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FILE PHOTO - Customers use computers at an internet cafe in Hefei, Anhui province March 16, 2012. REUTERS/Stringer
BEIJING (Reuters) - China has shut down or “dealt with” thousands of websites for sharing “harmful” erotic or obscene content since April, the state’s office for combating pornography and illegal publications announced on Thursday.
The office said 2,500 websites were prosecuted or shut down and more than 3 million “harmful” posts were deleted in eight months up to December during a drive to “purify” the internet in China and protect youth, the official Xinhua news agency reported.
The government has tightening its grip on Chinese cyberspace in recent months, in particular placing new restrictions on the fast-growing live-streaming industry.
The state has a zero-tolerance approach to what it considers lewd, smutty or illegal content and has in past crackdowns removed tens of thousands of websites in a single year.
Two popular news websites were also punished for spreading “illegal” content, Xinhua reported. It did not elaborate.
Aside from live-streaming, the office worked alongside the Ministry of Public Security, the ministry of Industry and Information Technology and the Cyberspace Administration of China to target cloud storage, chat apps and “vulgar” videos.
Social media platforms have become a key tool for spreading illegal content and mobile pay platforms including Alipay and WeChat pay have allowed individuals to make big profits, the office said. |
In its lawsuit, Google argues that Hood's subpoena is an affront to the company's constitutional rights (citing protections from both the First and Fourth Amendment) and, even if it wasn't, that issues of copyright fall exclusively under federal law. It goes on to say that the accusations made are damaging and false, and they contradict Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, which protects web-services from taking the blame for the illegal acts of their users. Google is now asking federal courts to issue a temporary restraining order on the Attorney General and a preliminary injunction to protect it from potential injury. It's not an ideal situation, Google explained in its announcement post, but the company believes it's become necessary. "We regret having to take this matter to court," the company wrote. "We are doing so only after years of efforts to explain both the merits of our position and the extensive steps we've taken on our platforms."
[Image credit: Photo by Mario Tama/Getty Images] |
About This Game
Other Titles From Excalibur
Navigate miles and miles of tyre changing, fuel burning, carburettor busting, mud clattering terrain, through night and day, rain and shine. Adapt to whatever the procedurally generated world of Jalopy can throw at you.Upgrade, maintain and care for your Laika 601 Deluxe motor vehicle. Keep close attention to everything from the state of your tyres, the condition of your engine and even the space in your trunk. Repair each aspect of your scrappy little car and install unique upgrades to deal with the changing world. Everything from cargo weight to the condition of your carburettor will determine how your car performs on the open road.The rise of capitalism brings an economical conundrum. Scavenge for scraps to make a small return of investment, or become a baron of the open road and smuggle contraband under the eyes of border patrols to make a sizable profit.Developer Greg Pryjmachuk worked on the Formula 1 franchise from 2009 through to 2014. In late 2014, Greg began work on this new driving simulation featuring the fictional Laika 601 Deluxe car; reminiscent of the East German “Trabbie”, it will need much love and care to keep it going on this memorable road trip! |
John Travolta has battled rumors about his sexuality for years, but the actor is now facing more serious allegations from an anonymous male masseur who is suing him for assault and sexual battery.
As TMZ is reporting, the unnamed masseur is reportedly seeking $2 million plus punitive damages after Travolta is said to have "began rubbing the masseur's leg, touched his scrotum and the shaft of his penis" after having stripped naked during an appointment.
Not only did Travolta allegedly try to have sex with the masseur, but he is also said to have told the plantiff -- identified only as "John Doe" -- that he "got where he is now due to sexual favors he had performed when he was in his 'Welcome Back, Kotter' days," and that "Hollywood is controlled by homosexual Jewish men who expect favors in return for sexual activity."
UPDATE: RadarOnline reports that a second masseur has filed a $2 million sexual battery lawsuit against Travolta. The website quotes documents which indicate this masseur claims to have "substantial documentation and numerous witnesses regarding the substance of Travolta's actions." The second alleged victim is represented by the same lawyer as the first accuser, and in the amended complaint, both are now suing the actor for sexual harassment as well.
The lawsuit spares few details of the alleged exchange: when the masseur says he reminded Travolta that sexual acts in exchange for money were illegal, the actor's rebuttal is stated as, "Come on dude, I’ll jerk you off!" The suit also describes Travolta's genitalia as "roughly 8 inches in length" with pubic hair that was "wirey and unkempt."
Travolta, who is married to actress Kelly Preston, is said to have later apologized for his behavior. But the actor later suggested he and the masseur team up to have sex with "a Hollywood starlet in the building that wanted to have three-way sex and to be double penetrated," according to the lawsuit.
Travolta's camp slammed the allegations in a statement to E! Online, calling the case "complete fiction and fabrication."
The statement reads, "None of the events claimed in the suit ever occurred. The plaintiff, who refuses to give their name, knows that the suit is a baseless lie...On that date when plaintiff claims John met him, John was not in California and it can be proved that he was on the East Coast. Plaintiff's attorney has filed this suit to try and get his 15 minutes of fame. John intends to get this case thrown out and then he will sue the attorney and Plaintiff for malicious prosecution."
In addition to punitive damages, the lawsuit cites emotional distress and requests a jury trial, according to MassLive.
Take a look at other celebrities who've faced rumors about their sexuality below: |
WITH its nautical boutiques, trim lawns and tennis club, the seaside town of Le Touquet is the weekend refuge for the bourgeoisie of northern France. Set in deep conservative country, the town is run by a centre-right Republican mayor, Daniel Fasquelle, and voted overwhelmingly for François Fillon, the Republican candidate defeated in the first round of the presidential election earlier this year. For ten years, Mr Fasquelle has also been a parliamentary deputy. Back in January, the town expected to bring a welcome end to five years of Socialist rule in France, and a return to conservative order.
Yet at a first-round ballot on June 11th for a new parliament, the good folk of Le Touquet put an unknown entrepreneur, Thibaut Guilluy, into the lead, pushing their mayor into second place and a run-off vote on June 18th. Mr Guilluy belongs to an army of novice candidates standing for President Emmanuel Macron’s party, La République en Marche! (LRM) who, without pike or pitchfork, are mounting a peaceful revolution in democratic politics.
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Mr Macron’s political movement, created just 14 months ago, took 32% of the vote, ten points ahead of the Republicans. This puts it on course to win a crushing majority at the run-off with more than 400 of the 577 National Assembly seats (see chart)—one of the biggest under the Fifth Republic—that would squeeze the Republicans, sideline the far right and far left, and all but wipe out the Socialist Party, which could lose 90% of its seats.
For Le Touquet, which considers Mr Macron a local son, this would be a particularly symbolic victory. He and his wife, Brigitte, have a second home in the resort, were married there and are regular visitors. The presidential jet landed on Le Touquet’s small airstrip so that he could vote at the town hall. “Everyone knows him here,” says a local by the sea front: “He’s never arrogant; people want to give him a chance.” The family link does not stop there. Mr Guilluy’s deputy, Tiphaine Auzière, is Mr Macron’s stepdaughter.
The entrenched
On a blustery afternoon, Mr Guilluy can be found inland in the red-brick village of Rang-du-Fliers, beside his yellow campaign bus. He is joined by Ms Auzière, a local lawyer, who turns up on a bicycle. The pair are up against entrenched centre-right voting habits and networks, as well as a resilient far-right in rural parts. Farther east, Marine Le Pen, leader of the nationalist National Front (FN), topped voting in Hénin-Beaumont, where she is running for parliament. “This constituency is on the right, and everyone said it wasn’t winnable,” says Ms Auzière: “But we’ve had an incredibly warm welcome on the ground.”
Before Mr Macron was elected, many wondered how he could ever hope to govern. The party had no deputies. The presidential campaign was focused on his personality and political preferences, and it was not obvious that this could transfer into a party vote. Yet, on a wave of dégagisme, or desire to kick the old lot out, the French are proving the doubters wrong. First-round turnout, at under 50%, may have been lower than usual, but the result was unambiguous. LRM has already felled a forest of old-timers, including Benoît Hamon, the Socialists’ defeated presidential candidate, and Jean-Christophe Cambadélis, the party leader. Neither made the parliamentary run-off.
The implications could be far-reaching and a case study in political change. A 39-year-old former Socialist economy minister and one-time investment banker, who had never stood for elected office, Mr Macron has already defied all the unwritten rules to become president at first try. Three other consequences could now follow: the reshaping of French party politics; the reinvention of political representation; and the construction of a new dynamic for reform.
Mr Macron’s new politics were not directly inspired by theorists of the “radical centre”. But his thinking shares some of that, notably the value of borrowing ideas freely from left and right, and the need to remake democratic politics. His underlying idea is that the big forces shaping the future—technology, the freelance economy, the environment—no longer fall neatly into the old ideological divide between left and right. By seeking out like-minded people across the spectrum, he has sought to realign politics along a new fault line: between those in favour of an open society, trade, markets and Europe; and, on the other side, nationalists advocating protectionism and identity politics.
Mr Macron is not the first to try to forge a radical centre in France. Past attempts were made by Jean Lecanuet, a justice minister who, in a neat twist, campaigned for the presidency in 1965 with the slogan “une France en marche”; Jacques Chaban-Delmas, prime minister from 1969-72, advocated a centrist “new society”; or François Bayrou, a centrist former presidential hopeful who is now Mr Macron’s justice minister. But these all began on the centre-right, failed to gain traction, and were usually framed as a quest for a middle path between Gaullism and Socialism.
Mr Macron, by contrast, has roots on the left. He believes in a strong role for government, particularly on investment and education (though he wants an overall reduction in public spending). And, like his former mentor, Michel Rocard, centre-left prime minister in 1988-91, he seeks to work across the party divide. His ambition is not to create a middling alternative to the left and right, but to force a party realignment. Attitudes to Europe measure this new split. A recent poll asked if voters would regret the end of the European Union. As Gérard Grunberg, a political scientist, points out, a majority of Socialist, LRM and Republican supporters said they would; most of the far left and far right would not. The former, drawn from across the party divide, make up the backbone of Mr Macron’s post-partisan support.
So overwhelming is Mr Macron’s expected victory that worries are turning to how to curb excessive power. This week Le Monde ran an editorial entitled “The challenges of hegemony”, fretting about the “non-existent” opposition. Parliament’s newcomers, say some, will lack the experience to hold the executive to account. Concerns about the solidity of opposition over the next five years, though, risk masking a more positive renewal. When the debutants step into the National Assembly for the first time, floor plans in hand, the face of parliament will be transformed.
For years, the country has lamented its inability to break the ageing, pale, male grip on parliament. The most common age band among outgoing deputies was 60-70. Some 17% were over 70. The average age of the 281 LRM deputies seeking office for the first time is as low as 43. After selection hearings based on 19,000 online applications, it picked a total of 525 candidates. Half are women. A fair few are of immigrant origin, including Mounir Mahjoubi, a digital entrepreneur standing in Paris, or Hervé Berville, a Rwanda-born economist running in Brittany. Novice candidates include business people, teachers, doctors, 11 farmers, two firemen, a fighter pilot, a mathematician and a hairdresser.
On social media
This rinsing out of the old political class was a deliberate attempt by Mr Macron to combat political extremes. Dismayed by politicians’ failure to curb the rise of Ms Le Pen’s FN, he argued that confidence in mainstream politics would be restored only by closer, more meaningful links between deputies and voters. “What doesn’t work anymore is the party system,” he told The Economist last year: “We need to find far more direct forms of exchange with people.” He launched En Marche! last April to that effect, using social media to spread the movement, drawing people into politics who had previously been put off by the sect-like approach to party activism.
The huge inflow of newcomers is cleansing, but will bring its own difficulties. They will soon have to learn the grubby, and necessary, art of compromise. And this may disappoint voters. Tensions in such a broad movement are bound to emerge too, testing its unity. For now, though, the rejuvenated political line-up appeals, and in no small measure due to the Macron effect. It is not by chance that unknown candidates have pasted photos of themselves with the new president on campaign billboards all over France. Mr Macron’s first month, marked by much diplomatic summitry, has gone down well. His muscular handshake with Donald Trump, his tough talk in front of Vladimir Putin and the dignified way he has represented France, have won plaudits. Some 70% think that he is improving France’s image. “He walks on water!” laughs Mickaël Littiere, an En Marche! organiser, with only a hint of irony.
A philosophy graduate, Mr Macron has thought hard about the nature of presidential office. As a former adviser to François Hollande, his hapless Socialist predecessor, he also watched at close quarters how to get it wrong. What is missing in France, Mr Macron told Le 1, a newspaper, in a rather astonishing interview in 2015, “is the figure of the king, whose death I fundamentally believe the French people did not want.” The empty feeling at the centre of French democracy, he argued, was only occasionally filled by great leaders, such as Charles de Gaulle. “After him”, said Mr Macron, “the normalisation of the presidential figure has reinstalled an empty chair in the heart of political life.”
Up to a point, Mr Macron can hope to restore confidence at home by occupying that seat and representing the country with aplomb abroad. His response to Mr Trump’s decision to pull out of the Paris climate agreement, for instance, was cleverly judged: a plea, in English, to “Make Our Planet Great Again”. Yet the real test of Mr Macron’s promise to make a difference will be his domestic reforms. He vows to pass a labour law before the end of the summer, using presidential orders, for which he will seek parliamentary approval in July.
The underlying problem is high joblessness, particularly among the young (see chart 2). France’s unemployment rate has stood for five years at 10%, more than twice that of Germany; for the under 25s, it reached 25% in 2016. Labour costs have been curbed, chiefly with lower social charges. But firms are still deterred from creating jobs by a 3,000-page labour code which protects permanent jobs, and ties employers up in knots of complexity and uncertainty. As Mr Macron repeatedly reminded voters, 80% of new contracts for young people are short-term. They often spend years in temporary work, which firms use to secure the flexibility the law generally denies them.
To encourage job creation, Mr Macron’s labour law will protect individuals rather than jobs. He wants his first reform to bring about three changes: to devolve more bargaining over pay and hours to firms, within national limits; to merge different works councils into one; and to cap redundancy awards for unfair dismissal. Further reforms, of unemployment benefits, training and pensions, will follow.
Efforts to reform the labour market have defeated many. Most attempts at introducing flexibility are regarded as an assault on rights, and an unpardonable gift to capitalist bosses. “Shameful and miserable regression to the 19th century” was how Aurélie Filippetti, a Socialist ex-minister, described Mr Macron’s labour-market plans in a tweet. Great skill will be needed to persuade union leaders, whose clout depends on their ability to draw protesters on to the streets. The summer may be quiet, but demonstrations could well mark the return to work in September.
Mr Macron and his centre-right prime minister, Edouard Philippe, are treading a perilous line. Their efforts will be keenly watched by Germany, to see whether Mr Macron can restore French credibility on economic reform. In their favour, a moderate union, the Confédération Française Démocratique du Travail, is now France’s biggest. Led by Laurent Berger, and for the first time since it was originally founded in 1919, it has overtaken the hardline Confédération Générale du Travail. Mr Macron also made a deft appointment in naming Muriel Pénicaud, a former human-resources director at Danone, a food company, to be labour minister.
The context is more favourable too. Mr Macron’s own election spoke of popular exasperation at the immobilisme of the past two decades. Economic growth has begun to pick up, forecast at 1.4% for this year and 1.7% next, according to the European Commission. Business confidence in May reached its highest level for six years. Conversations in the boardroom and around dinner tables have turned from lamenting French decline to a sort of stunned delight at finding the country the object of international admiration.
Nothing is guaranteed, even for Mr Macron. The hard slog of reform will test his skills, and his country’s new goodwill towards him. But the French have been in a form of collective depression, which has diminished their own expectations. “Ever since I was old enough to listen to political speeches, I’ve heard that France is in crisis,” wrote Mr Macron in a book published last year. They have already surprised the world at the ballot box. On paper at least, Mr Macron’s reform plans sound promising too. “Finally we’re not having the finger pointed at us for failing to try what other countries have already done,” says Ludovic Subran, chief economist at Euler Hermes, an insurer.
A year ago, only the touchingly optimistic believed that Mr Macron could take his political adventure anywhere. It has succeeded, if anything to excess. The young president’s legacy will be secured if he can defy the sceptics on economic reform too. That would be a real French revolution. |
The Trump mode has been to regulate bureaucrats rather than the public. New, large-scale regulation has largely stopped in 2017, and where it hasn’t, new costs are required to be offset.
President Donald Trump is capping the end of the fiscal year and beginning the new one with high-profile events on tax reform and cutting red tape, respectively. He highlighted these issues in a speech to the National Association of Manufacturers on Friday, the last working day of the federal government’s 2017 fiscal year. Then on Monday, the 2018 fiscal year starts, and the White House will host a "Cut the Red Tape" event to discuss the administration’s regulatory reform plans.
Trump’s focus on tax reform and cutting red tape is exceptionally good news for consumers, businesses and the economy. In recent years, I’ve estimated the baseline for the U.S. federal regulatory burden has amounted to nearly $2 trillion annually. This amounts to a hidden tax of nearly $15,000 per household in a given year.
Getting rid of complicated and unnecessary rules would create a fairer and simpler system that will help get America working for everyone. The combination of regulatory reform and tax reform would jumpstart the economy, finally resulting in the economic relief Americans have been waiting for: more jobs and higher wages. It would also help small business owners, driving more growth, investment, and productivity.
As we continue to watch the president’s progress on his economic priorities, it’s interesting to compare Trump with previous presidents, namely Ronald Reagan. Under Reagan, both regulations and Federal Register pages (where agency rules and regulations are published) dropped more than one-third. So far, Trump has reduced the flow of regulation even more.
Even though Congress has yet to send regulatory reform legislation to the president’s desk, this week’s “cut red tape” push follows three important efforts already initiated by the White House:
Trump’s January executive order requiring agencies to eliminate at least two rules for every new regulation adopted, and that they ensure net new regulatory costs of zero; A sweeping Reorganization Executive Order that requires the Office of Management and Budget to submit a plan aimed at streamlining and reducing the size of the administrative state generally. This plan will set the tone for Trump’s budget proposal next year. A memorandum from the new Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs (OIRA) administrator Neomi Rao directing agencies, for the first time as far as I can tell, to propose an overall incremental regulatory cost allowance for the agency in the new edition of their “Unified Agenda” on regulations. This report will appear in the fall. Prior editions, since the 1980s, would label rules as “economically significant,” but never has there been such a “regulatory budget.” Rao says, “OMB expects that each agency will propose a net reduction in total incremental regulatory costs for FY 2018.”
Although there is much regulation that cannot be counted, if we’re going to keep the executive branch in check, we must try to get a handle on what federal agencies are actually doing. For example, in the same way that President Obama invoked the “pen and phone” to go around Congress, agencies did so too. As a result, we call the multitude of guidances, notices, memoranda and the like, “regulatory dark matter,” and have started to catalog it. Trump’s agencies have eliminated some of the higher-profile, “dark matter” actions of Obama administration.
The transgender bathroom “guidelines” – neither a law, nor a regulation that went through – are gone.
The Department of Labor’s controversial “Administrator’s Interpretations” on franchising and on independent contracting is also gone.
As for ordinary rules, Trump had prominently declared that 70 percent of regulations "can go," and issued a regulatory freeze early in his term. The Interior Department followed suit and talked of reducing its regulations by 50 percent.
According to the data below, President Trump compared to his predecessors is—so far—the least regulatory president of all. Let’s look at the end of his first fiscal year.
Trump’s Federal Register Reduced Sets a Record
The Federal Register stands at 45,678 pages. Last year at this time, Barack Obama’s Federal Register stood at 67,900 pages. (Obama’s 2016 Federal Register set an all-time-record: 97,110 pages).
Compared to Obama at this time last year, Trump’s page count is down 32 percent so far in his first year.
It took a few years for Ronald Reagan to achieve his ultimate, one-third reduction in Federal Register pages following Jimmy Carter’s then-record Federal Register. So by this metric, Trump is moving much faster.
Trump Final Rules at Fiscal Year-End Compared to Obama
Let’s also review executive branch and independent agency rules the Trump administration has issued so far compared to the same period under President Obama in 2016 (Jan. 20-Sept. 30).
Nine Months of Trump Regulations vs. Obama (Jan 20-September 30)
Rules “Significant” Rules
Trump 2017 2,183 116
Obama 2016 2,686 274
In nine months, the Trump administration has issued 2,183 rules. Obama issued 2,686 rules in the corresponding time period in 2016. Trump’s tally represents an 18 percent decrease.
Keep in mind, even getting rid of a rule requires issuing a “rule” in order to comply with the Administrative Procedure Act’s notice-and-comment requirements. So these tallies may obscure that some of Trump’s rules have been eliminations or delays of earlier rules that hadn’t reached their effective date. For example, here are several delayed Environmental Protection Agency rules. Moreover, new costs agencies impose must be zero. (CEI has urged that Congress, or Trump via executive order, needs to change the nomenclature for a rollback so we can compare apples and oranges).
Significant rules issued, generally those with an impact of $100 million or more, are down an astonishing 58 percent compared to Obama. Trump’s agencies issued 116 significant final rules during his first nine months, while Obama’s issued 274 over the corresponding nine-month period in 2016. This also ignores any portion of Trump’s rules that are deferrals or freezes.
Rules Cooking in the Oven Are Way Down
The tally above is for rules finalized. Proposed rules are those being created, those in the process of being written, and those being commented upon. Their bulk implies either a higher or lower level of final rules (what we just covered) one would expect to see later.
In addition to final rules being down under Trump, overall proposed rules are down even more. The vibe in the Trump administration is to lessen what goes into the pipeline in the first place. Below, I also compare Trump to George W. Bush and Bill Clinton.
Trump’s First Fiscal Year: Proposed Rules Compared to Predecessors
(January 20 - September 30)
Proposed Rules “Significant” Proposed Rules
Trump (2017) 1241 65
Obama (2016) 1737 290
Obama (2009) 1413 216
Bush (2008) 1707 276
Bush (2001) 1757 129
Clinton (2000) 1976 198
Clinton (1997) 2134 169
Trump’s overall proposed rules in the pipeline are far below any of his predecessors (calendar-year comparisons may be found at www.tenthousandcommandments.com).
They are down a down 28 percent compared to the corresponding time frame from Obama’s final year. Trump: 1241, Obama: 1737.
Note that Trump’s “significant” proposed rules are drastically below any predecessor. They are down 77 percent compared to Obama. Trump: 65, Obama: 290. |
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Hundreds of Mosul residents were killed by airstrikes in their homes following repeated instructions from Iraqi authorities not to leave, Amnesty International says. It adds coalition forces should have known they were likely to result in civilian deaths.
Citing numerous testimonies given by survivors and eyewitnesses, Amnesty said many people did not attempt to flee during the US-backed operation to retake the city from Islamic State (IS, formerly ISIS/ISIL) due to Iraqi authorities’ instructions.
Read more
“Evidence gathered on the ground in east Mosul points to an alarming pattern of US-led coalition airstrikes which have destroyed whole houses with entire families inside,” said Donatella Rovera, a senior crisis response adviser who carried out field investigations in Mosul.
She noted the increasingly high civilian death toll “suggests that coalition forces leading the offensive in Mosul have failed to take adequate precautions to prevent civilian deaths, in flagrant violation of international humanitarian law.”
The fact that the Iraqi authorities repeatedly told civilians not to flee the war-ravaged city in the midst of fighting, “indicates that coalition forces should have known that these strikes were likely to result in a significant numbers of civilian casualties,” the organization said.
"We are concerned about the pattern of civilian casualties which has been happening since the start of the operation [on October 17]" Rovera told RT. "Amnesty International is concerned that there is disproportionate use of force and this could constitute war crimes."
Rovera noted to RT that the US coalition is failing to undertake "all possible and feasible precautions to minimize civilian casualties," especially when it comes to cases where civilian structures are destroyed.
"The use of munitions and tactics at times are causing civilian casualties — notably in situations where ISIS fighters are on the roof of houses — large munitions have been used which have destroyed those houses and killed the civilians in the house," the senior investigator explained.
Wa’ad Ahmad al-Tai, a resident of eastern Mosul, said these instructions were delivered via radio and through leaflets dropped from military aircraft.
“The government … told us [to] stay in our homes and avoid displacement,” he added.
Amnesty in their report has also noted IS resorts to using civilians as human shields, which amounts to a war crime.
READ MORE: Civilian deaths in Mosul are miscalculations & mistakes – Iraqi President
“However, the IS’s use of human shields does not absolve Iraqi and coalition forces from their obligation not to launch disproportionate attacks,” said Rovera.
Amnesty has urged the Iraqi government and the US-led coalition to “immediately launch an independent and impartial investigation into the appalling civilian death toll resulting from the Mosul operation.”
The statement comes as the US-led coalition faces allegations that one of their airstrikes on March 17 killed dozens of civilians.
READ MORE: 307 civilians killed, 273 wounded in western Mosul since February 17 – UN human rights chief
The US declared that its forces are not planning to change the way they conduct airstrikes despite the battle for Mosul entering more densely-populated areas in the western part of the city.
Meanwhile, the Iraqi president told RIA Novosti that “there is coordination between the US coalition and Iraqi security forces, but sometimes it fails,” civilian deaths being the result of “miscalculations” and “unintended mistakes.”
UN Human Rights chief Zeid Ra'ad al-Hussein made a statement on Tuesday condemning the “massive loss of civilian lives in western Mosul,” where at least 307 people have been killed and 273 wounded in just over a month. |
Slowing down the aging process might be possible one day with supplements derived from gut bacteria.
Slowing down the aging process might be possible one day with supplements derived from gut bacteria. Scientists at Baylor College of Medicine and The University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston have identified bacterial genes and compounds that extend the life of and also slow down the progression of tumors and the accumulation of amyloid-beta, a compound associated with Alzheimer’s disease, in the laboratory worm C. elegans. The study appears in the journal Cell.
“The scientific community is increasingly aware that our body’s interactions with the millions of microbes in our bodies, the microbiome, can influence many of our functions, such as cognitive and metabolic activities and aging,” said corresponding author Dr. Meng Wang, associate professor of molecular and human genetics at Baylor and the Huffington Center On Aging. “In this work we investigated whether the genetic composition of the microbiome might also be important for longevity.”
This question is difficult to explore in mammals due to technical challenges, so the researchers turned to the laboratory worm C. elegans, a transparent, simple organism that is as long as a pinhead and shares essential characteristics with human biology. During its 2 to 3 week long lifespan, the worm feeds on bacteria, develops into an adult, reproduces, and progressively ages, loses strength and health and dies. Many research laboratories around the world, including the Wang lab, work with C. elegans to learn about basic biological processes.
“We think that C. elegans is a wonderful system in which to study the connection between bacterial genes and aging because we can very fine tune the genetics of microbes and test many genes in the worm in a relatively short time,” Wang said.
Testing thousands of genes, one at a time.
To study the effect of individual bacterial genes on the lifespan of C. elegans, Wang joined efforts with Dr. Christophe Herman, associate professor of molecular and human genetics and molecular virology and microbiology at Baylor, and other colleagues who are experts in bacterial genetics. They employed a complete gene-deletion library of bacterium E. coli; a collection of E. coli, each lacking one of close to 4,000 genes.
“We fed C. elegans each individual mutant bacteria and then looked at the worms’ life span,” Wang said. “Of the nearly 4,000 bacterial genes we tested, 29, when deleted, increased the worms’ lifespan. Twelve of these bacterial mutants also protected the worms from tumor growth and accumulation of amyloid-beta, a characteristic of Alzheimer’s disease in humans.”
Further experiments showed that some of the bacterial mutants increased longevity by acting on some of the worm’s known processes linked to aging. Other mutants encouraged longevity by over-producing the polysaccharide colanic acid. When the scientists provided purified colanic acid to C. elegans, the worms also lived longer. Colanic acid also showed similar effects in the laboratory fruit fly and in mammalian cells cultured in the lab.
The researchers propose that, based on these results, it might be possible in the future to design preparations of bacteria or their compounds that could help slow down the aging process.
Colanic acid mediates crosstalk between bacteria and mitochondria
Interestingly, the scientists found that colanic acid regulates the fusion-fission dynamics of mitochondria, the structures that provide the energy for the cell’s functions.
“These findings are also interesting and have implications from the biological point of view in the way we understand host-microbe communication,” Wang said. “Mitochondria seem to have evolved from bacteria that millions of years ago entered primitive cells. Our finding suggests that products from bacteria today can still chime in the communication between mitochondria in our cells. We think that this type of communication is very important and here we have provided the first evidence of this. Fully understanding microbe-mitochondria communication can help us understand at a deeper level the interactions between microbes and their hosts.”
Other contributors to this work include Bing Han, Priya Sivaramakrishnan, Chih-Chun J. Lin, Isaiah A.A. Neve, Jingquan He, Li Wei Rachel Tay, Jessica N. Sowa, Antons Sizovs, Guangwei Du and Jin Wang.
Financial support for this project was provided by the National Institutes of Health grants R01AG045183, R01AT009050, DP1DK113644, R01HL119478, R01GM088653, R01GM115622, R01CA207701 and Howard Hughes Medical Institute Faculty Scholar Award. |
Oracle addressed 40 security issues in Java and enabled online certificate revocation checking by default in its scheduled critical patch update for Java on Tuesday.
Thirty-four vulnerabilities patched in the newly released Java 7 Update 25 (Java 7u25) version affect only client deployments of Java. Another four affect both client and server deployments, one affects the Java installer and one the Javadoc tool that's used to create HTML documentation files.
Many of the client-only vulnerabilities received the maximum score on the vulnerability severity scale used by Oracle. These flaws can be exploited by attackers to take control of computers by hosting malicious Java applets—Java Web applications—on remote servers and tricking users to load them in their browsers.
The large number of Web-based attacks that targeted Java users this year by exploiting vulnerabilities in the Java browser plug-in prompted concern about the security worthiness of the Java platform among home users and in enterprise environments, where Java is also frequently used on servers.
In order to clearly differentiate between the security risks to Java client and server deployments, Oracle started shipping a separate Server JRE (Java Runtime Environment) package in April that doesn't include the browser plug-in.
The Javadoc issue could affect users who visit HTML pages generated with the tool that are hosted on Web servers.
"Some HTML pages that were created by any 1.5 or later versions of the Javadoc tool are vulnerable to frame injection," said Eric Maurice, Oracle's director of software assurance, in a blog post Tuesday. "If exploited, this vulnerability can result in granting a malicious attacker the ability to inject frames into a vulnerable web page, thus allowing the attacker to direct unsuspecting users to malicious web pages through their web browsers."
Java 7u25 includes a patched version of the Javadoc tool that no longer generates vulnerable Web pages. In addition, Oracle released a separate tool called the Java API Documentation Updater Tool, that can be used to fix previously generated and vulnerable pages.
The new update also makes some other security-related changes, including enabling the certificate revocation checking feature by default.
As part of its efforts to fight Java exploits, Oracle changed Java's default behavior earlier this year to prevent the execution of unsigned applets without user interaction, therefore encouraging developers to digitally sign their Java Web applications with valid certificates.
However, in order for this to work properly as a defense mechanism, Java needs to be able to check in real time if the certificates used to sign applets have been revoked by their issuing certificate authorities (CAs). Otherwise, an attacker could sign a malicious applet with a stolen certificate and there would be no way for Java to detect that, even if the CA later revoked the certificate for abuse.
While support for two methods of certificate revocation checking—by using certificate revocation lists (CRLs) and the Online Certificate Status Protocol (OCSP)—have existed in Java for a long time, the feature was turned off by default. In May, Oracle promised to change thatin a future release.
The change was made in Java 7 Update 25 which now uses both CRL and OCSP to check for certificate revocations by default.
"Under normal circumstances revocation checking will have a slight impact on startup performance for applets and web start applications," Oracle said in its release notes for Java 7u25. "Enterprises with managed networks and without access to the Internet (resulting in no access to the revocation services provided by Certificate Authorities) will see a significant delay in startup times."
To avoid such delays, certificate revocation checking can be disabled through options available in the Java Control Panel. However, this "should only be considered in managed environments as it decreases security protections," Oracle said.
The number of vulnerabilities found and fixed in Java has increased significantly this year compared to the past two years, Amol Sarwate, director of Qualys Vulnerability Labs, said Wednesday in an emailed statement. "This year we had 137 vulnerabilities as compared to just 28 and 38 during the same period for the last two years."
"We highly encourage users to patch as soon as possible," he said. |
— Baltimore Police say the man who is suspected of killing four pit bull puppies in South Baltimore has turned himself in.
Police say 21-year old Donald Yearwood turned himself into authorities after four puppies were found with fatal injuries and left in a dumpster in early November. Yearwood is charged with 17 counts of animal cruelty and animal abuse related charges.
RELATED: Man Accused Of Killing 4 Puppies In South Baltimore
On November 9, Police say Yearwood was inside the home attempting to sleep. The puppies were making noise and Yearwood began to kick and stomp on the puppies, and then threw the puppies down a flight of stairs. However, during this incident, his girlfriend’s young children were home at the time and witnessed the attack. Yearwood allegedly then put the puppies in a box and left the location.
Police say that investigators found a video from a surveillance camera in the area of Donald Yearwood placing the puppies into a dumpster.
A warrant was issued for Donald Yearwood, who turned himself in on November 30 to the Southern District police station. Yearwood was transported to the Central Booking and Intake Facility.
Animal Control officers had been to Yearwood’s residence on 10th Street prior in October, after an adult female pit bull bit one of the children inside the home. The child had minor injuries.
The adult female dog and six week-old puppies were taken into custody by authorities and later adopted by other families. Animal Control officers say they weren’t aware of the four other puppies inside the home.
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Activists and Syrian state media give varying accounts of an oil pipeline explosion in Homs [AFP]
Syrian activists say at least 13 people have been killed by security forces across the country, on the same day a pipeline carrying oil from the east to a refinery in Homs city was set ablaze.
Syrian state news, SANA, called Thursday's fire and resulting explosion an act of sabotage by an armed terrorist group.
However, activists said government militia members hoping to place the blame on the protest movement started the fire.
Witnesses said Syrian media was immediately on the scene of the oil pipeline attack, next to a major military checkpoint in the restive city.
President Bashar al-Assad has in the past blamed terrorist groups for creating violent tension among the Syrian people in the last nine months.
The narrator of an online video showing raging flames and black clouds of smoke in the Bab Amr neighbourhood of Homs said the pipeline was attacked by a military force backed with armoured vehicles also pictured in the 40 second clip.
"Bab Amro, (this is) the armoured vehicle that attacked the oil pipeline, this is the armoured vehicle in Bab Amro
and these are the Shabiha (state-backed militia) around the armoured vehicle and this is another armoured vehicle, and
this is the oil pipeline facing the vehicles," the man could be heard saying.
Another video claiming to show the aftermath of the explosion, was narrated by a man accusing forces loyal to Assad of purposely sabotaging the pipeline leading to a refinery.
"(This is) Bab Amro, the burning of one of the pipelines by Assad's Shabiha (state-backed militia), using a mortar rocket in Bab Amro neighbourhood on December 8, 2011 and the houses around it are burning," the man narrated.
"The pipeline was attacked by the government forces so they can accuse the residents of doing it, so they can bomb Baba Amro entirely," the man continued. Al Jazeera could not independently verify the citizen videos.
The Homs refinery serves part of Syria's domestic requirement for refined oil products. A British-based Syrian human rights group says it is the main pipeline that feeds the Homs refinery.
Violence continues
Meanwhile, the violence continued elsewhere. Al Jazeera's Nisreen El-Shamayleh, reporting from Amman in neighbouring Jordan, said that three people were killed in Idlib and 10 in Homs.
The Syrian Revolution General Commission (SRGC), an opposition group, named some of those that died in Homs: Razouq al-Azou (in Bab Amro), Sabee' Dabdoub (23-years-old, in al-Bayyada), Salam al-Saleh (in Bab Amro), Nasser Suleiman al-Abrash (in al-Khalidieh) and Abdul Majid Khudeir al-Othman (in Asheera).
In Idlib, the commission said Mohammad Amin Subhi al-Najjar, an army defector from Aleppo, was also killed.
In the al-Houleh area of Homs, six people were also reportedly injured in gunfire. In al-Qaboun, outside Damascus, heavy gunfire was reported on Thursday morning.
In Deraa, security forces and government loyalists are said to have raided the al-Teebeh village, vandalising property and ransacking the homes of activists.
Denial of crackdown
The fresh violence came one day after a US interview with Assad made international headlines.
In an interview aired on Wednesday by the US broadcaster ABC, Assad said he had not given security forces a command "to kill or be brutal" and he denied ordering a deadly crackdown on the uprising that began last March.
"They're not my forces," Assad responded when asked if Syrian troops had cracked down too hard on protesters.
Jordan backs out from sanctions against Syria
"They are military forces [who] belong to the government. I don't own them. I'm president. I don't own the country. No government in the world kills its people, unless it is led by a crazy person."
Syria's foreign ministry responded to the interview saying the remarks made by Assad were taken out of context.
However, in his role as president, Assad is officially the commander of Syria's armed forces, which have reportedly used tanks, heavy weaponry, plain-clothed armed groups, and snipers to besiege dissidents in residential areas across the country.
After the interview aired, Jihad Makdissi, a Syrian foreign ministry spokesman, said that Assad wanted to make the point that the army was not his personal "militia". |
For the last several days, speculation has been circulating on whether the name SANSAR might be the name of the Lab’s new next generation platform for virtual experiences.
Speculation first came via a post made to the SL Universe forums, and has since appeared on both the Profile feeds and forums, relating to trademarks filed by the Lab on April 10th, 2015, namely:
In addition, in October 2014, Ascio Technologies, Inc., filed a domain name registration for projectsansar.com listing Linden Research as the Domain Administrator.
As has already been indicated in some of the responses to the forum posts referring to the trademarks, Sansara was one of the early names considered for Second life (being derived from Samsāra, which occurs in both Buddhism and Hinduism, and, perhaps more particularly where SL is concerned, was used by Hermann Hesse in his 1922 novel Siddhartha as a reference to the “world of illusion”), and currently lives on as the name of SL ‘s oldest and largest mainland continent. Whether “SANSAR” is a play on this is unclear – it might just as easily be an acronym.
The description of both trademarks is identical, and for those preferring to read it in a single pass rather than via the filings with the US Trademark office, it can be found on the Legal Force website, from which I’m quoting below:
Entertainment software, namely, software that is used for providing multi-player access to an on-line game environment; computer game software; virtual reality game software; computer graphics software; software that is used for providing multi-user access to an online 3D virtual environment; computer 3D virtual environment software, namely, software for use in creating, manipulating and participating in 3D virtual environments. Advertising and marketing services, namely, developing and distributing electronic marketing materials. Online financial services, namely, offering a fictional-dollar-denominated credit card to charge online purchases. Communication services in the nature of text messaging and electronic mail services used in playing on-line computer games; communication services in the nature of text messaging and electronic mail services used in an online virtual environment. Entertainment services, namely, providing an on-line computer game by means of communications networks; entertainment services in the nature of providing an on-line multi-player electronic computer game; entertainment services, namely, providing an on-line computer game that may be accessed by means of communications networks. Computer services, namely, hosting an on-line 3D virtual environment featuring a wide variety of user-defined subject matter and hosting an on-line 3D virtual environment featuring a wide variety of user-defined subject matter that may be accessed by means of communications networks; design and development of multimedia and three dimensional virtual environment software.
Most of this reads pretty much as description for Second Life – so the applicability for a new virtual experiences platform is fairly obvious, and hence the speculation that is circulating.
However, what really does pique interest in this description – beyond whether or not it pertains to the Lab’s new platform – is not the description of the environment, but the description of “online financial services”. The Lab has already indicated that Linden Dollars would be supported on the new platform, however, the description of a fictional-dollar-denominated credit card to charge online purchases suggests a new mechanism by which good and services within the new platform can be purchased, and by which the Lab might generate revenue.
Whether the name reflects the actual name for the Lab’s new virtual experiences platform or purely an interim project name (or even both, as may be the case given the two trademarks), is unclear. Sansar itself is a popular name for organisations related to the Asian continent (including SANSAR, the South Asian Network Supporting Awareness and Research based in Canada), so brand recognition, if this is to be the name, might be interesting in some quarters.
I approached Linden Lab for a comment on the matter, but have yet to receive a reply. Should one be forthcoming, I’ll update this article.
With thanks also to Ziki Questi
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On my flight to LA, I finally cracked open the copy of Runner’s World that Cole picked up because it featured our best man, Jesse Cherry’s adorable face on its cover. While I was paging through the magazine, it hit me just how many of my friends were on the pages.
There have been moments over the last 6 years of post-collegiate running that my familiarity with the entire US road running world has smacked me in the face.
Arriving at this weekend’s Olympic Trials was one of those moments. As soon as I arrived in the airport, I saw familiar faces, close friends, teammates, and role models. And it didn’t stop until I got on my flight to go home. There was constantly someone else I wanted to see and catch up with. It was a huge running family reunion.
Naturally with that sense of homecoming and unity over this shared passion, there were some very sentimental moments throughout the weekend.
It got started in our team meeting. My coach, Terrance Shea, is a man of numbers. He is very scientific, but also holds an incredible appreciation and respect for the importance of our senses and feelings in how we function as runners and as people. No part of us can possibly be isolated from all the others.
But with that meticulous attention to detail, when he requested that we meet as a team (for the first time ever) prior to the Technical Meeting on Friday afternoon, we all naturally assumed that he would just go over more logistics as to how we should best approach the course, the heat, etc. Although, at the same time, none of us could imagine anything he had left out in his extremely thorough emails from the previous weeks.
He had something else in mind. Instead, he took those 40 minutes to tell the rest of the group what made each of the 14 of us so special to him – as a runner but also as a person. He actually started off by describing his father who had passed away suddenly just weeks after my win at Twin Cities.
He described his dad’s love for the sport of long distance running, but more specifically for the people of the sport of running. I nodded through the entire description, knowing exactly what he meant by the camaraderie and mutual support amongst competitors that is so unique to distance running.
Terry went on to bring all of us to tears with very heartfelt praise of each and every one of us in the room, including his wife and the mother of their two children, Carly, who had unfortunately been unable to qualify to this year’s trials – largely due to their pregnancies. There wasn’t a dry eye in the room.
So in the spirit of Terry Shea Sr., I want to share some of those moments of joy and camaraderie that welled up inside of me on Saturday.
Aside from the overwhelming joy and appreciation that I felt for all the fans and spectators on the course, some of my most vivid emotions from the weekend were those feelings of joy for my old friends, teammates, and competition out on the course.
The first was for Wendy Thomas.
Wendy has had a very rough last few years, having now lost three members of her immediate family including the loss of her father and her grandfather in the past few months. Although I really only know her through racing and Facebook, it’s impossible not to admire all that she’s survived and the grace with which she has handled each of the daggers life has thrown her way.
Race morning, I made my way towards the gathering area where everyone was waiting to walk over the start. It was crowded, so I gravitated towards a corner where Wendy happened to be. She was looking at her phone, headphones in, and as I got closer, I could clearly see tears welling up in her eyes. I have no idea what she was looking at or thinking, but I could certainly imagine how she felt.
I immediately imagined how I would feel if neither of my parents could be there to cheer me on and witness this huge moment in my life. I set down my things, gave her a long silent hug, and held back my own tears as we went back to focusing on ourselves and our own races ahead.
(After writing this post on the flight home, I checked Wendy’s Facebook wall and found this post. When I checked to make sure that sharing her story was okay with her, she confirmed that it was this post and the comments from her family that reduced her to tears on Saturday morning just before I found her.)
Fast forward about an hour, and we were making our way to the start – Wendy with the number 17, and me with number 19 pinned to our backs. I asked her if her plan was to stick with me, to which she sheepishly admitted that it was. Of course I assured her I was so glad to help and promised not to lead her astray.
She followed the plan and loyally stuck with me through over 6 miles. But then she got a little antsy and as I stuck to my plan, Wendy slowly separated herself along with Erica Jesseman.
Even as she floated off, I knew that following my conservative start had still made a huge difference because it kept her from tacking onto the wrong group of people. About 8 miles later Wendy was still in sight, and I had relished as I watched her catch runner after runner ahead of me, mile after mile.
As she approached the 14 mile mark, I watched her round the hairpin ahead of me, and was so full of joy for her that I couldn’t help but smile even bigger than usual. She looked so strong, and in the wake of everything that has happened to her, she was rising out of those ashes with such incredible grace.
I didn’t catch her until 5 more miles later, and although she was fading, I knew she was still so much stronger than nearly all the others in the field that we had passed before. I was so glad to know that I had been a part of that, too, in helping her to keep things under control early on in the race.
I have passed Wendy on one of her worst days at Twin Cities 2013 and chased after Wendy on one of our best days at Boston 2014. She told me after Saturday, “in the Trials, I had a lot of tears. It was an emotional toll.” I’m so glad that she managed another incredible top-20 finish on such a physically and emotionally challenging day.
One of the many others was Tyler Pennel
With all the looping we did on the course, I could watch both the men’s and the women’s races in bits and pieces. The first time I saw Tyler Pennel came just after that moment I had of overflowing joy for Wendy at mile 14. As I got closer to turning off of Figueroa back into the start/finish area to begin my 3rd loop, I saw Tyler coming my way across the road.
Since our days at ZAP, he has been like a (very responsible and respectful) little brother to me. For a year I woke up at 7:30am to the sound of his erupting belly laugh from across the hall as he caught up on the Daily Show episode aired the night before. He’s been Cole’s and my third wheel since 2013. He was my champion partner in crime at the 2014 US Marathon Championships, and he’s still our best friend in Blowing Rock.
This sweet, odd, brutally competitive little brother was in 3rd place at the Olympic Trials. In his 2nd marathon ever. At that point he was just seconds behind Olympic medalists Meb Keflezighi and Galen Rupp.
Chills went down my spine despite the extreme heat. I got choked up seeing his familiar bouncy stride and the silly mullet I had sculpted for him that morning. He was killing it in one of those coveted 3 Olympic spots with just over 6 miles left to run.
Unfortunately by the time he caught me on Childs Way on the USC campus, he had lost significant ground on those two medalists and lost his 3rd place position to Jared Ward. As he approached, I reached back to give him a five, but he wasn’t moving up on me nearly as fast as I thought, so as he finally passed, he grabbed my hand and we ran like together like that for a few seconds instead.
For him it was the last loop and he had less than 4 miles left to run. For me, I had almost 10 miles left and was in the middle of the fastest 6-mile stretch of my entire race. It was definitely amazing and uplifting to see this tough little brother being so strong, fighting off pain to stay strong enough to finish as a possible Olympic alternate in the top-5.
These are the people we meet and the bonds that we make in the sport of long-distance running. The truth is that no one will run his or her best marathon completely alone. And when you’ve been through something like that together, you’ve shared the highest highs and the lowest lows.
Terry’s dad was right. This is what makes the sport of distance running so special. It’s the people, and the best that it brings out of us. |
Death ideation has been conceptualized as part of the suicide spectrum (Deykin & Buka, 1994; Lewinsohn, Rohde, & Seeley, 1996; de Neeleman, Graaf, & Vollebergh, 2004) whereby milder expressions of suicide precede self‐harm behavior (de Neeleman et al., 2004; Williams & Pollock, 2000). Deykin and Buka (1994) found that suicide ideation, together with death ideation, was predictive of later suicide attempts among adolescents. Among Black adults, suicide deaths were more likely associated with death ideation and suicide ideation than accidental deaths (Castle, Duberstein, Meldrum, Conner, & Conwell, 2004). Psychometric analyses have similarly revealed that death‐related items tend to load with suicide‐related items. We posit that strategic efforts to better understand suicide vulnerability among African American youth may be improved by investigating upstream determinants of milder death ideation.
Although the suicide rate for African American children doubled between 1993 and 2012 while the rate for similar age European American children decreased (Bridge et al., 2015), correlates of African American youth suicide are not well‐known. Overall, suicide is the fifth leading cause of death for African American youth age 10 to 14 years, and escalates to the third leading cause of death for African Americans age 15 to 24 years of age (Heron, 2007). Several studies (e.g., Castle et al., 2004; Joe & Kaplan, 2001) and conceptual reports (e.g., Willis, Coombs, Cockerham, & Frison, 2002) have suggested that social and contextual factors associated with discrimination exposure increase risk for suicide among vulnerable African American youth and adults. Given the well‐documented association between racial discrimination and negative psychological and social outcomes, this hypothesis is plausible. However, this dimension of suicide pathogenesis is yet to be tested in a preadolescent sample. This study was designed to test the overarching hypothesis that racial discrimination is associated with increased death ideation in young African Americans. In the text that follows, we (a) briefly summarize the available suicide literature for young African Americans; (b) consider the literature on the effects of racial discrimination on mental health outcomes; (c) examine a hypothesized link for racism to suicidality, and, finally, (d) test a model for the relationship between racial discrimination and death ideation, including potential differences for African American boys and girls. The study's primary contributions to the literature are threefold: (a) We consider African Americans' unique contextual vulnerability by examining the impact of racial discrimination above and beyond more general stressful life events; (b) we examine the role of anxiety symptoms to add insight to an alternative risk factor that may be as relevant as depressive symptomatology to death ideation; and (c) we provide evidence for differential effects of racism for boys and girls.
African American Youth Suicide Overall, the literature on African American suicide, including youth suicide, is relatively sparse. Empirical investigations of suicide rarely include adequate samples of African Americans—as youth or as adults—to disaggregate ethnic group differences. As such, suicide risk factors may appear to be consistent across ethnic groups. However, several epidemiological studies have noted that African Americans who die by suicide are significantly younger and do not consistently demonstrate often‐cited indicators of suicide risk such as previous suicide attempts, major depression, or substance abuse to the extent that other suicide decedents do (Abe, Mertz, Powell, & Hanzlick, 2006; Garlow, Purselle, & Heninger, 2005; Willis, Coombs, Drentea, & Cockerham, 2003). One study revealed that African American boys represented the majority of suicide deaths for persons less than 19 years of age (Garlow et al., 2005). The relatively low rate of suicide deaths among African American girls (National Center for Health Statistics, 2012) likely obscures the magnitude of suicidal behaviors. More epidemiological investigations that disaggregate death rates and emergency department admissions by race/ethnicity and also by sex are needed to assess differential patterns of suicide death. Available empirical studies have attempted to shed some light on psychological factors associated with suicidal behavior, including gender differences in those factors for African American boys and girls. Juon and Ensminger (1997) conducted a prospective study of African Americans who were followed from first grade to age 32 years. They found that depression and lifetime cocaine use were associated with suicidal behaviors in both men and women. Other findings suggested gender differences such that family structure and childhood psychopathology were associated with suicidal behavior in men, but women who experienced high assault behavior were more likely to engage in suicidal behavior. Bettes and Walker (1986) found that depression was associated with suicidal behavior in young females but not in young males. According to Trautman, Rotheram‐Borus, Dopkins, and Lewin (1991), depression (major and minor) and conduct disorder were associated with suicide attempts in African American and Hispanic adolescent girls. O'Donnell, O'Donnell, Wardlaw, and Stueve (2004) also found that symptoms of depression along with unmet basic needs were associated with suicide ideation in a sample of urban, economically disadvantaged African American youth. Although these studies add some insight to the youth suicide vulnerability literature, more work is needed. Studies to date have not provided insight to the role of key contextual variables (e.g., racism), while other studies have reported inconsistent findings regarding seemingly robust (i.e., mood disorder and/or symptomatology) risk factors. Several studies have noted that depressive symptomatology, the strongest clinical precipitant to suicide ideation (Harris & Barraclough, 1997), does not reliably predict actual suicide outcomes for African Americans across the life span (Abe et al., 2006; Joe, Baser, Breeden, Neighbors, & Jackson, 2006; Kung, Pearson, & Wei, 2005; Willis et al., 2003). The absence of major depressive disorder (MDD) and depressive symptomatology as factors in fatal and nonfatal suicide attempts may be accounted for by the role of anxiety‐related symptomatology. There is evidence that African Americans' risk for suicide increases substantially given the presence of an anxiety disorder (i.e., panic disorder, PTSD, OCD) and that anxiety is the single strongest risk factor after controlling for gender and other sociodemographic factors (Joe et al., 2006). For marginalized persons, feelings of helplessness may lead to hypervigilance, worry, and anxiety (cf. Barlow, 1988) and coincides with Hill, Castellanos, and Pettit's (2011) assertion that anxiety is an important marker of suicide risk that deserves more rigorous attention in the scientific literature. Sex differences, whereby boys are more likely to experience fatal suicide attempts relative to girls who engage in more nonfatal attempt behavior, are relatively consistent across ethnic groups (Goldsmith, Pellmar, Kleinman, & Bunney, 2002; Maris, Berman, & Silverman, 2000). Although reliable estimates of nonfatal suicide attempts are rarely available, recent studies have revealed that African American girls and young women are more likely than boys and young men to attempt suicide (Baca‐Garcia et al., 2010; Joe, Baser, Neighbors, Caldwell, & Jackson, 2009), lending to the paradoxical ratio of relatively high rate of attempts for girls compared to the relatively high rate of deaths for boys in the United States and internationally. Findings from nationally representative data seem to reveal that, for both youth and adults, anxiety disorders are more likely than or perhaps as likely as depression‐related problems to be associated with suicide‐related behavior. Hunter and Schmidt (2010) suggested that anxiety psychopathology in African American adults may be associated with awareness of racism and cultural mistrust. Given the lack of coherent literature, we posit that anxiety pathology and other novel approaches to conceptualizing African American youth suicide are necessary. Suicide surveillance and assessment for African American youth may be undermined by available suicide nomenclature that does not include milder forms of potential suicide expression. Silverman, Berman, Sanddal, O'Carroll, and Joiner (2007) revised O'Carroll, Berman, Maris, Moscicki, Tanney, and Silverman's (1996) taxonomy, but the revision was absent any attention to age/developmental/cultural differences in suicide expression. Nevertheless, there is reason to believe that African Americans may communicate differently about suicide (if at all) and that persons who may be suicidal are reluctant to disclose this experience (Morrison & Downey, 2000). Gutierrez and Osman (2008) noted that youth, in general, may be more reluctant than adults to report acute suicidality given stigmatization and perceptions about hospitalization. Regarding suicide assessment, they suggested that focus groups might be used to assess the appropriateness of available assessment strategies. Given the absence of culturally sensitive indices of suicide ideation and behavior, broader assessments of suicide vulnerability that include death ideation may be appropriate for use with African American youth. As an example, Lewinsohn et al.'s (1996) 4‐item suicide screener queries both suicide and death ideation (i.e., “I had thoughts about death”) and is predictive of later suicide attempts in youth and adolescents.
Psychological Effects of Racial Discrimination Kendler (2010) noted that while psychiatric problems directly impact suicide vulnerability, early adverse events have direct and indirect consequences. Racial discrimination is a common and particularly pernicious experience in the lives of many African Americans, including preadolescent African Americans (Clark, Anderson, Clark, & Williams, 1999; Gibbons, Gerrard, Cleveland, Wills, & Brody, 2004; Seaton, Caldwell, Sellers, & Jackson, 2008). Williams, Yu, Jackson, and Anderson (1997) concluded that, compared to more general social stressors, race‐related stress contributes incrementally to poor health. More than 90% of African American preadolescents report having experienced racial discrimination (Gibbons et al., 2004). Overall, adolescents' experiences of racism and psychological sequelae have been well documented (Nyborg & Curry, 2003; Seaton et al., 2008). The experience of inequity and interpersonal rejection can lead to a host of negative outcomes. Researchers have noted that both race‐related stress and experiences of racism have profound implications for the psychological health of African American youth and adults. Clark et al. (1999) cited anxiety, helplessness–hopelessness, and anger among a myriad of responses that incite maladaptive coping (e.g., anger suppression, hostility, substance use, etc.). Chronic perceptions of hopelessness are frequently linked to depression and suicide (Beck, Steer, Beck, & Newman, 1993). Williams and Williams‐Morris's (2000) review of mental health and discrimination emphasized that discrimination can affect individuals via negative internalized self‐evaluations. In longitudinal analyses, perceptions of racial discrimination were associated with depressive symptoms similarly in adolescent boys and girls (Brody et al., 2006) and have been mediated by depression and also anger (Simons et al., 2003). Greene, Way, and Pahl (2006) noted that Black adolescents in an urban setting reported experiencing increasingly more discrimination over time with subsequent increases in depressive symptoms and decreases in self‐esteem. In other studies, perceptions of discrimination affect academic motivation and social adjustment in addition to impacting mental health outcomes (Wong, Eccles, & Sameroff, 2003). Experiences of racism can be problematic in childhood and preadolescence, which are critical stages of psychological development. Among African American adults, a recent study found that perceived racism was related to thoughts of suicide, but that this association was moderated by religiosity (Walker, Salami, Carter, & Flowers, 2014). Preadolescent youth experience significant life change and transition but may not be equipped, cognitively, to cope with emotional strain and/or adversity.
Theoretical Support for Racial Discrimination as an Antecedent to Death Ideation The idea that marginalization, alienation, and/or interpersonal rejection leads to suicide ideation and attempts is, theoretically and empirically, well grounded. According to Durkheim's conceptualization of “egoistic suicide,” which occurs among those who experience low social integration, a compelling body of literature has emerged to support the profound effect of marginalization, ostracism, and social alienation that can lead to suicide planning and death. Joiner's (2005) interpersonal–psychological theory of suicide asserts that one's willingness to die (which evolves from absence of connection to a valued social group and sense of burdensomeness to others) is a necessary condition for suicide death. The desire to die emerges from experiences of diminished or thwarted belongingness whereby the at‐risk individual is not an integral part of a valued group. This thesis is supported in clinical, military, and nonclinical studies (Conner, Britton, Sworts, & Joiner, 2006; Joiner, Hollar, & Van Orden, 2006; Van Orden, Witte, Gordon, Bender, & Joiner, 2008; Van Orden et al., 2008). Notably, the common elements of these theories are consistent with Richman and Leary's (2009) conceptualization of discrimination as a serious form of interpersonal rejection to which exposure can lead to a multitude of deleterious outcomes. Together, these theoretical models provide a useful heuristic for better understanding of how contextual factors, particularly for African American youth, contribute to suicide risk in that discrimination might be linked to death ideation as a consequence of depression and anxiety symptomatology. For those who aim to be embraced by mainstream culture, but are instead rebutted, the result may be to consider one's relative value in society and subsequently to consider death. |
The alternate American pavilion, with its free espresso truck, tins of themed M&M’s and wireless internet that tells new users “the U.S. has not gone dark on climate action,” has rapidly become a hub of activity at the United Nations global warming negotiations taking place this week. On Saturday, a line of people waited in the rain to hear Michael R. Bloomberg, the former mayor of New York, Gov. Jerry Brown of California and a handful of United States senators, all Democrats, declare that much of America remains committed to reducing planet-warming carbon dioxide emissions.
“We’re in,” said Mr. Bloomberg, who put more than $1 million toward funding the pavilion, according to his office. “Just because the federal government has chosen not to participate,” he added in an interview, “the American public represented by its elected officials at other levels, by corporations, by universities, we understand that there’s a problem and we have to help solve that problem if we’re going to have a future in this world.”
The dueling American delegations here mirror a larger division within the United States over climate change. Mr. Trump’s decision in June to withdraw from the Paris agreement was popular with his supporters. On Thursday, the State Department and the Interior Department sent high-level political officials to address a conference in Texas sponsored by the Heartland Institute, which rejects the scientific consensus that climate change is occurring and primarily caused by human emissions. Scott Pruitt, the administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency, sent a video message of support.
“We have tremendous natural resources, from coal to natural gas to oil, to generate electricity in a very cost-effective way,” Mr. Pruitt told the conference. “We should celebrate that and be good stewards.”
Yet seven in 10 Americans believe global warming is occurring, according to a Yale University survey, and more than 60 percent say they are at least “somewhat worried” about its effects.
“There’s a debate in the United States between the denialists who pooh-pooh any thought about climate change and the catastrophic dangers it portends, and those who agree with the scientific academies of every country in the world that we’re facing an existential threat and we have to do something about it,” Governor Brown said Saturday. |
A fascination with Zelda and F. Scott Fitzgerald’s marriage ebbs and flows in our pop culture, and it is currently on the upswing, with shows such as “Z: The Beginning of Everything” and the new series “The Last Tycoon,” in which Zelda’s echo is faint and the viewer is left in the familiar position of wanting to know more about her life and her dynamism. A frequently overlooked aspect of Zelda is her passion for ballet. In the summer of 1925, ballet lessons at a studio in Paris became an outlet for her artistry, and swiftly led to an unsustainable fixation. Zelda was twenty-five, a mother and wife—she was five years into her marriage to Scott. Her commitment to dance quickly accelerated, and she decided to become a professional ballerina at the age of twenty-seven.
Having trained as a ballet dancer myself, I know that the physical demands of the art form are unforgiving. In a few years, Zelda had danced herself into an obsession, and mental illness erupted through the cracks of her physically exhausted body. In a recent conversation, Scott and Zelda’s granddaughter, Eleanor Lanahan, suggested that ballet seemed to give Zelda what she was seeking at the time—a mode of pure expression. It was a medium that wasn’t dominated by the great artists that were her social circle, where she might have felt easily overshadowed. “I’ll tell you about my mother,” Lanahan said of Zelda and Scott’s only child, Scottie Fitzgerald. “She felt her mother’s curse was that she had so much talent it was hard for her to focus on one.”
Dancing was an achievement that Zelda wanted completely for herself. In the July, 1929, issue of College Humor, the first of Zelda’s “Girls” stories was published, written with the intention of paying for her ballet lessons. “The Original Follies Girl” provides a satisfying glimpse into Zelda’s uncanny self-awareness. “She wore herself out with the struggle between her desire for physical perfection and her desire to use it,” Zelda wrote of her Girl. Later, she animated this mesmerizing period of her life in her only novel, “Save Me the Waltz,” published in 1932. It’s a deeply personal read, written while hospitalized in Phipps Clinic, in Baltimore, just after her second breakdown. We are shown the world of Zelda’s main character, Alabama, who begins taking ballet lessons and describes the pulling and twisting of her long legs at the barre.
Zelda’s infatuation with ballet can be traced to that summer, in 1925, when she began lessons in Paris with the great Russian ballerina Lubov Egorova. Afterward, travel kept the Fitzgeralds away from Paris until 1928. During that time, Zelda continued to train several days a week, in Philadelphia, while they rented a home in Delaware, but the discipline that drove her upon her return to France is remarkable. Egorova’s studio in Paris was a hive of the most talented dancers of the time. She had danced with the Imperial Russian Ballet and then with the Ballets Russes, under the famed Sergei Diaghilev. Each day, Zelda walked into a Degas scene: a studio filled with professional dancers who must have appeared to her as angels. One vision in particular was a ballerina called Lucienne. Scholars’ footnotes that accompany Zelda’s letters from 1930 identify Lucienne simply as “a ballerina at the studio.” It is more likely that this dancer is actually Lucienne Lamballe, of the Paris Opera Ballet. By 1924, Lamballe was a première danseuse, and she was a contemporary in age, only two years younger than Zelda. Lamballe took the professional class at the studio, and Egorova coached her privately for principal roles, common for prima ballerinas.
Zelda and Lucienne developed a friendship, and Lucienne appears several times in Scott’s ledger. In May, 1929, he simply recorded, “Lucien again,” as if she were a regular in the Fitzgeralds’ lives. After class, Zelda and Lucienne went to cafés and backstage at the Paris Opera theatre, but their relationship was susceptible to the strain and pressure of studio life. Zelda began to lose touch with her life at home, with her daughter, Scottie, and with Scott, who was drinking wildly as he struggled to focus on his next novel. Zelda’s dedication to her ballet technique became consuming.
It is not possible to verify how technically perfect Zelda’s dancing was. However, ballet cares little for personal feelings, and Egorova would not have continued to encourage Zelda’s intense training if her ability had no merit. Photographs from 1928 and 1929 show Zelda’s body changing. Noticeably thinner, her ankles were delicate and the arches of her feet high. Anne Margaret Daniel, the editor of “I’d Die for You: And Other Lost Stories,” a collection of previously unpublished or uncollected pieces by Fitzgerald, beautifully acknowledged this transformation as a manifestation of Zelda’s desire to literally, physically make something of herself. “I don’t think it had to be ballet, but ballet is what came to pass, and ballet is what she chose. It’s what she’s fixed upon. I think it’s indisputable that she was an accomplished dancer and that she was praised for her dancing as a young woman,” Daniel said. Perhaps, as an adult who was at a loss for inspiration, Zelda was looking to her youth.
There was a moment when Zelda’s efforts could have been entirely rewarded. Julia Sedova, a former dancer with the Imperial Russian Ballet and the ballet mistress of the San Carlo Opera dance company, wrote Zelda a letter, in French, dated September 23, 1929. In it, she offered Zelda the opportunity to perform in the Teatro di San Carlo’s production of the opera “Aida,” to dance “advantageous solos,” and, most incredibly, to dance for the full season with a monthly salary. Zelda did not go to Naples. (The letter is now stored at the Princeton University Library.)
Zelda’s decision not to go could perhaps be explained by her collapsing mental state at the time. She had begun to act desultory at home with Scott and friends. Her world was unravelling, and she exhibited mood swings that would have her enjoying parties at one moment and frantically fretting about leaving at the next. There were arguments with Lucienne, and Egorova began to see her as unhinged. In the spring of 1930, Zelda checked into Malmaison, a clinic near Paris, but she left shortly thereafter, for more dance lessons. Scott employed a “ballet psychoanalyst” (according to his ledger), to Zelda’s displeasure. Eventually, the strain became overwhelming, and she was admitted to Clinique Valmont, in Switzerland, and then to Prangins Clinic, near Geneva, on June 5, 1930. “I don’t want to call it a manifestation or a symptom,” Daniel commented of Zelda’s breakdown and its parallels to her ballet training. “I think that’s the wrong way of looking at it, I think it is a case of having to look at the mind and the body together.”
Throughout Zelda’s life, Scott supported her and desperately wanted to help her maintain good health. While Zelda was in treatment, Scott wrote to Egorova, asking her to evaluate Zelda’s dance abilities; Egorova replied that Zelda could go on to professional endeavors, but that, because of her late start, she could never be a first-rate ballerina. Scott understood this, and, in a particularly preachy letter to Zelda, in 1932, he attributed his own success, and Lucienne’s, to their “long desperate heart-destroying professional training beginning when we ie Lucienne + I were seven, probably.” Zelda did cultivate her other talents, especially her painting. She continually battled the “sense of inertia that hovers over my life” with a devout commitment to her own identity and creativity. But she never forgot her passion for ballet, and, in January, 1940, less than a year before Scott died, she wrote to him: “Scottie sent me a program of the Ballet Russe. This will never cease pulling at my heart-strings: not that I wish it would.” |
So much for having more control over minor league development.
According to a report by long-time Peoria Rivermen beat writer Dave Eminian, the Canucks will not operate their recently purchased AHL franchise in Peoria next season.
They are likely to leave the franchise dormant and loan their prospects to other minor league clubs, the report said. The Canucks bought the franchise in March with the intention of moving it to Abbotsford, but the Calgary Flames have six years remaining on an agreement there and don’t want to vacate.
Canucks assistant GM Laurence Gilman declined comment on the report.
The Canucks didn’t renew their minor league agreement with the Chicago Wolves because they didn’t think they enough control over the development of their prospects.
Here is a link to the report. |
Saudi bicycle ban lifted
Women can now bike, with certain restrictions.
Storified by The Stream· Tue, Apr 02 2013 10:10:44
Netizens celebrated the announcement. From Instagram user @YusufalAhmad
مبروك! #saudi #women #biking #حلالinstagram.com
"...Congratulations to you and your patience in the practice of discrimination and for giving the uprising of women in the Arab world its true meaning every day". Many shared the graphic below. The popular Facebook page The Uprising of Women in the Arab World posted the image with the words "no longer forbidden" and the following caption:
نعم، هذا صحيح، فقد أنعم أولياء الأمر "الذكور" ...Facebook
Still, many were underwhelmed by the announcement:
In shocking news, Saudi women can now ride a bike....Only for leisure, not transportation... Accompanied by a guy..... Progress!!Gappistan Radio
Another 300 years and they may be allowed to buy a bike RT @GemColl Saudi women can now ride bikes http://ynetnews.com/articles/0,734 …Kaz Nejatian
With mandatory abaya rule, I doubt many will. RT @thinkprogress Saudi women can now ride a bike in public – sort of http://thkpr.gs/10sEQrqJosh Shahryar شهريار
@La6iif: Skirts and pants are prohibited, and the abaya is difficult to wear. We offer you [this]. Some Twitter users offered an abaya alternative.
#الهيئة_السماح_للمرأه_بقياده_الدراجه ما دام ان التنانير والبناطيل ممنوعة ويصعب ارتداء العباية.. نقدم لكم ذا .. http://pic.twitter.com/gnHTeOHMEHla6efalameri
Others expressed scepticism, asking if the announcement, reported on April 1, was an April Fool's joke:
Apparently in the time I was away from twitter Saudi women can now ride a bike if with a male relative....errrr. #dizzyinglyfastprogressFatima Manji
The male relative must be present to "prevent exposure in case of an accident" (if only it were an April fool!) #saudibikeFatima Manji
@HudaAbdualrhman: [The ruling of the commission] was announced on the first of April. It's a downright lie. Please tell me this is false news or April Fool's.
#الهيئة_السماح_للمرأه_بقياده_الدراجه الخبر هذا في أول يوم من ابريل اكيد هذي اقوي كذبه في ابريل أرجوكم قولوا ان الخبر كاذب #كذبة_ابريلHuda Abdualrhman
@De7mee_: The commission allows women to ride bikes. Thank god. Thirty women are in the Shura Council. Now all that remains is letting them ride scooters. Commenters @De7mee_ and @Apra_Kadabra put the ruling in context of other reforms in the kingdom.
#الهيئة_السماح_للمرأه_بقياده_الدراجه الحمدلله. إنجاز قراري فاق تنصيب ٣٠ إمرأة في مجلس الشورى. بقي قيادة السكوتر...™دحيم القوي
@Apra_Kadabra: They demanded driver licenses for kids to ride bikes, and now they can drive cars. It's ok girls, we're almost there!
#الهيئة_السماح_للمرأة_بقيادة_السيكل كانوا يطلبون رخصة قيادة سيكل للعيال والحين يسوقون سيارات ، ماعليه يا بنات هانت !! http://pic.twitter.com/A6kQq4ZKLRSara Al-Jesus
Take a look at more of our coverage of Saudi Arabia:
Saudi women sit-in to take a standView the story "Saudi women sit-in to take a stand" on Storify] Protesters arrested for denouncing detention without due process. Storifi... |
Who will advance to the second round of the NBA playoffs? We polled the ESPN Forecast panel of experts.
Here are the results, displaying each team's chances to win the series, along with predictions from ESPN's Basketball Power Index (BPI), FiveThirtyEight and a fan poll.
ESPN Forecast: Celtics get past Bulls
BOS (%) CHI (%) BPI 72 28 FiveThirtyEight 70 30 Fan panel 77 23
ESPN Forecast: Cavs advance toward title defense
CLE (%) IND (%) BPI 80 20 FiveThirtyEight 59 41 Fan panel 90 10
ESPN Forecast: Raptors handle Bucks
TOR (%) MIL (%) BPI 83 17 FiveThirtyEight 78 22 Fan panel 75 25
ESPN Forecast: Wizards eliminate Hawks
WAS (%) ATL (%) BPI 67 33 FiveThirtyEight 79 21 Fan panel 75 25
ESPN Forecast: Warriors extinguish Blazers
GS (%) POR (%) BPI 99 1 FiveThirtyEight 94 6 Fan panel 97 3
ESPN Forecast: Spurs beat Grizzlies again
SA (%) MEM (%) BPI 90 10 FiveThirtyEight 90 10 Fan panel 90 10
ESPN Forecast: Rockets take out OKC
HOU (%) OKC (%) BPI 80 20 FiveThirtyEight 70 30 Fan panel 70 30
ESPN Forecast: Clips edge Jazz
LAC (%) UTAH (%) BPI 59 41 FiveThirtyEight 48 52 Fan panel 55 45
ESPN Forecast and the fan panel predictions were conducted in coordination with Microsoft Research. Join the fan panel here. |
When it comes to hacking, the stereotype is predominantly male. But fact of the matter is that Portland has some awesome women hackers. And that’s why it’s great to see them getting together. To hack.
Introducing Women Who Hack.
Our goal is to support local women hackers (and aspiring hackers) by providing a safe, welcoming environment in which you can connect with and learn from each other.
This will be a casual get together for women who want to hack on projects with or around other women. All types of projects (software and hardware), languages, platforms and experience levels are welcome.
We’re kid-friendly, too, so feel free to bring your children with you.
Sounds awesome, right? Well, get ready to be part of that awesomeness. The first gathering of Woman Who Hack will be held this Sunday, January 8, from noon until 5:00 at Collective Agency.
For more information, visit Women Who Hack, follow @WomenWhoHack on Twitter, or sign up for the Women Who Hack group.
(Image courtesy Betsy Weber. Used under Creative Commons.)
Want to connect with more awesome dots in the Portland startup community? Consider joining us over on Patreon ❤️
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It's beginning to feel a lot like basketball season! Georgetown announced its non-conference slate today which features a trip to Maui and games against Syracuse, Maryland, UConn and more!
Saturday, November 12th, 2016: University of South Carolina-Upstate
Tuesday, November 15th, 2016: University of Maryland (Gavitt Games)
Thursday, November 17th, 2016: Arkansas State at McDonough Gymnasium
Monday, November 21st, 2016: Oregon (Maui Invitational)
Tuesday, November 22nd, 2016: TBD (Maui Invitational)
Wednesday, November 23rd, 2016: TBD (Maui Invitational)
Sunday, November 27th, 2016: Howard University
Wednesday, November 30th, 2016: Coppin State University
Sunday, December 4th, 2016: Elon University (BB&T Classic)
Saturday, December 10th, 2016: LaSalle University (in Miami, Hoophall Invitational - 2pm, ESPN2)
Saturday, December 17th, 2016: Syracuse University (at the Carrier Dome - Noon, ESPN)
Thursday, December 22nd, 2016: UNC-Greensboro
Saturday, January 14th, 2017: University of Connecticut (FOX)
Presser from Georgetown:
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WASHINGTON - Highlighted by dates against Maryland, Connecticut and Syracuse as well as a trip to Hawaii to play in the Maui Invitational, the Georgetown University men's basketball non conference schedule for the 2016-17 season was released on Thursday. The Hoyas will play 12 non conference games before the start of the BIG EAST Conference schedule in late December, and then have one more game out of conference in January.
"We will be tested early and often against quality programs," Head Coach John Thompson III said. "We welcome a few traditional rivals to our schedule and also face a daunting field in Maui."
The 2016-17 regular season starts with three-straight games at home, starting on Saturday, Nov. 12 against the University of South Carolina-Upstate at Verizon Center. The Hoyas remain at home on Tuesday, Nov. 15 for a rematch against local rival Maryland as part of the Gavitt Games. Georgetown visited Maryland last year, falling 75-71.
Two days later, the Blue & Gray will return to campus, hosting Arkansas State at McDonough Arena on Thursday, Nov. 17. It will be Georgetown's first game in its on-campus home since beating West Virginia, 77-65, in the 2014 National Invitation Tournament first round. It will be the team's first regular season game at McDonough since playing Old Dominion in 2009-10.
The team then travels to play in the 33rd edition of Basketball in Paradise at the Maui Invitational. The Hoyas will play Oregon in their opening game and then play either Tennessee or Wisconsin. The other half of the bracket includes host Chaminade, Connecticut, North Carolina and Oklahoma State. This will be Georgetown's first appearance in the Maui Invitational since the 2011-12 season.
Six more non conference games will be played before the start of conference play, including four at home. The Hoyas will host Howard onSunday, Nov. 27 and then host Coppin State on Wednesday, Nov. 30, both games at Verizon Center. Georgetown will then host Elon University onSunday, Dec. 4 at Verizon Center as part of the BB&T Classic.
The Blue & Gray will travel to Miami to play LaSalle University on Saturday, Dec. 10 at AmericanAirlines Arena as part of the Second Annual Hoophall Miami Invitational. The game will air on ESPN2 at 2 p.m.
One of college basketball's great rivalries returns on Saturday, Dec. 17, as Georgetown travels to play longtime rival Syracuse at the Carrier Dome. The game will be shown live on ESPN. The teams renewed their rivalry last year at Verizon Center, with the Hoyas posting a 79-71 win. Before the start of BIG EAST Conference play, the Hoyas will host UNC Greensboro at Verizon Center on Thursday, Dec. 22.
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The Hoyas will play their final non conference game of the regular season on Saturday, Jan. 14, hosting long-time rival Connecticut at Verizon Center. The game will air live on FOX.
Season tickets for the 2016-17 Georgetown University men's basketball season are on sale now. To purchase season tickets, please visit here: https://oss. ticketmaster.com/aps/guhoyas/ EN/buy/details/16GTFS. Season tickets include all Verizon Center home games. The November 17game in McDonough Arena will be sold separately this fall. For more information or assistance, please contact the Georgetown Athletic Ticket Office at 202-687-HOYA (4692) or hoyatickets@georgetown.edu.
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Thoughts? Predictions? Anything? |
Fox has given a script commitment plus penalty to Eat Pray Thug, a single-camera comedy from Fresh Off The Boat co-executive producer Sanjay Shah, with Utkarsh Ambudkar (Pitch Perfect, Barbershop 3) attached to star.
Based on the real life of rapper Heems (formerly of hip-hop group Das Racist) and his relationship with his parents who live with him in Queens, Eat Pray Thug centers on a successful rapper (Ambudkar) who chooses to live with his Indian-American parents in Queens.
Shah executive produces, with Ambudkar serving as co-executive producer and Heems (real name Himanshu Suri) as co-producer. 20th Century Fox TV is th e studio.
Shah, who got his start on King Of The Hill and also worked on the Fox/20th comedy series Enlisted, is repped by UTA and attorney Ken Richman. Ambudkar, who has been recurring on The Mindy Project, is repped by Gersh, 3 Arts, and Jackoway Tyerman. Heems is repped by The Agency Group and attorney Theo Sedlmayr. |
Australia’s favourite spread is celebrating its 90th birthday today! That’s right, it has been 90 years since the beloved spread made its way into the hearts of Aussies and established itself as a staple in Australian breakfasts.
On Thursday Vegemite lovers gathered at the Port Melbourne Vegemite factory to celebrate the huge event. Employees at the factory were joined by Jamie Callister, grandson of Vegemite inventor Cyril Callister, and Tommy Dassalo – comedian and great-grandson of businessman Fred Walker, who hired Mr. Callister to formulate Vegemite in 1923. Also present at the gathering were the Hon. Bruce Billson MP, Minister for Small Business and Member for Dunkley Victoria and other VIPs.
According to a media release Mr. Billson said Vegemite is a prime example of local manufacturing that provides employment to Australians. He praised the more than 50,000 Australians that have been employed by the company over the last 90 years and paid tribute to the founding founders of the iconic product for their entrepreneurial spirit which sent Vegemite into store shelves.
“VEGEMITE is as unique to Australia as the croissant is to France, the hot dog in the US and spaghetti is to Italy. Australia has been home to VEGEMITE since 1923, around the same time construction started on the Sydney Harbour Bridge and Old Parliament House, so it has a special place in the nation’s history. What the VEGEMITE story shows is that with some Aussie grit and determination anything is possible,” said Mr. Billson.
Kathy Gavrilidis, the factory’s site manager who has been with Vegemite for 20 years, said she feels honoured to be working with the brand.
“I feel so humbled and honoured to be part of working with such an iconic and loved product – every day I am proud to say I work for VEGEMITE but never more so than on this special occasion as we celebrate the 90th birthday,” Ms. Gavrilidis said.
Darren O’Brien – Managing Director, Foods, offered his appreciation to the extended Vegemite family.
“I would like to personally recognise and thank the hundreds of people who have helped make VEGEMITE what it is today,” Mr. O’Brien said.
“We are very proud of the past 90 years and look forward to continuing to be Australia’s favourite spread for many more years to come.”
A large-scale digital campaign was launched by Vegemite for the month of October. For every ‘like’ received during the month of October on the VEGEMITE Facebook page, VEGEMITE together with its suppliers will donate a jar of VEGEMITE to Foodbank (up to 90,000 jars) to help ensure less fortunate Australians can also start their day the right way with a nutritious and delicious VEGEMITE breakfast.
The donation handed by Mr. O’Brien during the celebration is part of VEGEMITE’s ongoing partnership with Foodbank, Australia’s largest food relief agency, designed to give thousands of disadvantaged families the opportunity to start their day with VEGEMITE.
Travel back in time and read our feature on Vegemite’s colourful history here. Happy birthday once again, Vegemite!
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Last week Natasha Randall, 17, was found hanged at her home near Bridgend and a girl who is believed to know her self-harmed a day later.
South Wales Police are investigating if they had made contact on the internet, by e-mail or on a networking site.
Bridgend MP Madeleine Moon will raise internet use issues with police.
She will air her concerns at a meeting of a focus group, which includes the police and members of the local health trust, schools and council.
Somehow we're not reaching out to some of our very vulnerable young people and explaining to them that life offers lots of opportunities
Madeleine Moon, Bridgend MP speaking after the death of Natasha Randall, pictured
Mrs Moon said she was growing increasingly worried by the appearance of so-called "memory walls" on networking sites like Bebo, where members leave messages to mark the death of a friend.
"The worrying part about internet sites is it is a virtual world - it isn't a real world," she said. "The things that happen there don't necessarily demonstrate the consequences.
"I'm particularly concerned about this false romanticism of the memory wall that seems to have set up on Bebo giving some sort of romantic idea of suicide and not conveying the huge tragedy and wasted lives that we are looking at here," she told BBC Radio Wales.
Police investigating the latest incidents are trying to discover whether the girls had made contact on the internet, whether by e-mail or on a networking site.
YOUNG DEATHS Dale Crole, 18, from Porthcawl, went missing Sept 2006, body found Jan 2007 David Dilling, 19, Pyle, found hanging near home, Feb 2007 Thomas Davies, 20, North Cornelly, found hanged, Feb 2007, friends with Dale and David Zachary Barnes, 17, Bridgend, found hanged Liam Clarke, 20, Bridgend, found hanged in park, friend of Dale Gareth Morgan, 27, Bridgend, found hanged at home, knew Liam Natasha Randall, 17, Blaengarw, found hanged at home, friend of Liam
But Supt Tim Jones, divisional commander of Bridgend Police, said while some of the seven young people knew each other, there was nothing to link them all.
He stressed that no evidence of a suicide pact or bond between them had been found.
Last summer, Bridgend and valleys coroner Philip Walters said he was "desperately concerned" about the number of suicides among young men in the area.
Mr Walters has now that confirmed the number of suicides among people under 26 across the whole of Bridgend county in the past year was 13.
But he said he did not believe there was such a phenomenon as a "cluster" of suicides, and that it was a problem across the country.
Anne Parry, from the suicide prevention charity Papyrus, said she shared concerns about the influence of internet chatrooms and networking site.
"We've been running a campaign for the last three years to try to draw attention to the dangers of the internet," said Mrs Parry.
"Social network sites can be particularly dangerous. Of course they can give a lot of support to young people but they can also do quite the opposite and feed into suicidal feelings."
'Desperately concerned'
Although some newspapers have likened the series of suicides in Bridgend to a "cult," Mrs Parry said: "I think it is dangerous to use words like this".
However, she said the perils of networking sites should be recognised.
"It can certainly influence people and perhaps in the wrong way, in an adverse way - there's no doubt about that."
They really need to speak to somebody, even if it's over the phone
Melanie Davies, mother of Thomas, pictured
Mother's torment
One of those was 20-year-old Thomas Davies from North Cornelly, who hanged himself in February 2007. He had been friends with David Dilling, 19, and Dale Crole, 18, who had been found dead weeks earlier.
Thomas's mother, Melanie Davies, said she had talked to her son about the deaths of his friends: "He was quite upset about Dai because he went to school with him.
"I said to him: 'You would never do that to me, would you?'.
"He said 'I'd never do that to you - I wouldn't hurt you mam'. I think it was a couple of days later that he did it."
Mrs Davies has urged young people to seek help - rather than take often tragic actions.
"For the kids, I think they should talk to somebody, even if it's a stranger. They really need to speak to somebody, even if it's over the phone."
A Bebo spokesperson said: "The loss of any young life is always distressing.
"We will work closely with the authorities to provide any assistance which will help them with their investigations.
"We have close relationships with our member community, law enforcement agencies, and public safety partners - including Samaritans - to provide support and advice for our users. We are committed to providing our members with the safest possible environment online." |
STATEN ISLAND, N.Y. -- The kids are home from school, the vacation requests have been granted. With the warm weather here and mostly reruns on TV, summer is the perfect opportunity to get out with the family and make new memories.
With “staycations” still a popular trend, consider taking a family excursion without leaving Staten Island.
“There are a lot of things you can do [here] that are inexpensive,” said Larry Ambrosino, executive director of SINY, which promotes local attractions and events.
He suggests taking a drive up Grymes, Todt or Lighthouse hills to take in the spectacular views.
Extend the trip by visiting attractions along Hylan Boulevard. Start in Rosebank at the Alice Austen House to learn about the prominent Victorian photographer or for free story times offered certain days of the month. Make a stop for Italian pastries at one of the many local bakeries and go bowling at Rab’s Country Lanes.
If you follow Forest Avenue, stop for a game of tennis at Silver Lake Park, enjoy a scoop at the old-fashioned Egger’s Ice Cream Parlor or head to Clove Lakes Park and rent a paddleboat.
Livingston’s Snug Harbor Cultural Center (
) has plenty of family-friendly exhibits and events on tap this summer. At its “Movies Under the Stars,” you can catch “Jaws” (July 9), “Close Encounters of the Third Kind” (July 16) and “Madagascar” (July 23). Local bands will perform before each movie at 7 p.m.
Thinking of attending a Staten Island Yankees game this season? Go on a night when the ballpark has its post-game fireworks show, usually on Thursdays and Fridays. Before the game, take the kids to see the view of Manhattan from the Postcards memorial dedicated to victims of the Sept. 11 attacks.
Ambrosino suggests visiting the Staten Island Zoo, West Brighton, which has an extensive reptile collection, a tropical forest and African exhibit. This summer will be a great time to go, as the Zoo will be welcoming special animals from Australia for its Down Under Summer exhibit. Also check out Breakfast with the Beasts July 24 and Serpent Day Aug. 28.
THE SOUTH SHORE
Looking to reconnect with nature? The South Shore has an abundance of parks. (For a full list, go to
.)
At Tottenville’s Conference House Park, you can visit the southern-most tip of New York State, located on the beach and marked with a red South Pole, or attend one of several free concerts.
To cool off, take a dip in Tottenville’s public pool, on the corner of Hylan Boulevard and Joline Avenue.
Or, make a stop at the 260-acre Clay Pit Ponds State Park Preserve in Charleston to learn about local wildlife at its Interpretive Center or enlist in one of its many summer programs, including guided nature hikes — where you’re likely to see deer, groundhogs and birds — ecosystem workshops and evening wildlife walks.
At Lemon Creek Park in Prince’s Bay, you’ll discover a rock sculpture garden created by local resident Doug Schwartz.
End your adventure with a treat from Ralph’s Ices in Pleasant Plains or a skate at RollerJam USA, Richmond Valley.
TOURING THE ISLAND
For activities with more guidance, Ambrosino suggests taking the SINY Pizza Tour, with stops at four well-known Island pizzerias.
Amanda Straniere, tourism and cultural affairs liaison for the Staten Island Borough President’s Office, recommends taking a free bus tour of the future Fresh Kills Park, led by Urban Park Rangers, to learn about the site’s history, engineering and landscape design. Tours are filling up; visit
to sign up.
To learn more about the borough, Ms. Straniere suggests visiting the Staten Island Museum’s History Archives and Library on the grounds of Snug Harbor, where you can study local maps, newspapers, books and historic photographs.
Visit Woodrow’s Sandy Ground Historical Society, which now is exhibiting “Faces of the Underground Railroad.”
Or check out Arthur von Briesen Park — named after the prominent German immigrant who lived there — to get a panoramic view of the Verrazano Bridge.
Consider devising your own cultural tour by visiting local attractions that fall within the same theme. Plan an “Italian Day” including a visit to the Garibaldi-Meucci Museum in Rosebank, which celebrates Italian heritage, a ride to South Beach for a game of bocce on the public court and a bite to eat at one of the area’s many Italian restaurants.
A TASTE OF CULTURE
For a summer filled with cultural lessons, visit a different ethnic restaurant each week. On the Island, you can try Sri Lankan, Moroccan, Caribbean, Russian, Mexican, Spanish, Turkish, German, Indian and Greek. The options are endless.
Immerse yourself in Asian culture by visiting the Jacques Marchais Museum of Tibetan Art, now displaying “Tibetan Portrait: The Power of Compassion.” The Lighthouse Hill museum also offers meditation and tai chi classes.
Nearby is another bucolic setting, the Greenbelt, encompassing High Rock Park, Willowbrook Park and a nature center where visitors can sign up for lessons on local flora and fauna and guided hikes.
Ms. Straniere suggests heading to Richmond Town on Wednesday nights for the Staten Island Region Antique Automobile Club of America’s classic car showcase.
Another special event going on this summer is the free Starlight Concerts offered on Thursdays at different local parks. Check
for details.
"There’s a lot to do on Staten Island,” Ambrosino concluded. “People just have to look.”
. |
CHICAGO (Reuters) - Former Chicago Board of Trade Chairman Patrick Arbor said on Saturday that he was in Europe, following a newspaper report alleging he had fled the United States to avoid paying millions of dollars to his ex-wife.
Patrick H. Arbor, president and CEO of the Chicago Board of Trade (CBOT), marks the one-year anniversary of the Dow futures and futures-options contracts at the CBOT in Chicago October 6, 1998.
“I can’t talk about it,” Arbor told Reuters about the accusations when reached on his cell phone. Asked where he was, he said: “I’m in Europe. I’m an Italian citizen.”
A judge in Cook County, Illinois, which includes Chicago, issued the civil-court equivalent of an arrest warrant for Arbor on Tuesday, said Cara Smith, chief of policy for the Cook County Sheriff’s Office. She said she did not know whether the warrant had been filed with the sheriff’s office, which enables law enforcement officers to take Arbor into custody.
Smith did not have details on why the judge issued the warrant.
It calls for Arbor, who turns 77 on Friday, to be jailed until he pays $288,983 to his ex-wife Antoinette Vigilante, according to the Chicago Sun-Times. Arbor has repeatedly ignored judge’s orders in his divorce case, the newspaper reported on Saturday. He has been ordered to pay Vigilante, 56, more than $18 million and is thought to have moved to Italy or Switzerland to avoid paying the judgment, according to the report.
Arbor also is wanted by law enforcement under a criminal arrest warrant issued on April 10 in a child support case, Smith said. His bail was set at $24,887, according to the Cook County Sheriff’s Office website.
“A criminal child support warrant was issued,” Smith said. “Any law enforcement agency can look for him.”
County court records show that Vigilante filed for a divorce from Arbor last year and that a final judgment was entered on Tuesday. Vigilante could not be reached for comment.
Arbor was chairman of the Chicago Board of Trade, now owned by CME Group Inc, from 1993 to 1999.
A fixture on Chicago’s business and civic scenes, he is a principal at the trading firm Shatkin Arbor and listed as trustee at Loyola University of Chicago. In 2010, Arbor threw his hat into the ring to become lieutenant governor of Illinois, writing in an application to the state’s Democratic party: “Of course, my record is impeccable and I have a good reputation.” |
“ Everything happens for a reason.
— David's beliefs ”
David was the main antagonist of the winter chapter in The Last of Us, appearing as the leader of a group of cannibalistic survivors. He was voiced and mo-capped by Nolan North.[1]
Contents show]
Biography Edit
Background and early life Edit
Nothing is known about David's life prior to the cordyceps brain infection outbreak.
Events of The Last of Us Edit
Ellie first encountered David when she was hunting a deer during the winter of 2033. She was immediately cautious around him and his friend James. David offered to exchange supplies for a share of the meat from the deer that Ellie had tracked and killed. Ellie demanded antibiotics in return, threatening them with her bow if they tried anything. James left to get antibiotics at the group's settlement, and reluctantly left David alone with Ellie. David and Ellie then took refuge in a barn from the cold weather. David asked Ellie's name, but she, being cautious, didn't give it to him. Infected soon attack their shelter.[2]. David helped Ellie fight them off, complimenting her skill with a rifle. As they worked their way through the nearby buildings, fighting off several waves of Infected, Ellie's attitude towards him softened slightly.
After completely clearing out the buildings, he and Ellie return to their original refuge. He discussed the philosophy that everything happens for a reason, with which Ellie disagreed. David decided to prove his theory by revealing that it was in fact his men who attacked Joel and Ellie at the university. A returning James overheard the conversation and held Ellie at gunpoint, but David demanded Ellie be given the medicine and set loose, and James reluctantly complied.[3]
David sent his men to track Ellie with the hope that she would lead them to Joel. His men mentioned that they were under strict orders from David to keep her alive, but decided to ignore these orders when they found out from James that it was Joel who slaughtered half the raiders at the university. Overhearing their conversation, Ellie decided to lead them away from Joel, then double back to him. She rode away from David's group on horseback, then escaped on foot after her horse was shot and killed. Eventually, David himself found her, grabbed her from behind, and choked her unconscious, claiming that he was “keeping her alive.”
When Ellie regained consciousness she was in a small cell. She witnessed James chopping up a corpse on a table, and discovered that David and his group were cannibals. Ellie was visibly disgusted and hostile toward David, calling him an “animal.” David pleaded to Ellie that he had her best interests in mind, and offered her a place in his group. He then affectionately touched Ellie's hand. Seizing her chance, she broke David's finger and attempted to grab his keys, but David slammed her against the cell bars and threatened her life.[4]
The next day, David and James arrived and pinned Ellie down onto the table attempting to slaughter her for food. In the struggle, Ellie bit David's hand, which only infuriated him more. Just before David struck her with a butcher knife, Ellie exclaimed she was infected and stated that David was infected too. David was initially skeptical, but Ellie insisted that he should roll up her right sleeve and see for himself. Upon finding out she was telling the truth, James became frightened but David claimed it couldn’t be real because she would have already turned. As the two men argued, Ellie seized the butcher knife with her left hand and slashed James' throat, killing him. David shot at Ellie as she ran, but hit one of the hanging bodies instead. Ellie escaped from the room with her switchblade.[5] David organized a search party to look for Ellie and even taunted her in a demented tone as he traversed through the town.
David eventually found Ellie in an old restaurant, struggling with her as she attempted to escape from his people out the back door and commenting that she was easy to track. He knocked her down, taking her revolver, and held her at gunpoint. During their struggle a lantern had been shattered, and the fire distracted David long enough for Ellie to run and hide. As the restaurant was slowly engulfed in flames, he locked the exit and continued to taunt Ellie, telling her that she had nowhere to go and would need to take the keys from him if she wanted to leave. He stalked her throughout the restaurant, all the while mocking her and expressing his disappointment that she did not accept his offer to join the group. Ellie continued to hide among the tables of the restaurant, trying to outmaneuver David and get the keys.
After Ellie stabbed David from behind once with her switchblade, he threw her off and attempted to shoot her with his revolver, missing as she took cover. He then drew a machete and continued to stalk her, growing angrier and seemingly ignoring the bloody wound. Ellie used her small size to her advantage and managed to get behind David to stab him twice more. In the ensuing struggle, David slammed Ellie onto a table, knocking her out before he passed out as well.
David eventually regained consciousness and saw Ellie crawling towards his machete. Before she could reach it, David came behind her and kicked her repeatedly, telling her it was “OK to give up.” After she refused, David kicked Ellie again, pinned her down and grabbed her by the throat. What his intentions were are unclear, as before he could act on them Ellie managed to seize the machete and slash his arm. David screamed once before Ellie began hacking him repeatedly in the face and neck. She only stopped when Joel finally found her and pulled her off.[6]
David's actions affected Ellie long after his death, as she became distant and quiet, yet more determined than ever to reach the Fireflies, claiming that what she has done and been through "can't be for nothing."
Relationships Edit
Ellie Edit
Ellie's relationship with David was traumatizing for her. It was also rife with many ironies, for instance when David allowed Ellie to leave with the penicillin, she used it to heal Joel, who later helped Ellie kill most of David's group. Ellie also called him an "animal" despite eating the food he offered much like one in the cell. David even tried to keep Ellie alive, even though she later killed him with his own machete that he tried to kill her with.
David often talked to Ellie in a patronizing tone and treated Ellie like a child, namely when they first met, David offered to exchange supplies for a share of the meat from the deer that Ellie had tracked and killed, saying that his group needed the meat because they had many women and children to feed. He emphasized the phrase "Women and children" several times in the hopes that Ellie, being young, would naturally feel sympathy. David took advantage of her being a child by making her believe she was in control when confronting him and James, complying with Ellie's demands despite having an idea of who she is. When the Infected attacked, he revealed his true colors by saving her with a hidden revolver, asserting she never had control at all; he was just sizing her up.
Similar to Joel, he viewed himself as Ellie's protector, saving her from a Clicker and captured her personally to "keep her alive". He even offered Ellie a place in his group, saying he could protect her and how he viewed her as "special". However, he was much more manipulative with her than Joel was. When Ellie reacted with rage and disgust, he tried to calm her down as though she were an irate irrational youth. He dismissed Ellie's disdain for him and touched Ellie's hand only for her to break his finger and attempt to steal his keys, causing David to lose faith towards Ellie; he no longer desired to have her join the community. Despite having once protected Ellie from Infected, David was now willing to kill Ellie due to her stubborn nature.
As Ellie killed more and more of his men, (including his second in command, James), David grew more fixated on her and made several attempts to kill her. He did show some guilt when he decided to try to kill Ellie. He told her he was sorry about Callus's death, (caused by his men when they shot him in an attempt to capture Ellie), although he taunted her that they would eat him, and that if she gave up, he promised he would make her death as quick and painless as possible.
However, David met his demise when he was violently hacked to death with his own machete by Ellie. Considering his violent death, his actions left a mark on Ellie, making her distant and quiet towards Joel yet more determined to reach the Fireflies in the following chapter.
James Edit
James was implied to be David's right-hand man and was a cannibal like the rest of the group. David personally viewed the man as his friend. Unlike David, James was not seemingly as kind-hearted and does not always agree with David's decisions. Knowing that a group of David's men were killed in the University by a man and a little girl , he overheard David's conversation with Ellie about the incident and was reluctant to let Ellie leave, but complied none the less; one of the few cannibals to do so.
When James noticed Ellie waking up, he informed David straight away, having helped him secure a new "pet." James appeared to work for David at times, butchering a human corpse for him and the group. He also assisted him in their attempt to butcher Ellie, demonstrating David relied on him on several occasions to help. He even went out hunting with David, displaying a gesture of protection when Ellie threatened him.
When Ellie killed James though, David indicated sadness for his death, saying that James was just trying to do his job, and Ellie shouldn't have killed him.
Personality and traits Edit
David did not resort to violence if he could help it. At first, he displayed concern over Ellie and did his best to help her. It is implied he cared for the people in his group and their well-being, as early on he personally hunted for food with his partner James instead of having someone else do it. He was also charismatic, leading his group and controlled people like James and Ellie without the need to be aggressive or hostile towards them; he asked and they complied. He also supported those around him, complimenting their survival capabilities, notably Ellie.
His true colors were revealed, however, when he admitted his group were the ones that Ellie and Joel fought at the University. Later, David revealed that he and his group had resorted to cannibalism, treating strangers as food rather than people. He also exercised a belief in fate, asserting "everything happens for a reason", hinting he believed his encounter with Ellie felt like destiny to him.
It is implied he had disturbing intentions for Ellie, supported by him touching Ellie's hand and calling her "special". A cannibal Joel tortured even called Ellie "David's newest pet" suggesting he captured and manipulated other children beforehand.
When David tried to murder Ellie, he paced around in a hurried, slightly jerking manner and he sounded almost insane as he stalked around looking for her.
Skills and abilities Edit
David demonstrated leadership qualities by how he was voted leader of his town and has influence on his men. However, he didn't have full control over them, as evidenced when some questioned his leadership, a small group even disobeyed his order to keep Ellie alive. However, James followed him, having heeded his command to not kill Ellie despite what she had done to his friends.
David was also shown to be an excellent combatant in how he killed Runners and Clickers with just his revolver and fists; he even managed to kill a Bloater with Ellie's assistance. He was also able to use a hunting rifle, though he stated Ellie was a much better shot than him with it. He wielded a machete which he could use with lethal efficiency, being able to non-canonically kill Ellie with just one slash.
Similar to Joel, David was also adept at stealth in how he easily tracked Ellie on multiple occasions and successfully strangled and disarmed her at the same time. He was quiet enough to not be heard and would strike out of nowhere when given a chance, making it very difficult for Ellie to stab him for a third time. He also had a high pain tolerance, only grunting when stabbed and retained the strength to pin and strangle Ellie almost to her death despite having been stabbed several times.
David also had a good sense of hearing, able to track Ellie in the restaurant when he heard her step on broken plates from even the very back of the room despite a fire blazing in the background. He was quite fast, able to sprint over to Ellie in a matter of seconds and could continue doing so until he lost sight of Ellie, displaying incredible endurance.
Weapons Edit
Guns Edit
Melee weapons Edit
Quotes Edit
"Hello. We just wanna talk."
"I'd say we make a pretty good team." Ellie : "Psshh. We got lucky." David : "Lucky? No, no... No such thing as luck. No, you see I believe that everything happens for a reason"
"This is my town!"
"I know you're not infected. No one that's infected fights this hard to stay alive."
"And get this, he's — a crazy man traveling with a little girl."
"Now don't get upset. It's not your fault. You're just a kid."
"How'd you put it, huh? Tiny pieces? See you in the morning, Ellie."
"You know I love how you think that you're better than this. Better than us. But you're not."
"I gotta admit. You had me back there. For a second you shook my faith. But only for a second."
"You keep on surprising me Ellie!"
"Oh, hey, Ellie? I'm sorry about your horse. I truly am. I hope you take comfort in knowing we won't waste any part of him."
"That was good, kid, Everything's gonna be alright"
"It's a shame you wouldn't come around. But it's too late now."
"You give up now and I promise to be quick. Promise."
"Run little rabbit, run."
"I knew you had heart. You know it's okay to give up. It ain't no shame in it."
"Huh. I guess not. Just not your style is it?"
"You can try beggin'."
"You think you know me? Huh? Well, let me tell you somethin'. You have no idea what I'm capable of." (Last words)
Gallery Edit
Trivia Edit
It has been confirmed that David had sexual intentions towards Ellie due to a lack of surviving females. He shows affection towards Ellie by holding her hand and initially wanting to only capture her, rather than kill her. In an interview with IGN, Nolan North said that he wasn't trying to "rape her, or anything like that... at first". He felt, as the actor that portrayed him, that David wanted to repopulate the Earth and would not miss an opportunity to impregnate a woman, especially one talented in survival, as few still remain. When Ellie kept refusing, Nolan also stated that David was a type of person who always tried "to get what he wants." [7]
The writers of The Last of Us initially called David "the cannibal king" but fleshed out his character, giving him a name, when Nolan North secured the role. Neil Druckmann reportedly informed North to "not play a bad guy, [David] has to be charismatic enough for Ellie and his people to trust him".
initially called David "the cannibal king" but fleshed out his character, giving him a name, when Nolan North secured the role. David appears to be ambidextrous, as he uses both hands at different times when firing his revolver. His machete is at his left side, but he picks it up with his right hand.
David is the only antagonist that Joel does not directly fight against.
Despite David's claims that there are women and children in his group, only one woman is ever seen and heard in-game. However, when David informs the group that Ellie escaped, a woman says that she will "take the kids to the shelter." This confirms that children are in fact present in their group.
David has a very high pain tolerance, able to fully sprint even when stabbed twice by Ellie and still get up after the third stab.
David seems to be losing control of his group, as the player can hear some of his men say that after they kill Ellie they are going to put his leadership up to a vote because they are tired of him and his "hobbies." Also, they disobeyed his orders and attempted to kill Ellie, even though he wanted her alive.
Nolan North revealed in the Q & A panel at SacAnime 2013 that in certain scenes between David and Ellie, he and Ashley Johnson actually swapped roles, with North mo-capping Ellie and Johnson mo-capping David.
In Grounded difficulty, David will hear Ellie while crouched unless she is moving slowly; he is the only human in the game to show this behavior, as generally only Infected can hear the player moving at full speed while crouched.
David is the only non-infected enemy in the game the player has a boss battle against.
In cutscenes on the PS3, David's jacket is green, but in the same cutscenes on the PS4, it is blue. It is green during gameplay in both versions, however.
References Edit |
To mark this year's Eid al-Fitr, the July 6 celebration concluding the fasting month of Ramadan, a Canadian Muslim charity is giving $250,000 to the people of fire-ravaged Fort McMurray.
The Toronto-based International Development and Relief Foundation, founded by in 1984, was named one of Canada's top 25 charities by the Financial Post for their efforts to "provide humanitarian aid and sustainable development programs based on the Islamic principles of human dignity, self reliance and social justice."
The organization announced that their quarter-million dollar Eid gift — raised during a pre-Canada Day dinner in Markham, Ont. attended by local MP and Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship minister John McCallum — would go to Habitat for Humanity to rebuild and repair Fort McMurray homes for those with minimal or no insurance coverage.
Muslims are required to donate a portion of their wealth each year, as a pillar of the faith. Many choose to give charity, known as zakat in Arabic, during the month of Ramadan.
Fire still burning in Fort McMurray
In early May, a massive wildfire forced the evacuation of more than 80,000 Fort McMurray residents, destroying 2,400 buildings and damaging thousands more. While people were allowed to return a month ago, only this week did the Alberta government declare the fire under control thanks to recent rains. It is still a little under 5,900 square kilometres in size.
"Unfortunately the fires have left so many families without a place to live. The money raised will be used to repair and build a number of homes, the first being for a single mother of two. Thanks to the generosity of the community, this family will have a new place to call home soon," IDRF board chair Zeib Jeeva said in a press release.
"What better way for Canadian Muslims to celebrate both Canada Day and Eid than to join hundreds of thousands of other Canadians in helping the fellow Canadians who've had their lives turned upside down in Fort McMurray?"
Also on HuffPost |
After two long days on the set of Season 18 of “The Ultimate Fighter,” UFC women’s bantamweight champ Ronda Rousey can see normalcy inching toward her life.
The past few months have been a whirlwind of media appearances and fan events, but filming gives her one place to be every day.
For now, though, chaos remains the norm.
“I’m just having a couple days of the usual,” Rousey told MMAjunkie.com (www.mmajunkie.com). “Every day is different, and that’s the only thing that’s the same. If I had a bunch of similar days, that’s the thing that’s different. I’m used to things constantly evolving around me.”
Rousey arrived on Tuesday to find Miesha Tate waiting for her at the Las Vegas compound where filming takes place. She was supposed to coach on the show opposite the undefeated Cat Zingano, with the two fighting at the end of the year. But as she later found out, Zingano blew out her knee, and the UFC installed Tate.
The former opponents now coach opposing squads of male and female bantamweights who hope to secure a UFC contract by winning the reality show tournament.
According to a report about her first day of filming, the switch wasn’t a welcome surprise for Rousey. Although she’s unquestionably a star and the champion, she told a reporter she thought she was being replaced by Tate.
“I probably shouldn’t have said anything at all,” Rousey said. “But it was just I was approached with it, and the way it was said, was what led me to think that. I can’t really say anything more, but it’s reality gold. People are going to love it.
“I got punked. I hope a lot of people are entertained by that.”
After the initial shock wore off, Rousey saw the switch from a different perspective. She’s now excited to coach opposite Tate and fight her again.
The two brought fireworks to a headlining title fight in March 2012 under the now-defunct Strikeforce banner. Rousey submitted then-champ Tate with a brutal first-round armbar and cemented her status as a top-tier competitor.
Rousey said their longstanding rivalry should drive the show to success.
“I’m happy that Miesha is here,” she said. “People were asking for there to be a ‘TUF’ between me and Miesha long before it was announced that there was going to be a women’s ‘Ultimate Fighter,’ and so the demand for this to happen has been there long before this actually manifested.”
If the first few days of the shoot is any indication, the fireworks this time around might not be between Rousey and Tate, but Rousey and Tate’s fighter boyfriend, Bryan Caraway.
“Miesha by herself isn’t that bad,” Rousey said. “Miesha in combination with her pet boyfriend, Mr. Tate, is frickin’ something else. She’s different when he’s around. I can’t stand him. I really feel like if she wasn’t with him, she would fight better and she would be a better person.
“He’s always glued to her hip, because if he’s not next to her, no one ever notices him.”
Rousey paid close attention to Caraway’s recent controversial comments about marijuana. Pat Healy tested positive for pot at UFC 159, prompting the UFC to strip him of $130,000 in bonuses – and instead give a $65,000 “Submission of the Night” bonus to Caraway, who fought on the same card.
Caraway initially said he hated marijuana, which prompted sometime Rousey training partner Nate Diaz to call the fighter a derogatory slur for homosexuals. Rousey called Diaz’s comment “a poor choice of words at the worst possible time.”
Later, Caraway softened his stance to say that his comments were informed by past negative experiences with the drug. Rousey was none too impressed.
“He’s a little f—king tool, and it sounds like the kind of thing he would have to say,” she said. “He hates on something he knows nothing about. If he did any of his research, he could give an intelligent answer. But honestly, he hasn’t, so he can’t.”
On Thursday afternoon, Caraway responded to Rousey’s comments in a written statement.
“I respect Ronda as a fighter,” Caraway said. “I wish her the best of luck with this season of ‘The Ultimate Fighter.’ She’s entitled to her opinion. I would just respond by asking her to literally take her own advice: She hates on something she knows nothing about. If she did any of her research, she could give an intelligent answer regarding my relationship with Miesha. But honestly, she hasn’t, so she can’t.
“If she doesn’t like me, then she doesn’t, but this isn’t about me. This season of TUF is about Miesha, Ronda and the fighters on their teams.”
Despite her enmity, Rousey believes she’ll have no problem keeping herself in check during filming. She’s brought familiar faces to the set, as well, utilizing Manny Gamburyan and Edmond Tarverdyan as coaches on the show.
It was through Gamburyan that Rousey first became acquainted with “The Ultimate Fighter.” Gamburyan, nicknamed, “The Anvil,” got his start in the UFC on the show’s fifth season, making it to the finale before a shoulder injury crowned Diaz the tournament champ.
“He’ll always be my favorite,” Rousey said of Gamburyan.
On Wednesday, Rousey left the set exhausted after more than nine hours of filming. She declined to complain about the investment, however, because she’s excited to help up-and-coming fighters reach their dreams.
A regular bed should be nice, too.
“I feel terrible for Cat,” Rousey said. “I know that she must be crushed. I know that she really deserved and earned the shot, but we’re just going to make the best with what we’re given, and I’m sure this is going to be the best season of ‘The Ultimate Fighter’ ever.”
For more on the UFC’s upcoming schedule, stay tuned to the UFC Rumors section of the site.
(Pictured: Ronda Rousey) |
Donald Trump speaks during a campaign rally at the University of Wisconsin at Eau Claire on Nov. 1. (Matt Rourke/AP)
EAU CLAIRE, Wis. — Donald Trump made what he called a “public service announcement” during a rally in this college town on Tuesday evening, telling Wisconsin voters who cast early ballots for Democrat Hillary Clinton that they can legally change their votes.
“A lot of things have happened over the last three days,” Trump said at a rally in Eau Claire on Tuesday evening. “This is a message for any Democratic voters who have already cast their ballots for Hillary Clinton and who are having a bad case of buyer's remorse — in other words, you want to change your vote — Wisconsin is one of several states where you can change your early ballot if you think you've made a mistake. A lot of stuff has come out since you voted.”
Trump told the crowd that voters in Pennsylvania, Minnesota or Michigan can also change their early votes from Clinton to Trump. Trump's campaign circulated this information earlier in the day on Twitter, with his director of social media tweeting out phone numbers that voters in each state can call to change their vote.
[Trump's outreach team comes really close to getting some voter outreach correct]
The “a lot of stuff” that Trump is talking about likely includes the letter that FBI Director James B. Comey sent to lawmakers on Friday, announcing that he had become aware of additional emails that might be related to the investigation into the private email server that Clinton used while secretary of state. Trump has also been highlighting tidbits of information from emails related to Clinton that were released by WikiLeaks.
But it's unlikely that Trump's newest voter outreach effort will net many votes, as there's no evidence that many voters who were motivated enough to vote early will change their minds. A Washington Post-ABC News tracking poll released Sunday found that most voters didn't think Comey's letter would make them less likely to vote for Clinton — and two-thirds of those who said that it did were Republicans. A poll from Politico and Morning Consult had similar results.
Philip Bump contributed to this report. |
With one spectacular, three-fingered grab, Giants rookie receiver Odell Beckham earned a permanent spot in NFL highlight films for decades to come.
But more importantly, he earned a spot in that increasingly hallowed hall — that of Internet meme infamy.
First, in case you were living under a rock, on an early Black Friday run or watching some show about zombies, here is that catch:
Article continues below ...
We’ve also got more details on the catch, Beckham’s big night and the actual result of the game.
But for the real fun stuff, here you go:
Aquí un meme de la atrapada de Odell Beckham pic.twitter.com/dNwZ78JpXr — Kent Brockman (@R3PORT3RO) November 24, 2014
Odell Beckham with the Catch of the Year! VIDEO: http://t.co/rjRm5i74lI pic.twitter.com/09lg0zVJ8n — NFL Memes (@NFLMemez) November 24, 2014
Lol. RT @KatzM: Odell Beckham NASA Frog Meme please share pic.twitter.com/5XDI2TIvOt — Jamie O'Grady (@JamieOGrady) November 24, 2014
Cowboys fans watching ODELL BECKHAM JR pic.twitter.com/VTUdfBSv84 — Craig Sager II (@CraigSagerJr) November 24, 2014
Nice, internet RT @SBNation: Let’s look at the Internet’s best Odell Beckham Jr. photoshops http://t.co/Yf6bBkole9 pic.twitter.com/zrd70YYQHO — Ian Rapoport (@RapSheet) November 24, 2014 |
You can see, by the way, Villa Park Councilwoman Debra Pauly's tirade here. You'll need to click; embedding has been disabled. ICNA has the original video here.
I don't know whether Collins actually took the footage in the video (and, what, sent it to CAIR?) I do know that there are fair use exceptions for this sort of thing. In the past, Daily Kos has captured suppressed videos where Markos and Jed think that they have a legitimate right to do so. I'd like to see that happen here.
If anyone can tell me how to download the CAIR video that's still on my open window, I'd like to make sure that it gets preserved.
Preventing the suppression of this sort of scene of hatred is critical -- but it doesn't happen by itself. People have to go out and do it. I hope that others will join me in trying to ensure that this video is retained until the copyright claim can be, presumably, defeated. It should not be suppressed. Markos can do it, I can do it (if I can get instructions), anyone who can get access to the original can do it.
But the screaming bigots in that video did the deed and they should now endure the shame of it. |
Image caption The House of Lords is the upper chamber of the UK Parliament
A reformed House of Lords should be 80% elected and there should be a referendum before any change is made, a parliamentary committee has said.
MPs and peers also said there should be 450 peers - down from about 800 - who would serve for 15-year terms.
But the committee was split - nine of the 26 members voted against elected peers and eight opposed a referendum.
Earlier David Cameron said he was not persuaded of the need for a referendum but would not rule one out.
The Conservatives and Liberal Democrats agreed in their coalition deal to set up a committee to examine proposals for a "wholly or mainly elected upper chamber" - but the issue is seen as one that is driven more by the Lib Dems.
The government's proposals unveiled last year had been for a smaller, 300-member upper chamber, with 240 elected peers and 60 appointed peers serving single terms of 15 years.
Too small
But the committee said if there were to be elections it should be to a 450-member House of Lords, with 20% of peers appointed "as a means of preserving expertise and placing its mandate on a different footing from that of the Commons".
The 15-year terms would be non-renewable and peers would also receive a salary of about £50,000 a year, rather than the existing attendance allowance.
Analysis Reforming the House of Lords is a priority for few voters. And to many it is an arcane debate that rumbles on unresolved decade after decade. But we have reached another of those moments where the government of the day has scraped together enough political will at least to have a fresh crack at it. The question of who sits on the red leather benches in the posh end of parliament - and how they are selected or elected - may seem an issue for political obsessives. And yet in truth the stakes could not be higher. Reform of the Lords raises a fundamental question of where power lies in parliament. Can the House of Commons remain the supreme authority in parliament with an elected and thus more legitimate House of Lords down the corridor? It is also a question of political priorities. Should the government spend time and political capital on an issue that is a second-order issue for voters struggling with a sluggish economy? This is why Lords' reform has set Tory against Lib Dem, and this is why some fear it could tear the coalition apart.
The report said a 300-member House would be "too small to provide an adequate pool to fulfil the demands of a revising chamber".
But some members of the committee released a separate report arguing that the government's draft bill "totally fails" to protect the primacy of the House of Commons and proposing a "constitutional convention" should be set up to consider the issue more widely.
The House of Lords, the "upper house" of Parliament, scrutinises legislation but can be overridden by the House of Commons using the Parliament Act.
Most members, "life peers", are nominated by the prime minister, although some are nominated by other party leaders.
Other peers, the 26 "Lords Spiritual", are drawn from the Church of England, and about 90 hereditary peers remain - 666 hereditary peers lost the automatic right to sit and vote in Parliament under previous reforms.
The committee's report agreed by a majority of just 13 to nine that a reformed House of Lords "should have an electoral mandate provided that it has commensurate powers", although it noted concerns it could mean elected peers would challenge the traditional primacy of the House of Commons.
The committee backed the government's proposals that peers be elected by single transferable vote (STV), a form of proportional representation and that the number of bishops be reduced from 26 to 12.
It said the new peers should be introduced in three stages up to 2025 but all current peers who attend fewer than one in three sitting days in Parliament should be immediately removed in 2015.
Heated meeting
A telephone survey of 1,000 British adults by ComRes for BBC Radio 4's World at One programme suggested that 72% backed a referendum on Lords reform, 69% supported electing at least 80% of peers and just 23% supported the status quo.
Committee chairman Lord Richard said the joint committee had undertaken "a thorough and detailed analysis of the proposals put forward in the government's draft Bill" and had decided "on a majority" that the Lords should have a "democratic mandate".
But a dissenting group of 12 committee members, including Labour, Conservative and crossbench peers and MPs, said a wider "constitutional convention" was needed to consider all the issues involved.
Media playback is unsupported on your device Media caption David Cameron: "Stong case against" Lords reform referendum
One of its members, Conservative peer Baroness Shephard told the BBC research by Labour peer Lord Lipsey suggested there would be a "vast increase" in costs - from just under £19m a year to up to £433m over five years to 2020.
She said it may turn out to be "worth it in the name of democracy" but the public should know: "I wonder if it were put to them in that way whether they would be as enthusiastic as your polling says they are for 450 more elected paid party politicians."
But Constitutional Reform Minister Mark Harper said those costs were "completely speculative" and he did not yet know whether costs would rise, but said a referendum on the issue would cost "around £100m".
Some Conservative MPs are unhappy about the government's proposals to change the House of Lords but Lib Dem Deputy PM Nick Clegg said on Sunday that politicians from all parties should "get on with it now, with minimum fuss".
Mr Cameron told BBC Radio 4's Today programme that while the issue was "not the most important thing this government is doing", it was a "sensible, reasonable" reform and "the right thing to do".
He said he personally was not persuaded of the need for a costly referendum when the three biggest Westminster parties all backed some form of change in their 2010 manifestos, but added: "We don't rule it out."
Shadow justice secretary Sadiq Khan told the BBC Labour wanted a 100% elected House of Lords and a referendum adding: "It's unacceptable that Ed Miliband, David Cameron and Nick Clegg decide who the legislators are, we believe the public should have a say."
He said the party was "very keen" to work with the government on the issue but added that other issues also needed resolving - to decide which chamber had "primacy": "We don't want gridlock, we don't want the House of Lords flexing their muscles more than they currently do." |
HOUSTON – If Bellator MMA officials thought UFC President Dana White might have been intrigued by their latest offer in regards to Ben Askren, they would be wrong.
Bellator CEO Bjorn Rebney recently offered to let conditional free agent Ben Askren walk away from the company provided UFC officials would guarantee him a title shot upon his move to the octagon.
White wasn’t impressed.
“They’re playing f—ing games,” White told MMAjunkie.com. “I don’t care what they’re doing. It doesn’t matter to me.”
White, who spoke to a group of reporters following Thursday’s pre-UFC 166 media day in Houston, wasn’t at all interested in discussing the potential merits of the offer, which Rebney insisted was made with no strings attached.
“I don’t give a s–t what they’re doing,” White said. “They don’t matter and I don’t care.”
Askren (12-0 MMA, 9-0 BMMA), the current Bellator MMA welterweight title holder, is a former two-time NCAA Division I wrestling champion, and is pure skills in that art are considered among the best in MMA. And while he has endued criticism for a string of six straight decisions under the Bellator banner, his past two title defenses both ended with TKO finishes.
He’s currently ranked No. 7 in the latest USA TODAY Sports/MMAjunkie.com MMA welterweight rankings, but some believe his skillset is perfect to upset longtime UFC champ Georges St-Pierre (assuming Johny Hendricks isn’t the man for that task). However, Bellator retains matching rights to any offer for Askren until next summer. After a similar situation involving Eddie Alvarez turned into a legal hassle, UFC officials have been hesitant to engage in such a play for Askren.
White has, in the past, expressed at least some interest in signing Askren, but this latest offer doesn’t seem to have found its mark.
“When you’re willing to let your f—ing champion go, it’s weird,” White said.
For more on the UFC and Bellator, check out the MMA Rumors section of the site.
(Pictured: Dana White) |
#1 - Most of the honey you buy in the grocery store contains no actual honey whatsoever
#2 - The fluoride that's dripped into municipal water supplies is actually a highly toxic industrial chemical byproduct
#3 - Flu vaccines often contain live flu viruses and actually cause the flu as a way to worsen the flu season and scare more people into buying vaccines
#4 - Ron Paul is deliberately stripped out of mainstream news reports, online polls and debate coverage in order to "game the system" against him
#5 - The United States government openly trafficks illegal guns into Mexico as a way to cause gun violence in the USA
#6 - Prestigious U.S. hospitals are widely engaged in black market organ trafficking and organ transplants
#7 - The child sex slave industry is huge, highly profitable, and found everywhere across America (and the world)
#8 - Commercial chickens are routinely fed arsenic, and commercial cows are routinely fed chicken poop
#9 - "Natural" foods and cereals are routinely made with genetically modified ingredients
#10 - The global banking industry is a criminal racket that steals wealth from working class People and redistributes it to the global wealthy elite
#11 - The U.S. government routinely conspires with pharmaceutical giants to conduct criminal, inhumane medical experiments on innocent people
What else is true?
(NaturalNews) We are living through a time of. The people of our world are beginning to open their eyes and realize the stunning depth of the scams and collusion taking place all around them. These scams that steal their wealth, poison them with chemicals, enslave them with financial trickery and control their minds with propaganda. These scams are, the mainstream media, universities and so-called "science" institutions.Here are 11 of those scams that you probably never would have believed just 2-3 years ago; but nowWelcome to the real world, my friends. Now that we recognize the depth of the scams,(Occupy America!)It's true, the so-called "honey" isn't even technically honey. Most of it is made of cheap "mystery" sweeteners, illegally imported from China, right under the nose of the FDA.This scam is exploding in the faces of all the ignorant dentists and doctors who have been pushing this poison for years. Once again, they were wrong; the "conspiracy theorists" were right.It's also true with MMR vaccines, whichthe measles. Flu vaccines are the greatest medical hoax that has ever been perpetrated on the world:The power elite don't really want "fair and open" elections in America, you see. It's all about rigging the system to make sure agets elected instead of a Man of the People.It all seemed so very clever, and now it just seems. So why can the federal government run illegal guns and nothing happens to them, but if you or I do it, we go to prison for a long, long time?And why not? It's profitable, and they can claim they're "saving lives!" Make no mistake: the organ transplant industry isYou wouldn't have believed this, probably, until the whole Penn State scandal recently made headline news around the world. As everybody now knows, Penn State sports officials, even pimping them out to other criminal rapists who paid big money to rape young boys. This went onright inside a prestigious university, right here in America.Are you shocked? You shouldn't be. Alex Jones has been sounding the alarm about this for. Nobody listened to him. They couldn't believe it was real. People would rather bury their heads in the sand than face reality.And yet, this Penn State scandal just scratches the surface. The far deeper horrifying truth of all this is thatroutinely kidnaps young American children and sells them into sex slavery -- so-called "white slavery." That story has not yet been covered by the mainstream media.Oh, you didn't know that? When you eat conventional beef, you're eating meat from cows who created that meat by consuming chicken poop. Yumm! Can I have some more poop on that burger, please?Oh, you thought "natural" meant better than organic? Non-GMO? Stop getting suckered by the cereal companies and dishonest food conglomerates. Know what you're really eating:You wouldn't have believed this five years ago, but now, looking at your own bank account, the job you lost, the house you can't sell and the health care you can't afford, it's all sinking in: The global financial system isthat suckers working-class people into giving up all their wealth, piece by piece, until they die bankrupt. Indentured servitude...Recent revelations about the U.S. government's secret medical experiments in Guatemala are just the tip of the iceberg here. Dr. Jona Salk, inventor of the polio vaccine , also ran unethical medical experiments on people. In fact, the entire history of modern medicine (pharmaceuticals, vaccines, chemotherapy and more) is something of a "house of horrors" of inhumane medical experiments on innocent victims.Ever wonder what else might be true about our world that you never would have believed just a few years ago? Maybe it's time you started reading books byor evenNow is a good time to start listening to theon www.NaturalNewsRadio.com where you'll also hear news fromPerhaps it's time we all started, medicine, corporate science, banking institutions and all governments. Discard your blinders.Maybe it's time we opened our eyes to reality and stopped lying to ourselves about the depth of corruption and evil in our world. And why would we do that? Becausewhere we work together to create... a world where such criminality and suffering is ancient history.Accept reality, in other words... and then CHANGE it for the better.Open your eyes at the following websites: |
Egyptian panel give green light to search for burial place of Queen Nefertiti, which is believed to be hidden off the king’s tomb
An Egyptian panel of experts has approved the use of radar to search for a hidden chamber in King Tutankhamun’s tomb, which may be the burial place of Queen Nefertiti, said an official.
Archaeologists have never discovered the mummy of the legendary beauty, but the renowned British archaeologist Nicholas Reeves said in a recent study that her tomb could be in a secret chamber adjoining Tutankhamun’s tomb in the Valley of Kings at Luxor, southern Egypt.
Reeves, who was in Luxor in September to test his theory, believes one door of Tutankhamun’s tomb could conceal the burial place of Nefertiti.
“The committee of experts has given its approval for using radars,” said Mushira Mussa, an antiquities ministry spokeswoman. “But we are still awaiting clearance from security services, and some time in November we may start searching Tutankhamun’s tomb.”
According to Reeves, professor of archeology at the University of Arizona, Tutankhamun, who died unexpectedly, was buried hurriedly in an underground chamber that was probably not intended for him.
Queen Nefertiti dazzles the modern imagination – but why? Read more
His death would have forced priests to reopen Nefertiti’s tomb 10 years after her death because the young pharaoh’s own mausoleum had not yet been built.
But the antiquities minister, Mamduh al-Damati, believes that such a chamber, if found adjoining Tutankhamun’s tomb, may contain Kiya, a wife of the pharaoh Akhenaten, or his daughter Merytaten.
Nefertiti played a major political and religious role in the 14th century BC. She actively supported her husband Akhenaten, the pharaoh who temporarily converted ancient Egypt to monotheism by imposing the single cult of the sun god Aten.
Damati and Reeves hope that sophisticated radar equipment will reveal the existence of another funerary chamber in the heart of Tutankhamun’s tomb, which the minister says would be the archaeological “discovery of the century”.
The final resting place of the boy king Tutankhamun, who died in 1324BC after just nine years on the throne, was discovered by another British Egyptologist, Howard Carter, in 1922. |
What is Vertcoin?
Vertcoin is a digital currency that’s actually staying true to the original vision of cryptocurrency.
It’s designed with one main goal in mind: to resist centralization and ensure power remains in the users’ hands. Vertcoin is completely owned by its users, fairly distributed, and developed by community members working as volunteers. This is why Vertcoin is known as “the people’s coin.”
What Does Vertcoin Do?
The core focus of Vertcoin is decentralized mining. The development team is wholly committed to keeping ASICs out of their network — which means miners aren’t allowed to use big expensive hardware whose sole purpose is to mine as many coins as possible. This is a very good thing because it ensures one entity doesn’t control a large amount of the network, thus keeping fair distribution of the currency.
Vertcoin uses the proof-of-work method of validating transactions, the same as Bitcoin and Ethereum. This means you can use your system’s computing power as a way to validate the network transactions. As a reward for helping generate additional Vertcoins, you receive some Vertcoins yourself. Currently the blocktime is 2.5 minutes with 50 coins rewarded per block.
Since Vertcoin is truly decentralized, anyone can easily mine it for a profit. They’re currently developing a “1-Click” Vertcoin miner, to make mining the cryptocurrency as simple as possible. As long as you have a computer, you can mine Vertcoin yourself.
Vertcoin uses the Lightning Network for scalable, instant blockchain transactions. This technology allows for a massive increase in the network capacity by moving the bulk of transactions off of the blockchain for faster processing.
A feature of the Lightning Network is something called “atomic cross-chain trading,” also known as “atomic swaps.” This allows users to seamlessly exchange their Vertcoins in a decentralized way. You can turn your Vertcoins into Bitcoins or Litecoins (and vice versa), directly in your Vertcoin wallet.
History of Vertcoin
Vertcoin was released via a client on GitHub on January 8, 2014. It’s been around for quite a while, as far as cryptocurrencies go.
About a year later, Vertcoin forked from Scrypt-Adaptive-N proof-of-work function to Lyra2RE. They did this as a proactive defense against emerging ASICs that were using the former algorithm.
Then, on August 10, 2015, Vertcoin forked again, this time from Lyra2RE to Lyra2RE(v2) because a botnet was controlling 50% of the hashing power of the Vertcoin network.
Clearly the Vertcoin team isn’t kidding around when they say their main goal is making sure Vertcoin is truly decentralized. As their website states: “Our developers have pledged to take whatever steps are necessary to protect this coin from specialized mining equipment and make sure that it will always be possible to mine with consumer grade hardware.”
The Vertcoin Team
James Lovejoy started Vertcoin when he was still in high school. He’s been programming since the tender age of 10. Now, he’s an undergraduate researcher at MIT DCI, working on enacting decentralized monetary policy.
The entire team behind Vertcoin is made up of volunteers, and the project is funded solely on donations. The team currently has 9 members from all over the globe, each passionately dedicated enough to spend countless hours on improving and expanding Vertcoin’s vision.
Anyone with an interest in the project is encouraged to donate or volunteer their time helping improve Vertcoin. The team works around the clock to ensure an open-source environment.
Challenges
The main challenge for Vertcoin has been keeping the platform ASIC resistant. They’ve had to fork twice to defend themselves against ASICs and ensure Vertcoin stays decentralized. This will surely continue to be Vertcoin’s biggest and most important challenge, since it’s the main reason they exist in the first place.
Another challenge has been marketing. Some have criticized the team for not being more aggressive in getting the word out there about Vertcoin. In the eyes of the Vertcoin team, however, they focus on growing the community organically instead of using “gimmicky marketing tactics.”
How to Purchase and Store Vertcoin
First, download the Vertcoin wallet from their website. There are versions available for Windows, Mac, and Linux.
Once you’ve done that, you can now send and receive Vertcoins ($VTC). Just obtain an address, which can be easily generated from any Vertcoin wallet. Vertcoin addresses always begin with a V and contain 26-36 alphanumeric characters.
After a transaction is made, funds should clear within 5 minutes. There is a small fee to help with the upkeep of the network.
The easiest way to purchase Vertcoin is with Bitcoin. Just trade Bitcoin for Vertcoin on one of these cryptocurrency exchanges:
English Markets: POLONIEX / BITTREX / BLEUTRADE / YOBIT
Chinese Markets: JUBI / 19800
Euro Markets: LITEBIT
Person-To-Person Trading: LOCAL VERTCOINS
Last Thoughts
It’s quite refreshing to see Vertcoin sticking to the original vision of why cryptocurrencies exist in the first place. Not to raise millions of dollars in ICO sales, not to create crazy hype for products that don’t even exist — but simply to put power in the users’ hands instead of intermediaries.
With Vertcoin, you can truly be your own bank.
And people are clearly taking interest: Vertcoin has increased in value a staggering 20,000% over the past year. The fact that it can be used by pretty much anyone is a huge appeal to the masses.
To get involved with Vertcoin and join the community, you can follow them on Twitter, check out their subreddit, and join the Discord channel. |
Tom Nook also neutered
Animal Crossing is a series about doing whatever you want, with a few loose goals put in place if you choose to pursue them. It's one of the least punishing series ever made. One of the few times you might feel anything unpleasant in the series is if you try to cheat by hitting reset, presumably to undo an in-game "mistake" like failing to catch a cool fish or having a bad interaction with a talking penguin.
Reseting causes a character named Mr. Resetti to pop up the next time you start the game, who then lectures you about how you shouldn't have cheated. Along with Psycho Mantis's mind reading in Metal Gear Solid, it's one of the more creative fourth wall-breaking moments in gaming history. For a game that's otherwise focused on giving the player total freedom to apply negative reinforcement by forcing you to read a lengthy (and often hilarious) in-game lecture seems perfect.
But maybe it was too perfect, as according to the latest entry of Iwata Asks, Mr. Resetti's chastising was enough to bring some players to tears, presumably out of guilt. That led the developers to make him an optional in Animal Crossing: New Leaf. They also changed the underlying goal of the game from paying off rent to Tom Nook to improving the town as its new mayor.
New Leaf is quickly moving towards becoming the best-selling game in the series, so it's clear that Nintendo made the right move. Still, I can't help but feel like Animal Crossing is better when it can make players feel awful. It adds contrast to what can otherwise be a wholly soft experience. Without dark we can have no light, without Yin there is no Yang, without stress you can't relax, and other cliches. How about you? How do you feel about Animal Crossing with zero feel-bad potential?
Animal Crossing's Mr. Resetti made optional because he made players cry [Shacknews]
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“Netflix and chill” is a phrase that has become embedded in our pop culture; where the expression typically is code for hanging out and having sex, it now takes on a new role—horror. It’s difficult to find originality in modern horror movies, but by including current trends into a movie’s theme the creators may be onto an original premise here.
On Tuesday, September 6, Screen Rant reported that the short horror-comedy film Netflix & Chill is in development.
“Continuing the trend-optioning, Umami Media and Cinecrowd announced today they will be producing ‘the first movie based on an internet meme’—Netflix & Chill. The short film, written and directed by Michael Middelkoop, is being described as a horror/comedy. Middelkoop gave a little insight into his vision for this film:” “With Netflix & Chill I hope to deliver an absurd horror comedy that makes a bit of fun of our excessive media consumption. Also, there should be enough gore to make both John Carpenter and Wes Craven proud.'”
The site would go on to describe the synopsis of the horror-comedy.
“After months of flirting and texting, a young guy finally gets the message he’s been waiting for: the girl of his dreams invites him over. Her parents are gone for the weekend and she’s down for a good film on Netflix. As the night progresses, one guy hoping to get lucky find out that luck is having a day off.”
Production is scheduled for spring of 2017 and until then, fans of horror movies and comedy can enjoy the humorous trailer for Netflix & Chill.
In September of 2016, horror fans can enjoy an abundance of horror movies currently available on Netflix. Netflix always has a large list of horror movies but some are better than others. While a few fans of horror may have enjoyed the widely panned remake of The Wicker Man, most viewers felt the same as the critics. This list concentrates on only the best horror movies available on Netflix. Some of these titles have been newly released on Netflix in September, while others are horror movies still currently available throughout the month of September.
The Amityville Horror (2005)
Though both the original and the remake were not popular among critics, horror enthusiasts love The Amityville Horror. This updated version of the 1979 classic is much creepier than the original. Ryan Reynolds stars in this movie about a family that moves into a new house that comes face-to-face with demonic forces.
The Factory (2011)
Two detectives, portrayed by John Cusack and Jennifer Carpenter, are hunting down a serial killer. This movie features one of the more intriguing horror villains of the past few years, played by Dallas Roberts, and the creepy visuals and tense scenes are sure to please Netflix viewers.
[Image via Warner Bros.] Jaws (1975)
The entire Jaws franchise is currently available on Netflix but nothing compares to the original. Still strong after 40 years, this movie proves that all you need is an ocean and a great white shark to entice terror.
Housebound (2014)
Housebound is a horror-comedy from first-time director Gerard Johnstone. Rotten Tomatoes provides the premise for one of the best horror movies on Netflix for September 2016.
“Kylie Bucknell is forced to return to the house she grew up in when the court places her on home detention. Her punishment is made all the more unbearable by the fact she has to live there with her mother Miriam – a well-intentioned blabbermouth who’s convinced that the house is haunted. Kylie dismisses Miriam’s superstitions as nothing more than a distraction from a life occupied by boiled vegetables & small-town gossip. However, when she too becomes privy to unsettling whispers & strange bumps in the night, she begins to wonder whether she’s inherited her overactive imagination, or if the house is in fact possessed by a hostile spirit who’s not particularly thrilled about her return.”
Hellraiser(1987)
Clive Barker’s feature length debut film became an instant cult hit among horror movie fans and still is to this day. A man escapes from hell and the demon-like creatures known as the Cenobites, led by the infamous Pinhead, come to reclaim his soul.
[Image via New World Pictures] Never Sleep Again: The Elm Street Legacy (2010)
This four-hour film is not a horror movie per se, but a documentary covering the iconic horror franchise of A Nightmare on Elm Street. Though a documentary, this film does include a lot of horror as well as trivia that Netflix audiences are sure to enjoy.
The Exorcist (1973)
The Exorcist is the movie that started it all for the possession genre of the horror industry. A young girl in Georgetown is possessed and the mother calls on two priests to save her life. This iconic film is considered one of the most intense horror movies of all-time.
Scream 2 (1997)
In the mid ’90s, Wes Craven’s Scream breathed new life into the horror genre. Often sequels don’t live up to their predecessor but Scream 2 is just as fun and thrilling as the original.
[Image via Dimension Films] Sleepy Hollow (1999)
Tim Burton directs this retelling of Washington Irving’s The Legend of Sleepy Hollow starring Johnny Depp, Christina Ricci, and Christopher Walken. Depp plays Ichabod Crane and Walken portrays the Headless Horseman—enough said.
Children of the Corn (1984)
IMDB provides the synopsis for this classic adaptation of the Stephen King horror story.
“A boy preacher named Isaac goes to a town in Nebraska called Gatlin and gets all the children to murder every adult in town. A young couple have a murder to report and they go to the nearest town (Gatlin) to seek help but the town seems deserted. They are soon trapped in Gatlin with little chance of getting out alive.”
[Image via New World Pictures] Hush (2016)
Hush has quickly become a horror and thriller favorite among Netflix subscribers. A deaf woman lives in seclusion and is stalked by a psychotic killer. Soon, the killer realizes that he is going to have a longer night on his hands than he anticipated. After watching this suspenseful horror film viewers may think twice about buying a house in the woods.
OTHER MOVIE ARTICLES FROM THE INQUISITR
Best Horror Movies on Hulu That Will Give You Chills
Best Horror Movies of 2016 & Horror Movies Coming Soon [Trailers]
Best Movies & Netflix Series Perfect for Labor Day Weekend September 2016
Best Movies on Netflix September 2016: ‘Zootopia,’ ‘Saving Private Ryan’ and More
While fans wait for Netflix & Chill, they can enjoy a variety of the best horror movies on Netflix throughout the month of September.
[Image via YinYang/iStock] |
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This piece was originally published at The New Statesman. Reprinted with permission. Ad Policy
It’s official: disabled people aren’t allowed to be independent. This week, amid rows about how this country treats people with disabilities, it was announced that the government will be phasing out the Independent Living Fund (ILF), a vital stipend that allows more than 21,000 "severely disabled people to pay for help so they can live independently". Such provisions, unlike bank bailouts and subsidies to arms dealers and millionaire tax dodgers, are no longer a priority for this administration. When I heard the news, I couldn’t help but think of Jody McIntyre, a 20-year-old activist and journalist with cerebral palsy, who I saw batoned and dragged from his wheelchair at the demonstrations last Thursday, and who later delivered a series of epic discursive smackdowns to a senior BBC correspondent on prime time television.
The press have been trying to imply that, because Jody is a revolutionary activist and ideologue who has travelled to Palestine and South America, he cannot be a "real" disabled person — he must, as Ben Brown suggested on the BBC, have somehow been "provoked". He must have deserved the beating and the humiliation of being pulled out of his chair and across the road; he must have asked for it. Richard Littlejohn went so far as to compare McIntyre to Andy, a hilariously fraudulent and fatuous wheelchair-using character in the most disgusting pageant of blackface and grotesquery ever to defile British television screens, Little Britain. Like Brown and others, Littlejohn seemed to imply that because he fought back and spoke up, because he attended a protest and because he is not afraid to make his voice heard, Jody McIntyre is not a real disabled person.
Others, including McIntyre himself, have written eloquently about how surprised we really shouldn’t be that the police attacked a disabled protester, nearly killed another protester, and injured and traumatised hundreds more. That we live in a state where police attack women, minorities and the visibly vulnerable in what has been suggested are deliberate tactics to provoke protest crowds to riot is not something I see much need to debate. The truly fascinating aspect of McIntyre’s story is what it reveals about how the British understand disability: namely, that real disabled people are not whole human beings. The attitude is that there are two types of disabled person: there are real disabled people, who are quiet and grateful and utterly incapable of any sort of personal agency whatsoever, and fake disabled people, people like Jody McIntyre, who are disqualified from being truly disabled by virtue of having personality, ambition, outside interests and, in this case, the cojones to stand up to a corrupt and duplicitous government.
This remarkable Catch-22 clause, whereby the authorities can claim that any disabled person who criticises them on disability issues or any other issues must de facto not actually be disabled, does not only affect how individuals like McIntyre are treated. It directly influences policymaking in the most clinical and ruthless of ways. Bear in mind that, alongside its highly publicised cuts to secondary and higher education funding, this government is also taking away benefits from disabled people: housing benefit, income support, the mobility component of Disability Living Allowance and other vital sources of funding are being decimated or removed entirely. The withdrawal of the mobility component for people in residential care is a particularly nasty slash, as this is a benefit that allows people with mobility issues a modicum of independence, something which, in the eyes of this government, real disabled people should neither want nor need. It pays for taxis, motorised scooters and wheelchairs—wheelchairs like the one the police damaged when they tipped Jody McIntyre right out of it.
On top of this, those claiming sickness benefits or Employment and Support Allowance will be obliged to take another round of punishing tests that are acknowledged to be specifically designed to prevent hundreds of thousands of benefit recipients from receiving any more money. "Currently, nearly a third of all disabled people live below the official poverty line, with a quarter of families with disabled children unable to afford heating," said Eleanor, a spokesperson for Disabled People Against Cuts (DPAC), who protested in central London today about what the group sees as a direct assault on disability rights in the UK. "A tenth of all disabled women have incomes under £31 per week," she said "And yet, the government intends to slash the number of claimants on disability living allowance by 20 per cent, although the fraud rate is estimated to be a mere 0.5 per cent."
Six months ago, when I was helping my disabled partner, who has severe mobility issues and chronic pain, prepare to claim DLA, we realised that he would not be considered sufficiently disabled unless he was prepared to actually demonstrate to a partial outside observer that he could not walk 30 steps without falling on his face. It was humiliating and it was inhumane, and eventually, like many others, we gave up. The subsequent poverty and the stress of watching my partner struggle to cope with his disability with no support eventually ended the relationship and left me with a profound understanding of how successive administrations have used welfare reform to humiliate and terrorise the most vulnerable into abject complaisance.
All of this is justified by the assumption that most people claiming disability benefits are, to put it bluntly, faking. That’s right, hundreds of thousands of people with mental or physical health problems that prevent them from working have the audacity to want a scrap of agency, a life that is in any way full or useful, so they must be faking it all.
This government would prefer it if people with disabilities were not also people with opinions, desires and personalities. This government would prefer it if there were a clear demarcation line between people with the ability to stand up for themselves in any way whatsoever and people who are entirely reliant on the state, who ought to know their place: head bowed, hands outstretched, mouth shut, uncomplaining, accustomed to poverty and public derision. This government, with its utter contempt for the entire concept of social security, would prefer to only be obliged to support those who are prepared to sacrifice absolutely every bit of personal agency, to put up and shut up.
This is, of course, utter rubbish. This is not a Victorian melodrama, with the world neatly divided into people who are whole and hale and mawkish, abject cripples who are terminally grateful for any charity thrown to them and permanently followed around by a chorus of tiny violins. In the real world, the only difference between people with disabilities and everyone else is that people with disabilities sometimes need a little extra support to live the best lives that they can. They should get that support—and they should not have to ask nicely. |
Through the summer, American officials continued to assume that the agreement would be amended, and Mr. Obama was willing to support a continued military presence. In June, diplomats and Iraqi officials said that Mr. Obama had told Mr. Maliki that he was prepared to leave up to 10,000 soldiers to continue training and equipping the Iraqi security forces. Mr. Maliki agreed, but said he needed time to line up political allies.
Mr. Maliki was afraid that if he came out publicly in favor of keeping troops without gaining the support of other parties in Parliament, his rivals — particularly the former Prime Minister Ayad Allawi — would exploit the issue to weaken his shaky coalition government. Eventually, he got authorization from the group to begin talks with the Americans on keeping troops in Iraq.
In August, after debates between the Pentagon, the State Department and the White House, the Americans settled on the 3,000 to 5,000 number, which was reported in August. According to two people briefed on the matter, one inside the administration and one outside, the arguments of two White House officials, Thomas E. Donilon, the national security adviser, and his deputy, Denis McDonough, prevailed over those of the military.
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Intelligence assessments that Iraq was not at great risk of slipping into chaos in the absence of American forces were a factor in the decision, an American official said.
This month, American officials pressed the Iraqi leadership to meet again at President Talabani’s compound to discuss the issue. This time the Americans asked them to take a stand on the question of immunity for troops, hoping to remove what had always been the most difficult hurdle. But they misread Iraqi politics and the Iraqi public. Still burdened by the traumas of this and previous wars, and having watched the revolutions sweeping their region, the Iraqis were unwilling to accept anything that infringed on their sovereignty.
Acutely aware of that sentiment, the Iraqi leadership quickly said publicly that they would not support legal protections for any American troops. Some American officials have privately said that pushing for that meeting — in essence forcing the Iraqis to take a public stand on such a controversial matter before working out the politics of presenting it to their constituents and to Parliament — was a severe tactical mistake that ended any possibility of keeping American troops here past December.
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But the repeated lesson of Iraqi politics is that putatively final agreements are always subject to revision. Even now, with a definitive sounding statement from the president, the two sides are continuing to discuss a continuing military relationship.
Shortly after Mr. Obama’s remarks, which were carried on Iraqi television, Gen. Babakir Zebari, the chief of staff of the Iraqi Army, who has said previously that Iraq’s security forces would need American help until 2020, said in a statement that the country still needed military trainers.
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Sami al-Askari, a member of Parliament and close adviser to Mr. Maliki, said in an interview that, Mr. Obama’s statement notwithstanding, not much had really changed. “As we said before, the SOFA is totally different from the trainers issue, which is still under negotiation, because we have said that there is a necessity for trainers,” he said.
Defense Secretary Leon E. Panetta held out the possibility of keeping a small force of American military trainers in Iraq in the future, although there are no negotiations under way on numbers or a mission.
“We’re prepared to meet their training needs, we’re prepared to engage in exercises with them, we’re prepared to provide guidance and training with regard to their pilots, we’re prepared to continue to develop an ongoing relationship with them in the future,” Mr. Panetta told reporters on his plane on Friday en route to Indonesia.
On Friday evening, an American official in Iraq, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because the deliberations are confidential, said that negotiations would now center on arrangements that would begin next year, after all United States troops leave.
Possibilities being discussed are for some troops to return in 2012, an option preferred by some Iraqi politicians who want to claim credit for ending what many here still call an occupation, even though legally it ended years ago. Other scenarios being discussed include offering training in the United States, in a nearby country such as Kuwait, or having some troops here under NATO auspices. |
On the release page, there is this comment:
Quote Caveat for Windows: To use the GUI client on Windows, you must first install a generic USB driver to allow libusb to access the device. An easy tool for doing this is zadig.exe. This will however prevent Windows from using the usb interface with that driver as HID input (that is to say, either typing (Interface 0) or mouse movement (Interface 1) will be lost).
What does this mean? Does this mean I would need to uninstall the generic USB driver before I could use the ErgoDox or my trackball?
No, it would affect only the keyboard itself. Here's the issue: Windows has a limitation that you can't send USB vendor commands (what the firmware uses for configuration) to a standard HID device like a keyboard or mouse. So to use the configuration software on Windows, you have to replace the standard HID driver with a generic driver allowing vendor commands. The problem with doing this though is that suddenly you can no longer use the device that you reinstalled the driver of for its standard purpose (i.e typing or mouse movement). Fortunately, the keyboard firmware presents a composite device with two interfaces - a keyboard and a mouse (for mousekey support). Replacing the driver on the mouse interface loses mouse key support, but overall that's not a very big loss.There's a way to fix the issue: if I change the firmware to use HID feature reports for its configuration interface instead of vendor commands, it'll work without any special driver on Windows. This is definitely on my todo list, but I haven't gotten around to it yet - I use a Mac, so it doesn't personally affect me. If I get a few Windows users asking for the feature, I'll try and get around to it soon(There's a second, much hackier way to fix the issue: make the keyboard report a third completely fake interface, and just install the generic driver on that. I've pushed a completely untested branch with this to github here |
Kurdish man forced to kiss Atatürk statue in southwest Turkey
MUĞLA
DHA photo
Turkish nationalists in the southwestern city of Muğla have forced a Kurdish man to kiss a statue of Mustafa Kemal Atatürk as a “punishment” for a social media message he posted, Doğan News Agency reported on Sept. 8.According to the report, the man, identified only as İbrahim Ç., shared a photo on Facebook of himself wearing the uniform of the peshmerga military force of the Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG), alongside the message “It is an honor to wear this uniform.”Many outraged Facebook users then shared the photo, claiming that he was a supporter of the outlawed Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), which has staged attacks and killed dozens of Turkish security forces since July 20.After his post spread online, İbrahim Ç. was tracked down and attacked in the Kumluova district of Muğla province. A group of locals beat him and tore his clothes before forcing him to kiss a statue of Atatürk in the city.The man, who was born in the southeastern province of Şanlıurfa, was injured and reportedly taken to hospital by gendarmie forces who arrived at the scene. |
We received this box for our review. Hello Subscription may earn compensation via links in this post. Read the full disclosure
The Jock’s Box is a monthly subscription box that awards the fan. They will send exciting sports related products each month to a specific theme. This is the first box we have gotten and my 8 year old son was beside himself for me to get through the pictures so that he could dig in. I love the front of this box and I know its supposed to be someone cheering there team but my first thought was to the end of The Breakfast Club which has nothing to do with sports but made me smile when I looked at it.
First look and I knew my boys would be happy.
Inside the lid was the info card tucked into corner tabs. This is a great idea and keeps the card visible and flat so that it doesn’t get crinkled up. The May theme was an NBA Finals Bound.
The back of the insert card had information on the playoffs and a list of included items.
Everything in this month’s box.
Lebron James HD Mesh hooded mask ($17.99) – This is hysterical and I can totally see someone wearing it at a game. It has a black cap that goes over your head with the face mesh that hangs infront of your face so you then look like Lebron. My boys were laughing with it and kept having everyone try it on.
San Antonio Spurs Mini Basketball ($16.99) – This came uninflated in the box and we had my hubby blow it up as soon as he got home. We love these mini balls and as you can see this one has already been used and gotten a bit dirty.
Limited Edition Steph Curry Bleacher Creature ($19.99) – My son loves Steph Curry and has carried this around when he was home all night. He then took it to bed and brought it back down so I could blog it this morning. These are a great size to be displayed or played with.
Toronto Raptors T-shirt ( I can’t find this exact one online but I would expect to pay about $20 for it) – The box only has men size shirts to pick from and this is a men’s small. It is big on my son but he does not care at all. He says he will sleep in it and wear it to the pool. It is a really soft shirt and nice weight t-shirt.
Complete Panini NBA Trading Cards ($10.66 for a whole sealed box of cards – We got two packs) – My boys loved sports cards and already divided these up between them.
NBA gummy basketballs ($1.25) – I was told these were really good but I did not get to try any. They opened and took these out to share and they were gone.
This was a great box and we love it. Even with estimating the t-shirt the value is more than the cost of the box which is always great. Sports merchandise is so expensive. We can’t wait to see what the theme for next month is and what is included. Since I’m getting this primarily for my 8 year old he does not care which team or what sport he gets as long as it is some kind of sport so being a surprise each month is perfect for him. This would make a fantastic gift for Father’s Day too!
What did you think of The Jock’s Box? Save 15% on your first box with coupon code HELLOSUB15.
Visit The Jock’s Box to subscribe or find out more! |
Less than two weeks ago, Netflix gave us the gift that is the mystery-filled sci-fi series “Stranger Things” — and a little bit of Austin had something to do with it.
From the “Goonies”-esque ragtag band of kids to Winona Ryder’s performance, the show quickly became a binge-watch favorite. But a major part of the show’s allure has to do with it being a major ’80s throwback. “Stranger Things” is riddled with sounds and tracks from the era, including The Clash’s “Should I Stay or Should I Go,” “Waiting For A Girl Like You” by Foreigner, Modern English’s “I Melt With You” and, of course, that opening theme.
The score to the “Stranger Things” title sequence — which on its own already resembles the cover of a 1980s mystery novel — has captured people’s attention. And it turns out the men behind the eerie, synth-laden track are part of an Austin band named Survive.
Kyle Dixon and Michael Stein formed their duo in Austin in 2008 and got their first Hollywood gig composing the song “Hourglass” for 2014 action-horror film “The Guest.” They currently have a Facebook page and upload their work to Bandcamp. In 2015, Survive played at Levitation and Fun Fun Fun Fest. The band recently signed a deal for a new LP with Relapse Records, and the album is set to be released Sept. 30.
The Duffer Brothers, the creators of “Stranger Things,” asked Dixon and Stein to write all the original music in the first season. It’s not clear yet if they’ll return for later episodes or if Netflix will ever get around to releasing the soundtrack.
But here’s to hoping.
Check out what people have to say about the song on Twitter:
How do I make the Stranger Things theme song play every time I walk into a room — Teresa Finney (@teresatothemax) July 25, 2016
I’ve spent entirely too much time with this unofficial extended version of the STRANGER THINGS theme. https://t.co/SP4qi39LGO — Russ Fischer (@russfischer) July 23, 2016
I want #StrangerThings theme song as ringtone — Spencer Pratt (@spencerpratt) July 23, 2016
The theme song of stranger things is so tite — brillz (@ItsBrillz) July 23, 2016
So I stumbled across the artists who made the Stranger Things theme. It is all really good stuff: https://t.co/d35QidfDxY — Nate Boyles (@AnimNate) July 21, 2016
found out S U R V I V E wrote the rad theme music for @Stranger_Things – no wonder ! I love that band — Chelsea Wolfe (@CCHELSEAWWOLFE) July 20, 2016
Watch Ryder talk about the smash hit show below. |
David Katz applauds an analysis of the carbonated-drinks industry and public health.
Soda Politics: Taking on Big Soda (and Winning) By Marion Nestle Oxford University Press: 2015. 9780190263430
If any one name evokes unfettered truths about the sociopolitical machinations of 'Big Food', it is that of Marion Nestle, professor of nutrition, food studies and public health at New York University. Author of Food Politics (Univ. California Press, 2002) and the blog of the same name, she held senior positions in US food policy in the 1980s and 1990s, sitting, for example, on the 1995 US Dietary Guidelines Advisory Committee. Her writing exerts a powerful influence on almost all other contributors in this realm.
Image: Illustrations by Karolis Strautniekas/www.folioart.co.uk
Nestle's latest, Soda Politics, addresses carbonated, non-alcoholic, sweetened beverages as an emblem of modern wars focused on food, politics, policy, personal choice and culture. This concentrated source of sucrose, high-fructose corn syrup and calories, free of any nutritional attributes, accounts for one-third of all US sugar intake. Soda Politics is what those who know Nestle and her work would expect. It is thorough and thoughtful, careful and comprehensive, exacting and erudite — and only rarely surprising. She elaborates opposing views before rendering her generally moderate verdicts, such as: “Sugar is neither a poison nor entirely harmless.”
After defining her terms, Nestle distils what is agreed and what is contentious regarding the health effects of soft drinks, and provides an overview of the industry (valued at anything from US$200 billion to $800 billion globally) and its characteristic responses to public health. She covers the scientific evidence on health effects, the industry's impact on the environment and the preferential marketing of soft drinks to children, specific ethnic groups and poor people, for instance at sporting and cultural events — strategies that Nestle characterizes as “softball”.
A prominent theme in Soda Politics is the correspondence between the tactics of the soft-drinks and tobacco industries. Both use “hardball” strategies such as litigation, lobbying of Congress, and front groups such as New Yorkers Against Unfair Taxes, established by the beverage industry to oppose a soft-drinks levy. Nestle asserts that these interests “forge alliances with health organizations and researchers to make the science appear confusing and to silence criticism” — tactics that stretch back to the 1970s and beyond. She cites the work of beverage-industry-funded researchers who examine the effects of soft-drink consumption on health, and highlights how their results consistently diverge from findings of studies with unconflicted funders. She backs up every argument abundantly; this is a hefty, well-researched book.
Nestle's blunt assessment of current interactions between the soft-drink industry and certain luminaries of public health and public policy is provocative. She tells us about the Alliance for a Healthier Generation — founded jointly by the American Heart Association and the Clinton Foundation (a non-profit group set up by former US president Bill Clinton to help people meet “challenges of global interdependence”). It was, she writes, formed to negotiate policies on selling soft drinks in schools with the beverage industry. The deal reached, and announced with fanfare, Nestle relates, “rescued sports drinks, sugar-sweetened waters, and the machines that sold them”, while helping soft-drink companies to sidestep a class-action lawsuit. As Nestle shows, this lawsuit was abandoned with Clinton's encouragement when the beverage industry agreed to the terms brokered by the Alliance.
We also hear of close ties between the leadership of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, a philanthropic body focusing on many aspects of health and health care, and that of Pepsico. Nestle writes that the foundation's president and Pepsico's chief executive routinely sit together at public events. We are told that as much as $4 billion in food stamps under the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program is spent each year on soft drinks. And we learn of the unexpected alliance of entities that oppose remedying this with policy, such as food retailers that profit from the programme. We get a bracing reality check regarding front groups. For instance, the non-profit education and advocacy organization the American Council on Science and Health, Nestle tells us, “depends heavily on funding from corporations that have a financial stake in the scientific debate it aims to shape”. Coca-Cola is a significant sponsor.
Nestle's decisive opinions slice through a number of polarized controversies in public health. She asserts that “it is so well established that sodas and other sugary drinks contribute to higher calorie intake, weight gain, obesity, and type-2 diabetes that stopping drinking them is the first line of defense against any of these conditions”. Amen. She states that diet drinks, which now account for 30% of US soft-drink sales, have not been shown to help most people to control their weight. And she points out that although high-fructose corn syrup and sucrose differ in how they deliver free fructose and in their specific metabolic effects, it is unclear that the differences matter much to public health in light of the overall excess. My own work in this area has led me to the same conclusion.
Occasionally, Soda Politics serves up genuine surprises. Coca-Cola, for instance, markets 3,500 products under 500 brand names in more than 200 countries. Yet despite fierce brand loyalties, the products of the leading manufacturers are consistently indistinguishable in blind taste tests. As a result of industry obfuscation, which keeps relevant data proprietary and shielded from public view, researchers are not sure how much the modern citizen drinks, only that it is a lot (average per capita US intake has been estimated at nearly 170 litres per year). Each 350-millilitre portion contains 10 teaspoons of sugar — other ingredients may serve principally to mask this extreme sweetness. Nestle also briefly discusses 4-methylimidazole, a by-product of the caramel colouring used in some soft drinks, which has been deemed a potential carcinogen by the US National Toxicology Program following thus-far equivocal findings in a two-year rodent study. The US Food and Drug Administration is currently reviewing the range of data available on the compound.
“Between 340 and 620 litres of water are used for every litre of soft drink produced.”
For me, the single most stunning and appalling revelation comes in the section about environmental impact and industry responses to it. It is that between 340 and 620 litres of water are used for every litre of soft drink produced, about 20% of that related to packaging. Despite such disturbing revelations, Soda Politics is not discouraging. The parallels between the practices of the soft-drink and the tobacco industries can inform strategies for winning this public-health battle, pointing to moves such as banning television advertising. Throughout the book, Nestle provides tactics for practical, local advocacy, such as working with school wellness committees and engaging local policymakers. And since 2002, the proportion of US citizens who say that they avoid soft drinks has risen by 20%, reaching nearly two-thirds of the population.
Nestle cannot attribute that trend to any one action; it is the aggregate effect of many, and of increasing awareness. The soft-drink industry is, however, vast and shrewd, profitable, pervasive and powerful. For public health to prevail over soda politics as usual, we have miles to go. This book is the richly drawn map of how to get there, from here.
Author information Affiliations David Katz is the founding director of the Yale-Griffin Prevention Research Center in Derby, Connecticut, founder of the True Health Coalition (http://glimmerinitiative.org/) and president of the American College of Lifestyle Medicine. His latest book is Disease Proof. David Katz Authors Search for David Katz in: Nature Research journals •
PubMed •
Google Scholar Corresponding author Correspondence to David Katz.
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Rand Paul says he never proposed ending aid to Israel — even though he did
Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul on Monday denied that he once supported ending federal aid to Israel — an idea he proposed as recently as 2011.
“I haven’t really proposed that in the past,” Paul told Yahoo News when asked if he still thought the U.S. should phase out aid to Israel, which has been battling Hamas in Gaza for weeks. “We’ve never had a legislative proposal to do that. You can mistake my position, but then I’ll answer the question. That has not been a position — a legislative position — we have introduced to phase out or get rid of Israel’s aid. That’s the answer to that question. Israel has always been a strong ally of ours and I appreciate that. I voted just this week to give money — more money — to the Iron Dome, so don’t mischaracterize my position on Israel.”
Paul, who was in Omaha campaigning for Nebraska Senate candidate Ben Sasse before a three-day tour of neighboring Iowa, may not like it when reporters bring up his proposal from three years ago to end all U.S. foreign aid — including to Israel. But that was in fact his position.
In 2011, the newly elected Paul proposed a budget that would have cut $500 billion from the federal budget in part by cutting off foreign aid to all countries, including financial grants to Israel. The United States provides about $3 billion to Israel annually, and last week the Senate approved $225 million to help support Israel’s Iron Dome technology, which blocks rocket fire from Gaza. (Paul supported the measure.)
Paul, in his first months in office, however, defended phasing out aid by saying that the U.S. could no longer afford to give cash to other countries.
“I’m not singling out Israel. I support Israel. I want to be known as a friend of Israel, but not with money you don’t have,” Paul said in 2011 during an interview with ABC News. “We can’t just borrow from our kids’ future and give it to countries, even if they are our friends.”
He even pointed to Israel as an example of a nation that doesn’t need foreign aid because of its own wealth.
“I think they’re an important ally, but I also think that their per capita income is greater than probably three-fourths of the rest of the world,” Paul said, also in 2011. “Should we be giving free money or welfare to a wealthy nation? I don’t think so.”
Paul, a possible 2016 presidential contender whom some in the GOP regard as insufficiently pro-Israel, has recently changed his tune on foreign aid to the Jewish state. His budget proposals since 2001 have included aid to Israel.
It’s one thing for a politician to admit that his views have changed on an issue and an entirely other thing to say that he never held the position at all.
This article has been updated. |
The SNP councillor wife of John Wilson MSP has become the latest politician to quit the party in protest at the vote to overturn its long-standing opposition to Nato.
North Lanarkshire member Frances McGlinchey's decision has fuelled speculation her Nationalist Central Scotland MSP husband will follow her out of the party.
It follows the decision by Highland MSPs John Finnie and Jean Urquhart to leave the party on Tuesday.
The head of the SNP's CND group, Colin Darroch, has also reportedly quit after 46 years.
Last night, Mr Wilson said: "That was entirely her position. My position remains 'no comment' at the present moment."
The Strathkelvin councillor said she "could not and would not" speak on behalf of her husband when asked if he was likely to follow her exit from the SNP.
She said: "He does his thing and I do mine. He was surprised when he found out I'd left the SNP and didn't even know. We both previously left Labour, but I left a long time before John did."
Ms McGlinchey said she had been a lifetime peace campaigner, adding: "I felt that I just didn't see a place in the party for me any more."
An SNP spokesman said: "It is sad that Councillor McGlinchey has decided to leave the party." |
Source: Global Climate Risk Index Report, Germanwatch **The Lancet, 2017
In terms of climate change, Pakistan is the 7th most affected country
The government forsees a fourfold increase in greenhouse gas emissions by 2030
Annual climate adaption needs for Pakistan range between $7bn and $14bn
ALTHOUGH Pakistan does not contribute significantly to global carbon emissions — ranking 135th in per capita emissions — it is amongst the top 10 countries most vulnerable to the impacts of climate change. According to a recent country profile by the Asian Development Bank (ADB), “Climatic changes are expected to have wide-ranging impacts on Pakistan, affecting agricultural productivity, water availability, and increased frequency of extreme climatic events.” Addressing these risks will require climate change to be mainstreamed into national strategy and policy, the report notes.
Noticeable changes in Pakistan’s weather patterns include an increase in the annual mean temperature by roughly 0.5°C in the last 50 years, according to ADB research, increasing the likelihood of extreme weather events. Annual heatwave days have increased nearly fivefold in the last 30 years — in 2015, Karachi’s severe heatwave killed over 1,200 people. Meanwhile, the sea-level along Karachi’s coast has risen approximately 10 centimetres in the last century. Sea-levels are projected to rise by one metre by 2100, severely affecting low-lying coastal cities.
Annual precipitation has also increased in the last 50 years. Increasing temperatures will result in a decline in snowpack and permafrost (frozen soil and rock), which might lead to less water in rivers in the future. More than 50 per cent of the flows from the Indus river system come from melting snow and glaciers. There is also the probability of greater flooding. In 2010, floods that were triggered by unprecedented rainfall killed 1,600 people and caused around $10 billion in damages.
Given that the country is just about self-sufficient in food production, these climatic changes can prove disastrous to its rate of increase, which may be unable to keep pace with surging populations. Qamar-uz-Zaman Chaudhry, former director general of the Pakistan Meteorological Department, explains, “Both are difficult prospects given the negative impacts of climate change affecting water availability and crop yields.” The government must be cognisant of an impending food shortage as yields of wheat and rice are expected to decline which could drive production northward subject to water availability.
Chief executive of the World Wildlife Fund-Pakistan Hammad Naqi predicts the country’s water crisis will be exacerbated because of how water resources are being used. “Pakistan has gone from being water surplus to water stressed, and soon there will be water scarcity. We have to change the way we grow certain commodities of crops. For example, we cannot afford to grow sugar cane in large areas when we don’t have enough water. Our leadership needs to make tough decisions, and soon.”
Distracted leadership, weak governance
Experts say that research into key areas impacted by climate change, including the future of glaciers and water security, are lacking. For its part, the government has revamped the Global Change Impact Studies Centre previously staffed by retired nuclear scientists. The appointment of Harvard-trained economist, Tariq Banuri, as executive director is reason enough, many believe, that mitigation policies may gradually see implementation.
Unfortunately, the country’s policymakers are too distracted by militancy and political instability to focus on pressing environmental challenges. Although Pakistan is one of the world’s few countries to have a dedicated federal climate change ministry, it was only activated in 2015 by the current government. In fact, when the PML-N came to power in 2013, it downgraded the ministry to a division, removing its ability to make high-level decisions. In January 2015, Senator Mushahidullah Khan, a long-time party loyalist with little climate change experience, was appointed minister of the newly reinstated ministry. Khan was replaced in August 2015 by Zahid Hamid, who took additional charge of the ministry and headed to the Paris conference in December 2015.
In Paris, alongside over 190 countries, Pakistan had pledged to limit the global average temperature increase to below 2°C which scientists say is the limit for safety — meaning that global carbon emissions need to peak by 2020 at the latest, and get to net-zero by 2050. The Agreement included mechanisms for pledges to be reviewed, but without setting rules — these will be decided at Bonn this week before being finalised in Warsaw in 2018.
Pakistan’s plan of action after the 2015 Paris Agreement
Mr Hamid’s two years at the ministry were productive — he helped ratify the Paris Agreement and submit Pakistan’s voluntary plans to cut emissions, called the Nationally Determined Contributions (NDC) document, to the UN. Pakistan’s plan, however, foresees a fourfold increase in the country’s greenhouse gas emissions by 2030. It says the country will reduce up to 20pc of its 2030 projected greenhouse gas emissions, subject to the availability of international grants to meet the cumulative abatement costs amounting to approximately $40bn. Annual adaptation needs have been identified as between $7bn and $14bn — an amount expected from international climate finance that might not be forthcoming given that the US, a big contributor, is pulling out of the Paris Agreement. The recently operational Green Climate Fund has given Pakistan $37m for a project to scale up Glacial Lake Outburst Flood risk reduction in northern Pakistan. The GCF was supposed to receive $100bn annually until 2020 from developed countries, but it has only raised $10.3bn so far.
Critics say that Pakistan’s NDC is hardly ambitious compared to other developing countries in the region, needing to be reworked to reflect emission cuts from installed and upcoming renewable energy projects like the Quaid-i-Azam solar park (which will go up to 1,000MW) and wind farms in Sindh.
Other projects under Mr Hamid’s tenure include introducing the Green Pakistan Programme with the objective to plant 100 million trees, ensuring the National Forest Policy was approved by the Council of Common Interests and passing the Climate Change Act (CCA), 2016. But criticism remains that little has been achieved on the ground. “The fact remains that we have policies for everything, but where is the enforcement?” Mr Naqi asks. The new legislation is, in fact, very similar to the Pakistan Environmental Protection Act (PEPA), 1997. Environmental protection agencies set up under PEPA were widely regarded as ineffective and unable to enforce the law. In an interview, the reinstated minister Senator Khan told Dawn that he is prepared to set up a new authority (envisioned by the CCA), including hiring half a dozen professionals and organising a meeting of a high-level climate change council chaired by the prime minister. Interestingly, the council set up under PEPA was also headed by the prime minister, and it barely met.
Why the government should prioritise climate change
According to Mr Chaudhry — also the author of Pakistan’s National Climate Change Policy (NCCP), 2012 — steps proposed under CCA should have already been implemented. “In the UNDP’s Climate Public Expenditure and Institutional Review, we learned that Pakistan spends 8pc of its total budget on climate relevant activities, which is a good figure. However, there are certain areas, basically mitigation activities and climate adaptation, which should be taken more seriously.”
As a guiding document, the NCCP highlighted the objective of achieving climate-resilient development by mainstreaming it into various sectors. It was passed by the then PPP government; later, an implementation framework for the policy was also prepared. After the 18th amendment, however, the onus was placed largely on the provinces to prepare their respective detailed action plans, although even at the time, there were concerns about a lack of capacity and competency at provincial levels.
Tackling climate change is beyond the ability of the provinces, admits Senator Khan. On this, he concurs with the findings of the ADB report that there has been an “erosion of climate change policy ownership by the provinces, due to potentially conflicting or overlapping objectives ... between provinces and federal agencies.” Working towards a solution, he says that his ministry has now helped coordinate and prepare drafts of policies and action plans in Azad Kashmir, Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, Gilgit-Baltistan and Punjab. Given the communication gap between federal and provincial departments, he says he will “ensure that a member of parliament and a senator from each province are nominated to coordinate and oversee implementation in their respective province”.
Reacting to the lack of implementation on the NCCP, a farmer from Lahore recently petitioned the Lahore High Court. Justice Mansoor Ali Shah set up a 21-member climate change commission to investigate the implementation of the NCCP’s short-term and medium-term measures by relevant government departments. Mr Naqi, who serves on the commission, says, “The problem is that government departments relate everything to adaptation. The agricultural department says we are helping farmers level the land and that is adaptation or the forest department says we are planting trees so that is adaptation. That is all true, but we have to do so much more.”
The writer is an environmental journalist.
She can be reached at rinasaeed@gmail.com
Published in Dawn, November 15th, 2017 |
The decision by the British Government to threaten to impose welfare cuts in Northern Ireland unilaterally has been opposed by the Government, Minister for Foreign Affairs, Charlie Flanagan has said.
Speaking in Cambridge, following a speech to the British/Irish Association, Mr Flanagan said the British move is “a departure from devolution.
“I acknowledge and accept that the British Government is doing this very much as a last resort, but it is not something that is supported by the Irish Government.
“Anything that is a departure from devolution would not be supported by us,” said Mr Flanagan, who side-stepped questions about the degree of notice Dublin enjoyed about the British action.
The Government had opposed unilateral British action after last year’s Stormont House Agreement and again earlier this summer: “This is not something that in any circumstances would be supported by the Irish Government,” he told The Irish Times.
Urging the NI parties to negotiate in the talks beginning on Tuesday, Mr Flanagan declared: “It is essential that all parties enter into talks with the intention of compromises, and tough compromises.”
Meanwhile, the Sinn Féin Deputy First Minister Martin McGuinness criticised Northern Secretary Ms Villiers for threatening to impose welfare from Westminster if the Stormont parties could not not agree to British welfare reform.
“Any move by the British government to impose its welfare cuts agenda over the heads of the Assembly and Executive will seriously undermine devolution and the political institutions,” he said.
“It would be a huge mistake,” Mr McGuinness warned.
The DUP First Minister Peter Robinson however welcomed Ms Villiers statement describing it as a “potential game changer”.
“For some time we have been pressing the government to take this step as a way of resolving the present impasse over welfare reform,” he said.
“We remain committed to seeking to agree a way forward in the coming weeks between the local parties but there is no doubt that this statement will introduce a dose of reality to these negotiations and make a resolution more likely,” added Mr Robinson.
“Either way this move allows the Executive to put our finances on a firm and sustainable footing and will lift the prospect of fines running to hundreds of millions of pounds next year. This is good news for key public services such as health and education and will allow the most vulnerable in our society to be protected,” he said.
Mr Robinson continued, “Even before the murder of Mr McGuigan the Assembly faced collapse over the issue of welfare reform. It had been the single biggest threat to devolution since 2007. This announcement paves the way for the removal of this roadblock and for a return to sound financial management that had been endangered by the irresponsible actions of Sinn Féin and the SDLP.
“While this statement vindicates the DUP’s decision to stay and fight our corner, it is equally essential that the government respond to our proposals on the issue of paramilitary activity and how to deal with the talks process in the coming days.”
Mr Robinson said it would “not be business as usual at Stormont until these issues are fully resolved”.
“We will outline shortly how we intend to act in line with this principle. It must be those who are responsible for the present problems that are punished and not everyone else,” he added. |
In what looks to be a terrible ruling for Maryland gun owners a federal judge has essentially ruled that guns that were regulated by the state of Maryland last year, including AR-15 and AK style rifles (as well as other magazine fed, semi-auto rifles with certain features), “fall outside Second Amendment protection as dangerous and unusual arms,” according to a 47 page opinion by U.S. District Judge Catherine C. Blake.
The case in question is Kolbe et al v. O’Malley et al which named numerous plaintiffs including the Associated Gun Clubs of Baltimore, Maryland Licensed Firearms Dealers Association, Maryland State Rifle and Pistol Association, and the National Shooting Sports Foundation (NSSF), among others which challenged the constitutionality of Maryland’s strict new gun laws.
Here are some of Blake’s other comments [emphasis mine],
Upon review of all the parties’ evidence, the court seriously doubts that the banned assault long guns are commonly possessed for lawful purposes, particularly self-defense in the home, which is at the core of the Second Amendment right, and is inclined to find the weapons fall outside Second Amendment protection as dangerous and unusual. First, the court is not persuaded that assault weapons are commonly possessed based on the absolute number of those weapons owned by the public. Even accepting that there are 8.2 million assault weapons in the civilian gun stock, as the plaintiffs claim, assault weapons represent no more than 3% of the current civilian gun stock, and ownership of those weapons is highly concentrated in less than 1% of the U.S. population. The court is also not persuaded by the plaintiffs’ claims that assault weapons are used infrequently in mass shootings and murders of law enforcement officers. The available statistics indicate that assault weapons are used disproportionately to their ownership in the general public and, furthermore, cause more injuries and more fatalities when they are used. As for their claims that assault weapons are well-suited for self-defense, the plaintiffs proffer no evidence beyond their desire to possess assault weapons for self-defense in the home that they are in fact commonly used, or possessed, for that purpose. Finally, despite the plaintiffs’ claims that they would like to use assault weapons for defensive purposes, assault weapons are military-style weapons designed for offensive use, and are equally, or possibly even more effective, in functioning and killing capacity as their fully automatic versions.
Blake’s comments are misguided at best and it would seem difficult to weigh her opinion against the Supreme Court’s Heller decision.
Blake is a Bill Clinton appointed judge. |
Two years ago, Google drove its way into a fair amount of hot water when it accidentally (as was claimed) scooped up private data over WiFi while collecting Street View and location data. Now, the Justice Department has cleared the prolific mapsters of the wiretapping violations. The DOJ made its decision not to push for prosecution based on reports from employees and investigating key documents reports Wired. The Wiretap Act (which is the relevant one here) was argued to only pertain to "traditional radio services," by US District Judge James Ware, but neither the DOJ or FCC said they could find any evidence that Google accessed the date it snared. In an extra move of openness, the search giant has also released the entire FCC report on the Street View investigation (redacted to protect identities) which can be found in the more coverage link. So, next time you see the famous camera-topped wagons roll around, you can leave your tin hat in the closet. |
A majority of members on the board that governed last year’s Scottish independence campaign privately supported naming a Plan B currency despite Alex Salmond’s public claims that George Osborne was bluffing over not sharing the pound, a senior nationalist has disclosed.
Jim Sillars, the SNP’s former deputy leader, said they eventually decided not to put forward an alternative because they feared it would mean Yes Scotland being portrayed as split on the crucial issue.
But Mr Sillars said he now believed this was the campaign’s biggest mistake following academic research into the Unionist Better Together campaign’s 11-point victory that showed “people didn’t know what kind of money they would use.”
The SNP rejected his claims, made in a new book published to coincide with the referendum’s first anniversary, but his version of events was supported by other members of the Yes Scotland advisory board.
The row broke out as Nicola Sturgeon again raised the prospect of a second referendum, reiterating her warning to David Cameron that support for independence will increase if he fails to make good his promise to devolve more powers.
During the campaign Mr Salmond insisted there would be a currency union between a separate Scotland and the remainder of the UK after a Yes vote, and Mr Osborne was bluffing over rejecting any such deal.
He said there were three Plan Bs – the euro, a new Scottish currency and unilaterally adopting the pound in the same way countries like Panama use the US dollar – without specifying his preference.
But Mr Sillars, who is Mr Salmond’s former mentor, said senior Yes Scotland board members wanted to give public backing to creating a new Scottish pound. They included Dennis Canavan, the campaign’s chairman, Colin Fox, the Scottish Socialist Party leader, and Patrick Harive, the Scottish Greens’ co-leader.
“Without that (proposal), the uncertainty was not removed. At that time, I got in touch with some members of the Yes Scotland advisory board to persuade them that whatever the SNP government said about a currency union, the broader Yes campaign had to have a plan B – our own Scottish currency,” he told the Sunday Times.
“Most of them agreed and at one meeting of the advisory board, there was a majority for an alternative plan B. This fact has never been made public, primarily because that majority was persuaded that to declare for a plan B would be seen as the Yes side being split.”
Photo: PA
Mr Harvie said it was “no secret” the campaign was divided on the issue but the SNP “were going to get the lion’s share of media attention for their policy because it’s such a large and dominant political party.”
But he said he thought their negotiations for a currency union would have failed if there had been a Yes vote and it was a “weakness of the campaign” will have to be addressed by nationalists if there is another referendum.
In response to a tweet yesterday stating the campaign lost because of the lack of a currency Plan B even though a majority of the board wanted one, Pat Kane, the musician and another board member, responded: “Well, that’s true.”
But an SNP spokesman said: “Jim was a powerful and persuasive voice in the Yes campaign - but the reality is the No campaign were intent on spreading fear and sowing uncertainty at every turn, and would have done so whatever options had been proposed on currency and Europe."
Mr Salmond has blamed the last-minute Unionist “vow” of more powers for Scotland for the defeat but this was rejected by academic research into the result, which found the impact of the vow was negligible and economic factors were to blame.
In a recent interview, Ms Sturgeon cited the Yes campaign’s failure to convince enough people about “the economic ability of Scotland to be an independent country.” |
Check back for updates, scroll down for video
UPDATE 1/21, 1 AM
via the AP:
WASHINGTON -- "At Last" may have been just what President Barack Obama and his wife Michelle were thinking Tuesday night as they glided through their first inaugural dance to the Etta James classic.
The Obamas were the star attraction at the 10 inaugural celebrations they attended into the early hours of Wednesday. The celebrations marked the end of a long day of formal inaugural events and the two-year campaign that put them in the White House.
The president pulled his wife close and they danced a slow, dignified two-step while, offstage, Beyonce sang. The president spun first lady Michelle Obama once in a half-turn.
Obama cut loose in a faster groove a few minutes later, as Shakira, Mary J. Blige, Faith Hill and Mariah Carey sang along with Stevie Wonder to his "Signed, Sealed, Delivered." The song was played at nearly all of Obama's rallies throughout the campaign.
"You could tell that's a black president from the way he was moving," comedian Jamie Foxx joked following the dance.
The president wore white tie, while Michelle shimmered in a white, one-shouldered, floor-length gown. It was embellished from top to bottom with white floral details and made by 26-year-old New York designer Jason Wu.
"First of all, how good looking is my wife?" Obama asked the crowd of celebrities and supporters.
At the Obama Home States ball, the president pulled the first lady much closer than he did on their first dance. At one point, he wrapped both arms around her waist and locked his fingers together at the small of her back.
"Hello, everybody. Aloha. What's going on?" Obama said in the dialects of the Hawaii and Illinois contingents, saying they reflected his roots. "So many of you got involved not just in our campaign but in our lives."
Obama and Vice President Joe Biden each saluted the nation's military men and women at the Commander in Chief Ball via satellite. Biden said he wasn't looking forward to his moment in the spotlight _ the dancing, that is.
"The thing that frightens me the most (is) I'm going to have to stand in that circle and dance in a minute." At that, he laughed and did a quick sign of the cross.
The Obamas were more enthusiastic, splitting up to dance with Marine Sgt. Elidio Guillen of Madera, Calif. _ who was shorter than dance partner Michelle _ and Army Sgt. Margaret H. Herrera of San Antonio, Texas, who cried in the president's arms.
Despite the formal attire and celebrity entertainment, balls aren't overly fancy affairs. Lines often are long to get in, go to the bathroom or check your coat, and the food is heavy on vegetables with dip and cheese cubes.
In a sign, perhaps, of the tough economic times, guests who already paid anywhere from $75 for a ticket to thousands more for a package deal had to buy their own drinks served in small plastic cups. Beer went for $6, cocktails for $9 and champagne for $12.
People were standing in line outside Union Station to get into the Eastern States Ball an hour and a half after it started. Because of very limited seating at the Western ball, a number of attendees in long gowns and fancy dress plopped cross-legged on the floor.
"This is what happens in a down economy. No chairs, no highboys _ it's the floor and plastic cups," commented ballgoer Brig Lawson, 38, of Las Vegas.
Director Ron Howard said he sympathized with the long day Obama was having.
"I feel bad for him," Howard said in an interview with The Associated Press at the Western Ball. "He's had a long day and now he has to do seven dances. This has got to be the grueling part for the first family."
At the Obama Home States ball, the dance floor was dominated by two little girls who skipped and twirled in matching red dresses while the grown-ups stood still, crowded around the stage waiting for Obama to appear.
Singer Sheryl Crow, doing a sound check for the Midwestern Ball, said she was homesick.
"I have not seen my child in four days. I'm miserable," she told her band between songs.
But there was still plenty of fun to be had at the official balls and dozens of other parties around Washington.
Crow was greeted by a cheering crowd later for her appropriate hit, "A Change Would Do You Good." When hip-hop star Wyclef Jean asked the men at the Mid-Atlantic Ball to pull off their tuxedo jackets and swing them in the air to show their support for Barack Obama, thousands did.
At the Youth Ball, Kid Rock belted out songs as well-dresed 20-somethings mingled about. One of them walked up to a bartender, gave him a high five and said, "Barack Obama is president!"
The Obamas, following Kid Rock and Kanye West, got the real rock-star reception and launched into something of an awkward dance, laughing as they swayed. When they were done, the president grabbed a mic and said, "That's what's called old school."
At the Midwestern Ball, he joked that it was time to "dance with the one who brung me, who does everything that I do except backwards and in heels."
And though the mood was celebratory, the reality that the country remains at war hung over the festivities at the Commander in Chief ball and a separate Heroes Red White & Blue Ball.
"Please know that you are in our thoughts and prayers today, every day, forever," Obama told troops at the Commander in Chief ball. "Tonight, we celebrate. Tomorrow, the work begins. ... Together, I am confident we will write the next great chapter in America's story."
___
Associated Press writers Nedra Pickler, Erica Werner, Suzanne Gamboa, Laurie Kellman, Kimberly Hefling, Sam Hananel, Samantha Critchell, Ben Feller, Philip Elliott and Ann Sanner contributed to this report.
UPDATE 1/20, 10:40 PM
President Obama addressed troops in Kabul via satellite at the Commander In Chief Ball. Satellite lag made the conversation awkward, as did baseball alliances.
UPDATE 1/20, 9:45 PM
Obama addresses the Hometown Inaugural Ball, which features guests from Hawaii and Illinois.
WATCH:
UPDATE 1/20, 9:20 PM
Obama arrived at the Neighborhood Inaugural Ball, his first stop of the evening and started by introducing Michelle's dress.
WATCH:
He then followed the speech with his first dance with the first lady as president (video here). A slideshow of the Obamas party stops can be seen below, along with pictures from the first dance. We'll be updating this slideshow as more photos become available.
PHOTO GALLERY 2009 Inaugural Balls
***
Washington DC has laid down the welcome mat for the Obamas and will be welcoming the new president with a variety of inaugural balls. The first couple is expected to attend ten parties and Sasha and Malia will even be having a slumber party at the White House with some of the Biden children, CNN reports. We'll bring you updates with video as parties start.
The many celebrations for President Obama come on a day when he challenged the nation to "set aside childish things." Read about his sober sermon to the nation in Arianna's blog.
DemConWatch has a list of the balls that will be appearing on TV and when:
Neighborhood Ball: An Inauguration Celebration (ABC - 8:00 Eastern) Yes We Will! Inaugural Celebration (BET - 8:00 Eastern) Change and Challenge: The Inauguration of Barack Obama (CBS - 9 Eastern)" Frontline - Dreams of Obama (PBS - 9 Eastern) A Moment In History: The Inauguration of Barack Obama (ABC - 10 Eastern) The Inauguration of Barack Obama (NBC - 10 Eastern) Be the Change Live from the Inaugural (MTV - 10 Eastern)
CNN will be live streaming the balls at this link.
The Washington Post's Mary Ann Akers will be covering a few of the bigger parties via Twitter.
Silicon Alley Insider has a great retrospective of some of the more lavish inauguration balls of the past. |
USC brings a 22-0 record to Seattle.
It’s a big Pac-12 showdown this weekend as the Washington volleyball team battles No. 1 USC on Friday night and then No. 8 UCLA on Sunday morning.
USC brings a 22-0 record to Seattle, with a 10-0 mark in conference play, and owns a two-game lead over the Huskies and Bruins. Combined, the three teams competing in Alaska Airlines Arena boast a record of 57-5. Pac-12 Networks will televise both matches live (8 p.m. Friday and 11 a.m. Sunday).
Washington (8-2 in Pac-12 this season) has a record 25-match winning streak in Pac-12 home matches.
USC senior Samantha Bricio leads the Pac-12 with 5.07 kills per set, and she also leads in aces with 0.76 per set, more than twice the rate of anyone else in the league.
UCLA is one of the best defensive teams in the Pac-12, with 16.47 digs per set in conference play, second only to USC.
Soccer
• Bryson Pavel and Keenan dePinna each scored and the Seattle Pacific men’s soccer team held on to beat University of Mary 2-1 at Interbay Stadium. The defending champion Falcons (12-1-3) improved to 8-1-3 in league play. They have 27 points and a three-point lead in the standings with two games left.
• The Western Washington men lost 4-2 to Northwest Nazarene. The Vikings (5-8-3, 3-7-2 GNAC) have dropped four of their last five matches.
• Catherine Miles scored a pair of goals as the Western Washington women won 4-0 over Northwest Nazarene. The Vikings (16-1) have clinched first place in the GNAC at 11-0. Western won its 14th consecutive game, the second-longest streak in school history (38 straight in 1982-84).
• Kaytlin Willis and Maddy Booster each scored and the Seattle Pacific women won 2-0 over Western Oregon. The Falcons (11-3-2) completed their league slate with a 7-3-2 record to finish in third place.
Volleyball
• Martina Samadan led Seattle University (14-9, 6-4 WAC) with 15 kills, including the 1,000th kill of her collegiate career, but CSU Bakersfield beat the Redhawks, 3-1 (21-25, 25-20, 25-17, 25-19).
• Shaun Crespi had a double-double with 10 kills and 10 block assists but Seattle Pacific (6-15, 4-9 GNAC) dropped a five-game match to Alaska Fairbanks, 18-25, 27-25, 21-25, 25-18, 15-13. |
Players for all 30 teams report to their respective spring training camps in February on the dates listed below.
2019 Grapefruit League Reporting Dates Team Pitchers & Catchers First Workout Position Players First Workout Location Astros February 13 February 14 February 17 February 18 W Palm Beach Blue Jays February 13 February 14 February 17 February 18 Dunedin Braves February 15 February 16 February 20 February 21 Orlando Cardinals February 12 February 13 February 17 February 18 Jupiter Marlins February 12 February 13 February 17 February 18 Jupiter Mets February 12 February 14 February 16 February 18 Port St. Lucie Nationals February 13 February 14 February 18 February 19 W Palm Beach Orioles February 12 February 13 February 17 February 18 Sarasota Phillies February 12 February 13 February 17 February 18 Clearwater Pirates February 11 February 13 February 17 February 18 Bradenton Rays February 13 February 13 February 18 February 18 Port Charlotte Red Sox February 13 February 13 February 18 February 18 Fort Myers Tigers February 12 February 13 February 17 February 18 Lakeland Twins February 14 February 14 February 18 February 18 Fort Myers Yankees February 13 February 14 February 18 February 19 Tampa
2019 Cactus League Reporting Dates Team Pitchers & Catchers First Workout Position Players First Workout Location Angels February 12 February 13 February 17 February 18 Tempe A's February 10 February 11 February 15 February 16 Mesa Brewers February 13 February 14 February 18 February 19 Maryvale Cubs February 12 February 13 February 17 February 18 Mesa D-backs February 12 February 13 February 17 February 18 Scottsdale Dodgers February 13 February 14 February 19 February 20 Glendale Giants February 12 February 13 February 17 February 18 Scottsdale Indians February 12 February 14 February 16 February 18 Goodyear Mariners February 11 February 12 February 15 February 16 Peoria Padres February 13 February 14 February 18 February 19 Peoria Rangers February 12 February 13 February 17 February 18 Surprise Reds February 12 February 13 February 17 February 18 Goodyear Rockies February 12 February 13 February 17 February 18 Scottsdale Royals February 12 February 13 February 17 February 18 Surprise White Sox February 13 February 13 February 18 February 18 Glendale
Contact Us With Any Questions About Spring Training |
Image from glennwilliamspdx McClatchy News' Tom Knudson has a lengthy, sobering piece on the impact of climate change on Yosemite National Park that is well-worth reading for anybody who has ever had the chance to traipse through its beautiful vistas. As I've noted before, the warmer temperatures have taken a harsh toll on the Sierra Nevada's snowpack , California's largest surface water reservoir (it supplies about 65 percent of the state's freshwater needs), and many of Yosemite's best known glaciers have been equally affected. The park's second-largest glacier, Lyell, could be gone by the end of the century, according to Pete Devine, a glacier observer affiliated with the nonprofit Yosemite Association, and the remaining 100 could suffer a similar fate.Image from ground.zero
Here's how Knudson described the Sierra's predicament:
More of the Sierra's precipitation is falling as rain instead of snow, studies show, and the snow that blankets the range in winter is running off earlier in the spring. And snow in the Sierra touches everything. Take it away and droughts deepen, ski areas go bust and fire seasons rage longer.
Or, as Greg Stock, a geologist with the park, put it: "All across the Sierra, glaciers are transitioning into ice patches. Ice patches are transitioning to snow fields. And snow fields are transitioning into bedrock."
To make matters worse, the earlier loss of snow in the region could trigger the dreaded albedo effect -- basically a positive feedback loop in which melting snow exposes the ground, leading to more heat being absorbed and, eventually, more warming. Noah Diffenbaugh, a professor of earth sciences from Purdue University, published a much-noticed article in Geophysical Research Letters a few months ago in which he predicted that spring snowmelt could start 2 months earlier by 2100.
It hasn't helped that the region has been suffering through one of the worst drought cycles in recent history, which has only accelerated the Sierra's dramatic meltwater flow:
Clear as vodka, it trickled and tumbled, spilled and splashed. At times, its sound seemed almost musical: steady and sonorous, with a cadence like a chant or a funeral dirge. And with temperatures barely below freezing at night, the music played 24-7 - not a good sign for a glacier. All glaciers melt naturally. But to remain stable or grow, they must replace meltwater with snowfall. And that's not happening at Lyell or elsewhere. Today, scientists are finding that not only is more precipitation across the region arriving as rain, but also less snow overall is falling. The current drought - now heading into a possible third year - could be catastrophic for California, state officials say. "With a healthy glacier, we expect to see the upper half covered in snow and the lower half bare ice," Stock said in base camp one morning. "Instead, virtually all of the glacier is bare ice. It's losing a lot more than it's gaining. It's definitely deteriorating."
Very scary stuff and visible proof (as if you really needed it) that climate change is here and only getting worse with time.
More melting news
Watch Greenland Melting - on the Icecam
Sierra Snowpack Melting Likely to Be Faster than Previously Expected
50/50 Bet North Pole Melts Away This Summer |
"Gold Digger" is a song recorded by American rapper Kanye West featuring guest vocals by Jamie Foxx. Released as the second single from West's second album, Late Registration (2005), "Gold Digger" peaked at number one on the US Billboard Hot 100 on September 6, 2005, becoming West's and Foxx's second number one single. Co-produced with Jon Brion, the song contains samples of Ray Charles' "I Got a Woman".
The single broke a record for the most digital downloads in a week, selling over 80,000,[1] and at the time was also the fastest-selling digital download of all time;[2] both records have since been broken. It was 2005's second-longest running number one on the Billboard Hot 100 behind "We Belong Together" by Mariah Carey and is the joint sixth longest ever at ten weeks.[3]
At the 2006 Grammy Awards, "Gold Digger" was nominated for Record of the Year and won the award for Best Rap Solo Performance. The song lists at number 60 on Billboard magazine's All Time Top 100 and at number 9 on the Billboard Hot 100 Songs of the Decade.[4][5] "Gold Digger" was voted number 20 on VH1's 100 Greatest Songs of Hip Hop. The single topped The 2005 Pazz & Jop Critics Poll.[6] As of January 2011, the song has sold over 3,000,000 copies in the United States.
Background [ edit ]
Upon its release, many surmised that West conceived "Gold Digger" after watching Jamie Foxx's Oscar-winning portrayal of Ray Charles in the biographical film Ray. However, he had actually constructed the beat of the song long before the movie was even developed.[7] West originally produced and recorded "Gold Digger" in Ludacris's home in Atlanta for Shawnna's 2004 debut album Worth Tha Weight and had written the chorus from a female first-person viewpoint: "I'm not sayin' I'm a gold digger, but I ain't messin' with no broke niggas." However, for reasons unknown, Shawnna passed on using the song. Not wanting to let it go to waste, West decided to keep the beat for himself and add lyrics expressed from a male's point-of-view.[7]
The second verse of "Gold Digger" was the first to be written, as West used to rap the verse in early 2004 while on tour promoting his debut album, The College Dropout. The first verse was made later in the year while West was on Usher's Evolution Tour. Lastly, the original third verse was taken from an unreleased song called "Drop Dead Gorgeous," which West had produced and rapped on for Murphy Lee of St. Lunatics. About a year later, right before "Gold Digger" was set to be released as a single, West decided to write a different third verse and in a week the new song was recorded and mastered at Sony Music Studios in New York City.[7]
The idea of employing Jamie Foxx specifically to sing an interpolation of Ray Charles' "I Got a Woman" in place of its initial sample did in fact arise from West seeing Ray with his friend John Mayer.[7] Foxx's vocals were recorded over many takes; in one version he sang from start to finish, but the track was retracted as his performance didn't coincide well with the song's instrumentation. After recording another version, Foxx decided to re-record it once more as he felt it contained too many explicit lyrics.[7] Once the track was finally in place, it was layered with additional instruments provided by American film score composer Jon Brion and individually selected by West. By the end of their very first studio session together, the pair had completed the basic tracks for the final version of "Gold Digger".[8] Despite being a featured singer, Foxx's part only appears in the intro and the rest of the song uses West's vocals and samples of Charles.
Music and lyrics [ edit ]
"Gold Digger" contains samples (as well as an interpolation during the introduction) of "I Got a Woman" by Ray Charles, and a bouncy beat formed from handclaps and scratches by DJ A-Trak. Towards the end, the song employs vintage 1970s synthesizers which emit a honking sound in cadence to Kanye's voice.[9] West delivers a tongue-in-cheek lyrical narrative within "Gold Digger" in which he critically depicts the disastrous life of a man married to a woman who manipulates him for financial gain. However, another story arises within the third verse, which illustrates a once destitute black male who earns a fortune and decides to leave a loyal, unselfish girlfriend for a white girl.[10]
In 2013 it was reported that Trena Steward and Lorenzo Pryor, two children of the late musician David Pryor had filed a lawsuit against West for allegedly sampling "get down girl, go 'head, get down" from their father's 1974 obscure single "Bumpin' Bus Stop".[11]
Music video [ edit ]
The song's music video was directed by Hype Williams, who also directed West's previous video, "Diamonds from Sierra Leone".[12] Shot in a widescreen letterbox format, using stylized art direction with few props, the video features performances shots of West interspersed with footage of Williams' trademark female video models depicted as "pin-up" cover models from fictional vintage magazines.[13] The titles of the magazines on whose covers the women appear reflect the correlating verses in the song. Foxx is also present, lip-synching both his own parts and the Ray Charles vocal sample. John Legend makes a brief cameo.[14] "Gold Digger" won the BET Award for Video of the Year at the 2006 BET Awards and received nominations for both Best Male Video and Best Hip Hop Video, at the 2006 MTV Video Music Awards but did not win either of these awards.
Commercial performance [ edit ]
West and Foxx performing "Gold Digger"
Following the chart performance of "Diamonds from Sierra Leone", which failed to crack the Top 40 of the Billboard Hot 100, West's label became concerned with how a follow up single would perform. Their concerns were unfounded as "Gold Digger" became a success, hitting number one on the Billboard Hot 100, Pop 100, Hot R&B/Hip-Hop Singles & Tracks and the Hot Rap Tracks charts.[15]
When Late Registration was released, the album version of "Gold Digger" was first made available for download. Approximately 80,000 digital downloads of "Gold Digger" were sold through legal music services such as iTunes and Napster in that first week, making it the most successful digital sales debut ever. The song broke the record for the most digital downloads sold in one week, and the record for the fastest selling digital single of all time, both previously held by Gwen Stefani's "Hollaback Girl". "Gold Digger" sold over 1,000,000 downloads during its seven weeks of release. This makes "Gold Digger" one of the first songs in history to sell over 1,000,000 downloads in the United States. "Gold Digger" was certified as 5 times platinum on April 10, 2014.[16]
The high digital download sales helped propel the song from number 19 to number one in one week, the fifth highest jump ever to that position on the Hot 100. The jump ended the 14-week (and 10th consecutive week) run of Mariah Carey's "We Belong Together" at number one, and kept Carey's "Shake It Off" from replacing "We Belong Together" as the number one single. The song spent 10 weeks at the top of the Hot 100 until rising pop star Chris Brown's hit "Run It!" shot up to the pole position for the week of November 19.
"Gold Digger" also became West's first Top 10 single on the Mainstream Top 40 chart, peaking at number two.[17] On the Pop 100, "Gold Digger" also broke a record by jumping from number 94 to number two, giving West the record for the biggest ever jump on that chart.[citation needed] By reaching number one, "Gold Digger" gave Charles his first Hot 100 chart-topper as a songwriter, credited as a result of the "I Got a Woman" sample. As an artist, Charles topped the Hot 100 three times in the 1960s, but always with other writers' songs. As of May 2011, the song has sold 3,083,000 copies in the US.[18]
"Gold Digger" is Kanye West's second highest charting single in the UK, only behind his number one single "Stronger". It was only held off the top spot by The Pussycat Dolls' "Don't Cha". It is by far West's longest charting single in the UK having amassed an impressive 48 weeks inside the top 100 songs. 295,000 copies of "Gold Digger" have been sold in the UK as stated by the Official UK Charts Company.[19] The single was the top selling iTunes song of 2005.[20]
In MAX music TV's top 1000 songs of all time, 'Gold Digger' was number 462 on the list.[21]
Accolades [ edit ]
Cover versions and remixes [ edit ]
Cover versions
Remixes
In the media [ edit ]
Formats and track listings [ edit ]
Single track list A-side "Gold Digger" (Radio) "Gold Digger" (Remix) featuring Jamie Foxx & Jay-Z "Gold Digger" (Instrumental) "Gold Digger" (Dirty) "Gold Digger" (Clean) B-side "Diamonds from Sierra Leone" (Remix) (Radio) "Diamonds from Sierra Leone" (Remix) (LP) "Diamonds from Sierra Leone" (Remix) (Instrumental) Promotion only version "Gold Digger" (Radio) (3:29) "Gold Digger" (Instrumental) (3:15) "Gold Digger" (Call Out) (0:11) European CD Maxisingle "Gold Digger" (3:28) "Diamonds from Sierra Leone" (Remix) (3:34) "We Can Make It Better" (3:52) European 12" Maxi-single A-Side "Gold Digger" (Album Version) (Explicit) "Gold Digger" (Radio Version) B-Side B1 "Diamonds from Sierra Leone' (Remix) B2 "We Can Make It Better" United States 12" Maxi-single A-Side "Gold Digger" (Radio) "Gold Digger" (LP) "Gold Digger" (Instrumental) B-Side "Diamonds from Sierra Leone" (Remix) (Radio version) Featuring - Jay-Z "Diamonds from Sierra Leone" (Remix) (LP version) Featuring - Jay-Z "Diamonds from Sierra Leone" (Remix) (Instrumental)
Charts [ edit ]
Certifications [ edit ]
Personnel [ edit ]
Information taken from Late Registration liner notes.[86]
Songwriters: Kanye West, Ray Charles, Renald Richard
Producers: Kanye West, Jon Brion
Recorded by: Andrew Dawson, Anthony Kilhoffer, Tom Biller
Audio mixing: Mike Dean
Assistant engineers: Richard Reitz, Matt Green, Nate Connelly, Mike Mo
Additional vocals: Plain Pat, Don C
Scratches: A-Trak
See also [ edit ] |
The nice thing about cash is that it doesn’t care what you use it to buy. But the folks at PayPal apparently don’t want their service to be used for the purpose of buying e-books that reference certain sexual acts or behavior.
According to e-book distributor Smashwords.com, PayPal has told the company to remove all titles that contain bestiality, rape and incest, or PayPal will no longer be available as a payment option to customers.
Smashwords has given authors whose content falls under that umbrella until today to remove their titles from the platform.
Company founder Mark Coker explains Smashwords’ decision to go along with the PayPal order:
We do not want to see PayPal clamp down further against erotica. We think our authors should be allowed to publish erotica. Erotica, despite the attacks it faces from moralists, is a category worthy of protection. Erotica allows readers to safely explore aspects of sexuality that they might never want to explore in the real world. The moralists forget that we humans are all sexual creatures, and the biggest sex organ is the brain. If it were not the case, none of us would be here. Erotica authors are facing discrimination, plain and simple. Topics that are perfectly acceptable in mainstream fiction are verboten in erotica. That’s not fair. Our decisions today are imperfect. Please, act responsibly, don’t try to game the system or publish content that pushes the limits of legality. Help us continue to help indie authors around the world to continue to publish and distribute with freedom… You might wonder if Smashwords should simply switch to a different payment provider. It’s not so easy. PayPal is designed into the wiring of the Smashwords platform. They run the credit card processing for our retail store, and they’re how we pay our authors and publishers. PayPal is also an extremely popular, trusted payment option for our customers. It is not feasible for us to simply switch to another provider, should such a suitable provider even exist, especially with so few days notice.
PayPal As Moral Police? Forces E-Book Sellers To Remove Certain Erotica Content [TechCrunch.com] |
Donald Trump was entirely correct in his speech last night when he said that Hillary Clinton's plan for 200,000 new jobs in Upstate New York, a promise made when she was running to be Senator, was a complete and total bust. From which we can draw two lessons. One is that campaign promises quite possibly shouldn't be taken seriously but then everyone except the children knows that one. The other is that government actions simply isn't one of those things which creates jobs. Government action can prevent jobs from being created, sure, that's possible, but the way that jobs are created is that entrepreneurs find a way to make something that people want. And, crucially, are willing to pay for. Thus we should always be very leery indeed about any job creation claims other than the ones which promise to get government out of the way of the entrepreneurs.
At which point of course Hillary's entire premise disappears but then that's politics, not economics. Trump said this in his speech:
The State of New York has already lived through Hillary Clinton’s failed leadership. The Washington Post just published a devastating article on Hillary Clinton’s broken promises. She pledged 200,000 jobs for upstate New York as Senator. But what happened? The Washington Post writes, and I quote: “upstate job growth stagnated overall during her tenure, with manufacturing jobs plunging nearly 25 percent…the
former first lady was unable to pass big ticket legislation… Many promised jobs never materialized and others migrated to other states as she turned to her first presidential run…data shows that upstate actually lost jobs during Clinton’s first term.”
That Washington Post piece is here and it's really just isn't a celebration of triumphant job creation:
She turned to smaller-scale projects, but some of those fell flat after initial glowing headlines, a Washington Post review shows. Many promised jobs never materialized and others migrated to other states as she turned to her first presidential run, said former officials who worked with her in New York. Clinton’s self-styled role as economic promoter also showcases an operating style that has come to define the political and money-making machine known to some critics of the former first couple as Clinton Inc. Some of her pet economic projects involved loyal campaign contributors, who also supported the Clinton Foundation, The Post review shows.
It's worth reading in full simply because it is a litany of asking for special perks from this or that level of government which then produces nothing very much of interest. And yet that's roughly the Hillary Clinton style, to think that we can prepare some litany of special perks and policies from this or that level of government and then things will be fine. But that's not how an economy works, not how it works at all.
The growth in an economy, and most certainly the jobs growth and the technological turnover, comes not from extant corporations or producers. It comes from new entrants into the marketplace. New entrants being exactly the people who cannot gain government perks as they don't exist as yet and so aren't a voting block that needs to be appeased.
Thus the way to grow an economy and, yes, how to create those "good jobs", is to get government and everyone else out of the way of those new market entrants. Reduce to an absolute minimum the financial costs of getting into business. In my native UK it takes perhaps one hour and only £20 (about $30) to incorporate a new company and you're good to go. This most certainly was not my experience in California some time back.
To give another CA example, it was necessary to both pay a fee for the profits tax which would not be paid (because a business almost never makes a profit in that first year) and also put up a bond for the sales tax collected which would be sitting in our bank account before being paid to the State. Again to compare this with Britain - over here everyone, the VAT (VAT is our sales tax) guys included, know very well that new businesses use that sales tax float as part of their cash flow financing. And the judgement is made that it's better to possibly lose a bit of the tax revenue to those who cheat or fail that it is encumber new businesses with further capital requirements in the form of such a bond.
The way to grow is to clear the decks of all of the regulations which impede new business creation. Which just isn't what Clinton is likely to do now, is it? And not what she did do which is why that jobs creation program was a bust. |
Bodega Customer Accused Of Using Stolen Credit Card Allegedly Tried To Set Clerk On Fire With Axe Body Spray
While there are those who find the smell of Axe body spray offensive (as anyone with a teenage brother/son going through that phase can attest to), using it as a weapon is an entirely different, more dangerous move. Police in Brooklyn say a bodega customer accused of using a stolen credit card fought back, biting a clerk on the arm before trying to light him on fire with Axe.
The shop’s owner told police that the 18-year-old suspect tried to pay for $174 worth of gum, soda, candy, detergent, cigarettes and such using a prepaid PayPal card, reports DNAInfo.com.
An employee working the counter thought something was fishy about the attempted transaction and confronted the suspect, keeping him from leaving. The teen then reportedly said he would go without the stuff, but instead the clerk called the owner to the shop.
That’s when some sort of brawl apparently started, with the suspect biting the worker on the arm and then grabbing a can of Axe body spray from a shelf, using a lighter to try and get a fire going while aiming at the worker, cops said.
It didn’t work, and police arrived to arrest him. He was charged with assault, criminal weapons possession, menacing and harassment.
Man Tries to Light Bodega Worker on Fire With Axe Body Spray, Police Say [DNAInfo.com] |
City Hall Location Map
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Rochester, known as the Lilac City, is located in southeastern New Hampshire. With a population of almost 30,000, Rochester is one of the largest cities in New Hampshire. Encompassing over 44 square miles of rolling hills and rivers, Rochester is conveniently located only a short distance from New Hampshire's famous Lakes Region, the White Mountains with its ski resorts and the Seacoast with its superb beaches.
Whether covered with its famous lilacs in the spring, flowers blooming in the summer, spectacular autumn foliage or fresh-fallen snow, the Rochester area is a scenic delight.
One of Rochester's many attributes is its excellent air, highway, rail and water transportation connections. Major highways include routes 11, 108, 125, 202 and the Spaulding Turnpike (Route 16), a four lane, limited access highway with six exits to the City. This expressway provides easy access to Interstate 95, the Pease International Tradeport, Boston's Logan Airport, Manchester International Airport, the Portland International Jetport and the Port of Portsmouth. The New Hampshire Northcoast rail line and Skyhaven Airport also serve Rochester.
Rochester enjoys many of the conveniences of a prospering city combined with the delights of small-town New England traditions. Due to the restoration of the historic Rochester Opera House, cultural and civic activities are offered to residents in the area. Rochester celebrates an annual Lilac Family Fun Festival in the spring, a summer festival at the Rochester Commons, a Fourth of July celebration complete with activities and fireworks in the summer, over 120 years of the Rochester Fair (an old fashioned agricultural fair) held in the fall, and a holiday parade in the winter.
Traditions of strong family values, strong work ethic and lasting community spirit sustain the lasting pride among residents and businesses in Rochester. Awareness of Rochester's many natural assets and its recent industrial growth contributes to that pride. A great sense of volunteerism exists that is second to none. Whatever the need, whether for an individual or organization, Rochester opens its heart each and every time to help with a worthwhile cause.
Rochester's commitment to economic development has spurred major growth of manufacturing and high-tech companies. The City continues to diversify, strengthen and grow as business and industrial expansions attract new residents to the area.
Excellent educational advantages are available to residents. The Richard W. Creteau Regional Technology Center trains students for well-paid positions and assures companies in the area of a skilled workforce.
Shopping in Rochester provides residents in the city and surrounding communities with an attractive downtown area and several malls and plazas. Antiques, footwear, appliances, pharmacies, restaurants and a variety of services are found in downtown Rochester and small boutiques to large department and grocery stores are found at several plazas and malls located throughout the City.
Cultural and recreational activities include plays at the Rochester Opera House, theater, the Rochester Country Club golf course, ball fields, hiking, walking paths, rivers, ponds and lakes.
Combined with its natural beauty, easy access and many opportunities, Rochester is The Place To Be. |
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Gabrielle Union agrees with Skip Bayless.
It may not happen often but she took to Twitter to debate a call in the final minute of the game that went against the Miami Heat.
With just five seconds remaining, Dwyane Wade made his way toward the basket before having the game-tying shot contested by Cody Zeller and Courtney Lee.
• MORE NBA: Lee finds redemption, his shot in Game 5 victory over Heat
“There’s no reason for me to look at it. It ain’t going to change anything. I thought I did. It wasn’t called,” he told reporters after the game.
Detroit Pistons guard Reggie Jackson was also critical of the officiating following his team’s elimination from the playoffs in four games by the Cleveland Cavaliers. He told the media that referees should face fines and suspensions for blown calls.
• MORE NBA: Latest Open Floor Podcast | NBA playoffs winners and losers
UPDATE: The NBA ruled Thursday that Wade was not fouled in the closing seconds of Game 5.
The NBA formally rules that Dwyane Wade was not fouled in the final moments of Heat's Game 5 loss. pic.twitter.com/A1L8CWF2Kp — The Crossover (@TheCrossover) April 28, 2016
See how Union reacted on Twitter below:
They need to get fined. Period. Crappy officiating deserves a FINE and suspension. Not after the fact "oh well" https://t.co/B6CSxn4ck2 — Gabrielle Union (@itsgabrielleu) April 28, 2016
In all fairness I DID let refs know when they gave us calls we didn't deserve... his response "I thought you'd be at the concert" #FineEm — Gabrielle Union (@itsgabrielleu) April 28, 2016
2 min report is BS... after the fact WHO CARES?!?!?! If you don't #FineEm what's the motivation to get it right in the future?? #logic — Gabrielle Union (@itsgabrielleu) April 28, 2016
If players/coaches/owners get fined for complaints about poor officiating, makes sense that poor officiating =fines for the refs #logic — Gabrielle Union (@itsgabrielleu) April 28, 2016
And plsssss...hands straight up mean NADA if you get hit with the body down low. Stop it #FineEm — Gabrielle Union (@itsgabrielleu) April 28, 2016
Yes and they should be held accountable when they mess up #FineEm https://t.co/OJ1zGsoG9j — Gabrielle Union (@itsgabrielleu) April 28, 2016
My butt is actually amazing... your avi on the other hand 👀👀👀 https://t.co/ISqOFApvHk — Gabrielle Union (@itsgabrielleu) April 28, 2016
True story... whole section was shocked... ummmm if you talking to me you ain't focused on your job #FineEm https://t.co/1F990Bwq83 — Gabrielle Union (@itsgabrielleu) April 28, 2016
The Hornets walked away with the 90–88 victory with Lee’s three-pointer being the game-winning basket. Charlotte now leads the series 3–2 with Game 6 set for Friday. |
“Hillary Clinton ratcheted up her attacks on Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders’ gun control record Monday,” capitalnewyork.com reports, “telling a private gathering of state legislators near the State Capitol that many of the guns used by New York criminals come across the border from the Green Mountain State.” That’s news to me. And to the Democratic lawmakers, lobbyists and other “party stalwarts” who gathered to hear the presumptive nominee pontificate. Such as Buffalo State Senator Tim Kennedy . . .
“She said she wants to work to get illegal guns off the street and said it’s been part of her work as an elected official to strengthen laws to keep America safe. She said that it’s going to be coming out in the very near future that many of the catastrophes that have taken human lives in the State of New York have been the product of guns coming over the border from Vermont,” said State Sen. Tim Kennedy, a Democrat from Buffalo. “That’s the first I heard it. I think it caught everybody’s attention and we’re looking forward to learning more about it.”
You know the Watergate thing, right? Must have two sources. Well, here’s another one:
“She said that many of the guns that are found to be involved in crimes in this state are found to have their origins in Vermont,” said Assemblyman Kevin Cahill, a Democrat from Kingston. “The implication was just that many of the guns that are involved in crimes in this state come from Vermont.”
Clearly, Ms. Clinton is trying to paint her rival, Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders, as weak on gun control. The problem with this particular line of attack: it’s not true. Not only is Sanders for an assault weapons ban, but his state is hardly a major source of firearms for New York Criminals. dailycaller.com:
In 2014, out of 7,686 firearms recovered and traced in New York, only 55 were first purchased in Vermont, according to the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives. That’s compared to 371 that came from Pennsylvania, 395 that were sourced to Virginia, and 386 from Georgia, government data shows. , 61 of the 8,539 guns recovered and traced in New York came from Vermont. That’s compared to 423 that came from Virginia. In 2013 , 61 of the 8,539 guns recovered and traced in New York came from Vermont. That’s compared to 423 that came from Virginia.
Senator Sanders campaign has pushed Ms. Clinton to the left on many issues. While this piece of nonsense doesn’t indicate that she’s moved to an even more extreme position on gun control, if such a thing were even possible, it does show that Ms. Clinton is will say anything to further her civilian disarmament agenda. In case you didn’t know. |
Lasers by their nature emit light where each photon has nearly the same frequency. That "nearly" is good enough for most applications, but there are still cases where we'd like to do better: atomic clocks, gravitational wave detectors, and tests of variations in physical constants. All of these bump up against the limits of current lasers. A laser with a more stable frequency known as a superradiant laser has been studied theoretically, and now a prototype has been built shows what must be done to make it a practical reality.
Justin G. Bohnet et al. (of JILA/NIST) constructed a demonstration superradiant laser using ultracold rubidium atoms, in which the laser's photons act to synchronize the electronic transitions within the atoms. While a standard laser has many photons present in the laser cavity, this superradiant laser has a cavity that, at any given time, may be empty of photons. Where in a normal laser the light is coherent and the atoms are uncorrelated, in a superradiant laser, it's the atoms that are coherent, transitioning between energy states in concert. While the prototype is not a fully-working superradiant laser, it shows what steps are necessary to construct the real thing, and demonstrates how it should work.
The word "laser" is an acronym, standing for Light Amplification by the Stimulated Emission of Radiation. In a normal laser, atoms are "pumped" by an external power source until they all perform the same electronic transitions. They do not typically transition as a single synchronized unit, but since they all undergo the same quantum absorption and emission, the light they emit is close to being the same wavelength—nearly monochromatic.
In an ordinary laser, a standing wave formed of many photons reflects between mirrors at opposite ends of a cavity. Thermal fluctuations in the mirrors and other vibrations (say from passing footsteps) will slightly change the length of the cavity, which in turn creates small variations in the wavelength of the photons when they are sent out in a beam.
A superradiant laser, on the other hand, exploits atomic transitions with wavelengths that are much less than the length of the cavity, so that small fluctuations in the positions of the mirrors are mostly irrelevant. In this type of system, very few photons may be present in the cavity at any given time—instead of a standing wave of light, the coherence is due the atoms themselves. ("Superradiance" refers not to the number of photons, but to the synchronization of the atoms.)
In fact, the superradiant laser prototype built by Bohnet et al., generally doesn't have any photons in it. At any given moment, there is only a 20 percent chance of finding a single photon in the cavity.
The researchers trapped several million rubidium atoms in a cavity approximately 2 centimeters in length. Rubidium atoms are particularly easy to cool and trap (the original Bose-Einstein condensate was achieved using rubidium, for example). However, rubidium isn't ideal for lasers, since it doesn't normally have the correct types of electronic transitions.
However, the right behavior can be induced by driving the rubidium atoms with another regular laser. The externally supplied photons induce the atoms to allow the right kind of transitions as long as the laser is shining. This allowed the authors to demonstrate the predicted behavior of a superradiant laser: synchronization between the atoms drove the emission of photons in the cavity (although not many of them).
However, since the regular laser is subject to the same vibrational fluctuations in frequency, the rubidium superradiant laser Bohnet et al. achieved wasn't any better than a normal laser, even though the atoms were synchronized.
If a true self-sustaining superradiant laser can be built, it will have far lower variability due to the fluctuations in the length of the cavity. As a result, superradiant lasers can be used to calibrate even more precise atomic clocks than those currently in use. Additionally, gravitational wave detectors—which use interference between laser beams—need to be very sensitive to extremely tiny displacements, which means any fluctuations in the laser frequency need to be even smaller. Finally, detecting any fluctuations in physical constants (such as the fine-structure constant that sets the strength of the electromagnetic force) requires precision measurements, so superradiant lasers could be used in such experiments.
In short, if we can work out some of the limits in this demonstration, it opens the door to lots of interesting experiments.
Nature, 2012. DOI: 10.1038/nature10920 (About DOIs). |
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Foto: Lehtikuva/Roni Rekomaa KSML: Hakkarainen sprider våldtäktsdomar på nätet Sannfinländarnas riksdagsledamot Teuvo Hakkarainen sprider ett tingsrättsdokument på Facebook. Dokumentet avslöjar två namn på personer som gjort sig skyldiga till våldtäkt, skriver Keskisuomalainen. HBL-FNB Publicerad:
20.4.2012 21.17 Uppdaterad:
20.4.2012 21.18 Twittra Mindre A Större Hakkarainen har länkat en dom från Helsingfors tingsrätt till sin Facebooksida. Fallet gäller en våldtäkt som Iltalehti skrivit om den här veckan. Två unga Helsingforsare dömdes till villkorligt fängelse för våldtäkten på en 15-årig flicka. En av de dömda är minderårig. Bägge har utländska namn. Enligt de rättslärda som Keskisuomalainen intervjuat kan det vara olagligt att sprida information som kränker privatlivet. Det kan också röra sig om brott mot personuppgiftslagen. Domen har läckts till en nättjänst där man kan publicera dokument anonymt. Till tidningen säger Hakkarainen att han publicerade dokumentet för att han inte vill skydda våldtäktsmän. – Om någon vill skydda dem, gör det då, men det gör inte jag. |
THOUSANDS of middle class people are receiving emergency lack of perspective treatment following the cancellation of Secret Cinema.
Around 84,000 people had tickets for special ‘immersive’ screenings of Back to the Future, the non-occurence of which is the biggest bourgeois crisis since the chalk paint drought of 2013.
Architect Stephen Malley said: “I had made travel arrangements and bought a Marty McFly gilet off eBay, all for nothing. Nothing!
“The monsters responsible have offered me a refund, or replacement tickets for next weekend, which is when I’ve got a wedding in Italy.
“Jesus christ, I don’t want to live in a world where innovative art-at-scale projects are run unreliably.
“I’m going to kill myself by eating non-artisan fried chicken for every meal until I keel over.”
Brand consultant Emma Bradford said: “Secret Cinema is cancelled and people are telling me to get a grip? You try getting a fucking grip when there’s suddenly a gaping hole in your schedule.
“They can’t do this to me. I know people in the media. Cool people.”
Lack of perspective specialist Dr Tom Logan said: “My advice is to stop hyperventilating, have a quick look at the global news agenda, then go and buy some tickets for the normal cinema.
“The new Planet of the Apes is on, it’s quite good.” |
Editor's note: This post began as a FanPost and has been lightly edited.
Andy's recent "addiction" post has generated some interesting discussion about the conflict between expectations and results among Gator fans in the Age of Muschamp. What follows is my attempt to think through my own fandom and some ideas as to why we find ourselves in the place we do right now.
As always, my impulse is to start with history.
Florida fans, by and large, are aware that in the long view we are Johnnys-come-lately. We know that our team's real relevance in college football, its first sustained success, is less than 25 years old, which hardly compares to gridiron royalty like Alabama. We know that we don't have the history of excellence of many of our SEC brethren, and not even some of the old-line northern and western programs .
For much of the modern era , being a Gator fan was an exercise in frustration, the maddening experience of being decidedly middle-class in a world run by and for the haves. Florida teams enjoyed some success in the 1960s under Ray Graves, but he finished his career with a middling .686 winning percentage , while the Dickey years of the 1970s were characterized by frustrating backsliding interspersed with outright embarrassment. Throughout these decades, the likes of Alabama, Notre Dame, Oklahoma, and Penn State dominated the national scene, while Gators rivals like Auburn, Georgia, and Miami dispensed misery on an annual basis. Florida was often pretty good, but rarely excellent, and never a champion.
The experience of the 1980s only made things worse. Charley Pell and Galen Hall brought the Gators to previously unimaginable heights, exemplified by the 1984 "national championship" season. The Gators of the mid-'80s could play with anyone, and beat their rivals with regularity. Those heady results turned out to be fool's gold, however, and the sanctions and disgrace that hastened Pell's departure proved too much for Hall's Gators to overcome, especially when SEC Presidents voted 6-4 to strip the Gators of what would have been their first SEC title in 1984. After Hall's alleged cash payments to assistants and players (which he still denies) brought NCAA sanctions, and the threat of even more severe sanctions forced regime change in the 1989 season, Steve Spurrier's return to Gainesville was met with relief and excitement.
But no one expected the decade of cathartic ass-whippings that the HBC would unleash on the SEC.
No matter what our differences as Gator fans, I think we can all agree that the Spurrier years were glorious. It wasn't simply that the Gators were winning; it was that they were destroying teams in a fashion only rarely seen before in the SEC. Over the 1993-1996 seasons, the Gators' average margin of victory (aMoV ) was 24.3 points, and many games were well in hand by halftime, allowing fans to get a head start for the Porpoise. Blowouts were the norm, close games were aberrations, and Spurrier was an avenging angel, humiliating opponents by gaudy margins and sniping at them in the press.
Gator fans, understandably, loved every second of it, as the decades of numbing losses and wait-'til-next-year rationalizations melted away, replaced by sunny memories of receivers running 15 yards free past opposing secondaries. The apotheosis of the Spurrier era is burned into the brain of any Gator fan old enough to remember it for very good reason: Four straight SEC titles, Danny Wuerffel's Heisman, two games played for the national title, and a punishing revenge performance against one of our bitterest rivals in the 1997 Sugar Bowl to claim Florida's first championship belt.
The 1990s are the formative decade for Gator fans not just because we won, but because we won in such awe-inspiring and revolutionary fashion. It was low-stress, it was fun, it was beautiful. If you are a Florida fan, this is likely the narrative of your fandom: You struggle for years to overcome your own circumstances, your limitations, the overwhelming odds that seem to pen you in at every turn. You have a glimpse of success, but even before you can fully understand what you've accomplished it's taken from you by those who already have so much. Finally, after years of toil and suffering, you reach the mountaintop. And when you get there, something else happens: you don't just beat your opponents, you smash them.
Once you have a taste of that kind of success, it's impossible to be satisfied with anything less. Ron Zook never had a chance .
The Urban Meyer years further solidified an association between winning and winning big for Florida fans. The 2006 team's defining moment came not in a series of grinding, gut-check wins, but after Dallas Baker's pirouetting TD catch opened the floodgates against Ohio State. The 2008 Death Star, once it became fully operational, posted a 44-13 average score, the highest margin in school history. Taken together, those 2006-2009 teams posted a 21.9-point aMoV, second only to the mid-'90s juggernaut. I am sure that I was not the only Gator fan to whom this seemed to be the natural order of things.
The five years since then have been hard.
I've remarked more than once during the Muschamp years that watching Gator football isn't as fun as it used to be. While I'm sure much of my diminished enjoyment comes from the many ways I've changed, a lot of it has to do with the fact that I can no longer settle in for a game with any reliable expectation that my team will dominate the other to the tune of a three-touchdown win. This is the very definition of "spoiled," and I know that.
But self-awareness doesn't make it any easier to watch a team you love — something that means more to you than it should by any reasonable measure — sweat and struggle against inferior opponents, stumble its way into heartbreakers, and reduce itself to "inept" performance at times. It's uncomfortable because at these moments (of which there have been plenty lately), we are who we used to be. If the Will Muschamp era has taught us anything, it's that the offensive explosions of the '90s and 2000s have not been enough to exorcise the ghosts of our own mediocrity.
I can't shake the feeling that even if the Gators under Will Muschamp somehow win, say, 10 games this year, the determining factor in fans' opinion of the season will not be the style in which the offense plays, but the margin of victory. If a "ground-and-pound" offense wins games comfortably, Florida fans will love it, and the worm will begin to turn. If a high-flying pass-heavy attack pulls out a bunch of squeakers, the calls for Muschamp's head will continue. Winning close games doesn't feel right to many Gators; it doesn't summon the visceral satisfaction of not just defeating your rivals, but laying them low, burning away the weight of history with the fire of the present.
We have come to believe that this is our birthright. We should know better. We don't.
The past three seasons have made me think that Gator fans are going to have a hard time being truly, fully satisfied until a coach can produce a team on the field whose performance approaches, if not duplicates, the blowouts that characterized the best years of Meyer and Spurrier. Perhaps that will be Will Muschamp, and the transformation will begin this season — I don't know, but I hope so.
However, it seems clear that unless he can erase all doubt that the Gators are better, unless he can conquer that sneaking suspicion that we don't belong, we will resent him for reminding us that once again, just like in the bad old days, we don't. |
Quote Computer software, namely application programming interfaces for the purpose of creating, rendering, and displaying 2D and 3D computer graphics; computer software, namely application programming interfaces for the purpose of accessing parallel computing resources; downloadable specifications for the aforementioned goods
It seems a recent trademark request from 'The Khronos Group Inc.' includes a new API named ‘VULKAN’.You can see the full listing here , and it is described as this:Not the best timing considering our beloved actor Leonard Nimoy recently passed away, who was known for being a 'Vulcan' named Spock (amongst many other things). It would have been nice if it was a tribute, but it was filed before the reports of his passing.A name doesn't mean all that much, so we will hopefully see some demonstrations of it next week at GDC. If this is the new official name, I approve. |
The Atlantic bluefin tuna (Thunnus thynnus) is a species of tuna in the family Scombridae. It is variously known as the northern bluefin tuna (mainly when including Pacific bluefin as a subspecies), giant bluefin tuna [for individuals exceeding 150 kg (330 lb)], and formerly as the tunny.
Atlantic bluefins are native to both the western and eastern Atlantic Ocean, as well as the Mediterranean Sea. They have become extinct in the Black Sea. The Atlantic bluefin tuna is a close relative of the other two bluefin tuna species—the Pacific bluefin tuna and the southern bluefin tuna.
Atlantic bluefin tuna may exceed 900 kg (2,000 lb) in weight, and rival the black marlin, blue marlin, and swordfish as the largest Perciformes. Throughout recorded history, the Atlantic bluefin tuna has been highly prized as a food fish. Besides their commercial value as food, the great size, speed, and power they display as apex predators has attracted the admiration of fishermen, writers, and scientists.
The Atlantic bluefin tuna has been the foundation of one of the world's most lucrative commercial fisheries. Medium-sized and large individuals are heavily targeted for the Japanese raw-fish market, where all bluefin species are highly prized for sushi and sashimi.
This commercial importance has led to severe overfishing. The International Commission for the Conservation of Atlantic Tunas affirmed in October 2009 that Atlantic bluefin tuna stocks have declined dramatically over the last 40 years, by 72% in the Eastern Atlantic, and by 82% in the Western Atlantic.[3] On 16 October 2009, Monaco formally recommended endangered Atlantic bluefin tuna for an Appendix I CITES listing and international trade ban. In early 2010, European officials, led by the French ecology minister, increased pressure to ban the commercial fishing of bluefin tuna internationally.[4] European Union nations, which are responsible for most bluefin tuna overfishing, later abstained from voting to protect the species from international trade.[5]
Most bluefins are captured commercially by professional fishermen using longlines, purse seines, assorted hook-and-line gear, heavy rods and reels, and harpoons. Recreationally, bluefins have been one of the most important big-game species sought by sports fishermen since the 1930s, particularly in the United States, but also in Canada, Spain, France, and Italy.
Taxonomy [ edit ]
The Atlantic bluefin tuna was one of the many fish species originally described by Linnaeus in the landmark 1758 10th edition of his Systema Naturae, where it was given the binomial name of Scomber thynnus.[6]
It is most closely related to the Pacific bluefin tuna (T. orientalis) and the southern bluefin tuna (T. maccoyii), and more distantly to the other large tunas of the genus Thunnus – the bigeye tuna (T. obesus) and the yellowfin tuna (T. albacares).[7] For many years, the Pacific and Atlantic bluefin tuna species were considered to be the same, or subspecies, and referred to as the "northern bluefin tuna".[7] This name occasionally gives rise to some confusion, as the longtail tuna (T. tonggol) can in Australia sometimes be known under the name "northern bluefin tuna".[8][9] This is also true in New Zealand and Fiji.
Bluefin tuna were often referred to as the common tunny, especially in the UK, Australia, and New Zealand. The name "tuna", a derivative of the Spanish atún, was widely adopted in California in the early 1900s, and has since become accepted for all tunas, including the bluefin, throughout the English-speaking world. In some languages, the red color of the bluefin's meat is included in its name, as in atún rojo (Spanish) and tonno rosso (Italian), amongst others.
Description [ edit ]
Atlantic bluefin tuna migration
The body of the Atlantic bluefin tuna is rhomboidal in profile and robust. The head is conical and the mouth rather large. The head contains a "pineal window" that allows the fish to navigate over its multiple thousands-of-miles range.[10] Their color is dark blue above and gray below, with a gold coruscation covering the body and bright yellow caudal finlets. Bluefin tuna can be distinguished from other family members by the relatively short length of their pectoral fins. Their livers have a unique characteristic in that they are covered with blood vessels (striated). In other tunas with short pectoral fins, such vessels are either not present or present in small numbers along the edges.
Fully mature adult specimens average 2–2.5 m (6.6–8.2 ft) long and weigh around 225–250 kg (496–551 lb).[11][12] The largest recorded specimen taken under International Game Fish Association rules was caught off Nova Scotia, an area renowned for huge Atlantic bluefin, and weighed 679 kg (1,497 lb) and was 3.7 m (12 ft) long.[13] The longest contest between man and tuna fish occurred near Liverpool, Nova Scotia in 1934, when six men taking turns fought a 164–363 kilograms (361–800 lb) tuna for 62 hours.[14] Both the Smithsonian Institution and the U. S. National Marine Fisheries Service has accepted that this species can weigh up to 910 kg (2,010 lb), though further details are lacking.[12][15] Atlantic bluefin tuna reach maturity relatively quickly. In a survey that included specimens up to 2.55 m (8.4 ft) in length and 247 kg (545 lb) in weight, none was believed to be older than 15 years.[16] However, very large specimens may be up to 50 years old.[16]
The bluefin possesses enormous muscular strength, which it channels through a pair of tendons to its lunate-shaped caudal fin for propulsion. In contrast to many other fish, the body stays rigid while the tail flicks back and forth, increasing stroke efficiency.[17] It also has a very efficient circulatory system. It possesses one of the highest blood-hemoglobin concentrations among fish, which allows it to efficiently deliver oxygen to its tissues; this is combined with an exceptionally thin blood-water barrier to ensure rapid oxygen uptake.[18]
To keep its core muscles warm, which are used for power and steady swimming, the Atlantic bluefin uses countercurrent exchange to prevent heat from being lost to the surrounding water. Heat in the venous blood is efficiently transferred to the cool, oxygenated arterial blood entering a rete mirabile.[18] While all members of the tuna family are warm-blooded, the ability to thermoregulate is more highly developed in bluefin tuna than in any other fish. This allows them to seek food in the rich but chilly waters of the North Atlantic.[10]
Biology and ecology [ edit ]
Bluefins dive to depths of 500 m (1,600 ft).[19] They can reach speeds of 40 mph (64 km/h).[10]
The Atlantic bluefin tuna typically hunts small fish such as sardines, herring, and mackerel, and invertebrates such as squid and crustaceans.
The tetraphyllidean tapeworm Pelichnibothrium speciosum parasitizes this species.[20] As the tapeworm's definite host is the blue shark, which does not generally seem to feed on tuna,[citation needed] the Atlantic bluefin tuna likely is a dead-end host for P. speciosum.
Life history [ edit ]
Female bluefins are thought to produce up to 30 million eggs. Atlantic bluefin tuna spawn in two widely separated areas. One spawning ground exists in the western Mediterranean, particularly in the area of the Balearic Islands. Their other important spawning ground is the Gulf of Mexico. Pop-up satellite tracking results appear to confirm in large measure the belief held by many scientists and fishermen that although bluefin that were spawned in each area may forage widely across the Atlantic, they return to the same area to spawn.
Atlantic bluefins group together in large concentrations to spawn, and at such times are highly vulnerable to commercial fishing. This is particularly so in the Mediterranean, where the groups of spawning bluefins can be spotted from the air by light aircraft and purse seines directed to set around the schools. The western and eastern populations are thought to mature at different ages. Bluefins born in the east are thought to reach maturity a year or two earlier than those spawned in the west.[19]
Human interaction [ edit ]
Capture of Atlantic bluefin tuna in tonnes from 1950 to 2009
Ancient Fishery [ edit ]
According to by Longo, "by the turn of the first millennium CE, a sophisticated bluefin tuna trap fishery [had] emerged...This trap fishery, called tonnara in Italian, madrague in French, almadraba in Spanish, and armação in Portuguese, forms an elaborate maze of nets that capture and corral bluefin tuna during their spawning season. Active for more than a thousand years, the traditional/artisanal bluefin tuna trap fishery has experienced a collapsed in the Mediterranean and has struggled where it is still practiced."[21]
Aquaculture [ edit ]
Tuna farming began as early as the 1970s. Canadian fishermen in St Mary's Bay captured young fish and raised them in pens. In captivity, they grow to reach hundreds of kilos, eventually fetching premium prices in Japan. Farming enables farmers to exploit the unpredictable supply of wild-caught fish. Ranches across the Mediterranean and off South Australia grow bluefins offshore. Annual revenues are $220 million.[citation needed][when?] Large proportions of juvenile and young Mediterranean fish are taken to be grown on tuna farms. Because the tuna are taken from the wild to the pens before they are old enough to reproduce, farming is one of the most serious threats to the species.[citation needed] The bluefin's slow growth and late sexual maturity compound its problems. The Atlantic population has declined by nearly 90% since the 1970s.[22]
In Europe and Australia, scientists have used light-manipulation technology and time-release hormone implants to bring about the first large-scale captive spawning of Atlantic and southern bluefins.[10] The technology involves implanting gonadotropin-releasing hormone in the fish to stimulate fertile egg production and may push the fish to reach sexual maturity at younger ages.[23]
However, since bluefins require so much food per unit of weight gained - up to 10 times that of salmon - if bluefins were to be farmed at the same scale as 21st-century salmon farming, many of their prey species might become depleted if farmed bluefin were fed the same diet as their wild counterparts. As of 2010, 30 million tons of small forage fish were removed from the oceans yearly, the majority to feed farmed fish.[10]
Market entry by many North African Mediterranean countries, such as Tunisia and Libya in the 1990s, along with the increasingly widespread practice of tuna farming in the Mediterranean and other areas, such as southern Australia (for southern bluefin tuna), depressed prices. One result is that fishermen must now catch up to twice as many fish to maintain their revenues.[citation needed]
As food [ edit ]
The bluefin species are listed by the Monterey Bay Aquarium on its Seafood Watch list and pocket guides as fish to avoid due to overfishing.[24]
This tuna is one of the most highly prized fish used in Japanese raw fish dishes. About 80% of the caught Atlantic and Pacific bluefin tunas are consumed in Japan.[25] Bluefin tuna sashimi is a particular delicacy in Japan. For example, an Atlantic bluefin caught off eastern United States sold for US$247,000 at the Tsukiji fish market in Tokyo in 2008.[26] This high price is considerably less than the highest prices paid for Pacific bluefin.[25][26] Prices were highest in the late 1970s and 1980s.[citation needed]
Japanese began eating tuna sushi in the 1840s, when a large catch came into Edo [old Tokyo] one season. A chef marinated a few pieces in soy sauce and served it as nigiri sushi. At that time, these fish were nicknamed shibi — "four days" — because chefs would bury them for four days to mellow their bloody taste.[10]
Originally, fish with red flesh were looked down on in Japan as a low-class food, and white fish were much preferred....Fish with red flesh tended to spoil quickly and develop a noticeable stench, so in the days before refrigeration, the Japanese aristocracy despised them, and this attitude was adopted by the citizens of Edo. – Michiyo Murata[10]
By the 1930s, tuna sushi was commonplace in Japan. After World War II, Japanese fishermen needed more fish to eat and to export for European and U.S. canning industries. They expanded their range and perfected industrial long-line fishing, a practice that employs thousands of baited hooks on miles-long lines. In the 1970s, Japanese manufacturers developed lightweight, high-strength polymers that were spun into drift nets. Though they were banned on the high seas by the early 1990s, in the 1970s, hundreds of miles of them were often deployed in a single night. At-sea freezing technology then allowed them to bring frozen sushi-ready tuna from the farthest oceans to market after as long as a year.[10]
The initial target was yellowfin tuna. Japanese did not value bluefin before the 1960s. By the late 1960s, sportfishing for giant bluefin tuna was burgeoning off Nova Scotia, New England, and Long Island. North Americans, too, had little appetite for bluefins, usually discarding them after taking a picture. Bluefin sportfishing’s rise, however, coincided with Japan’s export boom. In the 1960s and ’70s, cargo planes were returning to Japan empty. A Japanese entrepreneur realized he could buy New England and Canadian bluefins cheaply, and started filling Japan-bound holds with tuna. Exposure to beef and other fatty meats during the U.S. occupation following World War Two had prepared the Japanese palate for bluefin’s fatty belly (otoro). The Atlantic bluefin was the biggest and the favorite. The appreciation rebounded across the Pacific when Americans started to eat raw fish in the late 1970s.[10]
Prior to the 1960s, Atlantic bluefin fisheries were relatively small scale, and populations remained stable. Although some local stocks, such as those in the North Sea, were damaged by unrestricted commercial fishing, other populations were not at risk. However, in the 1960s, purse seiners catching fish for the canned tuna market in United States coastal waters removed huge numbers of juvenile and young Western Atlantic bluefins, taking out several entire-year classes. Mediterranean fisheries have historically been poorly regulated and catches under-reported, with French, Spanish, and Italian fishermen competing with North African nations for a diminishing population.[citation needed] The fish's migratory habits complicate the task of regulating the fishery, because they spend time in the national waters of multiple countries, as well as the open ocean outside of any national jurisdiction.[10]
Larval bluefin
Adult bluefin on deck
Threats [ edit ]
Global appetite for fish is the predominant threat to Atlantic bluefin. Bluefin aquaculture, which arose in response to declining wild stocks, has yet to achieve a sustainability, in part because it predominantly relies on harvesting and ranching juveniles rather than captive breeding.
Despite some concern, assessments from the 2010 Deepwater Horizon oil spill estimated that the population loss would not be significant, ranging from 0.4–4.0% of juveniles, which is within the range of annual variations.[27][needs update?]
Conservation [ edit ]
Overfishing continues despite repeated warnings of the current precipitous decline. In 2007, researchers from the International Commission for the Conservation of Atlantic Tunas (ICCAT)—the regulators of Atlantic bluefin fishing—recommended a global quota of 15,000 tonnes to maintain current stocks or 10,000 tonnes to allow the fisheries recovery. ICCAT then chose a quota of 36,000 tonnes, but surveys indicated that up to 60,000 tonnes were actually being taken (a third of the total remaining stocks) and the limit was reduced to 22,500 tonnes. Their scientists now say that 7500 tonnes are the sustainable limit. In November 2009, ICCAT set the 2010 quota at 13,500 tonnes and said that if stocks were not rebuilt by 2022, it would consider closing some areas.[5]
In 2010, Greenpeace International added the northern bluefin tuna to its seafood red list.[28]
On 18 March 2010, the United Nations rejected a U.S.-backed effort to impose a total ban on Atlantic bluefin tuna fishing and trading.[29] The Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species (CITES) vote was 68 to 20 with 30 European abstentions. The leading opponent, Japan, claimed that ICCAT was the proper regulatory body.[5]
In 2011, the USA's National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) decided not to list the Atlantic bluefin tuna as an endangered species. NOAA officials said that the more stringent international fishing rules created in November 2010 would be enough for the Atlantic bluefin tuna to recover. NOAA agreed to reconsider the species' endangered status in 2013.[30] It was made a National Marine Fisheries Service Species of Concern, one of those species about which the U.S. government has some concerns regarding status and threats, but for which insufficient information is available to indicate a need to list the species under the U.S. Endangered Species Act.[31]
In the summer of 2011, the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society led a campaign against supposedly illegal bluefin tuna fishing off the coast of Libya, which was under Muammar Gaddafi's regime at the time. The fishermen retaliated against Sea Shepherd's intervention by throwing various, small metal pieces at the crew. Nobody was injured due to the other side's actions during the conflict.[32]
In November 2011, food critic Eric Asimov of The New York Times criticized the top-ranked New York City restaurant Sushi Yasuda for offering bluefin tuna on their menu, arguing that drawing from such a threatened fishery constituted an unjustifiable risk to bluefins, and to the future of culinary traditions that depend on the species.[33]
In November 2012, 48 countries meeting in Morocco for the International Commission for the Conservation of Atlantic Tunas voted to keep strict fishing limits, saying the species' population is still fragile. The quota will rise only slightly, from 12,900 metric tons a year to 13,500.[34] The decision was reviewed in November 2014, resulting in higher allowances listed below.
The latest stock assessment for Atlantic bluefin tuna reflected an improvement in the status for both western and eastern Atlantic/Mediterranean stocks. The Commission adopted new management measures that are within the range of scientific advice, are consistent with the respective rebuilding plans, and allow for continued stock growth. For the western stock, the TAC of 2,000 mt annually for 2015 and 2016 will provide for continued growth in spawning stock biomass and allow the strong 2003 year-class to continue to enhance the productivity of the stock. The TAC for the eastern Atlantic/Mediterranean stock was set at 16,142 t for 2015; 19,296 t for 2016; and 23,155 t for 2017.[35]
Popular culture [ edit ]
The American television reality show Wicked Tuna and its spinoff Wicked Tuna: Outer Banks follow commercial hook-and-line Atlantic bluefin tuna off the East Coast of the United States.[36] Wicked Tuna premiered in 2014 and is broadcast by National Geographic.
See also [ edit ]
References [ edit ]
Further reading [ edit ] |
FILE - This Sept. 21, 2010 file photo shows the interior of the lethal injection facility at San Quentin State Prison in San Quentin, Calif. The California Supreme Court upheld a ballot measure narrowly approved by voters to change the state's dysfunctional death penalty system and speed up executions. The highly anticipated ruling Thursday, Aug. 24, 2017 concerned Proposition 66, a push to "mend not end" capital punishment in California. (AP Photo/Eric Risberg, File) The Associated Press
SAN FRANCISCO (AP) — The Latest on California's efforts to resume executions (all times local):
6 p.m.
California correctional officials are asking state regulators to approve a revised method of carrying out death sentences after years of delays that have stalled executions since 2006.
The new regulations filed with the Office of Administrative Law on Friday would allow California's death row inmates to be executed using one of two different drugs or choose the gas chamber.
The state is acting after what critics say are years of delaying tactics by Democratic office-holders who have been in no hurry to resume carrying out the death penalty.
Corrections officials filed the revised regulations one day after the state Supreme Court upheld a voter-approved measure to speed up death sentences. That leaves one major obstacle before executions can resume: Getting approval for a new lethal injection method. |
Recently, Denise Dorman, the wife of the great Star Wars artist, Dave Dorman, posted a blog where she described the financial difficulties faced by many of the comics creators who attend conventions. Hers was a sobering account, honest and sincere, but she wound up having to walk it back a few days later. The problem? In her original piece, she vented about the carnival-like atmosphere of modern conventions and wondered whether many of the cosplayers knew or cared about the creators whose work had inspired such conventions in the first place. In reading the blog, it seemed pretty clear that Dorman’s real point was to talk about financial strains on creators, but the Internet community, with its typical grasp of nuance and perspective, exploded. It was yet another reminder of how inept we often seem to be when it comes to listening to one another. Take William Shatner’s appearance at Nashville’s Comic Con last weekend. Now if you’ve followed the entertainment news sites, you’ve probably seen the screaming headlines about Shatner returning to star in Star Trek 3. This is why I don’t like gossip sites. I was shocked when I saw all the headlines—some of them even from mainstream news sites like ABC and USA Today. But I was even more shocked when I realized they were all citing Shatner’s panel in Nashville. You see, I was in the room when Shatner discussed Star Trek 3 and it never would’ve dawned on me to lead with that as part of a news story. What did Shatner actually say? Basically that J. J. Abrams called him, he returned the call, they chatted about Star Trek 3, and that the director, Robert Orci, has suggested that he might be interested in using Shatner in an upcoming film if they could figure out a good way to do it. The whole thing was very sketchy—even by Hollywood standards—and Shatner expressed his own doubts that anyone could write a plausible scenario that would work. That was it. But somehow that turned into screaming headlines. What’s particularly troubling though isn’t that this incident was wildly exaggerated, but rather that focusing on such a non-story meant that the real story from the Shatner panel never got covered. There was something from his appearance that day that was genuinely significant, powerful, and newsworthy, though I’m willing to bet you haven’t heard it. To set it up properly, I need to tell you a little story. I grew up in rural Arkansas—what we used to call “the sticks”—where the idea of attending a comic book convention was about as likely being invited to sit in the President’s box for the State of the Union. I thought that might change a few years ago when I moved to Nashville, but it wasn’t until last year when Wizard World added Nashville to their Comic Con schedule that I finally attended my first real comic book convention. Sadly, I didn’t enjoy it. The panels were nice, but something about being on the main floor with all the vendors, celebrity autograph booths, and creator tables in Artist Alley left me feeling depressed. All these talented people seemed desperate for people to buy their wares, their books, their prints, or their autographed pictures, and most of them were being ignored—including most of the celebrities. I hadn’t intended to pay for any celebrity encounters, but when I saw Henry Winkler I couldn’t help myself. Happy Days had been my favorite show as a kid, and Fonzie was my childhood role model. (He was also a type of superhero, but that’s another column.) So despite feeling a little silly, I counted out my $30 and walked up to his booth to ask for a picture. After blubbering incoherently about what his work meant to me, I carefully placed the $30 on the table directly in front of his assistant. That’s when Winkler reached forward, grabbed the bills, and stuffed them in his pants pocket. Let me be clear. Henry Winkler didn’t do anything wrong. He was great—friendly and polite the entire time—and if his assistant had put the money in a metal cash box I would’ve been fine. But I just wasn’t prepared to see my childhood hero stuff money in his pocket. It seemed … pitiful. So I left that convention as depressed as Charlie Brown at Christmastime. I had hopes that this year would be different. But after walking the main floor for a couple of hours, all I could see, once again, was the obsession with money. I was beginning to feel like Karl Marx touring the New York Stock Exchange, so I headed for the safety of the panels instead. All of which brings me back to William Shatner. He was the headliner for this year’s convention, and I am an unabashed, hardcore Shatner fan. I’ve used cuts from his albums in my classes and I’ve watched The Andersonville Trial at least a half-dozen times. His panel was great. He came on stage, told a couple of funny stories, and then started fielding questions. Some of them were good and some were awkward, but Shatner gamely answered all, occasionally trying to make larger, more philosophical points. For example, when asked about his death scene in Star Trek: Generations, Shatner talked about people dying like they lived. He said he always saw Kirk as someone who approached the world with what he called “awe and wonder,” and he stressed the need for all of us to see our world the same way. Shortly thereafter, when he turned to the microphone on his left for the next question, he noticed that the fan was a young boy. Shatner suddenly came alive. “How old are you?” “Eleven.” “Wow,” he said, “I’m filled with awe and wonder.” But after getting his laugh, the celebrity raconteur gave way to the former talk show host and Shatner decided to ask more questions of this boy. “What’s it like to be eleven? Do you go to school with … anticipation? Like you’re looking forward to it? When you go to school, do you look at everything with awe and wonder?” “No.” The boy’s comic timing was impeccable, but Shatner wouldn’t let it go. “What would you rather be doing?” “Probably be in Star Trek.” “You’d rather be in Star Trek?” Then Shatner drew the microphone close to his mouth and whispered with intense desperation, “So would I.” The crowd roared, but even from a distance I could see the 83-year-old actor turning things over in his head, his energy rising. It was like that moment in The Wrath of Khan where Captain Kirk stands on the damaged bridge of the Enterprise, stalling Khan for a couple of minutes while Spock looks up the Reliant’s prefix code. Like Kirk, Shatner was getting an idea. “There are no podcasts for kids who are eleven … From nine to twelve, there’s no one expressing themselves and engaging other eleven-year-olds in conversation.” The more Shatner talked about this gap in the media, the more his ideas seemed to come together. He proposed that someone like this boy should be asking other eleven-year-olds about their lives, and about why they would rather be in Star Trek than in school. Soon his words were pouring out with the speed and intensity of a Shakespearian monologue:
It’s what’s wrong with our schools, by the way, because at eleven, you should just be … wondering—“The moons around Jupiter are revolving!” and “Why are they there?” and “What is Jupiter?” and “How do we get there?” And all that … excitement is at school and you’re not a party to it, and it’s not your fault; it’s our fault!
He then issued a challenge to the young fan: “I would love to hear you in a podcast talking about why school is not interesting to you and why you’d rather do something else.” For anyone looking for a “moment” from the convention, this was it. It was spontaneous, it was poignant, it had far reaching social implications, and it left both the boy and the whole audience with a new charge—one that didn’t involve Visa or MasterCard. Normally I tend to be jaded and a little cynical, but as I left the ballroom, I felt … moved—even inspired. I had gone into the panel feeling depressed and detached, but when I returned to the main floor I was determined to see things with what Shatner would call awe and wonder. So what did I do? I spent much of the rest of the day taking pictures of cosplayers. It’s a remarkable thing. In the midst of the most commercial, money-driven environment imaginable, here were people who simply chose … to play. That’s the right word isn’t it? It’s what we used to call it—dressing up in costume, pretending to be someone else. These people had come to play. Now don’t get me wrong. I know that many of the cosplayers compete for cash prizes, and I actually had a couple of people give me their cosplayer business cards and ask for tweets. Clearly the “play” gets tainted. But I opted to feign ignorance about all that. Columnist’s prerogative. Because as I marveled at a ten-foot Groot and blinked at a four-foot weeping angel, I had two feelings—awe and wonder—and they felt pretty good. |
Mark Clattenburg was given a warm welcome as he returned to refereeing after being cleared of racially abusing Chelsea's John Mikel Obi.
Exactly a month after taking charge of his last game, the 37-year-old was in charge of the 1-1 Premier League draw between Southampton and Norwich.
He was given a standing ovation by both sets of supporters before the match.
Both Saints manager Nigel Adkins and Norwich boss Chris Hughton said they were glad to see him return.
"He is an excellent referee, and I speak for most when I say we are delighted to see him back," Hughton told BBC Sport.
"He has a passion for what he does, is very good at what he does and we need the best referees week in, week out."
Adkins added: "Of course I'm pleased to see him back. It was an unfortunate situation that arose and he is a fine referee that has a great career in front of him."
Clattenburg missed four weekends of Premier League matches while the Football Association investigated Chelsea's complaint after he was accused of using inappropriate language towards midfielder Mikel in their 3-2 home defeat by Manchester United on 28 October.
But he was later cleared by the FA, while a police investigation into the referee was also dropped.
On Tuesday Chelsea issued a statement saying they regretted the way they handled their accusation towards Clattenburg and referees' union Prospect later welcomed the joint statement saying it was "tantamount to, and accepted by Mark and the Select Group [of referees], as an apology".
Wednesday's game was a relatively uneventful one for the referee, who had been the fourth official at Tottenham's home game with West Ham on Sunday.
The only decision he had to make that was open to any contention was Rickie Lambert's opener for Saints that appeared to bounce up off the striker's arm.
But Hughton refused to blame the referee following that incident, adding he felt Clattenburg had been unsighted.
Media playback is not supported on this device Hughton pleased to extend run
Saints manager Adkins agreed with Clattenburg's decision not to rule out Saints' opening goal but was less glowing of his overall performance.
"I don't think it was a free-kick, but he made some interesting decisions," said Adkins.
Prospect boss Alan Leighton had speculated that Chelsea's accusation would stick, adding: "Everybody always remembers an allegation but not everybody always remembers the outcome."
But if there was any doubt how the general public felt towards Clattenburg the gesture of applauding him as he left the pitch at St Mary's after his pre-match warm up ended any lingering doubts.
However, he was not spared the insulting chants normally directed the way of referees during matches.
'You don't know what you're doing' followed by 'you're not fit to referee' were directed his way while he was also sarcastically applauded when awarding the home side a free-kick after turning down previous appeals. |
Mayo set to breach GAA rules with April training camp December 04, 2017
The Mayo players gather for a team talk.
©INPHO/James Crombie. The Mayo players gather for a team talk.©INPHO/James Crombie.
The Mayo footballers will contravene GAA rules if they proceed with a week-long training camp next April.
Mayo manager Stephen Rochford has informed the county board of his plans to hold the camp from April 11 to 18, but under new GAA rules, inter-county training camps are not permitted to take place until Friday, May 4. The penalty for breaching the rule, which was introduced at Special Congress in September to free up time for club activity, would see Mayo lose home advantage for their next 'home' game in the 2019 Allianz League.
Speaking in his capacity as vice-chairman of Ballyhaunis GAA club at a meeting of Mayo club managers and officials last week, Connacht GAA secretary John Prenty noted how that the month of April has effectively been set aside for club activity.
"County players have to be available to clubs in April," he is quoted as saying in the Western People.
"That's what was passed at Congress. I would say that in the month of April, it's possible to play at least four rounds of league football that don't have to be starred (games that can take place without county players)."
Mayo Central Council delegate Sean Mac Eil added: "One of the standpoints of the Super 8s introduction was that April would be free to the clubs - it was up there in flashing red lights."
Most Read Stories |
Monday, January 11, 2016 at 8:56AM
How do you scale a system from one user to more than 11 million users? Joel Williams, Amazon Web Services Solutions Architect, gives an excellent talk on just that subject: AWS re:Invent 2015 Scaling Up to Your First 10 Million Users.
If you are an advanced AWS user this talk is not for you, but it’s a great way to get started if you are new to AWS, new to the cloud, or if you haven’t kept up with with constant stream of new features Amazon keeps pumping out.
As you might expect since this is a talk by Amazon that Amazon services are always front and center as the solution to any problem. Their platform play is impressive and instructive. It's obvious by how the pieces all fit together Amazon has done a great job of mapping out what users need and then making sure they have a product in that space.
Some of the interesting takeaways:
Start with SQL and only move to NoSQL when necessary.
A consistent theme is take components and separate them out. This allows those components to scale and fail independently. It applies to breaking up tiers and creating microservices.
Only invest in tasks that differentiate you as a business, don't reinvent the wheel.
Scalability and redundancy are not two separate concepts, you can often do both at the same time.
There's no mention of costs. That would be a good addition to the talk as that is one of the major criticisms of AWS solutions.
The Basics
AWS is in 12 regions around the world. A Region is a physical location in the world where Amazon has multiple Availability Zones. There are regions in: North America; South America; Europe; Middle East; Africa; Asia Pacific. An Availability Zone (AZ) is generally a single datacenter, though they can be constructed out of multiple datacenters. Each AZ is separate enough that they have separate power and Internet connectivity. The only connection between AZs is a low latency network. AZs can be 5 or 15 miles apart, for example. The network is fast enough that your application can act like all AZs are in the same datacenter. Each Region has at least two Availability Zones. There are 32 AZs total. Using AZs it’s possible to create a high availability architecture for your application. At least 9 more Availability Zones and 4 more Regions are coming in 2016.
AWS has 53 edge locations around the world. Edge locations are used by CloudFront, Amazon’s Content Distribution Network (CDN) and Route53, Amazon’s managed DNS server. Edge locations enable users to access content with a very low latency no matter where they are in the world.
Building Block Services AWS has created a number of services that use multiple AZs internally to be highly available and fault tolerant. Here is a list of what services are available where. You can use these services in your application, for a fee, without having to worry about making them highly available yourself. Some services that exist within an AZ: CloudFront, Route 53, S3, DynamoDB, Elastic Load Balancing, EFS, Lambda, SQS, SNS, SES, SWF. A highly available architecture can be created using services even though they exist within a single AZ.
1 User
In this scenario you are the only user and you want to get a website running.
Your architecture will look something like: Run on a single instance, maybe a type t2.micro. Instance types comprise varying combinations of CPU, memory, storage, and networking capacity and give you the flexibility to choose the appropriate mix of resources for your applications. The one instance would run the entire web stack, for example: web app, database, management, etc. Use Amazon Route 53 for the DNS. Attach a single Elastic IP address to the instance. Works great, for a while.
Vertical Scaling
You need a bigger box. Simplest approach to scaling is choose a larger instance type. Maybe a c4.8xlarge or m3.2xlarge, for example.
This approach is called vertical scaling.
Just stop your instance and choose a new instance type and you’re running with more power.
There is a wide mix of different hardware configurations to choose from. You can have a system with 244 gigs of RAM (2TB of RAM types are coming soon). Or one with 40 cores. There are High I/O instances, High CPU Instances, High storage instances.
Some Amazon services come with a Provisioned IOPS option to guarantee performance. The idea is you can perhaps use a smaller instance type for your service and make use of Amazon services like DynamoDB that can deliver scalable services so you don’t have to.
Vertical scaling has a big problem: there’s no failover, no redundancy. If the instance has a problem your website will die. All your eggs are in one basket.
Eventually a single instances can only get so big. You need to do something else.
Users > 10
Separate out a single host into multiple hosts One host for the web site. One host for the database. Run any database you want, but you are on the hook for the database administration. Using separate hosts allows the web site and the database to be scaled independently of each other. Perhaps your database will need a bigger machine than your web site, for example.
Or instead of running your own database you could use a database service. Are you a database admin? Do your really want to worry about backups? High availability? Patches? Operating systems? A big advantage of using a service is you can have a multi Availability Zone database setup with a single click. You won’t have to worry about replication or any of that sort of thing. Your database will be highly available and reliable.
As you might imagine Amazon has several fully managed database services to sell you: Amazon RDS (Relational Database Service). There are many options: Microsoft SQL Server, Oracle, MySQL, PostgreSQL, MariaDB, Amazon Aurora. Amazon DynamoDB. A NoSQL managed database. Amazon Redshift. A petabyte scale data warehouse system.
More Amazon Aurora: Automatic storage scaling up to 64TB. You no longer have to provision the storage for your data. Up to 15 read read-replicas Continuous (incremental) backups to S3. 6-way replication across 3 AZs. This helps you handle failure. MySQL compatible.
Start with a SQL database instead of a NoSQL database. The suggestion is to start with a SQL database. The technology is established. There’s lots of existing code, communities, support groups, books, and tools. You aren’t going to break a SQL database with your first 10 million users. Not even close. (unless your data is huge). Clear patterns to scalability.
When might you need start with a NoSQL database? If you need to store > 5 TB of data in year one or you have an incredibly data intensive workload. Your application has super low-latency requirements. You need really high throughput. You need to really tweak the IOs you are getting both on the reads and the writes. You don’t have any relational data.
Users > 100
Use a separate host for the web tier.
Store the database on Amazon RDS. It takes care of everything.
That’s all you have to do.
Users > 1000
As architected your application has availability issues. If the host for your web service fails then your web site goes down.
So you need another web instance in another Availability Zone. That’s OK because the latency between the AZs is in the low single digit milliseconds, almost like they right next to each other.
You also need to a slave database to RDS that runs in another AZ. If there’s a problem with the master your application will automatically switch over to the slave. There are no application changes necessary on the failover because your application always uses the same endpoint.
An Elastic Load Balancer (ELB) is added to the configuration to load balance users between your two web host instances in the two AZs.
Elastic Load Balancer (ELB): ELB is a highly available managed load balancer. The ELB exists in all AZs. It’s a single DNS endpoint for your application. Just put it in Route 53 and it will load balance across your web host instances. The ELB has Health Checks that make sure traffic doesn’t flow to failed hosts. It scales without your doing anything. If it sees additional traffic it scales behind the scenes both horizontally and vertically. You don’t have to manage it. As your applications scales so is the ELB.
Users > 10,000s - 100,000s
The previous configuration has 2 instances behind the ELB, in practice you can have 1000s of instances behind the ELB. This is horizontal scaling.
You’ll need to add more read replicas to the database, to RDS. This will take load off the write master.
Consider performance and efficiency by lightening the load off your web tier servers by moving some of the traffic elsewhere. Move static content in your web app to Amazon S3 and Amazon CloudFront. CloudFront is the Amazon’s CDN that stores your data in the 53 edge locations across the world.
Amazon S3 is an object base store. It’s not like EBS, it’s not storage that’s attached to an EC2 instance, it’s an object store, not a block store. It’s a great place to store static content, like javascript, css, images, videos. This sort of content does not need to sit on an EC2 instance. Highly durable, 11 9’s of reliability. Infinitely scalable, throw as much data as it as you want. Customers store multiple petabytes of data in S3. Objects of up to 5TB in size are supported. Encryption is supported. You can use Amazon’s encryption, your encryption, or an encryption service.
Amazon CloudFront is cache for your content. It caches content at the edge locations to provide your users the lowest latency access possible. Without a CDN your users will experience higher latency access to your content. Your servers will also be under higher load as they are serving the content as well as handling the web requests. One customer needed to serve content at 60 Gbps. The web tier didn’t even know that was going on, CloudFront handled it all.
You can also lighten the load by shifting session state off your web tier. Store the session state in ElastiCache or DynamoDB. This approach also sets your system up to support auto scaling in the future.
You can also lighten the load by caching data from your database into ElastiCache. Your database doesn’t need to handle all the gets for data. A cache can handle a lot of that work and leaves the database to handle more important traffic.
Amazon DynamoDB - A managed NoSQL database You provision the throughput you want. You dial up the read and write performance you want to pay for. Supports fast, predictable performance. Fully distributed and fault tolerant. It exists in multiple Availability Zones. It’s a key-value store. JSON is supported. Documents up to 400KB in size are supported.
Amazon Elasticache - a managed Memcached or Redis Managing a memcached cluster isn’t making you more money so let Amazon do that for you. That’s the pitch. The clusters are automatically scaled for you. It’s a self-healing infrastructure, if nodes fail new nodes are started automatically.
You can also lighten the load by shifting dynamic content to CloudFront. A lot of people know CloudFront can handle static content, like files, but it can also handle some dynamic content. This topic is not discussed further in the talk, but here’s a link.
If you provision enough capacity to always handle your peak traffic load, Black Friday, for example, you are wasting money. It would be better to match compute power with demand. That’s what Auto Scaling let’s you do, the automatic resizing of compute clusters.
You can define the minimum and maximum size of your pools. As a user you decide what’s the smallest number of instances in your cluster and the largest number of instances.
CloudWatch is a management service that’s embedded into all applications. CloudWatch events drive scaling. Are you going to scale on CPU utilization? Are you going to scale on latency? On network traffic? You can also push your own custom metrics into CloudWatch. If you want to scale on something application specific you can push that metric into CloudWatch and then tell Auto Scaling you want to scale on that metric.
Users > 500,000+
The addition from the previous configuration is auto scaling groups are added to the web tier. The auto scaling group includes the two AZs, but can expand to 3 AZs, up to as many as are in the same region. Instances can pop up in multiple AZs not just for scalability, but for availability.
The example has 3 web tier instances in each AZ, but it could be thousands of instances. You could say you want a minimum of 10 instances and a maximum of a 1000.
ElastiCache is used to offload popular reads from the database.
DynamoDB is used to offload Session data.
You need to add monitoring, metrics and logging. Host level metrics. Look at a single CPU instance within an autoscaling group and figure out what’s going wrong. Aggregate level metrics. Look at metrics on the Elastic Load Balancer to get feel for performance of the entire set of instances. Log analysis. Look at what the application is telling you using CloudWatch logs. CloudTrail helps you analyze and manage logs. External Site Performance. Know what your customers are seeing as end users. Use a service like New Relic or Pingdom.
You need to know what your customers are saying. Is their latency bad? Are they getting an error when they go to your web page?
Squeeze as much performance as you can from your configuration. Auto Scaling can help with that. You don’t want systems that are at 20% CPU utilization.
Automation
The infrastructure is getting big, it can scale to 1000s of instances. We have read replicas, we have horizontal scaling, but we need some automation to help manage it all, we don’t want to manage each individual instance.
There’s a hierarchy of automation tools. Do it yourself: Amazon EC2, AWS CloudFormation. Higher-level services: AWS Elastic Beanstalk, AWS OpsWorks
AWS Elastic Beanstalk: manages the infrastructure for your application automatically. It’s convenient but there’s not a lot of control.
AWS OpsWorks: an environment where you build your application in layers, you use Chef recipes to manage the layers of your application. Also enables the ability to do Continuous Integration and deployment.
AWS CloudFormation: been around the longest. Offers the most flexibility because it offers a templatized view of your stack. It can be used to build your entire stack or just components of the stack. If you want to update your stack you update the Cloud Formation template it will update just that one piece of your application. Lots of control, but less convenient.
AWS CodeDeploy: Deploys your code to a fleet of EC2 instances. Can deploy to one or thousands of instances. Code Deploy can point to an auto scaling configuration so code is deployed to a group of instances. Can also be used in conjunction with Chef and Puppet.
Decouple Infrastructure
Use SOA/microservices. Take components from your tiers and separate them out. Create separate services like when you separated the web tier from the database tier.
The individual services can then be scaled independently. This gives you a lot of flexibility for scaling and high availability.
SOA is a key component of the architectures built by Amazon.
Loose coupling sets you free. You can scale and fail components independently. If a worker node fails in pulling work from SQS does it matter? No, just start another one. Things are going to fail, let’s build an architecture that handles failure. Design everything as a black box. Decouple interactions. Favor services with built-in redundancy and scalability rather than building your own.
Don’t Reinvent the Wheel
Only invest in tasks that differentiate you as a business.
Amazon has a lot of services that are inherently fault tolerant because they span multiple AZs. For example: queuing, email, transcoding, search, databases, monitoring, metrics, logging, compute. You don’t have to build these yourself.
SQS: queueing service. The first Amazon service offered. It spans multiple AZs so it’s fault tolerant. It’s scalable, secure, and simple. Queuing can help your infrastructure by helping you pass messages between different components of your infrastructure. Take for example a Photo CMS. The systems that collects the photos and processes them should be two different systems. They should be able to scale independently. They should be loosely coupled. Ingest a photo, put it in queue, and workers can pull photos off the queue and do something with them.
AWS Lambda: lets you run code without provisioning or managing servers. Great tool for allowing you to decouple your application. In the Photo CMS example Lambda can respond to S3 events so when a S3 file is added the Lambda function to process is automatically triggered. We’ve done away with EC2. It scales out for you and there’s no OS to manage.
Users > 1,000,000+
Reaching a million users and above requires bits of all the previous points: Multi-AZ Elastic Load Balancing between tiers. Not just on the web tier, but also on the application tier, data tier, and any other tier you have. Auto Scaling Service Oriented Architecture Serve Content Smartly with S3 and CloudFront Put caching in front of the DB Move state off the web tier.
Use Amazon SES to send email.
Use CloudWatch for monitoring.
Users > 10,000,000+
As we get bigger we’ll hit issues in the data tier. You will potentially start to run into issues with your database around contention with the write master, which basically means you can only send so much write traffic to one server.
How do you solve it? Federation Sharding Moving some functionality to other types of DBs (NoSQL, graph, etc)
Federation - splitting into multiple DBs based on function For example, create a Forums Database, a User Database, a Products Database. You might have had these in a single database before, now spread them out. The different databases can be scaled independently of each other. The downsides: you can’t do cross database queries; it delays getting to the next strategy, which is sharding.
Sharding - splitting one dataset across multiple hosts More complex at the application layer, but there’s no practical limit on scalability. For example, in a Users Database ⅓ of the users might be sent to one shard, and the last third to another shard, and another shard to another third.
Moving some functionality to other types of DBs Start thinking about a NoSQL database. If you have data that doesn’t require complex joins, like say a leaderboard, rapid ingest of clickstream/log data, temporary data, hot tables, metadata/lookup tables, then consider moving it to a NoSQL database. This means they can be scaled independently of each other.
Users > 11 Million
Scaling is an iterative process. As you get bigger there's always more you can do.
Fine tune your application.
More SOA of features/functionality.
Go from Multi-AZ to multi-region.
Start to build custom solutions to solve your particular problem that nobody has ever done before. If you need to serve a billion customers you may need custom solutions.
Deep analysis of your entire stack.
In Review
Use a multi-AZ infrastructure for reliability.
Make use of self-scaling services like ELB, S3, SQS, SNS, DynamoDB, etc.
Build in redundancy at every level. Scalability and redundancy are not two separate concepts, you can often do both at the same time.
Start with a traditional relational SQL database.
Cache data both inside and outside your infrastructure.
Use automation tools in your infrastructure.
Make sure you have good metrics/monitoring/logging in place. Make sure you are finding out what your customers experience with your application.
Split tiers into individual services (SOA) so they can scale and fail independently of each other.
Use Auto Scaling once you’re ready for it.
Don’t reinvent the wheel, use a managed service instead of coding your own, unless it’s absolutely necessary.
Move to NoSQL if and when it makes sense. |
The "spies" indicated that the security agencies require them to act as couriers.
Several persons who returned to India from Pakistan after completing their sentence for spying have decided to approach the government for compensation for the years they spent behind bars.
They claim they were on a "spying mission" for Indian intelligence agencies and that the government discarded them once they got arrested in Pakistan.
Even after their return to India after languishing in jail, the authorities remained indifferent towards them, they said.
The only exception was Kashmir Singh, who got land and monetary compensation from the Punjab government. He returned in 2008 after spending over three decades in a Pakistani jail.
Karamat Rahi, who lives in Gurdaspur district's Khaira Kalan village, said: "I am living a pauper's life now and have fallen off the agencies' map. Former spies have been coordinating with each other across the border states. We plan to highlight our plight to the government and demand compensation for giving our prime years to the nation."
Karamat had shifted to India from Pakistan in 1980. "The security agencies took advantage of my background. They pushed me back into Pakistan in 1983. I worked for the agency and got arrested in 1988 near Minar-e-Pakistan with sensitive documents. The agencies summarily condemned me following my arrest," he said. Karamat's release was possible in 2005 after the intervention of then Punjab CM Amarinder Singh.
"When I returned after spending 18 years in jail, I approached the agency for rehabilitation. They told me not to make a noise about my plight. But I need help for settling my son, who has grown up," Karamat said.
Surjeet Singh, who returned to India after spending over three decades in prison, echoed similar sentiments.
"I will relax for a few days and then work out a strategy for seeking compensation from the government," he said, adding that he would welcome any move by fellow "spies" towards a joint effort for compensation.
Daniel aka Bahadur, who hails from Dadwain village in Gurdaspur and pulls a rickshaw to earn his livelihood, also accused the "authorities who sent him to Pakistan" of refusing to recognise him.
Daniel was apprehended by the Pakistani rangers in 1993 and imprisoned for over four years. "I tried to contact the officers who had sent me to the country but no one bothered about me," he said.
According to him, he met many other Indians incarcerated in jail in Pakistan on espionage charges.
Another resident of Dadwain village, Sunil Masih, was arrested on February 2, 1999, in Shakargarh in the neighbouring country. He spent eight years in jail and returned home in 2006. "I was in a bad shape when I returned. I was vomiting blood and had wounds all over my body," he recalled.
Karamat revealed many "spies" had died in Pakistan unsung. Satpal of Dadwain village was arrested in the country in 1999 for being a RAW agent. He died in a Pakistani jail in 2000. When the government tried to hand over his body to India, the agencies disowned him. His body was kept in a Lahore hospital for a month. It was finally sent to India after the local press highlighted the issue.
The "spies" indicated that the security agencies require them to act as couriers. After picking them up, the agencies train them to identify military vehicles and strategic installations. They also teach them the local language and customs.
"In Kashmir's case, he assumed a Muslim name and learnt to offer namaz. He was also circumcised," Karamat said.
How the spies source information is another tricky issue. Corruption is deep-rooted in Pakistan as well. "Money always does the trick for us. What do you think, they will let me in at a cantonment if I enter it for selling oranges?" a person claiming to be a former spy asked.
He also claimed that several Pakistani soldiers were on the "payroll" of Indian agencies. |
Edmontonians are “terrible drivers,” says the city’s police chief, and the massive increase in traffic fatalities this year seems to enforce his belief.
There have been 35 traffic fatalities in Edmonton in 2015, surpassing the totals from each of the past five years. There were 12 more fatalities this year than in 2014. Edmonton’s total also dwarfs those of Calgary (23), Hamilton (18) and Winnipeg (12).
The victims are drivers and pedestrians; men and women. They range in age from their early 20s to their 90s.
Drivers have crashed into a Walmart, a tree, a cement post, a parked car and a power pole this year. Two pedestrians died after being hit by LRT trains.
In February, a 39-year-old woman died after she was struck by a snow removal vehicle. In March, a 65-year-old woman died after she was mowed down by a bicycle.
Edmontonians continue to tell police that traffic enforcement is their “No. 1 priority,” police Chief Rod Knecht said during a year-end interview.
People have told police they want to see more traffic enforcement, including speed traps and tickets for distracted driving, Knecht said, but police have had to cut down in that area because calls for service are up significantly, with an additional 12,000 from last year, he said.
Distracted and impaired driving, and speeding have remained consistent factors in collisions during the past three years, acting Staff Sgt. Gener Alvarado with the major collision investigation section said in August.
And nearly half of the people involved in fatal collisions were not wearing seatbelts.
“It’s still the decision-making process of the driver that’s the bulk of the reason why we have this accident rate,” Alvarado said.
Starting Friday, distracted drivers in Alberta will be issued a $287 fine and three demerit points on their licences. The law was amended by the NDP government to include the demerit points and refers to driving while using hand-held cellphones, texting or e-mailing, using electronic devices, such as laptop computers, video games, cameras, video entertainment displays and MP3 players, entering information on GPS units, reading printed materials, writing, printing or sketching, and personal grooming.
Personal grooming is defined as brushing and flossing teeth, putting on makeup, curling hair, clipping nails or shaving.
Knecht said earlier this month that he supports the inclusion of demerits.
“Prolific offenders really want to keep their licence … and I think this will deter those folks,” he said.
In Alberta, fully licensed drivers who accumulate 15 or more points over two years face a one-month licence suspension.
Knecht also said he would like officers to have the power to seize vehicles if the drivers have been caught driving at excessively dangerous speeds. He said officers are continuously catching people speeding at more than 50 km/h over the posted limit.
Traffic safety is a shared responsibility and reducing collisions, injuries and fatalities requires a concerted effort by all road users, said Maya Filipovic, spokeswoman for the City of Edmonton’s office of traffic safety.
The office adopts an integrated approach to traffic safety that is embedded in the five E’s: education, engineering, enforcement, engagement and evaluation, she said Tuesday. In line with this approach, the office has initiatives in place to increase traffic safety in Edmonton.
Recently, city council approved the 2016-2020 road safety strategy for the city. The strategy’s goal is to have no fatalities or injuries on city streets.
“We continue to work hard to reduce collisions, injuries and fatalities relating to key factors such as speed, distraction and impairment,” Filipovic said.
Edmonton traffic fatalities
2010- 28
2011- 20
2012- 29
2013- 26
2014- 23
2015- 35
2015 traffic fatalities across Canada (as of Dec. 29)
Calgary — 23
Hamilton — 18
Winnipeg — 12
oellwand@postmedia.com
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Author Peter Bebergal’s new book, Season of the Witch: How the Occult Saved Rock and Roll examines a wide swath of subcultural history to explore the marriage between mysticism and music in the rock era. Covered in-depth are David Bowie, Killing Joke, King Crimson, Arthur Brown, Led Zeppelin and The Rolling Stones. And of course Aleister Crowley and underground filmmaker Kenneth Anger loom large over the proceedings. I asked the author a few questions over email.
What’s the book’s overarching thesis in a nutshell? How did the occult save rock and roll?
The essential spirit behind rock and roll, especially in the early days, is rebellion. It was a social, sexual, political, and even an artistic agitation. The book’s main claim is that at the root of this is a spiritual rebellion. Even rock’s physicality—driven by sex—was condemned as sinful, a temptation by the devil to lure kids into deviant behavior. Fears of rock were also driven by racism as the rhythms and energy of rock were—rightly—seen as coming from African American music, but was believed to be barbaric, tribal, and wickedly pagan. For musicians and fans to push forward was a deliberate, albeit often unconscious, middle-finger to mainstream ideas about what was godly. The Beat Generation, who a decade or so earlier were using art as a form of personal and social revolt, had already paved a path laden with drugs, Eastern mysticism, and occult imagery. It made perfect sense that when artists, and by extension the culture of rock, were seeking a spiritual identity to give weight to their music and meaning to their own lives, they would turn towards alternative spiritual practices.
Furthermore, there is something deeply human that what we call occult practices have given expression to. I would call this a desire for ecstasis, for having an unmediated experience with the divine. Magic and religion were once inseparable, but even when these practices were outlawed, people continued to find ways to have their own personal agency in regards to their spiritual lives. But I think we would prefer to do this in the context of community, as had once been done. This drive will always find a way to manifest, and rock and roll provided a most potent vehicle to reignite the echo of the earliest forms of worship; theater, dance, performance, shouting, drumming, and even intoxication and the shadow of madness, of being possessed by the gods.
All of these elements come together in what I define in the book as the “occult imagination,” which includes not only the way musicians and fans together created a mystique and mystery around the music, but the negative responses often found in the media and the mainstream religious communities. At the crossroads of all these things is where a potent spell has been cast over popular culture. The occult is the spiritual salvation of rock and roll, and I believe if you were to pull out this thread, popular music would sound and look very different.
How pivotal was the role Kenneth Anger played in all this? When I was a kid reading about his misadventures with the Rolling Stones and Jimmy Page, he seemed like such a far-out, fascinating and glamorous character to me. My own lifelong interest in Aleister Crowley probably starts there.
Kenneth Anger’s arrival into the midst of rock and roll culture couldn’t have been better timed. Here were young musicians like Jimmy Page and Mick Jagger, at the top of their game and feeling on top of the world, finding themselves often characterized in the media as dangerous, as bringers of chaos by way of their music and their colorful lives on and off stage. Here comes this controversial filmmaker, this “glamorous character” exactly as you say, talking about magic and how art can be a form of ritual. Anger was also older by almost twenty years, so anything he said about Crowley or the occult must have been heard as dark wisdom. Page loved this stuff, but I don’t think he ever actually practiced magic in any serious way, if at all, but Anger was the real deal. And he wasn’t a hermit. He didn’t require you to give up your fame and fortune to be initiated. In fact, for Anger, the fame and fortune were part of magic’s appeal and had the ability to transform culture through art. Jagger liked the Baudelaireian dandyism of Anger, and imagined himself the same. For Page and Jagger, Anger elevated fanciful ideas of the occult into something that could be perceived as serious and real. And their association with him, despite the various falling outs they each had with the filmmaker, only fueled the public’s speculations about Led Zeppelin and The Rolling Stones being occult devotees or even Satanists. Even though Anger was in no way a Satanist, it was during this time that the conflating of occultism and devil worship was becoming solidified. It was only deepened when Jagger would swagger like a prideful Lucifer when singing “Sympathy for the Devil.” In the end, Anger is a shadow figure that is responsible for giving both the Rolling Stones and Led Zeppelin, two of the most influential rock bands of all time, an aura of magic and mystery that would shape so much of rock’s identity and the way the media and public responded to them. In this sense, Anger’s magic was successful.
Which rockers do you find really consider themselves as occultists working in the rock idiom—occultist first, musician second—versus some who it’s all an act for them. Coil, for instance, seemed equally about the spell-casting and the music.
Coil certainly fit this definition, as well as Psychic TV, who for a time created a kind of virtual magical lodge via Thee Temple ov Psychick Youth. I think for a time Jinx Dawson saw her band Coven as being a vehicle for her occult practice, and later the band Tool integrated their own beliefs about magic into their music. But for some, while they saw their music has having potential to work magic, they still saw themselves first and foremost as musicians. Arthur Brown, best known for his song “Fire” believed a rock concert could function as a shamanic rite. He used every element of the performance, from his makeup to the staging to the way he moved, as an attempt to channel and then release what he believed was magical energy. Others would later copy his stage antics, but had no occult intentions at all, such as Alice Cooper and KISS (although they would of course be accused of being in league with infernal forces). I also think David Bowie for time believed he was working a kind of magic, but again, it was the music and the performance where it was wholly realized.
What’s the weirdest thing you uncovered when researching the book?
I was quite surprised to learn that the members of Killing Joke, following the lead of their singer Jaz Coleman, went to Iceland to await what Coleman believed was a coming apocalypse. I also learned that after Arthur Brown had disbanded his first band the Crazy World of Arthur Brown, he had a mescaline vision in which he was visited by an angel in armor, holding aloft a sword. Brown interpreted this as any real rock musician should: God was telling him to start another band. But I think the weirdest thing was how so much of rock’s association with the occult started by a simple problem of translation. In the 1840s, a young African named Samuel Ajayi Crowther from a Yoruba who had converted to Christianity wanted to start a mission back in his homeland, so he set out translating the bible into Yoruban. Of course not every word had a corresponding one in the other language, and so when he came to the issue of what to call the devil, he chose the name of his people’s trickster god, the closest the Yorubans had to a god that could not be trusted, that might tempt you. This god’s name was Eshu, and by the time the deity travelled with other converted Yorubans back to the American South, the god of the crossroads became Satan.
Below, Cerith Wyn Evans video for Psychic TV’s “Unclean”: |
Web server benchmarking is a way of determining the performance of a web server with the aim of establishing how well it copes under a sufficiently high workload. Performance testing is important to help maintain continuous system performance.
The performance of a web server can be expressed in a number of different ways including the number of requests served within a certain time, the latency response time for each new connection or request, or the throughput.
The open source Linux benchmarking tools featured in this article enable the performance of a web server to be tested prior to releasing it in a production environment. Accurately testing a web server is quite a challenging activity. This is, in part, because a web system is a distributed system. Further, Hypertext Transfer Protocol, the application protocol for hypermedia information systems, can cause connection usage patterns that the Transmission Control Protocol was not designed for. Moreover, problems are generated in testing the performance because of the sheer dynamism of a web server.
To provide an insight into the quality of software that is available, we have compiled a list of 6 high quality web server performance tools that offer accurate and reliable benchmarking. Hopefully, there will be something of interest here for anyone that needs to test web server performance.
Now, let’s explore the 6 performance testing tools at hand. For each title we have compiled its own portal page, a full description with an in-depth analysis of its features, a screenshot of the software in action, together with links to relevant resources and reviews.
Web Server Benchmarking Tools Apache JMeter Load testing and performance measurement application curl-loader Performance testing tool ApacheBench Apache (and other web servers) benchmark tool FunkLoad Web testing tool in the same spirit as Perl's WWW::Mechanize httperf HTTP load generator Siege HTTP regression testing and benchmarking utility
Return to our complete collection of Group Tests, identifying the finest free and open source Linux software.
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The holiday season is typically a busy one for Judge Roy Bean Public House in midtown Manhattan.
The bar and restaurant had been on a solid run, up 20 percent overall for the year, and owner Peter Pernicone had high hopes for strong sales to close out 2016.
Then came Election Day.
The small business is located in the shadow of Trump Tower on West 56th Street, which is now swarmed with New York police officers and Secret Service agents, guarding President-elect Donald Trump as he makes the transition from businessman to commander-in-chief.
"For November, we're down 30 percent," Pernicone said. "They're keeping the streets open, then closing them down. There's no rhyme or reason. We don't know what to expect. The police presence on the corner has been intimidating, and tourists are scared to walk down 56th street." |
President Obama issued an alternative pay plan late Friday, setting an across-the-board increase for civilian federal employees of 1.3 percent in 2016.
The figure matches the amount the president requested in his fiscal 2016 budget proposal. Obama issued a separate plan providing a 1.3 percent boost in monthly basic pay rates for military service members.
The civilian raise will come in two forms. On Friday, Obama authorized a 1 percent across-the-board raise. In November, the president said he will issue an alternative plan for locality pay rates that will bring the aggregate increases to 1.3 percent.
“The 1.0 percent across-the-board base pay increase for civilian employees is the first step toward implementing an aggregate 1.3 percent increase as proposed earlier this year and included in the president’s FY 2016 budget,” a spokeswoman for the Office of Management and Budget told Government Executive. “The remaining increase in civilian pay will come in the form of locality adjustments across all pay areas.”
The National Treasury Employees Union said the 1 percent across-the-board raise will be coupled with a 0.3 percent locality pay bump. Locality pay has been frozen since 2010.
Obama said that his pay proposal “will not materially affect the federal government's ability to attract and retain a well-qualified federal workforce.”
NTEU President Tony Reardon took issue with that claim.
“NTEU will continue to push for a more meaningful raise for the federal workforce,” Reardon said, “one that would help the government stay competitive with private-sector employers and help employees cope with rising costs for everything from housing to tuition to food. Fair pay will be one of my key priorities in the coming year.”
If the president had not informed Congress of his alternative pay plan for feds by the end of August, then the increase mandated by the 1990 Federal Employees Pay Comparability Act would have kicked in. Under FEPCA, the raise would be determined by the change in the Employment Cost Index minus 0.5 percent.
Presidents largely have ignored the FEPCA formula in their federal pay raise proposals, preferring to offer their own figure. Congress created FEPCA, which provides an annual across-the-board salary boost and a locality pay adjustment for General Schedule employees, to close the public and private sector pay gap. The Federal Salary Council has said that federal employees are underpaid relative to private sector workers by approximately 34.6 percent.
The reality, however, is that Congress will end up determining whether federal employees receive a pay raise next year. So far, lawmakers have remained mum on the issue. Unless Congress proactively alters the proposal, Obama’s 1.3 percent recommendation will become law.
Unlike last year, Obama did not indicate he would have given civilian employees a higher raise if economic conditions were improved. He did mention that for the military, however.
“As our country continues to recover from serious economic conditions affecting the general welfare, however, we must maintain efforts to keep our nation on a sustainable fiscal course,” Obama wrote in his order to Congress. “This effort requires tough choices, especially in light of budget constraints.”
The House has approved a 2.3 percent pay raise for members of the military in 2016, who also received a 1 percent raise in 2014 and 2015. Senate bills setting military pay, however, support a 1.3 percent raise for troops in 2016 -- the same as Obama’s proposal.
Raises for both the military and civilian workforces will go into effect Jan. 1, 2016. |
If a flash is bright enough, it can cause reflection off of the retina. iStockphoto.com /Andrei Nacu
We've all see photographs where the people in the picture have spooky red eyes. These are photos taken at night with a flash. Where do the red eyes come from?
The red color comes from light that reflects off of the retinas in our eyes. In many animals, including dogs, cats and deer, the retina has a special reflective layer called the tapetum lucidum that acts almost like a mirror at the backs of their eyes. If you shine a flashlight or headlights into their eyes at night, their eyes shine back with bright, white light. Here is what Encyclopedia Britannica has to say about the tapetum lucidum:
Humans don't have this tapetum lucidum layer in their retinas. If you shine a flashlight in a person's eyes at night, you don't see any sort of reflection. The flash on a camera is bright enough, however, to cause a reflection off of the retina -- what you see is the red color from the blood vessels nourishing the eye.
Many cameras have a "red eye reduction" feature. In these cameras, the flash goes off twice -- once right before the picture is taken, and then again to actually take the picture. The first flash causes people's pupils to contract, reducing "red eye" significantly. Another trick is to turn on all the lights in the room, which also contracts the pupil.
Another way to reduce or eliminate "red eye" in pictures is to move the flash away from the lens. On most small cameras, the flash is only an inch or two away from the lens, so the reflection comes right back into the lens and shows up on the film. If you can detach the flash and hold it several feet away from the lens, that helps a lot. You can also try bouncing the flash off the ceiling if that is an option.
For more photography tips, see the links below.
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If we reduce wastage, drug prices won’t go down Back in March, the NY Times published an article claiming that we lose $3 billion dollars each year because of the cancer drug that are wasted. The article was inspired by a paper from Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center which came up with the daunting $3 billion number. The crux of the argument is that drug companies sell their products in packages that leave physicians no choice but to throw out the “extra” drug that remains after a dose is administered. If drug companies simply sold their products in more convenient sizes, we could reduce this waste and recoup some of that $3 billion. Going even further than that, Peter Bach, one of the authors of the paper, infers that drug companies are intentionally doing this to boost their profits! That’s quite an accusation. The leftover drug still has to be paid for, even when discarded, making it possible for drug companies to artificially increase the amount of drug they sell per treated patient by increasing the amount in each single dose vial relative to the typically required dose. – Peter Bach In reality, reducing the wastage of drugs would have no impact whatsoever on the price of drugs. And more importantly, if drug manufacturers followed Peter’s advice and came up with more vial sizes to reduce waste, that would be going against FDA guidance and likely result in an increase of mis-dosing of cancer drugs. It is true that cancer drugs are wasted. In fact, it’s practically unavoidable for certain drugs that are dosed based on body-weight. Since patients come in all shapes and sizes, you would need an infinite number of vial sizes in order to make sure no wastage occurred. But the question is, would reducing wastage reduce drug prices? The answer to the question is no. Drug companies determine price independent of packaging or vial size. Let’s look at a hypothetical drug, Product A. If Product A is 10% better than a drug on the market, you might chose to price it at a 10% premium (yes, it’s more complex than that, but bear with me). If the competing drug is $1000/month, you would then price Product A at $1100/month. Keep in mind you haven’t even thought about your packaging or dosing at this point. Pretty straightforward so far. Let’s look at a couple of extreme examples to see how you might price Product A under different vial size scenarios: (1) only one large vial size is produced and (2) 5 smaller vial sizes are produced. How would each one be priced? Option 1: One large vial (200 mg) This vial would be large enough so that any patient would require only one vial. The math is easy on this one, just price the vial for an average patient ($1100/month). Yes, for smaller patients, most of the vial would be thrown away, but every single patient would cost $1100/month. Option 2: Five smaller vials (1 mg, 5 mg, 10 mg, 25 mg, 50 mg) Since there are so many more vial sizes, there will be a lot less wastage in this scenario. Before we look at costs, lets do some math so we have the numbers we need. If the average patient should cost $1100/month the the price per mg is $11/mg ($1100/month for average patient who take 100 mg per month). If an average patient weights 70 kg and is taking 100 mg per month, the dose is 1.4 mg/kg. Looking at the costs across three different patient types: Small patient (50 kg) – they need 70 mg per month (1 x 50mg and 2 x 10mg vials), so they cost $770 Average patient (70 kg) – they need 100 mg per month (2 x 50mg vials), so they cost $1100/month Large patient (90 kg) – they need 129 mg per month (2 x 50mg, 1 x 25mg and 4 x 1mg vials, $1414/month What do you end up with if you average costs across all patients? A cost of $1100/month. Nothing has changed except you wasted a lot less of the drug and the large patient’s physician or nurse needs to gather up 7 vials in 3 different sizes and make sure there are no mistakes! Now you might be saying “but you’re not wasting as much drug! Isn’t that a positive thing?” Yes, reducing waste would reduce manufacturing costs, so yes, it is a positive thing in isolation. But what if we look at the big picture? First off, raw material costs are a very small part of the cost for most pharmaceuticals. The cost of goods sold (COGS) for most drugs is less than 10% of the price and often only a few percent. However, if you chose to create more vial sizes, that has additional expense as well. You have more vials to manufacturer, more validation studies to do, etc. Overall, the cost of having more vials might be more than the savings on raw materials! However, the most important reason to limit the number of vial sizes is patient safety, as show in the “large patient” example above. That’s why the FDA prefers fewer rather than more vial sizes. If you go in for a chemotherapy session, do you know if the pharmacist grabbed the right vial? You do if there is only one size available. Fewer vial sizes means less of an opportunity for dosing mistakes. In conclusion, the paper published by Memorial Sloan Kettering has good intentions, but missed out on the bigger picture. Reducing drug waste would likely result in no cost savings whatsoever and an increase in medical errors. Advertisements Share this: Twitter
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An unprecedented looked at how biotech prices their drugs Whether you’re in the biopharma industry or not, you’ve heard about the controversy surrounding the pricing of Sovaldi and Harvoni, two therapies for hepatitis C that have revolutionized the treatment of a very common and sometimes deadly disease. The topic first came up when Sovaldi was launched December 2013, but the noise still hasn’t died down thanks to people like Martin Shkreli and companies like Valeant. At the same time there have been a lot of views expressed about how drugs companies price drugs and how they should price drugs. The interesting part is that very few people know how drug pricing is done today. That shouldn’t be surprising since those types of decisions are highly confidential and no company is interested in releasing any information to the public. That all changed last December when the Senate Finance Committee released a report on their investigation into the pricing of Sovaldi and Harvoni. You can download the entire, 144-page report here. When I started to go through it, my jaw dropped. This report provides an incredible in-depth look at how Gilead priced both drugs, including: (1) market research results from physicians and payers, (2) minutes from closed-door meetings among Gilead executives that led to the final pricing strategy and (3) post-launch responses from private and public payers. If you are at all interested in this topic, I suggest you spend a couple hours reading through the report. I will warn you though, I thought the report did show some bias in supporting the government’s position that Gilead acted recklessly. Regardless, it is an unprecedented look at how biopharma companies price their drugs. Share this: Twitter
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FDA dismisses study that shows generic drugs are lower quality than branded version In this blog post I’m going to take a step away from the business side of the pharmaceutical industry and dive a little bit deeper in to the science. In March of last year, a paper (paywall) and a poster were published that claimed generic versions of Pfizer’s Lipitor (atorvastatin) had quality problems that may impact public health. The study in question was run by a physician at Brigham and Women’s hospital in Boston by the name of Preston Mason. I don’t know about you, but a study from a very well respected institution such as Brigham and Women’s gets my attention, especially if it concerns drug quality. If you take a closer look at the results, they are quite alarming. The study found that every single generic drug they tested had very high levels of an impurity, sometimes up to 30%! This is a important issue in the industry right now as several foreign generic manufacturers, such as Ranbaxy, have been placed under FDA bans that prevent their drugs from being imported to the United States. This is quite a shocking result as the FDA standards that exist rarely allow more than a few tenths of a percent of impurities in a final product. To find impurity levels as high as 30% would suggest very lax quality standards at these generic manufacturers and would warrant an immediate recall and possible sanctions for the manufacturer. If we dive into the science a little deeper, we see that the impurity that was found was the methyl ester of Lipitor. For those who are not chemists, esters are very simple derivatives of carboxylic acids that are formed from the acid and an alcohol. The diagram below shows how the alcohol is incorporated into the molecule. At first glance the analytical methods used in the paper seem quite robust. The scientists obtained pure reference samples of both atorvastatin (the active molecule in Lipitor) and the methyl ester impurity. The researchers even went so far as to test the biologic activity of impurity to show that such high levels of the impurity would reduce the effectiveness of the drug. However, if we look a little closer, we find a critical error in the analysis that raises some doubt about the findings. If you examine how the analysis was done, the generic drug samples were prepared for analysis by dissolving them in methanol. This is a pretty typical method to prepare samples, however in this case, this method may have resulted in formation of the impurity itself. If you look at the ester chemistry diagram above, you can see that if methanol reacts with a carboxylic acid, it forms a methyl ester, the impurity in question. However, the authors of this paper did run a control. They took some of the atorvastatin reference material and placed it in methanol for 10 weeks and they did see methyl ester impurity forming, however it was a very slow process (it took 10 weeks to convert 20% of the drug to the ester). Apparently their argument is that since it took 10 weeks to form the methyl ester (and they conducted the analysis of the generic drugs much more quickly than that) that the generic drugs must have had that impurity present from the start. That is where the experimental error was made. The assumption the scientists made is that formation of the methyl ester always happens slowly. However, they only tested this on the pure atorvastatin reference material. The generic drugs that they analyzed contain more than just the active drug, they also contain other compounds used to form the tablet called excipients. Excipients are a class of chemicals that have many uses in tablet manufacturing. They are used as fillers, binders (make sure the tablet doesn’t crumble), coloring and flavoring agents. Excipient selection is very important as you need to ensure that the drug is stable, but that it also dissolves reproducibly when a patient swallows it. The excipients themselves can have a number of different properties, some are basic (alkaline) and some are acidic. If you look at the ester chemistry diagram above, you’ll see the symbol H+, which represents an acid. The formation of esters is catalyzed by acids. What likely happened in this research was that the excipients in the generic drug catalyzed the formation of the methyl ester “impurity” such that after only a few minutes in methanol a large amount of the methyl ester was formed. How could these researchers test that theory? Simply use a different alcohol in the preparation of the generic drug samples. If they used an alcohol like ethanol (ethyl alcohol), they very likely would have seen an ethyl ester impurity instead of the methyl ester, which would prove that the “impurity” was being formed by their analytic method, not by the manufacturer of the drug. This paper is a great example of why the design of scientific experiments is so critical, especially the use of controls. The only way you can prove that something like an impurity is there is by proving you’re not putting it there. This research didn’t do that and that might explain why the FDA just recently dismissed all of the paper’s findings. Share this: Twitter
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How the government makes healthcare more expensive by cutting costs Increasing healthcare costs are one of the most important issues facing the United States today. Although the rate of increase has slowed down over the past few years, the amount of money spent on healthcare in the US has risen at an alarming rate over the past decade. It’s not only an issue for private insurers as the impact of Medicare and Medicaid spending also threatens to balloon the federal budget. Incredibly, cost savings measures instituted by the government have, and will, lead to further increases in healthcare costs. How will this happen? Lets focus on the treatment of cancer for a moment; the cause and effect should be clear. When a cancer patient requires treatment such as chemotherapy, they are typically treated in one of two settings: (1) a community-based oncology clinic or (2) a hospital-affiliated clinic. Community-based clinics are private clinics owned by the doctors who practice there and can vary in size from only a few physicians to 50 or more. These clinics are run like small businesses with physicians paying themselves a salary and the clinic taking either a profit or loss at the end of the year. Hospital-affiliated clinics look very similar to community clinics from the outside, but differ in that the hospital system handles all of the accounting and the physicians who work there are typically paid a salary. Another, very important difference between the two settings is that treating a cancer patient in a hospital-affiliated clinic is typically much more expensive than treating a patient in a community clinic. Data gathered by Avalere shows that, on average, the cost of treating a cancer patient is 20% to 55% more in a hospital-based setting (table 3 in this report). Now, if you wanted to reduce the cost of healthcare, it would seem prudent to encourage cancer patients to receive their care at community-based clinics. If you’re saving roughly a third per patient on average, it adds up to a significant amount of money. The reality is that the government has instituted two different programs that are pushing patients away from community-based clinics towards hospital-affiliated clinics. And incredibly, both of these programs were instituted to reduce healthcare costs. The first government program was an attempt to reduce the amount spent on the drugs used to treat cancer. Typically, oncologists are reimbursed through “buy-and-bill.” Physicians purchase a cancer drug using their own money and once they have used it to treat a patient, they bill the patient’s insurance company. Insurers, both public and private, typically pay physicians more than what the drug actually costs in order to cover some of the overhead associated with treating a patient. This extra money is typically referred to as the “spread.” In the past, the spread was quite generous; if a doctor bought a drug for $10,000, they might get an additional 10 or 20% ($11,000 or $12,000 back from the insurer). As healthcare costs continued to rise, Medicare and Medicaid decided to reduce their reimbursement levels so as to provide as little as an additional 4.2% in spread and there is talk of lowering it further. These changes have drastically reduced the revenue that community clinics take in and in many cases has forced doctors to sell or close their community-based practices. A recent report has shown that in 2012 there was a 20% increase in both oncology clinics closing or merging with existing hospital systems. Between 2005 and 2011, the percentage of cancer patients treated in the hospital setting increased by 150% (from 13.5% to 33%). As the number of community-based clinics decreases, more patients get treated in the more expensive hospital-affiliated clinics. The other factor driving patients to hospital-affiliated clinics is the 340b program. Initially designed to assist hospitals who treat patients with little or no health insurance, the program allows certified hospitals to purchase out-patient drugs (such as cancer therapies) at a 23.1% discount (same discount Medicaid gets). This certainly helps those hospitals who treat underinsured and uninsured patients, but the program has a catch: 340b hospitals can purchase all of their out-patient drugs through this program, whether they are used for uninsured or insured patients. In addition, hospitals don’t have to pass along the savings to the insurer, they are allowed to pocket the difference. It isn’t unusual for oncology therapies to cost more than $100K/yr per patient, so that 23.1% discount becomes a lot of money, all of which goes to the bottom line of the hospitals. To give you an example, the Duke University Hospital system effectively doubled their profit margin on drugs to 53% for a gross profit of $70M. This has created a huge incentive for hospitals to both become 340b certified and for them to attract oncology patients to their clinics. The situation we now have is that cancer patients are being pushed out of the less expensive community-based setting as oncologists struggle to stay profitable and pulled into the more expensive hospital-affiliated clinics as hospitals seek to capture as much 340b business as possible. Not exactly a great way to save money now is it? Controlling healthcare spending will be a priority for the US in the coming decade. In order for that to happen, we need a coordinated effort by the government and private insurers to find a way to incentivize not only quality care but also cost-efficient care. Without an understanding of the economic pressures and incentives offered by the current system, this may prove a very difficult task. Share this: Twitter
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A setback for the hygiene hypothesis It’s always interesting when a clinical trial you’ve been watching reads out. One of the first posts I wrote for this blog was about a clinical trial that Coronado Biosciences was running based on the hygiene hypothesis. The company was testing the efficacy of T. suis ova (pig whipworm eggs) in treating Crohn’s disease. Well, Coronado Biosciences just released the results of a phase 2 trial (TRUST-1) and they are not positive. It was a double-blinded, placebo-controlled trial of 250 patients with moderate to severe Crohn’s disease, so a positive signal would have been pretty convincing evidence of the efficacy of the therapy. The primary endpoint of the trial measured response using the Crohn’s Disease Activity Index (number of patients who see a >100-point decrease in CDAI) and the secondary endpoint measured induction of remission (number of patients who achieve a CDAI score of less than 150). For both endpoints, there was no significant difference between the treated patient population and the patients who received a placebo. This is not a “we almost made it” result, but rather a “this doesn’t work at all” result. The company did see a small signal in patients with very high CDAI scores (> 290), but unfortunately it was not statistically significant. Coronado blamed it on a higher than expected placebo response, which may at first glance seem like a cop-out, but is actually quite common in trials for relapsing-remitting inflammatory diseases. Another European trial is underway (TRUST-2) so Coronado will have a second chance to prove the therapy works, but things don’t look very promising at this point. Crohn’s disease is a pretty tough market to compete in as several effective therapies already exist. Even if TRUST-2 has a positive read-out, it’s unlikely the efficacy would be enough to support commercialization.
Coronado is also running trials of T. suis ova in several other indications including ulcerative colitis, multiple sclerosis, autism and psoriasis. I’ll be following those trials closely as a positive outcome would be an incredible jump forward in our understanding of the immune system and offer new therapies for patients who often have few other options. I’ll keep you posted. Follow-up: Only a few days after posting this, Coronado Biosciences halted their TRUST-2 trial due to lack of efficacy. Not surprising, but certainly a nail in the coffin for T. suis ova in the treatment of Crohn’s disease. It will be interesting to see how the other indications fare… Share this: Twitter
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Big pharma’s “pay-to-delay” deals: Helping or hurting patients? A few weeks ago it was announced that Jon Leibowitz has decided to leave his post at the Federal Trade Commission. Jon has been the driving force behind the FTC’s attempt to ban so called “pay-to-delay” deals that have become increasingly common between branded and generic pharmaceutical companies. The FTC claims that these deals are “anti-competitive” and basically amount to collusion between branded and generic companies. According to the FTC, these deals cost the American public $3.5 billion per year in higher drug cost as cheaper generic drugs are delayed from entering the marketplace. Jon’s efforts seem to have paid off as Senator Chuck Grassley recently introduced legislation banning the deals and the Supreme Court will soon decide if the deals are legal. You might be wondering what these “pay-to-delay” deals are exactly, so lets look at a hypothetical example: Let’s say a branded pharmaceutical company is selling a patent-protected drug with annual sales of $5 billion per year. The company’s patent on the drug doesn’t expire until 2020 so they will continue to promote and sell the drug until then, upon which time a generic drug company will begin producing and selling a generic version (after gaining approval from the FDA). Generic companies compete with each other to get their generic version approved first, since it comes with a 180 day exclusivity period where no other generic company can sell their version. During the 180 days, the generic company will undercut the price of the branded therapy and grab a large part of the market share. Since the generic drug company only has to do a fraction of the R&D that the branded company did, the 180 day exclusivity is very profitable. After the 180 days are up, any generic drug company can sell their generic and the price falls to the point where there is little profit to be made. Where thing get complicated is that generic companies often don’t wait until the branded drug’s patent expires. Instead, they will challenge the validity of the patent in court and if successful, they will get the coveted 180 days of exclusivity and can start selling their generic version immediately. As you can imagine, this potential payoff creates a lot of incentive to challenge a patent. What does the patent holder do when their patent is challenged? Since there are often billions of dollars of profit at stake, they fight it out in court by hiring some very expensive lawyers to argue that their patent is valid . If the generic drug company has already started selling their generic version before the patent issue is settled (a so called “at risk” launch), the branded drug company can sue for damages if the patent is found to be valid. Since the law allows for recovery of triple damages, losing a patent decision is what generic companies fear the most (for a great example of such an outcome, look no further than Pfizer’s request for $2 billion in damages for Teva’s at-risk launch of Protonix). As you can see, the stakes are very high for both companies if a patent challenge actually ends up being decided by a judge. It’s an all or nothing outcome: one party will win big and one party will lose big. It’s for this reason that many patent challenges lead to out-of-court settlements that include so called “pay-to-delay” deals. In exchange for a payment from the branded drug company (either in the form of cash or other financial incentives) the generic drug company will agree to delay the launch of their generic version. You can think of this as a way to “meet in the middle”. Both companies get something out of the deal and it eliminates the risk of being on the losing end of a winner-takes all outcome. However, is the FTC’s allegation that pay-to-delay deals delay entry of cheaper generic drugs and hurt the consumer true? No. The launch of the generic drug is only delayed in the sense it would enter the market later than if the generic company succeeded in invalidating the patent. However, the reason why the generic company agrees to the pay-to-delay deal is because it doesn’t believe it will succeed in invalidating the patent. If pay-to-delay deals were banned, the generic company would likely just pack up its bags and head home as the possibility of losing the patent challenge is more risk than they can tolerate. If anything, pay-to-delay deals actually result in a generic drug entering the market sooner than it would have otherwise. If pay-to-deal deals are banned and branded and generic companies lose the ability to “meet in the middle”, the availability of generic drugs will likely be delayed in many cases, which is exactly what the FTC is trying to avoid. It will remain to be seen if Chuck Grassley’s bill passes into law, but in the mean time, keep an eye out for the Supreme Court decision. The court’s decision will have far reaching consequences for the pharmaceutical industry and in the end the consumer. Share this: Twitter
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Space X: What is next?
Today Space X landed a Falcon 9 1st stage on a drone in the Atlantic Ocean. The overarching goal of Space X is to colonize Mars and this is a significant advancement towards that goal. Reusable rockets will dramatically lower the cost of rocket launches and space travel. Elon Musk compares it to how expensive air travel would be if we destroyed a plane every time we took a flight. Space X previously landed a rocket on land, but this is the first time on the ocean after four previous failures. Longer range rocket launches are too far from the landing site and don’t have enough fuel to bring them back. They have test fired the other recaptured rocket and Elon Musk said they will likely reuse this rocket and launch it as early as June.
So what is next on the horizon?
18 Launches in 2016
Space X is planning 18 launches in 2016, up from 6 last year.
MCT plans released — September 2016
Elon Musk is planning to unveil the plans for the Mars Colonial Transporter in September. This will carry 100 people and 100 tons of cargo to Mars. Elon Musk has recently asserted that Space X will go to Mars in 10 years.
Falcon Heavy launch — Late 2016
The Falcon Heavy is essentially 3 Falcon 9s joined together and will be the highest capacity rocket system in use. It is only second to the Saturn V rockets that took us to the moon.
Manned launch — 2 to 3 years
Space X is planning to launch a manned spacecraft, Dragon. The test flight are planned to be at near the end of 2017. It is possible Dragon will land propulsively.
Mission to Mars 2024
Space is planning to send a dragon capsule to Mars in 2018. They also plan to send more cargo at each launch window (2020, 2022) and they plan to send people in 2024, arriving in 2025. Long term Elon Musk expects trips to Mars to take 3 months and possibly as low as 1 month. |
Suburban Canada, where SUVs fill driveways and folks seem more preoccupied with hockey schedules than climate change, may seem an elusive target for the environmental movement.
But it is on those manicured streets that the fight over pipelines, tankers and oil-sands expansion – and the Canadians who can be swayed to cast a federal ballot to curtail them – is in full swing.
Political candidates who are just now putting their electoral machines in gear are well behind the environmentalists who have been campaigning in targeted ridings for months and, in some cases, years.
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As non-partisan agencies, they say their overriding goal is to ensure that the environment is top of mind at the local level and that all candidates understand its importance to the people who will cast ballots.
But the environmentalists also acknowledge that unseating Prime Minister Stephen Harper would be a welcome result of their efforts.
"The battle for the soul of Canada is being fought in suburban areas around Canada's major cities," says Graham Saul, the executive director of Ecology Ottawa, which has been sending teams door to door for the past two years in the riding of Ottawa-Orleans – a seat currently held by Conservative MP Royal Galipeau.
"We knocked on 15,000 to 20,000 doors last year. Last summer, we knocked on every door in Orleans and some twice," Mr. Saul said. "The response is very favourable."
Historically, the environment has been a difficult sell during federal election campaigns. Stéphane Dion's Liberals tanked in 2008 on a promise of a carbon tax. And conventional wisdom says that when the economy is not strong, environmental concerns are supplanted by those that affect the pocketbook.
Nik Nanos, the president of Nanos Research, says the environment has not been a top priority of most Canadians for the past six years, perhaps because federal politicians have not been talking much about it.
But in some parts of the country, especially suburban British Columbia and Quebec, the environment is definitely on the radar, Mr. Nanos said.
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"If those environmental groups are looking at ridings in those particular regions, it probably makes a lot of sense," he said. "The outcome of the next election is uncertain. Every single riding will count. So, if you are [an] environmental advocate and you can swing five ridings out of one column into another, that could actually have a significant impact on the outcome of the next election."
Campaigning on the promise of a carbon tax would be a large risk for any political party, said John Bennett, the executive director of Sierra Club Canada.
"But there is a huge appetite out there for actually taking real environmental protection," said Mr. Bennett, whose group is a charity and does not take part in political activities, such as door-knocking. "I think there are points to be made for political parties this year to talk about climate change."
The Dogwood Initiative, an organization that aims to engage Canadians in environmental issues, is campaigning in three ridings in British Columbia and may expand its teams to as many as six more.
The work has been localized because all politics are local, says Will Horter, Dogwood's executive director.
While there are many ridings in which environmental issues are way down the list of voters' priorities, there are others in which it will be the deciding factor, and many of them are in British Columbia where Mr. Horter is convinced the 2015 election will be won.
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Dogwood and other groups with similar agendas are not targeting every seat, he said, but choosing the battlegrounds where the environmental sentiments are strong.
Mr. Saul said that is the reason his team has selected Ottawa-Orleans. It is a seat that has been held by both Liberals and Conservatives, and it's a place where environmental issues seem to have traction.
Ecology Ottawa gets behind candidates – whether Liberal, New Democrat or Green – whom it considers to be environmentally progressive and to have the best chance of winning.
"We are talking about strategic voting in cases where that's most likely to result in environmental leadership," Mr. Saul said. He is confident that his work is paying off.
"I think there is something in the air," Mr. Saul said. "I think parties that put themselves out there as trying to solve problems like the energy conflicts and public transportation and real transportation options are going to be appealing to people and those who wander around and say we can't afford to do anything are going to be seen an unimaginative and ultimately unprogressive." |
Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach (R) continued to fight releasing documents from a meeting with President Donald Trump in November, saying that the public did not need to see them and that disclosing them would impede his ability to serve on Trump’s commission to investigate voter fraud.
Kobach, who has lent support to Trump’s claims of widespread voter fraud and exaggerated instances of it in the past, made the argument with his lawyer in a Friday court filing as part of an ongoing lawsuit brought by the American Civil Liberties Union over a Kansas law requiring people to prove their citizenship to vote. As part of the lawsuit, the ACLU is requesting a Kansas federal judge unseal documents that Kobach was photographed holding when he met with Trump in November 2016, as well as a draft amendment to federal voting law, which circulated in his office. The documents contain potential amendments to the National Voter Registration Act, a 1993 law requiring motor vehicle and some other state agencies to provide opportunities to register to vote.
The public release of the documents would be significant because Kobach is the de facto leader of the Presidential Advisory Commission on Election Integrity, a probe Trump convened in May to investigate election confidence. Trump and Kobach have promised a neutral investigation, but critics say the panel is an effort to substantiate Trump’s claims of widespread voter fraud and lay the groundwork for restrictive voting laws. Documents that show Kobach attempting to change federal law to impose more restrictive voting policies could substantially undermine the perception of impartiality.
A separate email made public as part of the lawsuit revealed Kobach was already working on an attempt to amend NVRA the day after Trump was elected.
The Washington Post via Getty Images The ACLU wants the documents pictured above made public.
In the filing, Kobach, who is also running for governor of Kansas for 2018, seemed aware that releasing the documents would impact his work on the commission.
“It would undermine Secretary Kobach’s interest in fulfilling his appointed duty and responsibilities on the Presidential Election Commission which include being able to advise the President privately on matters within the purview of the Commission,” Kobach and his lawyer wrote. “The public broadcast of the Secretary’s documents related to these meetings with the President would hinder his ability to confidently advise the President.”
ACLU lawyers sought the documents because they say an attempt to amend NVRA would be a concession by Kobach that federal law, as written, does not allow the state to impose a proof of citizenship requirement. Kobach initially refused to turn over the documents to ACLU lawyers, saying they were irrelevant, but only did so after a U.S. magistrate judge forced him to do so. Those documents are currently under a protective seal from the court and not available to the public.
The magistrate judge also sanctioned Kobach with a $1,000 fine last month for misleading the court about the contents of the documents. In denying Kobach’s appeal of the sanctions, U.S. District Judge Julie Robinson noted Kobach had a pattern of misleading statements before the court.
Beyond hindering his work on the commission, Kobach said in the Friday filing the documents were irrelevant to the central claims in the lawsuit and the ACLU only wanted them to be made public because the group wanted to fundraise off of them. Kobach also said the documents were protected by Kansas state law and disclosing would make it more difficult for him to give candid advice on sensitive matters in the future. |
Airlines quick to drop discounts Updated: 2011-07-18 07:15 By Xin Dingding (China Daily)
BEIJING - Seeing a string of malfunctions and ensuing delays on the Beijing-Shanghai high-speed railway in the past week, domestic airlines stopped giving deep discounts and started charging higher prices for air tickets between the two cities over the weekend.
According to Ctrip.com, an online travel service, the cheapest price for flights from Beijing to Shanghai in the next four days are 720 yuan ($111) before the airport construction fee and the fuel surcharge. This amounts to 36 percent off the full ticket price of 1,130 yuan.
Most tickets are full price, and only a few have a 20 percent discount.
In comparison, the lowest price offered in the first week since the high-speed rail's opening on June 30 was only around 360 yuan, with many flights having sold for around 400 yuan to compete with the 300 km/h trains' second-class seat of 555 yuan.
Without warning, the price adjustment came right after three glitches on the high-speed rail line in four days from July 10 to 13. Passengers complained they were stranded in sweltering carriages for a couple of hours, with no compensation or extra services.
Although railway authorities quickly apologized and vowed on Saturday to improve the punctuality of the high-speed trains - calling it a priority in the summer travel season - many netizens still expressed disappointment at the high-speed rail service.
But the airlines' price rises have also aroused criticism.
Many netizens showed their scorn for the new pricing policy on Sunday, saying airlines were "looting a burning house" and taking advantage of passengers.
Mao Zhongxing, a netizen from Shanghai, said in his micro blog that business travelers should not go anywhere on days when thunderstorms are forecast, because neither trains nor planes are reliable.
"Joining in a video meeting is the best way to avoid trouble," he said.
In addition to the frequent malfunctions on the railway, the airlines suffered a smaller impact from high-speed railways than they expected.
China Eastern Airlines board secretary Luo Zhuping told China Business News that the number of passengers on its Beijing-Shanghai flights dropped by 18 percent in the first 10 days of July compared to the same period last year.
Previously, high-speed trains were expected to take away 20 to 30 percent of passengers from the airlines.
An insider said airlines had been worried because the new rail line opened at a time when flight delays were most serious because of frequent summer thunderstorms. In July 2010, only 32.6 percent of flights between Beijing and Shanghai took off on time, according to a report by Xinhua News Agency in May.
But high-speed trains seemed to have the same problem, as well as some teething problems.
Li Xiaojin, a professor at the Civil Aviation University of China, said: "Considering the losses airlines suffered at first, when the ticket price level dropped by 20 percent because of the high-speed rail, the airlines are now trying to recover some of the losses."
Li said the long-term impact will depend on the safety records of the Beijing-Shanghai high-speed rail line. "Safety is the key factor for travelers in choosing their transport means," he said.
China's top work safety supervisor on Sunday ordered cities and provinces along the Beijing-Shanghai high-speed railway to eliminate problems that could endanger traffic security along the line.
The Work Safety Commission of the State Council has required local authorities to carry out special campaigns to identify and solve problems.
The statement said the authorities should adopt long-term mechanisms such as setting up a map of areas along the line that are restricted to the public, conducting coordinated security inspections and exchanging information regularly. |
This article is about the Doug E. Fresh Song. For the 2015 album by Battles, see La Di Da Di (album)
"La Di Da Di" is a song performed by Doug E. Fresh, who provides the beatboxed instrumental, and MC Ricky D (later known as Slick Rick), who performs the vocals. It was originally released in 1985 as the B-side to "The Show". The song has since gained a reputation as an early hip hop classic, and has been sampled or referenced in numerous other hip hop songs since its release.
Different edits [ edit ]
There are two releases of the song. The original vinyl and cassette versions contain sung lyrics from "Sukiyaki" by A Taste of Honey, but due to a lack of clearance, CD versions are missing the following refrains in the middle of the song, most likely because of copyright issues:
It's all because of you, I'm feeling sad and blue. You went away, and now my life is filled with rainy days. I love you so, how much you'll never know, Cause you took your love away from me
Cover versions [ edit ]
Snoop Dogg covered "La Di Da Di" as "Lodi Dodi". Mindless Self Indulgence also covered the song, with some changes in lyrics. The song has been covered live by Chuck Brown and also by Korn.
Snoop Doggy Dogg version charts [ edit ]
Samples and references by later artists [ edit ]
"La Di Da Di" has gained a reputation for consistently being sampled and referenced by many artists. The following is a list of other songs that referenced "La Di Da Di": |
Excerpt from The British Dream: Successes and Failures of Post-war Immigration, by David Goodhart (Atlantic Books, 2013). Reprinted with permission from the author.
From Chapter 4: The Multicultural Odyssey
It is often said that a host society cannot demand anything of a newcomer that it does not demand of existing citizens. It is an idea that I would agree with in most circumstances, but it’s not always true. In citizenship and language tests Britain makes special demands on newcomers and it’s right that it does so. The act of immigration is, normally, freely chosen. The immigrant has chosen to come to an already existing country with its own laws, history, language and so on. Those need to be respected and understood. The host society must offer equal rights to the newcomer, including the right to be different in a way that does not foster separation. Majorities do then adapt to accommodate minorities but it is a long-term and largely unconscious process, whereas the immigrant’s adaptation is shorter-term and more conscious. That is as it should be. But the stress that academic multiculturalists place on the ‘two-way street’ implies that the immigrant is doing the host society a favour by coming to the country and that its citizens should be grateful; a somewhat eccentric view of immigration, especially of the low-skill kind.
The host society majority are, in any case, largely absent from the multiculturalism story. It is one of the blind spots of most of the academic multiculturalists I have been considering (though Parekh has publicly acknowledged the failure). Multiculturalism encourages, and wants funded from the public purse, the expression of minority ethnic identification, but has been silent about – or hostile to – the expression of majority ethnic identification.[1]
It is often hard being a newcomer in a society, even a liberal one like Britain that offers undreamt of protections and rights compared with earlier eras. But mass immigration makes big demands on host communities too, and if multiculturalism only addresses the concerns and promotes the identity of minorities – what Eric Kaufmann calls ‘asymmetrical multiculturalism’ – it will not help Britain to adapt successfully to the big demographic changes taking place. A successful integration strategy must engage the attention, consent and sympathy of the majority, particularly in the areas of high immigration, if the formal equalities offered to minorities by politics and law are to become the felt equality and acceptance of everyday life.
What, for example, does multiculturalism theory have to say to those elderly white people of the Pollards Hill estate in Merton, in south-west London, many of whom feel displaced and disrupted by the arrival of a large Ghanain population in recent years? To the local whites the Ghanaians are not fitting in but imposing their own way of life on the neighbourhood. Similar small battles are taking place in thousands of other housing estates up and down the country.
There is a strong strand of wishful thinking in most academic multiculturalism – and a reluctance to accept trade-offs. All three thinkers I have been looking at assert, for example, that strong multicultural identities are perfectly compatible with strong national identities, but they provide no evidence for this claim. Common sense would surely suggest that, on the contrary, minority autonomy and feelings of national solidarity pull in different directions.
Modood makes much of the ‘ethnicity paradox’ that the more you are allowed to be yourself and take pride in your own roots the more likely you are to identify with your adopted country – again, this may be true for some groups, particularly relatively successful ones like Hindu Indians, but where is the evidence? French Muslims who tend to be less pious than British ones identify more with France than their British counterparts.
Indeed the argument could be turned around. The more the majority in a modern liberal state has a confident and well-articulated sense of its collective identity and history the easier it is for minorities – both as individuals and collectively – to see themselves as part of the national story. This seems to be the case in Scotland, for example, where many of the South Asian minority are enthusiastic Scottish nationalists. On the other hand, as Lauren McLaren has written, possibly with the English in mind, ‘where individuals struggle to define their socio-political community they tend to be more threatened by outside influences. Without knowing who “we” are, we worry about where “they” will fit in.’[2]
Surely the interesting and difficult issue here is the balance: how much separateness in lifestyles, language and so on remains compatible with an idea of strong citizenship? All three theorists just assume that the welcoming stance implied by multiculturalism towards newcomers must succeed in incorporating them as loyal citizens. And once this is seen to happen, sceptical natives will no longer view immigrants as a threat to prevailing values and will come to accept cultural heterogeneity as compatible with national cohesion.
Will Kymlicka makes a strong case for this in the Canadian story, but Canada is a one-off where multiculturalism has always had a strongly integrationist assumption and where it has become part of the country’s identity in the quest to distinguish itself from the US. But it is not obviously borne out by recent history in, say, Britain or the Netherlands.
The work of American academic Jack Citrin shows that differences in multicultural policy regimes between countries make no discernible difference to public attitudes towards immigration or minorities. It is just as plausible to argue that multiculturalism has elevated ethnic identification and group belonging at the expense of a commitment to a common core of norms and experience and that the insistence on difference – in dress, in language and so on – provokes resentment that can easily turn into outright hostility. One Labour MP in a town with a large and quite segregated Muslim minority told me about the suppressed anger he has often observed in his white constituents when passing a Muslim woman in a niqab in the town centre. ‘You can see them muttering to themselves and scowling at the woman,’ he says. That is just an anecdote but no better evidence is provided for the inherently less plausible claim that celebrating difference encourages minorities to join in and majorities to embrace them.[3]
Because it is hostile to the idea of a core national culture and the idea of the legitimate cultural and political weight of the majority community, academic multiculturalism can end up supporting a very thin notion of national citizenship. And despite the avowed leftism of most academic multiculturalists, they often end up on the same side as liberal individualists and conservatives. ‘So long as I pay my taxes and obey the law, society can make no further demands on me’ – one can imagine this being said by both a small-state free-market conservative and a separatist multiculturalist.
The minority demand for greater autonomy in the light of the prejudice that was still pervasive in the early 1980s was understandable. But at what point does a ‘demeaned identity’ cease to be demeaned? And how can the demand for something as nebulous as ‘recognition’ ever be satisfied? Too much of academic multiculturalism remains stuck in the 1980s. Instead of requiring that long-established liberal democracies tear up the rule book and reshape their political structures to suit minority group rights, something that would surely serve only to alienate the majority, academic multiculturalism should focus on how best to exploit the plentiful space offered to minorities by modern liberalism.
Much of the work of multiculturalist writers is highly abstract, with little attempt to test the ideas against the real world. And multiculturalism in the universities has had no significant internal opposition to bring it back to earth. Yet, as one of the intellectual manifestations of post-war immigration, it has brought some insight, and passion, into old debates on liberalism, pluralism, universalism, relativism, religious freedom and identities. And a few good ideas have emerged over recent years. One example is Parekh’s idea of ‘operative public values’ – how values are often hidden or implicit in national institutions, which then tends to favour insiders who enjoy a kind of implicit knowledge. These values should be made more explicit; indeed, if we are trying to reimagine national citizenship for a more plural but still coherent society, many things must be made more explicit.
But the great advances of recent decades in minority rights and anti-discrimination legislation owe little to academic multiculturalism (despite the claims it sometimes makes) and much to conventional, colour-blind liberalism. Moreover, academic multiculturalism’s uncritical championing of minority traditions, its neglect of majorities, and suspicion of integration, its continuing promotion of minority autonomy even after Britain has become a much more accommodating country, has left it politically marginalised.
The broader story of multiculturalism as a ‘live and let live’ approach to the management of minority-majority relationships can, however, count some successes. There is, indeed, some truth in Tariq Modood’s ‘ethnicity paradox’. By allowing the post-war minorities to find their own way to an understanding of the country and their own hybrid versions of what it is to be British, it has probably ended up binding them into the country more thoroughly than if they had been pushed.
This has worked especially well for those minorities, such as Hindus and Sikhs from India, East African Asians and some black Africans, which have the right level of ‘cultural protection’ – a benign combination of supportive family networks, a powerful work ethic, a pro-education tradition and a cultural confidence that has also helped them to integrate successfully.
But ‘laissez-faire’ has worked much less well for those groups such as Kashmiri Pakistanis, Bangladeshis and Somalis who were poor and often illiterate when they arrived and brought with them a conservative, rural version of Islam and family networks that locked them away from mainstream society.
Successful immigrant groups do not need an integration strategy, they already have one in their culture and their socio-economic starting points. Britain’s brand of multiculturalism has allowed the well-equipped to succeed and the problem groups to flounder and self-segregate. That is one reason why it is possible to hold apparently contradictory views about the multiculturalism record.
Excerpted from The British Dream by David Goodhart. Copyright © David Goodhart, 2013. All rights reserved.
David Goodhart is the director of the think tank DEMOS, and the editor-at-large of Prospect magazine, which he founded in 1995. He was previously a senior correspondent for the Financial Times.
[1] Varun Uberoi and Tariq Modood talk about ‘minimising’ the dominant culture, see ‘Inclusive Britishness: A Multiculturalist Advance’, Political Studies, 2012.
[2] See the recent work of Christian Joppke.
[3] The opinion poll data also shows no support for a strong multiculturalist position even from minorities. According to Ipsos MORI only 16 per cent of the native born with native parents strongly agree that ethnic groups should maintain their traditions. For EU immigrants the figure is similarly low; it is a bit higher for non-European immigrants – 43 per cent for those who have been here less than seven years and 34 per cent for more than seven years.
White Britons ‘In Retreat’ From Minority Areas
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A university's students union has banned students from getting free sombreros claiming they are "racist".
Students were being given free sombreros by a local Tex-Mex restaurant in a bid to drum up business with a smile, before uni chiefs ordered them to stop - because it violates strict cultural appropriation rules.
The University of East Anglia student union officials even took the big floppy hats from students at the Freshers' Fair, because non-Mexicans wearing the traditional item of headwear could be seen as offensive, according to a new initiative.
The Union has stated that the handing out of sombreros breached a key advertising policy which was sent to all stallholders before the event, prohibiting any use of stereotypical imagery in advertising.
It read: "Discriminatory or stereotypical language or imagery aimed towards to any group or individual based on characteristics will not be permitted as part of our advertising."
"Who is going to get offended? Speedy Gonzales?" A student
The policy specifies 15 types of discrimination, some of which include colour, ethnic origin, and nationality.
The sombreros were seen as racist and a form of cultural appropriation, despite the fact that the restaurant's website says it offers a "Tex-Mex experience."
When Pedros were asked to stop handing out the sombreros they were amicable in doing so, although some students were less impressed.
Speaking to student newspaper The Tab, one first year who asked not to be named, said: "It's ridiculous - it's a comedy hat, not some sort of sacred religious dress.
"Who is going to get offended? Speedy Gonzales?"
Photo: Alamy
Rafel Spilman added: "What utter b*****ks."
But the Union defended their madcap stance on the floppy hat.
Campaigns and Democracy officer Chris Jarvis said: "We know that when it comes to cultural appropriation the issues can sometimes be difficult to understand and many don't realise that they may be about to cause offence or break a policy.
"So we're discussing internally how we can improve our briefing to both external organisations and our own members so that people aren't caught out at the last minute."
He added: "At the SU we want all members feel safe and accepted, so at all events we try to ensure that there is no behaviour, language or imagery which could be considered racist, sexist, homophobic, transphobic or ableist."
The offending sombreros were being handed out at the University of East Anglia freshers' fair in Norwich last week.
Pedros Tex-Mex Cantina is an independent, family-owned restaurant that opened in 1991 in Norwich.
The restaurant is highly rated on review site TripAdvisor and dishes up a variety of traditional Tex-Mex dishes, including nachos, chilli and tacos.
"I would applaud any business of any nationality for doing anything to try to drum up business in a legitimate way, which this seems." British Mexican Society
Manager Matthew Ward was unavailable to comment yesterday morning, but a worker at the restaurant said: "It's ridiculous."
The British Mexican Society backed the Tex-Mex eatery for giving away the free hats.
Chairman Richard Maudslay said: "I would applaud any business of any nationality for doing anything to try to drum up business in a legitimate way, which this seems.
"I applaud them - it's not a Mexican issue. It's a much broader issue than that.
"We are delighted to learn that there is a Mexican restaurant in Norwich and hope that they would like to join us to become members of the British Mexican Society."
The non-political charity regularly hold fundraisers for projects in Mexico, and annually offer a prize to the best PhD thesis produced at any British University, by a student of any nationality, on a topic related to the country.
Mr Maudslay added: "We would welcome the restaurant on board.
• Oxford Union admits it is 'institutionally racist'
"We would welcome anyone with a contact within Mexico.
"As a society we are wasting time on things that are really not going to change the world." |
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Lena Dunham is apologizing to New York Giants wide receiver Odell Beckham Jr. for making "narcissistic assumptions" about his motivations in an article published Friday her Lenny Letter.
In a discussion with Amy Schumer about the most recent Met Gala, Dunham said she was seated near Beckham, who she claimed was looking at his cellphone instead of her because he found her sexually unappealing.
Dunham apologized Saturday on her social media accounts, saying she projected her personal insecurities onto the football star and presented them as facts. She said she and Beckham have never met and, "after listening to a lot of valid criticism" understands that it is wrong to ascribe misogynistic thoughts to a stranger.
Beckham has not acknowledged Dunham's original comments or apology on his social media accounts. |
Open Source Permaculture: Bringing Permaculture to Everyone
Imagine being able to access a wealth of free resources teaching you how to enhance the sustainability of your home or land. You could ask any question you have, and you would receive answers written by experienced Permaculturists. With access to a library of free ebooks on everything from Natural Farming to Urban Permaculture, anyone around the world could teach themselves how to grow food using the least resources (water, fertilizer, labor), design buildings and landscapes integrated into the local ecosystem, or start their own rainwater harvesting systems. Anyone (including you!) could learn how to grow a backyard permaculture garden, just as beautiful as the picture above shows.
Sophia Novak is a documentary film student who wants to give everyone the opportunity to learn about Permaculture, a method of sustainable farming and landscape design based on ecological principles, no matter who they are or where they’re from. So she’s created a crowdfunding campaign, to support the expansion of Open Source Permaculture.
The premise of this campaign is the creation of a free Urban Permaculture eBook, a Permaculture Q&A website and Wiki, granting easier access to information and resources for those looking to create their own projects on a small budget.
Permaculture is a promising path to developing sustainable living ecosystems. It is founded on a system of ethics, emphasizing the importance of shared values among people in a community. Its ethics embrace care for the Earth, care for the people, and sharing the collective fruits of labor. It supports mindful use of technology, and its ethics and principles can be applied to non-physical systems such as social structures and business concepts. As a gardening method, permaculture can also be called ‘natural farming’, as its techniques seek to emulate nature.
With 7 billion human beings on the planet, people are the number one urban resource. That means it’s really a smart idea to bring Permaculture to the city, where more people can take action and work together to build a more sustainable and resilient future. More permaculture design courses are being taught in urban settings these days, adapting the course content to include topics on ecological landscape architecture, such as green roofs, rain gardens, and other innovations that integrate into the city landscape.
Sophia Novak is the force behind the Permaculture Media Blog, an extensive online resource of free Permaculture guides and ebooks, and a course directory across the globe.
Help make Open Source Permaculture a reality, and give the gift of Permaculture to everyone!
Your contribution will receive a thank-you reward listed on their site. A $25 donation gets you a free pre-release version of the Urban Permaculture Guide eBook! Other potential rewards include a handmade natural bag with ornaments, and a tree planted on the The Wolf Private Natural Reserve in Slovakia.
[Images used with permission from Sophia Novak] |
The 999 operator then said: "This is genuine."
The operator asked to have all the people inside the hotel leave as a number of police officers would be arriving.
The hearing was told officers arrived at the hotel 14 minutes after the 999 call to arrest Williams.
Williams, 34, was released from prison just two weeks before he killed Miss Yemm. He then died himself after being Tasered by police.
Miss Yemm was found covered in blood lying underneath Williams in his hostel room - after he binged on drink and drugs in the days before.
An inquest into both their deaths heard paranoid schizophrenic Williams was released from custody without any medication or supervision despite being sectioned twice and complaining of hearing voices in his head.
His mother, Sally Ann Williams, told the inquest that her son had previously been diagnosed with drug-induced schizophrenia after claiming he was a tree and saying his food was poisoned.
She said he had been placed in foster care as a teenager after being caught stealing to buy drugs, and his drug addiction was "set in" after he returned from a young offenders' institution. |
Joseph Dwyer, a professor of physics and space sciences at the Florida Institute of Technology, has been wondering the same thing.
Your question lies at the core of one of science's great mysteries: What causes lightning? Decades of electric field measurements made inside thunderstorms have failed to find large enough electric fields to cause a spark, even when the effects of precipitation are taken into account. Since we know that lightning does occur—in fact, it strikes the earth about four million times a day—we must be missing something in our understanding.
A mechanism proposed by Russian physicist Alex V. Gurevich of the Lebedev Physical Institute and his collaborators suggest that the movement of large showers of energetic particles produced by high-energy cosmic rays—which originate from exploding stars halfway across the galaxy—might provide a conductive path that initiates lightning. There are indeed types of particle detectors called spark chambers that exploit this principle. In a spark chamber, a very large voltage is applied across a small gap filled with a gas. The resulting electric field is large enough to cause the gap to break down (or spark), so long as there exist some free electrons to get the whole process going. Think of loose rocks ready to fall down the side of a mountain. In order to get an avalanche going, all that is needed is the first moving rock. Similarly, when a charged particle (the first rock) passes through the gap, the ionization it leaves behind will cause a spark, which more or less follows the particle's path. For these kinds of detectors, the location of the spark can be used to identify when and where the charged particle went through.
On the other hand, the case of thunderstorms and lightning is slightly different. Unlike the spark chamber, the electric fields inside the thunderstorm do not appear to be big enough to initiate a spark, so in order for Gurevich's mechanism to do the job, he had to suppose that there were many, many charged particles passing through the storm at once. Because cosmic-ray air showers do not produce enough particles by themselves, Gurevich postulated that the thunderstorm gave the cosmic-ray shower a boost by increasing the number of energetic electrons through an exotic process called "runaway breakdown."
Runaway breakdown occurs when the drag force that electrons experience moving through air is less than the electric force acting upon them. In such cases, the electrons will "run away," gaining very large amounts of energy. As the runaway electrons collide with air molecules, they generate other runaway electrons plus x-rays and gamma rays, resulting in an avalanche of high-energy particles. Instead of rocks in a landslide, think of the runaway electrons as shrapnel tearing up a path through the storm cloud. According to the Gurevich model, this conductive path is what causes lightning.
Runaway breakdown can create large amounts of high-energy electrons, as well as x-rays and gamma rays. Interestingly, we know that runaway breakdown works for the low electric fields already seen inside thunderstorms. We also know that it does sometimes happen right before lightning, because we can see big bursts of x-rays and gamma rays shooting out of thunderstorms. In fact, these gamma rays are so energetic and so bright that they have been observed from outer space, 600 kilometers (373 miles) above Earth's surface.
So, does all this add up to cosmic rays as the cause of lightning? No one can be sure at present.
Some researchers, including myself, have voiced skepticism about this mechanism, due to a few technical problems. For example, for lightning to propagate it must form a hot, conductive channel. This channel acts like a metal wire, allowing very big electrical currents to flow. It is difficult to understand how a large, diffuse discharge produced by an air shower and runaway breakdown could result in such a hot channel measuring just a few centimeters across. Alternative explanations of lightning initiation have been proposed, including some that involve a conventional breakdown from water and ice particles, as well as others that involve differing forms of runaway breakdown without cosmic rays. Scientists are busy working on models and experiments to test the validity of all these ideas. |
In January 2014, Samit, a 30-year-old film editor in Delhi got a phone call. His girlfriend Mohini was 24 and worked as a sub-editor in an Assamese newspaper in Guwahati. The phone call was from her father who’d just found out about their secret long-distance relationship. “He told me that if I didn’t call off the relationship, he’d inform his ULFA contacts and get rid of both me and Mohini,” Samit says.
Funny? Empty threats? Not so much. Back in Guwahati, Mohini was forced to quit her job. She was locked at home for a week until she finally ran away from home and jumped on a train to Delhi. In Delhi, 2,000 km away, they weren’t safe. Samit recalls: “Mohini’s cousins in Delhi traced us. We urgently needed to get married but we had no money to.”
* * *
On May 16, 2014, the day India elected its new government, Pradeepa, a 23-year-old engineering student in Namakkal district, Tamil Nadu, was denied examination hall tickets because she had converted to Islam to marry a man of her choice. A second year civil engineering student, she had fallen in love with J Fazil, a 23-year-old fellow student. On April 12 this year she’d married him under sharia law and their marriage certificate was issued by a government-appointed qazi the same day. Of all the problems they anticipated, not being able to do their exams was not one of them.
* * *
Twenty-three-year-old Manish fell in love with Khurshida, a 19-year-old, in Nilokheri village of Karnal, Haryana. In this Jat-dominated village, there were five Dalit Muslim families who lived on the outskirts of the village. They were treated as untouchables. When Manish and Khurshida finally eloped to get married in January 2014, Manish’s landowning feudal father approached the khap panchayat in the village, which in turn alerted the Muslim khap panchayat in the vicinity. “We went to the mosque because I wanted to convert to Islam for the sake of getting married. They held Khurshida hostage and called the members of both the khap panchayats. Somehow, we escaped before they arrived,” he recalls. The news had spread across villages in the next few hours. “No temple was ready to convert Khurshida to Hinduism to get us married. It had almost become a communal issue in the area,” he says.
* * *
A couple of years ago, when I was protesting against my extended family’s attempts to find me a match, one of my aunts said, “If you want to go for love marriage, we have no problem. It will only save us money.” To my youthful sensibility, it seemed the most obnoxious response ever. This year I remembered what my aunt said. Here’s why.
Around the time Samit and Mohini were in trouble, my partner N and I had decided to get married. Much to our friends’ disappointment. They thought we’d failed them by succumbing to the patriarchal institution of marriage to guard our companionship. But we’d weighed it up and thought it was practical to get married – to be able to manage our crumbling finances better, to be able to live with each other without lying to landlords and real estate agents, to check in to the same room in small town hotels without scandalizing staff. We’d decided to pick our battles.
Since both of us are non-believers, we decided we’d get married under the Special Marriage Act (SMA), 1954. The SMA was enacted by Parliament to provide a special kind of marriage for all Indian nationals in India and in foreign countries, irrespective of the religion or faith followed by either party. It provides equal inheritance and divorce rights to both women and men.
Story continues
My extended family was surprisingly, easily convinced. They didn’t particularly care for my loud opposition to patriarchal rituals. In fact, they had an excellent patriarchal reason to accept it. They thought civil marriage was most suitable for me, with my father being dead. Who’d make the painful and expensive arrangements for a ‘normal’ wedding? One of the only few endearing aunts I have even told me, secretly, “Perfect decision. Otherwise you’d have to do your pheras and supervise the ghee for the hawan also.”
We were lucky not to be rushed into marriage. In Chennai, the very young Pradeepa and Fazil wanted to get married right away because they were facing plenty of opposition from both parents. Pradeepa’s parents were threatening her to get her married off to a boy of their choice. “We’d heard that the court procedures are longer so we decided to go for the Islamic method which took less than half a day,” she explains. She says, “I had no choice but to convert. That was the only way to get married quickly.”
It was a month later that her college, Pavai College of Technology, told her that she and her new husband would not get hall tickets as they objected to her conversion to Islam and her inter-religious wedding. It was only after the Madras High Court intervened a week later that the college issued the couple hall tickets.
In India, more and more young people are exerting their choice when it comes to whom they marry. Breaking caste, language and religious barriers, they often court the displeasure and sometimes vengeance of their families. Sometimes just the decision to exert their choice invites punishment that ranges from emotional blackmail, ostracizing over years all the way to murder. Across the country, particularly in states like Haryana, Rajasthan and Uttar Pradesh, numerous couples who have decided to marry on their own have been killed either on the diktats of khap panchayats or by their own families.
In the past, Hindu right wing outfits like the Bajrang Dal and the Sri Ram Sene have not just taken pride in threatening couples who break caste or religious barriers, but have also increased their visibility by doing so. They’ve formed groups like the Hindu Kanya Raksha Samiti and issued death threats to inter-caste couples.
They have accused Muslim men of carrying out a malicious campaign of conversion via seduction and marriage – aka Love Jihad.
Just a week after Pradeepa’s exam hall surprise and two days before Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s swearing-in ceremony, the Vishwa Hindu Parishad (VHP), an affiliate organization of the winning BJP, presented a legal prohibition on ‘horizontal religious conversions’ as one of the top priorities on its wish list to the new government. (‘Horizontal’ conversion in the VHP lexicon refers to changing from one faith to another.)
This brazen cocktail of ruthless fathers, busybody cousins and violent religious organizations does have one happy by-product: the lucrative business of organizing weddings for runaway couples. A business that I was to get to know intimately rather soon.
How to be civil in marriage. Or not.
Our first visit to make an inquiry about the proceedings should have warned us. The entrance to the newly constructed Saket court complex in south Delhi, next to mammoth shopping malls, is fenced with lawyers in black coats, clutching thin stacks of files. Each time a new entrant passes through the security gate, they break into a song of “Challan-bail-shaadi-affidavit- haan ji-Challan-bail-shaadi-affidavit-haan ji?”
As we pushed through the passage towards the enquiry section to find out the procedure for a civil marriage, a thin, short man with neatly oiled hair moved towards us. His eyes had judged us and found us wanting. “Sir, at least tell what do you want. You want to get married?”
“Yes,” I said.
“Do you want to know the procedure? Come with me, no charges for explaining,” he said. We looked at each other in approval and agreed to be explained to.
Om Prakash, in his early 30s, from Bareilly, Uttar Pradesh, was pleased to learn that I was from UP too. Three of us walked towards the lawyers’ chambers. The paan stains on the newly constructed yellow spiral staircase were so uniform that they seemed like art. Giant photos of candidates for the Bar Council elections wished a happy Dussehra, Diwali, Eid, Guru Parv, Christmas, New Year and Republic Day to the visitors – all in one go. There couldn’t have been a more assuring token display of secularism – as it turned out, the last token display of secularism that day.
Om Prakash took us to a narrow chamber on the third floor shared by three more lawyers. He placed himself on a chair behind the furthest table and asked us to join him.
“Now tell me your exact requirement,” he said, thumping the table.
“We are here for a civil marriage,” N said.
“No problem. It can be done,” he said in a reassuring tone.
“How long does the whole procedure take?” N asked.
“One week.”
“Just one week? What are the requirements?” N asked. We had heard that the Special Marriage Act takes a month.
“Two garlands, two witnesses, your date of birth certificate and residence proof.”
“Garlands for what?” N was a bit foxed.
“We will take you to the Arya Samaj Mandir, get the two of you to exchange garlands and do a havan. Once the pujari issues the marriage certificate and we get the pictures, we will submit the application in the court. The judge will call you in the next ten days for approval,” he explained.
“No, but we want a court wedding not an Arya Samaj wedding,” I said.
“This is a court wedding,” he argued.
“Under Special Marriage Act,” I said emphatically.
“Wait, what is your name?” he asked pointing his finger towards me.
“Neha Dixit.”
“And what is yours?” He asked N.
“N Sawhney.”
“Hmmm. That’s what. Sawhney and Dixit. Both will come under Hindu Marriage Act. This is safe, don’t worry. Parents will not even come to know,” he said.
“No, our parents will be a part of it. We want a civil marriage.”
“Why? Both of you are Hindus.”
“I am not a Hindu. Technically, I am a Sikh,” N corrected him.
“But Sikh is also Hindu!” he clapped his hands in triumph. N told me later that for a moment, he was distracted by an irrational rage at Om Prakash’s cavalier dismissal of the entire Khalistan movement. (Recently, the Anand Marriage Act, 2014 was announced for registration of Sikh couples. Until then, Sikh couples abroad who didn’t want to be identified as Hindu were stymied by marriage certificates issued under the Hindu Marriage Act.)
“No, we don’t want a religious wedding,” N said.
“Why? Both of you are Hindus. Why should Hindus run from Hinduism, Nehaji? You are from my part of the world. You’ll wear ver-meee-llion after the wedding anyway. So what’s the big deal?” he gave me a slimy grin.
“No, I will not,” I replied.
This was clearly a blow to his conception of what a decent girl from his part of the world is like. But he continued the conversation, “But it’s not possible. Two Hindus can only marry under the Hindu Marriage Act.”
“Why not the Special Marriage Act?” N asked.
“That’s for different religions. You cannot go for it unless one of you converts to some other religion like Islam or Christianity,” said Om Prakash.
“But we don’t believe in any religion at all. We are atheists, agnostics – something like that,” said N.
Om Prakash had an expression – like the hapless hero of a Ramsay horror who’d discovered that the sultry heroine was actually a witch. “That’s very difficult. There is no provision to convert to atheism.”
We looked at each other. I could see N was done. I could also see he was irritated with me for looking like I was willing to negotiate, for not storming out.
“What is the procedure to get married under the Hindu Marriage Act?” I asked.
“As I explained earlier, we can get it done quickly. We charge Rs 25,000, which includes Arya Samaj Mandir expenses, affidavits, attestation from a gazetted officer, a photographer to take your pictures and a wedding card as a proof of your wedding. Next day, we will file for registration.”
We left.
Om Prakash and his associate Bhagwan Jha claim to conduct 15-20 such weddings every month. Most of his clients are ‘runaway couples’ who are often in a hurry to get married for fear of non-consenting parents, as in the case of Samit and Mohini, sometimes even seeking protection from the court because their families have threatened to kill them. These couples on the run often don’t enjoy the luxury of rejecting Om Prakash, of finding a way to celebrate their marriage in a way that affirms their own belief systems. They are told that the usual process entails an Arya Samaj wedding, and that’s what they get.
Then there’s the cost. Based on our spot poll of all the touts at the Saket court and through online consultations, we put together a current rate list for ‘runaway’ couples to get married.
Arya Samaj wedding
1. Basic wedding: Rs 5,000-Rs 8,000
2. Wedding, materials and photographer: Rs 10,000
3. Combo package, including a wedding and court registration: Rs 15,000-20,000
4. Combo package with two witnesses and complete documents: Rs 22,000-25,000
5. Combo package with two witnesses and complete documents, all in one day: Rs 40,000-50,000
6. Combo package, two witnesses, complete documents and police protection, all in one day: Rs 65,000-75,000
Muslim wedding
Since government registration is still not mandatory for Muslim couples, the legal services double up as matrimony facilitators for mixed couples where one of the partners wishes to convert to Islam. Muslim weddings are conducted and approved by Qazis.
1. Marriage with certificate: up to Rs 10,000
2. Marriage with certificate and conversion of one partner to Islam: Rs 30,000
3. Marriage with certificate, conversion and police protection: Rs 35,000-Rs 70,000, depending on the availability of documents.
Marriages between Muslims, Hindus and Christians under the Special Marriage Act
1. Application submission with attestations and affidavits: Rs 6,000-Rs10,000
2. Application with attestations, affidavits and supporting identity documents: Rs 25,000
3. All-in-one, including three witnesses and complete documents: Rs 25,000-Rs 35,000
4. All-in-one with police protection: Rs 40,000-Rs 70,000
When Mohini caught the getaway train to Delhi, Samit didn’t have a stable job at the time, nor proof of residence in Delhi. They couldn’t afford the going rates to get married. “We sought help from Love Commandos [a group that offers help to eloping couples] who were ready to rob us of whatever we had,” he says. Samit says the Love Commandos asked for Rs 10,000.When some friends stepped in with money they could finally get married – in an Arya Samaj Mandir.
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Going To The Arya Samaj. Gonna Get Married
Before the Hindu Marriage Act was passed in 1955, which allowed inter-caste marriages and equal divorce rights to men and women, people who wanted to remain Hindus but marry across caste could only do so under the Arya Marriage Validation Act of 1937. Arya Samaj marriages were used more as a euphemism for ‘irregular marriages’. Apart from inter-caste marriages, the Arya Marriage Validation Act allowed the marriages of widows and converts from other religions after a shuddhi.
In case of a Hindu and a non-Hindu marrying, the conversion to Hinduism is done after a controversial ‘purification’ ritual called shuddhi executed by the Arya Samaj temple priests. Thereafter, the couple goes to the District Court for registration under the Hindu Marriage Act along with age proof, residential proof and two witnesses. After that, couples who fear violence from their families can apply to the High Court for police protection.
Not that protection from the law is guaranteed even to couples who enter holy matrimony.
In January this year, the Punjab and Haryana High court passed an unusual judgment. Justice Paramjeet Singh, on hearing the plea of a runaway couple seeking court protection, asked the groom to make a fixed deposit of Rs 2 lakh in the bride’s name and present the receipt in the courts. The court’s intent, according to a news report, was to “[gauge] the bona fides of the grooms and the genuineness of the relationship after judging the monetary competence of the grooms to carry on with the relationships and their willingness to deposit the money in the bride’s name.”
Justice Singh added that the court had come across cases where girls returned to their parents after being robbed of their “chastity”. “Can procurers and panders be allowed to lure innocent young girls in full bloom and put their lives in peril? This is the question, which this court is confronted with. Another question is how to combat the hideous monster, the masked man, to protect the safety and purity of womanhood.” The couple got married in a temple but their plea for court protection was turned down.
As if this wasn’t enough, the courts have gone one step further in characterizing marriages where two adults have made their own choice. In 2011, a bench comprising Justices Dalip Singh and Sajjan Singh Kothari of the Rajasthan High Court stated that marriages based on the right to choose, more generally known as love marriages, were examples of “lust and greed”! The judges remarked, “The pious purpose of the Arya Samaj mission has been lost sight at [sic] by local units in the state and they are becoming tool [sic] for pacification of ‘greed and lust’ for girl and boy, and once it is over the marriage lands in courts resulting in irreversible breakdowns”. And that: “It takes them one hour to solemnise a marriage between an 18-year-old girl and a 38- or 40-year-old gentleman, which leaves scars forever in the life of parents who bring up their children with great passion and aspirations. Such marriages in lust and greed by young blood cannot be said to be correct.”
It is in the same spirit that on May 9, 2013, a bench of the Uttarakhand High Court delivered a judgment barring the Arya Samaj from issuing marriage certificates to couples. This makes the state, which is accountable for upholding the constitutional rights of citizens, complicit in regressive, patriarchal extra-constitutional practices.
Pandit Vidyadhar Shastri, who is the chief priest at the Arya Samaj Mandir in Saket, Delhi says, “We do solemnize weddings of a number of eloped couples. In our personal capacity we may have problems with them hurting the feelings of their parents but in principle we do not turn down any such request. In fact, we have engaged lawyers ourselves to facilitate it for the couples.”
* * *
In Nilokheri village, young Manish and Khurshida didn’t know what to do. Conversion was not working out. And they didn’t know any other way to get married.
A friend told them to get in touch with the All-India Democratic Women’s Association (AIDWA), the women’s wing of the Communist Party of India (Marxist) who have helped such couples in the past. “We didn’t have money to run away to another city nor were we educated enough to know the government procedures. Both the communities were chasing us and saying that we were doing was illegal. We couldn’t believe it was so difficult to be with each other,” says Khurshida.
Jagmati Sangwan, the national vice president of AIDWA, who has tirelessly fought for twenty years against the atrocities of khap panchayats in Haryana and ensured human rights for over 200 such couples, is of the view that the state has very often failed its citizens by not just pushing them towards religious patriarchal structures in matters of love but has also indulged in moral policing itself. AIDWA activists worked hard to pacify the family members and the khaps to ensure that neither community looked at it as a case of religious conversion in the ‘garb of love marriage.’
Sangwan says, “We got Manish and Khurshida married under the Special Marriage Act tactically, to prevent what was taking the shape of a communal issue. The families have dissociated themselves with the couple but at least so many lives were saved from a communal riot in the area.” In January 2014 after getting married, Khurshida and Manish moved to Delhi.
Sangwan says, “Courts, khap panchayats and right wing groups have been similar [in their treatment of] the couples. All demand parent’s validation for consenting adults to choose their life partners. It’s because of the lack of state support [that] couples are forced to run away to other cities, making themselves all the more vulnerable to scamsters who take them to Arya Samaj temples and mosques and get conned without legal proof of marriage. Communal issues are also unnecessarily often flared up in cases of inter-religious marriages for lack of state support.”
It is in this context that the Special Marriage Act (SMA), 1954 is not just an important tool for consenting adults but also integral to the larger secular structure of India.
A Very Special Marriage Act
The Special Marriage Act embodies all contradictions of liberal citizenship. It is a civil and secular law of marriage. It has been argued that the SMA will be a basis for the future Uniform Civil Code (UCC) in India, which has been recently brought back to the fore by the newly elected NDA government.
Scholars also claim that SMA in the current form is seen as being more aligned with feminist principles of marriage, inheritance and divorce as compared to the UCC, which caters to patriarchal Hindu family values. Naveen TK, a legal academic who teaches at IIT Delhi, says, “SMA can definitely provide a framework or a template for UCC, but the triumph of SMA remains in the fact that it is not dominated by the Hindu majority laws or the right wing.”
Perveez Mody in her excellent book, The Intimate state: Love-Marriage and the Law in Delhi, that documents the role of the laws of the land in cases of self-choice marriages in Delhi writes, “It is noteworthy that SMA and uniform civil code were both opposed together in the Parliament in 1951 because they were seen as a threat to ‘Hindu India’.”
In 1996, a
Supreme Court judgment included a discussion of the value of “inter-caste, inter-religion, and inter-region marriages” for promoting national unity. The decision cited the Special Marriage Act of 1954 as well as the Hindu Marriage Act of 1955, which could be used for such marriages (the latter encompasses a broad definition of ‘Hindu’, and can be used for marriages between Hindus, Buddhists, Jains, and Sikhs).
At the Delhi Saket Court Registrar. Photo credit Aniruddha Shankar More
The SMA is also seen as woman-friendly in the sense that it limits the application of personal law in family affairs. In India, family affairs like marriage, divorce and succession are governed by a different set of laws according to faith, which are known as personal laws. Divorce by triple talaq does not apply to Muslim women married under SMA. Women across religions are entitled to equal inheritance, while they may not under personal laws. According to legal experts, the Indian Succession Act is applicable to both men and women married under the Special Marriage Act, which is far more egalitarian than the personal laws.
The SMA was originally Act III of 1872. It was introduced by Henry Sumner Maine, a British comparative jurist and historian. Maine is well known for his
thesis that in ancient societies individuals were tied to status of traditional groups. In the modern one, the thesis argues, individuals are seen as autonomous agents who are free to make contracts or associations with whomever they choose.
Meshing with this worldview, Henry Maine’s Act III of 1872 permitted “any dissenters [from religion] to marry whomever they chose under the new civil marriage law.” The puritanical administrators and representatives from the local government in India responded with disdain and opposed Maine’s Bill. They were of the view that the particular legislation would not just lead to immorality but also encourage marriages based on lust.
Religion and Personal Law in Secular India, a 2001 book edited by Gerald James Larson mentions that independent India introduced an element of choice while retaining personal laws through the SMA, 1954: “The Special Marriage Act of 1872 had provided a code of general law under which couples could choose to marry and divorce, but in order to utilize this option they had to affirm that neither was a Christian, Jew, Hindu, or Muslim. In effect they had to renounce their religious and property relations with their families. In 1954, Parliament passed a new Special Marriage Act that eliminated the onerous renunciatory costs of availing of civil marriage.”
The SMA, 1954, allowed individuals the freedom to defy both caste and religion in the case of marriage. While the bill was being argued, the SMA was seen as being for the westernized urban elite, while the Hindu Marriage Act, was seen as being for the larger majority. At the time, several MPs objected that the law was destroying society by facilitating inter-caste marriages and hurting the idea of family by introducing divorce.
* * *
In contemporary times, the process of a civil marriage in India, however, is subject to a number of conditions. Conditions that negate the Supreme Court judgment’s dream of abolishing the caste and religion divide through inter-caste marriage.
According to the law, any unmarried, sane, consenting adults, where the bridegroom is over 21 years of age and the bride is over 18, and who are unrelated within the degrees of prohibited relationship irrespective of faith or caste, can get married under the SMA. The only exception is in the state of Jammu and Kashmir, where it does not apply. It shouldn’t cost anything and requires no ritual.
However, the SMA has its own shortcomings. Touts Om Prakash and Bhagwan Jha were a clear window into the conditions under which many couples who want a court wedding never get a chance to negotiate their right to get married under the secular SMA. In my case, where we had the luxury of time and money and the opportunity to figure out what we really believed in, it was still not very easy to get endorsed by this law. After we ditched the touts and their many wares there was still a lot to trudge through in pursuit of our secular dream.
As a nation drunk on Bollywood weddings, it is only runaway couples who we see getting married in court in films, be it the famous Bombay or the flop Ahista Ahista, where the protagonist earns his living by appearing as a witness to the marriages of eloped couples in court. Popular culture has therefore conveniently marginalized the SMA instead of bringing it into mainstream culture.
We had to furnish copies of our passports to establish permanent addresses, our PAN card copies, our Class 10 certificates to prove our age, and copies of our rent agreement, electricity and water bill. Also, while the Supreme Court noted in September 2013 that the Aadhaar card was not mandatory for marriage registration, apart from other things, the notification of the judgment had not reached the lower courts in January 2014. This is why we were also required to give copies of our Aadhar cards, which we had to run one more marathon to acquire.
Additionally, since one of us had given a rent agreement copy, we needed a separate round of police verification and a guarantee from the neighbors that they had known me for over six months. We were also required to furnish the identity proof, Aadhar card copies and photos of three witnesses (as compared to two under the Hindu Marriage Act) a full month in advance.
In Delhi, 55 percent of citizens still do not have ration card, the most basic identity card. In comparison, the need for the above listed documents is a clear attempt at marginalizing SMA to a privileged small group.
But troubles don’t end with acquiring these documents. As soon as the complete application is submitted in court, one set of notices announcing your intention to marry is pasted outside the marriage office. And another set is dispatched – hold your breath – to the families of the two parties. This is done 30 days in advance to invite objections, if any, from acquaintances and family. Interestingly, unlike the SMA, no such notice is required in ‘regular’ religious marriages. All states in India except Delhi follow this infantilizing practice.
In a landmark judgment by Justice S Ravindra Bhat of the Delhi High Court in April 2009, the practice of sending notices to the homes of couples desirous of solemnizing their marriage under the SMA was curbed. But in practice, it still continues in most Delhi courts as officials fear the wrath of the parents of the couples or moral policing groups.
An official in the Magistrate's office who did not wish to be identified said to me, “There are anti-Love Jihad groups who are regulars here checking for inter-religious weddings. They then inform the parents of the couple. ”
Another report suggests that the administrations in Ghaziabad, Noida and Gurgaon in the states of Uttar Pradesh and Haryana insist on illegally dispatching these notices but are not willing to bear the expenses of doing so. They insist that couples provide pre-addressed, pre-stamped envelopes beforehand. Couples in these towns have to publish an advertisement of their proposed marriage in a leading newspaper and submit a copy of the published advertisement to the office of the marriage officer.
In Gurgaon, the Deputy Commissioner’s office has taken pains to add a column for specifying the applicants’ religion in the ‘Intent to Marry’ form and an additional point about the citizenship of the applicants in the declaration form.
Sangwan has recently appealed to the Haryana government, asking that the 30-day rule under SMA be done away with. She says, “SMA in its present form is no different from the khap panchayats. Both ask for parents’ consent. Moreover, its complicated proceedings force the majority of couples on the run, confronted by various hostile and complex sociopolitical pressures, to opt for a religious form of marriage.”
The number of SMA marriages is fairly low when compared to religious ones. A 2002 media report suggested that in a period of one year, while 1,100 marriages were registered under Hindu Marriage Act in Chandigarh, only 49 marriages were registered under the SMA in a period of 10 months.
Another fall-out of the complicated procedures and general atmosphere of transgression is the rising number of illegal inter-religious marriages, especially in Tamil Nadu. In the hurry to get married, many couples registered under the Tamil Nadu Registration of Marriages Act (TNRMA), 2009, and managed to get married the same day only to realize years later that their marriage was invalid.
After spending close to Rs 5,000 in running costs, on the day we submitted our application to the Mehrauli Badarpur Magistrate’s office, the Additional District Magistrate asked, “Why do you want to marry under the SMA when you can marry under the Hindu Marriage Act? Such a complicated procedure!”
I was about to explain the intended logic when N, anticipating further trouble, cut me short and manufactured the reason, “Sir, my parents want us to marry under the Sikh customs and her parents want us to marry under the Hindu customs. That is why we have convinced them of our marriage under the SMA.”
“Oh, okay. That makes sense,” he replied.
Religion triumphed over rationality and our application was accepted.
Neha Dixit is a freelance journalist based in New Delhi. She blogs at http://neha-dixit.blogspot.in/ |
Western Kentucky coach Rick Stansbury released a statement Monday in regards to Mitchell Robinson.
“WKU freshman center Mitchell Robinson is suspended indefinitely from the program for a violation of team rules," Stansbury said "Mitchell is a good kid, but the team will always be more important than one individual player. He needs to understand the value of structure and accountability in his life, and his return will be dependent upon requirements that will be handled internally. My focus is on our team, and I’m excited about this group as we prepare for next week’s trip to Costa Rica.”
A freshman center, Robinson left Bowling Green last week, although he's still listed in the school's online directory and still a member of the WKU program. According to his Facebook page, Robinson is currently in Pensacola, Fla.
The 7-foot graduate of Chalmette High School in Louisiana arrived at Western on July 10. His summer included a trip to Colorado Springs, Colo., to take part in Team USA's under-19 squad tryouts.
Robinson became the program's first signee to play in the McDonald's All American Game in Chicago. He also played in the Jordan Brand Classic in Brooklyn, N.Y., after averaging 25.7 points, 12.6 rebounds and six blocks per game as a senior at CHS. He was ranked as the No. 8 prospect nationally in the 2017 class by Rivals, Scout and 247Sports.
Because Robinson enrolled in Western Kentucky and had already received financial aid via scholarship, he would only be eligible to play at a different Division I program this fall should he receive a waiver from the NCAA.
The Hilltoppers, meanwhile, depart for Costa Rica for a week-long preseason trip starting Aug. 7.
— Follow WBKO sportswriter Chad Bishop on Twitter @MrChadBishop |
Syrian Journalist Released After Years In Prison
Enlarge this image toggle caption Francois Mori/AP Francois Mori/AP
Several activists groups celebrated the release of Mazen Darwish, a Syrian journalist and human rights activist, from prison on Monday. In a statement, the Syrian Center for Media and Freedom of Expression, which Darwish helped found, said, "After an arbitrary arrest that lasted three years, five months, and 23 days, Mazen Darwish has been released from prison today."
The AP reports Darwish was imprisoned for his reporting on President Bashar Assad's crackdown on protesters during the early days of an uprising against the presidency, which later became a full-blown civil war.
As we previously reported, Darwish was arrested in February 2012, after a raid on his offices in the capital Damascus. His detention was part of a sweeping arrest campaign of opposition activists and intellectuals by the Assad government. The AP reports Darwish was "one of the rare journalists who dared publish details of arbitrary arrests and violations by policy and security forces and became a symbol of the battle for human rights in Syria following his detention."
Dozens of human rights groups and the U.S. Department of State called for Darwish's release over the last three years. In a February statement, the State Department said:
"For three years, Darwish's powerful voice for reason and peace has been muted by a brutal Syrian regime intent on the complete repression of the civil and human rights of the Syrian people."
Reporters Without Borders said in a statement that during his detention, Darwish was subjected to "mistreatment, torture, and enforced disappearance."
Though Darwish has been released, the AP reports that he is still standing trial and has to appear in court on August 30th. Reporters Without Borders says his trial has been postponed about 25 times. The Committee to Protect Journalists tweeted today, "We're relieved to hear Mazen Darwish was released. But with him due back in court in two weeks, it's time to put this case to rest forever."
Reporters Without Borders says the Syrian government is holding at least 30 journalists and "information activists" in its jails. |
Oct 25, 2017-
Heli Air Nepal has launched sightseeing flights by gyrocopter in Pokhara, marking the start of yet another adventure tourism product in the lake city after paragliding and ultra light aircraft.
The company started commercial service with the one-passenger rotary-wing aircraft more than a month ago after receiving an operating licence from the Civil Aviation Authority of Nepal (Caan). The service has buoyed tourism entrepreneurs in Pokhara who expect the new product to attract more thrill seekers to one of the most famous tourist destinations in the country.
According to Ronan Lamichhane, managing director of Heli Air Nepal, the company currently flies two French-made gyrocopters, and plans to bring another one soon. It operates seven to eight flights daily.
“Around 90 percent of our clients are foreigners and the rest are Nepalis,” said Lamichhane. “A majority of them go on the flight to enjoy panoramic views of the mountains around the city.” Passengers can get a 360-degree view of the scenery from the aircraft, so the flight is very popular among those who want to take photos and videos, added Lamichhane.
Heli Air Nepal charges $149 for a 15-minute flight, $249 for a flight lasting half an hour, $398 for an hour-long flight and $548 for a flight lasting one and a half hours.
According to the manufacturer’s website, a gyrocopter can even be flown in strong winds and weather conditions, and can be used practically round the year.
It is a type of rotorcraft that uses an unpowered rotor in autorotation to develop lift, and an engine-powered propeller, similar to that of a fixed-wing aircraft, to provide thrust.
Although a gyrocopter can’t take off vertically like a helicopter, it can land—depending on wind speed—within a distance of zero to 30 metres and can deal with strong winds and turbulence in mountainous areas. The company claimed that as the aircraft has a double petrol-powered engine, it can land anywhere in an emergency.
The gyrocopter can fly at a height of up to 18,000 feet. “However, we operate flights only up to 12,000 feet as we would require artificial oxygen to fly higher than that,” said Lamichhane. A gyrocopter can fly continuously for 3 hours and has a range of 800 km.
Heli Air Nepal has claimed that it is the first company to operate gyrocopters in South Asia.
Published: 25-10-2017 08:57 |
Bend's Ian Boswell, front, on stage six of the 2016 Paris-Nice cycling race in France. (Graham Watson/submitted photo) 6316261
Bend's Ian Boswell, front, on stage six of the 2016 Paris-Nice cycling race in France. (Graham Watson/submitted photo) - Bulletin
Bend's Ian Boswell hopes to compete for the overall win in the Tour of California, which starts Sunday and runs through Saturday. (Russ Ellis/Team Sky photo) 6316258
Bend's Ian Boswell hopes to compete for the overall win in the Tour of California, which starts Sunday and runs through Saturday. (Russ Ellis/Team Sky photo) - Bulletin
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Tour of California What: A seven-stage road cycling race widely regarded as the most prestigious and competitive in the United States When: Sunday through Saturday Where: The race starts Sunday in Sacramento and finishes Saturday in Pasadena Television: The race is scheduled to air live on NBCSN, and the final stage will air live on NBC Website: www.amgentourofcalifornia.com
First it was shingles. Then he suffered one of the worst crashes of his career.
But after enduring a rather inauspicious start to his season, Bend’s Ian Boswell is ready and raring to represent his home country in professional cycling’s most prestigious and competitive race in the United States.
Tour of California What: A seven-stage road cycling race widely regarded as the most prestigious and competitive in the United States When: Sunday through Saturday Where: The race starts Sunday in Sacramento and finishes Saturday in Pasadena Television: The race is scheduled to air live on NBCSN, and the final stage will air live on NBC Website: www.amgentourofcalifornia.com View More
Boswell, who finished seventh overall in the 2015 Tour of California, is aiming for even loftier goals this time around in the seven-stage race, which starts Sunday in Sacramento.
As one of the leaders of Team Sky, can he win the overall title in the World Tour race?
“Potentially, yeah,” Boswell says. “I haven’t raced at full health in a couple weeks now, so it’s hard to really judge. But I guess that’s my goal. It’s a race that I’ll have opportunities to race for the win, which is something to take advantage of.”
A 2009 graduate of Bend’s Summit High School, Boswell, 26, is in his fifth year on the England-based Team Sky, regarded as one of the top teams in pro cycling.
He raced in the Giro d’Italia last year at this time and he raced in the Vuelta a España in both 2015 and 2016. Those two races represent two of cycling’s three Grand Tours, the other being the Tour de France.
A strong performance in California for Boswell could influence Team Sky officials when assembling their team for this year’s Tour de France.
“Depending on how everything’s going, I’ll try to make the Tour team,” Boswell says. “It’s still a while away, but I’m hoping to try to put my hand up for that by having a good ride in California. That would kind of raise the eyebrows of the selection committee of Sky.
“That’s kind of how it works — talk with your legs.”
Boswell — who has been based in Nice, France, for the past several years — came down with shingles in late February. The painful skin rash, caused by the same virus that causes chickenpox, hampered his training, but he was able to get back on track after about two to three weeks.
Then, in the Tour of the Alps race in Austria and Italy in mid-April, Boswell crashed while descending at about 50 mph. While he suffered no broken bones, the left side of his body was bruised and badly scraped.
“When you go down at that speed you tend to bang yourself up pretty good,” Boswell says. “I still have a few scars, but it’s pretty much healed and thankfully nothing was broken. That’s the worst crash I’ve had in quite a while. The timing of it definitely wasn’t ideal.”
Boswell spent more than a week back home in Bend recovering before leaving for Sacramento on Thursday. He took part in a few group rides while he was in Central Oregon, catching up with longtime friends.
“It’s funny how Bend has changed and grown, but at the same time a lot of familiar faces in the cycling community,” Boswell says.
He says he has been eyeing the Tour of California since the start of the season. As an all-around cyclist (a strong climber and time trialist), Boswell is a rider capable of competing for an overall victory in the general classification (GC). But three other Team Sky riders in the Tour of California have similar skills, including Brits Tao Geoghegan Hart and Peter Kennaugh, and Spaniard David Lopez.
“There’s four of us who are kind of the climber/GC guys, so between the four of us, it will kind of be decided on the road with how we’re all feeling,” Boswell says. “I’ll definitely have my opportunities, and if I’m feeling good, I’ll have free rein to race for my own aspirations.”
Boswell also points to Andrew Talansky of Cannondale-Drapac and David de la Cruz of Quick-Step Floors as other top riders to watch this week.
Boswell says the two decisive stages in the Tour of California will be stage five, a 78-mile route that finishes with a climb to the top of 4,193-foot Mount Baldy near Los Angeles and includes 12,000 feet of elevation gain, and stage six, a 15-mile time trial at Big Bear Lake, east of L.A.
The first four stages will likely feature mostly sprint finishes, during which Team Sky will try to procure stage wins for its standout sprinter, Elia Viviani of Italy.
“If we can win a couple stages beforehand, and kind of build up the morale of the team, that’ll be really good going into the back half of the race,” Boswell says.
This marks the first year that the Tour of California, in its 12th edition, will be a World Tour race, putting it in the same category as the Grand Tours. That means more European teams and riders, making this the strongest California field ever.
But Boswell says he is ready.
“My preparation hasn’t been ideal with the crash and sickness this spring, but at the same time I’m more experienced than in years past, and stronger with so many hard races in my legs,” he says. “The experience I’ve gained over the last couple years has definitely paid off, and you just get a bit wiser and a bit stronger each year.”
— Reporter: 541-383-0318,
mmorical@bendbulletin.com
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