, I turn to Helen, “You know I really love those roosters. It makes it feel so…. so exotic here.” “We don’t know where they have come from. We used to only have the one, but a new one arrived over the holidays. This one is a bit more aggressive and has been trying to peck the students. We may have to get rid of both of them now.” “Oh, how sad. I hope they can stay.” On the way back to class, I think of the exoticness of the roosters and the feelings it brought to me. And then I place my finger on it. Home. The roosters brought me the feelings of being home. Not home in the land of Australia, but home in the Land of Exoticness. For weeks I’ve been questioning why I can’t love being home in my own country, why it just doesn’t feel right to me, and why I want to leave every couple of hours. Australia is too familiar and I can’t squeeze back into its zone of comfort. The life of a nomad. For 13 years I’ve been living in the Land of Exoticness, where each day is new, awe inspiring, and wonderful. A place that gifts me the freedom to grow. When I am in the Land of Exoticness, Australia becomes a part of that. Australia is exotic and I sing her praises endlessly. But when I return home, she becomes familiar and I become caged and itchy. Australia, or maybe just this town, is no longer my real home. My home is with the roosters and the life it arouses in the temples, mosques, churches, and early morning markets. My home is in the backpack that weighs me down physically but lightens my load in every other way. My home is in the classroom where the sweat runs down my face and onto the microphone that projects my voice above the busy Bangkok street. My home is in the conversations with the strangers who can’t understand a word I am saying. My home is the gentle breeze that cools down the intense heat of the tropics. My home is with the fiddle, the pints of Guinness, and the Irish Craic. My home is sitting on a plastic table on the sidewalk, eating Tom Yung Gung from the street carts. My home is immersed in the screaming crowds of Carolina Blue. My home is with the animals that roam wild and free in the Savannah. My home is with the cheers, the slaintes, the saluts of my new found foreign friends. My home is drinking apple tea with carpet sellers on the streets of Istanbul. My home is in the Land of Exoticness … and it is the only place I want to be. NB This post is nothing to do with Australia, but everything to do with me and my inability to adjust. More posts about reverse culture shock:

Canada's Minister of Foreign Affairs called the alleged detention and killings of gay and bisexual men in Chechnya "reprehensible," as LGBT rights groups called on the international community to act. In a statement released Saturday, Chrystia Freeland called on Russian authorities to investigate the reports and "to immediately ensure the safety of all persons in Chechnya who may be at risk due to their sexual orientation." The allegations that up to 100 men are being detained prompted a protest outside the Russian embassy in London on Wednesday. Russian independent newspaper Novaya Gazeta has reported that at least three of those men have been killed in secret prisons described as "concentration camps." It also reported threats from Chechen religious leaders of "reprisals" for its coverage of the issue. Canada calls persecution of <a href="https://twitter.com/hashtag/LGBTQ2?src=hash">#LGBTQ2</a> people in <a href="https://twitter.com/hashtag/Chechnya?src=hash">#Chechnya</a> reprehensible: <a href="https://t.co/jT0hKIzYWE">https://t.co/jT0hKIzYWE</a> —@cafreeland "Human rights have no borders. Canada believes human rights are universal and indivisible, and these include the human rights of LGBTQ2 people," Freeland`s statement read. "We deplore acts of violence and discrimination, in all regions of the world, committed against individuals because of their sexual orientation or gender identity." Chechen leaders 'publicly calling for violence' Björn van Roozendaal, program director for the International Lesbian and Gay Association in Europe, told CBC News that several people within the organization are on the ground in Russia, working to verify the reports. Some have spoken to people who claim to be victims. "There's a lot of word about violence against these people and torture and rape and beatings. People are alleged to have died because of the situation on the ground," he said. Van Roozendaal blames authorities for their inaction, and says some have even encouraged the violence. "The leaders in Chechnya are saying that there are no gay people, so this information cannot be true," he said, noting Russia has said possible victims should reach out to their leaders. A spokesman for Ramzan Kadyrov, president of the southern Russian region of Chechnya and a vocal supporter of Russian President Vladimir Putin, was quoted by Russia's Interfax news agency as denying the alleged abuses have taken place. "Nobody can detain or harass anyone who is simply not present in the republic," Alvi Karimov was quoted as telling Interfax. CBC News speaks with Björn van Roozendaal, program director for the International Lesbian and Gay Association in Europe 4:44 There have also been calls from religious leaders for families to protect family honour by killing the son or brother who is detained and released. "However, the leaders have been quite publicly calling for violence," van Roozendaal said. "They have said in particular — the religious leaders in Chechnya have said — that people should not exist like that in Chechnya." Helping people to get out For now, van Roozendaal and his organization are focusing on helping people get out of the region, and hopes international pressure on the government will lead to change. "It's important to keep pressure on the government, that's extremely important," he said. "International organizations, including the United Nations, have been speaking out." "[We hope] it will send a signal to the victims that there are people looking out for them." 📣 The ongoing situation in <a href="https://twitter.com/hashtag/Chechnya?src=hash">#Chechnya</a> has received widespread media attention, but has not yet been resolved: <a href="https://t.co/O1ktvBAAzf">https://t.co/O1ktvBAAzf</a> <a href="https://twitter.com/hashtag/LGBTI?src=hash">#LGBTI</a> <a href="https://t.co/gDtprTuvYs">pic.twitter.com/gDtprTuvYs</a> —@ILGAEurope The rights arm of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) on Friday urged Russia to investigation the allegations. "The authorities in the Russian Federation must urgently investigate the horrific reports of human rights violations against allegedly gay men in Chechnya, as well as identify, prosecute and punish any known perpetrators," the head of the OSCE's Office for Democratic Institutions and Human Rights (ODIHR), Michael Link, said in a statement. The OSCE, once a rare forum for discussion between East and West during the Cold War, has 57 participating states stretching from North America to Russia and Central Asia. ODIHR deals with election monitoring and human rights in those states. Link said Moscow had to step in. "Given the reported unwillingness of local authorities to investigate and prosecute the serious violations alleged to have been committed by security services, it is incumbent upon Russian Federation authorities to intervene and protect all those remaining at risk," he said. A spokesperson for Ramzan Kadyrov, president of Chechnya, says there is no such thing as gays in the region. (Maxim Shemetov /Reuters) A spokesman for Russian President Vladimir Putin says the Kremlin does not have confirmed information on the violence targeting the LGBT community.

The Antiques Roadshow rolled into Tulsa this weekend and history was made! The most expensive item in the show's 16 year history walked right through the doors of the Tulsa Convention Center."Tulsa is famous, a Roadshow record," says Roadshow Executive Producer Marsha Bemko.History was made, records were broken and jaws were dropping. A man is walking away a millionaire this weekend. He came to the Tulsa Convention Center with a set of cups he's had since the 1970's. He soon found out his 5 Chinese carved cups, made of rhinoceros horn, are his retirement package. "That are worth between $1,000,000 and $1,500,000," says appraiser Lark Mason. For his safety we are not identifying the big winner, but his find puts Tulsa on top. "As each one came out of the box my jaw started to drop a little more and that of at my colleagues eyes and their jaws dropped as well," says Mason. Never in the 16 year history of Antiques Roadshow has there ever been a more expensive item appraised. Mason had the good fortune to tell the owner he was a millionaire."I was hoping he wasn't going to collapse but he said that he was glad that he didn't need his inhaler," says Mason. "You clearly could even see, in the tape that I was watching, the color rush over his face," says producer Bemko.Mason says the million dollar cups were given as gifts to wealthy people for special occasions in the late 17th to early 18th centuries.During that time it was thought that rhinoceros horn had special powers. What makes them so valuable today is china's power and stance in the world. "We had not had a million dollar find until last season we found some jade in Raleigh now Tulsa, you are the top dogs now," says the show's host Mark Walberg. "Top Dogs" is sure to be a title Tulsans are proud to hold.Its safe to say none of the Roadshow crew knew they would be breaking records in Green Country."I certainly wasn't expecting this in Tulsa, Oklahoma," says Mason. "Although Tulsa is a wonderful place and now it's even more wonderful as far as I'm concerned.""I am no longer surprise by what I'm going to find anywhere, but yeah okay a little surprised to find it in Tulsa, but delighted," says Bemko.The last time the Roadshow was in Tulsa was nearly ten years ago, hopefully with the big find this weekend they will visit us a little sooner. {}{}{} {}Producers tell us Tulsa's record breaking show will air on PBS some time early next year.

Tritonia Cucumber-Lime Gose to Make Can Debut In addition to brewing the highly sought after Tropicalia IPA Creature Comforts also offers a great variety of popular Berliners and Goses. One fan favorite, Tritonia with Cucumber and Lime, will see its first can release in late May with the draft version available a bit earlier in the month. More info from Creature Comforts via press release: Tritonia is a tart and refreshing Gose with hints of coriander and sea salt. This variant of Tritonia will feature the addition of cucumber and lime and is 4.5-percent ABV. The tartness of the beer and addition of lime is perfectly balanced by the cool freshness of cucumber. “Tritonia is one of my favorite of our limited release beers,” said Co-founder and Head Brewer David Stein. “It’s extremely refreshing and perfect for the spring months as the weather starts to warm up.” In addition to releasing two versions of Athena Paradiso each year, the brewery also plans on releasing two versions of its Gose, Tritonia, annually. Tritonia with Cucumber and Lime will be available just in time to be a refreshing spring limited release. Tritonia with Cucumber and Lime will be available on-site at Creature Comforts as well as in the Athens and Atlanta markets. Tritonia with Cucumber and Lime Style: Fruited Gose ABV: 4.5% Packaging: Draft and 12 oz cans Availability: Early May on draft and late May for cans, will be available in Athens and Atlanta markets

Let’s talk, for a minute, about something a little more serious than “de gozaru"s. The Kyoryugers introduce themselves individually as "Xの勇者”, where “勇者” is “hero”. Instead, probably in order to match the English word “brave” being in the roll call, they went with “brave”. This is a bad call in literally every way. “Brave” is seriously racially charged. You can easily do justice to the Kyoryuger’s nature as super-brave warriors without calling on the phrasing of “braves” as warriors, which in and of itself has a really rocky history built on racist stereotypes from white people–“noble savage” overtones, et cetera–and nothing about the Kyoryugers makes them Native American warriors. You know, what a brave actually is. The first definition of “hero” is more correct in this case. With a QC team as extensive as TV-Nihon’s, someone should have brought this up with the first script, so they could fix it then and there. On top of being racist, as if this shit sundae needed any more whipped cream, it’s also just not a good representation of the source material. The above as a translation for “史上最強のブレイブ!” shows a clear misunderstanding of what that “brave” refers to. It refers not to the Kyoryugers themselves with “brave” as their title. In the show’s lore, “brave” is “bravery”. Not people, but their feelings. The heroes are the bravest in history. In summary, whoever made this decision ought to be ashamed of themselves, because this is crap on every level, and more importantly than that, it's racist crap.

An ISIS affiliated group is calling on their followers to follow the example of the Orlando Terrorist; calling him a hero, and asking their followers to continue attacking targets in America. The statement, which was posted by the Al-Battar Media Foundation, encouraged other Islamic followers to target movie theaters, hospitals, airports, trains, amusement parks and restaurants. Part of the statement read: “While the tyrants shut the immigration door in your faces, open in their faces the door of jihad” … “While one of you wishes and strives to reach the Islamic State, one of us wishes to be in your place.” More Attacks Could be Coming Very Soon According to CBS News, the Orlando Terrorist posted a warning on Facebook moments before the attack that read: “In the next few days you will see attacks from the Islamic State [ISIS] in the USA.” Since Islamic State leaders began calling on followers to stage attacks in their home countries, the FBI has seen a huge increase in the number of terrorist sympathizers here in the U.S. FBI has over 1,000 ISIS cases open across U.S. Last week, before the attacks in Orlando, James Comey, the Director of the FBI, admitted that the FBI had over 1,000 terror related cases open in all 50 states. During a news conference at the FBI’s field office in Brooklyn Center last week, Comey said terror recruitment is a problem across the country. “The bureau has close to 1,000 open cases in all 50 states focused on people who are at some stage between consuming the poison from the group we call ISIL to acting on that poison, either by traveling or moving toward violence here in the United States.” Stay Alert: Beware of your Surroundings In the aftermath of Orlando, people need to be especially careful when attending large events or going anywhere where a large number of people gather in one place. These animals are looking for large body counts, and they are looking for easy targets.

Access to several social media sites was blocked for over an hour in Turkey today during a reported military coup. Although internet traffic appears to be flowing normally again, Turkey’s government frequently responds to political events by blocking certain websites or throttling traffic. “We saw the throttling of connections from Turkey to Twitter and Facebook just after the reports of the coup in Turkey,” Doug Madory, the director of internet analysis at Dyn Research, told TechCrunch. “We did not see any problems with YouTube, but I have also seen others report problems accessing that website.” Livestreaming services like Twitter’s Periscope and Facebook Live appeared unaffected by the block. Overall, internet traffic in Turkey may have dropped by half, according to CloudFlare data. CloudFlare CEO Matthew Prince tweeted, “From CloudFlare data, appears there’s about a 50% drop in Internet traffic coming out of Turkey.” Turkish censorship of social media has been relatively easy to circumvent in the past — users could use DNS services like Google Public DNS to evade the blocks. But Turkey has become more sophisticated in how it blocks its citizens from accessing social media, according to Madory. “This time Turkey appears to be restricting bandwidth when accessing social media. This represents a more sophisticated censorship technique that is harder to detect,” Madory said. “Users should still be able to circumvent it using a VPN, but the average user in Turkey may still not have that technology readily available.” Variations in online censorship techniques may be partially due to the fact that the Turkish government orders shutdowns but does not provide technical details to service providers about how to enforce them. Blocking techniques can vary between internet service providers and telecoms, according to the digital civil liberties organization Access Now. “We believe this is because the authorities order a shutdown, but to some degree it is left to the carriers to work out how exactly they will implement the block,” Peter Micek, global policy counsel at Access Now, told TechCrunch. Because Turkey primarily relies on DNS blocking, using a VPN is usually enough to circumvent the block, but other techniques might become necessary too. Turkey certainly isn’t the only nation with a history of cutting off access to social media in times of political upheaval — Egypt and Iran have blocked access in the past. Access Now advocates for internet access with its #KeepItOn campaign and has called on Turkey to restore internet access for its citizens. “People in Turkey will need access to information and,given the outbreak of violence, access to emergency services — all of which depend on stable communications channels,” Micek said. “To protect human rights, authorities should keep social media and the internet on.” Here are a few techniques for getting around internet blocks during times of turmoil: Install Tor Tor, short for “The Onion Router,” is a service that bounces your traffic around a network of anonymous servers so that it’s difficult to track. It’s free and easy to install, but because of how it works, it can be very slow and isn’t recommended for things like streaming live video. The easiest way to use Tor is by installing its browser bundle, which includes everything you need and is available for many operating systems. On Android, Orbot and Orfox provide similar functionality, and are also free. Here is a guide to using Tor and Orbot, written in Turkish. Use a VPN A Virtual Private Network routes your traffic through servers in other locations throughout the world, which is useful for getting around certain types of censorship or blockage. There are dozens of VPN providers, and TechCrunch doesn’t recommend any in particular — you may have to do a little research to find one that meets your needs and fits in your budget. Some popular paid VPNs: ExpressVPN TorGuard And free or ad-supported ones: VPNBook Hotspot Shield The TunnelBear VPN service is currently offering unlimited data for Turkish users: VPNs are a popular resource for Turkish citizens trying to access social media during a blackout: Hotspot Shield reported a 322% growth in new installs in Turkey within the first 2 hours of the reported coup. Change your DNS Blocking can be done at the Domain Name System level, meaning the service many ISPs provide that connects a website name (like facebook.com) with an IP address (like 66.220.144.241). Replacing your default DNS with another, like Google’s Public DNS or one from the OpenNIC project can get around this form of censorship. Peer-to-peer messaging Firechat is a good thing to have on your phone in case other messaging apps like Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp, and Line go offline. Firechat forms a peer-to-peer network with nearby phones instead of using a central server, allowing people to communicate even when mobile services are being disrupted, whether by deliberate interference or something like a widespread power outage. Switch apps Just because one app is blocked doesn’t mean they all are. If Twitter is down, Tumblr may be up. If you can’t upload a video to YouTube, try DailyMotion or even put it in the public folder of your Dropbox.

Second Sydney airport site to be identified within months, Deputy PM Warren Truss says Updated A decision on the location of Sydney's second airport will be made within months, with the Federal Government giving the strongest indication yet that Badgery's Creek is the preferred option. Deputy Prime Minister Warren Truss said this morning that the planning process is well advanced. "We committed during the election campaign to identify a site for Sydney's second airport in our first term and it's likely to be early in our first term," he told the ABC. "We'll identify a preferred site either late this year or early next year. "On the basis of the Sydney master plan that's being developed and the other information that's been put together through a series of government inquiries and examinations now that have been going on for more than a decade, I'd expect a decision within months." Mr Truss says the final master plan from Sydney Airport Corporation is due in December, and it will guide the construction timeline for a second airport. Badgery's Creek 'remains a strong contender' Mr Truss flatly rejected reports that he favours the Richmond Air Force base, north-west of Sydney, as the new site. "It's simply too small to be a credible second airport, it couldn't cater for larger aircraft," he said. Mr Truss says the base has been considered previously and each time has been rejected as an option. He has given a strong indication that he prefers the site at Badgery's Creek, in Sydney's west. "Badgery's Creek was chosen as the best site decades ago, it's Government-owned and it remains a strong contender," he said. Both sides of politics agree that time is running out to build a second airport in Sydney, but the location is likely to remain a sticking point. The site at Badgery's Creek was purchased by the Hawke government in the 1980s but its proximity to western Sydney, and a swag of marginal electorates, have worked against it. Topics: air-transport, industry, government-and-politics, federal-government, sydney-2000 First posted

Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has said that Ankara-backed militants will advance toward the northern Syrian town of Manbij in Aleppo province after they accomplish their mission in al-Bab city in the same province. Meanwhile, Syria has strongly denounced Ankara’s attacks near al-Bab. Ankara seeks “to absorb northern Syria into the greater Turkey,” because the Turkish authorities want to take possession of Syrian water and oil resources, says Richard Hayden Black, a Republican member of the Virginia state Senate. Turkey uses terrorist groups like Daesh and al-Qaeda to carry out ethnic cleansing in northern Syria and pave the ground for Ankara's dominance there, the senator told Press TV on Tuesday. According to Hayden Black, “The group ISIS (Daesh) is sort of a tool of Turkey, of the United States, [and] of all of these groups (US allies). They don’t want [Syria] to eventually survive, because Erdogan sees himself as the head of a vast caliphate, [and] as [the head of] a resurgent Ottoman Empire that stretches from Europe onto China.” “Turkey has been the greatest ally of the ISIS (Daesh) throughout most of the six-year war” in Syria, he said, adding that Daesh had 2,000 oil tankers, which carried massive amounts of oil stolen from Syria and took it to Turkey. Back in August, Turkish Special Forces, tanks and jets, backed by planes from the US-led coalition, launched their first coordinated offensive in Syria in an alleged bid to battle terror groups such as Daesh and the Democratic Union Party (PYD), a US-backed Kurdish group based in Syria. Read More:

Brief Summary: The purpose of the study is to see if the investigational medication uridine reduces depression symptoms in adolescents with bipolar disorder. Uridine is a naturally occurring chemical that is made by the human liver. Uridine is part of a family of compounds called pyrimidines, and is normally involved in many of the body's processes such as the use of energy by cells. Uridine is considered experimental, because it has not been approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to treat bipolar depression in adolescents. The study will use standard methods of assessing adolescent's mood, such as rating scales and questionnaires. In addition, the study will use Magnetic Resonance Imaging Spectroscopy (MRI/MRS) brain scans to see if levels of certain chemicals in the brain change when adolescents are treated with uridine. These scans use a magnet to create images of the brain, and do not expose patients to radiation. This is an open-label study of the investigational drug uridine in the treatment of adolescents with depression with bipolar disorder. Uridine has shown positive results in a Phase II study of bipolar disorder in adults (http://clinicaltrials.gov/ct2/show/NCT00322764). This study will enroll 30 depressed adolescent participants who meet DSM-IV-TR criteria for bipolar disorder type I, type II or bipolar disorder not otherwise specified. Participants who are currently taking psychotropic medication(s) will continue on their current regimen, with uridine added as adjunctive therapy. Participants who are untreated will be informed of the alternatives to study participation. This will include informing the parent(s) or guardian(s) that Lithium, Risperdal and Abilify are FDA-approved treatments for adolescent bipolar disorder that would be available to their child in community care. The study has three objectives: 1) To use Magnetic Resonance Spectroscopy (MRS) brain imaging to measure levels of beta-nucleoside triphosphate (b-NTP) in the anterior cingulate cortex of 30 adolescents with bipolar disorder, before-and-after 6 weeks of treatment with the investigational drug uridine; 2) To measure the antidepressant response to uridine in the 30 participants with the Children's Depression Rating Scale (CDRS); and 3) To acquire structural Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) data in the 30 participants with bipolar disorder and the 30 healthy controls, to establish regionally-specific structure/neurochemical relationships. Adolescent participants with bipolar disorder will be treated with uridine 500mg twice daily for six weeks. The primary clinical outcome measure is the Children's Depression Rating Scale (CDRS), with response defined as a 30% reduction in CDRS score. In addition to this standardized clinical assessment, participants will undergo magnetic resonance imaging and magnetic resonance spectroscopy (MRI/MRS) brain scans at baseline, and after six weeks of treatment with uridine. This novel approach is designed to explore objectively measurable biomarkers of illness and treatment response in pediatric bipolar disorder. The investigators hypothesize that participants whose depression responds to uridine will demonstrate an increased concentration of beta-nucleoside triphosphate (b-NTP) in the anterior cingulate cortex. This would support the hypothesis that depressive states are associated with abnormalities in brain energy metabolism. As a neuroimaging comparison group for the participants with bipolar disorder, 30 healthy adolescent controls with no history of psychiatric illness will be recruited for MRI/MRS scanning only. The investigators hypothesize that controls will have higher levels of b-NTP in the anterior cingulate cortex than participants with depression associated with bipolar disorder, further supporting a connection between brain bioenergetics and depression.

It’s a ghost story that begins a few years before Texas was even officially the Republic of Texas. But after nearly 200 years the tall tale—or eyewitness truth, depending who you ask—is alive and well on Bailey’s Prairie in Brazoria County. He was a notorious and eccentric early Texas pioneer named James Briton “Brit” Bailey who arrived in what is now Brazoria County several years before Stephen F. Austin established his Old 300 colony in the same area. “He was a heavy drinker and loved to fight,” said Brazoria County Historical Museum Research Librarian Jamie Murray, who says Austin reluctantly accepted Bailey into the colony although he reportedly did not approve of Bailey’s love for whiskey and a good fist fight. Watch: The Legend of Bailey's Light The rest of Bailey’s story, including the story of his ghost, can be found in several large files at the museum in Angleton. In a handwritten copy of his will, and on a roadside historical marker along Highway 35, are the words that helped start the legend. “And the will does say he wants to be buried standing up and facing west,” Murray said. And as the story goes, in 1832 his descendants did follow his wishes, lowering a casket vertically into the ground so that he could continue, in death, to face the vast western expanse of the country he longed to continue exploring. "And he said he didn't want anybody to stand over his grave and say ‘there lies old Britt Bailey,’” Murray added. Bailey was a veteran of the War of 1812 and a native of North Carolina. The story of Bailey's Light airs at 10 on Friday the 13th! (PHOTOS BY KEVIN REECE / KHOU 11 NEWS) We visited the Brazoria Heritage Foundation in the town of Brazoria for a few more details on Bailey and his ghost, because in the hallway of a 1930s school house now operating as a museum, they keep a mannequin under lock and key dressed like Brit Bailey. He’s wearing a pioneer’s leather jacket, and, as the legend goes, appears with the items with which he was buried: a rifle at his side, a lantern to light his way to the west, and a jug of whiskey at his feet. Well, almost with the jug of whiskey. "His wife said he'd had enough of that during his lifetime,” said Dortha Pekar, 70, with the Brazoria Heritage Foundation, referring to Bailey’s reported love of a stiff drink. “And she threw it out on the prairie and said he'd already had enough of that. And apparently he had.” "And because his wife said he had enough whiskey in his lifetime he did not need to take it with him,” Murray said. "But the basic story remains the same. He was a character." A character who, according to Brazoria County legend and numerous reported sightings over the following 184 years, haunts Bailey’s Prairie. As the story goes, on any given night—but best seen in the fall of the year when the “mist is on the prairie”—a floating light can be seen hovering over the prairie that bears his name. Catherine Munson Foster, the late Brazoria County historian, librarian and storyteller whose family lived on the property where Bailey was believed to be buried, would tell the tale to anyone who would listen. One of her presentations is part of the Brit Bailey file at the Brazoria County Historical Museum. Photos: Ghostly story of Bailey's Light <p>Bailey's Light is among the most infamous ghost stories in Brazoria County. (PHOTOS BY KEVIN REECE / KHOU 11 NEWS)</p> <p>James "Britt" Bailey was an eccentric early 1800's pioneer. In his will, he made an unusual request that he wanted to be buried standing up and facing west. (PHOTOS BY KEVIN REECE / KHOU 11 NEWS)</p> <p>Bailey said he didn't want anyone to stand over his grave. ( PHOTOS BY KEVIN REECE / KHOU 11 NEWS)</p> <p>Bailey was also buried with his rifle, a latern to light his way, and his favorite jug of whiskey. However his wife Dorothy said he'd had enough whiskey during his lifetime and took it out of the grave. ( PHOTOS BY KEVIN REECE/ KHOU 11 NEWS)</p> <p>Bailey's wife threw the whiskey out on the prairie. (PHOTOS BY KEVIN REECE / KHOU 11 NEWS)</p> <p>Bailey was also buried with his rifle. (PHOTOS BY KEVIN REECE / KHOU 11 NEWS)</p> <p>The legend goes that after Dorthy Bailey threw out the whiskey, James Bailey is out at night with his lantern searching for it on the prairie. ( PHOTOS BY KEVIN REECE / KHOU 11 NEWS)</p> <p>The Brazoria County Historical Museum in Angleton has files on Bailey. ( PHOTOS BY KEVIN REECE / KHOU 11 NEWS)</p> <p>On any given night, a floating light can be seen hovering over Bailey's Prairie. ( PHOTOS BY KEVIN REECE / KHOU 11 NEWS)</p> <p>The sightings of Bailey's Light goes back 184 years. (PHOTOS BY KEVIN REECE / KHOU 11 NEWS)</p> <p>You can learn more about James "Britt" Bailey at the Brazoria County Historical Museum. (PHOTOS BY KEVIN REECE / KHOU 11 NEWS)</p> <p>Bailey lived from 1779 to 1833. (PHOTOS BY KEVIN REECE / KHOU 11 NEWS)</p> <p>Bailey was a veteran of the War of 1812 and a native of North Carolina. The story of Bailey's Light airs at 10 on Friday the 13th! (PHOTOS BY KEVIN REECE / KHOU 11 NEWS)</p> Photos: Bailey's Light lives on in Brazoria County "Now it takes the form of a mysterious light that floats across the prairie and darts up into the tops of the trees,” she told a group of school children in a video recording from 1984. "It's been a well-established fact that Brit Bailey does haunt the prairie in the shape of a light.” Why? They say it’s an angry Brit Bailey, with that lantern he was buried with, roaming the prairie searching for that jug of whiskey his wife removed from his grave. Jamie Murray says the first sighting of Bailey’s ghost, as detailed in the book “Victorian Lady on the Texas Frontier” was by a family who says they saw Bailey himself. "But from then on nobody ever saw his form, just a light, just the bouncing light,” said Murray. "Daddy saw Bailey's Light several times,” Pekar said, recounting the stories of her own father, although she admits her dad sometimes just had fun telling the story whether he believed it or not. "When I go past Bailey's Prairie, I always look for him.” To the doubters, 184 years of sightings of Bailey's Light are nothing more than occasional puffs of South Texas natural gas. And a few local historians might be doubters, too. <p>The legend goes that after Dorthy Bailey threw out the whiskey, James Bailey is out at night with his lantern searching for it on the prairie. ( PHOTOS BY KEVIN REECE / KHOU 11 NEWS)</p> "We like our ghosts, and I don't necessarily believe in ghosts, but I believe in ghost stories,” Pekar said. “Well part of me believes in it. And then part of me knows that there are more rational forces in the world,” Murray laughed. "Do I believe it's old Brit Bailey with his lantern, looking for his jug of whiskey? I'd hate to have to say, because that ruins the story.” A story that tells us Bailey was a nemesis of Stephen F. Austin. The two didn't necessarily get along. But now, as Austin's statue stands watch over Brazoria County along Highway 288, somewhere along Highway 35 Brit Bailey is in a grave still standing, too. Although a roadside marker in front of Munson Cemetery on Highway 35 tells Bailey’s story, no one seems to know exactly where the infamous pioneer was buried back in 1832, only that he was buried under a large tree on a high ridge. But if you ask the diehard believers in Brazoria County, Bailey’s Light still makes occasional appearances across the vast expanses of Bailey’s Prairie: an early Texas pioneer still on the prowl, still looking for trouble, and still looking for his jug of whiskey.

If you don't have time for a half hour of reading on the TPPA, get the skinny here in less than three minutes. Don't get how the TPPA will it actually affect our everyday lives? In the fifth of a five-part series, we look at how it affects the New Zealand music industry. Lorde fans, fear not, your album collection won't really be affected by the TPPA. Well, not for another 50 years. Lorde's copyright will extend another 20 years. The trade agreement extends copyright from 50 to 70 years, so money paid for royalties and licenses will have to keep rolling in to copyright holders for a couple more decades. READ MORE: * How the TPPA will affect your grocery bills * How TPPA will affect your prescriptions * How the TPPA will affect your pay packet * Why you should care about the TPPA * The TPPA explained in 30 seconds * The TPPA explained in three minutes * The TPPA explained in 30 minutes It's estimated that change will eventually cost consumers about $55 million per year (over a "long term" including the initial 20-year period), according to the Government. This covers foregone savings on books, films, music and other works. However, Retail NZ general manager of public affairs Greg Harford said the cost was unlikely to hurt your wallet. "Any impact will be pretty marginal," he says. "If you look at the price for older music now, music from the 60's or 70's, it's pretty well-priced and it's not significantly different to stuff that's even older than that and outside the copyright period." That's because new music is priced at a premium when it's released, and then declines and flattens out with time as demand falls away. So it won't really cost Joe Bloggs any more to buy music. What if I'm an aspiring musician? Then this deal is great for you, says Recorded Music CEO Damian Vaughan. The law change would be "in line with every other Western nation on earth that has copyright". "People we represent, record labels and recording artists are on equal footing in the world," Vaughan said. However, the government has a complicated "phase-in" period of extending copyright to 60 years, before deciding to change it 70 years - which makes it "administratively burdensome". How does copyright for recorded music work? There are two copyrights when a song is recorded: one belongs to the person who wrote the song. Royals was written by Ella Yelich-O'Connor (Lorde) and Joel Little. That means their rights at the moment will last throughout their lifetime, and then another 50 years. The other copyright is for the recording - which in this example would belong to Lorde's record company Universal. That goes for 50 years after the recording. In the first stage of implementing the TPPA change, copyright will move to 60 years, and then the government has eight years to decide when they will move it up to 70. The "cost" the government has predicted is seen as a "benefit" by copyright administrator Recorded Music.

Chris Robshaw's brilliant breakdown performance in England's 26-17 win over Australia should have finally silenced his remaining doubters. We pick out the highlights of his display. A trivia question to start, so no cheating if you do not know the answer. Here you go: who said this about whom last week? “He’s an absolute pest. Last year he had a really good performance against us around the ruck and made it a really tough night for us.” There is not much point in building suspense. This was Australia skipper Michael Hooper, arguably the best pilfering openside on the planet, speaking about Chris Robshaw, a figure many still do not rate as a ‘proper seven’ – whatever that vague, fluffy phrase even means. And the outstanding Wallaby should know. While he has caused total havoc consistently throughout his young but brilliant Test career, two of his least effective games have come against England. Twelve months ago, Hooper was crowded into anonymity as the hosts triumphed 20-13 at Twickenham. Robshaw won the official man-of-the-match gong. On Saturday, he latched on for an early penalty and charged around athletically. However, he was comprehensively outdone by the England back row. Tom Wood was relentless, Ben Morgan barged to a brace of tries and Robshaw seemed utterly inspired when the ball was on the ground. Here is a run-down of his awesome afternoon. England 0-0 Australia, 1 minute: Early set-back Even accounting for the fact that England survived on grisly scraps – just 34 per cent of possession over the 80 minutes – the fact that they only had 36 rucks is amazing. By comparison, Australia’s commitment to keeping ball in hand saw them get through 112. In any case, it is significant that Robshaw carries for this first turnover. Of course, that means he is not there to secure the ruck. Billy Twelvetrees does not identify the threat of Hooper and clears Rob Horne instead. By the time Dylan Hartley and David Wilson arrive, it is too late. Following this false start, England tightened up markedly at the breakdown with Robshaw driving the standards. England 0-3 Australia, 4 minutes: Linking attack Field position meant England could show some early spark and they went through the phases nicely. Robshaw’s slip pass to Wood here is a trademark piece of skill. This is his bread and butter. He is so good at transferring the point of contact to unbalance defenders. Watch how the excellent Matt Toomua must adjust and an overlap is created momentarily: A punchy carry to challenge the fringes from the next ruck demonstrates Robshaw’s appetite for work in attack. England moved the ball left from here and won a penalty to level the scores. They spent long, long periods soaking up pressure from there, but their skipper stood firm. England 6-3 Australia, 25 minutes: Toomua turned over During the summer he spent at home while the 2013 Lions were touring, Robshaw sought out Australian forwards guru Laurie Fisher – the mentor of turnover pioneer and legendary Wallaby centurion George Smith – for tips on how best to improve his defensive breakdown skills. Here, the Harlequin stalks before Wilson makes the tackle. He then strikes and stays strong over the ball despite the dual challenge of Rob Simmons and James Slipper, who stack up to a combined weight of 232 kilograms. It is a copybook piece of work. England 6-3 Australia, 28 minutes: Rapid ruck-clear for Morgan’s try The roles of Wood and Morgan are easily more eye-catching here. Certainly, Wood’s slip pass is gorgeous and Morgan’s finish muscular. That said, the try comes about because of the speed of the breakdown following Barritt’s carry. Guess who helps secure the ball: As Morgan and Wood snake around the corner, Robshaw helps Anthony Watson secure possession and Ben Youngs can whip his pass away before the Australian line is set. It is a subtle but essential job – a hallmark of a fine openside flanker. England 13-3 Australia, 34 minutes: Phipps disrupted Scrum-half Nick Phipps has personified the Wallabies’ admirable ambition this tour. Incredibly, he did not kick the ball once over five matches. His long, strong passing game is integral to the pacy, wide way Cheika wants to play. Here though, Robshaw is quick to fire through and forces the ball loose. It was nearly a try-scoring turnover too. Youngs hits a clever kick from the box and Watson and Brown win the chase, but neither can gather: England 13-3 Australia, 38 minutes: Another penalty earned The most effective proponents of the ‘jackal’ – the art of crouching over the ball and forcing the player on the floor to be penalised for holding on – generate a collective anxiety among the opposition. Rivals always have Hooper, Richie McCaw and Peter O’Mahony in the back of their minds on attack. Austin Healey has admitted that one England squad member wore a ‘Brian O’Driscoll bib’ for the training week leading up to Ireland matches and spent rucking drills purposely misbehaving. Here, the knock-on effect of Robshaw’s excellent first-half is evident as Sam Carter clears him out from the side illegally. Before that though, we see the England captain’s innate desire and work ethic as he leads the line: Andy Farrell is less fussed about dog legs and spacing than he is about putting pressure on carriers – he calls his defensive system a ‘messy’ one and it is focussed on disruption. Sean McMahon actually steps past Robshaw, but Wood makes a superb chop tackle. Robshaw wheels around to threaten the ruck and Carter, clearly fretting about the prospect of another turnover, rushes into an unlawful clear-out: England 13-3 Australia, 54 minutes: Rescue act Into the second half now and the midst of Australia’s strongest period. Here, they probe the wide channel and the Wood-Robshaw combination strikes with a tackle-turnover once more. However, most impressive is what happens a phase earlier. Breakdowns are about decision-making as much as anything else – not hitting the beach at every ruck but picking your moments. Watch Ben Alexander’s carry again. Robshaw thinks about committing, but bails out and evades McMahon’s clear-out so he can stay on his feet: It is a selfless option that pays dividends seconds later. England 20-10 Australia, 58 minutes: Reception committee Tackle counts are a big part of what makes Robshaw a special player. Put simply, his engine is astounding. On Saturday he felled 14 runners, but this one is about quality rather than quantity. Will Skelton, a 140-kilogram lock has just come on. Australia look to get him into the game right away but Robshaw leads by example and cuts off the Waratahs behemoth behind the gain-line. Skelton scored a few phases later, but the sentiment remains admirable. England 23-17 Australia, 68 minutes: Still spoiling Israel Folau and Hooper outstrip Robshaw comfortably in pursuit of Owen Farrell’s hack through. Even so, this clip epitomises industriousness, especially given everything that had gone on before. England 23-17 Australia, 74 minutes: Suffocating Australia This autumn, Graham Rowntree’s pack has reinforced its class. In fact, England probably possess the best tight-five options in the world right now. The lineout maul is definitely on a par with South Africa’s for consistent destruction. This one rumbled over the Wallaby 10-metre line and England then won the match-clinching penalty out wide. You can probably guess who spearheaded the charge: Maggie Alphonsi, another England openside, lives by the motto “be so good they can’t ignore you.” Since being left out of the 2011 World Cup party by Martin Johnson, Robshaw has embodied that. The development he has undergone over his 32 caps thus far has been pretty amazing to watch. This weekend was his most influential Test as a breakdown scavenger, something he has worked hard at improving on. Regardless of the considerable talents of contenders Steffon Armitage, Will Fraser and Matt Kvesic – plus the fact that England’s skipper could play at six as well– it is lunacy to slap the lazy ‘not a proper seven’ label on Robshaw. Hopefully those calls finally dry up with this fantastic performance.

The post will be updated to include video when the Bregman's TED Talk becomes available. If the kind of reception the idea of a universal basic income received Tuesday is any gauge, political leaders should take note. According to Business Insider, it "just got a standing ovation at this year's TED conference." The cheers came during historian Rutger Bregman's talk at TED2017 in Vancouver, in which he touted the social welfare concept of providing people with income to pay for their basic needs as a means of tackling poverty. The TEDBlog wrote: According to Bregman, a basic income in the United States would cost $175 billion, just a quarter of the U.S.'s military budget. And universal basic income impacts the future of work itself—it's a complete rethink of what "work" actually is. Ultimately, Bregman believes in a "future where the value of your work is not determined by the size of your paycheck, but by the amount of happiness you spread and the amount of meaning you give." Bregman also said in his talk: "Just imagine how much talent we would unleash if we got rid of poverty once and for all." "Just imagine how much talent we would unleash if we got rid of poverty once and for all." @rcbregman on universal basic income #TED2017 — TED Talks (@TEDTalks) April 25, 2017 The concept the Utopia for Realists author is floating is far from new, and recent examples are easy to find. As Laura Williams, activism officer at the U.K.-based advocacy group Global Justice Now, noted recently: "In 2008-2009 Namibia experimented with the world-wide first Basic Income Grant pilot project in Otjivero – Omitara and found that the project led to reduction in poverty, increase in economic activity, and improvements in health. A similar series of trials in India produced similar results." SCROLL TO CONTINUE WITH CONTENT Help Keep Common Dreams Alive Our progressive news model only survives if those informed and inspired by this work support our efforts More evidence is set to come from the Canadian province of Ontario, where a pilot universal basic income program is set to launch in three cities. "If we look at the evidence, we don't have to be worried at all about huge reductions in work hours, or that people will be lazy," Bregman said to Huffington Post Australia last month. "In fact, it's to the contrary, especially for people living in poverty. They will have the means to get up and do something and contribute to the common good, and a lot of people not in poverty but in so called 'bullshit jobs' will be able to quit those jobs and do something that they consider to be fulfilling and useful," he added. Writing last month at the Guardian, Bregman likened universal basic income to "venture capital for the people": While it won't solve all the world's ills—and ideas such as a rent cap and more social housing are necessary in places where housing is scarce—a basic income would work like venture capital for the people. We can't afford not to do it—poverty is hugely expensive. The costs of child poverty in the U.S. are estimated at $500bn (£410bn) each year, in terms of higher healthcare spending, less education, and more crime. It's an incredible waste of potential. It would cost just $175bn, a quarter of the country's current military budget, to do what Dauphin [a city in Manitoba, Canada, which had a successful experiment in basic income] did long ago: eradicate poverty. That should be our goal. The time for small thoughts and little nudges is past. The time has come for new, radical ideas. If this sounds utopian to you, then remember that every milestone of civilisation—the end of slavery, democracy, equal rights for men and women—was once a utopian fantasy too. Bregman's new talk comes amidst increasing inequality and as automation (read: computers and robots) takes over some lower-wage jobs, thus setting the stage to "amplify economic disparities." Looking at a possible "robot uprising," George Dvorsky, contributing editor at Gizmodo, wrote:

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