text stringlengths 316 100k |
|---|
Welcome to the 2014 edition of “Top Shelf Prospects”. As we have gone through the Summer of 2014 I featured a team-by-team look at the top prospects in the NHL. You can find all the articles here. You can also find the 2014 Draftees in our extensive NHL Draft preview, where players were reviewed and ranked prior to the 2014 NHL Draft. For those wondering, the cut-off for what is or isn’t a prospect is typically about 50 NHL games played (including playoffs) or being 25 years old. These are not hard or fast rules though, and I may make some exceptions depending on the circumstances.
With all thirty NHL teams reviewed (3 prospects per team, plus one sleeper) its time to wrap up the series. In order to do this we will be releasing a number of wrap up pieces this week. Stay tuned for our organizational rankings, looking at the deepest and best prospect systems in the NHL, as well as our top 10 Calder Contenders. How are the Calder contenders different from the top prospects you ask? Well, our top 39 prospects are who we are picking to have the best careers, a Calder contender will be a prediction of who is going to have the best rookie season. NHL readiness, the situation inherited (linemates and opportunities) and the fact that the Calder is typically a very difficult award for a defenceman to win in recent years all play into this.
As for today, we bring you our selection for top NHL Prospects. Note that the reports here are condensed, and that by clicking on the player name you will get a full report.
For Players 11 – 30 Click Here
Top 10 NHL Prospects
10) Leon Draisatl, C, Edmonton Oilers
Leon Draisaitl is a big centre with excellent reach and stickhandling ability. He protects the puck very well, especially in the cycle game. He also has the vision and the passing skill to finds an open teammate with a quick and accurate pass. Draisaitl also has a strong and accurate wrist shot, with a very good release, leading to goal scoring ability. Draisaitl is not afraid to take the puck to the net, and has the soft hands to finish when he gets there. What is most impressive though is his ability to read the play, and be in the right spot at the right time. Draisaitl has very impressive hockey sense.
9)Andrey Vasilevski, G, Tampa Bay Lightning
Coming in at 6’3″ tall, Vasilevski has the ideal height and size that NHL teams are looking for more and more in goaltenders today. He is big and takes up a lot of space. When he gets out on his angles he doesn’t leave shooters with a whole lot of net to look at. Vasilevski is mature beyond his years, and this helps him maintain a cool and calm composure in the net. Vasilevski has quick and agile legs that cover the bottom of the net. He is very hard to beat down low. He also has an effective glove hand and is very good in his lateral movement. He gets side to side in his crease quickly and doesn’t overcommit to cross-ice passes.
8) Sam Bennett, C, Calgary Flames
Bennett has excellent hockey sense, and always seems to be in the right place, and make the right play. He finds holes in the defence and can get open. With the puck on his stick he is a deadly playmaker as he has the vision to find open teammates, and the skills to make tape-to-tape passes. He is a hard worker who will work on the cycle game and can protect the puck well. This will only get better as he adds muscle. Bennett can also score goals with good hands in tight, and an excellent release on his wrist shot. Good skating, and excellent agility and acceleration make Bennett a menace off the rush, or in cycling the puck as he seems to slip by defenders who can’t keep up with him when he quickly changes speeds.
7) Teuvo Teravainen, C, Chicago Blackhawks
Teravainen is one of my favorite prospects to watch play. He has incredible hockey sense and vision, and is an extremely creative playmaker. Teravainen will attempt passes that most forwards don’t even dream about, feathering pucks through sticks and legs and putting them on the tape of his teammates. He shows incredible vision and passing skills in making these dynamic plays. Teravainen prefers to control the play in the offensive zone often working as a setup man working off the half boards. The has very good hands, and excellent stickhandling leading to a strong puck protection game despite his size. Teravainen also possesses a very hard and accurate one-timer and often unleashes it from the top of the circle. He is especially effective on the Power Play. He has shown that he is willing to take a hit to make a play, despite the fact he is often facing larger opponents. He could use increased upper body strength however, in order to help him win more battles along the boards.
6) John Gibson, G: Anaheim Ducks
As opposed to the traditional butterfly goalie, Gibson plays a hybrid style in net that is becoming more popular in recent years. He has excellent size, and is willing to come out of the crease to challenge shooters and cut down angles. He gives the shooter very little net to work with, especially down low, as his quick legs take away the bottom of the net. Excellent puck tracking and side to side movement are also major assets for Gibson. He has developed very good rebound control for a goaltender his age. His glove hand is also quick and takes away the top of the net. Gibson shows poise beyond his years, and the Ducks feel he is NHL ready after just one year in the AHL. He has shown to be nearly unflappable even in the most pressure packed situations and carries himself with extreme confidence.
5) Ryan Strome, C, New York Islanders
Strome has all the offensive talent you would look for in a young player. He is a terrific skater with good top end speed and great acceleration. This acceleration gives Strome the ability to fool defenders by changing speeds on the rush. When he gets half a step to the outside he is able to turn it into another gear and drive past his opponent and get to the net. He also has terrific agility and edgework which help him to gain that half a step necessary to beat defenders in this way. Strome is also a terrific stickhandler, with great puck protection, and silky smooth hands. Add to that the creativity and confidence to try anything and Strome is extremely dangerous off the rush. Strome has the vision and creativity to be an outstanding playmaker as he is able to feather passes through the smallest of openings, and set up teammates with tape to tape passes to create quality scoring chances. As a sniper, he is NHL ready, having a fantastic wrist shot and release, an excellent slapshot, and a great one timer.
4) Sam Reinhart, C, Buffalo Sabres
Reinhart has excellent hockey sense and vision. He seems to know where the puck is going before it gets there and finds the openings in the defence. He has excellent stickhandling and puck protection skills, which when coupled with his good vision and passing make him an excellent playmaker. Reinhart is one of those special types of centres who has the ability to make his linemates better. He is very unpredictable, when a goalie is thinking shot he makes the perfect pass to a teammate to give them a wide open net, and if a goalie cheats towards the pass, he’ll put the puck in the back of the net. While his shot could be a little harder and should get there as he gains muscle, but he is deadly accurate and has a great release that fools goaltenders. Reinhart has shown the ability to protect the puck on the cycle and is willing to play in the dirty areas of the ice in order to score points. He’s a natural leader who seems to get a “letter” wherever he goes, whether it be Kootenay or Team Canada.
3) Aaron Ekblad, D: Florida Panthers
Aaron Ekblad has everything you could possibly want in a defenceman, and is great at both ends of the ice. He has a bullet slap shot from the point, and a strong first pass. He shows a ton of offensive potential and has been close to a point per game pace with 23 goals and 53 points in 58 games. He is extremely smart with the puck, and a good quarterback on the powerplay. He understands how to keep his shot low and on net when there is traffic in front of the net, but can still blast away. He has the skating and puckhandling skills to join the rush, or even lead it and recover defensively. Even with that great offensive potential, he’s even better defensively, as Ekblad dominates older players physically in his own zone winning board battles and clearing the front of the net.
2) Evgeny Kuznetsov, C: Washington Capitals
Kuznetsov has limitless talent. At 6’3″, he has the ideal size that teams crave down the middle in the modern NHL. He could stand to bulk up a little, but it’s not an immediate concern. He’s an outstanding skater, with great top-end speed, excellent acceleration and changes of pace, super edgework and agility, and is strong and balanced on his skates. Combine that skating ability with his silky smooth hands, wide variety of creative moves, a fearlessness to try anything, and the ability to do all this with the puck while skating at top speed, and you have a player who is an absolute nightmare to defend off the rush. Add a lethal wrist shot and release, and it’s almost unfair to defenders and goalies.
1) Jonathan Drouin, C/LW; Tampa Bay Lightning
The first thing that stands out about Drouin, is his incredible hands. Drouin has the ability to stickhandle in a phone booth and can make tremendous plays both off the rush and by controlling the puck in the offensive zone. He regularly beats defenders one-on-one leading to high quality scoring opportunities for himself and his linemates. He has tremendous vision and is more of a set-up man than a goal scorer, and is able to thread passes through the tiniest of openings. However, those great hands in tight situations, and a very good wrist shot and release, also help Drouin to score goals. He plays a fearless game. He’s willing to battle in the corners and at the front of the net, getting in the dirty areas he needs to be in to score points. While many are concerned with Drouin’s size, we feel that due to his extremely high skill level, his non-stop motor and compete level, and his tremendous hockey IQ, the issue of size will not hold him back at the next level.
Drouin is a tremendous skater. His balance, agility, edgework, and ability to change speeds makes him extremely dangerous off the rush. There are a number of tools in his arsenal that he can use to beat a defender one-on-one off the rush. Add to that his ability to get by you and make a play towards the net in the cycle game, and you have an offensive terror. To top it all off, Drouin’s top-end speed is well above average, and once he gets by, it is very difficult to chase him down from behind.
For the latest sports injury news, check out our friends at Sports Injury Alert.
Thank you for reading. Please take a moment to follow me on Twitter – @lastwordBkerr. Support LWOS by following us on Twitter – @LastWordOnSport – and “liking” our Facebook page.
Have you tuned into Last Word On Sports Radio? LWOS is pleased to bring you 24/7 sports radio to your PC, laptop, tablet or smartphone. What are you waiting for? GO! |
The father of a newborn baby girl was charged with selling heroin in the maternity ward at Excela Health Westmoreland hospital, just feet away from the infant.
Cody R. Hulse, 25, of Latrobe was arraigned Friday on charges of possession of heroin, possession and delivery of a controlled substance, possession of drug paraphernalia and endangering the welfare of children filed by Greensburg police.
When officers confronted Hulse in his girlfriend’s room Thursday just hours after the baby’s birth, he admitted selling heroin to people who visited him in the Greensburg hospital, according to the affidavit filed by Detective Sgt. John Swank. Police confiscated 34 stamp bags of heroin, four empty stamp bags and multiple hypodermic needles Hulse was carrying, police said.
“This affidavit says you had needles in there, you were selling drugs in there … all with a newborn baby in the room. This is very disturbing,” District Judge James Albert told the handcuffed and shackled Hulse.
“I have an issue myself with drugs … heroin. I really didn’t want to bring it in,” Hulse said.
As Albert contemplated the amount of bond, Hulse asked him to consider that he is a new father and has a full-time job at a lumber company.
When Albert set bond at $100,000 cash, Hulse lowered his head and muttered, “This is ridiculous.”
Officers were led to Hulse after a traffic stop on North Main Street in Greensburg at 6:51 p.m. Thursday, where people “had drug paraphernalia in plain view on the front seat,” Swank wrote.
The officer found several stamp bags of heroin labeled “Final Call” in a cigarette case in the center console.
The people in the traffic stop, who have not been charged, told Swank they had just purchased the heroin in the hospital maternity ward from a man named Cody.
Swank and other officers went to the hospital, phoning nurses ahead of time to take the baby from the room before they arrived. Swank said in court documents that he and the other officers went into the room and placed Hulse under arrest.
“Hulse admitted he had heroin in his pocket and had delivered heroin to several persons who had visited the room,” Swank wrote in court papers.
Swank said Hulse’s girlfriend, the mother of his child, maintained that she did not know he was selling drugs from the room.
Albert ordered that Hulse be held in the county prison and have no contact with the baby.
Hulse declined comment as he was led from Albert’s office.
Paul Peirce is a Tribune-Review staff writer. Reach him at 724-850-2860, ppeirce@tribweb.com or via Twitter @ppeirce_trib
Paul Peirce is a Tribune-Review staff reporter. You can contact Paul at 724-850-2860, ppeirce@tribweb.com or via Twitter . |
Last week, the commerce department released data on GDP for the first quarter that showed the economy growing at just a 1.8% annual rate. This brought the growth rate over the last year to just 2.3%, slightly less than the 2.5% growth rate needed to keep pace with the growth in the labour force.
It might have been expected that this closely watched number set off all sorts of alarm bells about the weakness of the recovery. Instead, it was buried in the business pages with the headlines dismissing the weakness as the result of bad weather.
The weather line should not have provided much consolation. Even a generous assessment of the impact of weather would not lead to a counterfactual of more than 2.7% growth for the quarter. This would raise the rate for the last year to around 2.5%, still a dismal pace for an economy recovering from a steep downturn.
The professional excuse makers seem to rely heavily on the weather. The drop in fourth quarter GDP in the UK was also attributed to the weather. But these folks apparently forgot that weather-related weakness should mean a sharp bounceback in the following period.
With the first quarter growth in the UK just offsetting the fourth-quarter decline, it is clear that weather does not explain economic weakness there, nor can weather explain the poor growth in the United States. The basic problem is that the US economy, like the UK economy, simply lacks much momentum and is likely to weaken further as the impact of the deficit cutting is increasingly felt.
Those boasting of the strong recovery have touted the fact that the unemployment rate has fallen by 1.3 percentage points since its peak in October of 2009. However, this decline is almost entirely attributable to people dropping out of the labour force, rather than people finding jobs. The employment to population ratio, the percentage of the population that holds jobs, is the same today as it was in October of 2009 and only 0.3 percentage points above the low hit last fall. In short, we have not been creating jobs at a sufficiently rapid pace to bring down the unemployment rate.
While the picture to date is bad, it is likely to get worse over the next year. The runup in oil prices is directly pulling money out of people's pockets every time they go the gas station. This could explain the fact of a sharp increase in weekly unemployment claims over the last three weeks to levels that are inconsistent with job growth.
In addition, house prices are again falling at double-digit annual rates, now that the first time buyers' tax credit has expired. At the current pace, homeowners stand to lose another $2tn in equity by the end of 2011, compared with the tax credit-induced peak reached in the summer of 2010. This will further depress consumption, as well as leading to more problems for banks due to underwater mortgages.
With the budget cutters reducing expenditures at all levels of government, there is yet another factor depressing growth. Finally, there are both personal and business tax cuts that are scheduled to expire at the end of 2011. These may be extended in some form, but if not, this will also slow growth over the next year.
If economic policy was driven by economic reality, then there would be a serious debate in Washington right now about possible routes for boosting demand. This would include calls for more fiscal stimulus, more aggressive monetary policy and a reduction in the value of the dollar in order to boost net exports.
Unfortunately, none of these items are on the table. The debate in Congress is over the best way to reduce the deficit – in other words, how much and how quickly we want to slow growth further. At his press conference last week, Federal Reserve Board Chairman Ben Bernanke essentially swore off any further monetary stimulus and expressed his willingness to fight inflation that is not there. And no one in Washington seem seems to understand that amount we import is affected by the price of imports, so lowering the value of the dollar never enters the discussion.
This is a great recipe for continued slow growth and high unemployment. And few in Congress or the media seem to give a damn. |
Get the biggest daily news stories by email Subscribe Thank you for subscribing We have more newsletters Show me See our privacy notice Could not subscribe, try again later Invalid Email
You could quite literally be wasting a fortune every time you go to the toilet after scientists discovered gold in human faeces.
Brave boffins have revealed that our poo also contains other valuable minerals such as silver, and rare elements including palladium and vanadium.
According to the US researchers, sewage sludge contains levels of gold, silver and platinum that, if found in rocks, would be seen as ‘commercially viable’ for prospectors.
The scientists made the bizarre discovery when studying waste from American sewage treatment plants.
The microscopic nuggets were observed using a scanning electron microscope.
Lead scientist Dr Kathleen Smith, from the US Geological Survey, said: "The gold we found was at the level of a minimal mineral deposit.”
(Image: Kari Marttila / Alamy)
She added: "There are metals everywhere - in your hair care products, detergents, even nanoparticles that are put in socks to prevent bad odours.”
The metals find their way into the body and end up being excreted and going down the toilet. At sewage treatment plants they are concentrated in left-over "biosolids", more than seven million tons of which are produced in the US each year.
Half the biosolids are used as fertiliser on fields and in forests while the other half are incinerated or buried at landfill sites.
Dr Smith said: "We have a two-pronged approach. In one part of the study, we are looking at removing some regulated metals from the biosolids that limit their use for land application.
"In the other part of the project, we're interested in collecting valuable metals that could be sold, including some of the more technologically important metals, such as vanadium and copper that are in cell phones, computers and alloys.”
Taking a lesson from industrial mining, the scientists are experimenting with chemicals called leachates that are used to pull metals out of rock.
(Image: PA)
Some of these chemicals have a bad reputation for damaging ecosystems when they leak or spill into the environment.
But in controlled conditions, they could safely be used to recover metals from treated solid waste, Dr Smith claims.
"If you can get rid of some of the nuisance metals that currently limit how much of these biosolids we can use on fields and forests, and at the same time recover valuable metals and other elements, that's a win-win," she said.
The researchers described their work at the 249th national meeting of the American Chemical Society in Denver, Colorado.
A previous study published in the journal Environmental Science and Technology estimated that the waste from one million Americans could contain as much as £8.7 million worth of metals. |
We’re No. 1! And if you’re reading this, you’re included.
The rankings for the America’s Most Literate Cities study were released today with Seattle coming in first out of 75 cities.
Washington D.C. came in second and the citizens of Minneapolis, with whom Seattleites have wrestled for the top spot since the first study in 2003, fell to third place.
Seattle tied for first with Minneapolis in 2008 and came in second after the Minnesota city in 2007.
The study, by Dr. Jack Miller of Central Connecticut State University, ranks cities based on a number of criteria across six categories, including the number of retail bookstores per 10,000 population, the percentage of adult population with a high school diploma or higher, the number of Web page views per capita to a city’s Internet version of a newspaper and the total weekday circulation of a city’s newspapers.
These criteria, according to the study, provide a measurement of the extent to which people in a given city use their literacy.
The study is limited to cities that have a population of 250,000 or larger.
Top 10 most literate cities of 2009:
1) Seattle
2) Washington, DC
3) Minneapolis
4) Pittsburgh
5) Atlanta
6) Portland, Ore.
7) St. Paul, Minn.
8) Boston
9) Cincinnati
10) Denver
At the bottom of the list is El Paso, Texas; Corpus Christi, Texas; Bakersfield, Calif., and Stockton, Calif.
Seattle also topped the lists in the Booksellers and Education categories. It was in the top five cities for the Internet and Library categories and within the top 20 cities for the Newspaper and Publication categories.
To see descriptions of the criteria used to assess each category, go here.
Full list of rankings is here. |
For several years, and especially since the Edward Snowden revelations, there has been a need for an easy-to-use, automatically encrypted communications service.
Many people have flocked to Protonmail, the closed-source e-mail application based in Switzerland, which has seen a great deal of corporate backing and a rapidly expanding user base. The key word here is closed-source – meaning that the security researchers of the world are not immediately free to audit the viability of the secure algorithms used to encrypt messages on the service.
Enter Tutanota, the German-based alternative to Protonmail, which is both open-source and as easy to use as Protonmail. Tutanota is Latin for “secure message,” at least if you separate the two words. The company was founded in 2011 and presently serves around 100,000 accounts. It is backed by two German private investors and has ambitions to expand into other areas, such as a secure calendar interface and a file sharing / storage service not unlike Mega.
Encrypting E-mails was Just Too Complicated
Co-founder Arne Möhle explained in a phone call that the impetus for creating the service was that, in their previous lives, he and co-founder Mathieu Pfau found that it was overly complicated to securely communicate with business partners and customers.
Before we started with Tutanota, we were in some other jobs, and all of us, we always saw this problem that encrypting e-mails for communication with partners or with customers was just too complicated. And that’s when we said there must be some easier way to do that. That’s when we started to develop Tutanota, which hides all the stuff which is complicated like generating keys, exchanging keys, managing certificates, and so on.
In the same way that Mega easily encrypts files for users using client-side browser-based security, Tutanota does not require much of the user in terms of technical know-how. While Tutanota and Protonmail are hardly the first in this space, Hushmail was famously compromised several years ago. Further, Hushmail actively logs IP addresses and over the years, due to complicity with law enforcement and other mistakes, they have fallen off the radar as the go-to secure e-mail provider.
As stated earlier, Tutanota intends to expand into other markets, potentially even into instant messaging later on. The implementation of encrypted calendaring would be a first, and will be something that the next generation of businesses will truly appreciate. It is much easier to track someone’s whereabouts if you can easily access their calendar. In this vein, Tutanota already has a business application, Tutanota for Outlook, which is one of the ways they are already generating revenue. It is also open source so that companies can be sure things are working properly under the hood.
We also have a business product, which is Tutanota for Outlook. So you can just send and receive end-to-end encrypted e-mails directly with Outlook. It works with an Outlook plug-in. And that’s the business variant of Tutanota. […] We’re thinking about integrating it into Thunderbird, but it’s not yet decided if we’re going to do it but we have to see which is the highest priority to work on, and Thunderbird is not currently the highest priority, but it may become the highest priority in the future. […] For private users, we currently focus on the web application and the Android and iPhone applications.
Tutanota is encrypted with RSA/AES 2048 encryption. Hacked got in touch with Dr. Brian Sovryn, a technologist and podcaster based in New Hampshire, for his thoughts on the open-source alternative to Protonmail.
The fact is, we live in a surveillance state. But it’s more than that. It’s also a surveillance society, where people seem to just accept a lack of privacy in their lives and communications. I think the reason they accept this is because it appears that regaining privacy is hard. But that’s the beauty of services like Tutanota, where it takes some of the best open-source encryption devised and makes it easy to use with an app on your smartphone, in your web browser, and even in Outlook! Even if somehow that encryption were cracked, getting people used to encryption being the rule, and no longer the exception, is essential to human freedom.
In the modern age, you can almost bet that anything you send and received is being watched by someone, and governments are not the only third-party to be concerned about.
Hackers who traffic in financial and personal data, marketers who profit by knowing every click of your mouse within the browser, and those with even more nefarious purposes, such as terrorist organizations, all have a motive to know what goes on in the private lives of everyday people.
Möhle says that the state of mass surveillance we live under was a big concern, and the hope is that Tutanota gives people without a great deal of technical knowledge the freedom to communicate unmolested.
Images from Shutterstock and Tutanota.
Editor’s note: in the original article, we gave the impression that all of ProtonMail’s code is closed-source, which is not true. ProtonMail utilizes the open-source library OpenPGPjs. While ALL of TutaNota’s code is freely availably (https://github.com/tutao/ tutanota) and they do intend to add PGP (https://tutanota.uservoice. com/forums/237921-general/ suggestions/6979966-pgp- support), ProtonMail creator Andy Yen felt that we were unfair to ProtonMail. He wrote to say:
“It is often claimed that Tutanota is open source while ProtonMail is not, but that is actually quite disingenuous. ProtonMail’s client side encryption is based on the OpenPGPjs library (https://github.com/openpgpjs/ openpgpjs) and not only do we use that library, our developers are also active in contributing to it. OpenPGPjs is open source. But it is better than open source. It has also been audited and reviewed. And it has a very active developer community which is constantly improving it and making it more secure. In other words, it is an exemplary example of how to leverage the strengths of open source.” |
Need for Speed Returns in an Action Driving Experience That Unites the Culture of Speed
Deep Customisation, Authentic Urban Car Culture, Open World, and Immersive Narrative All Feature in the Reboot of the Famed Need for Speed Franchise
GOTHENBURG, Sweden--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Ghost Games™, an Electronic Arts Inc. (NASDAQ: EA) studio, announced today the return of Need for Speed™ in a full reboot of this storied franchise. The game delivers on what the fans want, and what Need for Speed stands for - deep customisation, authentic urban car culture, a nocturnal open world, and an immersive narrative that pulls you through the game.“Need for Speed is one of the most iconic names in gaming, and we're returning it to greatness in this reboot,” said Marcus Nilsson, Executive Producer at Ghost Games. “Pulling on our 20 years of history, and then taking a year out from releasing a game, we are making the game we’ve always wanted to. We're listening to the fans and delivering an experience that will capture their imagination and unleash their passion for cars and speed.”Fuelled by EA's own car culture community, Speedhunters (www.speedhunters.com), Need for Speed will deliver an experience that's grounded in authentic car culture by diving into the rich world of past, present and emergent trends of the urban car scene. This collaboration with Speedhunters in the research and development of the game means the level of detail and real-world authenticity will envelop gamers in an exciting world to discover and enjoy in a way that only Need for Speed can deliver.Need for Speed will launch worldwide in Fall 2015 on Origin™ for PC , PlayStation®4 computer entertainment system and Xbox One, the all-in-one games and entertainment system from Microsoft. To join the Need for Speed conversation please visit https://www.facebook.com/NeedforSpeed , follow us on Twitter® at https://twitter.com/NeedforSpeed |
Remember the 18-foot-wide sign welcoming visitors to the city of Hawkins, Texas?
Mayor Will Rogers had defended the Jesus-tastic sign even after receiving a letter of complaint from the Freedom From Religion Foundation. At one point, he said it wasn’t religious at all. He later said the sign should stay because Jesus was like Superman — and if the FFRF didn’t want a fictional being (in their opinion) welcoming people to Hawkins, then they would oppose Superman, too. So there.
Last we heard, the city council postponed a vote to decide the fate of the sign.
It’s been months since that delay was announced, but the city council has finally decided to do the right thing:
On Monday night, council members voted to take the sign down, which will be placed in storage until its rightful owner comes forward to claim it. The sign has been standing since 2011, after Hawkins mayor Will Rogers first asked city council for permission to erect the sign before he became mayor.
The sign will come down sometime within the next 30 days, which is good since Jesus has completely overstayed his welcome.
(Thanks to Amanda for the link. Large portions of this article were published earlier.) |
We first wrote about the absurd case against US Air Force Tech Sgt. Matt Pinkerton in early November, when he was charged with murder by Assistant State’s Attorney Glen Neubauer. What was Pinkerton’s crime? Not pausing to dial 9-1-1 after Kendall Green forced is way into Pinkerton’s home at 2:00 AM.
Our friend and Bearing Arms contributor Mike McDaniel has been following the Pinkerton case on his own site, and now reports that charges against Pinkerton have been dismissed by the judge… and that’s no small thing:
…Pinkerton was apparently not acquitted, in other words, found not guilty of the charges. There is a significant difference in the process of the similar outcomes. To be acquitted, one much normally endure a complete trial and a jury must render a “not guilty” verdict. In this case it seems that the judge determined that there wasn’t enough evidence to sustain any of the multiple charges against Pinkerton. If this trial followed the normal course of such things, after the prosecution presented its case, the defense asked that the judge dismiss the charges because the prosecution failed to sustain its burden of proof, and that request was obviously granted, likely with prejudice, meaning the charges cannot be refilled in the future. If so, the case is over. There is, however, one additional possibility: the judge might have dismissed prior to the conclusion of the prosecution’s case, so obvious was the prosecution’s lack of evidence, so poorly did the prosecutor observe Maryland state law. If that happened, it is unusual indeed. Prosecutors normally do not bring murder charges absent a very strong case, and judges are normally reluctant to dismiss a murder case before all potential evidence has been heard.
Mike gives the case a very thorough review, pointing out just how absurd the charges were. It isn’t Mike Nifong bad, but it was still an absurd case to bring to trial.
The judge in the case obviously felt that you do have a right to defend your home and family against a belligerent person attempting to invade your home, even in the freedom-hating anti-gun state of Maryland.
Who knew? |
CNN host Soledad O’Brien on Wednesday told Family Research Council President Tony Perkins that he could be “on the wrong side of history” after he defended the Boy Scouts’ ban on LGBT members by suggesting that homosexuals were more likely to be pedophiles.
As the Boy Scouts of American national board was set to decide if local organizations would be allowed to include gay members on Wednesday, O’Brien asked Perkins if there was “a possibility that you’re wrong” because “historically there have been core values that in retrospect turned out to be flawed?”
“You’re comparing immutable characteristics with characteristics that are not immutable,” Perkins explained. “In part, their policy has been to protect boys, to create obviously not a perfect environment, but one that is in line with what the parents want, to ensure their children are safe when they go out in these scouting activities.”
O’Brien wondered “why it would make a difference to open up scouting to people who are gay” because the Boy Scouts had already released 14,500 pages of so-called “perversion files” showing years of sexual abuse on minors that had been covered up by the organization.
“Why would I let a man who is attracted to other males go camping with my boys,” Perkins argued.
“A pedophile has sex with children,” O’Brien pointed out. “Are you saying that someone who’s gay is a pedophile?”
“No, I never said that,” the Family Research Council president insisted. “I’m saying that they’re trying to create an environment that is protective the children. This doesn’t make it more protective. There is a disproportionate number of male on boy pedophilia — when we get into pedophilia, it’s male on boy. There’s a higher incident rate of that. We never said all homosexuals are pedophiles or all pedophiles are homosexuals.”
“Why would they want to come in and change an organization that’s been around 100 years?” Perkins added.
“Because it’s discriminatory,” O’Brien observed. “Do you worry you’re on the wrong side of history on this? Do you think that you’re going to look up and say, ‘We were on the wrong side in this debate, that this was an organization that ultimately stood for discriminating against some people.’ Don’t you worry about that?”
“The question for the scouts is, are we going to continue in our mission and are we going to provide the safest possible environment for these boys or are we going to cave in corporate dollars?” Perkins replied. “That’s the question before the board today.”
In a statement last year, the Southern Poverty Law Center said that it had listed the Family Research Council as a hate group since 2010 because “it has knowingly spread false and denigrating propaganda about LGBT people,” including the claim pedophilia was a “homosexual problem.”
Watch this video from CNN’s Starting Point, broadcast Feb. 6, 2013.
(h/t: Think Progress) |
Story highlights The cases reviewed involved searches without a warrant following an arrest
The unanimous decision was a sweeping endorsement for privacy rights
Most people in the United States own a cellphone
The Supreme Court on Wednesday unanimously ruled that police may not search the cell phones of criminal suspects upon arrest without a warrant -- a sweeping endorsement for privacy rights.
By a 9-0 vote, the justices said smart phones and other electronic devices were not in the same category as wallets, briefcases, and vehicles -- all currently subject to limited initial examination by law enforcement.
Generally such searches are permitted if there is "probable cause" that a crime has been committed, to ensure officers' safety and prevent destruction of evidence.
JUST WATCHED Supreme Court: Warrants for cell phones Replay More Videos ... MUST WATCH Supreme Court: Warrants for cell phones 01:18
Criminal suspects in Massachusetts and California were separately convicted, in part, after phone numbers, text messages, photos and addresses obtained from personal electronic devices linked them to drug and gang activity.
Those cases were appealed to the high court, giving it an opportunity to re-enter the public debate over the limits of privacy rights, with a focus on the ubiquitous cellphone and its vast storage of information and video.
The appeals were not related to the recent mass surveillance of phone metadata by the National Security Agency, which has raised similar constitutional concerns.
"The fact that technology now allows an individual to carry such information in his hand does not make the information any less worthy of the protection for which the Founders fought," the ruling said. "Our answer to the question of what police must do before searching a cell phone seized incident to an arrest is accordingly simple — get a warrant."
Ellen Canale, a Justice Department spokeswoman, said the agency would work with law enforcement to ensure "full compliance" with the decision.
"We will make use of whatever technology is available to preserve evidence on cell phones while seeking a warrant, and we will assist our agents in determining when exigent circumstances or another applicable exception to the warrant requirement will permit them to search the phone immediately without a warrant," Canale said.
Most people have cellphones
A January Pew Research Center survey found more than 90 percent of Americans now own or regularly use a cellphone, and 58 percent have a more sophisticated smartphone.
They have become the most quickly adopted technology ever. It's estimated that most of the world's 7 billion people have access to mobile devices, according to the United Nations.
Lower courts nationwide are divided over how to apply a 40-year-old high court precedent allowing searches of a suspect's items after arrest. Home searches generally require warrants and are given greater constitutional protection than vehicles or a person in public.
Of the two cases addressed by the Supreme Court, David Riley's attracted the most scrutiny.
Two convictions
He was detained in 2009 for having an expired vehicle registration and driving with a suspended license. When authorities impounded his vehicle, loaded weapons were found hidden under the hood.
After the college student's subsequent arrest, San Diego police took a look at his smartphone. Text messages, contacts and video in the touch-screen device led officers to believe Riley had organized crime connections. A photograph of another vehicle owned by the suspect was linked to an earlier drive-by shooting.
He was convicted in state court and received a 15-year prison sentence.
Separately, Brima Wurie was arrested in 2007 for selling two packets of crack cocaine. He had an old-style flip phone in his pocket, and police in Boston used call logs on the device to trace his real home address, after the suspect gave a bogus one.
There, officers with a search warrant found more drugs, a weapon and ammunition. Wurie was convicted in federal court and is serving 22 years.
In neither case did police seek a warrant before the phones were searched. One appeals court upheld Riley's conviction, and another tossed out Wurie's.
Broader impact
Unclear from the high court's ruling is whether other defendants convicted on such electronic evidence will also have their cases dismissed.
But the court minced no words in separating such devices from other things a person might have on them when detained by police.
"Modern cell phones, as a category, implicate privacy concerns far beyond those implicated by the search of a cigarette pack, a wallet, or a purse," said Chief Justice John Roberts. "Cell phones differ in both a quantitative and a qualitative sense from other objects that might be kept on an arrestee's person."
The Constitution's Fourth Amendment protects against "unreasonable searches and seizures."
But the Supreme Court has repeatedly affirmed the government's discretion to conduct warrantless initial pat-downs and searches of people and vehicles -- to ensure officers' safety and prevent destruction of evidence.
That included a 1973 ruling upholding the police search of a suspect's crumpled cigarette box, where heroin capsules were discovered. The motorist had first been stopped on suspicion of driving on a suspended license in Washington.
Cellphones different
Similar law enforcement searches can include other closed containers, such as wallets and address books, even if it is not initially apparent the items are contraband or dangerous.
But privacy advocates and defense attorneys had argued that portable, easily storable technology makes these appeals different. The court, in sweeping terms, agreed. |
University of Wisconsin-Madison ecologists have played a key role in a petition filed with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service Friday seeking emergency Endangered Species Act protection for the Venus flytrap.
The unique carnivorous plant captures flies and captivates nature lovers, but in the wild is found only in North Carolina and South Carolina.
"Kids love them, adults love them. It's a plant that captures the imagination of everybody who sees it," says Don Waller, a professor of botany and noted expert in conservation biology at UW-Madison. "Darwin called them a 'most wonderful plant' and experimented on them for several years in the greenhouse, but these plants are threatened by a combination of development, poaching and rising sea levels, and so we are asking for an expedited 'endangered' designation for the Venus flytrap."
The plant's home turf is around bogs near Wilmington, in coastal North Carolina. This is a long way from its closest relative, an aquatic plant in South Africa. The Wilmington region is growing rapidly, and the bogs are being paved and built up, Waller says.
The plant's very popularity is another key to its undoing, he adds. "People are fascinated by a plant that can move faster than the insects it eats, but ironically one result is a market for plants stolen from the wild."
Stolen plants are usually sold as house plants, but "many people don't know how, or can't be bothered, to care for them," Waller says. "Venus flytraps are high-maintenance plants, except in their native habitat."
The Venus flytrap uniquely evolved a "snap-trap contraption" that closes in about one-tenth of a second, enveloping its insect prey so rain does not wash the food away before the plant digests it. The flytrap has three hairs in each leaf, and a snap requires triggering more than one hair. "The insect has to hit one hair and then within a limited period hit another," says Waller. "Only after that double signal will the leaf close. It's a pretty clever plant."
Neither small insects nor raindrops will trigger a snap.
As the number and size of Venus flytrap populations decline, the survivors face multiple threats: further habitat loss, diminished genetic diversity, predators and outbreaks of disease. According to the Endangered Species Act petition, a "viable population," meaning one that is expected to survive and evolve over the long term, needs at least 1,000 plants. Only nine such populations are known.
The petition was written and signed by a national group of experts in conservation and ecology, including Waller and Tom Gibson of UW-Madison, Yari Johnson of UW-Platteville, and Robert Evans of the Virginia Natural Heritage Program. Waller has launched an online campaign in support of the petition: https://www.change.org/p/u-s-fish-and-wildlife-service-protect-the-venus-flytrap-endangered-species-petition?recruiter=61889226&utm_source=share_petition&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=share_email_responsive
As collectors continue to snatch plants from declining wild populations, "we have reached a situation where there are more flytraps in captivity than in the wild," Waller says. "That might be construed as good news, if it assures they will survive in captivity, but it's distressing for ecologists and conservation biologists. A population can only persist and evolve in its native habitat, and we've already seen the disappearance of 90 percent of wild plants. We have lost whole bogs, populations and individuals."
Protection under the ESA would require the Fish and Wildlife Service to identify critical habitat for the species and takes steps to protect it, Waller says.
At stake is what Waller considers one of the most marvelous examples of evolution. "Snaptraps have only evolved once in the 3.7 billion-year history of life on Earth. This species is native to just one area of North America, and represents a unique and fascinating offshoot in the tree of life. Having plants only in greenhouses is like having tigers only in zoos. It's not the same."
Change is normal in biology, Waller adds. "This plant, like any species, is a process connected to an ancient past and an indefinite future. That's what we are trying to protect. If we lose the habitat, we lose the species and its future. The world would be a poorer place without wild Venus flytraps." |
Paramore are back with their first new album in four years, After Laughter. The follow-up to their self-titled album is out May 12 on Fueled By Ramen. Watch the new video for “Hard Times” below. The Andrew Joffe-directed clip, in which Hayley Williams crashes into a video set bedecked in hand-drawn squiggles, is styled after the album art, which you can see below with the tracklist. Produced by Justin Meldal-Johnsen and Paramore’s Taylor York, After Laughter marks the return of drummer Zac Farro, who quit the band in 2010. Though it was rumored that Zac’s contribution would be limited to drums, the band signaled his full return via Instagram with “I'm Back” t-shirts. See details of the band’s European tour, set for June, here.
Earlier in April, Williams joined Farro’s side project Halfnoise to perform a cover of Radiohead's “House of Cards” from In Rainbows.
After Laughter:
01 Hard Times
02 Rose-Colored Boy
03 Told You So
04 Forgiveness
05 Fake Happy
06 26
07 Pool
08 Grudges
09 Caught In The Middle
10 Idle Worship
11 No Friend
12 Tell Me How
CORRECTION: A previous version of this story erroneously indicated that former bassist Jeremy Davis was Zac Farro's brother. Guitarist Josh Farro was the member of Paramore who departed in 2010. |
Don’t tell Centre College graduate Greg Smith that art and science don’t mix, especially in his Conservation Science Laboratory at the Indianapolis Museum of Art (IMA), where he is the director and Otto N. Frenzel III Senior Conservation Scientist.
“Science and art have always shared a rich interface,” he says. “The restoration and safeguarding of our collections is just as much a question of chemistry as it is of art history or aesthetics.”
Jeff Fieberg, Centre College’s newly appointed John C. Walkup Professor of Chemistry, shares the same philosophy. Although a chemist by training, he discovered his love of art while studying in Europe his senior year.
“I had never studied painting until Centre humanities classes,” Fieberg says. “Under [music professor] Barbara Hall’s tutelage, I thought, ‘Wow I really like this.’ During winter term my senior year, I studied with Bob Weaver, the music professor, in Paris, Florence, Munich, and Amsterdam. He taught one course on music, the other on art and architecture. That experience was transformative.”
Now Fieberg blends his two passions, performing technical and historical investigations of modernist paintings and analyses of artists’ materials.
During his 2011-12 sabbatical, Fieberg was working in Smith’s lab, using spectroscopy (the study of the interaction between matter and light) to analyze paintings, when serendipity presented the scientists with Vincent van Gogh’s Undergrowth with Two Figures from the Cincinnati Art Museum. The 1890 post-Impressionist painting depicts a peaceful scene of a couple walking between two rows of trees and hundreds of flowers.
But all was not as it seemed.
A 1974 conservation treatment had left the painting coated with thin layers of wax and varnish which, over decades, had turned milky white and obscured Van Gogh’s signature brushwork and use of color.
During the museum conservator’s meticulous restoration process, he found minute, hot pink paint fragments embedded in the wax that didn’t match any portion of the painting. What pink features originally existed in the painting? What was the identity of this pigment?
Smith and Fieberg were called in to find the answers. Using x-ray and laser spectroscopy techniques, the team examined 387 of the white flowers. They discovered that Van Gogh had used the pink pigment “geranium lake,” one of the many new synthetic colorants that chemists were inventing toward the end of the 19th century.
The key to discovering the lost pink flowers was in the element bromine, an unusual addition to artists’ materials that occurred only in geranium lake pigment during Van Gogh’s time. Using non-destructive x-ray analysis to locate the residual bromine, the telltale pigment was found in 38 percent of the now-white flowers—which used to be pink—and also in some now-blue tree trunks that Van Gogh described in his day as “violet.”
The discovery was critical because with the original colors the viewer’s eye travels around the painting differently and creates different interpretations and emotions than in its current state.
“We consider Van Gogh to be a master of color, and yet we are learning that because of material choices he made, what we see today is not an accurate representation of his artwork,” says Smith.
So the two scientists set out to digitally reconstruct the color scheme that Van Gogh originally envisioned.
“We determined the correct color coordinates and then injected the pink color back into the flowers in the digital rendition. It looks more like it would have when Van Gogh painted it,” says Fieberg.
The new “painting” regularly receives accolades when Fieberg and Smith present their findings to both academic and public audiences in the U.S. and abroad.
“The reception is always the same—wonder and excitement about the interplay of high-tech science and beautiful artworks,” says Smith.
The journal Applied Spectroscopy made their article, ‘‘Paintings Fade Like Flowers’’ (written with co-authors Per Knutås of the Cleveland Museum of Art and Kurt Hostettler of the Indianapolis Museum of Art), its featured paper in April.
As two-time director of the Centre-in-Strasbourg program, Fieberg has used such publicity to secure unforgettable opportunities for Centre students to visit conservation labs at the Louvre, in Marseille, and in Avignon. And during the three-week CentreTerm, Fieberg teaches “Molecular Modernism: Manet to Matisse” as a travel course in Paris and southern France.
He credits Centre study-abroad opportunities as life-changing for both Smith (Strasbourg, London) and him.
“I take students to the town of Auvers-sur-Oise, where Van Gogh lived when he painted Undergrowth with Two Figures, to the wheat fields where he shot himself, and to his grave. Students then realize they are studying real people,” says Fieberg.
“It’s one of the most powerful parts of my program.”
The two plan to continue their collaboration when Fieberg returns to the IMA lab during his 2018 sabbatical. They are hoping to investigate another of Van Gogh’s works, as well as works by Gaugin and others from the same time period who could also have used the disappearing pink pigment.
Like his paintings, Van Gogh’s life faded too soon. Thankfully, through science, Fieberg and Smith can restore the bright colors of Van Gogh’s art. |
No immediate reason was given for her departure, and it was unclear who would replace her. Ms. Tagliavini had won praise on all sides for her persistence in trying to shepherd the talks to a positive conclusion, although her efforts had been largely unsuccessful.
In the newspaper interview, a transcript of which was published on the Kremlin website on Saturday, Mr. Putin made some of his most expansive statements in recent weeks on the situation in eastern Ukraine, and he reiterated his longstanding view that the embattled regions should be granted substantial political autonomy.
“Specifically, there needs to be a constitutional reform to ensure the autonomous rights of the unrecognized republics,” Mr. Putin said. “The Kiev authorities do not want to call it autonomy — they prefer different terms, such as decentralization.
“Our European partners,” he continued, “those very partners who wrote the corresponding clause in the Minsk agreements, explained what should be understood as decentralization. It gives them the right to speak their language, to have their own cultural identity and engage in cross-border trade — nothing special, nothing beyond the civilized understanding of ethnic minorities’ rights in any European country.”
Although Mr. Putin spoke of the situation in eastern Ukraine as if the rights of Russian-speaking citizens had been under threat, there has been little evidence of such discrimination. Russian is still widely spoken in Ukraine, including in Kiev.
Still, Mr. Putin laid blame for the failure of the peace process on Mr. Poroshenko. Russia regularly refers to the Ukrainian government as having come to power in a coup, because of the ouster last year of Viktor F. Yanukovych, the pro-Russian president, after months of prolonged street protests. Demonstrators had expressed their anger over Mr. Yanukovych’s broken promise to sign sweeping political and economic agreements with the European Union, and over years of entrenched corruption.
Mr. Putin complained that Mr. Poroshenko would not negotiate directly with the separatist leadership in the east.
“The problem is that the current Kiev authorities don’t even want to sit down to talks with them,” Mr. Putin said. “And there is nothing we can do about it. Only our European and American partners can influence this situation. There is no need to threaten us with sanctions.”The European Union is considering whether to extend sanctions against Russia, which will expire at the end of July. |
All Gary Quackenbush wanted to do was take his wife to see
Instead he found himself in an uncomfortable seat, bored by a long film and pained by a tender tailbone. When the closing credits finally rolled, Quackenbush couldn't wait to get out of the Tillamook movie house.
It wasn't until he arrived home in Tillamook that he realized the 1941 model Beretta given to him by his father was missing -- worked loose from the holster on his hip by all his shifting in the seat.
And that's how it was that seventh-graders Levi Crabtree and Kolton McKinney
-- on a school field trip Wednesday to the Coliseum Theatre --
. It fell from the seat when one of the students pushed the seat down. The boys stayed back and called for a teacher, who called police.
On Thursday, Quackenbush, 61, apologized for the scare and said he was up all night worrying about his missing gun.
Police are now holding the pistol as evidence and have revoked Quackenbush's concealed handgun permit.
Quackenbush said he carried the permit and weapon because of shootings such as the one at Clackamas Town Center and Sandy Hook Elementary School. He's also a licensed gun dealer, but said he does very little selling and mostly steers buyers to good websites.
"You go into a mall and all of a sudden there is this jackass psycho killing people," he said. "I'll stand in front of a kid and take the bullet, but I'm going to take him out, too."
Tillamook Police Chief Terry Wright said he's recommending that Tillamook County prosecutors charge Quackenbush with reckless endangerment, a misdemeanor. The U.S. Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives said it wouldn't affect his gun-selling license.
"This is not something we can just blow off," Wright said, noting that the gun had a bullet in the chamber and the safety was off.
District Attorney Bill Porter wouldn't comment on the case, other than to say it was under investigation.
Quackenbush said the safety was on when the gun was on his hip. His father brought back the Beretta from Italy in 1944 or 1945, he said. His father had witnessed the execution of Mussolini and later took the gun off a Nazi police officer, he said.
"He gave it to me when I was 2 years old, then he locked it up until I was 14. He took me out in the forest and trained me," Quackenbush said. "Then he locked it up again until I was 19. He wanted to scare me with the power of a weapon so I would have a reluctance to ever use it and it stuck with me."
After Quackenbush discovered the gun was missing Tuesday night, he tried repeatedly to call the theater, but got no answer, he said.
In a letter to the editor he shared with The Oregonian, he wrote: "By 11:10 I gave up but continued to pace the floor until dawn. I was sure they were busy cleaning up and couldn't hear the phone.
"Wednesday I made sure I was at the movie house before their normal opening only to find that a school group had been there earlier. I had them call the police to inform them I was there to recover my property. Much to my shock the officer had a trail of media on his heels five minutes later. How they got there from Portland baffled me."
He closed the letter by writing: "This whole episode is unfortunate for all involved and I truly regret any distress this may have caused. ... You all have my most sincere apologies for the mishap and rest assured my intent is for the betterment and security of my friends and neighbors in Tillamook and nothing else."
Still, the man whose passion is writing whimsical stories and who looks forward to retiring after running a local market for years, ponders how he's now cast as a "malevolent criminal."
"You have people shooting up malls, building bombs," he said. "And I'm the bad guy."
-- |
Speaker Paul Ryan Paul Davis RyanBrexit and exit: A transatlantic comparison Five takeaways from McCabe’s allegations against Trump The Hill's 12:30 Report: Sanders set to shake up 2020 race MORE (R-Wis.) in an interview to be broadcast early Thursday said he does not want to work with Democrats on healthcare legislation, breaking with President Trump's recent comments.
“I don’t want that to happen,” Ryan told Norah O’Donnell on "CBS This Morning."
“I want a patient-centered system," he added. "I don’t want government running healthcare. The government shouldn’t tell you what you must do with your life, with your healthcare. We should give people choices.”
Ryan added GOP infighting may drive Trump to partner with Democrats over members of his own party.
"[If] the Republican Congress allows the perfect to be the enemy of the good, I worry we'll push the president into working with Democrats. He's been suggesting that as much," he said, adding merely retooling ObamaCare is "hardly a conservative thing."
ADVERTISEMENT
White House press secretary Sean Spicer said Monday that Trump is sincere about working with Democrats on healthcare reform after Republicans' plan to repeal and replace ObamaCare failed to make it to a House floor vote last week.
“Starting Friday afternoon through late yesterday, [Trump] has received a number of calls, as well as other members of the senior staff that have been working on healthcare, from members of both sides saying that they would like to work together, offer up ideas and have suggestions about how to come to a resolution on this and get a House vote on this,” he told reporters.
Trump later Monday predicted that Democrats would ultimately ally with Republicans on healthcare once ObamaCare starts failing.
The Democrats will make a deal with me on healthcare as soon as ObamaCare folds - not long. Do not worry, we are in very good shape! — Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) March 28, 2017
Republicans abandoned their effort to repeal ObamaCare in a shocking defeat last Friday, pulling legislation before a vote on the House floor.
Conservative House Freedom Caucus members fiercely opposed the American Health Care Act, demanding a number of changes intended to lower healthcare premium costs.
Mark Hensch contributed to this report, which was updated at 7:29 a.m. |
<img class="styles__noscript__2rw2y" src="https://dsx.weather.com//util/image/w/florida-oranges_0.jpg?v=at&w=485&h=273&api=7db9fe61-7414-47b5-9871-e17d87b8b6a0" srcset="https://dsx.weather.com//util/image/w/florida-oranges_0.jpg?v=at&w=485&h=273&api=7db9fe61-7414-47b5-9871-e17d87b8b6a0 400w, https://dsx.weather.com//util/image/w/florida-oranges_0.jpg?v=ap&w=980&h=551&api=7db9fe61-7414-47b5-9871-e17d87b8b6a0 800w" > Oranges are seen in a tree as the citrus industry tries to find a cure for the disease 'citrus greening' that is caused by the Asian citrus psyllid, an insect, that carries the bacterium, 'citrus greening' or huanglongbing, from tree to tree on May 13, 2013 in Fort Pierce, Florida. There is no known cure for the disease that forms when the insect deposits the bacterium on citrus trees causing the leaves on the tree to turn yellow the roots to decay and bitter fruits fall off the dying branches prematurely. (Getty Images/Joe Raedle) (Getty Images/Joe Raedle)
Growers in the Sunshine State are struggling with one of the worst catastrophes to hit their crop in a generation.
A little invasive bug, known as the Asian citrus psyllid, has spread a crippling pathogen to every county in Florida, devastating its citrus economy and leaving the future of the industry in doubt. Known as citrus greening, once an orange tree is infected, its leaves begin to bleach, fruit becomes bitter and irregularly formed, and the whole plant begins to die.
A new report by the Florida Department of Citrus says that the state's annual harvest could plummet to 27 million boxes if nothing is done to stem the impact of the disease, which costs $1 billion dollars in damage to Florida's economy each year. Since the pathogen arrived in 2005, the disease has cost the industry around $7.80 billion dollars in cumulative losses and thousands of jobs lost.
This year, the U.S. Department of Agriculture estimates Florida's annual orange yield will shrink to 74 million boxes, down from 96.7 million last year.
"The entire industry is in peril," said Rusty Wiygul, the director of grower's affairs at Florida Citrus Mutual, a trade group representing the citrus industry. "We're fighting it in every grove in Florida. It attacks the root system of the tree, gets into the phloem of the tree (innermost layer of the bark), and blocks the flow of nutrients into the foliage and the fruit so the tree can't feed properly, and it slowly dies."
"The Asian citrus psyllid was first detected in Florida in 1998," explained Xavier Martini, who is a researcher at the Citrus Research and Education Center. "It is now present in California and Texas, but the densities in these states are still low compared to Florida. This insect is the vector of a bacteria which is the causal agent of the citrus disease called huanglongbing (HLB), or citrus greening."
Florida has tried to deal with citrus greening in a plethora of ways: intensive insecticide treatments, removal of infected trees, re-planting healthy citrus plants produced in insect-proof nurseries, thermotherapy methods which involve heating up individual trees in portable greenhouses or steaming the trees, and even transmitting a piezoelectric buzzer that mimics the insect's mating calls.
"Expecting one silver bullet is unrealistic at this point," noted Kirsten Pelz-Stelinski, an associate professor of entomology at the Citrus Research and Education Center, who endorsed an all-of-the-above approach to combating citrus greening.
Treating groves with pesticides has largely been inadequate in fully combating the epidemic.
"The problem with using pesticides is that the insect is killed, but the tree is still infected," Michelle Cilia, a research molecular biologist at the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Agricultural Research Service, told weather.com in an email. "Even if a grower sprays his grove, psyllids can come into these treated groves from someone's backyard citrus tree or abandoned groves. Pesticides are highly ineffective; we need new approaches."
Another possible approach is genetically modifying orange trees to become resistant to the pathogen, but growers are wary of public opposition to such a plan, despite overwhelming scientific evidence showing GMOs to be safe. The U.S. EPA gave citrus grower Southern Gardens approval in May for large-scale field testing and just last week, University of Florida’s Institute of Food and Agricultural Sciences announced they had successfully created genetically modified citrus trees that showed enhanced resistance to greening.
"Improvement of citrus through genetic engineering remains the fastest method for improvement of existing citrus cultivars and has been a key component in the University of Florida’s genetic improvement strategy," UF plant cell genetics professor Judd Grosser said in a statement.
"What people don't understand is that we're not growing breasts on the tree, we're using a beet gene to work into the tree that helps it with it being not susceptible," Wiygul added.
Florida is set to provide additional funds to fight citrus greening, according to Jeri Bustamante, a spokeswoman for Florida Governor Rick Scott.
"(Last Monday) Gov. Scott rolled out his proposed budget for next year," she told weather.com. "The Florida First budget invests $8.5 million for research to stop the spread of citrus greening (Line Item 1436), and $7.7 million for the Citrus Health Response Program (Line Item 1467). This program is responsible for surveying citrus groves for pests and diseases, as well as ensuring growers are taking appropriate measures to suppress disease incidence and minimize spread."
Cilia said the most concerning thing about citrus greening was the speed in which it has spread throughout the state. "Once a tree dies, it's like a the death of family member in Florida," Cilia observed. "Some of these orange trees have been in people's family's for generations."
Wiygul said despite the widespread devastation of citrus greening, he was optimistic a cure would be found soon. "We don't have a lot of time," Wiygul said. "We're fast losing our industry."
MORE ON WEATHER.COM: Foods in Danger Due to Climate Change |
Summary of the tragic events so far, in which Russia’s envoy to Turkey, Andrey Karlov, has been shot dead in Ankara by a gunman in an assassination apparently linked to Moscow’s role in Syria’s civil war. Here are key facts and reaction summarized by BBG:
The Gunman shouted about Aleppo, the Syrian city where rebels were defeated this month by Russian-backed government forces, as he carried out the attack at an art exhibit, CNN- Turk television says
Ankara Mayor Melih Gokcek says man who killed ambassador was a police officer
Attack comes amid reconciliation efforts between Russia, Turkey as nations seek to improve ties after Turkey shot down a Russian fighter jet over Syria last yr
Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan called Russian President Vladimir Putin to share information after the assassination, NTV reports, citing Erdogan’s spokesman Ibrahim Kalin
Russian President Vladimir Putin called the assassination of the Russian ambassador in Ankara a clear provocation aimed at derailing the Syrian peace negotiations.
Elena Suponina, senior analyst at the Russian Institute of Strategic Studies which advises the Kremlin, says attack “will only bring Russia and Turkey closer together” because it shows “we have a common enemy -- terrorism -- and only by joining forces can we deal with this enemy”
“While Putin is unlikely to burn bridges with Turkey, he is very likely to adopt a tougher stance in Syria against the rebels,” said Nihat Ali Ozcan, an analyst at the Economic Policy Research Foundation in Ankara. “Russia may still be talking to Turkey at the table but it will probably have a much more aggressive stance on the ground in Syria”
Tougher Russian stance toward Turkey could delay return of Russian tourists; lira weakened after shooting to trade 0.8% down at 3.5337/dollar at 9 pm in Istanbul
Attack highlights fragile security situation in Turkey, where dozens of security personnel have been killed in past 10 days as a conflict between govt, separatist Kurds intensifies
Incident unlikely to change development of conflict in Syria, says Ayham Kamel, director of Middle East and North Africa at Eurasia
“Broadly we’re moving toward a position in Syria where the regime will incrementally consolidate its control over the trajectory of the conflict,” Kamel says
“The Russian support for the Syrian regime will remain on track and the plan to combine a military campaign initially with support for a political solution at a later stage will not significantly change”
Live Feed from RT:
The shooting caught on tape:
A photo of the attacker and his victim:
Update 9:
Russian President Vladimir Putin said in televised comments that the “blackguard” assassination of Russia’s ambassador to Turkey “is obviously a provocation aimed at disrupting the normalization of Russian-Turkish relations and the failure of the peace process in Syria.”
“The answer to this can only be strengthening the fight against terror; bandits will feel it.”
Putin says he discussed issue with Turkish counterpart Recep Tayyip Erdogan by phone, and added that Russia will send a group of investigators to Turkey, which was agreed to on the phone call.
The Russian president also ordered security at Russian embassies around the world to be stepped up, and stated that he wants to know who directed the killer's hand.
Putin said he would hold a special Kremlin meeting to discuss the murder.
* * *
Update 8:
Russian President Vladimir Putin called the assassination of the Russian ambassador in Ankara a clear provocation aimed at derailing the Syrian peace negotiations.
* * *
Update 7:
The sister and the mother of the gunman who shot the Russian ambassador have been detained in Turkey's Aydin, CNN Turk reports
* * *
Update 6:
The US has said it stands "ready to offer assistance to Russia and Tukey as they investigate this despicable attack."
US stand "ready to offer assistance to Russia and Turkey as they investigate this despicable attack." #VOAalert pic.twitter.com/yoU4Y3HUOK — Steve Herman (@W7VOA) December 19, 2016
The Turkish embassy has offered its condolences to Russia, calling the murder of Ambassador Karlov “an inhumane tragedy”.
“An inhumane tragedy occurred today with our distinguished colleague Andrey Karlov,” the Turkish embassy said, according to TASS. “There is no person in their right mind who would not condemn this evil act,” the mission said. “We grieve with all our hearts. We bring our deepest condolences to the people of Russia. This is our shared pain and loss.”
The Turkish Foreign Ministry added that it won't let the attack on the ambassador to overshadow tires.
The ball is now in Putin's court.
Meanwhile, Twitter has circulated a picture allegedly showing the personal file of perpetrator, Melvut Mert Altintas, apparently proving he was a police officer.
Rus Büyükelçisi Karlov'u öldüren suikastçi aktif görevde olan çevik kuvvet polisi Mevlüt Mert Alt?nta?. pic.twitter.com/uyf5ovIjUH — ahmet ??k (@sahmetsahmet) December 19, 2016
* * *
Update 5: And here come the accusations: according to the Ankara Mayor the Assassint was a "Gulenist", suggesting that Turkey will promptly blame the "shadow government" of the cleric Fetullah Gulen who continues to reside in rural Pennsylvania.
Meanwhile the US State Department is urging US citizens to avoid the US embassy in Ankara.
EU spokesman Federica Mogherini said she "Expressed to Russia FM Lavrov EU condolences for unconceivable killing of Ambassador Karlov. Also in contact with #Turkey authorities"
At the same time, the Russian Federation Council, which branded the assassination a "terrorist act" said it considers the killing of Ambassador a grave failure of Turkish law enforcement.
* * *
Update 4: According to the Russian Foreign Ministry, Russia views the attack as a terrorist act and will raise the matter at a UN Security Council meeting. Furthermore, according to local Yeni Safak, the assassin is said to be a police officer. The man was an active member of the riot police force in the city, according to Turkey’s Yeni Safak newspaper, which gave the assassin’s initials as M.M.A. without naming him.
The publication adds that the alleged assassin was born in 1994 in Aydin and attended police academy in Izmir on Turkey’s Aegean coast, Yeni Safak says.
In a strange twist, eyewitness to CNN Turk said that people were checked with a metal detectors to visit photo exhibition where Russian Turkey ambassador was shot at in Ankara, suggesting there may have been coordination.
The following photo has emerged of the alleged assassin M.M.A. after his shootout with the police (NSFW)
* * *
Update 3: The attacker reportedly identified himself as a police officer as he entered the exhibition, a Turkish military source told Interfax. “We have information, from one of the witnesses, that the attacker presented himself as a police officer, showing the relevant ID at the entrance. This information is being checked right now,” the source is quoted as saying.
The perpetrator, who was wearing a suit and a tie, shouted ‘Allahu Akbar’ (‘God is great’ in Arabic) during the attack, AP reports, citing their own photographer. The attacker also said several words in Russian, according to the news agency, and damaged several of the photos at the expo.
Turkish authorities have stepped up security at the Russian embassy in Ankara following the attack, a RIA Novosti correspondent reports.
US State Dept spox issued the following statement on twitter:
We have seen reports that the Russian Ambassador to Turkey Andrey Karlov and others have been attacked by a gunman in Ankara. We condemn this act of violence, whatever its source. Our thoughts and prayers are with the victims and their families
The German embassy in Turkey condemned the attack in a tweet.
We are deeply shocked about the heinous killing of Ambassador #Karlov. We join our #Russian colleagues in mourning. #Ankara — AlmanyaBE (@AlmanyaBE) December 19, 2016
* * *
Update 2: US equity markets stumbled and gold and bonds were bid as safe havens as the headlines hit...
Update 1
RUSSIA AMBASSADOR TO TURKEY DIES OF GUNSHOT WOUND - RIA CITES SOURCE
Another video of the moment of the shooting:
Is this the Archduke moment?
* * *
The Russian ambassador to Turkey, Andrey Karlov, has been shoot dead after an armed attack in Ankara. According to CNN Turk man opened fire in the air then fired twice at the ambassador, who was shot in the back. Turkish TRT adds that after a shootout with the police, the gunman has been shot dead.
Russian ambassador Andrey Karlov
The Ambassador shown moments before the attack:
The following photo from Huyrriet shows the moment of the attack:
And a video of the attack:
A photo of the attacker:
Footage from outside the building where the Russian ambassador was killed:
VIDEO: Footage from in front of the building in #Ankara where Russian ambassador was shot; Details here https://t.co/oHK7ihnwn0 pic.twitter.com/zFQtnhL13E — RT (@RT_com) December 19, 2016
The attack took place at the opening of the "Russia through Turks' eyes" photo exhibition, Turkish NTV news channel reports, and adds that there is information that three other people are injured. Karlov is reportedly getting aid at the scene of the shooting, and is said to be in critical condition.
"The ambassador was delivering a speech at the opening of the exhibition, and suddenly, during his speech, there was a shriek 'Allah Akbar!' — and someone started shooting," an eyewitness told RIA Novosti. "It is likely that the attack was aimed at the Ambassador because after the shots were made the assailant let those present escape the room."
An Associated Press photographer present at the shooting of the Russian Ambassador says the gunman fired multiple shots - 8 or more
In video showing the shooting Russian Ambassador to Turkey, the gunman heard shouting "Don't forget about Aleppo, don't forget about Syria!" and shouting "Allahu Akbar"
After shouting about Aleppo the gunman also shouts "So long as those places are not secure, you won't taste security yourselves."
Russian Embassy in Ankara has not issued an official statement concerning the assault yet. However, soon after the news emerged, Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs spokeswoman Maria Zakharova said that Russian Foreign Ministry would soon issue a statement. The attack comes just a day before Turkish Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu's planned visit to Moscow for Syria talks with his Russian and Iranian counterparts.
Soon after the attack, Turkish Interior Minister Suleyman Soylu arrived at the site.
CNN Turk also adds that the man who shot the ambassador shouted about Aleppo.
Sputnik reports that the Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs has confirmed the information that Russian Ambassador suffered a gunshot wound. The official statement noted that Russia is in contact with Turkish authorities regarding the attack.
According to interfax, Russia has called on Turkey to protect and aid the wounder ambassador.
* * *
Google translation from the latest upates via Turkish' Hurriyet:
Russian Ambassador Andrey Gennadiyevich Karlov was armed at the opening of a painting exhibition in the Center for Contemporary Arts in Ankara. It was stated that the ambassador and the ambassador to whom he was attacked were still inside. Special Operations Police turned around the building, 15-20 hand guns were heard. It is stated that there is a conflict. The attack took place during the opening of a painting exhibition in Ankara's Center for Contemporary Arts. Russia's Ankara Ambassador Andrey Karlov, who came to the floor to speak after the opening, was attacked at this time. Hürriyet Ankara representative Deniz Zeyrek said: "We have a photograph from our Ankara buremus and we have a photograph about the incident and there was an exhibition of photographs of Çamkatka while the ambassador spoke to the air before the attacker first shot it and then the ambassador shot him from the back. The ambassador and the aggressor are still inside.Police said in the preparation for the operation that " Hürriyet photomuhavi Ha?im K?l?ç explained the people living there: There was a photo exhibition organized by the Russian embassy. A man in a black suit was standing behind the ambassador, who we thought was our protection when the embassy was speaking. And then he fired at the air. Then the ambassador shot. The attacker said more about Aleppo. Then he wanted people to go out. As the people went out, they fired a few more hands into the body of the ambassador. I guess one of those invites came to one of the invites. He said that the Contemporary Arts Center's security was entering by showing a police ID. There were about 100 people in the guesthouse and they were completely evacuated. As the people ran away, the ambassador fired a few more hands. Special Operations and police teams surrounded the building. 15-20 gun shots were heard. It is stated that there is a conflict. In the meantime, Russian officials who spoke to hurriyet.com.tr said that the attacks were carried out by radical Islamic terrorists.
* * *
The Turkish Lira is sliding on the news:
Developing story. |
Sequoia Voting Systems, a company that manufactures electronic voting machines, sent an e-mail message last week to two computer scientists at Princeton University, warning them against dissecting Sequoia machines and software. The scientists, Edward W. Felten and Andrew Appel, are well known for exposing security flaws in electronic voting machines and warning the public against trusting them.
The scientists received the message because New Jersey election officials announced plans to send the men Sequoia e-voting machines for analysis. A Sequoia vice president, Edwin Smith, wrote that the plan would violate Sequoia’s contract for use of its machines. “Sequoia has also retained counsel to stop any infringement of our intellectual properties, including any noncompliant analysis,” the message read. Mr. Smith added that the company would “take appropriate steps to protect against any publication of Sequoia software.”
Last year Mr. Appel publicized weaknesses in Sequoia machines. In 2006 Mr. Felten helped to expose vulnerabilities in a Diebold voting machine. And in 2001 he received a threatening letter from the recording industry about a speech he planned to deliver on unscrambling encrypted digital music. —Andrea L. Foster |
"Income inequality" is one of the populist issues du jour, even if there is a certain logical incoherence in believing that the growing income of rich people is somehow necessarily bad for poor people.
A new economic study suggests that, actually, we can calculate when a billionaire's riches harm the poor and when they're helpful. The "bad" billionaires aren't the ones who flood the marketplace with cheap goods and jobs that some folks want to blame for all our ills. Those billionaires help the poor (by providing cheap goods and jobs, obviously). It's the billionaires who get and keep their riches because of their connections to the government and through crony capitalism who create the most harmful consequences of income inequality. From the Washington Post:
Specifically, when billionaires get their wealth because of political connections, that wealth inequality tends to drag on the broader economy, the study finds. But when billionaires get their wealth through the market — through business activities that are not related to the government — it does not.
The idea is perfectly logical. Billionaires who get their wealth through the market have to provide a good or a service others find valuable and they have to do so efficiently and at a price their customers can afford. When the prices are low, the poor are able to get the goods that they need to thrive and still keep more of their own money. When the customer is the government those market efficiencies just often are not there or not as pronounced. Government is not spending its own money. It has much less of an incentive (if any) to be careful. It shrugs off cost overruns (or embraces them since government employees are often the beneficiaries), allowing crony billionaires to cash in by taking more of the money of the citizenry yet not having to care as much about efficiency or pricing as their market-oriented brethren. Thus, the economic multiplier is subverted. Citizens are forced to give money to the government, who gives it to cronies (and themselves), who then provide inefficient and costly goods and services that are actually worth less than what was paid for them.
The researchers for this study went global to try to quantify this logic. It would be tough to try to calculate this impact in America and other Western countries because there's a complicated mix of market and crony capitalism. In countries like Russia and India, it's a lot easier to observe:
The researchers used a very conservative standard for classifying people as politically connected, only assigning billionaires to this group when it was clear that their wealth was a product of government connections. Just benefiting from a government that was pro-business, like those in Singapore and Hong Kong, wasn't enough. Rather, the researchers were looking for a situation like Indonesia under Suharto, where political connections were usually needed to secure import licenses, or Russia in the mid-1990s, when some state employees made fortunes overnight as the state privatized assets.
Using such a calculation, the United States actually ranked surprisingly low. The researchers calculated that only one percent of America's Gross Domestic Product owned by billionaires is a direct result of political connections. Compare that to 84 percent of Colombia's GDP or 66 percent of India's GDP. That America's number is actually a lot lower than we might think could explain that, despite all the populist complaints about income inequality, our low-income citizens still have access to goods and services and parts of the marketplace that would have turned their great-grandparents green with envy. But in countries like Colombia and India:
When the researchers compared these figures to economic growth, the findings were clear: These politically connected billionaires weighed on economic growth. In fact, wealth inequality that came from political connections was responsible for nearly all the negative effect on economic growth that the researchers had observed from wealth inequality overall. Wealth inequality that wasn't due to political connections, income inequality and poverty all had little effect on growth. "The negative effects of wealth inequality are largely being driven by politically connected wealth inequality. That seems to be the primary channel that drives this relationship," [researcher Sutirtha] Bagchi said in an interview.
And here is your libertarian, free market "OF COURSE, THIS IS WHAT HAPPENS" moment:
Politically connected business elites can charge consumers higher prices for services, control access to bank loans and other funding, and prevent outsiders from starting competing businesses. "One of the things that shocked us is that once the billionaires had a significant amount of wealth, they would often take steps to try to limit the amount of competition," Bagchi said.
I'm shocked that anybody who studies economics would be shocked by this.
Read more about the study and other examples here.
(Hat tip to Tom G. Palmer of the Cato Institute and Atlas Network) |
President Trump embarked on his first foreign trip Friday and is heading to Saudi Arabia, a nation that he recently accused of being the largest supporter of terrorism.
His administration has also signed a $110 billion weapons deal with the Arab nation. This is the largest single arms deal in American history. This deal reportedly includes tanks, anti-missile technology and combat ships.
The Saudi deputy crown prince visited the White House in March, a meeting that was described as a “turning point” by a Saudi adviser.
This alliance with Saudi Arabia has been due to the joint-opposition by the two nations against Iran.
Before taking office, however, Trump identified Saudi Arabia as the “world’s biggest funder of terrorism.” He wrote these comments in his 2011 book, “Time to Get Tough: Make America Great Again!”
“Saudi Arabia funnels our petro dollars, our very own money, to fund the terrorists that seek to destroy our people while the Saudis rely on us to protect them,” Trump wrote. His attacks on the Arab nation continued during his presidential campaign.
The Intercept noted Thursday that twice in a single day Trump said Saudi Arabia was behind the 9/11 terror attacks. He asked “Fox and Friends” hosts on Feb. 17, 2016, “Who blew up the World Trade Center?”
“It wasn’t the Iraqis, it was Saudi — take a look at Saudi Arabia, open the documents,” Trump continued.
At a campaign rally in South Carolina, he said, “It wasn’t the Iraqis that knocked down the World Trade Center … because they have papers in there that are very secret, you may find it’s the Saudis, OK?”
The Daily Caller has reported that the 9/11 Commission Report found links between the-then Saudi Ambassador to the U.S. Prince Bandar bin Sultan and a Saudi intelligence officer who provided assistance to the 9/11 hijackers.
Former Florida Sen. Bob Graham also said in a 2012 affidavit, “I am convinced that there was a direct line between at least some of the terrorists who carried out the September 11 attacks and the government of Saudi Arabia.”
Hillary Clinton also tied Saudi Arabia to jihadi terrorism in a speech and email released by WikiLeaks. |
Strongman has an aspect to the events that is unique compared to many of the other strength sports: in strongman, some of the events are for max reps in a given amount of time. The time stays the same whether it’s a really heavy implement where athletes might get one to four reps or a lighter event where athletes are hitting more than 15 reps. Here lies the strategy of a timed event for reps.
You need to figure out which pace allows you to hit the most reps. If you are only likely to hit two to three reps, it doesn’t make sense to do three in 15 seconds and then stand there getting buried by the weight for another 45 seconds. It also doesn’t make sense to pace yourself slowly for an event where 20 reps will win. This is where sports specific training comes into play. I’ve come up with a couple strategies on training your ability to do reps over the full course of 60 seconds.
The first thing I’ll have an athlete do is use contest weight for 30 seconds of reps. The goal here is not to see how many reps they can hit in 30 seconds, but rather start to figure out a sustainable pace that they can continue with for the entire duration. The reason for multiple sets is that we’re looking for the pace to be repeatable. I have found some athletes have difficulty with feeling where they are within the time allotment. This method allows them to get a better feel for it. As long as their pace is highly repeatable, they’ll be able to tell within seconds where they are in the time limit.
The next step is to start having them perform the 30 second sets with short rest intervals. In other words, if they did 30 seconds of work and then rested for three minutes for three sets, we can consider it to be a seven minute and 30-second long set for our purposes. Now we cut the rest to two minutes. Then, 60 or 90 seconds. At this point, they’re doing the same amount of total reps but in a lesser overall time. You can then cycle back through it. Change the time limit to 40 or 45 seconds and repeat. Finally, have them do straight sets of 60 seconds.
You would start this technique several weeks out from the contest to allow enough time to make micro progressions during the entire duration of your training cycle. If the weight is very heavy for an athlete or their technique is suffering, I would not use this method to work on technique. Rather, what you could do is have them do technique work separately. You could either do 60-70% for some sets before you start the timed work and utilize it as a sort of warm-up, or you could just land it on a separate day. If they’re lacking that much on the event, an increase in frequency would certainly help them.
I have found that this allows athletes to be highly consistent so that going into an event they know within one rep how many total reps to expect. At most contests, they announce the time at least once as well, or an athlete can always ask, so they will know whether they can speed up a bit or if they’re right on pace. I’ve also found that this is a great way to squeeze out a few more reps with athletes where the weight is very heavy for them. They do a rep, step back, gather, and go. I have taken athletes that could barely get a rep to having them do three to five reps. At a big contest, that is a massive improvement in points results.
I have also found that this benefits the athletes that might be hitting higher reps. This allows them to get comfortable with the time limit so they are not rushing. I’ve seen athletes get tripped up before because they know they need a lot of reps — they start out great and then one rep gets off groove and it takes a ton of time for them to regather and get back on pace. In the meantime, they’ve lost a ton of time and, along with that, a ton of reps. This technique allows them to go about the time limit with a controlled sense of urgency.
MORE: 9 Log Press Mistakes and How to Fix Them
Start working on this with your athletes and you will see great improvements. I’ve always found that people lack direction in their strategy and that it would be better spent on other things. For instance, rather than getting consumed with how high the pick is on a deadlift apparatus or how far apart the yoke uprights are, spend your time worrying about things that you can control. I’ve also seen far too often guys that could barely get a rep or two going all out insane for the first 15 or 20 seconds only to struggle for the remainder because they somehow thought they would be able to hit an eight-rep PR at the contest. Getting strong is a huge aspect to strongman but so is tactical preparedness, just like any other sport. |
A lot of people on Reddit have pointed out that the term “Super Bowl” might mean something different this year as the Lombardi Trophy is guaranteed to go to a team from a state that legalized marijuana. Should other states follow suit? Absolutely: the economist Jeffrey Miron refers to drug prohibition as “one of [the US’s] most disastrous policy experiments,” and it is clear that we would live in a safer, freer, and more prosperous world if we ended drug prohibition. In large part, it is because this would also eliminate a lot of the violence associated with the drug trade.
In a recent New Yorker interview, President Obama claimed that he doesn’t think marijuana “is more dangerous than alcohol” and that “it’s important for [the legalization of marijuana in Colorado and Washington] to go forward” because of the fact that only a small percentage of the people who break laws against drug use actually get punished. I can’t say much about the science behind people’s claims about the effects of marijuana, but from a public policy standpoint the case for legalization is overwhelming.
As I’ve written before, the War on Drugs is literally a textbook example of a public policy with negative unintended consequences. In plain language, people like to get high, and they aren’t that sensitive to changes in the price of getting high. Reducing the supply of drugs doesn’t do much to people’s drug consumption, and it can actually increase revenues for drug gangs.
Furthermore, since drugs are illegal drug-related disputes get settled with street violence rather than through the court system. Entire neighborhoods are war zones because of drug prohibition, and we are filling America’s prisons with non-violent drug offenders. Our prisons are filled with violent drug offenders, too, but again, almost all of the violence surrounding the drug trade is due to the fact that drugs are illegal and not due to the drugs per se.
The case for drug legalization is not based on speculation, and it is hardly new. Almost twenty years ago, economists Jeffrey A. Miron and Jeffrey Zwiebel summarized “The Economic Case Against Drug Prohibition” in the Journal of Economic Perspectives. The economist Mark Thornton’s book The Economics of Prohibition (the link is to a $0 ungated PDF) was published in 1991. In 2008, England’s Institute of Economic Affairs published a volume titled Prohibitions (link is also to a $0 ungated PDF) that considers the unintended consequences of prohibitions on drugs, pornography, firearms, boxing, and other goods and services.
The evidence is pretty compelling: if someone is eating, drinking, smoking, or shooting something you don’t like, one of the worst things you can do is pass a law against it. In the early twentieth century, we learned from the disaster that was alcohol prohibition. Shouldn’t we also learn from the disaster that has been prohibition of other drugs in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries? |
Shaun Higgins has played 48 games for the Roos since crossing from the Dogs
SHAUN Higgins is confident he can take his football to greater heights after re-signing with North Melbourne until the end of 2019.
Higgins' talent was always obvious in his 129-game, nine-season stint with the Western Bulldogs, but the former Geelong Falcon has produced the most consistent football of his career since crossing to the Kangaroos in the 2014 free agency period.
Higgins finished third in North's best and fairest award in his first season at Arden St and, after a knee injury limited him to nine games in 2016, he has been one of the Roos' best performers in a difficult 2017.
Already contracted for 2018, Higgins extended his tenure at North for a further year this week.
The 29-year-old told NMFC.com.au on Friday he has high hopes for himself and North over the next two years.
"As long as the club felt I could be a benefit to the team, I had no hesitation in signing an extension, knowing that I still have my best footy ahead of me," Higgins said.
"I've loved my time at Arden St and while this year has been somewhat disappointing I'm really excited by what the future holds and strongly believe we are on the right path."
Higgins has missed just one game this season – with a hamstring injury in round five – and has averaged 22.1 possessions (third at North) at 70 per cent efficiency, five inside 50s (first) and 5.5 tackles (second).
The Kangaroos' classiest ball-user, he is ranked first at the club for goal assists and equal fourth for goals (14, behind Ben Brown, Jarrad Waite and Kayne Turner).
Higgins has also spent more time in the midfield this season and has thrived at stoppages, establishing himself as one of the Kangaroos' best inside midfielders. He is ranked third in contested possessions, clearances and centre clearances at North this year. |
MP Axelle Lemaire is the face of French President François Hollande's Socialist party in London. And Helsinki. And Estonia. And a few other places, including one country she's never visited.
"I try to represent the spirit of northern Europe," the Canadian-born Ms. Lemaire explained, more than once, when asked to describe her role as the first member of the French National Assembly for north Europe.
The 38-year-old mother of two from what is now the city of Gatineau, Que., landed a seat at the heart of power in parliamentary elections in June, after voters replaced president Nicolas Sarkozy with the anti-austerity Mr. Hollande. Her post was created when the French constitution was changed in 2009 to create 11 Assembly members to represent the 1.6 million French living abroad.
Story continues below advertisement
As a long-time socialist activist, she was considered a long shot. "I thought most of French citizens [abroad] were rather more on [the] bourgeois, banking, professional sector side and therefore it was not a guaranteed Socialist seat," said one of her former employers, Britain's former minister for Europe Denis MacShane.
The issues for France and Europe are pressing right now: 24 per cent of French youth are jobless; France's debt is almost 57 per cent of GDP; investors and wealthy French people are spooked by a seven-month-old government that has raised the top tax rate to 75 per cent. Europe's second-largest economy, after Germany, is in trouble, and the fate of the euro may well be decided in Paris, not Athens or Madrid.
Ms. Lemaire is used to being an outsider.
She is the daughter of a University of Ottawa professor and his Parisian wife. Her parents retired to Montpellier, France, and she left Canada at 16. The culture shock was evident from the start.
"I was the only 16-year-old who did not smoke," Ms. Lemaire said. Her classmates viewed her as a visiting Canadian athlete.
Between working at McDonald's and Planet Hollywood, Ms. Lemaire studied political science and law, and taught ballet as she finally began to appreciate French culture in the context of her Canadian roots. "My difference became something I was proud of," she added.
She graduated from a Paris law school, relocated to London a decade ago, had two children with her partner and worked as a political researcher for Mr. MacShane. She headed the London branch of France's Socialist Party before being elected in June with 54.6 per cent of the vote – although fewer than 18,000, or barely 20 per cent, of the eligible French voters in her expansive riding cast a ballot.
Story continues below advertisement
Story continues below advertisement
Ms. Lemaire sees no contradiction in being a Socialist in a country dominated by conservative, Euro-skeptics or in working as an MP representing 10 countries but with a niche brief. She campaigned on improving French schools overseas, protecting the right to dual nationality (she retains her Canadian citizenship) and the recognition of French professional qualifications overseas.
"I'm meeting … with parents who send their children to French school who are concerned with the high fees," Ms. Lemaire said when pressed for a practical example of how her Socialist ideals are utilized on the job. She also represents constituent views to Paris on matters such as immigration, justice and the economy, she said.
She dismisses questions about how her government will bring France to its knees taxing the rich at 75 per cent, saying the number of uber-rich affected is so small as to be symbolic.
"Some people here say we are Communists. We are not. We are Socialists," Ms. Lemaire said.
But that hasn't reassured critics. The Socialists have stumbled through their first six months. When Mr. Hollande's government threatened to nationalize ArcelorMittals's steel furnaces to rescue 600-plus jobs, it should have been a coup. Instead, it resulted in a two-month stand off, unnerving international investors who crave a stable environment.
London Mayor Boris Johnson declared that "sans culottes" revolutionaries were controlling Paris and advised investors to re-direct their money to Britain. Ms. Lemaire dismissed his comments as British "French-bashing," but no doubt he struck a nerve.
Story continues below advertisement
France has had senators representing overseas citizens for 30 years. It's not clear that expats wanted representation in the National Assembly.
"Having an expat MP is 'too little, too late' for us," said Muriel Demarcus, a French businesswomen who moved to the UK in 2004. "I have seen no difference at all since we have a MP."
"Since I don't pay tax [in France], it's far less relevant to me than Westminster's antics," said Will Salomone, born to a French father and English mother.
A random questioning of 10 French ex-pats at the Institut Français in London turned up only one who knew France had a North Europe MP. Loic Lefrileux said he voted for Ms. Lemaire but couldn't say what use she might be to him: "Maybe if I were in the jungle, and I lost my passport, and the consulate was hundreds of kilometres away?"
Ms. Lemaire appears determined to represent France's expatriates when they like it or not, however. She's held "Skype surgeries" for far-flung constituents and has so far travelled to nine of the 10 countries whose "spirit" she represents.
Iceland, supposedly a hotbed of French Socialism, is last on her list although neither the MP nor her assistant were clear how many French voters remained in Reykjavik after the collapse of the banking sector.
Story continues below advertisement
It's been a long journey from Quebec. Does she ever miss the simple life? Yes, Ms. Lemaire admits. She misses the optimism she finds lacking in Europe, in politics and lately in France.
"I miss the nonchalance of Canada, the sense that everything will be all right," Ms. Lemaire said.
Special to The Globe and Mail |
In 2014, the C.P.S.’s estimate of rural America was 50 million. After the boundary change in 2015, that number fell to 44 million. “If rural America were a state, it would be a big state; it is one where exactly where you draw the line matters,” said Arloc Sherman, a co-author of the report. “And they really changed the line a lot.”
This problem is built into the C.P.S. because it changes its boundaries once every 10 years, while the A.C.S. makes its changes incrementally. These differences were so large that the Census Bureau actually warned against comparing the C.P.S. estimates of geographic mobility between 2014 and 2015 because they “do not accurately reflect the actual respective populations.”
The census did post a “User Note” on Friday, after the center’s report was released, directing people to use the A.C.S. for comparisons between metro and nonmetro areas.
It’s not clear why the census even included those numbers in the initial big income report in the first place. To be fair to the census researchers, this number was not labeled statistically significant in the report — meaning that the researchers couldn’t be sure if they were actually detecting a real change in income for rural households in 2015. But this lack of significance turned out to be a detail that few reporters noticed.
Perhaps part of the reason the news media didn’t see the problems in the C.P.S.’s number was that the narrative of a divergence between rural and urban America seemed too irresistible. It confirmed suspicions about a link between people’s economic anxieties in rural America and the rise of Donald J. Trump.
In many cases, data further complicates our view of the world, making things murkier instead of clearer. By contrast, the sharp differences in rural and urban income growth suggested by the C.P.S. felt like a gift from the statistics gods.
But our loss is clearly the American people’s gain, because it shows that the recovery is even more broadly shared than we thought. |
Well, that didn't take long. Moody's Investors Service has changed its outlook for Ontario's fiscal situation to "negative" and warned of a forthcoming downgrade of debt. Standard & Poor's is likely to follow very shortly.
Can you blame the ratings agencies? They studied the Ontario budget presented by the governing Liberals. They witnessed the party's majority election triumph. They heard pledges, repeated in Thursday's Speech from the Throne, to push ahead with that budget and its $12.5-billion deficit. And they witnessed Premier Kathleen Wynne's refusal thus far to take a hard decision about anything.
That the ratings agencies would do what Moody's has now begun was evident before the election. In this space May 31, it was written that "ratings agencies already smell a rat. Get ready for a downgrading of Ontario's standing if the Liberals win and actually try to implement this budget." The only question was when, not if, reality would smack the Liberals in the face.
Story continues below advertisement
Now, having systematically fled from reality before and during the election, and having been rewarded handsomely for this evasion, Ms. Wynne and her government face the difficult task of beginning to tell the truth. This volte-face is always hard for a government that lives and dies by what pollsters tell politicians that voters want to hear, rather than by what they need to hear.
Squaring the circle of Ontario's deteriorating fiscal situation with the expansionist Liberal budget will require spending restraint of a kind for which the party did not prepare the electorate, because the spending restraint will have to be tighter than anything the Liberals imagined. Moreover, the tax increase on people earning more than $150,000 a year, while progressive in a manner of speaking, will raise only a small amount of money, far below what the deficit requires.
Already, rumblings have begun at Queen's Park about further tax increases. But on what, and how? If taxes are indeed boosted beyond the additional levy on those earning more than $150,000, what would that do for stronger economic growth, on which the Liberals have pinned an inordinate amount of hope?
Perhaps – but this is mere speculation – the Liberals will do a Quebec and appoint a commission to investigate the province's tax code to see if it can find the right balance of promoting fairness and efficiency. After all, the previous Liberal government asked economist Don Drummond and his colleague to examine only the spending side of the ledger. His mandate explicitly ruled out examining revenues, a restriction he ruefully lamented. Governments in doubt, as Ms. Wynne's evidently is, often seek delay and help through commissions. Why not, therefore Drummond II?
Of course, Ms. Wynne will whinge about how unfairly Ontario is being treated by federal transfer policies, a complaint recently given modest support by the Parliamentary Budget Office. But even if treatment were improved, Ontario would still face obstacles of its own making, and, more important, of shifts in the world and North American economies, and of an aging population, that will render governing choices much harder than anything the Premier spoke about before and during the campaign.
The most likely scenario, now that reality is smacking Ms. Wynne in the face, is that she will do a Jean Chrétien. Here was a prime minister who waltzed into office with a big smile in 1993 saying trust me and everything will be okay. He dawdled through 1994 and then, with finance minister Paul Martin helping hugely, got serious about attacking the federal fiscal situation with a tough budget in 1995 – for which the party was rewarded by public opinion.
It helped the Chrétien-Martin duo to find courage when outside observers – including ratings agencies – started sending disquieting signals about the country's inattention to its fiscal challenge. The knock-knock coming from the ratings agencies for Ontario might therefore help concentrate previously scattered minds.
Story continues below advertisement
Story continues below advertisement
The Chrétien-Martin effort was easier in one sense than what confronts Ontario. Ottawa could cut transfers to the provinces as part of its assault on the deficit, an option obviously not available to a provincial government.
The only glimmer of hope is that a majority government and external messages of disquiet will encourage the Ontario Liberals to govern with a seriousness of purpose almost completely lacking in their election campaign. |
Thanks to a compromise brokered by supporters of Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders over the weekend, superdelegates may soon be a thing of the past.
Few things proved more controversial during this Democratic primary than superdelegates — the elite class of Democratic presidential delegates who are not bound to vote the way their states voted in primaries and caucuses, and may vote however they choose.
Superdelegates — which make up 15 percent of all Democratic delegates — are congressmen, governors, and Democratic Party officials. (Party VIPs, like former presidents and vice presidents, are superdelegates too.)
The system was instituted in 1984, partially to insulate the party from a primary process that had resulted in the nomination of candidates considered unelectable and overly liberal, like George McGovern. Some Democrats have found merit in the system, since it prevents top Democratic elected officials from having to run for delegate slots against their constituent, rank-and-file Democrats.
Now, it seems as if the pendulum has swung the other way. Thanks to a compromise brokered by supporters of Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders over the weekend, superdelegates may soon be a thing of the past. They agreed to establish a “unity commission” that will make recommendations on the role superdelegates will play in future elections.
Both sides mostly agree that superdelegates should be a far less significant part of the process. The commission is expected to recommend that top elected officials like governors and members of Congress be permitted to remain unbound to any candidate, while lower-level party officials should be bound to candidates.
(Super)delegate math
For Sanders supporters, superdelegates became a flashpoint over the course of the primary. They grew to believe that giving the governors, congressmen, and Democratic Party brass who fill the superdelegate ranks the privilege of voting however they like ensured that Sanders never had a real chance — even though it became clear Clinton would have won the nomination with or without the superdelegates.
Despite that, in the waning weeks of the Democratic primary, the Sanders camp undertook an organized effort to convert superdelegates to their side, arguing that Sanders was better positioned to defeat Trump.
Minnesota is a good example of how the superdelegate process frustrated Sanders supporters: Of the North Star State’s pledged delegates, 46 are bound to Sanders, and 31 are bound to Clinton, reflecting the Vermonter’s 23-point win on caucus night.
Of the 12 superdelegates present at the convention, 11 — the governor, senators, members of Congress, and delegates to the Democratic National Committee — voted for Clinton. One superdelegate, Rep. Keith Ellison, voted for Sanders.
They helped make the final Minnesota delegate count much closer: 47 for Sanders to Clinton’s 42.
Time for change
Minnesota superdelegates from both sides largely seem happy to see the system, as currently constructed, get the ax.
Ellison said he sees both sides of the issue. “I agree with Bernie supporters — it’s pretty discouraging that Clinton was pretty much spotted 400 delegates before anything even started,” he said.
At the same time, Ellison said it was clear that Clinton would have won the nomination even if superdelegates didn’t exist and all results were linked to how the states voted.
Ellison added that the superdelegate system has some value: “It allows me to not have to go try to compete with a member of the Democratic Party who’s not a public official” for a spot as a convention delegate. “I don’t want to go do that.”
Sens. Al Franken and Amy Klobuchar, Clinton supporters, welcomed the commission and its work.
“I’m very open to the idea that we should make changes,” Klobuchar told MinnPost. “I think they acknowledge that the general focus would be that statewide officials and members of Congress would continue in that role, but maybe we have too many people in that role, and that if we are going to auto-designate some of the other leaders in the party, that they follow where their states are.”
In a statement, Franken called the commission “a productive step forward. … Going forward, we will all have to take a close look at reforming the primary process — including our superdelegate system and the caucuses — to ensure that our democracy is functioning in the most inclusive way possible.”
One Clinton superdelegate, if he had his way, would just do away with the whole thing. For Javier Morillo, a member of the Democratic National Committee and president of the Minnesota SEIU, the whole thing was a headache.
“We should absolutely get rid of all of them, excluding congresspeople,” Morillo said, echoing Ellison’s comment that it wouldn’t quite work to have lawmakers compete against their own constituents for delegate spots. “I think we should bind all the delegates by the results of the primary and that’s it, end of story.”
Morillo is vocally pro-Clinton on Twitter, and often criticized Sanders supporters’ arguments on superdelegates, delegate math, and the whole process.
“It’s not worth the heartache,” he said. “I mean, today, I’m still getting deluged with people asking me to vote for Bernie,” even though the campaign formally gave up the effort to persuade superdelegates to vote Sanders some time ago.
Morillo’s term as a Democratic committee member is coming to a close. He’s not sad to see his superdelegate status end.
“After this, who the hell wants this?” |
President Barack Obama spoke to Hillary Clinton supporters at a New York City fundraiser Sunday night, espousing the improvements he made upon the country since his first term in office.
“It’s very hard to find an area where we’re not better off than we were before,” President Obama said, making no mention of Saturday’s explosion in New York’s Chelsea neighborhood, as per the White House pool report. President Obama also made no mention of the bombing in New Jersey or stabbing attack in Minnesota.
“Now, to the matter at hand, there’s an election coming up. And because this is an intimate group, I want to spend most of our time in conversation, but let me just say a few things at the top,” Obama said to laughter.
President Obama went on to talk about “the good race” he ran in 2008 and how “we are much better now” than at that point, citing jobs numbers and the recent report from the Census relating to the increase in household incomes.
Obama also boasted about the administration’s engagement with normalizing relations with Cuba as well as the nuclear deal with Iran and putting Osama Bin Laden “out of the battlefield”.
November 8, the president said, “should not be a close election, but it will be,” calling the U.S. a “polarized society” as one of the reasons why the election will be close.
“Despite of that, I have confidence in the American people,” he added. “I’m confident Hillary will be a great president.”
Obama described the Trump campaign as an “infomercial” and a “reality show.”
Worse, he said, “It’s tapping into some of our worst impulses as a country.”
Follow Kerry on Twitter |
Nuisance Abatement The NYPD’s Aggressive Enforcement of a Little-known Law
A wide swath of public officials are calling for change in response to a Daily News and ProPublica investigation about the NYPD’s use of an obscure type of lawsuit to boot hundreds of people from homes. The cases are happening almost exclusively in minority neighborhoods.
Several city council members said they were considering amendments and other reforms to safeguard abuses.
Council Member Vanessa L. Gibson said the statistics included in the story are “shocking.”
Public Advocate Letitia James said she would conduct a thorough inquiry into “some serious legal and constitutional questions” raised by the story. “Some of the rights that individuals are forfeiting, to me, constitutes coercion.”
The judge who oversees the day-to-day operation of the state’s trial courts, which handle nuisance abatement cases, also said there should be more safeguards.
First Deputy Chief Administrative Judge Lawrence K. Marks, top, and Public Advocate Letitia James. (Mike Groll/AP, Corey Sipkin/New York Daily News)
“It strikes me that this law may be broader than it should be,” said Chief Administrative Judge Lawrence Marks. “The Mayor’s Office and the city council might take a close look at that.”
Mayor Bill de Blasio, who was elected on a promise of police reform, deferred comment to the NYPD. The NYPD ignored repeated requests for comment.
As a result of the story, Marks said that an educational session for judges handling the nuisance abatement cases would be held later this month. Marks stressed judges are independent and entitled to apply the law as they interpret it.
Requiring more recent evidence, prohibiting hearsay evidence, and requiring that cases include an arrest or conviction are all issues that would need to be addressed legislatively, Marks said.
The Daily News and ProPublica story found the NYPD has used the nuisance abatement law, enacted in the 1970s to clean up Times Square, to lock families out of their homes over investigations that often never led to a criminal conviction. After reviewing more than 500 cases filed against residences during 2013 and the first half of 2014, the investigation found:
In 75 percent of cases, judges approved the NYPD’s request to lock people out before residents even had a chance to come to court.
NYPD requests for locking out residents came an average of six months after the alleged illegal activity, even though the requests justified such an extreme measure by claiming illegal activity was “ongoing.”
In order to settle the cases, tenants and homeowners often agreed to onerous provisions, such as banning specific family members for life, warrantless searches, and automatically forfeiting leases if merely accused of wrongdoing in the future.
173 of the 297 people who gave up their leases or were banned from homes were not convicted of a crime. Forty-four of those people appear to have faced no criminal prosecution whatsoever.
Tenants, who rarely had lawyers, described scenarios of being left to fend for themselves against an NYPD attorney, while a judge was nowhere to be seen.
“I would hope that the administration, including the mayor and the police commissioner, (Bill) Bratton, gets to the bottom of this,” said James, the public advocate. “The office of public advocate will be drafting a letter asking for the specificity and answers to some very serious questions.”
James said she would look at whether there’s a pattern of “illegal enforcement,” of the law, the lack of criminal convictions in the cases, the reliance on confidential informants, and whether this is “a continuation of Broken Windows,” referring to the NYPD’s strategy of aggressively enforcing low-level offenses to prevent more serious crime.
City Councilman Mark Levine (D-Manhattan) said his office is working on three legislative items: a bill that would require the NYPD to produce regular publicly available reports on its use of the nuisance abatement law; establishing a 90-day window within which the NYPD must file an action after the last-known violation; and stipulating that these cases can only be brought after an arrest or conviction.
The NYPD Is Kicking People Out of Their Homes, Even If They Haven’t Committed a Crime And it’s happening almost exclusively in minority neighborhoods. Read the story.
Levine, along with Judge Marks, also said he would push for more funding to provide lawyers to defendants in the cases.
“Loss of a home has life-changing impact, and no one should face such a penalty without benefit of an attorney,” Levine said.
Councilman Rory Lancman (D-Queens), chairman of the Committee on Courts and Legal Services, said he thinks a hearing is necessary to flesh out possible reforms.
"Nuisance abatement actions are an important quality-of-life tool, but the wide disparity among judges in granting temporary closing orders and the lack of representation for those facing eviction raise legitimate due process concerns that the city council needs to examine through a hearing and possibly address through legislation,” said Lancman.
The deputy chief administrative judge who oversees the city’s court system, Fern Fisher, issued an advisory notice to judges earlier this month in response to The News and ProPublica’s findings.
The advisory recommends judges limit the practice of granting temporary closing orders against residences, particularly when the evidence is stale, based on “multiple layers of hearsay,” or the word of confidential informants. The advisory also recommends judges hold settlement agreements in open court, with a court reporter present, to ensure tenants are fully informed of their rights and understand what they are signing.
Advocates are calling for even further changes.
NYCLU Associate Legal Director Chris Dunn said the city and the court system should review every closing order and settlement and void the ones that are improper.
Dunn also called for an independent investigation into the NYPD’s practice of using records from sealed criminal cases against people in these civil court actions, as was done in some of the cases reviewed by The News and ProPublica. This is a violation of the state sealing statute.
Bob Gangi of the Prison Reform Organizing Project said the NYPD’s Civil Enforcement Unit, which is responsible for nuisance abatement cases, should be thoroughly investigated and disbanded.
Update, Feb. 8, 2016: Mayor de Blasio was asked about nuisance abatement at an unrelated press conference. Here is his response:
"The concept of the law is to make sure that if people are posing a threat to their neighbors, that we're able to address that threat. It is not that different from what we do in public housing when someone is a danger to their fellow residents, that there are measures we take to make sure that they don't create a danger. There should always be due process. So we're certainly going to look carefully at the protocols to make sure that there's appropriate due process and decisions are made carefully. But the underlying idea is an appropriate one, that if we believe someone is an ongoing threat and treating their neighbors inappropriately, it's one of the steps we have the option to take." |
U.S. Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont, who in April announced his candidacy for president for the 2016 election, on Wednesday will introduce a bill to break up the country's biggest banks—just a day after the Senate passed a Republican budget that takes aim at many progressive issues.
Under the proposal, called the Too Big to Fail, Too Big to Exist Act, regulators on the Financial Stability Oversight Council would compile a list of institutions which say they are so large that their collapse could trigger an economic crisis—otherwise known as "too big to fail."
The Treasury Secretary would then have a year from the bill's passing to break them up.
"If an institution is too big to fail, it is too big to exist," Sanders said Tuesday. "No single financial institution should have holdings so extensive that its failure could send the world economy into crisis."
SCROLL TO CONTINUE WITH CONTENT Help Keep Common Dreams Alive Our progressive news model only survives if those informed and inspired by this work support our efforts
The firms on that list would also be banned from using customer money to make "risky or speculative activities on the financial market," Reuters reports.
Rep. Brad Sherman (D-Calif.) is co-sponsoring the bill.
While the proposal is unlikely to pass, Sanders' stance on the issue indicates his support of more progressive policies than his fellow Democratic presidential candidate, Hillary Clinton.
Clinton has been criticized for what some see as a friendly relationship with Wall Street, having taken millions of dollars in contributions from financial firms and other big corporations throughout her political career. |
He may be “half-man” but he’s got brains. Tyrion Lannister, the master of words, has used his wisdom and intellect to survive the harsh realm of Westeros. If you’re in need of some inspiration or motivation, the wordsmith’s funny one-liners and words of advice are here to help you get through life.
Spoken eloquently and perfectly delivered by none other than the incredible Peter Dinklage, here are 13 epic Tyrion Lannister quotes to live by…
1. Tyrion teaches us how to handle criticism in this wise quote…
“Once you’ve accepted your flaws, no one can use them against you.”
2. Unlike Tyrion, we may never lay eyes on a dragon, but there are other great possibilities in life…
“Death is so final. Whereas life, ah, life is full of possibilities.”
3. If ever in a bad mood, go by this Tyrion quote…
“Everything’s better with some wine in the belly.”
4. In case you thought another drink would be a good idea on a wild night out…
“It’s not easy being drunk all the time. If it were easy, everyone would do it.”
5. Forget Pokemon Go, Tyrion reminds you to remember the power of the book!
“A mind needs books like a sword needs a whetstone.”
6. We all need a friend like Varys and an accomplice like Daenerys…
“I try to know as many people as I can. You never know which one you’ll need.”
7. He’s the master of inspirational quotes! Tyrion tells us to appreciate our lives…
“Death is so boring especially now with so much excitement in the world.”
8. Tyrion, the drinker and the knower. When people wonder why you’re so damn smart, tell them…
“That’s what I do: I drink and I know things.”
9. Tyrion telling us there will never be a shortage of enemies once you have one…
“Everytime we deal with an enemy, we create two more”
10. They may not tear out our tongues, but they try to keep us quiet…
“When you tear out a man’s tongue, you are not proving him to be a liar, you’re only telling the world that you fear what he might say.”
11. Is this the best Game of Thrones quote? No truer word has ever been spoken…
“The powerful have always preyed on the powerless, that’s how they became powerful in the first place.”
12. The little Lannister reminds us not to be like everyone else…
“Laughing at another person’s misery was the only thing that made me feel like everyone else.”
13. He has a way with words! We’re pretty sure a few of you share this in common with Tyrion…
“I am the god of tits and wine.”
It’s official. Tyrion Lannister has the most wit and wisdom in Westeros. If his “Tyrion-isms” are wise enough to be turned into t-shirts, then they’re certainly enough to win him the Iron Throne!
If only Tyrion was based on a real-life person, everyone needs someone like him in their lives. There are in fact other Game of Thrones characters that were inspired by these real-life historical figures. |
Japan is in a tough spot, energy-wise. The nation imports nearly all of its oil and natural gas. Most of its nuclear reactors have been shut down after Fukushima. Wind and solar are still in the early stages of ramping up.
A methane hydrate block embedded in sediment in Oregon. (Wikipedia)
That explains why the country is looking for energy in unexpected places. Japan is currently trying to tap into undersea deposits of methane hydrates — also known as "fire ice" — in hopes of converting the trapped methane into usable natural gas.
On Tuesday, Japan announced a major new breakthrough. For the first time, a team aboard the drilling ship Chikyu had successfully extracted gas from a layer of methane hydrates 1,000 feet below the seabed in the Eastern Nankai Trough.
Now, this is just an initial step — albeit a big one. The Japanese government says that it's still five years away from commercial extraction of natural gas from methane hydrates. The drilling process itself is still tricky and expensive. But if Japan figures out how to unlock these hydrates, it could have huge implications for both energy and climate change.
Here's a quick primer on the issue:
What are methane hydrates? Methane hydrates are essentially cage-like lattices of water molecules that contain methane, the chief ingredient in natural gas. They can be found either beneath the seafloor or underneath Arctic permafrost:
Where are they found? All over the world. Right now, Japan is trying to extract methane from offshore gas hydrates in the Sea of Japan. The United States is currently funding 14 different research projects into the energy source after a successful test on Alaska's North Slope:
How much energy are we talking about? Potentially, a staggering amount. The U.S. Geological Survey estimates that gas hydrates could contain between 10,000 trillion cubic feet to more than 100,000 trillion cubic feet of natural gas.
Some of that gas will never be accessible at reasonable prices. But if even a fraction of that total can be commercially extracted, that's an enormous amount. To put this in context, U.S. shale reserves are estimated to contain 827 trillion cubic feet of natural gas.
Um, wouldn't burning all that fuel heat up the planet? Yes, if enough natural gas was extracted and burned, that would produce a whole lot of carbon-dioxide emissions. The U.S. Geological Survey estimates that there's more carbon trapped inside gas hydrates than is contained in all known reserves of fossil fuels:
Distribution of organic carbon in Earth (excluding dispersed carbon in rocks and sediments, which equals nearly 1,000 times this total amount). Numbers in gigatons (1015 tons) of carbon.
Now, that might be a high-end estimate. More recent studies have suggested that the hydrates contain somewhere between 500 and 2,500 gigatons of carbon-dioxide. Even that lower figure, however, is more than twice as much as the carbon contained in natural gas from all of Earth's other sources.
Bottom line: It could prove impossible to keep global warming below the goal of 2°C if a significant fraction of this natural gas gets burned.
Why are methane hydrates so tricky to exploit? In part because most of the hydrates are located either in colder environments or deep underwater, places that are simply difficult and expensive to drill in. As a U.S. Geological Survey study (pdf) notes, "Technologies exist to address all of these issues, but their implementation will add to overall development costs for producing natural gas from hydrate."
The U.S. Energy Information Administration is even more skeptical: "So far, gas hydrates have provided more problems than solutions."
Meanwhile, drillers also have to be careful to not let the methane trapped in the hydrates leak out. When methane is released directly into the atmosphere, it's an even more potent greenhouse gas than carbon-dioxide. Already, climate scientists have raised concerns about methane from hydrates bubbling up naturally as the Earth warms and permafrost melts — which, in turn, heats the Earth even further. Drilling could exacerbate that problem without proper precautions.
Is there a cleaner way to harness methane hydrates? Possibly. Researchers have been wondering if it might be possible to pump carbon-dioxide back into the undersea lattices once the methane has been extracted — making the whole thing carbon neutral. A test at Conoco-Phillips' oil field in the North Slope of Alaska last year showed this was technically possible. So far, though, this idea is very far from a reality.
Does Japan have any other, cleaner options for energy? Potentially, yes. The legislature introduced new incentives for renewable energy last July, and already wind and solar installations are surging. Meanwhile, Japan has the third-largest geothermal resources in the world, with enough to satisfy nearly 10 percent of the nation's energy needs. There's also the possibility that Japan will restart many of its currently shuttered nuclear reactors.
So gas hydrates are still a ways off? Yes, but don't be surprised if we hear a lot more about them in the next few years. |
London is a melting pot.
According to the 2011 Census, one in three people (37%) in London were born outside the UK. So where is everyone coming from and where are they are moving to in the capital?
The map below displays the largest migrant populations by country of birth in each of London's 32 boroughs. The darker the shade of the flag, the larger percentage of people from that country were born abroad.
You can see that the outskirts of the city have a smaller foreign-born population compared with inner-London:
Graphics: Business Insider/Data: London Datastore
The chart down here presents the data. Every borough appears with a number, which helps you to find it on the map:
Data: London Data Store
The data was made available by the London Data Store, the official provider of free data from the Greater London Authority. |
Experience developing PS4 dungeon RPG aimed for release in Japan in 2017
A new IP aimed at the core audience.
Experience, developer of dungeon RPGs such as Demon Gaze, Operation Babel, and Stranger of Sword City, is developing a dungeon RPG for PlayStation 4 that it plans to release in Japan in 2017, company president Hajime Chikami told Famitsu.
“As we turn towards 2017, what we’re announcing at the current time is the Xbox One game we talked about some time ago, Yomi wo Saku Hana, and our PS Vita game, Death Mark, but in 2017 we would like to tackle a title for another platform as well,” Chikami said.
Famitsu asked if that is to say that Experience is developing a title for PlayStation 4.
Chikami responded, “Large-scale titles are being released and I think that there is momentum, and I would like to increase the platforms that we can develop for.
“With PlayStation 4, I would like to create a new dungeon RPG, which is what this company is best at. A new IP.”
Famitsu asked, being that they’re taking on new hardware with a new IP, if they’re aiming to attract new users. Chikami responded that the game will mainly be for fans of the company and that its content is aimed at the core audience.
Experience director Motoya Ataka added that, “If we’re aiming to make a dungeon RPG for core users, since it wouldn’t be interesting if it was the same as before, we want to make something that satisfies our fans, and yet is leveled up a rank. We’re aiming for something that won’t be referred to as ‘the same as before.'”
As for its release window, Chikami said, “If possible, I would like to release it in 2017.” |
Toni Graphia Annotation
Now we’ve finally caught up to the end of Episode 213! Welcome to 1968.
Loved the idea of a war room where R/B/C worked at a detective board like at a police station to organize the facts. When the Art Department asked about the look of Jamie’s timeline, a few of us in the writers’ room actually drew the timeline on a whiteboard. We experimented a lot with the look and information on the timeline before we ended up with what you see on screen.
The names of the prison—Tolbooth, Stirling, Arbroath, Blackness, are a few of the real prisons where Jacobites were sent after Culloden. I included Blackness as an Easter egg for the fans, since we shot at Blackness Castle. It was our Fort William.
You’ll remember the “Dunbonnet” from Episode 302. A couple hundred years later, the tales of Jamie’s heroism had become legend! |
« "Did Nancy Reagan's War on Drugs Backfire?" | Main | Quick (inside-the-Beltway) reflections on the latest odds of those inside-the-Beltway getting federal sentencing reform done in 2016 »
March 8, 2016
Judge John Gleeson invents and issues a "federal certificate of rehabilitation"
Thanks to this post at the Collateral Consequences Resource Center, I see that US District Judge John Gleeson has issued yet another remarkable opinion concerning the collateral consequences of a federal criminal conviction and what he thinks he can do as a federal judge in response. Here is how the 33-page opinion in Doe v. US, No. 15-MC-1174 (EDNY March 7, 2016)(available here) gets started:
On June 23, 2015, Jane Doe moved to expunge a now thirteen-year-old fraud conviction due to its adverse impact on her ability to work. The conviction has proven troublesome for Doe because it appears in the government’s databases and in the New York City Professional Discipline Summaries. In other words, the conviction is visible to a prospective employer both as the result of a criminal background check and upon examination of her nursing license. Numerous employers have denied Doe a job because of her conviction. On more than one occasion, she was hired by a nursing agency only to have her offer revoked after the employer learned of her record. Despite these obstacles, Doe has found work at a few nursing companies, and she currently runs her own business as a house cleaner. Doe’s two children help to support her, and during periods of unemployment, her parents have also assisted her financially. The government opposes Doe’s motion, contending that federal district courts do not have subject matter jurisdiction to expunge a conviction on equitable grounds. The Second Circuit has ruled, however, that “[t]he application of ancillary jurisdiction in [expungement] case[s] is proper.” U.S. v. Schnitzer, 567 F.2d 536, 538 (1977), cert. denied, 435 U.S. 907 (1978). Accordingly, I have weighed the equities in this case, which are grounded in my understanding of Doe’s criminal conviction and sentence; I was the judge who presided over her jury trial and imposed punishment. I conclude that while Doe has struggled considerably as a result of her conviction, her situation does not amount to the “extreme circumstances” that merit expungement. See id. at 539. That said, I had no intention to sentence her to the unending hardship she has endured in the job market. I have reviewed her case in painstaking detail, and I can certify that Doe has been rehabilitated. Her conviction makes her no different than any other nursing applicant. In the 12 years since she reentered society after serving her prison sentence, she has not been convicted of any other wrongdoing. She has worked diligently to obtain stable employment, albeit with only intermittent success. Accordingly, I am issuing Doe a federal certificate of rehabilitation. As explained below, this court-issued relief aligns with efforts the Justice Department, the President, and Congress are already undertaking to help people in Doe’s position shed the burden imposed by a record of conviction and move forward with their lives.
March 8, 2016 at 09:19 AM | Permalink
Comments
Very innovative. Congratulations to Judge Gleason.
Posted by: Micael R. Levine | Mar 8, 2016 10:10:14 AM
I would love to hear your thoughts on this Prof. Berman. It seems substantially less problematic than his expungement order because it does not actually require any party to do anything. It doesn't purport to bind private parties from acting in any way. It's essentially the judge's opinion with the word "Order" at the top of the page.
Posted by: A Non-E Mous | Mar 8, 2016 10:42:38 AM
"I can certify that Doe has been rehabilitated."
Does this come with a certificate?
Seriously, good luck and keep trucking judge.
Posted by: Joe | Mar 8, 2016 11:32:09 AM
Judge Gleason's rationale is best expressed by his statement, "I had no intention to sentence her to the unending hardship she has endured in the job market." Most federal judges share Judge Gleason's concern about collateral consequences in cases like this. They should carefully consider Judge Gleason's equitable approach and adopt it.
Posted by: Michael R. Levine | Mar 8, 2016 11:34:27 AM
So long as this 'certificate' has no enforceable legal effect I don't have a problem with it. But the moment she brings a claim against a potential employer for not hiring her, or even against a data provider for not removing her name I do. Actually, in that second case I would have problems even if it were an actual expungement order. The conviction actually happened, just because the government chooses to forgive the offense doesn't mean anyone else needs to.
Posted by: Soronel Haetir | Mar 8, 2016 4:33:34 PM
That's cute. It doesn't appear to have any real legal effect but, who knows, maybe someone will give it some weight. Convictions are too permanent in their consequences. I hope this helps ameliorate that a bit.
Posted by: Erik M | Mar 8, 2016 5:52:45 PM
I've read about another certificate: Under 28 U.S.C. § 1495, the U.S. Court of Federal Claims has jurisdiction over damages claims by actually innocent persons who were wrongfully imprisoned for federal crimes. To prevail, the plaintiff first needs to obtain a “certificate” establishing his innocence from the federal district court in which he was convicted (28 U.S.C. § 2513).
Anyone cite me a sample of such a certificate, or a pleading & memo of Ps & As, requesting such a certificate?
TIA,
Barry
Posted by: Barry J. Baker Sipe | Mar 8, 2016 10:59:22 PM
BREAKING NEWS: The 97th District Court of Montague County’s Community Supervision and Corrections Department Cody Busby, Director has admitted in a Court Hearing that he has no Oath of Office and was unaware that he needed one.
Incompetence gallops in the judicial system, ignorance of the Law is no excuse, The Constitution and the State Laws should be required reading before becoming a Public Employee.
It is State Law of Texas that all elected and all appointed Public Employees MUST have an Oath of Office.
The Director was appointed by the Court. The implications are numerous, all those people subjected to probation and paying fines by an unlawful public employee appointed by a Court.
Could this be fraud upon the court?
Could this be conspiracy by Public Employees?
Who is keeping the financial records?
Why are the courts always back logged?
Our local court is more like a circus act. The court never starts on time. The attorney's stand around by the jury box joking and talking, they show up unprepared for court and must take their client to a private room to talk to them before they suggest that they take a plea bargain.
Our previous judge informed everyone that this is his court (I was under the mistaken assumption that it was the peoples court) and there will be no cameras or recordings used.
A few years back, when the previous DA was running for judge (now current judge), he proudly admitted in his speech to the Tea Party that in all his cases he would attach probation requirements. He said that this is to pull them back into the system if they step out of line.
It seems that the only thing that gets accomplished with our public employees is that they can vote themselves higher pay raise and more benefits.
Posted by: LC in Texas | Mar 10, 2016 4:46:11 PM
Post a comment |
Location: http://www.reddit.com/r/hiphopheads
Size: Not Listed
Registered members: 105,136
Notable thread: "Kanye Is Selling $120 White Tees #NoNewSlaves"
Over the past few years, Reddit has become a ubiquitous social platform, hosting in-depth conversation on pretty much every conceivable subject. Hip-hop is no exception—the Hip Hop Heads (HHH) Reddit is perhaps the most active board dedicated to rap music. At any given time you are sure to find hundreds of posters discussing the latest mixtapes and news stories. One common criticism of message boards is their relatively slow pace; since long-form, measured responses are valued, message boards lose out to more immediate social media platforms like Twitter. Such is not the case with Reddit, and the discussions on HHH move just as quickly as any Twitter conversation. In true Reddit form, HHH is often home to in-depth conversations and AMA sessions with rappers, connecting them to their fans—in fact, Chance the Rapper is a frequent poster. |
Eli Burakian/Dartmouth College
Hany Farid, a computer scientist at Dartmouth College in Hanover, New Hampshire, specialises in detecting manipulated images and videos. Farid, who provides his services to clients as varied as universities, media organizations, and law courts, says that image manipulation is becoming both more frequent and more sophisticated. He spoke to Nature about the arms race to stay ahead of the forgers.
Where do you start when trying to spot a fake image?
One simple but powerful technique is reverse image search. You give the image to a site such as Google Image Search or TinEye, and they show you all other instances of it. A project at Columbia University, in New York City, is taking this to the next level, and starting to find parts of images that have been repurposed from other images.
“I’ve seen the technology get good enough that I’m now very concerned” Generally, we think about which patterns, geometries, colours or structures are going to be disrupted when someone manipulates a photo. For example, when people add an object into a scene, we know that where they put the shadow is usually wrong. A viral video called Golden Eagle Snatches Kid from 2012 is one of my favourite examples. It took us only 15 minutes of analysis to show shadow inconsistencies: the eagle and baby were computer-generated.
What about if fake images make only slight tweaks?
There are a number of analyses we can do. In a colour picture, every pixel needs three values — corresponding to the amounts of red, green and blue at that point. But in most cameras, every pixel records just one colour, and the camera fills in the gaps by taking the average values of the pixels around it. This means that, for any given colour in an image, each missing pixel has a particular correlation with its neighbours, which will be destroyed if we add or airbrush something, and we can detect that.
Another technique is JPEG compression. Almost every image is stored in a JPEG file, which throws away some information to save on storage. There is a huge amount of variation in how each camera does that. If a JPEG is unpacked — opened in Photoshop — and then put back together, it is always repackaged slightly differently, and we can detect that. I wish you could just upload any image and we could tell you if it’s real or not, but it’s still a very difficult process and requires expertise to understand different components.
Who uses your digital forensic services?
I do analysis for organisations such as the Associated Press, Reuters, and The New York Times. There are only a handful of academics worldwide who are specialists in this, so it doesn’t scale — and that means you can only do the analysis of really high-stakes images. But there are efforts under way to scale this up. Last year, the US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) got into this game with a large project of which I’m part. Over the next five years they’re trying to create a system that will allow you to analyse hundreds of thousands of images a day. It’s a very ambitious programme.
I also do a lot of work in the courts. For example, here in the United States, child pornography is illegal, but computer-generated child pornography counts as 'protected speech' under the First Amendment. If someone’s arrested they might say that the offending image isn’t real, and I might have to prove that it is. I also get lots of e-mails from people about photo hoaxes — almost daily.
Do you apply your techniques to scientific papers?
I have worked on many cases of scientific misconduct, hired by universities conducting internal investigations. When I visited the US Office of Research Integrity recently, they asked me “how do we get our hands on automated tools?” The reality is we’re still not there. But creating something that uses some of the tools, such as clone detection, which looks to see whether parts of an image have been copied and pasted from elsewhere, would be possible as a semi-automated process looking at dozens, not millions, of images a day. It’s something my colleagues and I are thinking about, and it’s a small but not insignificant part of the DARPA programme.
How about fake videos?
Researchers are now able to splice together footage to create videos of famous people seeming to say things they never said — for instance, this video of President Obama. And they can create fake images or short videos using machine learning techniques: in particular, generative adversarial networks (GANs), which learn to generate fake content. These pit a network that generates fake content against a ‘classifer’ network that attempts to discriminate between real and fake content, so that the faking network rapidly improves.
I’ve seen the technology get good enough that I’m now very concerned. In 5 or 10 years, this is going to get really good. At some point we will reach a stage where we can generate realistic video, with audio, of a world leader, and that’s going to be very disconcerting. I would say that the field of digital forensics is now behind in video.
How can you detect fake video?
JPEG compression has an analogous construct in video, which is a bit harder to detect because video uses a more sophisticated version. Another approach is to use machine learning for detection. But we’re taking an approach similar to what we do with images — which is based on the observation that computer-generated content lacks the imperfections that are present in a recorded video. It’s created in almost too perfect a world. So one of the things we look at is, are we not seeing the statistical and geometric patterns we’d expect to see in the physical world?
Another technique is based on some beautiful work by William Freeman and colleagues at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, who showed how if you magnify really small changes in a video of a person, you can see subtle changes in the colours in their face that correspond to their pulse rate. We showed that you can use this to distinguish real people from computer-generated people.
Couldn’t machine learning algorithms learn to include these features?
Perhaps in principle. But in practice, these algorithms have limited time and training data, and there is little control over which features a neural network will pick up on to discriminate between real and fake videos. A GAN is only trying to fool the classifier it’s trained on. That’s no guarantee that it will learn all aspects of what makes an image or video real or fake, or that it will fool another classifier.
My adversary will have to implement all the forensic techniques that I use, so that the neural network can learn to circumvent these analyses: for example, by adding a pulse in. In that way, I’ve made their job a little harder.
It’s an arms race. As we are developing faster, folks are creating more sophisticated technology to augment audio, images and video. The way this is going to end is that you take the ability to create a perfect fake out of the hands of the amateur. You make it harder, so it takes more time and skill, and there’s a greater risk of getting caught. |
Meechaiel Criner's grandmother in Texarkana told KSLA News 12 that they hadn't seen or heard from him since he left home last August. (Video courtesy KSLA)
The suspect in the murder of a freshman University of Texas-Austin student is a homeless 17-year-old from Texarkana, Texas.
Meechaiel Criner is charged with murder, a first degree felony, for the killing of Haruka Weiser, a first-year dance student at UT.
Her body was found Tuesday in a creek on campus. Criner was taken into custody Thursday after surveillance video was released to the public.
Austin firefighters recognized him from a trash fire just north of campus. Court documents say he was trying to burn evidence.
CBS station KSLA News 12 in Shreveport, Louisiana talked to family members who say they're shocked to hear of Criner's arrest in connection with the case.
Criner's grandmother told KSLA that they hadn't seen or heard from him since he left home last August.
A December 2014 issue of Texarkana's Texas High School student newspaper, the Tiger Times, features Criner in a story headlined, "A voice of hope," KSLA reports.
In it, Criner recounts enduring bullying in his younger years over his clothing and his "African-like accent," and describes the six months he spent in foster care when he was in fifth grade as "a really harsh time in my life." He claimed he was the victim of physical violence while in foster care, saying "People can be mean and hateful."
The article ends by saying Criner's future goals were unclear, "but there is one thing Criner aims to accomplish. 'Every day, I feel people think I'm not capable of much,' Criner said. 'What I want to leave behind is my name. I want them to know who Meechaiel Criner is,'" KSLA reports. |
Eunice aphroditois (colloquially known as the Bobbit(t) worm or sand striker ) is an aquatic predatory polychaete worm dwelling at the ocean floor . An ambush predator , the animal buries its long body into an ocean bed composed of gravel , mud , or corals , where it waits for a stimulus to one of its five antennae , attacking when it senses prey. Armed with sharp teeth, it is known to attack with such speed and ferocity that its prey is sometimes sliced in half. [1] [2]
Eunicids inject a toxin into their prey, which stuns or kills it, such that prey much larger than the worm itself can be eaten and digested.[3] The "Coral Reefs" episode of Blue Planet II shows that the Bobbit worm is capable of killing fish that are formidable predators in their own right, such as lionfish. Another family of polychaete worms, the fireworms (Amphinomidae), have harpoon-shaped chaetae (bristles) that release a toxin that can cause severe skin irritation, but in E. aphroditois, the chaetae are used only for grip when crawling over sediment.[3]
Little is known about the sexual habits and lifespan of this worm, but researchers hypothesize that sexual reproduction starts at an early stage, maybe even when the worm is about 100 mm (4 in) in length; this is very early, considering these worms can grow to sizes of nearly 3 m (10 ft) in some cases (although most observations point to a much lower average length of 1 m (3 ft 3 in) and an average of 25 mm (1 in) in diameter).
E. aphroditois is found in warmer oceans around the world, including the Indo-Pacific and Atlantic.[4] |
Hillary Clinton has a history of forming strong relationships with the mothers of children who have died as a result of gun violence or unnecessary force used by police. Trayvon Martin‘s mother endorsed her in her race for the presidency earlier this year and the mother of Brandon Tate-Brown called Clinton a “winner” after speaking to her two weeks ago.
In honor of Mother’s Day, Clinton taped an appearance for VH1’s Dear Mama special during which she addressed Lucy McBath, mother of Jordan Davis, who was killed by a man at a gas station who didn’t like how loud the music Davis’ music was. McBath is the founder of Mothers of the Movement, a group of moms who have lost children to gun violence and who work for gun law reform. Clinton has met with the organization in the past.
Here is her segment from the forthcoming VH1 special:
As footage of McBath traveling, speaking to lawmakers, praying, and leading marches played, Clinton said, “Lucy, honestly, I don’t know how you do what you do. From the Walk With Jordan Scholarship Foundation, to your advocacy for common-sense gun laws, you’re moving mountains through your faith and determination.”
She finished with, “From one mother to another, happy Mother’s Day, my friend,” as old photos of McBath and Davis appeared on-screen.
McBath is the 2016 recipient of Dear Mama‘s Mother of the Year award. Her acceptance speech will be available in full when the special airs at 9:00 p.m. EST this Sunday. Watch above to see a snippet of the speech following Clinton’s tribute and tune in Sunday to see stars like Queen Latifah, Jaden and Willow Smith, and Alicia Keys honor their moms, too.
[image via screengrab]
For more from Lindsey, follow her on Twitter or Facebook.
Have a tip we should know? tips@mediaite.com |
Dads banned from nursery to avoid offending Muslims
Kids Go Wild is Britain’s first toddler group to introduce a women-only policy. Managers defended the decision, claiming that Muslim mothers welcomed it for “cultural reasons”. But it has angered both Muslims and non-Muslims and led the Equality and Human Rights Commission to investigate after dozens of fathers complained. One father turned away from the centre branded the move “disgusting” and “sexist”. He said: “To turn me away because I’m a man is against the Equality Act.” A poster outside the centre, in the predominantly Asian area of Sparkhill, Birmingham, reads: “Ladies and children only. No boys over nine allowed.” The newly-formed group advertises itself as “the UK’s first ladies and children’s only soft play centre”.
To turn me away because I’m a man is against the Equality Act A father
Muslim mother-of-one Ruksana Ayub said: “I understand why women would want a place like this where there are no men. They won’t feel they have to cover up so they might feel more able to relax and to socialise. But I’m quite modern in my outlook, so I also find it quite shocking that men aren’t allowed in. It’s a shame for kids who don’t have a mum.” The move was branded a “worrying situation” by local councillor Habib Rehman, a Muslim and father-of-four. He said: “There’s something wrong here when a dad can’t take his kids to a play centre.” Father-of-three Tariq Mahmood, of nearby Hall Green, said: “In the Muslim community men and women being separate is normal at religious events and social functions. But a play centre isn’t a religious or function thing. It’s somewhere for children to play. A ban on men gives the wrong impression about men.” |
The much anticipated new novel from Harry Potter writer JK Rowling now has a cover. A Casual Vacancy, which will be published in September this year, is designed by Mario J Pulice and features an illustration and lettering by Joel Holland.
It will be the first novel Rowling has written which is aimed at adults. The plot centres on the town of Pagford: "A seemingly English idyll, with a cobbled market square and an ancient abbey, but what lies behind the pretty façade is a town at war", according to the book's publishers, Little Brown.
The town is left in shock after Barry Fairbrother dies in his early 40s and leaves an empty seat on the parish council.
Rowling, 46, has amassed a fortune estimated to be more than £620 million from her seven Harry Potter books for children, plus all the spin-off rights. |
Zougla.gr Shows Who That 50% Of “Undecided Voters” Support: Golden Dawn First In Polls!
Latest Results:
Golden Dawn : 27.1%
SYRIZA: 23.8%
New Democracy: 11.1%
The poll group, which was the only one who predicted the real results of Golden Dawn in the 2012 Greek elections, Zougla.gr, unveiled a poll on Greek television yesterday showing Golden Dawn is now the most popular party in Greece!
The Greek media has been attempting to show doctored polls as of late, alleging that these are “proof” of Golden Dawn’s falling popularity. What these polls all seem to have in common however, is the very large number of undecided voters who refuse to answer. The reason for this is that these fake polls are taken via telephone, and in the current climate of illegal imprisonment and terrorism against Golden Dawn supporters many average citizens are afraid to give their real beliefs to strangers who know their phone number and profile them demographically. What makes zougla.gr polls unique is that they are taken via internet, with catches in place to correct fraud.
The following tables present the meteoric rise of the Golden Dawn and the commanding lead the People’s Nationalist movement holds in preparation for the upcoming European and Municipal elections. Golden Dawn leader N. Michaloliakos has increased substantially in popularity, and other research shows a mass exodus of New Democracy voters to the Nationalist alternative. (1 in 3 ND voters are spitting on Samaras and becoming supporters of Golden Dawn).
The party of Samaras has been suffering unprecedented desertion and lack of voter confidence, here is the zougla.gr chart outlining so:
At this point, New Democracy is on its way to becoming the next PASOK (who we won’t be talking about for much longer, after they polled in at 1.5%), as its base dissolves with 30.9% of voters coming to Golden Dawn. Every attempt to unfairly persecute the People’s Nationalists, every lie and defamation, the Greek people are paying them back in full.
The last part of the poll was important as well. In terms of the view of who would make the best political leader, Golden Dawn’s Michaloliakos, in spite of being illegally incarcerated and deprived of public discourse, is third most popular, barely a few percentage points away from Tsipras and Samaras.
It is only a matter of time until the Memorandum’s junta collapses and the new dawn of Hellenism arises. No matter what they do, May is coming! |
Tomorrow night the new moon will make a close approach to Earth, giving rise to the second supermoon of the year—but this one will have the power of invisibility.
Because the moon's orbit is egg shaped, there are times in the roughly monthlong lunar cycle when the moon is at perigee—its closest distance to Earth—or at apogee, its farthest distance from Earth.
"A supermoon occurs when the moon is at perigee and it's in either a full or new phase," said Raminder Singh Samra, an astronomer at the H.R. MacMillan Space Centre in Vancouver, Canada.
In March sky-watchers were treated to a full moon at perigee, which made for the biggest full moon seen in 18 years.
A new moon happens when the lunar orb positions itself between Earth and the sun, so that the side of the moon that faces Earth is unlighted.
"The upcoming moon on September 27, 2011, is set to be at perigee and at the new phase," Samra said, "so we won't be able to witness the event, as the moon and sun will be in the same region of the sky" and the lunar disk will be entirely dark.
Supermoon to Affect Earth's Tides?
Because the size of the moon's orbit also varies slightly, each perigee is not always the same distance from Earth.
When at perigee, the moon is about 18,640 miles (30,000 kilometers) closer to Earth than its average distance of roughly 240,000 miles (385,000 kilometers). When perigee occurs during a full moon, the lunar disk can appear about 14 percent bigger in the sky, Samra said.
Tuesday's dark supermoon will be just 222,175 miles (357,557 kilometers) away from Earth.
Some people have speculated that this lunar proximity can have unusual gravitational effects on Earth, triggering dramatic events such as earthquakes. (Take a moon myths and mysteries quiz.)
But the truth is that there's only a very small correlation between full or new moons and seismic stresses, said Jim Todd, planetarium manager at the Oregon Museum of Science and Industry.
"Stronger tidal forces caused by the alignment of the sun and moon may put added stress on tectonic plates," Todd said.
"However, seismologists have found no evidence connecting lunar perigees to heightened seismic activity. Instead the Earth constantly stores up energy and releases it any time the built-up energy becomes too great."
Lunar close encounters are well known to cause slightly higher ocean tides, so any localized flooding during a supermoon would be most noticeable around beaches and other low-lying areas.
But linking the supermoon to effects beyond that is far-fetched, the H.R. MacMillan Space Centre's Samra said. |
Valerie Hartmann’s Camino made a big impact on her, as did a Leave No Trace training that she attended a few years ago. Both experiences instilled a “tread lightly” mentality of stewardship toward our world. Valerie put her thoughts into action by writing the report, “Leave No Trace Outdoor Ethics for Camino de Santiago.” She recently shared it with us NorCal Chapter coordinators, and I am happy to help spread the word. I completely agree that some people can be more respectful to the environment and fellow pilgrims. Her report is full of common sense and good tips to be a mindful pilgrim and keep the Camino litter-free. Add this reading to your pre-Camino checklist and consider treading more lightly on your next Camino.
Valerie writes,
Greetings Peregrinos.
My 2016 pilgrimage was wonderful. It was only marred by the litter and human waste along the Camino. With input of other pilgrims and the guidance of Ben Lawhon, Educational Director of Leave No Trace – Center of Outdoor Ethics, I’ve developed the attached document as my contribution to the Camino and to tomorrow’s pilgrims. I had been forewarned that there was litter on the Camino. On my summer 2016 walk from St. Jean to Finisterre I was actually pleased that the minimal litter I came across seemed only a day or two old. There were obviously trash picker-uppers on the trail in front of me. I considered my picking up random corners of energy bars and empty plastic bottle as my contribution to the Camino. If I ever felt put upon or self-righteous I’d visualize a benevolently smiling Dalai Lama saying, “They are just children. They haven’t been around as many times as you.” What confused me was the toilet paper. I have hiked for plenty of decades in plenty of countries and have never experienced people “toileting” on the actual trail. People aren’t being evil, somehow surface toileting on the Camino has become normal. With the increasing number of pilgrims this needs to be rectified before it becomes even more of a health hazard and before the locals get fed up with our ill-mannered behavior. We pilgrims are the problem so we pilgrims need to be the solution by behaving appropriately ourselves and teaching our fellow pilgrims. Ideally, we can achieve a multiplier effect. By the time pilgrims return home, the Leave No Trace ethic will be their new normal. The Camino will clean up and pilgrims will carry the Leave No Trace principals to their home countries.
Leave No Trace: Outdoor Ethics for Camino de Santiago
By Valerie Hartmann
While your Camino experiences will be personally satisfying, your pilgrimage can have
adverse impacts on the places you visit and the people to meet. Your impact can be lessened if you practice Leave No Trace. The foundation of Leave No Trace is the Seven Principles for reducing the impacts caused by outdoor activities.
Principles of Leave No Trace
• Plan Ahead and Prepare
• Travel and Camp on Durable Surfaces
• Dispose of Waste Properly
• Leave What You Find
• Minimize Campfire Impacts
• Respect Farm Animals and Wildlife
• Be Considerate of Other Visitors
Plan Ahead and Prepare
Camping will not be covered in depth in this information since most pilgrims stay in albergues or hotels. If you are considering camping, keep in mind that wild camping is not permitted in Spain. You will need to locate the owner of the land and pay for permission to camp. Things to consider: Your pack will be 50% heavier with cooking equipment, tent, sleeping bag, etc. Is your Spanish good enough? What about rain? When will you dry the dew from your equipment? Is it worth it when, for 5-10 Euros you can have a warm bed, hot shower, roof, table, chair, kitchen, electricity, and camaraderie?
If you snore, anti-snoring mouth guards (both prescription and over-the-counter) are readily available. A sleep study prescribed by your doctor might even diagnose Sleep Apnea, a dangerous yet treatable condition. Mitigate your snoring before your pilgrimage. Buy rubber tips for your walking poles. Metal tipped poles will slip on cobble stones and the tip-tip-tip through the village at o’dark thirty disturbs later rising Spaniards. Always carry a small plastic bag for trash (a cinch strap on your equipment lets you easily carry larger trash) and a lightweight plastic trowel in case you need to defecate between villages.
Exchange contact information with pilgrims you meet. Prearrange a meeting place or a way to communicate. If you leave a paper note, be sure to date it so it can be removed when obsolete. Arranging rendezvous with fellow pilgrims by writing on walls with permanent markers is considered graffiti, and is never in style. You wouldn’t do it in your own hometown so don’t do it in Spain.
Albergue dorms are for sleeping, not for early morning dressing or packing. Have your
equipment pre-positioned so you do not disturb sleeping pilgrims. Dress and pack in the bathroom, shower room, laundry, hallway, or even outside.
Travel and Camp on Durable Surfaces
Walk on the established Camino—even where it’s wet, muddy, or rocky. Trails become
progressively wider and form parallel paths when people walk on the edges of the trail.
Walking on the edge of the trail destroys the vegetation, compacts the soil, and encourages others to do so. Once trailside plants are destroyed and the soil compacted, erosion can continue with or without additional foot traffic. Always use established roads and trails to visit places of interest as unestablished or “social
trails” mar the area and promote erosion. If you have sorted out legal camping use locations where the ground cover is already worn away. Do not build a ground fire as this sterilizes the soil and the ash will mar the surface.
Wear soft-soled shoes and concentrate your activities in the center of the site to avoid
enlarging it. Tents, packs, gear, and the kitchen area should be concentrated in one area on previously compacted, naturally resistant, or reinforced surfaces. This approach protects surrounding vegetation and prevents development of “satellite” sites. Leave your campsite clean and natural looking— Before departing, naturalize and disguise the site by replacing any rocks or sticks you may have moved.
Dispose of Waste Properly
With the ready availability of toilet facilities most pilgrims never defecate except in plumbed village toilets. For the few times you do need to defecate while between villages remember the four objectives of proper human waste disposal are:
• Avoid polluting water sources
• Eliminate the spread of disease
• Maximize decomposition
• Minimize the chances of social impacts
Fecal matter left on the surface is tracked by pilgrim boots into villages and albergues, rain washed into irrigation canals where it is pumped onto food crops, rain washed into streams, carried by flies to your food, and is unsightly. If you do need to defecate between villages, move 200’ (70 steps) away from any structures, trails or water sources and dig a 6-8” deep and 4-6” diameter cat hole (your trowel may have embossed measurements). Avoid eroded areas where your feces might be unearthed by rain. Use a small zip style bag to carry out toilet paper, wet wipes, and any other hygiene products. Burying them increases the risk of animals digging them up and spreading them in the area. If packing out used toilet paper is not an option, bury deeply in the cathole. Cover your feces with the dirt you dug out of the hole, and
disguise the hole by covering with leaves and twigs. An exemplary trowel is the GSI
Outdoors Cathole Sanitation Trowel available through REI (3.1 ounces, under $5.00) and the Big Dig Titanium Cat Hole Trowel (0.6 ounces, $36). In cases of an emergency it is acceptable to defecate first and dig your cat hole afterwards.
While it is unlawful to put untreated human feces in the trashcans found in communities along the Camino, an alternative is to carry a couple Cleanwaste Go Anywhere Waste Bags (12 for $34, 3 ounces each) to encapsulate and carry your waste to the next village’s trash containers. Feces don’t weigh any more outside your body than it did inside your body. For the few kilometers to the next town, it will help prevent the spread of disease, keep water sources clean, and will leave the Camino better than you found it. If cave explorers and canyon rafters can do it, so can Camino pilgrims. Again, leaving feces on the surface of the ground is never acceptable.
While the odor of urine can be a problem in many areas, it is typically not a serious health concern unless highly concentrated in large amounts. Feel free to “bless the fields” well away (200’) from trails and water sources. Remember, tens of thousands of people walk the Camino each year and the impact of thousands of people just ducking around a stone wall adds up. Do not urinate against stone surfaces, inside any structures, or on the Camino itself. There needs to be active bacteria to break down the odor producing chemicals, hence the recommendation to urinate well away from structures, hardened surfaces, or against stone walls. Wildlife with salt-deficient diets sometimes defoliate plants to consume the salt in urine, so urinate on bare soil if possible rather than on vegetation. Consider diluting your urine by rinsing the site if you have enough water to do so. If toilet paper is used, simply place it in your trash baggie and carry it to the next village for disposal in their trash cans.
Food waste (apple cores, banana peels, orange peels, bread crusts) also go in your trash
baggie. You might be tempted to toss it into the bushes. However, this is an un-natural food source that has been documented to harm birds and insects along trails. Aggressive birds like jays and crows follow the food waste humans toss aside, crowding out the less aggressive birds that should be in that environment. Even though it is biodegradable, these items still don’t belong there. Ask yourself: would the item be there if you hadn’t brought it there? If the answer is no, pack it out.
Cigarette butts also go in your trash baggie. Nicotine is a natural insecticide. Just a few butts washed into a puddle can prevent insect eggs from hatching, depriving insects and birds of their natural food source.
Leave What You Find
People visit the Camino for many reasons, among them to witness nature’s mysteries and surprises. Objects in nature derive much of their beauty from their surroundings and never look quite the same back home. When we leave rocks, shells, plants, antlers, feathers, fossils and other objects of interest as we find them, we pass the gift of discovery on to the pilgrims who follow.
Discovering evidence of earlier cultures such as clay pottery shards, rock art, and antique glass is exhilarating, and it’s tempting to take such things home as souvenirs. Archeological and historical artifacts are reminders of the rich human history of the Camino and belong to all people for all time. It is expressly forbidden to take “any movable property belonging to the Spanish Historical Heritage or export it without authorization. The state shall carry out any actions leading to recovery of illegally exported property.” All objects found by chance are considered of the public domain. The discoverer shall immediately notify appropriate authorities. (Law 16/1985 dated 25 June, Spanish Historical Heritage)
AVOID SPREADING NONNATIVE PLANTS AND ANIMALS.
Invasive species of plants, animals, and organisms can cause large-scale, irreversible changes to ecosystems. We can help prevent the spread of invasive species by following a few practical suggestions.
• Don’t transport flowers, weeds, or aquatic plants into wild lands.
• Empty and clean your packs, tents, boats, fishing equipment and other gear as you move on to new regions and after you return home. Water, mud and soil may contain harmful seeds, spores, or tiny plants and animals.
• Clean the dirt out of your boots or tire treads.
• Never discard or release live bait.
• Make sure pack stock and pets are immunized, recently de-wormed, and their coats are free of seeds, twigs, and harmful pests such as ticks.
Hostess gifts are appreciated, but do not give wildflower seeds from your homeland (such as the California poppy) as they can become invasive. While you will be awed by the beautiful Spanish broom plants, they are a serious invasive pest in areas with climates similar to Spain, such as California. Be sure no seeds hitchhike home.
Minimize Campfire Impacts
Campfires are generally rare on the Camino but can cause lasting impacts if built improperly. Campfires are often beautiful by night. But the enormous rings of soot-scarred rocks—overflowing with ashes, partly burned logs, food and trash—are unsightly. More importantly, campfires can and do ignite wildfires. If a campfire is important to you, use an established fire ring.
• Ask about pertinent regulations and campfire management techniques.
• Judge the wind, weather, location, and wood availability. Decide whether it’s safe and
responsible to build a campfire.
• Where there are no fire rings or grates, bring a fire pan or set aside time to build a mound fire.
• Have a trowel or small shovel and a container for saturating the ashes with water
Respect Farm Animals and Wildlife
Wild animals need pilgrims who will promote their survival rather than add to the pressures they already endure.
OBSERVE FROM A DISTANCE. Always watch or photograph animals from a safe distance to avoid startling them or forcing them to flee. Do not follow or approach them. Back away if animals react to your presence. To leave the area, move away from the animal even if you must detour from your intended travel direction. You have more options in your movements than animals do. Treat them generously.
NEVER FEED ANIMALS. Feeding wildlife damages their health, alters natural behaviors, and exposes them to predators and other dangers.
Traveling with a dog on the Camino is complicated as they are not allowed in most albergues, forcing you to camp. If you do travel with your dog, remove pet feces from trails, picnic areas, and campsites by disposing of it as you would any litter. Always use a collar and a short hand-held leash to control your dog.
When you encounter Spaniards using the Camino to move livestock, step off the trail, stand still, and speak in a calm tone so your presence is not startling. Do not feed local dogs you may encounter as this only encourages begging which some pilgrims might interpret as aggression. Do not entice dogs to follow you. Even if they are collarless and loose, they probably belong to somebody; if they follow you too far they may become lost and truly end up homeless.
Be Considerate of Other Visitors
RESPECT OTHER VISITORS AND PROTECT THE QUALITY OF THEIR EXPERIENCE.
Some people visit the Camino to prayerfully enjoy quiet and solitude. Others come for
camaraderie. Both Camino experiences are equally authentic. While our motivations may vary, there’s always room on the Camino for people with open minds, generous hearts, and tolerant dispositions. Choose to maintain a cooperative spirit on the Camino. Our interactions should reflect the knowledge that we can and do rely on each other. More often than not, our experiences ultimately depend on our treatment of others and their attitudes toward us. You may go for the Camino, but most of your memories will be about the people you meet.
Parasites are a fact of life on the Camino. If you are aware of a bed bug infestation, politely, but firmly ask to see the albergue’s inspection form (it will be posted on a wall). Take a picture or record the information from the form. Call the number on the form and report the infestation yourself. Bed bug infestations are very expensive to eradicate. Your host has probably been trying to take care of it themselves. Unfortunately, people are being bitten, the reputation of Spain is suffering, and albergues down stream are being impacted.
To minimize the spread of bedbugs use lockers, coat trees, or shelves to keep your backpack and possessions off the floor. Avoid leaning your backpack against other pilgrim’s backpacks.
Do not lean your backpack against mattresses, especially overnight. Avoid taking tomorrow’s clothes to bed with you. Inspect mattress seams for bedbugs (newly hatched are 1/16th of an inch and white while adults can be as large as apple seeds and blood red), discarded exoskeletons, and insect droppings. If you see blood spots on the mattress in the morning, you were certainly visited during the night. Turn your bed clothes inside out and inspect the seams for hitchhiker insects. If you suspect bedbugs, machine dry anything that came in contact with your sleeping area so you do not transport them to the next albergue.
Lice are another reality of the Camino. If you experience intense night time itching in the pubic area or daytime itching of your head, you have probably had lice for several days if not weeks (you have to build up an allergic reaction to the bites before itching begins). Talk with a pharmacist for the appropriate medication and advice on machine drying your items on high heat. After your first treatment, you will not know if you still have an active infestation until 7-10 days have passed. During that time period you need to tell each albergue host that they need to machine wash and dry on high heat, not only the sheets, but the blankets as well. Do not slink away feeling ashamed; you have done nothing wrong. That is unless you do slink away and not tell your host that you are undergoing treatment for lice. Do not expose the pilgrims using your bed after you to lice as they will not experience symptoms for days or weeks, unwittingly spreading the insects to even more albergues and pilgrims.
YIELD TO OTHERS.
Walk humbly. You are, after all, on pilgrimage. The little things are often the most important. Simple courtesies such as offering a friendly greeting on the trail, wearing culturally respectful clothing, stepping aside to let someone pass, waiting patiently for a turn, or preserving the quiet, all make a difference. Show your respect to Spaniards whose communities support your pilgrimage. Be friendly, unobtrusive and self-sufficient. Ask permission to cross private lands, and obey all laws and restrictions. Likewise, don’t disturb the livestock or equipment of ranchers, anglers, hunters, loggers, and others who derive their income from the permitted use of public lands. Leave gates open or shut, as you find them. People leading or riding livestock have the right-of-way on the Camino. Hikers and bicyclists should move to the downhill side
and talk quietly to the horseback riders as they pass, since horses and other pack stock
sometimes frighten easily.
If riding a bicycle, stay in control. When approaching others from behind, politely announce your presence with a friendly greeting or ring of your bell. Always proceed with caution as you do not know the hearing ability or ear bud usage of the pilgrims your pass.
KEEP A LOW PROFILE.
When charging your phone overnight, be sure it is powered off so incoming notifications do not disturb sleeping pilgrims. Make sure your morning alarm doesn’t rob other pilgrims of much needed sleep. Set your phone on mute and vibration only and wear it against your skin during the night. In the morning, be sure to cancel the alarm and not just hit snooze. If you are using headlamps on the trail, be sure to not shine them on pilgrims walking by moonlight as you will spoil their night vision for many minutes. Take rest breaks a short distance from the trail on durable surfaces, such as rock or bare ground. If the vegetation around you is thick or easily crushed, pick a wide spot in the trail so others can easily pass by. If possible, camp out of sight and sound of trails and other visitors.
When visiting a church, remember it is an active house of worship. Hushed tones are
appropriate as long as there is no religious service in progress. A respectful silence will never be incorrect. Cover bare shoulders. As a general rule, do not step up onto any raised areas inside churches as they designate holy, sanctuary areas. If you are unsure of church etiquette, walk only in the aisles or where other folks are walking. You can always ask; your interest and concern will be appreciated. Flash photography is not permitted inside most churches as the high energy from the flash speeds the fading of paints and cloth. If your poles are metal tipped, be sure they do not strike the floor. Donate generously. The ancient buildings are an expensive burden on the dwindling populations of poor, rural villages. Stay off of the stone walls.
LET NATURE’S SOUNDS PREVAIL. Avoid the use of radios, Bluetooth speakers,
electronic games and other intrusive devices. To some, technology is a necessity even on the Camino. To others, it is inappropriate. Avoid conflicts by making a conscious effort to allow everyone his or her own experience. Teach dogs to be quiet.
As much as possible, keep the noise down, especially in houses of worship, at night, in the early morning, or in remote areas. When walking in the early morning, be considerate of the Spanish that keep later hours than pilgrims. Save your conversations for the countryside instead of the narrow city streets where your voices echo between the high stone walls.
Consider only wearing a single ear bud as two can be dangerous with farm equipment and bikes approaching from the rear.
Use cellular phones discreetly.
Download the PDF: Leave No Trace for Camino de Santiago
For those interested in learning more about Leave No Trace, please visit LNT.org.
Much of this information was derived from copyrighted Leave No Trace information, and has been reprinted here under special arrangement with the Leave No Trace Center for Outdoor Ethics. For more information, visit www.LNT.org
Header photo courtesy of Brien Crothers, author of route report for Vía de la Plata (The Silver Way) |
See if you can spot all the legal violations that occurred yesterday at Delta Middle School in Colorado.
Here’s the situation: Students in a social studies class were taken to the library to do some work. When they arrived, their teacher told them there were bibles on a table in the main doorway, and they could pick one up as they left.
According to the District’s own policy on distributing non-curricular material, here’s what went wrong.
The policy says material cannot “be distributed in any classroom of any building then being occupied by a regularly-scheduled class.” Well, this was going on inside of the library where a class was taking place.
The policy says materials can only be given out “one-half hour before school and/or during regularly scheduled lunch periods and/or 15 minutes after the close of school.” This took place during the school day and not during a lunch period.
The teacher supposedly said to kids, “There’s bibles and they are free if you want one.” You can debate whether that’s a form of coercion. You can also debate whether a book that says Jews and Muslims and atheists are going to hell constitutes literature that “attacks” non-Christian groups.
Finally, the policy says “Students may not be used as the agents for distribution of such materials without the written consent of the student’s parent.” However, as soon as the students began leaving the library, they began pressuring their classmates to take one, effectively making them “agents of distribution.”
When one student didn’t — she’s the one who told her mother about this, which is why we know about it at all — this is what happened:
The student who did not take a bible was confronted by her classmates about why she didn’t take one, and the classmates started pressuring her to feel ashamed for not conforming to Christian beliefs.
Basically, the District did everything wrong in the way they conducted this Bible distribution.
I think there’s only one way to handle this.
The Satanic Temple needs to send this District a stack of coloring books for distribution:
Anne Landman, who first posted about this problem on her website, points out that District officials aren’t admitting to any wrongdoing:
Principal [Jennifer] Lohrberg denied that any violations had occurred. She even assured the concerned parent all was done in accordance with school board policy and the bible giveaway had been approved by the District’s lawyers. After being brushed off by Principal Lohrberg, the parent called the Delta County School District Assistant Superintendent, who similarly insisted the bible distribution was in accordance with District policy and the school was doing nothing wrong by making the bibles available. The superintendent suggested the concerned parent take the matter up with the School Board.
The parent may do that. But she’s also contacting the Freedom From Religion Foundation and American Civil Liberties Union in the meantime.
And it sounds like this is just the latest in a pattern of legal violations by the District:
Other incidents of religious proselytizing reported at Delta Middle School over the last year alone have included school staff mandating all middle school students attend a Christian religious play, students in the DMS drama club being forced to attend a Christian-themed musical performance while on a field trip to Denver last spring, and use of free doughnuts to coerce students to attend morning prayers led by a DMS teacher.
How about a tip of the hat to the student who realized this Bible distribution was a problem and let her mother know about it? At least she has a better sense of the law than some of the adults in that building.
(Image via Shutterstock. Thanks to Joe for the link) |
Stéfanie Trudeau, known as "Officer 728" because of her badge number, has been found guilty of assault for using excessive force during a 2012 arrest.
Trudeau, a former Montreal police constable, faced the charge for her actions while arresting Serge Lavoie for drinking a beer outside his residence on Oct. 2, 2012.
She was suspended from the force shortly afterward. She quit last September.
Stéfanie Trudeau, better known by her badge number 728, was accused of using excessive force during a 2012 arrest. (Annik MH de Carufel) In his ruling, Quebec Court Judge Daniel Bédard spent more than two hours going over the night of the arrest. He said Trudeau used excessive force and that she was "brutal."
He added that Trudeau, who first gained notoriety as "Officer 728" after she was caught on video pepper-spraying protesters during student protests in 2012, was clearly not ready to go back to work following her leave.
'I was sure I would die'
In his testimony during the trial last October, Lavoie denied that he had been drinking and said he did not resist arrest. He said he did not understand why Trudeau was after him.
This image was captured in a cellular phone video entered as evidence in the trial of suspended Montreal police officer Stéfanie Trudeau. Serge Lavoie is the man wearing red glasses. (CBC) Videos of the incident that the Crown presented as evidence during the trial show Trudeau forcing Lavoie down a set of stairs in a chokehold.
"I was sure I would die. I told her she's going to kill me," he testified.
Later, under cross-examination by the defence, Lavoie admitted to having had a couple of beers earlier in the day.
It was also pointed out that Lavoie can be heard on the video calling Trudeau "grosse niaseuse,"which translates roughly as "fat dummy," during an earlier altercation between the officer and another man outside the apartment.
In late 2014, the Crown agreed to try Trudeau by summary trial rather than as an indictable offence, which reduces the severity of the charge.
As a result, Trudeau faces a maximum of six months in jail rather than the maximum sentence of five years for an indictable offence. |
This article is over 3 years old
Tax authority alerts police amid suspicion that foreign companies have defrauded its system over past three years
Denmark’s tax authority said on Wednesday that it had alerted police after foreign companies appeared to have drained more than 800m euros from the system in what would be the country’s biggest tax fraud.
“Over the summer we became suspicious after receiving information from a foreign authority,” said Jesper Ronnow Simonsen, head of the Skat tax agency.
“Our own internal investigations have strengthened our suspicions and we have therefore turned the case over to the police.”
The global system for holding corporations to account is in need of serious reform Read more
Danish police confirmed the investigation and said the case was top priority.
A Skat spokesman was not willing to disclose which country had flagged the matter to Denmark.
The case involves returns on stock, including dividends, in Danish companies paid to foreign companies.
Dividends normally carry a 27% tax in Denmark. Under double taxation agreements, however, foreign companies based abroad are entitled to a refund of part or all of the Danish tax if they have paid tax on the dividend in their country of domicile.
Simonsen said Skat’s investigations showed that “a large network of companies abroad have apparently applied to have their dividend taxes refunded for fictional share holdings, based on falsified documents”.
“The expected criminal fraud in refunds has so far been calculated based on 2120 individual claims totalling some 6.2bn kroner [$940m] in the 2012 to 2015 period.”
The Danish police’s special economic and international crime unit said the case was top priority.
“The treasury and society have possibly been robbed of very considerable funds ... We have a major investigation ahead of us. I envisage a long hard haul to find out what has happened,” the national prosecutor, Morten Niels Jacobsen, said.
Neither the tax authority nor the crime unit would disclose any information about the cases, or name any of the companies involved. |
Anuradha Koirala, founder of the anti-trafficking charity Maiti Nepal, will be presented the Padma Shri – one of the highest civilian awards by India. (Reuters)
A 67-year-old Nepali woman honoured with one of India’s most prestigious awards for freeing thousands of girls from sexual slavery said on Friday it was the unbearable pain of victims that has motivated her to fight trafficking. Anuradha Koirala, founder of the anti-trafficking charity Maiti Nepal, will be presented the Padma Shri – one of the highest civilian awards – by India’s president at a ceremony in March or April, said a government statement this week.
“Rescued and rehabilitated 12,000 sex trafficking victims and prevented over 45,000 from being trafficked,” an infographic on Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s website read, listing the names and achievements of some of the 89 Padma award winners. The small, frail teacher-turned-activist said she was encouraged by the award, and it would make her work harder to stop girls being bought and sold in the sex trade.”The pain of victims has motivated me to continue my work,” Koirala told the Thomson Reuters Foundation by phone.
“When I see their pain – their mental pain as well as physical pain – it is so troubling that I cannot turn myself away. This gives me strength to fight and root this crime out.” South Asia is one of the fastest-growing region for human trafficking in the world, according to the United Nations Office for Drugs and Crime. Anti-slavery activists say thousands of people mostly from poor villages are trafficked from countries such as Nepal and Bangladesh to India by gangs who sell them into bonded labour or hire them out to unscrupulous employers.
Many women and girls are sold into brothels. Others end up as domestic workers or labourers in brick kilns, roadside restaurants or small textile and embroidery workshops. India is home to 40 percent of the world’s 46 million slaves, according to the 2016 Global Slavery Index, produced by the Australia-based Walk Free Foundation. Koirala left her two-decade-long career as a teacher in 1993 and founded Maiti, which means “Mother’s Home” in Nepali, to support victims rescued from sex trafficking who face social stigma and are ostracised by their families and communities.
You May Also Like To Watch This:
Over the last 24 years, Maiti has established a shelter in Kathmandu, eleven transit homes along the Nepal-India border, three prevention homes where high-risk girls receive counselling and training in skills such as sewing and candle making, two hospitals and a school which teaches around 1,000 children. The organisation also conducts public awareness campaigns on human trafficking, provides legal support to trafficked and victims, and works with police and government officials to rescue victims and apprehend perpetrators.
Koirala, affectionately know as “dijju” which means “elder sister” in Nepali, has won numerous awards from across the world for her work, including from the United Nations. In 2010, she was awarded the CNN Heroes Award. “Unless families treat their sons and daughters equally it is very hard to end trafficking and slavery,” she said. The Padma awards recognise achievements from social work and public affairs to medicine and literature. The recipients are announced on Jan. 25, the eve of India’s Republic Day. |
Stanford University’s School of Engineering has a history of offering courses on some pretty interesting products for free online. Many of them have been through Apple’s iTunes U program, and this latest is no exception.
Stanford’s iPad and iPhone Application Development (CS193P) course is now available for free on iTunes U. The course includes lectures and lessons focused on iOS 5 app development. It’s broken out over 11 episodes that consist of videos and slides.
Stanford’s stuff is generally very good and the ratings on this course are excellent so far. This is an update of the previous course, updated to take advantage of the new features of iOS 5. So if you’re interested in iOS app development, it would behoove you to check this out.
The prerequisites are C language and programming experience and/or general object-oriented programming and UNIX experience.
Read next: Amazon The Hulking Giant [Infographic] |
Liquid lunch: some thoughts on Joylent
Will Morgan Blocked Unblock Follow Following Jul 13, 2015
A few years ago via Hacker News (where else?), I heard about Soylent, the powdered food eerily named after the film. Futuristic dystopia fears aside, the idea of a powdered formula that gives me 100% of everything I’m supposed to put down my gullet that is ready to eat within minutes is quite an appealing one, for the following reasons:
I can worry less about ensuring I eat a balanced diet
I no longer spend 30% of my free time at home cooking
my domestic food waste will be mostly eliminated
my food spend will be dramatically reduced
Soylent isn’t yet available for sale in the UK, so I checked out Joylent, the European (and apparently tastier) cousin.
I’ve been on a hybrid diet of Joylent and “normal” food since the 25th of June, so just over 2 weeks at time of writing. While my observations haven’t been journalled with scientific precision, I have kept most things fairly consistent, and would be open to cycling back on to normal food again just to record the differences.
The other supplements I’ve been consistently taking before and during this “experiment” are creatine (5g/day) and 60g of ON protein powder for powerlifting / muscle mass loss prevention purposes, as I’m trying to get in to shape.
Anyway, on to my personal findings.
How do you know when someone’s taking Joylent? Don’t worry, they’ll tell you.
Yup, I turned in to one of those people for the first week, but then quickly came back down to earth, growing tired of the same old questions and comments such as:
won’t you miss the taste of real food?
are you sure that stuff is safe for you?
won’t you be going to the toilet every 30 minutes?
that stuff won’t fill you up!
you’ll miss the satisfaction of cooking real food
how much does it cost?
that’s just weird
For a while, I did debate and engage in discussion quite passionately. Now boredom has set in from the monotony of repeating the same battered points, so I’m keeping my mouth shut to anyone else I meet, and I’m writing this blog post so I can point people to it and explain through the lens of my personal experience if they’re ever interested.
Joylent’s taste vs “real food”
Joylent currently comes in chocolate, banana, strawberry and vanilla flavours — and they’re all pretty tasty to me. If you cycle through them enough, you won’t get bored of the taste, at least speaking after 2 weeks! However, it’s fair to say that they’re all on the sweet side, except the chocolate flavour which is a lot milder. Soylent is supposed to taste much milder, and part of Joylent’s mission is to make the stuff tasty.
The optimum powder:water ratio is down to you, and some people add other things to their shakes. I am not that adventurous yet.
While I have a sweet tooth, walking down Brick Lane does kick off some major curry cravings — but I don’t think that’s really an effect that Joylent alone is having on me.
Joylent’s food safety
Well, the ingredients are on the label and the EU hasn’t banned it after a couple of years of being in business. The majority of Joylent’s purpose is to give you 100% of your RDAs across the board, which is more than can be said of any other food. Some people can eat the same three meals a day and end up with a nutrient deficiency or imbalance which is arguably less healthy than eating something that’s following the guidelines that food regulation authorities put forward.
To my knowledge there haven’t been any scares regarding potentially bad chemicals or compounds inside Joylent. I’ve also not dropped dead yet, so there’s that. There is a good level of scepticism regarding the long term effects of a majority liquid diet, that are yet to be seen. In my view, going the hybrid route is probably a happy medium.
Certainly, the convenience and relative healthiness of Joylent versus a late night double cheeseburger is probably a little safer, long and short term.
Toilet trips
Due to the large amount of fibre in Joylent, which keeps you fuller for longer and does wonders for your digestive system, I felt a little gassy for the first couple of days. However, this eventually passed. I’m sorry if you were there for that.
For the sake of politeness, I shall just say that I am regular, clean as a whistle, and that the ideas about particularly unpleasant trips to the bathroom are misconceptions. In fact, my experience has improved.
However, if you are gluten or lactose intolerant, your mileage may vary.
Satiation
This is probably one of the best aspects of Joylent — the amount of fibre keeps you full for an incredibly long time.
I‘m currently eating at a caloric deficit and occasionally check MyFitnessPal to see that I’ve still got between 300–500 calories to consume on a given day.
For the first few days it was a bit of a stretch, however afterwards my body appeared to adapt. My stomach has also shrunk which means that whenever I do eat solid food, it’s harder to binge eat. Overall, quite satisfying.
Satisfaction of cooking
It’s down to you whatever you do. Personally I find the time saved by drinking Joylent means whenever I do cook a solid meal, I spend more time on preparation and presentation, and generally appreciate it more.
Cost, waste and the environment
This is a large factor for me as I was getting sick of spending £6/day on lunch at work, as well as scrambling every Sunday to go through all the food in my fridge that was going to go off. At scale, it is currently around £1.20/meal, or £3.60/day/human, if you eat a full bag per day. I currently consume less than this and thus it costs less, which means I have more money to spend on travelling and other nice things.
More brilliantly, the fact that this stuff costs so little means that the application of its concept on a global scale could potentially ease world hunger.
Finally, it’s a dry powder that you add water to, so it keeps for months. No more wastage.
“That’s just weird”
Well, perhaps a little eccentric at best, but no less weird than vegetarianism, veganism or paleo. It’s worth noting that there are some crazy diets that are glamorised in magazines that literally advise you to consume nothing but apples for days on end, and society doesn’t seem to have much of a problem with those.
At least this one attempts to be sustainable and fulfilling, and in my view, does a pretty good job.
Would I turn down a meal with my friends to sit at the table, plateless and sad? Probably not. And again, that’s not the point.
Other benefits
The time saving possibilities and adaptability benefits seem to be endless. I’m freeing up about 2.5 hours of my day every day (including washing up time), and can carry a bag of powder and shaker with me anywhere I go — just add water, consume, and move on.
I’ve been able to concentrate on music, weight traning and my career while pushing food as a concern well out of the way, for the time being.
General feelings
It’s hard to really quantify this because I started Joylent along with getting a solid 7.5 hours rest a night (up from 6–7 hours). In the last few months I have reduced dramatically my alcohol intake, increased my training schedule to 4 days a week and added a decent amount of cardio.
After consuming a shake, I feel pretty satisfied and the feeling of hunger subsides like it would with any other square meal.
In terms of physical health, I would say that as a part of a regime that you consistently stick to, it definitely helps — especially if you want an easy and predictable way to enter your calories consumed per day.
As far as powerlifting goes, my strength and energy has increased despite a fairly hefty caloric deficit. I have also lost 3 kilos in about 2 weeks without feeling seriously hungry due to the aforementioned satiation effects. I expect that I will soon plateau and need to increase my caloric intake, but as a tool to help fat loss alongside exercise, I would recommend it.
Final thoughts
My biggest initial gripe was the writing style used on their website, which honestly doesn’t inspire confidence in the company or the product. Compared to Soylent’s to-the-point and reassuring copy, there’s quite a dichotomy.
A quick Google shows that the founder of Joylent used to be a drug dealer. This was a bit of a shock to me at first, but considering the success of his product, I’d say this is an interesting and constructive way to turn things around. I also remembered that the investment arm of a four lettered high street bank launders cocaine money, so got over it and moved on with my life. |
I don’t know – was I surprised or not surprised by the sudden closing of our local newspaper, the Guelph Mercury?
Initially, yes – mostly because I thought it was doing all right. Not that I am especially plugged in to “what’s what” here in Guelph, Ont., but I hadn’t heard any inklings that it was in dire trouble.
True, I was taken aback for a moment … but then, with resignation, not much surprised, really. Nowadays, when you hear a newspaper has closed its doors that isn’t exactly shocking news.
It is very dispiriting, though. I don’t subscribe (pardon the pun) to the idea that printed newspapers are out of touch with the current culture. Why do people believe this? Just because digital devices are ubiquitous at the moment doesn’t mean that reading a physical newspaper is an absurd act. Can’t we do both? Are we that limited in our thinking?
Illustration by Seth
Have people forgotten the pleasure of opening a newspaper and being presented with a finite canvas – a carefully curated capsule of what is happening in our world today? Must it be a scrolling, infinite labyrinth of hyperlinks or nothing at all? Forgive me, I’m off on a tangent. I know most people read the newspaper online anyway. The culture wars of print versus digital are not what I’m supposed to be writing about here.
Back to the Guelph Mercury. Its closing is a loss. A real loss to Guelph.
I didn’t subscribe to the paper myself – this is not a shameful admission. You see, my wife, Tania, subscribes to “The Merc” at her barber shop (The Crown) and then brings it home for me at the end of the day, so I always see the news the day after. That’s fine with me. I’m not in a great hurry for the local news. I can wait a day. What’s the rush, everybody?
By the time I get the paper it is well-thumbed. More thumbed than the Globe or the Post (which also come home to me). Often those papers haven’t even been unfolded by Tania’s customers. Why is that? Well, it’s not because the Mercury was the best paper in Canada, it’s because it was the local paper. Believe it or not, even in this current worldwide mega-culture people still have some desire to be connected to where they live.
Thinking about it, I’d be hard-pressed to come up with another example, besides a local paper, that so effectively does that job. I mean, simply living somewhere doesn’t necessarily connect you to a place. You can live in Guelph, for example, yet spend your entire inner-life online – living in some “neitherworld” of neither here nor there.
If you are not actively involved in the local culture – somehow personally invested in it – it’s pretty easy for that place to simply be where you sleep and buy your groceries.
Reading the local paper is such a vivid reminder of where you are and sometimes, who you are, too.
When I moved here from Toronto around the turn of the century (this one, not the 19th century) it took me some time until I felt like a Guelphite. Quite some time. Maybe a decade. I was very invested in being a Torontonian. I’d lived 20 years there. It was a big part of my identity. Unlike most people, I spend the majority of my time at home (in my studio) and so I didn’t connect all that quickly to Guelph.
Three things helped me put down roots here. First, marrying a Guelphite. That was the big one. Second, the support I’ve received, as an artist, from the community. They’ve really embraced me over the years and made me one of “their own.”
And third, reading the Guelph Mercury.
That daily experience of seeing your local places, names and events creates a kind of resonance and connection and investment with where you live. Canadians pay a lot of lip service to the importance of telling Canadian stories. We are so used to seeing American references that just watching a movie, for example, set in a Canadian place will “charge us up” with local feeling. A sense of seeing “ourselves” portrayed.
That’s the daily charge of a local paper. Investing you with news and culture of YOUR PLACE. Take that away and you genuinely diminish that feeling in a community.
That is a real loss. Especially in a world where people are increasingly living in a central abstract space. A “no place.”
I’m an old-fashioned person. That’s no revelation to anyone who knows me or my work. I’m clinging to old models and mediums that, in my opinion, have deep and resonant value. Once they close we will never see complex institutions like local papers reopen. It’s sad to see our paper locking its doors. I won’t pretend to know much of The Merc’s long, important history. I’ve only been a Guelphite for about 16 years.
Some folks will surely say that if a newspaper can’t survive in the current media climate then its days were well over anyway. Move on.
Naturally, I disagree. The Mercury didn’t close because it wasn’t needed. It closed because you can’t make any money selling newspaper ads any longer. In my opinion, you don’t replace something valuable with nothing. What will fill that important role for Guelph now?
I guess, at the barber shop, we’ll subscribe to the Kitchener Record now. Kitchener is nearby. Not the same thing, though. That is, if the Record is still in business. I better Google it and find out first.
Seth is the author of the graphic novels It’s a Good Life If You Don’t Weaken and George Sprott (1894-1975). |
If you loved the original Shadow of Mordor you will love this game. The game mechanics are very similar, and all the familiar characters plus new ones. There are upgraded skills with a new, more customizable skill tree. Some of the animations have changed, for the better in my opinion. A new armor setup provides more customizable upgrades and different looks. The mobs have different skills also so gameplay maintains a respectable challenge, plus the addition of DRAKES to interact with!! Fighting Nazgul is pretty good too. The game world is much bigger than the original game. I have not completed the game yet so I don't have all the info, but it is definitely fun to spend some time slaughtering orcs or bending them to my will! I think the development team did a great job keeping all the things we loved about the original and adding enough new stuff to make it interesting. Good job on a sequel game! One thing I have heard mixed reviews on, and have not experienced, is the new online interaction features. There's now a market to buy special upgrades, characters, kits, etc... kind of like the supply drops in COD. You can spend real money, or in game money to purchase. I am not a fan of this feature, so I don't use it and it's not intrusive to the game play that I've noticed at all. Another online feature is the ability to avenge other players' deaths at the hands of orcs, and attack other players' fortresses. These features are pretty neat, even if there is no direct interaction with the other players, their game environment can feed your storyline. There is no negative impact to their game or yours when performing these interactions.
Read more |
The unanswered question for Atlanta Police chief George Turner: When will the protests end?
As hundreds of demonstrators gathered Sunday for a fourth consecutive night in downtown Atlanta, Turner worried about the impact relentless heat and stress is having on his officers as they work 12 hour shifts trying to keep safe the public and the protesters.
“They’ve been in the heat so long we don’t want them to lose their cool,” he said.
Turner’s force has been widely praised for its levelheaded response to a massive march Saturday night where some 10,000 people railed against police shootings in far off Louisiana and Minnesota.
The chief’s comments Sunday came as a legendary Atlanta civil rights leader had sharp words for the latest wave of protests.
“Those are some unlovable little brats out there some times,” Andrew Young told Atlanta police officers in a pep talk. “Don’t let anybody get you upset.”
The former Atlanta mayor, a leader on the frontlines of the 1960s battle for civil rights, said that today’s protesters have gathered “not even with a clear message.”
Young, the 84-year-old former U.S. ambassador, volunteered to talk to a couple dozen officers at a southwest precinct. He did so after Turner texted him a request for prayers. The two have a long history. Turner was assigned to protect Young 30 years ago and Young became a mentor to the future chief.
“These kids are able to show off with no consequences. I just hope they get tired of it,” Young said Sunday. He worried that they will hurt Atlanta’s economic gains and “mess up the climate we have taken 50 years to build.”
On Sunday, hundreds of demonstrators crowded the streets of downtown Atlanta again calling for an end to police brutality. And like the previous three nights, a splinter group of protesters roamed the streets of downtown, blocking traffic, chanting, dancing and sometimes confronting officers.
Kevin Hairston was among them. The Fayetteville man said he sympathizes with weary police, to a point.
“I understand they are getting tired, but we are getting tired as well,” Hairston said. “They need to step up and do something about it as well.”
Hairston a U.S. Army veteran, carried a homemade sign that says “I Served. Don’t Shoot.” He glued to his sign photos of his six children, ages six months to six years old.
“I’m just thinking that if I get pulled over one day, what is going to happen to me and who is going to be there to raise my kids?” he said.
A local NAACP leader - who has organized two of the gatherings - said he expects they will continue.
“It’s important that people continue to express their outrage at the continued white supremacist attitudes,” Richard Rose, the president of the NAACP’s Atlanta branch, Rose said, including some that continue in Atlanta.
“Whatever it takes to make a difference with the political structure to make them understand they should address the fears of these protesters.”
Rose, who is 67, said as a boy who took part in civil rights protests in Memphis in the 1960s. Even then, he said, people within the civil rights movement disagreed about tactics.
It’s true, he said, that many recent protesters in Atlanta don’t have a clear plan on what specific actions officials should take. “They are frustrated. They don’t know what to do.”
But he said Atlanta Mayor Kasim Reed and the chief of police should meet with him and other civil rights leaders to talk about steps to take to reduce “white supremacist attitudes” that still exist within the police force.
Rose suggested, for example, that every officer undergo periodic mental evaluations “to see if they are suited for the responsibility and the power they have and to determine if they are bigots.”
Reed spokeswoman Anne Torres said late Sunday that the mayor, “hasn’t heard from Mr. Rose, but is open to hearing his suggestions.”
“Over the last three days, the administration has been focused on the safety and security of protesters and officers.,” Torres said in an e-mailed statement. “Over the coming days and weeks, we will take steps to continue this conversation with important community voices, including civil rights leaders.”
Protests Friday and Saturday night remained largely free of violence and there were few arrests.
But Turner, the chief, wonders how long it will stay that way. He said officers had done “an amazing job” in dealing with protesters and he doesn’t want that to change as protests continue.
While he said he wants the protests to stop, he said he doesn’t plan to change police tactics that have allowed protesters to walk in streets undeterred, so long as they don’t cause property damage or attempt to gather on interstates.
Asked what he would rather protesters do to vent their frustrations, Turner said, “I wish I knew.” |
Air Canada has warned that some passengers face being stranded after a maintenance supplier, Aveos Fleet Performance, announced Tuesday it's liquidating its assets and throwing all 2,600 of its employees across the country out of work.
The firm, which gets up to 90 per cent of its work from Air Canada, said it was forced to file for creditor protection Monday "due to uncertain work volume across its business lines" from the airline.
Meanwhile, Air Canada has warned that 3,000 passengers could be stranded daily if Aveos doesn't complete the work on some planes.
However, Air Canada added that in order to ensure customers would not be inconvenienced, it would be activating its contingency plan.
"This will ensure that maintenance work continues in full compliance with all regulatory requirements and is consistent with the high standards of Air Canada's maintenance programs," the airline said in a release.
The airline had said that three wide-body planes and several narrow-body aircraft were sitting in Aveos facilities across the country, some missing landing gear.
"Since the beginning of the year, (Aveos') principal customer reduced, deferred, and cancelled maintenance work, which resulted in approximately $16 million in lost revenue in less than two months," Aveos said in a news release.
"While Aveos remained ready, willing and able to perform such work, such work did not materialize. This was a devastating blow to Aveos."
Air Canada replied Tuesday, adding that work deferred when Aveos could not comply.
"Work was sent to third parties only when Aveos was unable to perform it and only in accordance with the terms of the commercial agreements between the parties and the applicable collective agreements," the airline said in a release.
Air Canada offered a $15-million financial pledge Monday afternoon to help the company after "months of protracted negotiations," but that did not "appropriately address Aveos’ challenges" and made "clear that a restructuring under (creditor protection) would not be possible," the release said.
Air Canada said Tuesday it was disappointed in Aveos' decision to reject the emergency financing.
"Aveos has failed to act in the interests of its employees, customers and other stakeholders by abruptly abandoning its business while other viable options to closure were available," Air Canada said in a release.
Aveos has plants across Canada
Aveos shut down three main plants in Vancouver, Winnipeg and Montreal, as well as other facilities in Edmonton, Calgary, Trenton and Mississauga, Ont.
Bill Trbovich, a spokesman for the union representing Aveos employees, said those affected include 1,785 in Montreal, 412 in Winnipeg, and 356 in Vancouver.
The firm said Tuesday it would immediately cease all operations and begin the process of liquidating its assets.
The move means the employees who remained after 1,175 were let go Sunday when Aveos decided to close its airframe repair business will now lose their jobs too.
About 160 employees will oversee the liquidation process but will eventually be out of work as well.
The announcement came on a second day of protests in Montreal by the private company's laid-off workers.
Some workers blocked the street outside the Montreal offices of their company, which also heads to Air Canada's offices, and some tossed projectiles like rocks at riot police when officers moved in.
Police responded with chemical irritants.
One arrested after protests
Const. Daniel Lacoursiere said a police tactical unit moved in to clear a path. Some laid-off employees sat down on the road.
One person was arrested for a municipal bylaw infraction for refusing to leave the street.
"After police received a couple of rocks, we sprayed one shot of CS gas to back off the protesters," Lacoursiere said.
Police then backed off. Protesters left on their own soon after.
Under a court order, laid-off Aveos workers cannot impede access to the company's facilities anywhere in Canada. But protesters say they'll take their message on the road to Quebec City on Wednesday to picket in front of the legislature.
The federal government has said it won't intervene in the issue, calling it a private business decision.
Quebec could sue Air Canada
But the Quebec government appeared to be assessing the grounds for a lawsuit under terms of the legislation that transformed Air Canada from a Crown corporation into a private company in 1988.
"We're looking at the possibility of suing Air Canada in the hope of forcing Air Canada to subcontract with that company and bringing back the workers," Economic Development Minister Sam Hamad told the Quebec national assembly.
Aveos was once Air Canada's technical services division but in 2007 was spun off as a separate company.
Union spokesman Marcel St-Jean said Tuesday laid-off employees are upset they've been denied access to their former workplace to pick up their tools.
"The employees are as angry as ever, they feel abused and they don't have answers to their questions," St-Jean said in an interview.
"My people need to go get their tools if they want to work again and they won't let them go in to get them."
On its website, Aveos mapped out a schedule for employees seeking to pick up their equipment or looking for other information. |
Posted on August 29, 2014
The Maryland Transit Administration (MTA) received notice that the Federal Transit Administration (FTA) has advanced the Purple Line project to the engineering phase of its New Starts grant program. This action is a key milestone toward securing federal funding for the project and beginning construction next year.
Entry into the New Starts Engineering phase is the final milestone required before FTA can sign a Purple Line Full Funding Grant Agreement. With this achievement, MTA can start to incur costs that are eligible for federal reimbursement.
Last March, FTA gave the Purple Line project a Medium-High rating and recommended the Purple Line receive a total of $900 million, including $100 million in FY 2015.
The Purple Line is a 16-mile light rail line that runs east-west inside the Capital Beltway between Bethesda in Montgomery County and New Carrollton in Prince George’s County with 21 stations planned that will provide direct connections to Metrorail’s Orange Line, Green Line and two branches of the Red Line, and the MARC Brunswick, Camden and Penn Lines.
The Purple Line will go to construction in 2015 and be open for service 2020. |
ONE of my favourite places to eat in Hong Kong is The Monogamous Chinese. Offering an unusual mix of Beijing and Sichuanese cuisine, it is named after Hongzhi (弘治), the first Chinese emperor to remain faithful to one wife. At some point after the fall of the Qing dynasty, marital fidelity became the norm in China* as it was elsewhere. But China's marriage patterns remain distinctive in other ways. I am still waiting for a rival restaurant to call itself The Hypergamous Chinese in reference to the widespread tendency of Chinese women to marry up.
This habit of hypergamy (ie, marrying a person of higher social station) is documented in a recent Master's thesis by Yue Qian, a PhD candidate at Ohio State University. Although most Chinese newlyweds, like couples everywhere else, are of similar age and education, it is quite common for Chinese women to marry men who are better educated than themselves. As a corollary, men often marry women who are less educated. According to Yue Qian's calculations, 55% of university-educated Chinese men marry a less educated spouse, whereas only 32% of university-educated women do the same.
Get our daily newsletter Upgrade your inbox and get our Daily Dispatch and Editor's Picks.
One well-educated woman, quoted by Mary Kay Magistad in a piece for Public Radio International, explains the equilibrium that results:
There is an opinion that A quality guys will find B quality women, B quality guys will find C quality women, and C quality men will find D quality women...The people left are A quality women and D quality men.
Hypergamy is one social habit that skews China's marriage market. Misogyny is another. Men famously outnumber women in China, thanks largely to sex-selective abortion. The skewed sex ratio should work in women's favour, raising their bargaining power in the marriage market. In this week's issue of The Economist we discuss some of the lengths that Chinese men will go to in order to attract a bride.
Buying property is one popular way for a man to distinguish himself. A man's ability to provide a home is something that three-quarters of potential brides consider before taking his hand, according to a 2012 survey of young people in some of China's big cities by Horizon Research & Consultancy group, a market-research firm. As a result, the skewed marriage market may also be skewing China's property market. According to a widely-cited study by Shang-Jin Wei of Columbia University, Xiaobo Zhang of IFPRI and Yin Liu of Tsinghua University, the increase in China's sex ratio, and thus the heightened competition for brides, can explain up to 48% of the rise in urban home prices from 2003 to 2009.
But although numbers are on Chinese women's side, time is not. Women's marriage rates drop steeply after they turn 30 (see the chart below adapted from Yue Qian's thesis), something that is much less true for men. One explanation for this is hypergamy of a different kind: older husbands often take younger wives, but older women rarely marry younger men. The odds of a man marrying a younger spouse are almost 50 times as high as the odds of a woman doing so, according to Yue Qian. This "age hypergamy" has uneven effects on women's marital prospects. It improves the chances of younger women even further: they have plenty of men their own age to go around and they can also marry older men as well. But it hurts the chances of older women, who must compete with younger rivals for men their own age.
The upshot is that first marriage rates for young women are much higher than for young men. But unmarried women in their thirties are less likely to marry than thirtysomething men, despite being outnumbered by them (see chart). Women, especially "A-quality" women, who do not marry early often do not marry at all. Indeed, women over 30 who boast a university education have even lower marriages rates than poorly educated, similarly aged men who lack a high-school education.
This "marriage squeeze" impels women to try to marry before they turn 27. The pressure to do so is far greater than the pressure men feel to provide a home, argues Leta Hong Fincher, a PhD student at Tsinghua University. Eventually, the compulsion to marry early outweighs the wish to marry well.
This is some consolation for bachelors struggling in China's unforgiving property market. Ms Hong Fincher once heard someone offer the following piece of candid, albeit cold, advice to young men under pressure from their girlfriend's mother to buy her a home.
As soon as the daughter turns 26, she enters a time of crisis. By the time the daughter turns 28, this feeling turns to fear and dread. So all you have to do is put off the marriage until your girlfriend reaches age 27 or 28, then your zhang mu niang [mother-in-law] won’t be worried anymore.
* Lisa Tran of California State University, Fullerton writes that the Republican period (1911-49) "witnessed the transition from a marriage system in which a married man could have any number of extramarital sexual liaisons with impunity to one in which men were expected to remain faithful to their wives." |
How far will the U.S. media go to collude with the Clinton campaign? How corrupt is the U.S. press corp?
This research thread will answer those questions and more.
Following the debate Hillary Clinton held an “impromptu” presser with journalists aboard her campaign plane. However, if you look closely into how it’s coordinated it might just blow you away.
Watch as Hillary Clinton’s travelling press secretary, Nick Merrill, actually instructs specific reporters on what questions to ask. It took about three different camera angles to fully identify the ruse, but when you see it, it’s rather jaw dropping:
First. Here’s the segment as broadcast on MSNBC. Pay close attention at the very beginning to Andrea Mitchell and Nick Merrill (staffer with the suit/tie):
Notice at the very beginning, the construct begins with a seeded question to MSNBC’s Andrea Mitchell:
From a second (Fox) Camera Angle you can see what was taking place at that moment:
While Secretary Clinton is answering the seeded question from Andrea Mitchell, Nick Merrill (suit, black tie) begins typing up another question for another selected reporter.
Watch his eyes, and how Merrill signals via tapping on his phone to tell the next journalist what to ask. The signaling is at 01:44 of this video angle – WATCH HIM:
(Changing angle so you can see the questioner) The seeded “journalist” then asks the question about “Goldman Sachs and Bernie Sanders”:
As soon as those two questions are fully utilized, Fox News Jennifer Griffin asks about the James O’Keefe videos and Clinton abruptly ends the presser.
Here’s another angle where you can see what sequential activity Merrill was using to seed the questions and gain the communications narrative desired by the compliant press:
The media should be ashamed of themselves. Everyone in that airplane has zero journalistic integrity, everyone. Even the reporters who might not be participating directly are being willfully blind in not exposing this ridiculous Potemkin Village construct.
However, it didn’t go unnoticed to the viewing audience at home. Check out this couple’s response:
It’s all rigged folks.
ALL OF IT !!
Yet the pundits and people on TV wonder why their efforts no longer hold any weight.
There is no credibility left to lose.
Advertisements |
A former Palestinian negotiator has called for the Palestinian Authority to be shut down, saying that it is no longer geared toward achieving independence, but has become a tool for Israel to control the Palestinians.
Writing in an op-ed in the New York Times on Friday, Diana Buttu said that US President Donald Trump’s attempts to relaunch the peace process between Israel and the Palestinians will fail because the Palestinian Authority is no longer an effective representative of the Palestinian people and their aspirations. If the PA is dismantled, she argued, the Palestinians could “once again confront Israel’s occupation in a strategic way.”
“Many now question whether the Palestinian Authority plays any positive role or is simply a tool of control for Israel and the international community. The inescapable logic is that it’s time for the authority to go,” wrote Buttu, a former legal adviser to the PA and a fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School of Government
Get The Times of Israel's Daily Edition by email and never miss our top stories Free Sign Up
Buttu argued that the Palestinian Authority, which was established as part of the 1990’s Oslo Peace process and which was meant to be an intermediate body until the establishment of a Palestinian state, has become solely intent on preserving its own existence.
To do this, she said, the Palestinian security forces are focused on putting down Palestinian dissent, both against the PA and Israel.
“As time went on, it became clear that the authority’s budget and its priorities were primarily geared toward ensuring that Palestinians remained one of the most surveilled and controlled people on earth,” she wrote, noting that “a third of the authority’s roughly $4 billion budget goes to policing, more than for health and education combined.”
“In effect, the Palestinian Authority served as a subcontractor for the occupying Israeli military,” Buttu argued.
Palestinian security cooperation with Israel in the West Bank has been hailed by the international community as a major success and an indication of the Palestinians’ desire to avoid further conflict with Israel.
“Instead of becoming a sovereign state, the Palestinian Authority has become a proto-police state, a virtual dictatorship, endorsed and funded by the international community,” she wrote.
As an example of the PA’s lack of legitimacy, Buttu pointed to the fact that Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas has not held elections in recent years and has long-exceeded his original term.
She also noted the split among the Palestinians, with the Hamas terror group wresting control of the Gaza Strip from Abbas in 2007.
Buttu argued that the Palestinians need to return to a popular leadership like the Palestine Liberation Organization and called for groups like Hamas, which calls for Israel’s destruction, to be included.
“To some, this may sound like giving up on the national dream of self-rule. It is not. By dismantling the authority, Palestinians can once again confront Israel’s occupation in a strategic way, as opposed to Mr. Abbas’s merely symbolic bids for statehood,” she said.
While not explicitly rejecting violence as a means for confronting Israel, Buttu said resistance should focus on “supporting the community-based initiatives that organize nonviolent mass protests and press for boycotts, divestment and sanctions against Israel, like those that helped to end apartheid in South Africa.”
She also said the Palestinians should explore the option of one state with equal rights for all. Most Israelis oppose this, arguing that it would mean the end of Israel as a Jewish state.
“By dismantling the Palestinian Authority and reforming the PLO, the real will of Palestinians will be heard. Whether the endgame is two states or one state, it is up to this generation of Palestinians to decide,” she wrote. |
Looks like its not the Icon which is making a jump to Windows 10 this week. We’ve noted a few reports of AT & T’s Lumia 1520 SKU now receiving the Windows 10 Mobile update OTA.
The update is now available to download for the two AT&T Lumia 1520 users who aren’t on the Insider preview at the moment (- and the rest of you really shouldn’t wait).
Windows 10 Mobile brings newer and more powerful universal apps, slow-motion video capture, HDR and more customisation features to the aging flagship. While older devices may have taken a performance hit, the Snapdragon 800 of the 1520 is more than capable of handling the new OS.
If you’re not up to speed on the process, you can read our guide here to find out how to update to Windows 10 Mobile.
Download the Windows 10 Upgrade Advisor app here. |
More options: Share, Mark as favorite
Smart machines — call them drones, autonomous vehicles, algorithms, or robots — have the potential to dramatically alter job markets everywhere. Or, rather, keep altering them since the these changes are already happening.
I’ve written about this repeatedly (see posts here, here, here, and here.) But for more answers, we turn to Martin Ford, software developer, entrepreneur, and Silicon Valley-based author of The New York Times Bestselling Rise of the Robots: Technology and the Threat of a Jobless Future and The Lights in the Tunnel: Automation, Accelerating Technology and the Economy of the Future. He has a degree in a computer engineering from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor and a graduate business degree from the UCLA.
Here are some edited excerpts from our conversation via my podcast at Ricochet:
James Pethokoukis: There’s a lot of economic reports saying that US productivity and innovation isn’t what it used to be. Can we worry about a technological slowdown at the same time we’re worried about robots becoming smarter and more capable and taking all of the jobs?
Martin Ford: Well, I think we can. I mean, the interesting thing that’s happened, I think, over the last 30 years or so is that all of the progress has really focused in the information technology arena. I’m sure anyone who’s around my age remembers, the days when we anticipated advances in the space program and we thought there would be all this amazing stuff in the future, flying cars and all of that. And of course, most of that stuff has really turned out to be kind of a disappointment, except in information technology. If you think back to “Star Trek,” we don’t have any of that stuff, but we do have the communicator and we’re getting to the point where we may have the computer.
So what that implies, I think, and I think part of our problem is that all of that information technology is really having an impact on job markets. And one thing this is doing is it is making things less labor intensive, and that’s beginning to show up in some of the statistics, for example, in stagnant wages and so forth.
Is [technology] accelerating? How much should we be concerned about automation? Even if [there is acceleration] in information technology, shouldn’t that be reflected in statistics like productivity? If machines can do more, whether literally talking about robots or talking about software, if machines can do more and they are replacing people, shouldn’t we also be getting more productive that way? How come we don’t see any of this advanced robotics in productivity statistics? Or are we just missing something?
Well, I – you know, that’s something of a paradox and I think a lot of economists have been asking that question. There are a couple of theories out there. One, of course, is that there is a lag between the time that the technology comes online and whether businesses are able to really assimilate that and whether it shows up in the statistics. And of course, we did see rising productivity earlier in this century and now it has sort of petered out. So perhaps it kind of goes in bursts, perhaps.
You know, right now, you’re seeing some really remarkable advances on the technical side, in areas like artificial intelligence and what’s called deep learning or machine learning. And the question is, is that going to show up in the productivity? And I suspect that it will. Perhaps there will be something of a lag.
Another issue that I talk about that the economists don’t focus on too much is that, you know, productivity is tied to output. I mean, productivity, essentially, is the value of what we produce divided by the number of hours to produce it. And people tend to, when they talk about the robots, they focus just on the hours worked. In other words, they focus on the denominator of the productivity expression. And they assume that once the robots come online, the number of hours worked is going to fall and productivity should sore.
But you know, there is also an impact on the output, on demand. If there are fewer people out there that really have the income and the purchasing power to drive the economy and to create sufficient demand, then we may actually produce less than we might optimally. And that also could influence productivity.
So there is clearly a feedback loop there. If you automate some of the jobs, you can’t assume that productivity is just going to soar because that doesn’t happen in isolation. We only produce things in response to market demand. So if automation actually kills off some of that demand, then, the impact may be a little less clear than what most people expect.
Just give me a few examples of the sorts of advances that you find sort of most impressive and where those might lead us as far as either machines replacing humans or maybe in some ways complementing what we do.
Well, I think one obvious example is self-driving cars. I mean, when I started writing about this, back in 2009, I would have said that that was pretty much science fiction. That was something that in the longer-term future we might see. But the idea that a car could drive itself in traffic seemed to be well beyond where we were in terms of technology at that point. But obviously, Google has come pretty close to solving that problem. And now every other manufacturer has basically jumped on that bandwagon and does look like we’re doing to see progress over the next 10, 15, 20 years. I think it’s inevitable that we are going to have cars that can drive themselves.
And if you look at the approach that Google took to solving that problem, which is basically to use huge amounts of data and to map it out in advance, I think that that general approach can be applied all over the place. It’s all about machine learning and data. And there are probably many kinds of professions that are actually easier to automate than driving a car. If you are sitting at a desk doing the same kind of routine work again and again, if you’re a knowledge worker, you produce formulaic reports or some type of analysis, all of that is ultimately going to be susceptible to this.
So you can see on a very, I think, broad based impact from this. I mean, it’s really going to be across the board. And the thing is that it’s going to impact jobs really at all skill levels. It’s going to be blue-collar jobs driving cars or maybe working in fast food flipping hamburgers. Those jobs are certainly going to be impacted. But white-collar jobs taken by college graduates are also going to be impacted. So I think it’s a very broad based phenomenon.
I think in more than half the states, like nearly 30 out of 50, the single most common job is actually truck driver, either big rigs, delivery trucks. And that’s startling because that really does seem to be a job that could be greatly automated.
That’s right. And more broadly than that, it turns out that about 90% of our workforce works in occupations that existed 100 years ago. Now – and of course, it is. It’s areas like driving vehicles. It’s working in food service. It’s working in offices doing relatively routine things. Maybe working in factories, working in warehouses. These are all jobs that were there 100 years ago.
And so you hear a lot about all these new jobs being created by technology, like the website designers and the social media marketers and so forth. But those are a tiny number of jobs. Most people are working in traditional areas and a lot of those areas are going to be susceptible to this. And that’s just millions and millions of jobs that could essentially be vaporized.
The service sector, again, seems a little more difficult since it’s a lot more human interaction. But you obviously think the service sector’s obviously also right for this kind of disruption.
I think that’s the big disruption that’s coming. I mean, what you say is true. The service jobs traditionally have been harder to automate and that’s why we now have a sector economy, right? Everyone basically works in the service sector. Manufacturing is now less than 10% of employment in the United States, whereas back in 1950 it was more than a third.
But I do think that the service sector is next. It’s what’s coming next. You know, one of the things that’s really disruptive is this technology we call machine learning, which is all about analyzing data and having the machines or the algorithms figure out from this for themselves how to do these jobs. As opposed to what you just said, which is having a programmer figure out, you know, what are the 12 steps to do this job and then trying to sit down and program that.
So we now have this approach where the machines are figuring it out for themselves, and that’s going to be especially applicable across the service sector. But, you know, there’s lots of evidence that this is going to happen over the next 10-20 years and there’s going to be just an enormous impact on those service jobs.
The second chapter of your book is called, “Is This Time Different.” I’m sure in every interview you get the traditional economist’s analysis, that, yeah, we’ve heard this story before. And even though technologies can be disruptive and over the short term there might be a lot of losers, over the longer term, we figure it out. We figure out how to create new jobs that machines can’t do. We train humans to do these new jobs. So we sort of stay, you know, a few steps ahead so we don’t have mass unemployment. And you don’t have to go back to Industrial Revolution or the Luddites.
But in your book, you [discuss] the automation fears that we saw in the 1960s; there were a lot of concerns that technology was advancing so quickly that, you know, we would have a jobless future. Now here we are, decades later, tens of millions of jobs were created, pretty low unemployment. So why is it this time different?
Well it does have a long history and it’s reasonable for people to be skeptical. I always say that there seems to be something in common between this and that old story of the little boy who cries wolf. The false alarm gets raised again and again and people become complacent and skeptical, but in the end of that story the wolf does show up, and I think that that could happen this time. And the reason is really two things.
One is that machines are now in a limited sense beginning to think. They’re beginning to take on cognitive roles. And rather than just moving into some new area of the economy or having some new specific capabilities, machines are now beginning to encroach on that fundamental capability that really sets human beings apart. The thing that so far has allowed people to stay ahead of the march of technology is our ability to think and solve problems. As machines increasingly move into that intellectual work, it’s going to be more and more difficult for people to stay ahead.
The second thing is that, you know, all of this technology, including information technology generally – and I think artificial intelligence specifically – is really going to become a general-purpose technology. It’s just everywhere. It’s ubiquitous. It’s not like the innovations we’ve seen in the past. Specifically, for example, you look at agriculture. Agriculture is the classic example. In the United States, most people at one point worked on farms. Now less than 2% of the people worked on farms, and yet obviously that wasn’t a bad thing. Millions of jobs were vaporized, but it didn’t turn out to be a bad thing at all. People did move on to other roles that were more fulfilling, that paid more. You know, food is a lot cheaper now than it once was as a result of all that. So it was a great thing.
And so the skeptic will say, isn’t this just going to happen again? Aren’t we going to see what happened in agriculture just unfold? It’s going to be the same process.
That’s a pretty powerful counterargument.
Right, and my point is that that was a specific technology. That was mechanical technology specific to the agricultural sector. And at the time that transition happened, there was the whole rest of the economy out there to absorb those workers, right? You had a rising manufacturing sector. So people moved from the fields into factories. And then later on they moved from factories to the service sector, which is where they work now.
But the point is that the agricultural technology did not invade the factories and the service sector. But today, we’ve got this ubiquitous, across-the-board, general-purpose technology that’s coming everywhere. It’s going to scale across the entire economy. It’s going to come for every employment sector. There really isn’t going to be a safe haven. There isn’t going to be – it’s very hard to imagine some new area, some new industry that’s going to rise up in the future and it’s going to be very labor intensive.
You can certainly think of new industries that will arise, nanotechnology, synthetic biology, all of that. You could think of plenty examples. But I would challenge anyone to think of an example of a new industry that’s likely to arise in the future that will need to employ millions and millions of average workers. The fact is that that story is probably pretty much over.
The other thing that I focus on is really the nature of the work that’s being done. I mean, you know, people tend to think of this in terms of industries. They think, well, this industry gets automated or disrupted by technology, but there’ll always be some new industry or employment sector that will arise. Yeah, but the point here is that most people come to work and they do things that are on some level fundamentally predictable. They do things that are, in a sense, routine. You know, not rote, repetitive, but people do the same kinds of things again and again, and the things that they do are predictable based on what they’ve done in the past.
And if that is the case, then it means that what they’re doing is ultimately going to be susceptible to an algorithm that can churn through data and learn from that and figure out how to do a lot of that stuff. That’s the essence of machine learning and that’s really, I think, the big disruption that’s going to come.
And again, the important thing is that it’s across the board. It’s not specific to one industry or one area. It’s just a general-purpose technique that’s going to be applied everywhere. And that’s really what’s different from what happened in agriculture.
I wonder if you could just talk a little bit about that, the bit of that chapter about the ’60s panic and what it has to do with Martin Luther King Jr?
Obviously, we have certain perceptions about Dr. King that he’s, you know, exclusively all about civil rights and so forth. But it turns out that in 1964, there was a formal report put together by a very smart group of people. It included two Nobel laureates. It was called the Triple Revolution Report. And it talked about three revolutions. One was the civil rights revolution, the second one was the revolution in nuclear weapons; and the third thing, which everyone has now forgotten about, was the revolution in automation.
And this report actually focused mostly on that third issue and predicted that industrial automation was just going to totally upend the American economy, that there was going to be massive unemployment and social upheaval and so forth. And this report was put together and given to President Johnson in 1964. And at the time, it was a big issue. People were really worried about it. And it turned out that a few years later, you know, Dr. King gave what turned out to be his final Sunday sermon in Washington National Cathedral and he actually talked about this.
He didn’t just talk about civil rights. He talked about the impact of automation on the job market. So this was an issue that I think a lot of prominent people, a lot of intellectuals at that time had kind of assimilated. They were thinking about it. And it’s interesting how it was such a big issue then, but now, you know, in the years since then, it just completely went off the radar. And of course, the reason is that it didn’t happen. I mean, it was predicted. It did not happen.
But again, my feeling is that these people essentially got the basic idea correct, but they were just too soon. They were worrying about this at a time when computers where these huge monstrosities that filled entire rooms and yet had, you know, dramatically less power than you now have in your cell phone. They were just these big, plodding machines that weren’t even close to having the kind of capability that you would need in order to actually bring this off and make this happen. But of course, people didn’t realize that.
And so generally, I think that’s been the mistake that has been made. I think we need to distinguish between two kinds of errors here. I mean, it’s fine to say, OK, these alarms have been raised and they’ve always been wrong. But there are two ways to be wrong. One is to simply be premature and the other way is to be fundamentally wrong, and in other words to – for the truth to be that this is something that can never happen. And I tend to not believe that.
I’m making essentially the same prediction. Maybe I’m wrong, too, but if I am wrong I still believe it will be in that same way. It’ll be that I’m pretty mature and maybe the technology isn’t there yet, and maybe this is 50 or 100 years out.
The other day, I wrote a blog post looking at the old-fashioned misery index, you know, from like the ’70s — at unemployment and inflation. You put them together and if that’s a really low number, people should be pretty happy. Well, that right now it’s a really low number. Unemployment’s way down, inflation’s low, but people still seem really unhappy and really concerned about the future. About two thirds of Americans think the country’s heading in the wrong direction. So I’m trying to figure out where that anxiety comes from.
How much of it is just the current economic situation and how much is it the fear that the future labor market, because of technology, is just not going to be very inviting for a lot of workers?
The fact [is] that productivity over the last 30 years has continued its relentless climb, although there have been periods of low productivity like now. If you look at it in the long term, I mean, it’s been climbing relentlessly.
On the other hand, wages for most average workers have completely stagnated. People are not getting a raise at all, I mean literally for decades. There are some groups of workers, people with lower skill levels now that actually make less in real terms than they did in the 1970s.
So a lot of people are correct in perceiving that they’re worse off or at least that they’re not making any progress…. this kind of pessimism about the future, and this idea that our kids are going to be, you know, worse off than we are and so forth.
And I do think that technology has a lot to do with that. I think it’s one of the – certainly, one of the main forces that’s creating that wage stagnation and the decoupling of productivity and wages.
What has worked in the past is a free market economy that was able to create a lot of new interesting jobs that humans could do and we just were able to train people to take those new jobs. Why won’t that process — a vibrant economy and just educating people better — work now and for the next 50 to 100 years?
There’s a fundamental transition going on in the nature of technology. Historically machines have been tools. They have been things that workers have used that have increased the productivity of those workers and as a result have made the workers more valuable. If you’re a worker and you learned to use a better tool and that took makes you more productive, allows you to produce more, then you can demand a higher wave. And that’s exactly that happened during the so-called Golden Age after World War II.
But I do think that there’s now a transition happening, and machines are transitioning away from being tools and turning into workers. They’re becoming autonomous. And rather than complementing people and making people more valuable, in many cases they’re actually substituting for people. And that’s not true of everyone, of course. There’s always going to be an elite group of workers who have the education and the skill level and the creativity and the talent to leverage the new technology. And those people are going to do fine. But my concern is that that group of people as a percentage of the whole workforce is likely to shrink over time… more and more people are going to be left behind.
And again, it gets back to the fact that most people are doing relatively routine things, routine predictable things. I mean, not everyone can be a rocket scientist and do – you know, you hear a lot about – you hear the word “creativity” come up a lot. The idea is that we need to retrain workers, so that they can do more creative, blue-sky thinking kind of things. And of course, that’s going to work for some people, but in the United States we’ve got a workforce of around 150 million people. I don’t think that approach is going to work for 150 million people. Not – you know, people have different talents, different capabilities. Not everyone can be trained to do that, you know, that really high-level intellectual type work and so forth.
So I do think that this is ultimately going to have an impact on a very large percentage of our workforce and we’re going to have to figure out a solution to that.
There’s a bit in the book where – President [Kennedy] was asked about this issue and what we need to do in the future. And he mentioned things like more job training, better education. And you wrote,
the President’s words capture the conventional and nearly universal assumptions about the nature of unemployment problems. More education or more vocational training is always the solution. With the proper training, workers will continuously climb the skills ladder, somehow staying ahead of the machine. They will do more creative work, more blue-sky thinking. There’s apparently no limit to what average people can be educated and trained to do. And likewise, no limit to the number of high-level jobs the economy can create to absorb all those newly trained workers. Education and retraining, it seems, are a solution that is immutable across time.
Can you pretty much train just about anybody to do very high-level, very intensive jobs: rocket scientists or creative, high science, high math kinds of jobs? How many people can really do those jobs?
Obama basically says the same thing. So the point is that, you know, our approach to this has not changed at all, but the technology has changed. I mean, back when Kennedy was talking, it was machines displacing manual jobs. Today, of course, it’s machine learning algorithms that are displacing intellectual work. So that’s the big change. And yet, you’ve got two presidents, you know, 50 years apart saying exactly the same thing in terms of what the solution’s going to be.
Again, the retraining thing is going to work for some people. I tend to believe that there are limits to human capability – that not everyone is equal intellectually or – I mean, maybe that’s controversial, but I don’t think that among academics that study this it’s controversial. It’s also more, as you know, of a conservative position to recognize that. If you talk to someone like Charles Murray, who, you know, has written about the so-called cognitive elite and all of that, that there clearly are differences in fundamental capability. I just don’t think that you can expect to train everyone to become an expert in machine learning or become even a computer programmer.
People have a range of talents and capabilities. And there clearly is, in terms of human capability, a normal distribution, you know? Most people are going to be clustered around average and a much smaller number of people are going to be exceptional. And the whole point I’m really making is that it’s not going to be good enough to have middle class jobs for the top 5% and everyone else is, you know, struggling to survive. That doesn’t make for a sound society.
And it also doesn’t make for a vibrant market economy. You know, we – if we get into a situation like that, we’re not going to have enough consumer demand out there. We’re not going to have enough people that can actually buy the things being produced.
So we need to figure out a solution that’s going to be much more broad based than that, where everyone is going to have access to opportunity or at least to a decent income.
McKinsey just came out with a study which looked at jobs by not broad categories, but what happens inside the job. And what they concluded is that fewer than 5% of occupations currently could be entirely automated using current technology. But about 60% of occupations could have a big chunk of what goes on inside that occupation, 30% or more of the activities automated. And so the conclusion was that the jobs aren’t going to be automated away, but that more rote, boring parts of the jobs would be automated away, and then people would do the more interesting jobs or bits of them.
Do you find that a persuasive counterargument that it’s a “racing with with the machine” scenario instead of against it?
I don’t completely dismiss it, but I find it confusing that people seem to perceive a huge difference between automating entire jobs or just automating tasks. I mean, essentially what they’re saying is it’s not – we’re not going to eliminate entire occupations, we’re just going to eliminate a huge percentage of the tasks done by those workers.
OK. Well, what does that mean? We can have a very optimistic take and say that employers are going to keep people around to spend half their time doing all of this really creative stuff. Maybe that’s going to happen in some cases. But the other scenario, of course, is that if you’ve got two workers and you eliminate half of what each of those are doing, then pretty soon, you – the employer’s going to figure out that they only need one person, right?
So I think that eliminating half of what each worker does obviously leads to a lower job count–
I think the counterargument would be is that those more creative tasks will expand because you’ll be focusing on them. You’ll be able to do more deeper thinking. You don’t necessarily lose the number of workers, just those workers will become more productive. But let’s say that the scenario you’re describing takes place. We have a small sliver of people – a much smaller sliver of people really doing sort of high wage, interesting work. What does that society look like, and what is sort of the policy response if education only gets you so far?
It would be an extraordinarily unequal society. I think it would undermine the basic hope that we all have. If education is no longer an effective way to guarantee a decent livelihood, then we’re really out of options. I mean, education is really the only tool we have in the toolbox in terms of working conventionally. So at that point we have a big problem socially, and I think we have a big problem economically because we’d have huge numbers of people that really don’t have sufficient income to drive the economy, to go out there and be vibrant consumers and keep economic growth churning.
So I – my take on this is that we would need a radical solution at that point. And what I’ve proposed or advocated is some form of a guaranteed income, you know, where everyone in our society will have access to at least some kind of a minimal income. I think that that’s probably the best policy response to this in the long run. And of course, I am talking about the long run. I mean, it’s not something that I anticipate happening today.
I think some of my Democratic friends are ready for it right now.
Well, I mean, it was advocated by people in the past. There are groups of people who think we should have a basic income now, and that’s not an entirely spurious argument I don’t think. But politically, it does seem impossible, certainly in the United States. It seems almost unimaginable. And the thing is, of course, is when you talk about a guaranteed income, the immediate reaction to that is that it’s socialism – that it’s a massive expansion of the welfare state and turning everyone into a taker and a slacker and so forth.
The interesting thing, of course, is that if you know something about it, you know that in the past it has been advocated by conservatives and libertarians, most notably, as I point out in the book, Friedrich Hayek. Because essentially what it is is it’s a free market approach to a safety net. Rather than having the government take over the economy and provide for people and build housing and feed people, or try to run industries in a way that artificially creates jobs and so forth, what you do is you give people an income and you let them go out and you participate in the market. So it’s actually a free market approach to providing a basic safety net. And that’s why people like Friedrich Hayek and also Charles Murray, for example –
My AEI colleague, Charles Murray has written a book making that argument, that it’s a more market oriented solution and in this sort of post-industrial economy, that eventually all countries will realize that’s the solution. Now, you’ve been on a tour for a while now promoting the book. What is the response? Do you sense the people are generally worried?
Yeah, in general, I do think people are very concerned about it. One thing I notice is that whenever I go and talk about this, if there is a question-and-answer period afterwards, usually I’m just overwhelmed, that we have to cut off the questions because there are too many. So people have a tremendous interest in this.
And I’ve talked to lots of different groups, including average, typical people who are really worried about. And I’ve talked to very technology-oriented people, including people that are actually working in areas like machine learning and artificial intelligence, and they’re worried about it, too. In general I found that among technical people, there is at least an emerging consensus that this is likely to be an issue as far as the job market is concerned.
There’s also this other issue out there about artificial intelligence that you hear from – recently, you’ve heard it from Stephen Hawking and from Elon Musk, this idea that there’s an existential threat that smart machines are going to come to life and take over and really threaten humanity. And that’s something that I think most people who are really working in the field don’t worry too much about in the near term. I mean, maybe 50 years from now or more that might be an issue. But for now, the issue that I think people tend to worry a bit more about is the economic impact and the job market impact, and the fact that more specialized technologies — technologies that are not science fiction — are going to have a very practical impact on a lot of the jobs that people now rely on for an income.
Maybe we should just genetically engineer people to be smarter. Is that a way to stay ahead of the robots? You know the Chinese are working somewhere to create smarter people.
That’s one proposal. And in fact, the Chinese are working on it. There is a research facility in Beijing that is specifically focused on trying to isolate the genes for intelligence. And I don’t think they’ve succeeded at that yet. I think most scientists who specialize in that would say that there’re lots of genes that impact intelligence, so it’s very hard to do that. But they are trying to do it. Obviously, that gets into a lot of areas that here in the West we would be very squeamish about. So it’s an area that in the United States and in most Western countries, I think that we’re going to be very reluctant to get into. Christian conservatives would be really very kind of put off by this whole idea, for example.
So I don’t really see that happening here, but you know, if the Chinese succeed at it, that would be a big deal. They could, over time, engineer a more intelligent society and they would have an enormous competitive advantage as a result of that.
Is there a particular science fiction movie that you think gets these issues right or is somewhat instructive on dealing with a more automated world?
I don’t know one that specifically focuses on automation and the job market. The dystopian science fiction movie that I guess made the biggest impression on me was “The Matrix” series. I think it really gets at virtual reality, which is another trend that I think is going to be important.
One thing – one question you can ask is if people really become unemployed and increasingly dissatisfied with the real world, what are they going to do? And I think one of the answers is they’re going to plug into the virtual world. And I think that that could ultimately become a real social issue for us.
I think if you’d look at some of the advances in VR, like the Oculus Rift, you’re seeing – this is in its infancy now. You know, what’s it going to be like 10-20 years from now once we apply the same kind of acceleration that we’ve seen in other areas? I mean, it could be, I think, something that’s just extraordinarily disruptive. It could be almost like a drug that –
But that’s the future you’re painting, a bunch of people sitting on their couch with their VR helmets getting their government basic income checks and there’s no work.
Yeah, I mean, that’s the dystopian output or the dystopian outcome, you’re right. And so it would be really important to design a guaranteed income in a way that we don’t have that kind of an outcome.
But aside from, you know, the issues of income and so forth, the technology itself of virtual reality, I think it’s just going to raise a lot of issues. I really do think that eventually, it may be something akin to a drug and may – you’ll have people calling for it to be regulated in a way that drugs are regulated perhaps. I think that we underestimate how disruptive it could be if people have that ability to enter a world that might in many ways be indistinguishable on some level from the real world and in that virtual world, they can have all kinds of things that in our world would require income and hard work and so forth. So it could actually just really kind of upend the way our whole society and economy works if it really gets to the point where it’s truly advanced. |
BOZEMAN, Mont. - Gallatin County has a new notification system for emergencies. You can register to get alerts on your cellphone as a text message, through email, or a phone call. Even if you're not signed up you can still be alerted to county-wide emergencies through a text.
If there's a big county-wide event, like an earthquake, for example, every cellphone in the immediate area receives a message similar to an Amber Alert. For more local emergencies, like a power outage on your street, only those with landlines or those who registered get the alerts.
That's why officials want everyone to register on the county's new emergency alert system at alerts.readygallatin.com. Opting in means you can get emergency alerts on your cellphone or via email.
"One of the benefits we see of the Community Notification System is the ability for people to tell us how they want to receive messages and to push it out to them in a variety of different methods," said Patrick Lonergan, the county's emergency manager.
It's a system one resident told us he would find useful.
"It sounds like a great idea. It just seems like the more information we can have about emergencies through electronics and social media is great," said Bozeman resident Bob Zimmer. He said he's heard of other communities with similar programs.
The registration form is bit lengthy but the county's emergency manager says it's all about having accurate information to help you in an emergency.
Gallatin County has entered a five-year contract to have the system. It will cost $32,000 a year. Lonergan explained that there are limitations including how long a text message can be. He expects the system to advance and become more valuable in the future.
You can register by clicking here. |
As she waited for her flight from Seattle-Tacoma International Airport to Medford, Ore., last month, Linda Morrison noticed something unusual in the waiting area.
"A lady in a TSA uniform came over, put on her rubber gloves and went up and down the rows of seats, choosing bags to go through," remembered Morrison, a retired corporate recruiter who lives in Seattle. "She didn't identify herself, didn't give a reason for the search. She seemed to be targeting larger carry-on bags."
Morrison was stunned. She expected to be screened at the designated checkpoint area, or maybe at the gate, where the TSA sometimes randomly checks passengers as they board. But this was different. "To me, it just felt like an illegal search performed by a police state," she said.
There's that phrase again: police state. It's being thrown about a lot more since November's pat-down/opt-out fiasco, as public anger over the TSA's new security measures remains high. Which makes the question of whether we're traveling in a police state, or something like it, worth taking seriously.
At least one other reader also reported the roaming searches described by Morrison, also in Seattle. Christine Porter says she witnessed an identical procedure on two separate occasions. "TSA now randomly appears at boarding gates to check boarding passes and IDs as well as potentially hand-search carry-on luggage," she said. "It's irritating."
Is the TSA testing some new, more aggressive screening procedure in Seattle? I asked the agency.
"TSA officers at airports nationwide routinely screen passengers at the gate area using a variety of methods, including physically searching bags and using explosives detection technology," said agency spokesman Greg Soule. "This additional layer of security is part of our unpredictable approach to keep passengers safe and reduce the risk of dangerous items being carried on planes."
As is often the case with TSA's answers, I can't tell whether that's a yes or a no.
I decided to put the police state question to an expert on repressive regimes. Mariam Memarsadeghi is a Washington-based human rights activist. "It's absurd to liken the annoyances brought on by airport security to life under a police state," she said. "A police state is defined by perpetual fear - fear of a state apparatus that is incessantly watching over the actions of people for the sole purpose of maintaining its power over them."
Memarsadeghi notes that the threat American air travelers face isn't from the government but from international terrorist networks.
So maybe the term "police state" isn't quite right, then.
James Morrissey, a University of Illinois biochemistry professorand a frequent air traveler, prefers "intrusive security." "TSA has become a law unto itself, and it routinely tramples the civil rights of the flying public," he says. "Unfortunately, there will always be some people who will be perfectly okay with having their rights trampled in the name of security. But allowing this to happen is very disturbing to me."
Jeff Stollman, a security and privacy consultant in Philadelphia, thinks that "annoying" better describes air travel in 2011. He's irked by what he calls "security theater" that offers no real protection against terrorism. "I suspect that a lot of the current controls don't really do that much to improve security," he said.
Matthew Gast, a technology writer who works for a San Francisco-based publishing company, believes that it doesn't matter what it's called - it's wrong. The TSA has gone "too far" in trying to protect us from terrorism. "I have not taken a flight since I was forced to allow a TSA agent to put his hands down my pants," he said. "It's the only time I felt unsafe in an airport."
Supporters of the TSA's more aggressive screening measures are quick to point out that no one has to fly, and that Amtrak, Greyhound and personal vehicles are still available.
But similar security searches are now being conducted on trains and in other public areas, including random screenings of Metro passengers in Washington, as well as mass-transit riders in New York and Boston.
The TSA has also indicated that it wants to move the perimeter of aviation security screening beyond the airport, to checkpoints on the road, according to Chris Calabrese, an attorney for the American Civil Liberties Union. If these roving searches are tolerated within the terminal and are allowed to jump to the street, there's no telling what might come next. It isn't inconceivable that in the near future, the TSA could set up roadblocks to randomly screen automobiles anywhere it pleases.
And if the TSA is permitted to expand its screening, it could prompt further outcries from the traveling public and more comparisons to a police state, say Calabrese and other privacy advocates.
Not all travelers have accepted these new procedures. The Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC) has filed a suit against the government, claiming that the TSA violated the Constitution and five federal laws when it deployed body scanners for primary screening at U.S. airports. The case is scheduled to be heard in a Washington circuit court March 10. There are also numerous proposed laws to curb the TSA's power by either defunding the body scanners or making dissemination of scanner photos illegal.
"It's very much out of character for the U.S. to embrace this type of suspicion-less surveillance," says Marc Rotenberg, EPIC's executive director. "But instead of branding it as part of a police state, let's simply put an end to it."
Elliott is National Geographic Traveler magazine's reader advocate. E-mail him at celliott@ngs.org. |
Here we go again, with more proof, if anyone needed it, that the post-racial American society some hoped the election of an African American president signified is far from here.
Who would have thought that breakfast cereal would trigger the latest racial battle line? In this case, a Cheerios ad much like every other homespun Cheerios ad — with a heart healthy message and loving family – ran into trouble from some commenters because of the kind of family it featured. Mom is white, dad is black and their cute little daughter is a mix of the both of them.
That’s it.
Cheerios had to disable comments on YouTube – I’m not going to repeat them but you can imagine the general witless racism with stereotypes about minorities and warnings of race-mixing as the end of civilization. Late Friday night, after a day of widespread news coverage, the ad had more than 8,400 thumbs-up votes on YouTube, versus about 900 thumbs-down.
I didn’t take any of it personally, though my family’s morning breakfast ritual – black mom, white dad, son who is a mix of both of us – looks a lot like the ad if you subtract the general cheeriness before we get that first cup of coffee down.
The point is, it’s no big deal. Richard and Mildred Loving didn’t intend to start a legal case that made to the Supreme Court, which in 1967 struck down the bans against interracial marriage that still stood in 16 states. The white man and black woman from Virginia just wanted to get married and raise their family in their Virginia home.
The parents of Barack Obama married in one of the states where it was legal – that’s Hawaii, not Kenya – and his extended family portrait reflects the world.
The 2010 U.S. Census showed interracial or inter-ethnic opposite-sex married couple households grew by 28 percent over the decade, from 7 percent in 2000 to 10 percent in 2010. But feelings don’t always follow the law or the reality of the lives people now live. When a no-longer-enforced state law was placed on the ballot in South Carolina in 1998, 30 percent still favored the ban while 62 percent voted to get rid of it.
The holdouts have to realize that the numbers are hardly going to start moving in the other direction in our increasingly diverse society.
For its part, Cheerios has said the ad stands. Camille Gibson, vice president of marketing for Cheerios, told Gawker, “Consumers have responded positively to our new Cheerios ad. At Cheerios, we know there are many kinds of families and we celebrate them all.”
In making this ad, Cheerios is just reflecting the new reality, and might be gaining themselves many more customers than those inclined to punish them – if those folks even ate the cereal to begin with. Just as young people today think living in an America with a black first family in the White House is simply the way it is, children who see a family like their own on TV will hardly give the ad a second glance.
Mary C. Curtis, an award-winning multimedia journalist in Charlotte, N.C., has worked at The New York Times, Charlotte Observer and as national correspondent for Politics Daily. Follow her on Twitter: @mcurtisnc3 |
Last year, Yahoo revealed that some 1.5 billion accounts — representing about 1 billion users — had been compromised by a data breach going back years. Now that Yahoo’s new parent company Verizon has had a chance to investigate it turns out that the number of accounts compromised by the hack was… well, every single one of them.
Verizon disclosed the results of its internal investigation into the breach, which began in Aug. 2013, this afternoon in a filing [PDF] with the Securities and Exchange Commission.
According to the filing, Verizon now has reason to believe that the number of compromised accounts includes “all Yahoo user accounts.” That would put the total number of affected accounts at around 3 billion — about 40% of the world’s population.
Yahoo, which still exists but is part of Verizon’s new “Oath” media division, says it will blast out new email notifications to every account that was not part of the earlier group of compromised accounts.
Verizon says the thieves in this case did not include unencrypted passwords, or any bank/payment card data.
“Verizon is committed to the highest standards of accountability and transparency, and we proactively work to ensure the safety and security of our users and networks in an evolving landscape of online threats,” said Chandra McMahon, Chief Information Security Officer, Verizon. “Our investment in Yahoo is allowing that team to continue to take significant steps to enhance their security, as well as benefit from Verizon’s experience and resources.”
When reached for comment by Consumerist, a rep for Oath referred us back to the statement included in the SEC filing.
Editor's Note: This article originally appeared on Consumerist. |
Greetings Citizens
Greetings Citizens,
For many of us, Summer is upon us and I hope you all managed to stay cool over the weekend. I tried to dodge the heat and make some homemade lemonade and… let’s just say I’ll be sticking to the store bought stuff in the future.
With that, let’s take a look at this week.
Today, Citizens of the Stars introduces us to Oldschool, who has created a series of webcomics highlighting some of the funnier moments in the Star Citizen universe. Also, Junior Counsel Steven “Toast” Kam takes on the hotseat in Quantum Questions. I don’t know about the rest of you, but I am SO ready for Brian Chambers to be de-throned. I’m about ready to take on the hot seat myself and show him how it’s done.
Tuesday, the Lore Team will regale us with yet another detailed lore post. These posts are integral to building out our worlds and breathe life and history into the Star Citizen universe.
Also on Tuesday, we have a Subscriber’s Town Hall with the Props team. Jared Huckaby is joined joined by Ben Curtis and Cory Bamford from the Foundry 42 UK Props Team who are responsible for building a wide variety of items used to dress our in-game environments and ships!
Wednesday we sit down with Senior Writer Will Weissbaum to talk about the Tayac System for another installment of Loremaker’s Guide to the Galaxy.
Thursday. Personally, my favorite day of the week. In fact, Thursday should just be renamed to F5 day! What am I talking about? Around the Verse returns for its weekly update on Star Citizen’s on-going development! ༼ つ ◕_◕ ༽つ
Last but definitely not least, we end the week with May’s Monthly Studio Report! If the regular shows and comm-links were not enough, make sure to head over to the website on Friday for all that juicy information in one place.
That’s all for this week folks! We’ll see you in the ‘Verse!
Tyler “Zyloh” Witkin
Lead Community Manager |
We've teamed up with the Modev Wearables + Things conference to bring you preview versions of 3 talks from the upcoming Wearables + Things conference being held October 19-21 at the Artisphere in Rosslyn.
Join us to expand your knowledge of IoT and Wearables, see what other people are building, meet the speakers, and network with the IoT DC and Modev communities.
One lucky attendee will also win a Samsung Gear 2 Smartwatch at the close of the program - be sure to attend to have a chance.
Location is Canvas Co-work at 19th & M, a couple blocks from Farragut West (orange line), Farragut North (red line), and Dupont Circle.
Agenda
5:30 Food, beverages & networking
6:00 Presentations
7:00 Samsung Gear 2 giveaway & networking
Topics & Speakers
Landmark: Reimagining Navigation for Wearable Devices - Antonio Zugaldia and Stephanie Nguyen from Silica Labs
Home Security's Role in the Internet of Things - Rose Alexander from Alarm.com
Rapid Prototyping Google Glass Apps using WearScript - Jared Alexander from Capital One Labs
Information about the conference can be found here (http://wnt2014.gomodev.com/). Register using the code IOTDC to save 20%! |
Wellington (AFP) – New Zealand Prime Minister Bill English defended his love of pizza topped with tinned spaghetti and pineapple on Friday after the recipe sent fans of the Italian treat into an outraged frenzy.
English posted pictures of his unorthodox tastes on Facebook this week, saying he prepared the dish for his family.
The Internet melted down faster than buffalo mozzarella as purists poured online scorn on his spaghetti speciality.
“Why on earth would you promote such garbage? Would you serve this stuff to your international guests??,” one user posted.
Another said: “Sorry Bill, any man who puts spaghetti on a pizza is not fit to run my country, you cannot count on my vote come election time.”
Even US talk show host Jimmy Kimmel got in on the act, urging New Zealanders “impeach that man immediately!”.
“That is so offensive. That is an act of war. I think he just declared war on Italy, and maybe Hawaii too,” Kimmel told his audience.
Italy’s embassy in Wellington declared a vendetta, or blood feud, over the desecration, tweeting a picture of New Zealand’s beloved pavlova dessert covered with salami.
“Vendetta for PM’s pizza with tinned spaghetti and pineapple,” it said.
English was unfazed by the criticism, saying his recipe may have cooked up strong opinions but plenty of people were on his side.
“Everywhere I go now I meet people who put spaghetti and pineapple on their pizza,” he told NewstalkZB.
“They come up to me spontaneously when I’m walking through the airport and tell me.”
The culinary kerfuffle comes after Iceland President Gudni Johannesson revealed in February that he hated pineapple topping on pizzas and would ban it if he could.
English was unaware of that controversy but admitted he had been puzzled recently about how many times he had been asked whether he liked pineapple on pizzas.
“We answered the question, the nation was clearly interested, but they’ll probably move on pretty quickly now,” he said. |
AP Photo/ Evan Vucci
How much damage have the Republicans done to themselves going into the elections of 2014 and 2016? And has President Obama resolved to hang tough, not just in this round, but in the one that follows and the one after that?
The contrived shutdown crisis proved two things. It proved that Republicans are split down the middle between a lunatic, fundamentalist wing that prefers wreckage to governing and a pragmatic wing often allied with Wall Street. And it proved once and for all that being tough in the face of blackmail beats appeasement that only courts more rounds of blackmail.
Business elites applied escalating pressure on the Republicans not to let the United States default on its debt. In the end, 144 House Republicans voted against the measure, and 87 voted for it. That 144, though, exaggerates somewhat the true strength of the Tea Party faction. Some of that vote was a protest against the failure of the Democrats to give anything in return.
For now, public opinion has turned against the Republicans. Whether that shift endures depends in part on what Democrats do.
The crisis will recur this winter. As part of the deal, Congress and the White House have until December 13 to come up with some kind of scheme for budget “reform,” meaning spending cuts, specifically in the big social-insurance programs such as Social Security and Medicare. The enforcement mechanism is the threat of yet another crisis. The deal funds the government only through January 13 and provides the necessary debt authority only through February 7.
This set of deadlines and linkages is Bowles-Simpson and the super-committee and the usual blackmail all over again: put a gun to the government’s head to force cuts in social insurance.
In the past, President Obama has been an enabler of these rightwing maneuvers because he has backed the idea that we need to rein in “entitlements.” He has already put into his own proposed budget a cut in the annual cost of living adjustment for Social Security, the so-called chain-weighted CPI.
What Obama needs to do now is very simple. He needs to say that we are just not playing these games any longer. Any long-term discussions about revising Social Security and Medicare need to be delinked from threats to shut down the government or to allow America to default on its debt. We need to revert to the normal process of passing budgets.
The fact is that spending has already been cut by roughly $5 trillion over a decade.
Further cuts, as the Congressional Budget Office keeps documenting, would only retard the recovery and further harm needy people.
Obama, in this crisis, has discovered that a spine is a very useful thing to have. He has discovered that when he hangs tough, the latent schisms in the Republican Party break open. He needs to carry that new toughness into December and January, and beyond. His own worst enemy is both his congenital desire to appease and his on- and-off flirtation with cutting social insurance.
If the Democrats do hang tough, the Republicans will cave again. Major figures (and funders on the right—even the Koch Brothers—are rethinking their alliance with rightwing populist fundamentalists who dislike Wall Street almost as much as they dislike government.
Keep the pressure on and the Republican split will only widen. Keep shining a spotlight on the sheer recklessness and unreality of the Tea Party, and the Republicans will lose in both 2014 and 2016.
The real hero of this episode is Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid. In the January “fiscal cliff” crisis, Reid was prepared to hang tough at a time when the expiration of all Bush tax cuts gave Democrats a strong hand. But Obama undercut Reid by sending up Vice President Joe Biden to negotiate a much weaker separate peace.
This time, Reid’s resolution led Obama, and produced a resounding victory both for the country and the Democratic administration. Let’s see whether the lesson carries over into the next round. |
Must-see morning clip: "Daily Show" criticizes the media for not reporting Blackstone's shady deal The private equity firm recently made some underhanded financial dealings, but newspapers and TV didn't cover it
Like something straight out of gangster film "Goodfellas," private equity firm Blackstone has been making some underhanded financial dealings -- that are somehow totally legal. Bloomberg first broke the news, as "The Daily Show's" Jon Stewart explains:
Earlier this year Blackstone bought something called a credit default swap on debt that Codere owed to a third party. Which means Blackstone would make money if Codere blew a lone payment to the other guys. So far, so good. Then a short time later Blacksone offers Codere a $100 million loan with the condition that Codere pay the other loan to the other company late. The loan Blackstone had already bet that they would in fact pay late. So Blackstone loans Codere $100 million. Codere deliberately pays the other loan two days late. A credit default swap is triggered and Blackstone collects $15 million in insurance money.
But the outrage doesn't end there -- in a brilliant segment policing the media, "Daily Show" financial correspondent Samantha Bee investigated why virtually no media outlet has reported this story, including the New York Times. The Times' Gretchen Morgenson defended the paper's silence, saying, "You know, this is just another day on Wall Street."
Advertisement:
After getting in a solid jab at the Times' stale trend stories, Bee, desperate to get this story some attention, turned to Internet cat meme expert BuzzFeed, a local news anchor and Miley Cyrus on a wrecking ball. The results are marvelous. |
Tomorrow is May 6th—Bruce Cordell’s birthday! With so much going on with The Strange, it might be his busiest birthday ever. But in celebration, we’re officially unveiling The Strange to the gaming world. Kickstarter backers, of course, have been in the know for months, but tomorrow we’ll make the official announcement of the game’s release in August.
There’s an important update about BackerKit below—please be sure to read it. But first, a little news on how The Strange is coming along!
Design Update: Things are progressing at a frenetic pace here at MCG as we keep The Strange on track for its intended August release. The corebook is just over two weeks from heading to press, and we’re busy dotting Is and crossing Ts. (Metaphorically, of course: In the age of digital typesetting our Is come pre-dotted and Ts pre-crossed. But we ARE neck-deep in the process of giving the book its final proofing and review.)
The Player’s Guide follows the corebook by a few weeks (it doesn’t require as much press time), so it’s also nearing completion. And despite all that work, we’re keeping up the pace on other releases around the time of the game’s launch: Tales from the Strange fiction is written and headed for editing, The Dark Spiral is written and in internal playtesting, and we’re starting into the conversion guide, among other things.
And then there are all the cool bits and pieces in the Fan Kit and Player’s Kit. Most of the Fan Kit components are complete, and Bruce and Monte begin autographing them next week. (The cover art prints have already been printed and signed by Matt Stawicki.) The Player’s Kit bookbags are in production, as are the dice and the folder, with other components such as the XP Deck just about finished with the design cycle. Wherever possible, we’ve worked to ensure that components are not just top quality, but really unique (dare we say strange?) in design. To give you a taste, here’s a mockup of the Player’s Kit folder, perfect for storing your character sheet, recursion sheets, and notes along with any XP or cypher cards you’ve picked up along the way.
One particularly fun component has been the unique character cards. Over 1800 of our backers are receiving these, and each one will be different. The card design is underway, and the data set--the descriptors, types, foci, pools, and so on--for each faction has been fleshed out. These are going to be really cool!
BackerKit—This Is Important!: We are locking down BackerKit on 16 May—a week from Friday! From that point forward, you won’t be able to make any changes to your data (well, sort of—more on that in a minute). If you’ve had a change of address or email address (especially email address), please take a moment to log into BackerKit and get everything up to date.
96% of our backers have completed BackerKit, and that’s great! (Thanks to those of you who answered the call in the last update.) However, that means there are still 4% of you who haven’t. If that’s you (or if it might be you), please drop everything (the rest of this update will wait!) and complete BackerKit now!
And don’t forget that once BackerKit locks down, so do orders of many of our Kickstarter items. Actual products will be available in the future via the MCG web store (among other places), but Kickstarter-specifics such as the deluxe corebook or Player’s Kit will not be available. If there’s anything you’ve been thinking about adding to your The Strange collection, now’s the time to get it!
Facing a possible address change after 16 May? Don’t fret—when it’s time to ship your order, you’ll have one last change to confirm your address. We’ll have full details on how the fulfillment process will work in next month’s update.
The Pitch Room: If you backed at a level that gives you access to the Pitch Room, you should have received your invitation already—the Pitch Room is up and running. If you haven’t received your invite, contact Tammie at tammie@montecookgames.com.
Are You Visiting Our Website?: If you don't visit the Monte Cook Games website regularly, you might want to check it out. Monte and/or Bruce blog there regularly (visit the Latest News section)--so you'll catch their thoughts on gaming and design, as well as updates on all of our products and activities.
Communicating with MCG: Trying to reach us? Please don’t rely on the Kickstarter comment threads. These are awesome for keeping everyone up to date during the Kickstarter campaign, but afterword we focus our conversation on the MCG and The Strange Facebook pages. Commenting on Facebook is a much more reliable way of getting in touch with us!
Updates: Today is the first Monday of May. Our plan, generally, is to provide you with an update on the first Monday of every month. Check your email each month for an in-depth look at how the game is coming, sneak peeks at game mechanics and the world(s) of The Strange as they are finalized, and new art!
The Strange. Explore. Defend. Create. |
With President Barack Obama’s abstention at the United Nations Security Council on Friday, the Democratic Party is now an anti-Israel party.
There can be no possible pretense at bipartisanship any longer. Freed, as he told then-Russian President Dmitry Medvedev in 2012, to have more “flexibility,” with no more elections in sight, lame-duck Obama and UN Ambassador Samantha Power expressed their true colors by reversing decades of U.S. policy and allowing a profoundly anti-Israel resolution to pass.
There were some Democrats who objected. Incoming Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) called the Obama administration’s failure to veto the resolution “extremely frustrating, disappointing and confounding.” Then again, Schumer opposed the Iran nuclear deal last year in word, only to allow let it stand in deed. Other Democrats, such as Sen. Dianne Feinsten (D-CA), supported Obama’s decision to allow the Palestinian-backed resolution declaring Israeli settlements illegal.
Feinstein’s case, articulated in a press statement, is worth noting, because it is the administration’s ideological line:
President Obama’s refusal to veto today’s UN Security Council resolution condemning Israeli settlements sends a strong message that the United States still supports a two-state solution. Ending settlement activity in the West Bank and East Jerusalem is an absolute necessity if we’re ever to achieve a lasting peace between Israel and the Palestinians.
First of all, settlements are not the obstacle to peace. If they were, Palestinians would not have launched rockets at Israelis and dug terror tunnels after Israel pulled all of its settlers out of Gaza in 2005.
Second, the Israeli government of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu bowed to American pressure several years ago an adopted a “settlement freeze,” but Palestinians still rejected negotiations.
Third, the UN resolution does not encourage a two-state solution: if anything, it encourages Palestinians to believe they will get rid of Israel, because it recognizes no legitimate Israeli presence east of the 1949 armistice line — not even in the Old City of Jerusalem, and not even in the ancient Jewish city of Hebron, already protected by an agreement.
Notably, Feinstein’s statement makes no mention whatsoever of Palestinian terrorism, incitement, and rejection. And she represents the mainstream of her party, not the fringe of potential Democratic National Committee chair Rep. Keith Ellison.
The White House’s Ben Rhodes — errand boy for Obama on every single one of his failed foreign policies, from Benghazi to Iran to Cuba — told the Jerusalem Post that it was necessary to allow the UN Security Council resolution to pass because the administration had “tried everything” to bring about peace. Everything — except pressure the Palestinians, of course. When the new Republican Congress wanted to cut funding to the Palestinian Authority over its support for terror and incitement, President Obama exercised a waiver and made sure the funds went through. And that is just one of countless examples.
Time and again, when pro-Israel activists wanted to pressure the Obama administration, they were told by leaders of the American Jewish establishment that they should not make Israel a partisan issue. Well, now it is one — irreversibly. The Democrats stand with Palestinian terrorists, and the dictators of the UN. The Republicans stand with Israel. End of story.
Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News. He was named one of the “most influential” people in news media in 2016. His new book, See No Evil: 19 Hard Truths the Left Can’t Handle, is available from Regnery through Amazon. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak. |
Sean Lee Kenneth Chee (left) and Gary Lim have been dating for 18 years. In 2012, the Singaporean couple challenged the constitutionality of Section 377A, a colonial-era law that criminalizes homosexuality. “We didn’t want to be seen as ‘illegal,’” Chee said.
This is the third part of a 10-part series on LGBT rights in Southeast Asia, which uncovers the challenges facing the LGBT community in the region and highlights the courageous work of activists there.
***
SINGAPORE -- Kenneth Chee and Gary Lim have been together for almost two decades, but in the eyes of the law they're criminals.
The couple met by chance at a shopping mall in Singapore in 1997. “I guess my ‘gaydar’ went off,” Chee recalls. “I just went up to him and asked him for his number.” They’ve been inseparable ever since.
“If gay marriage was legal here, we would get married in a heartbeat,” Lim says. Chee, by his side, nods in agreement.
But gay marriage is not legal in Singapore. Same-sex civil partnerships are also not recognized, and there are no laws that protect against discrimination on the grounds of gender expression or sexual orientation.
In 2007, Singapore, which is a former British colony, made headlines when it struck colonial-era penal code Section 377 from its books. The statute had criminalized “carnal intercourse … against the order of nature,” which included anal and oral sex. The law, which dates back to 1860 and was exported to many British colonies, is still in place in several countries, including India, Malaysia and Myanmar. The statute has been called “England’s least lovely law export.”
Though 377 was removed, a related provision -- called Section 377A -- was kept intact. 377A specifically targets sexual acts between two men. Under this law, homosexuality is criminalized and punishable by imprisonment of up to two years.
The LGBT community in Singapore was incensed. Lim and Chee, who are both graphic designers, say they were shocked.
“Why are we being singled out to be punished? It’s legal for straight people to have anal sex and oral sex, so why are we seen as criminals?” Lim says. “This law is now always hanging over our heads.”
Outraged by the “blatant discrimination,” the couple decided to challenge the state in court -- a decidedly unusual move.
“I just refused to accept this nonsensical label,” Chee says. “We didn’t want to be seen as ‘illegal.’”
In 2010, a Singaporean man named Tan Eng Hong was charged under 377A for having oral sex with another man in a public restroom. At the time, Tan challenged the constitutionality of the law. Two years later, Lim and Chee raised a second challenge.
This was the first time in Singapore’s modern history that the constitutionality of a law was being challenged, according to the couple’s attorney, Peter Low.
Last October, the final ruling for the case was delivered after several years of bouncing through the courts. Singapore’s Court of Appeal, the nation’s highest court, determined that 377A is constitutional.
Homosexuality remains illegal in Singapore.
“We were very disappointed,” Lim says, his lips pursing grimly. “The message was loud and clear: We’re not ready for change.”
Singapore's government has repeatedly said that it will not “proactively enforce” Section 377A. (In the case of Tan Eng Hong, the charge against him was later changed to “committing an obscene act in a public place.”) But Jean Chong, co-founder of LGBT rights group Sayoni, says the law -- whether enforced or not -- has had a profound effect on the country’s LGBT community, and on human rights in general.
“377A may be targeted at men, but it has a cascading effect. It shapes public opinion, and informs policy. It impacts the entire LGBT community,” she says.
Scott Teng, a 30-year-old gay man, points out that the government’s stance on the law is akin to “holding a gun to a person’s head, but saying, ‘oh, we’ll never pull the trigger.’ That’s the case here. You always wonder -- at what point will the trigger be pulled?”
Such a law, he adds, can encourage marginalization.
“It gives people the justification to treat you as a lesser Singaporean, as a lesser human being,” Teng, who is an associate director at a brand consultancy, says. “It filters down to individual experiences, to the hurtful words people choose to use.”
Sean Lee “When I first came out to my mother, it went horribly,” said Scott Teng. “My family’s very traditional, and the first reaction I got was ‘Get out of my house, you devil spawn!’ She took it very hard. But though it took her a few months, she’s accepted it and now she’s honestly the best mom ever. She told me, ‘Even if the sky falls down, mom will be here for you.”
Sayoni has been documenting cases of violence and discrimination against Singapore's LGBT community for several years.
Most abuse is underreported Chong says, and she’s been “shocked” by many of the stories she's heard.
“Transgender women and gay women spoke about being assaulted, sometimes sexually, because of their appearance," she says. "One trans woman said she was gang-raped at a hotel room, but she didn’t report it to the police. She’s trans and she used to do sex work, so she didn’t feel comfortable.”
Chong says that the poor and the under-educated are particularly vulnerable to abuse. “They have less vocabulary to articulate what’s happening to them and they have fewer resources,” she says. These are individuals who don’t have access to the growing, though still small, LGBT community here.
Sean Lee Avin Tan, 30, is a gay man living with HIV. According to Tan, there have only been two gay people with HIV who have come out publicly in Singapore about their condition. Paddy Chew, who died in 1999 from HIV-related complications, was the first. Tan is the second. “More people need to come out. It takes guts and yes, it’s a risk, but we need people from every walk of life to speak up,” he said. “Only then will we see change.”
The first gay protagonist in a local TV series featured in a 2003 docu-drama called “Crunchtime,” which was aired on Singapore’s Channel U. It was a landmark moment, but the series, supposedly based on a true story, was criticized for promoting homophobia.
A subsequent exhibition about the history of Singaporean television, suggested that homosexuality was depicted as a mental illness in the show. The protagonist, named Shaohua, is seen visiting a counseling service in an effort to find the “correct and normal” path. By the end of the series, Shaohua is happily married to a woman, with whom he has a son.
Storylines like this aren't unique in Singapore.
“A happy LGBT character, who has a good job or family support, isn’t allowed on Singaporean television,” LGBT activist and corporate attorney Paerin Choa says. “They have to be sad, troubled, or suicidal. In Chinese dramas, the gay character is often a serial killer or a comical sidekick.”
The “promotion or glamorization of the homosexual lifestyle” is not allowed on television or in radio broadcasts, according to guidelines established by Singapore’s Media Development Authority.
“Information, themes or subplots on lifestyles such as homosexuality, lesbianism, bisexualism, transsexualism, transvestism, pedophilia and incest should be treated with utmost caution,” the guidelines state. “Their treatment should not in any way promote, justify or glamorize such lifestyles.”
MDA also noted that “music associated with drugs, alternative lifestyles (such as homosexuality) or the worship of the occult or the devil” should not be broadcast.
Activists say that media restrictions like these have impacted their ability to organize and advocate.
More than 50 percent of the 6,000 people who have been diagnosed with HIV in Singapore are gay men, yet, “because of the media law, we cannot run LGBT-specific campaigns,” Avin Tan, the head of advocacy and partnerships at Action for AIDS Singapore, the only organization in the country dedicated solely to HIV/AIDS awareness, treatment and prevention, tells HuffPost.
“We can’t even run condom ads” on mainstream media, he adds. “We have to rely on putting posters up in clubs or using social media. We end up only reaching 10 percent of the community.”
Tan, who lives with HIV, says that these restrictions aren’t just frustrating for advocates, but are potentially fatal for vulnerable individuals who are not being reached.
“For every person who is diagnosed, one is not,” Tan says, quoting an as-yet unpublished AFA study. “One of the greatest challenges right now when it comes to HIV/AIDS is a serious lack of access to information.”
Dominique Mosbergen Later this year, 32-year-old Ching S. Sia, a PhD student in architecture at the National University of Singapore, will be going to Australia to freeze her eggs. “Since young, I’ve always thought that I want to have a family one day,” she said. “As a gay woman, I want the option of having a kid when I want to.”
But for all the obstacles facing the country’s LGBT community, “there has been positive change,” according to Lynette Chua, an assistant law professor at the National University of Singapore and the author of Mobilizing Gay Singapore.
“As a scholar, if you solely study outcomes and if your main concern is what laws on the books have been changed, then you’d say activism in Singapore has not been successful,” Chua says. “But if you look at other outcomes, at what’s happening on the ground, there definitely has been progress.”
LGBT activism has a 25-year history in the country. The movement emerged in the early 1990s with small community groups, according to Chua. It was only a few years ago, however, that local activism gained real momentum. In 2009, Singapore’s first public gay pride event -- the annual Pink Dot -- was launched, and Sayoni was founded in 2012.
The size of the LGBT movement has ballooned in the last decade, Chua says, “and young people are coming out earlier.” There are more activists than ever before and the government has shown “an increased willingness to acknowledge the existence of gay activism.”
Sean Lee “Even as recently as 2009, the word ‘gay’ was very taboo. It wasn’t used in the media, it wasn’t often used in public. LGBT event were held behind closed doors. People were scared of being outed, of losing their jobs, that their families would find out. But that’s slowly changing,” said Pink Dot spokesperson Paerin Choa.
Indeed, when speaking to some members of the community, there is a tangible uniting sentiment: hope.
“When I was younger, ‘gay’ was such a disgusting word to me,” Teng says. “I had trouble even saying it. There wasn’t a sense of pride associated with the term at all. Instead the negative power of the word made me question if I even wanted to be called that.”
But the situation, he says, has “changed significantly.”
"Now being gay is associated with a lot of positive attributes. There’s a better narrative attached. There were no gay role models when I was a kid, but that’s changed too," Teng says.
In recent years, a handful of local celebrities have come out. Kumar, a prominent comedian, revealed that he was gay in 2011 after years of being in denial. Last year, local actor and theater director Ivan Heng announced in a moving Facebook post that he had married his longtime partner in a ceremony in the U.K.
Paerin Choa, the spokesperson for Pink Dot, says that the LGBT community has grown “more fearless.” The younger generation is “not so frightened or constrained by societal norms.”
“Just look at Pink Dot’s numbers,” Choa says. “In 2009, the first year it was held, 2,500 people showed up. The following year, we had 4,000. In 2015, we had 28,000 people.”
(Pink Dot has had its share of challenges, however, as conservative Christian and Muslim groups have called for believers to oppose the event.)
Progress has been visible in other ways too.
Christopher Khor, a 24-year-old transgender filmmaker, is releasing next year what promises to be a groundbreaking documentary about Singapore’s trans community.
“When we started making this film, there was absolutely nothing, no exposure for the community. I was the first trans person that I knew,” Khor says, his face breaking into a smile. “We hope this film will start to challenge the idea of trans as ‘other.’”
As for the future of Section 377A, both legal experts and activists tell HuffPost that it's unlikely the statute will be removed anytime soon. “Not in my lifetime anyway,” attorney Peter Low says.
Activists say that there’s plenty of work to be done before that goal can be reached.
“It’s going to be a long fight,” Chong says. “Activists must work the ground and it’s going to take a long, long time. Look at the U.S. How did they win gay marriage? Activists worked the ground for years, they knocked on doors, they educated people, they worked so hard. You need resources, you need tenacity and you need the commitment to slog it out for 10 to 20 years. You need to not give up, and yes, it’s going to be hard.”
Lim and Chee say they’re crossing their fingers that they’ll be around to see the needle shift.
“It took the U.S. 40 to 50 years to get where they are. We’re heading in the right direction, it’s just a matter of when,” Lim says. “I wouldn’t mind being 80 and getting married. I’d do it.”
Singapore-based photographer Sean Lee captured many of the portraits featured in this article. See more of his work here. |
Sony
With the Spider-Man movie franchise getting rebooted for the second time in a decade, the opportunity is clearly ripe for a whole new world of spiderstuff -- including a spin-off or two featuring the web-slinging superhero.
But while the rest of us are dreaming giant, sprawling dreams about a world in which super-spider-people are as numerous as actual spiders, Marvel Studios president Kevin Feige has just one goal in mind: Getting Spider-Man back onscreen, and back in the Marvel universe where he belongs.
Sony Pictures Entertainment
At an LA event celebrating the in-home release of “Avengers: Age of Ultron,” Feige told MTV News that for now, nobody is thinking beyond the stand-alone "Spider-Man" that will feature Tom Holland suiting up as Spidey.
"Well, there could be [spin-offs]," Feige said. "But the truth is, our job right now is that single Spider-Man movie based in the MCU. And that's where all our focus is."
However, when it does come time to think about spin-offs -- y'know, if spin-offs were a thing you were thinking about -- then both Feige and "Avengers" executive producer Jeremy Latcham sounded mighty interested in a certain fantasy mashup starring Emma Stone as Spider-Gwen.
At the time of the interview, neither of the men had seen the Vulture trailer featuring Stone in the Spidey suit, but we're betting they remedied that situation immediately thereafter, because both of them spoke up at once to say that it sounded "cool."
Feige added, "I think Spider-Gwen in the comics is cool."
Which is obviously a vast understatement if you're talking about the possibility of a "Spider-Gwen" movie.
But that's probably just because they're hiding their enthusiasm on purpose, lest we all get so excited about seeing Emma Stone as a superhero that we set the entire world on fire. Which, let's be honest, would not be an inappropriate response. |
Unamuno and the second is Jugo. In this Basque name , the first family name isand the second is
Miguel de Unamuno y Jugo (29 September 1864 – 31 December 1936) was a Spanish Basque essayist, novelist, poet, playwright, philosopher, professor of Greek and Classics, and later rector at the University of Salamanca.
His major philosophical essay was The Tragic Sense of Life (1912),[2] and his most famous novel was Abel Sánchez: The History of a Passion (1917),[3] a modern exploration of the Cain and Abel story.
Biography [ edit ]
Miguel de Unamuno was born in Bilbao, a port city of Basque Country, Spain, the son of Félix de Unamuno and Salomé Jugo. As a young man, he was interested in the Basque language and competed for a teaching position in the Instituto de Bilbao against Sabino Arana. The contest was finally won by the Basque scholar Resurrección María de Azkue.
Unamuno worked in all major genres: the essay, the novel, poetry, and theater, and, as a modernist, contributed greatly to dissolving the boundaries between genres. There is some debate as to whether Unamuno was in fact a member of the Generation of '98, an ex post facto literary group of Spanish intellectuals and philosophers that was the creation of José Martínez Ruiz (Azorín) — a group that includes, besides Azorín, Antonio Machado, Ramón Pérez de Ayala, Pío Baroja, Ramón del Valle-Inclán, Ramiro de Maeztu, and Ángel Ganivet, among others.
Unamuno would have preferred to be a philosophy professor, but was unable to get an academic appointment; philosophy was in Spain somewhat politicized. Instead he became a Greek professor.
In 1901 Unamuno gave his well-known conference on the scientific and literary inviability of the Basque. According to Azurmendi, Unamuno went against the Basque language once his political views changed along his reflection on Spain.[4]
In addition to his writing, Unamuno played an important role in the intellectual life of Spain. He served as rector of the University of Salamanca for two periods: from 1900 to 1924 and 1930 to 1936, during a time of great social and political upheaval. During the 1910s and 1920s, he became one of the most passionate advocates of Spanish liberalism. Unamuno linked his liberalism with his hometown of Bilbao, which, through its commerce and connection with the civilized world, Unamuno believed had developed an individualism and independent outlook in stark contrast to the narrow-mindedness of Carlist traditionalism.[5] When in 1912 José Canalejas was assassinated by an anarchist, he blamed it on the fact that Spain lacked a "true liberal democratic party" and in 1914 denounced the large property owners for their negligence and ignorance.[6] Along with many other Spanish writers and intellectuals, such as Benito Pérez Galdós, he was an outspoken supporter of the Allied cause during the First World War despite Spain's official neutrality.[7] Unamuno viewed the war as a crusade not just against the bellicose authoritarianism of the Germans, but against their sympathizers in Spain, and intensified his attacks on Alfonso XIII and the Spanish monarchy.[8]
Unamuno was removed from his two university chairs by the dictator General Miguel Primo de Rivera in 1924, over the protests of other Spanish intellectuals. As a result of his vociferous criticisms of Primo de Rivera's dictatorship, he lived in exile until 1930, first banished to Fuerteventura, one of the Canary Islands; his house there is now a museum,[9] as is his house in Salamanca. From Fuerteventura he escaped to France, as related in his book De Fuerteventura a Paris. After a year in Paris, Unamuno established himself in Hendaye, a border town in the French Basque Country, as close to Spain as he could get while remaining in France. Unamuno returned to Spain after the fall of General Primo de Rivera's dictatorship in 1930 and took up his rectorship again. It is said in Salamanca that the day he returned to the University, Unamuno began his lecture by saying "As we were saying yesterday..." (Decíamos ayer...) as Fray Luis de León had done in the same place in 1576, after four years of imprisonment by the Inquisition. It was as though he had not been absent at all. After the fall of Primo de Rivera's dictatorship, Spain embarked on its Second Republic. He was a candidate on the Republican/Socialist ticket and was elected, after which he led a large demonstration in the Plaza Mayor in which he raised the Republic's flag and declared its victory.[10] He always was a moderate and refused all political and anticlerical extremisms.
Having begun his literary career as an internationalist, Unamuno gradually became convinced of the universal values of Spanish culture, feeling that Spain's essential qualities would be destroyed if influenced too much by outside forces. Thus he initially welcomed Franco's revolt as necessary to rescue Spain from the excesses of the Second Republic.[11] However, the harsh tactics employed by the Francoists in the struggle against their republican opponents caused him to oppose both the Republic and Franco. Unamuno said of the military revolt that it would be the victory of "a brand of Catholicism that is not Christian and of a paranoid militarism bred in the colonial campaigns," referring in the latter case to the 1921 war with Abd el-Krim in what was then Spanish Morocco. (Franco's 1936 revolt also started from Spanish Morocco.)[12]
In 1936 Unamuno had a public quarrel with the Nationalist general Millán Astray at the university in which he denounced both Astray—with whom he had had verbal battles in the 1920s—and elements of the rebel movement. He called the battle cry of the elite Spanish Legion—"Long live death!"—repellent and suggested Astray wanted to see Spain crippled. One historian notes that his address was a "remarkable act of moral courage" and that he risked being lynched on the spot but was saved by Franco's wife who took him out of the place. Shortly afterwards, Unamuno was effectively removed for a second time from the rectorship of the University of Salamanca. A few days later he confided to Nikos Kazantzakis:
No, I have not become a right-winger. Pay no mind to what people say. No, I have not betrayed the cause of liberty. But for now, it's totally essential that order be restored. But one day I will rise up -- soon -- and throw myself into the fight for liberty, by myself. No, I am neither fascist nor Bolshevik. I am alone!...Like Croce in Italy, I am alone![13][14]
Broken-hearted, he was placed under house arrest by Franco, and his death followed ten weeks later, on 31 December.[15] Unamuno died while sleeping, which he regarded as the best and most painless way to die.
Unamuno was a well-known lusophile, being probably the best Spanish connoisseur of Portuguese culture, literature, and history of his time. He believed it was as important for a Spaniard to become familiar with the great names of Portuguese literature as with those of Catalan literature. He was also a supporter of Iberian Federalism.
In the final analysis Unamuno's significance is that he was one of a number of notable interwar intellectuals, along with luminaries such as Julien Benda, Karl Jaspers, Johan Huizinga, and José Ortega y Gasset, who resisted the intrusion of ideology into Western intellectual life.[16]
Fiction [ edit ]
Paz en la guerra ( Peace in War ) (1897) — a novel that explores the relationship of self and world through familiarity with death. It is based on his experiences as a child during the Carlist siege of Bilbao in the Third Carlist War.
( ) (1897) — a novel that explores the relationship of self and world through familiarity with death. It is based on his experiences as a child during the Carlist siege of Bilbao in the Third Carlist War. Amor y pedagogía ( Love and Pedagogy ) (1902) — a novel uniting comedy and tragedy in an absurd parody of positivist sociology.
( ) (1902) — a novel uniting comedy and tragedy in an absurd parody of positivist sociology. El espejo de la muerte (The Mirror of Death) (1913) — a collection of stories.
Niebla ( Mist ) (1914) — one of Unamuno's key works, which he called a nivola to distinguish it from the supposedly fixed form of the novel ("novela" in Spanish).
( ) (1914) — one of Unamuno's key works, which he called a to distinguish it from the supposedly fixed form of the novel ("novela" in Spanish). Vida de Don Quijote y Sancho (usually translated into English as Our Lord Don Quixote ) (1914) — another key work of Unamuno, often perceived one of the earliest works applying existential elements to Don Quixote . The book, on Unamuno's own admission, is of mixed genre with elements of personal essay, philosophy, and fiction. Unamuno felt that Cervantes had not told the story of Don Quijote very well, cluttering it with unrelated tales. This work was Don Quixote the way Unamuno thought it should have been written. He felt that as a quijotista (a fan or student of Don Quixote) he was superior to Cervantes. The work is primarily of interest to those studying Unamuno, not Cervantes.
(usually translated into English as ) (1914) — another key work of Unamuno, often perceived one of the earliest works applying existential elements to . The book, on Unamuno's own admission, is of mixed genre with elements of personal essay, philosophy, and fiction. Unamuno felt that Cervantes had not told the story of Don Quijote very well, cluttering it with unrelated tales. This work was Don Quixote the way Unamuno thought it should have been written. He felt that as a (a fan or student of Don Quixote) he was superior to Cervantes. The work is primarily of interest to those studying Unamuno, not Cervantes. Abel Sánchez (1917) — a novel that uses the story of Cain and Abel to explore envy.
(1917) — a novel that uses the story of Cain and Abel to explore envy. Tulio Montalbán (1920) — a short novel on the threat of a man's public image undoing his true personality, a problem familiar to the famous Unamuno.
(1920) — a short novel on the threat of a man's public image undoing his true personality, a problem familiar to the famous Unamuno. Tres novelas ejemplares y un prólogo ( Three Exemplary Novels and a Prologue ) (1920) — a much-studied work with a famous prologue. The title deliberately recalls the famous Novelas ejemplares of Miguel de Cervantes.
( ) (1920) — a much-studied work with a famous prologue. The title deliberately recalls the famous of Miguel de Cervantes. La tía Tula ( Aunt Tula ) (1921) — his final large-scale novel, a work about maternity, a theme that he had already examined in Amor y pedagogía and Dos madres .
( ) (1921) — his final large-scale novel, a work about maternity, a theme that he had already examined in and . Teresa (1924) — a narrative work that contains romantic poetry, achieving an ideal through the re-creation of the beloved.
(1924) — a narrative work that contains romantic poetry, achieving an ideal through the re-creation of the beloved. Cómo se hace una novela ( How to Make a Novel ) (1927) — the autopsy of an Unamuno novel.
( ) (1927) — the autopsy of an Unamuno novel. Don Sandalio, jugador de ajedrez ( Don Sandalio, Chess Player ) (1930).
( ) (1930). San Manuel Bueno, mártir (Saint Emmanuel the Good, Martyr) (1930) — a brief novella that synthesizes virtually all of Unamuno's thought. The novella centres on a heroic priest who has lost his faith in immortality, yet says nothing of his doubts to his parishioners, not wanting to disturb their faith, which he recognizes is a necessary support for their lives.
Philosophy [ edit ]
Unamuno's philosophy was not systematic but rather a negation of all systems and an affirmation of faith "in itself." He developed intellectually under the influence of rationalism and positivism, but during his youth he wrote articles that clearly show his sympathy for socialism and his great concern for the situation in which he found Spain at the time. An important concept for Unamuno was intrahistoria. He thought that history could best be understood by looking at the small histories of anonymous people, rather than by focusing on major events such as wars and political pacts. Some authors relativize the importance of intrahistoria in his thinking. Those authors say that more than a clear concept is an ambiguous metaphor. The term first appears in the essay En torno al casticismo (1895), but Unamuno leaves it soon.[17]
[18] Unamuno: "Those who believe they believe in God, but without passion in the heart, without uncertainty, without doubt, and even at times without despair, believe only in the idea of God, and not in God himself."
In the late nineteenth century Unamuno suffered a religious crisis and left the positivist philosophy. Then, in the early twentieth century, he developed his own thinking influenced by existentialism.[19] Life was tragic, according to Unamuno, because of the knowledge that we are to die. He explains much of human activity as an attempt to survive, in some form, after our death. Unamuno summarized his personal creed thus: "My religion is to seek for truth in life and for life in truth, even knowing that I shall not find them while I live."[20] He said, "Among men of flesh and bone there have been typical examples of those who possess this tragic sense of life. I recall now Marcus Aurelius, St. Augustine, Pascal, Rousseau, René, Obermann, Thomson, Leopardi, Vigny, Lenau, Kleist, Amiel, Quental, Kierkegaard—men burdened with wisdom rather than with knowledge."[21] He provides a stimulating discussion of the differences between faith and reason in his most famous work: Del sentimiento trágico de la vida (The Tragic Sense of Life, 1912).
A historically influential paperfolder from childhood to his last, difficult days, in several works Unamuno ironically expressed philosophical views of Platonism, scholasticism, positivism, and the "science vs religion" issue in terms of "origami" figures, notably the traditional Spanish pajarita. Since he was also a linguist (professor of Greek), he coined the word “cocotología” ("cocotology") to describe the art of paper folding. After the conclusion of Amor y pedagogía (Love and Pedagogy, 1902), he included in the volume, attributing it to one of the characters, "Notes for a Treatise on Cocotology" ("Apuntes para un tratado de cocotología").[22]
Along with The Tragic Sense of Life, Unamuno's long-form essay La agonía del cristianismo (The Agony of Christianity, 1931) and his novella San Manuel Bueno, mártir (Saint Emmanuel the Good, Martyr, 1930) were all included on the Index Librorum Prohibitorum.[23]
After his youthful sympathy for socialism ended, Unamuno gravitated towards liberalism. Unamuno's conception of liberalism, elaborated in essays such as La esencia del liberalismo in 1909, was one that sought to reconcile a great respect for individual freedom with a more interventionist state, bringing him to a position closer to social liberalism.[24] In writing about the Church in 1932 during the second Spanish Republic, Unamuno urged the clergy to end their attacks on liberalism and instead embrace it as a way of rejuvenating the faith.[25]
Poetry [ edit ]
For Unamuno, the art of poetry was a way of expressing spiritual problems. His themes were the same in his poetry as in his other fiction: spiritual anguish, the pain provoked by the silence of God, time and death.
Unamuno was always attracted to traditional meters and, though his early poems did not rhyme, he subsequently turned to rhyme in his later works.
Among his outstanding works of poetry are:
Poesías ( Poems ) (1907) — his first collection of poetry, in which he outlined the themes that would dominate his poetics: religious conflict, Spain, and domestic life
( ) (1907) — his first collection of poetry, in which he outlined the themes that would dominate his poetics: religious conflict, Spain, and domestic life Rosario de sonetos líricos [26] ( Rosary of Lyric Sonnets ) (1911)
( ) (1911) El Cristo de Velázquez ( The Christ of Velázquez ) (1920) — a religious work, divided into four parts, where Unamuno analyzes the figure of Christ from different perspectives: as a symbol of sacrifice and redemption, as a reflection on his Biblical names (Christ the myth, Christ the man on the cross, Christ, God, Christ the Eucharist), as poetic meaning, as painted by Diego Velázquez, etc.
( ) (1920) — a religious work, divided into four parts, where Unamuno analyzes the figure of Christ from different perspectives: as a symbol of sacrifice and redemption, as a reflection on his Biblical names (Christ the myth, Christ the man on the cross, Christ, God, Christ the Eucharist), as poetic meaning, as painted by Diego Velázquez, etc. Andanzas y visiones españolas (1922) — something of a travel book, in which Unamuno expresses profound emotion and experiments with landscape both evocative and realistic (a theme typical of his generation of writers)
(1922) — something of a travel book, in which Unamuno expresses profound emotion and experiments with landscape both evocative and realistic (a theme typical of his generation of writers) Rimas de dentro ( Rhymes from Within ) (1923)
( ) (1923) Rimas de un poeta desconocido ( Rhymes from an Unknown Poet ) (1924)
( ) (1924) De Fuerteventura a París ( From Fuerteventura to Paris ) (1925)
( ) (1925) Romancero del destierro ( Ballads of Exile ) (1928)
( ) (1928) Cancionero (Songbook) (1953, published posthumously)
Drama [ edit ]
Unamuno's dramatic production presents a philosophical progression.
Questions such as individual spirituality, faith as a "vital lie", and the problem of a double personality were at the center of La esfinge (The Sphinx) (1898), and La verdad (Truth), (1899).
In 1934, he wrote El hermano Juan o El mundo es teatro (Brother Juan or The World is a Theatre).
Unamuno's theatre is schematic; he did away with artifice and focused only on the conflicts and passions that affect the characters. This austerity was influenced by classical Greek theatre. What mattered to him was the presentation of the drama going on inside of the characters, because he understood the novel as a way of gaining knowledge about life.
By symbolizing passion and creating a theatre austere both in word and presentation, Unamuno's theatre opened the way for the renaissance of Spanish theatre undertaken by Ramón del Valle-Inclán, Azorín, and Federico García Lorca.
Confrontation with Millán Astray [ edit ]
On 12 October 1936 the celebration of Columbus Day had brought together a politically diverse crowd at the University of Salamanca, including Enrique Pla y Deniel, the Archbishop of Salamanca, and Carmen Polo Martínez-Valdés, the wife of Franco, Falangist General José Millán Astray and Unamuno himself. According to the British historian Hugh Thomas in his magnum opus The Spanish Civil War (1961), the evening began with an impassioned speech by the Falangist writer José María Pemán. After this, Professor Francisco Maldonado decried Catalonia and the Basque Country as "cancers on the body of the nation," adding that "Fascism, the healer of Spain, will know how to exterminate them, cutting into the live flesh, like a determined surgeon free from false sentimentalism."
From somewhere in the auditorium, someone cried out the motto "¡Viva la Muerte!" [Long live death!]. As was his habit, Millán Astray responded with "¡España!" [Spain!]; the crowd replied with "¡Una!" [One!]. He repeated "¡España!"; the crowd then replied "¡Grande!" [Great!]. A third time, Millán Astray shouted "¡España!"; the crowd responded "Libre!" [Free!] This – Spain, one, great and free – was a common Falangist cheer and would become a francoist motto thereafter. Later, a group of uniformed Falangists entered, saluting the portrait of Franco that hung on the wall.
Unamuno, who was presiding over the meeting, rose up slowly and addressed the crowd:
You are waiting for my words. You know me well, and know I cannot remain silent for long. Sometimes, to remain silent is to lie, since silence can be interpreted as assent. I want to comment on the so-called speech of Professor Maldonado, who is with us here. I will ignore the personal offence to the Basques and Catalans. I myself, as you know, was born in Bilbao. The Bishop,
Unamuno gestured to the Archbishop of Salamanca,
whether you like it or not, is Catalan, born in Barcelona. But now I have heard this insensible and necrophilous oath, "¡Viva la Muerte!", and I, having spent my life writing paradoxes that have provoked the ire of those who do not understand what I have written, and being an expert in this matter, find this ridiculous paradox repellent. General Millán Astray is a cripple. There is no need for us to say this with whispered tones. He is war cripple. So was Cervantes. But unfortunately, Spain today has too many cripples. And, if God does not help us, soon it will have very many more. It torments me to think that General Millán Astray could dictate the norms of the psychology of the masses. A cripple, who lacks the spiritual greatness of Cervantes, hopes to find relief by adding to the number of cripples around him.
Millán Astray responded: "Death to intelligence! Long live death!" provoking applause from the Falangists. Pemán, in an effort to calm the crowd, exclaimed "No! Long live intelligence! Death to the bad intellectuals!"
Unamuno continued: "This is the temple of intelligence, and I am its high priest. You are profaning its sacred domain. You will win [venceréis], because you have enough brute force. But you will not convince [pero no convenceréis]. In order to convince it is necessary to persuade, and to persuade you will need something that you lack: reason and right in the struggle. I see it is useless to ask you to think of Spain. I have spoken." Millán Astray, controlling himself, shouted "Take the lady's arm!" Unamuno took Carmen Polo by the arm and left under her protection.
In 2018, the details of Unamuno's speech were disputed by the historian Severiano Delgado, who suggested that the account in a 1941 article by Luis Gabriel Portillo (who was not present at Salamanca) in the British magazine Horizon may not have been an accurate representation of events. However, Delgado agrees that a "very fierce and violent verbal confrontation" between Unamuno and Millán Astray definitely occurred, which led to Unamuno being removed from his rectorship.[27]
See also [ edit ]
References [ edit ] |
Will Robots Take Rhode Islanders’ Jobs?
It may be Labor Day, but the reality is that tens of thousands of Rhode Island jobs are at risk to be replaced by robots, according to a number of new reports — including new research released recently that claims that increasing the minimum wage further expedites the shift to automation.
Two leading economists warn that raises to the minimum wage will increase the shift to automation.
“Manufacturing has been the most vulnerable in the past and will likely continue to be so. However, we can expect that other jobs will also become automated. These are jobs where consumers may care less about who provides them and technology have already made significant inroads - like waiting tables, brick laying, taxi driving and delivery services,” said Grace Lordan of the Department of Social Policy at the London School of Economics, in an interview.
Lordan wrote "People Versus Machines: The Impact of Minimum Wages on Automatable Jobs," along with Professor David Neumark of the Department of Economics at the University of California at Irvine.
“Conversely jobs where empathy is part of the job will be safe from automation - like child care and even hairdressing," said Lordan.
Some argue that American jobs are at risk because of poor trade policy, others claim it is illegal immigration, and others are claiming the increase of minimum wage will create more vulnerability. The implications for Rhode Island's economy will be significant.
Record Robot Sales
Orders for robots are exploding. “An all-time high total of 9,773 robots valued at approximately $516 million were ordered from North American robotics companies during the first quarter of 2017,” reported the trade organization Robotics Industry Association in May of 2017.
“This represents growth of 32 percent in units over the same period in 2016, which held the previous record.”
Just one local example of the use of robotics is in May of 2014, Care New England began using germ-zapping robots that eliminate hard-to-kill microorganisms in hard-to-clean places.
Two robots were placed at Kent Hospital in Warwick, and one is in place at Memorial Hospital in Pawtucket. The healthcare group claimed,"Xenex Disinfection Services’ UV disinfection system is the fastest, safest and most effective method for the advanced cleaning of hospital rooms, and is scientifically proven to destroy all major classes of microorganisms that can cause hospital-acquired infections (HAI)."
View Larger +
David Chenevert with the Rhode Island Manufacturers Association said that currently, he isn't too concerned about the impact of minimum wage increases on automation in the industry.
"The workforce environment has changed dramatically -- you won't see many hires [in manufacturing] in just the minimum wage category," said Chenevert. "Sure it could be a starting wage for someone, but manufacturing is more about providing someone with a livelihood to support a family."
"Manufacturing has evolved into more advanced technological operations -- so it's more about someone's capability and education," said Chenevert. "A lot of these jobs require astute knowledge of English, math, computers and being problem solvers. "
Top labor activist agrees. “Look, you see surgeons being replaced all the time -- where automation is having the most impact now is with places like the surgical suites rather than low wage workers,” said Michael Araujo who is the Executive Director of RI Jobs With Justice.
“The discussions around the implications of ‘automation’ have been going on since the emancipations of slaves -- and trying to get out of paying wages has been the driving force,” adds Araujo. "Just look at who is putting these 'studies' out."
But Lordan warns, “We do not want to stop automation, but flag that minimum wages that are set too high will accelerate the adoption of these technologies. Policy makers need to seriously consider the skills that tomorrow's low educated workforce will need to ensure that we don't end up with incomes that are even more polarized than they are currently. We also would like to emphasize that those who are affected may not get gainful employment again after their job disappears - particularly older workers."
Rhode Island’s top conservative fiscal policy group says that continuing to increase minimum wage may cause employers to push towards robots.
"You should use common sense -- if labor costs more, there is a lower demand for it. That's a basic tenet of economic policy. And I do have an economics degree from Harvard,” said Mike Stenhouse, who heads the RI Center for Freedom and Prosperity.
“For some reason, progressives and 'living wage' advocates think the laws of economics don't apply to minimum wages. So I ask people to use common sense in which reports to believe. If they show that automation costs less than labor, there will be more automation and less labor,” said Stenhouse.
“What's the option? Look at copy editors being replaced-- do you keep biddings wages lower under you're competing with an electron -- what's the point? The bottom line is people still have to eat,” said Araujo.
Related Articles
Enjoy this post? Share it with others. |
CALGARY – Calgary Stampede employees were forced to put down a prize cowboy Friday night after he sustained a leg injury during a chuckwagon race.
The 42 year-old male Caucasian, named ‘Sid’, was thrown from his wagon after a tight turn during a hotly contested race.
After limping off the track, the frightened rider was cornered by race officials and a doctor, who evaluated the injury and quickly decided that his racing career was over. Surrounding Sid with white sheets to prevent onlookers from witnessing the end of life procedure, the doctor administered a lethal injection.
“It’s never easy to lose a companion like that,” explained Calgary Stampede organizer Dale Nugget. “He was like family to many of us – especially to his wife and kids.”
Despite the numerous human fatalities that have marked the chuckwagon event over the years, Stampede officials still insist that the men driving the wagons are well cared for.
“I’m sure all those human rights advocates are gonna be screaming their heads off at their Toronto Human Rights Watch meetings when they hear about Sid. But honestly? Most of these cowboys are older men with nothing better to do,” explained Nugget. “They would have been killed years before in a bull riding accident or had a cow tip over on them if they hadn’t been selected to be chuckwagon drivers.”
In related news, 12 rodeo clowns were put down just for the hell of it. |
Share. Good god almighty. Good god almighty.
Since Grand Theft Auto III’s release on PlayStation 2 in 2001, the Grand Theft Auto franchise has been a mainstay in the gaming industry. And even before the next major iteration in the series – Grand Theft Auto V -- comes out early next year, franchise publisher Take-Two Interactive has revealed some rather staggering news: 125 million copies of Grand Theft Auto games have, to date, been shipped.
Exit Theatre Mode
This news comes by way of GameSpot, which reports that the number was announced by the publisher’s CEO, Strauss Zelnick, at the Credit Suisse 2012 Technology Conference. Take-Two also told GameSpot that the company has shipped 25 million copies of Grand Theft Auto IV alone.
It’s important to note that “shipped” does not mean “sold”, but it is safe to assume that very few of the 125 million shipped copies haven’t reached consumers’ hands. It’s also important to note that, at 125 million copies, Grand Theft Auto is easily one of the best-selling gaming franchises in the history of the industry.
Colin Moriarty is an IGN PlayStation editor. You can follow him on Twitter and IGN and learn just how sad the life of a New York Islanders and New York Jets fan can be. |
The crime scene. Click for larger breasts.
A German plastic surgeon hunting women who never paid for their operations has produced what may be the greatest ‘wanted’ poster in history. He’s published pictures of their enhanced breasts.
He hopes that publicising the pictures of the breasts will help police track down the women, who absconded from the clinic where the surgery took place without paying.
One of the women – who gave her name as ‘Tanja’ – asked to go out to get some ‘fresh air’ after the £5,400 (â¬8,000) was completed. She never came back.
Michael Koenig, the Cologne surgeon after the women, said: ‘The women registered under fake names. After the operations, which lasted about an hour, they just ran away,’ he told Germany’s Bild newspaper.
Bild also published a very large picture of two of the breasts in question.
Metro is proud to join this noble, public-spirited cause, as part of our never-ending crusade for justice. If you would like to look at a larger picture of the breasts (minus black bar) in an attempt to fight crime and evil-doers. |
The way in which Romania prepares for the presidency of the EU Council and how it finalises this are paramount for its role in a future Europe, says Cristian Buchiu, deputy head of the EU Representation to Romania. He talked to Jerry Cameron about the country’s ten years of EU membership.
Romania has been an EU member state for ten years now. Some argue it joined too early. How has that helped the country develop?
Romania joined the European Union at the right moment and its economic success since accession proves this. Its success story is both a function of its full economic rights within the single market and the EU policy of convergence, implemented with cohesion funds. During 2007-2013, over 35,000 new jobs were created and more than 400,000 people benefitted directly, each year, from projects aimed at investments in human capital.
Major projects were implemented ranging from national roads (356 km built) to waste management, from improved water supply and extended water networks to faster railways lines, and the list goes on. Not to be forgotten are the European-level projects such as the Extreme Light Infrastructure laser facilities in Măgurele, the cultural patrimony conservation at Monastery Dragomirna or the Cultural Palace in Blaj, the latter two of which were awarded EU prizes for cultural heritage.
What are the available funds now and what can they be spent on?
In the current financing period (which runs until 2020), Romania has been allocated €30.8 billion , under nine programmes, through the European Structural and Investment Funds.
They are to be used to develop infrastructure networks in energy and transport, to better protect the environment and to increase resources’ efficiency, to support transition to a low carbon economy, as well as in climate change adaptation and risk prevention. They are also designed to promote social inclusion and sustainable employment, including that for young people.
Last, but not least, their aim is to increase SMEs competitiveness, to provide quality education and vocational training, to support research and the ICT sector, and to provide technical assistance while increasing the efficiency of the public administration.
It is for Romania to find the best mix of projects to further develop its economy, so that both citizens and businesses have maximum benefits.
What does the EU funds absorption process look like now? There is criticism that this is not going fast enough. What are the reasons for that?
The absorption rate for the period 2007-2013 is estimated to reach around 90 percent. This was possible mostly because of efforts, from the regional policy commissioner, Corina Crețu, aimed atboth Romania and all EU Member States with absorption difficulties. She convinced the Commission to adopt initiatives that allow for the continuation of major projects beyond the 2007-2013 period and improved use of available funds to carry them out.
For the current period, the buzz word is simplification, also supported by Commissioner Crețu, who has spoken against “gold-plating” (the unnecessary complication of procedures for using EU funds at local levels) several times. Romanian authorities should answer this call for action and simplify.They need to support development of an efficient public administration, at all levels. Then, absorption capacity will no longer be an issue.
Romanians are one of the most EU-enthusiastic nations within the EU. What is the reason behind that and how/why will that strengthen in the future? Or will this enthusiasm decrease?
It is important for Romania to get actively involved in the construction of future Europe, by
participating in further integration initiatives. This is happening already, one example being the setting up of the European Public Prosecutor’s Office, with Romania as one of the founding Member States. There are a couple of fields were Romania would appreciate more progress, such as joining the Schengen area, as it already fulfils the requirements. Another is introducing the single currency. But these issues will not stop progress and integration in other fields.
In its ten years as a Member State, Romania has developed high standards in the fields of the fight against corruption, justice reform and respect of the rule of law, because of the Cooperation and Verification Mechanism. It has also made a major contribution to the protection of EU’s external borders, both at home and in Frontex operations, and it is a major factor for stability in its region.
Its role will be even more important in the first part of 2019, when it will hold the rotating
Presidency of the EU Council. It is a major task during an important time, when negotiations on the next financial framework and Brexit are to be concluded. The way in which Romania prepares for this task and how it would finalise it are paramount for its role in the future Europe. |
Italy's President Sergio Mattarella dissolved parliament on Thursday, placing the country on track for a national election likely to be scheduled next year in March that could lead to a hung parliament and years of political turbulence for the euro zone's third-largest economy, according to Bloomberg.
Mattarella signed a decree that ended the legislative session for both houses of parliament according to an emailed statement from his office.
Prime Minister Paolo Gentiloni is scheduled to lead a cabinet meeting later on Thursday evening, when the government will schedule the election for March 4, 2018.
Gentiloni delivered his end-of-year news conference on Thursday and tried to downplay concerns about potential political turmoil in the year ahead.
“We mustn’t dramatize the issue of political instability, which is certainly an issue but rather than being worried about it, we should tackle it knowing that we’re pretty much vaccinated against it,” Gentiloni said.
Adding that Frequent change of government “is not a recent phenomenon and it hasn’t stopped our country growing."
“I think it is in the interests of the country to have an election campaign that limits as much as possible the spreading of fears and illusions, these are the risks we have before us,” he said.
Italy's recovery is still training behind many European countries and risks a potentially hung parliament after next years' vote since opinion polls show the anti-establishment Five Star Movement leading Gnetiloni's Democratic Party and groups that would be a possible center-right coalition that would include former Premier Silvio Berlusconi's Forza Italia.
The Five Star Movement has run on a platform demanding a consultative referendum on abandoning the Euro if the European Union treaties aren't renegotiated concerning obligations to the migrant crisis.
No group is currently able to win a parliamentary majority according to surveys, even a possible "grand coalition" comprised of the Democrats and Forzia Italia.
Five Stars wants the President, whose task it is to appoint a premier, to grant it a mandate to try and form a government if it wins the most votes, which would be Italy's 65th since World War II.
However, Five Star has rejected calls for creating a coalition and said it would seek external support for its policies from all political forces.
Mattarella is also under no obligation to give a mandate to the leader of the party which comes out on top, according to an anonymous state official.
The president could also potentially seek to establish whether parties could agree on a coalition with enough seats to govern, with options also including reappointing Gentiloni to lead a new government until new elections.
Gentiloni said Italy had so far managed to curb an "abrupt end" to the five-year legislative period “at a very delicate time in which the economy and our society in general were licking their wounds after a long recession.”
Gentiloni also avoided the question of whether he could spearhead the "grand coalition" after the election.
"Anything I say would be used against me,” he said. “I hope that my political group will obtain a great result and that this allows the formation of a government.”
-WN.com, Maureen Foody |
The New York City Police Department’s largest officer union reached a $1.88 billion tentative deal with New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio this week that will require all patrol cops to wear body cameras by 2019.
The deal increases the average rank-and-file officer’s salary by 11.73 percent, and the average member of the Patrolmen’s Benevolent Association will get $12,235 in retroactive pay under the deal, according to Newsday.
Advertisement
The outlet also notes that by the end of the contract, the average officer’s salary will rise from $63,580 to $73,874, before overtime. That does not include a 2.25 percent bump starting March 15, a bonus that the administration says is being given for doing “neighborhood policing.”
The higher salary will be offset by lower salaries for newly hired officers, officials said.
The last NYPD contract with the city of New York expired in 2010. Since then, the union has played hardball with the mayor—picketing the official mayoral residence, as well as his gym and other events, to protest the fact that they were working without a contract.
Advertisement
The city had already outfitted at least 54 officers with body cameras—the result of a federal court order mandating their use. In 2013, U.S. District Judge Shira Scheindlin found that the NYPD’s stop-and-frisk practice violated the constitutional rights of nonwhite New Yorkers.
The Wall Street Journal reports that the NYPD began the body-camera pilot in 2014, with trials at six commands throughout the city. According to the Journal, the city plans to expand the program to 1,000 officers this summer.
What has not been agreed upon with this deal, however, is exactly when an officer must keep the camera on and how footage will be stored or released to the public. Officials said that those details will be hammered out later.
Advertisement
Read more at Newsday and the Wall Street Journal. |
FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler proposed Thursday to eliminate loopholes that allow Dish Network to score a multi-billion dollar discount in a recent airwaves auction.
Bidding discounts for smaller carriers would be capped under the new rules and a loophole that allowed Dish to essentially fund the bids for smaller companies would be eliminated, Wheeler’s aides said Thursday.
Bidding credits will be capped at $150 million for small businesses and at $10 million for rural wireless service providers, Wheeler’s aides said Thursday. They also proposed new limits on joint bidding between providers, saying that such bidding would only be permitted by “non-nationwide providers” and that “multiple applications by one party or by parties with common controlling interests” wouldn’t be allowed.
The rules will apply to an auction of TV airwaves set to happen next year. Verizon, AT&T and other carriers desperately want to win those airwave licenses because they could be used to help build out LTE networks across the U.S. The airwaves are coveted by wireless carriers because signals travel for long distances on them, which means that companies don’t need as many towers to build a reliable network.
Notably, Wheeler rejected an attempt to further limit how much spectrum wireless giants AT&T and Verizon would be able to acquire in the upcoming auction. T-Mobile and other smaller carriers have been pressing agency officials in recent weeks to increase the amount of airwaves licenses reserved for smaller carriers from 30 Mhz to at least 40 Mhz.
On Wednesday, the Justice Department and a group of Democratic senators suggested that the agency should consider increasing the amount of airwaves set aside for smaller carriers, saying that would lead to a more competitive wireless market for consumers.
In a blog post, Wheeler said the current reserve size “balances the desire to make low-band spectrum available to parties with limited holdings while facilitating competitive bidding for all auction participants” and that “there will be significant spectrum made available in all markets of the country to all bidders.”
The FCC’s five commissioners are set to vote on the new proposal at their regular monthly meeting next month. |
Grim Milestone: Over 20,000 Deadly Islamist Attacks Worldwide Since 9-11
Coffins of three Shi’ite Muslims, killed in a bomb attack, are carried during their funeral procession in Sanaa November 29, 2012. (Reuters)
Grim Milestone:
The liberal media may have missed this but this week we saw the 20,000 recorded deadly Islamist attack since the 9-11 attacks in 2001.
Religion of Peace reported:
On a week in which two suicide bombers slaughtered over 54 Christian and Druze and Sunni extremists massacred nearly 100 Shiites in Iraq, TROP recorded our 20,000th Islamic terror attack since 9/11. It happened to be the stabbing and dismemberment of a Jewish woman in her Iranian home by religious radicals intent on expanding a mosque. Allah’s Apostle said, “The Hour will not be established until you fight with the Jews, and the stone behind which a Jew will be hiding will say. “O Muslim! There is a Jew hiding behind me, so kill him.”
(Sahih Bukhari 52:177) “Killing Jews is worship that draws us closer to Allah.”
CAIR-supported Hamas
Remember this the next time you hear some unhinged progressive try to compare Islam to Christianity or any other religion. |
BALCH SPRINGS -- The shooting death of 15-year-old Jordan Edwards has made headlines around the world.
He was shot by former Balch Springs Police Officer Roy Oliver. Dallas County District Attorney Faith Johnson charged Oliver with murder on Friday.
"My argument and my position is if you have regular Joe Blow, who we thought we had probable cause to arrest them for murder, we would go and arrest them," she said.
DA Johnson says after reviewing body camera footage and talking to witnesses, she felt Oliver needed to stand trial for murder.
It's the first time anyone can recall in Dallas County that a district attorney has not waited for a grand jury to charge a police officer with murder.
"I did not think it was the right thing to do if we had probable cause for an offense to wait until we prepared our case for the grand jury, which could very well take anywhere from 30 days to three months," she said.
Jordan Edwards died of a gunshot wound to the head after Oliver fired his rifle into the car.
"I took an oath and that oath is to seek justice," Johnson said. "That oath is to do what is right and fair."
Jordan Edwards (Mesquite ISD)
Former Dallas County district attorneys have been criticized for not arresting officers or taking them to trial in officer-involved shooting deaths.
Johnson says she can't change what happened in the past, but says things are different now.
"I can let people know that there is a new day, there is a new DA, and this DA is committed to making certain the right thing is done in every single case," she said.
Oliver bonded out on a $300,000 bond. His attorney has not return our calls for comment.
Copyright 2016 WFAA |
Justice Secretary Vitaliano Aguirre II should first arrest President Rodrigo Duterte and then himself for committing the “most seditious and murderous act of inciting people to violence” against drug suspects, Senator Leila de Lima said on Thursday.
This was how De Lima, former Justice Secretary, responded to Justice Secretary Vitaliano Aguirre II’s warning against issuing statements that could be considered “inciting to sedition.”
ADVERTISEMENT
While Aguirre thinks calling Duterte a “sociopathic serial killer” was seditious, the senator explained that sedition includes committing “any act of hate or revenge against private persons or any social class” for “any political or social end.”
And when the Justice Secretary declared criminal suspects and addicts and users as not part of humanity, he reinforced the President’s pronouncement that they could be killed as a group without committing a crime against humanity, De Lima said.
“Aguirre should arrest his boss, then arrest himself, for committing the most seditious and murderous act of inciting people to violence against mere suspected pushers and users since the past seven months,” the senator said in a statement.
“This regime has been committing acts of sedition since the beginning for pitting the population against each other in a drug war that calls for the elimination of an entire class of the population which, according to the President, consists of three million pushers and users,” she said.
De Lima said the “single most abominable act of sedition” was Aguirre and Duterte inciting acts of hate and violence on the people they identify as no longer humans when the Constitution clearly provides that no one should be deprived of life without due process of law.
By calling a part of the population as sub-humans and ordering their killing without due process, the senator said, “this regime has overthrown constitutional order through a political coup and by perverting an electoral mandate in order to perpetrate a policy of premeditated mass murder.”
“Arestuhin at kasuhan mo muna si Duterte at sarili mo, Ginoong Aguirre, bago ako (Arrest and charge Duterte and yourself first before arresting and charging me),” De Lima said.
The senator described Aguirre and Duterte as “rebels and inciters against a constitutional order that values life and due process above everything else.”
“They have overthrown our constitutional government when they called for the elimination of an entire social class of suspected pushers and users, resulting in the murders and summary killings in our urban poor communities,” she said.
ADVERTISEMENT
“Sila ang mga rebelde at kriminal na dapat arestuhin, hindi ako (They are the rebels and criminals who must be arrested),” De Lima added. CDG
Read Next
LATEST STORIES
MOST READ |
FOXBOROUGH, Mass. -- Indiana running back Stephen Houston had multiple offers to sign with NFL teams after he went undrafted last weekend. How he chose the New England Patriots shines a spotlight on a sometimes overlooked part of the pre-draft process.
Stephen Houston is looking to use his physical running style to make an impact with the Patriots. Courtesy of Mike Reiss
Running backs coach Ivan Fears gets the credit for Houston choosing the Patriots.
“Coach Fears came in and worked me out after my pro day. We kept in touch and I felt the trust and the loyalty, felt comfortable talking to him. We hit it off right off the bat," Houston said Thursday at Gillette Stadium. "I had other choices but I didn’t feel the same way I felt with Coach Fears.”
Fears, one of the unsung members of the Patriots’ coaching staff, enters his 18th season with the franchise and 24th in the NFL. He was the team’s running backs coach in 2008 when another undrafted free agent, Mississippi's BenJarvus Green-Ellis, beat the odds to become a top player with the Patriots.
The 6-foot, 230-pound Houston, who like Green-Ellis is a pounder that takes pride in “getting first downs and getting tough yardage," received a simple message from Fears after the draft.
“He told me, ‘Come in, be humble, be hungry be ready to work,’” Houston relayed. “That’s what I want to do."
Houston finished fourth on Indiana’s all-time rushing list with 25 rushing touchdowns. Last season, he rushed for 753 yards on 112 attempts.
Each year, the Patriots seem to have an undrafted free agent who breaks through and the hard-charging Houston, who reminded this reporter that he hasn’t accomplished anything at this point and has to earn the respect of more experienced players, could be one to watch in 2014.
“You have to love this game to play it,” said Houston, who received $22,500 in guaranteed money from the Patriots, which ranked as the second-highest total among the club’s undrafted players. “I’m proud to be part of the Patriots. This is an elite group and you have to play up to elite status to help the team win, and that’s what I plan on doing.” |
ON the wall next to Ruth Davidson’s bed hangs a framed photograph of Edinburgh taken on one of those magical, bitterly cold, clear winter evenings, when the air swirls with the descriptive words of literary greats.
Greats like Norman MacCaig, whose poem November Night, Edinburgh is printed alongside the image – “the night tinkles like ice in glasses, leaves are glued to the pavement with frost”. Davidson is trying to remember the rest, but she is, she admits as we sit in a non-descript parliament meeting room, not quite running at 100 per cent. She had been out celebrating her 36th birthday the previous night. “Just a few libations” she laughs, swigging back some Diet Coke.
We are talking about Edinburgh, a city she obviously loves. “I have always felt a connection. I was born here and although I grew up in Fife it was still the big city we came to, and when I graduated I came to live and work here.
“I have lived the last 12 years in Glasgow and it amazes me that with such a short distance between the two, they are such different places. Glasgow is such a handsome city, whereas Edinburgh is beautiful.
“I love those nights in Edinburgh that the MacCaig poem describes – you don’t get that in the west because it’s damper. Edinburgh does this time of year very well – the change from autumn to winter, why would you be anywhere else?” She has, however, been around. Her parents are Glaswegians who moved to the Borders, then Buckhaven in Fife. She lived in Perth for a while and studied at Edinburgh University. Her campaigning too has taken her all over the country – from Gretna to Lerwick and everywhere in between. She talks about the scenery of the journey north through Perthshire and into the Highlands with something bordering on awe, “we live in a glorious country, we don’t take enough time to stop and look around”, she says.
She is waxing lyrical about the bleakness of the countryside north of Blair Atholl. This is not the guarded, word-watching politician you might expect. She’s obviously retained a love of words from studying English and Scottish literature at university, although she mostly reads non-fiction these days, analyses of wars and other military matters in particular. “But Walter Scott and his landscapes are wonderful, and the austere writing of Muriel Spark. And I love our crime fiction writers too.”
Davidson is not what people typically expect of a Conservative party leader. She’s young, she has a comprehensive education and a career before she entered politics, she’s female, she’s gay – and she doesn’t care what people think about any of those things.
She also had, according to many political commentators “a good referendum”, along with Labour’s Kezia Dugdale and, of course, the new SNP leader Nicola Sturgeon. Unlike the other two though, she had the baggage of being a Tory in a near Tory-free country to deal with and as a result of her capable performances on television throughout the independence debate has been described as “the acceptable face of Scottish Conservativism”.
She says: “I don’t think Annabel Goldie was the unacceptable face, or David McLetchie. Both were very highly respected even if people didn’t necessarily vote for their policies. I think it’s a lazy comparison. I think the reason the party was seen to have a good campaign was because we rolled up our sleeves and got stuck in and worked hard for something we believed in.
“People saw us put our hearts, bodies and souls into talking up our relationship with the UK. We don’t see the UK as being other or different. And I think people, voters, can tell when you mean what you say.”
What Davidson is though, which is perhaps her best qualification for her job – especially as she’s only been involved in politics for six years, three of those as an MSP, is tough. And little wonder. She lived her formative years in Fife, a part of Scotland in which the word Tory is readily used as an insult. Prior to that she’d been in Selkirk and had her happy life there uprooted to the Kingdom after her dad – a mill worker – lost his job. Being the new kid in school is always character forming. And of course, growing up knowing that you’re gay is never an easy option. Perhaps most telling of her strength of character, though, is the fact she has had two major accidents which could have left her either dead or paralysed, and has come through almost unscathed.
“I was hit by a truck when I was five,” she says. “I had a broken pelvis and a crushed femoral artery. I spent a lot of time in the Sick Kids getting specialist surgery. I had to learn to walk all over again. At first I had a zimmer frame to help and I can remember being frustrated by it. I wanted to play football and climb trees again.”
She speaks of it matter-of-factly but her parents were told her survival was 50-50. She pulled through, but with scars, hence trouser suits.
Then there was the time she was in the TA – hoping to become an Army officer. During a training exercise for Sandhurst entry, which involved jumping through a window, she landed on her back and cracked a number of vertebrae. She was in hospital again. She was she says “very lucky by a fraction of a fraction of an inch”.
With the Army then ruled out she turned to journalism, carving out a career in local newspapers before moving on to broadcast and the BBC. “I grew up in a house where my parents voted Tory but were never political. They weren’t party members or did any campaigning, nothing like that,” she says. “What made me first realise that politics were fascinating was getting to stay up late one night to watch the news because the Berlin Wall was coming down. I wish I’d been five years older to grasp what it was about, but even so I thought if this is politics it’s interesting.”
But she has her work cut out knocking down the Scottish wall “I’ve always been a Tory,” she laughs. “I was outed when I was 16 when a newspaper ran a feature on “Saffy Syndrome” focusing on girls who were like the daughter in Absolutely Fabulous. My school put me forward for it as I was so sensible, and so I was outed as supporter of the Conservatives. The other kids didn’t care, but some of the teachers got a bit sniffy.”
Some were a bit sniffy too when she went for the party leadership just six months after she became an MSP. But her election has, say those who know the Scottish Tories, been a breath of fresh air.
“I have changed things, yes,” she laughs. “We are changing our approach on some policy issues, just look at gay marriage. I don’t think there could be a better Tory policy than giving people the individual freedom to marry who they love.
“In the past we spent a lot of time speaking solely to a dwindling band of voters. We need to open up the discussion of our policies to many more people, people who are not Tories, so we’ve had a rural commission, we had the Strathclyde Commission and now we’ve launched a pamphlet for discussion on education.”
It was in 2008 that Davidson gave up her media career to work full-time in politics. Her election in 2011 was a surprise and then on her first day in Parliament her leader resigned. “There was a series of low points for us in that election. My only plan was to learn how to be a good MSP, not become leader. But I did know we had looked like amateurs in the election and that had to change. Coming up to next year’s general election, the job isn’t complete but we’ve taken huge steps. How will we do? I’ve put a fatwa on anyone discussing how many seats we might win. It’s too early, Scottish politics is in such flux.”
She says that at the Tory conference in Birmingham there had been some asking her when she “might join them in Westminster”. She laughs again. “Why would I want a demotion? Why would I want to be on the backbenches when there are so many new powers coming to Scotland? Why would I want to be anywhere else?” |
I'm glad to see that the LDS manual for Teachings of the Presidents in 2015 will cover Ezra Taft Benson , the man who was President of the Church from 1985 to 1994 and served as an Apostle beginning in 1943. Though he was often controversial for his views on government, one thing you must remember about him is that he may have more experience with government and politics than any other LDS president or apostle, having served as serving as United States Secretary of Agriculture from 1953 to 1961 under US President Dwight D. Eisenhower. He also had more to say on government than almost any other Church leader, and throughout his tenure as an Apostle frequently addressed topics such as the proper role of government, the US Constitution , threats to freedom, the existence and goals of secret combinations, etc.Much of what he said on these topics was said during the Cold War era, so his comments and rhetoric are often directed to communism and socialism, and surely will be offensive to many in our day, especially those who consider socialism as progress. The progress of the US government in size, power, and debt generation since his day surely has been impressive, and is quite in line with some of his warnings. His frequent statements on such topics, however, strike me as thoroughly downplayed in the new manual with his teachings, which may be entirely appropriate given the potential for political divisiveness and distraction from the goals. (The manual is intended for use during adult classes on the 2nd and 3rd Sundays of the month, and is used during the 3rd hour of our 3-hour block on Sundays.) But some may interpret the relative silence on such topics in the new manual as the result an official stance that such views are discredited and irrelevant today. I don't think that's a justified assumption. On the other hand, his controversial statements while an Apostle quickly became much more toned down once he was President of the Church, though he did not become completely silent or drop his stance, as you may see from a reference I mention below.Personally, I think much of what he had to say is worth understanding in the context of where the world was then, and in terms of the basic principles of personal liberty. We don't discuss these issues in much depth any more, I fear, though I hope we will consider these issues in our studies and have a healthy discussion in appropriate forums. The world has changed a great deal since the Cold War, but the conflict of personal liberty versus concentrated power in the hands of conspiring men (or even well meaning men) is still relevant, in my opinion, just as it was when the Constitution was framed. He saw and experienced a great deal about how government works, and I think it is foolhardy to disregard what he learned and saw without seeking to understand him. Further, for those who take the Book of Mormons seriously, it may be a fruitful exercise, regardless of your political views, to compare Book of Mormon teachings with his interpretation of its content relevant to government and secret combinations.For a little further background regarding his views, see his 1979 General Conference address, " A Witness and a Warning ." Also see his October 1988 talk given as President of the Church, " I Testify ," which makes an ominous reference to Ether 8 in the Book of Mormon and the complex topic of "secret combinations." If you want to more fully see what made him so controversial and so despised by some, dig up a copy of a book he wrote before he became President, An Enemy Hath Done This His tenure as President was a difficult one, touched with controversy not just from his previously expressed views on politics and government, but also with his tenure while ill and incapacitated. His last couple of years were sad and frustrating ones for his family and for the Church.May the Priesthood and Relief Society lessons in 2015 be worthwhile and helpful, without painful controversy and political divisiveness. For those who didn't like President Benson or his more controversial views, my scanning of the new manual suggests it won't be too difficult of a year for you. There is wisdom in sticking to the basics in our classes, but also much wisdom in digging deeper on our own. |
Olympic and WNBA basketballer Erin Phillips will follow in her eight-time premiership winning father Greg by one day playing for Port Adelaide [pic: PAFC/Kane Chenoweth]
OLYMPIC athlete Erin Phillips will be Port Adelaide’s first female AFL footballer, should the Power be awarded a licence in the national women’s competition.
The announcement comes as Port Adelaide commits to nominating for a women's football team in the national competition.
The daughter of eight-time Port Adelaide premiership player Greg is an elite female basketballer, with an Olympic silver and a world championship gold medal to her name.
Those come in addition to her two WNBA championship titles won with the Indiana Fever and Phoenix Mercury in 2012 and 2014.
She currently plays for the Los Angeles Sparks.
Phillips, 30, has agreed to effectively become a ‘marquee’ player for Port Adelaide in the event the club is granted a team in the future national women’s competition.
Aside from being there to watch her father captain Port Adelaide during the nineties, Erin was a talented junior footballer in South Australia before age restrictions on girls changed her focus to basketball.
“It was pretty unbelievable, really, since I was born I’ve wanted to play football for Port Adelaide like Dad,” Phillips told portadelaidefc.com.au.
“For this to happen now is quite incredible, quite surreal.”
The commitment to play for Port Adelaide is real, but with the AFL yet to determine which clubs will form the initial competition, Phillips’ elite basketball career will be unhindered in the immediate future.
That will allow her to focus on her preparations for the upcoming 2016 Summer Olympics in Rio de Janeiro, where she will be vying for a place in the Australian Opals line-up.
In the meantime, Phillips says she hopes her commitment helps add to the positive movement towards developing strong female footballers at grassroots levels, especially in her home state.
“My first and foremost priority is the Opals, and to make it to the Olympics in 2016,” Phillips said.
“This announcement hasn’t changed my passion and commitment for basketball or Australia – it’s my No. 1 priority right now.
“The chance to follow in Dad’s footsteps and play for the club is something that I’m really excited about doing.
“Obviously the competition is two years away and there are many unknowns, but I’m proud to be offered this opportunity to play for Port one day, and to be part of the journey.
“Really, this announcement isn’t about me, it’s about another club saying it wants to help give women and girls the opportunity to play football at the elite level.
“It’s exciting to be part of that.”
Erin outside the No. 22 locker bearing her father's name [Picture: portadelaidefc.com.au]
Added Power for female footy
In making the announcement on Wednesday, Port Adelaide also affirmed its commitment to working collaboratively with women’s football in South Australia to develop girls and female football in the state.
Port Adelaide’s head of football Chris Davies says the form of the club’s involvement in female football will be directed by the AFL and local women’s competitions.
“The AFL announced only yesterday their intention to attract athletes from other sports to widen the talent base for the national women’s competition, and we’re delighted to have Erin declare her intention to be involved through her passion for the Port Adelaide Football Club,” Davies told portadelaidefc.com.au.
“While we’re focussed on our potential involvement in the national elite competition, we are acutely aware of the need to provide a foundation for the future of the game.
“We’re very enthusiastic about working in a complementary way with the AFL, the local Adelaide Football League and the SANFL in driving participation in the game in South Australia.”
Port Adelaide will look at options to develop an elite talent academy program in 2016 – similar to its successful Aboriginal AFL Academy – which will allow talented women and girls to train and further develop their skills with the Power, additional to their training and playing duties at local clubs.
“There’s no doubt that from a talent perspective, an academy program similar to our existing Aboriginal AFL Academy will help fast-track the development of female footballers in SA,” Davies said.
“Those involved would train in an elite environment with elite coaches at Port Adelaide and could then use that experience to benefit their local clubs and strengthen the quality of their competitions.
“We’re committed to the commencement of such a program in 2016.”
CLUE ANSWER: How our riddle foretold of Erin's signing
Phillips says she'd love to take over the No. 22 jumper made famous by her father in over 300 games for Port Adelaide [pic: portadelaidefc.com.au]
A love for the game
While Phillips is an elite basketballer, her first love was her father’s footy club – Port Adelaide.
Greg Phillips played in 343 League games for Port between 1976 and 1982, and later 1987 and 1993.
He captained the club during that time, and played in eight premierships – a feat that headlined a long list of achievements accrued at Alberton during that time.
Erin would watch her father play football for the Magpies, forming part of a group that paved the way for the club’s eventual admission into the AFL as the Power.
Growing up, Erin played for local junior club SMOSH West Lakes – quickly becoming one of the best players in her teams – before age restrictions on girls playing footy in upper age groups ended her chance to participate in the game.
She switched her focus to an emerging basketball career, but would later play in the Little Heroes Foundation’s ‘Slowdowns’ – even winning a best-on-ground merit for her remarkable skill with the ball.
Phillips playing WNBA for Phoenix Mercury in her last championship-winning year
Phillips on the world stage
After playing for the Adelaide Lightning, Phillips has built up an impressive resume of achievements.
She was taken at selection 21 in the second round of the 2005 WNBA Draft by the Connecticut Sun, and played in every game of her debut 2006 season.
A torn anterior cruciate ligament kept her sidelined from the 2007 season, but she returned in 2008 to play eight games after winning silver with the Opals at the Beijing Olympics.
She later joined the Seattle Storm as a free agent for the 2011 season, and then joined the Indiana Fever in 2012, where she played in her first WNBA championship.
Phillips later played for the Phoenix Mercury – winning another championships in 2014, before joining the Los Angeles Sparks for the 2015 season.
More to come...
Port Adelaide has now made three Christmas announcements, with more to be 'unwrapped' in the coming days.
Thursday's announcement will be made on portadelaidefc.com.au at 11:30am (ACDT).
A clue to Port Adelaide's fourth announcement will appear on portadelaidefc.com.au at 6:00pm on Wednesday night.
Erin Victoria Phillips Bio
DOB: 19 May 1985
2x Women’s NBA Champion (2012, 2014)
Gold Medal – FIBA World Championships, Brazil (2006), Commonwealth Games (2006)
Silver Medal – Beijing Olympics (2008)
Bronze Medal – 2014 FIBA World Championships, Turkey (2014)
1x Women’s NBL Champion (2008)
3x Polish PLKK Champion (2010-2012)
Career progression
Adelaide Lightning, WNBL (2002-2008)
Connecticut Sun, WNBA (2006-2009)
Ramat Hasharon Electra, Israel (2008-2009)
Lotos Gdynia, Poland (2009-2010)
Wilsa Krakow, Poland (2010-2013)
Indiana Fever, WNBA (2011-2013)
Phoenix Mercury, WNBA (2014-2015)
Los Angeles Sparks, WNBA (2015-present)
South East Queensland, WNBL (2015-present) |
Times they have changed: a quarter of a century ago, reporter Michael J. Miller was on the West Coast bureau of Popular Computing. (Now he blogs for PC mag.)
A few choice extracts about his trip down to Cupertino to see the first Mac:
“I met with Steve Jobs, who was then Apple Chairman and heading up the Mac project, along with key designers including Burrell Smith, the original hardware designer and software designers Andy Hertzfeld and Bill Atkinson.”
“Most of the time I was meeting with other members on the team, but I remember Jobs coming in — he was very charismatic: intense, proud of the work and a bit prickly about any criticism. He and his folks were quick to put down the IBM PC and its clones for not pushing the envelope and settling for “mediocrity.”
“Jobs and the team were rightly proud of the new machine, which was very different from the IBM PC that then dominated the industry. Maybe it was the famous “Steve Jobs Reality Distortion Field,” but even then I was entranced by the new machine and the possibilities it offered – particularly the graphical user interface.”
Miller’s trip down memory lane — complete with anecdotes about the Mac II, Apple’s first laser printer and the role of industrial design at Apple — is well worth a read. |
After a long and hard battle, massive fundraising and support from famous faces including Susan Sarandon, Josh Charles, Hilary Rhoda and Sandra Bernhard, Maryland became the first state to legalize same-sex marriage through a ballot initiative. Things are looking up at long, long last people.
Politico is now reporting that, with 84% of the vote in, the ballot initiative that would allow same-sex couples to obtain a civil marriage license in Maryland will pass.
Much credit must go to Marylanders for Marriage Equality, the group that worked tirelessly to get out the word on this ballot initiative, and Maryland governor Martin O’Malley who was a very vocal supporter of making same-sex marriage legal in the state.
Now we wait on Maine, Washington and Minnesota.
Tammy Baldwin Elected As First Openly Gay Senator |
Authorities are searching for an ancient relic -- believed to be part of Christ's Crucifixion cross -- that was stolen from a San Francisco church.
Thieves broke into St. Dominic's Catholic Church on Thursday and popped the lock on the glass case that housed the artifact before fleeing without a trace, ABC affiliate KGO reported.
Church leaders and parishioners expressed their grief over the church's most treasured possession at Mass on Sunday.
"The true cross is a relic that goes back 2,000 years to the very cross of Christ himself. For it to be stolen in this kind of very deliberate way is certainly both upsetting and very saddening," the church's pastor, Father Michael Hurley, told parishioners, according to the station.
The church reportedly has no security cameras -- and police say they have few clues to lead them to the perpetrators.
Hurley said he's hoping the thief will have a change of heart and return the relic, the station reported.
"We're hoping that the thief will have a change of heart and perhaps we can discover it again and restore this important relic to our church," Hurley said.
Stolen! Sacred relic taken from St. Dominic's church in SF. Believed to be part of Christ's crucifixion cross. pic.twitter.com/MM4hWYfBg0 — Cbarnard (@CornellBarnard) August 21, 2016
The church placed a sign on the display case asking that the thief return the relic, with no questions asked.
Click for more from ABC7News.com |
Megyn Kelly delivered a biting and powerful monologue in response to the bombshell New York Times report on Bill O’Reilly’s massive $32 million settlement with Fox News analyst Lis Wiehl over sexual harassment allegations.
Kelly kicked off her show — ahead of her interview with O’Reilly accuser Juliet Huddy — emphasizing the enormous settlement payout made by O’Reilly to Wiehl, the analyst who reportedly accused the anchor of “repeated harassment, a nonconsensual sexual relationship and the sending of gay pornography and other sexually explicit material to her.”
Kelly, who made accusations of sexual harassment against Ailes in her memoir Settle For More, went on to detail her own problems with O’Reilly. Kelly recalled a time O’Reilly appeared on CBS News, as Settle For More was released, to hit back against those who try to “make [Fox News] look bad.”
O’Reilly’s appearance apparently prompted Kelly to pen an email to the then-co-presidents of Fox News, Bill Shine and Jack Abernathy, in which she slammed O’Reilly for “his attitude of shaming women,” and reminded the executives of his history of sexual harassment accusations.
But apparently the Fox heads didn’t listen: though Shine told Kelly he had dealt with O’Reilly, the Fox News anchor used his primetime show that evening to again bash the sexual harassment victims that were speaking out.
Kelly ended her opening monologue with an evocative diatribe against the culture of harassment and fear that she claims is pervasive:
“This is not unique to Fox News. Women everywhere are used to being dismissed, ignored or attacked when raising complaints about men in authority positions. They stay silent so often out of fear. Fear of ending their career, fear of lawyers, yes. And often fear of public shaming, including through the media.”
She even turned her ire towards Fox News publicist Irena Briganti, calling her out by name:
“At Fox News, the media relations chief Irena Briganti is known for her vindictiveness. To this day she pushes negative articles on certain Ailes accusers, like the one you are looking at right now.”
Kelly noted that her former employer has “absolutely made some reforms since all of this went down,” before concluding:
“But this must stop. the abuse of women, the shaming of them, the threatening and the retaliation, the silencing of them after the attack,” Kelly declared. “It has to stop.”
Watch the full monologue above, via NBC.
UPDATE 12:02 p.m. EST: 21st Century Fox has put out a statement in support of Irena Briganti:
21st Century Fox Statement of Support for Fox News Communications Chief Irena Briganti pic.twitter.com/BYkM68wN8m — Jon Levine (@LevineJonathan) October 23, 2017
[image via screengrab]
—
Follow Aidan McLaughlin (@aidnmclaughlin) on Twitter
Have a tip we should know? tips@mediaite.com |
Israeli forces have displaced at least 43 United Nations-registered refugees in a "large-scale demolition" of Bedouin homes and structures in the occupied West Bank, according to the UN agency for Palestinian refugees (UNRWA).
Among the buildings destroyed in the West Bank's Anata village were seven homes, four animal shelters and four outdoor washrooms, UNRWA spokesman Chris Gunness said in a statement on Wednesday.
Three of the buildings demolished on Tuesday were funded by an international NGO, he said.
Seven Palestinian families comprised of 43 people, including 25 children, were displaced by the demolitions, Gunness said.
They also included a 48-year-old father with Parkinson's disease, a 48-year-old man who is unable to walk, an 84-year-old woman and another woman who is seven months pregnant.
"It is heartbreaking to see such shocking disregard for international law and the impact it is having on an entire UN protected community," Gunness said.
"While condemning this disregard for international law, we would respectfully remind Israel, the occupying power, that under the Fourth Geneva Convention, it has an obligation to respect family rights, including the dwellings of the protected population - not destroy them."
A spokesperson for Israel's Coordinator of Government Activities in the Territories did not reply to Al Jazeera's request for a comment.
International law violations
During the early morning on Wednesday, Israeli forces also demolished at least three homes in the Jabal al-Mukaber neighbourhood of occupied East Jerusalem, the local Ma'an news agency reported.
While Israel claims the homes were built without the proper permits, rights groups maintain that Israel's ongoing occupation of the West Bank, including East Jerusalem, violates international law.
READ MORE: Israel's home demolitions 'court-sanctioned revenge'
Mona Sabella, a legal researcher and advocacy coordinator at the Al-Haq human rights group, said the demolitions in Jabal al-Mukaber "come at a time when Israel is increasing settlement construction in East Jerusalem and poverty is at an all-time high among Palestinian residents of Jerusalem.
"People are finding it more and more difficult to afford living in Jerusalem as a result of Israeli policies and practices towards forcible transfer, both direct and indirect," she told Al Jazeera.
During the first three months of 2016, Israeli forces demolished an average of 165 homes a month, according to the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs.
The Israeli rights groups B'Tselem estimates that 530,000 Israelis live in Jewish-only settlements - considered illegal under international law - across the West Bank, including East Jerusalem.
Earlier this month, Israeli politicians vowed to expand settlements after a Palestinian teenager killed a 13-year-old Israeli in the illegal settlement of Kiryat Arba in the southern West Bank.
'Morbid silence'
At the girl's funeral, Israeli Education Minister Naftali Bennett, a member of the ultra-nationalist Jewish Home party, called for increased settlement construction in the occupied territory, Israeli media reported at the time.
"We will build in Sarona and Kiryat Arba, in Jaffa and Jerusalem, in Itamar and Beersheba," Bennett said, referring to areas in both the West Bank and present-day Israel.
Echoing Bennett, Agriculture Minister Uri Ariel, a key figure in the Israeli settlement movement, said the expansion of settlements was needed "now more than ever" and demanded "Israeli sovereignty" in the West Bank.
READ MORE: West Bank village anxiously awaits demolition
Nur Arafeh, a policy fellow at Al-Shabaka: The Palestinian Policy Network, said using attacks as a pretext for settlement expansion "is not new.
"Israel has always sought to collectively punish Palestinians following every attack, and the expansion of illegal settlements is only one tool of collective punishment, among many," she told Al Jazeera.
"And what makes Israel repeatedly take such measures is the morbid silence of the international community and the complicity of some world powers and companies in maintaining this system of injustice."
Follow Patrick Strickland on Twitter: @P_Strickland_ |
An air traffic controller sealed the fate of a pilot who died in a Long Island plane crash last week when he gave him directions to a landing strip that no longer exists, according to a preliminary accident report released Monday.
Joseph Milo was killed Aug. 16 when his single-engine Hawker Beechcraft BE35 crashed onto a Long Island Rail Road crossing in Hicksville near South Oyster Bay Road.
Amazingly, his passenger, Carl Giordano, 55, survived the crash.
After departing from his hometown of Westhampton Beach, Milo, 59, began experiencing some sort of mechanical problem as he headed for Morristown, NJ, the National Transportation Safety Board reports.
When he radioed in to Republic Airport in Farmingdale, the closest airport, and told them he would have to take his plane down, an air traffic controller gave him information about the locations of Republic, LaGuardia, Kennedy and Westchester airports.
Explaining that he was having altitude difficulties, Milo indicated he would attempt to get to Republic but said he was worried he might not make it there.
The air traffic controller instructed him to try to make it to “Bethpage strip” — a site associated with defense contractor Northrup Grumman that has been closed for decades.
Despite the strip having been shuttered for years, the unidentified controller insisted there was still a usable runway there, the NTSB report says.
Milo was unable to find the landing strip because it had been replaced with a series of industrial buildings.
“The next several transmissions between the controller and pilot revealed that the pilot was unable to see the runway,” the NTSB report says, adding that the controller continued to give Milo information about its supposed location anyway.
After failing to find a place to land, Milo crashed his plane at the railway crossing between the Hicksville and Bethpage train stations.
He was just eight nautical miles northwest of Republic Airport, according to the NTSB report.
The site of the former Bethpage strip is about a quarter-mile from where Milo crashed his plane, the NTSB said. |
Beginner Tutorial: A Unity 5 Number Guessing Game
Oct
Written by:
In this tutorial, we will cover creating a simple number guessing game. The user will guess a number between 1 and 10.
You can play the game live at the following link: http://www.adefwebserver.com/unity/numberguesserapp/
The computer will tell the user if they are too high or too low.
When the user guesses the number correctly, the computer will inform them, and the user can click the spacebar to play again.
Create The Game
Open Unity and create a New Project.
Call the project NumberGuesser, select 2D and click the Create project button.
When the project opens, click on the Main Camera. then in the Inspector, click on the background color.
When the Color popup opens, drag the dot to the upper left-hand corner of the color pallet to change the color to white.
Click the Close button to close the Color popup.
From the menu bar, select GameObject then UI then Text.
A Canvas with a Text object and an EventSystem will appear.
Hold the Alt and right click-drag to zoom out (or click in the scene and scroll out using your mouse wheel).
Zoom out until you can see the Text Box.
Click on the Text Box and drag it until it is on the Canvas.
Ensure that the Rect tool is selected.
Select the Text Box, and in the Inspector:
Set the Width to 400 and the Height to 50
to 400 and the to 50 Set the Text to: Guess a number between 1 and 10
to: Guess a number between 1 and 10 Set the Alignment to centered
Click the Play button.
The text will display.
Click the Play button again to stop the program and return to design mode.
Create The Code For The Game
Select the Text Box, and in its properties (in the Inspector), select Add Component.
Scroll down to the bottom of the list and select the arrow next to New Script.
Enter TextController for the Name, ensure C Sharp is selected for the language, and click the Create and Add button.
The TextController script will be created and display in the Assets folder.
The script will also be attached to the TextBox.
Double-click on the TextController script in the Assets folder to open it.
Visual Studio will start up…
The script editor will open.
Change all the code to the following:
using UnityEngine; using UnityEngine.UI; using System.Collections; public class TextController : MonoBehaviour { public Text objText; int intRandomNumber; int intGuessedNumber; // Use this for initialization void Start() { } // Update is called once per frame void Update () { } }
Basically we are adding two variables that we will later use (intRandomNumber and intGuessedNumber) and a public property that we will use to communicate with the Text element on the game screen (objText).
Save the page…
Switch back to the Unity editor and click on the Text object in the Hierarchy to select it.
Drag the Text from the Hierarchy to the box next to Obj Text property in the Text Controller that is attached to the TextBox.
(This sets the Text Box as the objText property in the script we created. That script will set the text of the Text Box)
Switch back to Visual Studio and add the following method:
private void InitializeGame() { // Pick a random number intRandomNumber = Random.Range(1, 10); // Set the text to start the game objText.text = " Guess a number between 1 and 10 "; }
Next, update the Start method (that will run one time when the program is started) to the following code (to call the InitializeGame method we just created):
void Start() { InitializeGame(); }
If you have Visual Studio Tools for Unity installed, you can set a break point (by clicking in the grey area on the left-side of the code file) and then select Attach to Unity…
Switch back to the Unity editor and click the Play button…
…And you will hit your break point.
You can hit F5 to continue, and you will be switched back to the Unity game.
For now, just select Stop Debugging from the Debug menu in Visual Studio.
Change the Update method to the following code:
// Update is called once per frame void Update() { // Hitting the spacebar always restarts the game if (Input.GetKeyDown(KeyCode.Space)) { InitializeGame(); } }
This will call the InitializeGame method whenever the space bar is pressed.
That method will pick a new random number for the user to guess.
Add the following code to the Update method:
// Detect that a keystroke was pressed if (Input.anyKeyDown) { // Test to see if the keystroke was a number if ( int .TryParse(Input.inputString, out intGuessedNumber)) { if (intRandomNumber > intGuessedNumber) { objText.text = string .Format(" You guessed {0}. You are too low " , intGuessedNumber); } if (intRandomNumber < intGuessedNumber) { objText.text = string .Format(" You guessed {0}. You are too high " , intGuessedNumber); } if (intRandomNumber == intGuessedNumber) { objText.text = string .Format(" You guessed {0}.
You are correct!
(press spacebar to continue) " , intGuessedNumber); } } }
This will detect what key a user presses and compare that number to the random number created in the InitializeGame method.
If the correct number is guessed, the user is told to press the space bar to restart the game.
Links
Unity 5 Hello World!
Download
You can download the code from the Download page.
Unity 5 (or higher) is required to run the sample code. |
Subsets and Splits
No community queries yet
The top public SQL queries from the community will appear here once available.